A Fun and Flavorful Way to Eat Right, Your Way, Every Day

March is National Nutrition Month, and the theme for 2013 is, Eat Right, Your Way, Every Day. Sponsored by the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, this year’s theme acknowledges that everyone’s food likes and dislikes differ, as do their lifestyles, traditions, and health needs.

As dietitians, moms and food bloggers with a bent toward recipe makeovers, our personal approach to eating right is a diet filled with wholesome fresh fruits and vegetables, whole grains, nuts and seeds, seafood, lean meats and dairy, and good-for-you fats and oils. Our approach is colorful and easy, affordable and familiar, and we offer our families (and our readers’ families) healthy makeovers of classic recipes that are filled with fun, flavor, and nutrition.

Eat Right, Your Way, Every Day got us thinking about breakfast and the fact that lots of kids, especially teens, tend to skip it. Knowing that breakfast is the most important meal of the day --- kids who eat it do better in school --- we set out to create a hard-to-resist breakfast treat to encourage skippers to fill their stomachs before running out the door. We came up with a homemade version of the perennial kid favorite, toaster pastries (think Pop-Tarts® or Toaster Strudels®) Many store-bought toaster pastries aren’t exactly known for their health-promoting properties and, let’s face it, they’re often made with ingredients like high fructose corn syrup and artificial colors and flavors. For our toaster pastry make-over challenge, we created a whole grain, oatmeal-based crust, used coconut oil as our fat source, and cooked up a naturally sweet, real-fruit filling with fresh, flavorful Driscoll’s strawberries.

Our Strawberry-Filled Toaster Pastries make eating right hard to resist. Grab one for an on-the-go breakfast, or savor one with a glass of low-fat milk and a big bowl of fresh berries on the side. And most of all … enjoy!

By Liz Weiss, MS, RD and Janice Newell Bissex, MS, RD, authors, No Whine with Dinner and hosts of the family-food blog, Meal Makeover Moms’ Kitchen