Great way to get your veggies!

OK, I just saw that one of my fellow writers had added some content on here and it tweaked my conscious. Here's my contribution for the day (or should I say month??????).

This has become my favorite meal lately. It's simple, nutritious, pretty good for me and it helps me to reach that unobtainable goal of the number of daily veggies I'm supposed to be eating. I think we're now up to five to nine veggies and fruits each day aren't we? Is that because so much of our food has the goodness removed from it these days?

I don't eat near enough vegetables, mostly because everything else is so much more fun to eat.

I found these Birds Eye Steam & Serve vegetable packs at Kroger recently. They have four or five varieties of vegetables that are excellent. They come in this ready-made to toss in the microwave container that you just pull out of the freezer, nuke and eat. I have two favorite's, the "Beans with a Twist" and "Asian Vegetables with Roasted Cashews". I toss in some cranberries with the Asian veggies after I've steamed them part way. I nuke a pack of the Minute Ready to Serve Brown Rice to mix with the Beans with a Twist. I dump the rice in, mix it up and voila, I have a meal.

I guess if you feel like you need some meat you could serve them up with chicken or fish on the side. I leave off the meat and eat the entire container instead! It's supposed to be 2 - 3 servings, so I'm getting a really filling meal with minimal to no guilt (depending on which one I choose to eat, the one with butter works out to be about 330 calories without the rice. Adding the rice adds 170 calories. I usually sprinkle a bit of the non-gritty fiber stuff on anything that has fat in it just to mitigate some of the fat guilt.

The downside to the Birds Eye packs is the cost. They run around $3 each, which doesn't sound like a lot until you realize you can get a huge pack of green beans or broccoli for half that price. However, for me the convenience and taste are worth the price. Looking at it another way, if I stopped at a fast food restaurant for lunch it would cost me at least twice that amount, I'd be eating at least three or four times the calories and be getting a fraction of the nutritional benefits.

If I could figure out some way to recycle the black plastic containers the food comes in, I'd feel so virtuous I might have to eat two varieties on some days!

Hey, here's a kicker --- I just did a search on the Birds Eye Steam & Serve and discovered that they've been around since at least 2006. Gee, I thought this was something new I'd discovered. Oh well, they're still good. I just wish our local Wal-Mart carried them (although I've found that surprisingly, Kroger is often much cheaper than Wal-Mart).

That's it for me for the day. Hopefully I'll do better but I think I've said that before.