Let’s keep those ideas coming on your Best Meal of the Week. You can check out our archived posts with lots of great ideas.
Remember, “best” is highly subjective: healthy, super quick, inexpensive, fabulously delicious – or a combination of all that and more. Here are a few featured Best Meal ideas to get those creative juices flowing. Post your “best” in the comments below.
From Cindy, a reader:
For a super quick and easy meal, I like baked quesadillas. Simply take whole wheat tortillas put shredded cheese of your choice on half of each tortilla, include small amounts of other ingredients like black beans, chicken, shrimp, caramelized onions, red peppers or jalapeños. You can use whatever you have as leftovers that sounds good. Just keep it to small amounts so you don’t over power the tortilla. Fold the tortilla in half and place on a cookie sheet. Place in oven at 350°F until cheese is melted and tortilla is slightly golden. Top with sour cream and salsa. Using low fat cheese makes this a very healthy dish.
Happy Earth Day! We know we have customers, team members and vendors who are dedicated to helping our planet. Give yourself a quick pat on the back for everything you’ve done in the last year to green your life and business!
Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s get together and share ideas for ways to keep Earth Day going all year long. We’ll host a live blog this Friday, April 24th, at 1:00pm CST.
Kathy Loftus, nationally recognized green management expert and active member of Whole Foods Market’s Green Mission Team, will guide the chat. Whether you are new to green living or have been on the bandwagon a long time, join us to share your questions and answers to how we can all work together to protect the world around us.
Yvonne, one of our Whole Story readers, sent us this idea for a recipe makeover:
My daughter used to love to bake. However, we recently found out from her naturopath’s tests that she is gluten-, dairy- and egg-intolerant. Do you have any kid-friendly (cookies, cakes, muffins) baking recipes which are dairy, wheat and egg free? Thanks a million!
We’d love to help! We thought cupcakes might be just the thing to get Yvonne and her daughter back in the kitchen in a hurry. Typically a cupcake batter might be made with wheat flour, eggs, milk and butter. So Yvonne’s request does seem challenging, but the recipe I developed for Frosted Spice Cupcakes is a winner no one will be able to resist. These were a big hit in the test kitchen – even with tasters who normally don’t eat special diet goodies. We hope you’ll enjoy them as much as we did.
Earth Day is Wednesday, April 22. In celebration of our planet’s big day, why not take a moment to make a simple green resolution for the coming year?
Here’s mine: Bike to work at least once a week. Full disclosure: The last time I owned a bike, it was a blue Schwinn with a hot pink basket and I was 10. Sadly, I’ve outgrown that bike. But now, after months of bugging my friends for bike recommendations and visiting all of the bike shops around town, I’ve narrowed down my choices and am finally ready to invest in an “adult” bike at last. By this Earth Day, I am determined to be a proud bike owner/commuter/road warrior at least once a week. Why not every day? After years of making (and always breaking) grandiose New Year’s resolutions, I’ve learned that the simple, realistic changes are the ones that really last.
Now it’s your turn. Tell us one simple green change you’re planning to make for Earth Day. Everyone who enters a comment on this post between now and April 30th will be entered to win a $25 Whole Foods Market gift card and a FEED 100 bag. The winner will be announced the first week of May in our Whole Story blog, so stay tuned!
And even if you don’t win the prizes, your green resolution efforts will be rewarded with a cleaner, greener, healthier planet for many Earth Days to come. Here’s to wishing you and yours a Merry Earth Day and a Happy Earth Year!
Check out more green ideas on our Whole Story blog. Visit our website for more Earth Month tips, trivia, contests and more.
Ever felt guilty about forgetting your reuseable grocery bags and having to use a paper one instead? Well I certainly have! That’s why I’m excited to let you know that Whole Foods Market is the first national retailer to provide Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certified paper bags at our checkout counters. This means we are reducing pressure on virgin forests and protecting biodiversity. Hopefully other retailers will follow our lead and the impact will be even greater! Read the rest of this entry »
Judging by the classic motherly admonishment to “Eat your veggies,” it seems that some people have an aversion to them. Not me. I love vegetables — can’t live without them actually. For example, if I am traveling and have to go even one day without my fill of colorful veggies, something inside just doesn’t feel “quite right.” That may not be the case for you, but there are lots of reasons why you should eat your veggies even if you don’t love them (but I bet they’ll grow on you if you give them a fair shake).
Vegetables come in all kinds of colors, forms, shapes and sizes. Technically, a fruit is the seed-containing ovary or womb of a plant. That means fruits contain seeds. (There are few exceptions, like bananas.) Vegetables are pretty much all the rest of the plant: the stems, leaves, seeds, flowers and roots. So some foods we usually think of as veggies are actually fruit: tomatoes, cucumbers and squash, to name a few. But for our purposes, we aren’t getting technical – “vegetables” here means all of the common (and not so common) vegetables you find in our produce departments. Read the rest of this entry »
We know our readers are passionate about organics and we’re guessing you’re a talented lot as well. So we want to make sure you know about the Organic Institute’s contest seeking the next “organic idol.”
The scoop from their website:
The Organic Institute is looking for its first-ever consumer ambassador to serve as a spokesperson for all those who are passionate about organic agriculture and products. All we need is a 30-second audition video from you making your pitch.
Participation is easy:
Through May 8, join our YouTube group and submit a 30-second video at www.youtube.com/group/organicidol explaining the moment you realized organic products are worth it. Make us smile. Make us cry. Make us laugh. Make us think. Heartfelt, creative and quirky videos are welcomed, and encouraged.
Once your video is posted, tell your friends to view it! That’s because the Organic Institute’s board will consider the top 12 videos with the most views by May 8 as the initiative’s finalists.
Members of the Organic Trade Association will select from the 12 finalists who they feel is the best fit as our consumer ambassador. We’ll notify the winner in May, and he or she will be unveiled June 17 in Chicago at the All Things Organic Trade Show.
In addition to receiving a trip for two to Chicago for the trade show, the winner’s story will be shared on this Web site. And, he or she will be featured in the Institute’s next consumer advertising campaign, currently set for Fall 2009.
Bell & Evans is a leading producer of chickens raised without antibiotics. For four generations, beginning in the 1890s, Bell & Evans has been raising and processing the highest quality chickens in the heart of Pennsylvania Dutch country, in a modern facility equipped with the latest technology. The birds are raised on an all-vegetarian diet in a low stress environment, and delivered to Whole Foods Market within 24 hours of processing to ensure a fresh product with premium flavor.
Welcome to Whole Story, the official blog of Whole Foods Market.
Don’t know us? In a nutshell, we are the world's leading natural and organic grocer and we’re passionate about healthy food and a healthy planet. Learn more about us.
We’re lucky to have a whole bunch of smart, passionate people doing incredible things in areas like organics, supporting local growers, green practices, fair trade, micro-lending and all kinds of food related stuff. We’ll use this blog to share some of the cool things going on around here.
Of course, what makes this blog really exciting is YOU — so join the conversation!
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