Foxview Girl Scouts NuVal class at DePere Festival Foods

 This week I had the pleasure of working with a group of Junior Girl Scouts from Foxview Middle School in DePere. These girls are at a perfect age to learn about nutrition and making heathy food choices, and also to learn their way around the kitchen.   Leah Anderson, dietitian for Festival Foods, provided us with a fun and informative presentation on the NuVal system.  For those who might not know about NuVal, here is a brief explanation from the NuVal website: 

 The NuVal System does the nutritional heavy lifting so you don’t have to.  Developed by an independent panel of nutrition and medical experts, the System helps you see – at a glance – the nutritional value of the food you buy.

   How? The NuVal System scores food on a scale of 1-100. The higher the NuVal Score, the better the nutrition. It’s that simple. And it’s coming to every aisle of your favorite grocery stores – right there on the shelf tag.  Now you can compare overall nutrition the same way you compare price. You can even compare apples and oranges.  http://www.nuval.com/How

After the presentation, Leah took us around the store to shop for ingredients for our Fruit Salad with Honey Lime Yogurt Sauce.  This has been my go-to recipe for the NuVal class as well as other classes when I want a healthy, no-bake recipe.  I posted the recipe here  when we did the class last November. Many of our ingredients have very high scores...bananas 91; apples 96; pineapple 99; and blueberries 100.  Can't get any higher than that!   I like to use organic greek yogurt, and I let them decide if they wanted to use vanilla or plain.  They chose plain after seeing the score was higher.  The raw honey and pure maple syrup used to sweeten it are just sweet enough.  It's delicious!  And there is nothing wrong with eating fruit plain, as one girl chose to do.  

My role in this class was to guide the girls through the recipe and teach things that they might not know how to do...like zest the lime.  Unfortunately, we forgot to zest the lime before we cut and juiced it!  Mrs. Bunker suggested that they zest an orange; we had a whole bag of them, and any zest is going to add great flavor.  Mrs. Bunker also knew that the bitter white covering is called pith.   Such a yucky word, in my opinion!  

These girls were so self-directed.  I was very impressed with their knowledge, ability, politeness, and their cooperative spirit.  True Girl Scouts!  

Thank you Leah Anderson and Festival Foods for hosting us!

Choosing our organic apples and pears, talking about the Dirty Dozen and what Organic means.

Comparing juices...

Are fruit snacks a good substitute for fruit???  

Whisking the sauce...

Dicing the apples and pears....

I wish we would have taken a picture before the sauce went in...it was so
pretty and colorful! 

Devil Dogs

The recipe for D day was Deviled Eggs.  It's pretty boring to watch eggs boil, plus it would take almost half of our class time.  So I was on a mission to find another D recipe.  Did you know that Whoopie Pies are also called Devil Dogs?  How cool is that, since I just made Whoopie Pies the week before with the older group!  I thought I would simplify it for the Sprouts class and have the spinach done ahead of time.  Silly me to think I could just buy a jar of spinach baby food.  I guess it has been over 11 years since I have bought baby food...I guess they don't sell spinach any more.  From the contamination problems, maybe?  Anyway, I pureed the baby spinach before class, but didn't quite have time to get it as smooth as I would have liked, since I needed to also SHOVEL!!!  Finally got some snow, but couldn't it have waited until after class!?  It was a nasty day, but everyone ventured out in it to come to cooking class.

There were definitely some turned up noses and "yucks" when they saw the spinach.  But lo and behold, all plates were clean in the end.

Sweets for My Sweet

We made a BIG mess, but it was definitely worth it.  Our Peppermint Brownie Pops were delicious!  (though they ended up being Bites and not pops).  We really painted our muffin tins with LOTS of coconut oil,  but they were still very tough to get out.  As much as I don't like to use a spray oil, the best thing to use for these is Baker's Joy.  It has flour in it, and when I sold Pampered Chef, it's what they recommended for making brownies in this pan.

We were so busy decorating and packaging, I didn't take any pictures of the finished product.  But they were very cute....each decorated with red, white and pink heart sprinkles and chopped up peppermint candies, and packaged in a clear favor bag wrapped with a ribbon, and popped into a red bag we decorated with Valentine's Day stickers.