real food for busy women: the fruit bowl

Sometimes, it seems that there are so many food blogs out there, that it's hard to find anything unique to say. Today, I think I do have something uncommon to add to the blogosphere: this is about the fruit bowl as the most basic possible thing anyone can do to improve their own or their family's health.

This is part of the series: posts for Pat (real food for busy women); a fruit bowl is a very easy way to improve your diet and it literally takes 5-10 minutes while doing your normal grocery shopping, As a rough estimate, multiply the number of people who live in your home by 5 or 6; buy that many pieces of fruit; come home and stick in a bowl. That's pretty much all there is to it!

The fruit bowl is not just for still life paintings!

As a diabetic, I do not eat piles of fruit, and anyone with blood glucose issues may need to limit fruit intake to some degree. However, fruit beats the heck out of almost every other snack-y type food there is.

Crackers vs. apples - it's apples for the win!

Chips vs. grapes - grapes win hands down!

Cookies vs. bananas - the banana upsets the cookie!

(I could probably come up with more clever sports metaphors if I knew anything about sports.)

Nuts and cheese make nice snacks too, as does yogurt. But it's hard to beat the convenience of a piece of fruit, portable, eaten out-of-hand without silverware and no dishes to do. It is the ultimate lazy food and thus Jackie-approved!

My mom kept a big fruit bowl on the table. She had four kids and if we ever said we were hungry between meals, we were invited to the fruit bowl. Once in a while, she might offer a yogurt if there were any left from the last grocery trip, but most of the time, it was fruit.

My mom was an Adelle Davis fan before there even was an Internet, let alone a thousand nutrition blogs. She disapproved of sugar and white flour profoundly. So she cooked real meals for her horde 3 times a day and she wasn't about to start making snacks too! If you walked in her kitchen with a question, the answer was fruit.

When I grew up and had a baby, pretty much as soon as she was past needing her fruit blended, we had a fruit bowl. She is 30 years old and living across country and we still have a fruit bowl here. As I write this, there are 3 pounds of gala apples, a pink grapefruit, 2 honey oranges and 4 bananas in my fruit bowl. There's ALWAYS something.

I buy bananas all year round, usually getting a few ripe and others green so they last for a bit. I'm not big on bananas myself and I've noticed people eat lots of bananas for a bit, then slack off. No worries if they go brown, they freeze beautifully for banana nut bread or smoothies.

Kiwi, like bananas, seems to be around all year.

Apples are in season from fall through winter and even into spring and keep long enough that even the smallest family can usually get through the 3 lb bags. Pears are best in fall, but won't last as long as apples.

In fall, I definitely make sure I get some Concord grapes, but will buy the seedless ones the rest of the time. Pomegranates tend to be available in late fall or early winter only.

Citrus is in season in winter, so the bowl can overflow with oranges, tangerines and grapefruit through the holidays. Traditionally in my family, we had a nut bowl on the table through the holidays also.

In summer, our fruit bowl is a bit lame. We adore melons and berries of all sorts and tend to get more refrigerated fruit in summer when it's local and in season. But when the local peaches come in, the bowl recovers nicely. HINT: Either buy melon cut up in the first place or cut it as soon as you get home, before you put it in the fridge. Otherwise, it goes bad before anyone eats it!

Really, it depends what I can get for a good price, which varies seasonally. But there is always, always, ALWAYS fruit in a bowl on my table. When I shop, I dump out what is left, wipe the bowl out, put the new purchases on the bottom and the older stuff on top. In 2 minutes, we have snacks for the week.

When children are small, it's best to get lots of grapes, the smallest apples you can find and tangerines as they're more likely to finish it in a serving.

As they get older, they begin to realize that other people's homes have bags of chips and cookies, and they may get vaguely envious of that. But their friends are thrilled with all the fruit at your place! Use peer pressure to your advantage here.

When kids get to the "eye-rolling" stage, they claim not to want fruit. But if they have to bike a few blocks to buy a donut with their own money and there's an orange right there, they eat the orange.

It works for adults too! This is one way of really using laziness to full advantage. You wander into the kitchen vaguely peckish and as hubby says, "There's no food here, only ingredients!" So... you have a piece of fruit.

If you have a kitchen, you need a fruit bowl. Heck, I've been without a working stove, but still had a fruit bowl.