Summer of salads
Each fortnight Spotswood College and New Plymouth Boys’ High School showcase the talents and tasty treats of their students who take food and nutrition, with a focus on lifelong skills that can be used every day to enhance the benefits of a healthy diet and lifestyle. This fortnight it’s the turn of New Plymouth Boys’ High School. Written by Aaron Lock and Adrienne Roberts.
Welcome back to 2018 and another year where the success of the students who take the Food and Nutrition and Hospitality subjects from Spotswood and New Plymouth Boys’ High are celebrated here in our local newspaper. We hope by sharing the stories of our students we will inspire the young ones in your household to pick up a recipe, give it a go and cook a meal for the family.
This lesson was the first time that I had the year 12 boys in the cooking classroom for 2018, so we had a mixture of boys that have taken the subject since year 9 and those who were stepping into the kitchen for the first time.
It meant it was a bit chaotic when the photographer turned up. He had free reign to take photos of the boys while they prepared their salads, as I went about reminding them about how things worked in the kitchen.
It was really useful having the boys with a little bit of experience paired up with those new boys, this tuakana-teina relationship worked well and let those boys with the knowledge pass it on. Any time we can tap into the student’s prior knowledge it strengthens the learning process and improves the classroom dynamic.
Salads are a great place to start learning how to cook as they can be made as simple or as complex as needed. Eating salad almost every day may be one of the most healthy eating habits you can adopt, experts say. If you are time poor and lacking a range of nutrients in the evening meal, having a salad is a super-convenient way to work in a couple of servings of vegetables and/or fruit.
All you need to make a quick salad at home is a bag of prewashed salad greens, a few carrots or other veges, and a bottle of light salad dressing paired with a protein (cooked chicken, ham or tuna) and dinner is done.
Not only that, salads are cool, crunchy, and fun to eat (lots of textures, colours, and flavours). Most people enjoy eating salads-even kids! You can customise them to include the fruits and vegetables that appeal to you the most, and whichever ones you have on hand.
Salads are normally high in fibre: it’s hard to believe that something we can’t even digest can be so good for us. Eating a high-fibre diet can help lower cholesterol levels and prevent constipation. Eating more fibre can help you feel fuller, so you eat less, and ultimately lose weight.
It is never a bad thing to eat more fruits and vegetables (especially dark green and orange vegetables) and legumes – all popular salad ingredients. There is plenty of evidence that nutrientrich plant foods contribute to overall health.
If you frequently eat green salads, you’ll likely have a host of powerful antioxidants (vitamin C and E, folic acid, lycopene, and alpha- and beta-carotene,) especially if your salad includes some raw vegetables. Antioxidants are substances that help protect the body from damage caused by harmful molecules called free radicals.
For years, researchers have noted a link between eating lots of fruits and vegetables and lower risks of many diseases, particularly cancer. Foods found to be particularly protective include beans and peas, string beans, peppers, tomatoes, carrots, apples, nectarines, peaches, plums, pears, and strawberries.
If losing weight is your goal, you may want to replace a couple of your evening meals with a green salad.
With a salad you can adopt a ‘‘bigger is better’’ mantra as long as the salad is bigger in volume, not in calories – which means more veges and less dressing and other fatty add-ons.
Eating a little good fat (like the monounsaturated fat found in olive oil, avocado and nuts) with your vegetables appears to help your body absorb protective phytochemicals, like lycopene from tomatoes and lutein from dark green vegetables.
A recent study from Ohio State University measured how well phytochemicals were absorbed by the body after people ate a salad of lettuce, carrot, and spinach, with or without 2 1/2 tablespoons of avocado.
The avocado-eaters absorbed eight times more alpha-carotene and more than 13 times more betacarotene (both of which are thought to help protect against cancer and heart disease) than the group eating salads without avocado.
Even though the boys had these recipes to follow, I left the presentation was entirely up to them, so those who didn’t like green beans, for example, didn’t put them on.
You can add or subtract ingredients from these recipes to make them appeal to your family, that is the joy of salads! Have fun and enjoy your healthy salads!