The best tip I can give you to save money is to buy frozen!

Make yourself a smoothie in the morning with Frozen raspberries, strawberries, blueberries, and grass fed milk organic milk.

Use frozen veggies for stir fry or chilli! They get a lil soggier than fresh veggies but chances are they’re collected when they’re at the peak of their season meaning more vitamins for you and more money in your wallet!!

Just a tip from the Smartypantiest!!

Made this recipe myself. It was seriously amazingggggggggg!

1/4 Cup Olive Oil

1/8 Cup White Wine Vinegar

1/8 Cup White Balsamic Vinegar

1 Tablespoon of Lemon Juice

2 Handfulls of Chopped Basil (Chopped Fine)

Salt and Pepper to Your Liking. I like lots of pepper.

5 Big Heirloom Tomatoes (or any tomato really)

Handfull of Chopped Onion

Mix dressing together. Pour over veggies and marinate in fridge for at least 30 minutes.

Yummmmmmmmmm!

It’s no secret that Smartypanties thinks that organic is super important for any doll these days. But don’t take my unqualified word for it. Hit up this article on the Mayo Clinic website to get hte facts!

Please visit Rachel Ray if you’re like me and can’t bear giving up your favorite cheesy and creamy dishes for a diet. This cheese sauce is delectable!

Click here for the recipe!

You lose the calories but not the taste! The secret ingredient is evaporated skim milk!

Let us know what you think in the comments!

Have we mentioned how obsessed we are with Rachel Ray? We just love her! One of the perks of our job is monitoring children’s advertising, which leaves us with a DVR and TV in our office. Being the Smartypanties that we are, we decided to start DVR-ing Rachel Ray and watching her as we eat lunch. We’ve seriously started to learn to actually cook! It’s fantastic.

I digress. There was this dude on her show, David Zinczenko, Editor of Men’s Health magazine who just came out with a new book called Eat This Not That: Supermarket Survival Guide. The book helps you navigate the supermarket and teaches you tricks and pitfalls of the food manufacturers.  For instance, did you know that Fat Free usually just means added sugar and salt. I mean, to quote RR, if you eat 1200 calories of Fat Free, you’re still going to be the size of a house! Touche RR, Touche.

He discussed some good tricks on the show we thought we’d share:

Be on the lookout for high fructose corn syrup–it’s in everything. It’s just like sugar. It’s a little creep that may be causing you to gain weight.

Ignore buzzwords on packaging like “All Natural,” “Fat Free” and their cousins. It’s a nutritional fakeout. Just go straight to the nutrition label. Basically like if you’re purchasing a loaf of bread–it should have 6-7 ingredients. Not 50! You should also aim for 3 grams of fiber per every 100 calories.

I’m definitely going to check out this book. Let us know if you already have in the comments!

PS-WE Heart you Rachel Ray! Have an EVOO filled holiday!

Did anyone see the SNL video imitating the Activia commercial? So funny…

PS- We received the Yogurt as well as the Flip Video camera for free in order to make this post. As always we like to be up front with you girls. It never taints our opinion but just so you know all the facts, there you have them. And get ready for many more posts where I act like a total dork on camera thanks to this snazzy cam!

In sum, I’d buy the Key Lime again, probably not the Strawberry.

So, speaking of disclosing when we get products for free…

We joined a service called MyBlogSpark.com, which sends bloggers new products so that we can review them and let our readers know what we think. So, as always, just want to let y’all know we got this product for free. I mean, you know the drill at this point, it’s the lawyer in us beating the disclosure over the head.And we don’t have to write about the products but I thought my girls can always use a healthy snack idea!

We’re going to try and keep our reviews concise and to the point from now on so here goes nothing…

These nut clusters are a yummy alternative to snacking on plain ol’ granola, which is usually low in protein. Here because of the nuts you get 4g of protein per serving (4.5 servings in a bag). They’re salty and sweet at the same time. Our fave one was the cashews, but go figure that’s one of our fave nuts.

As we’ve said in the past, we’ve been trying to eat less sugar after reading Anti-Cancer. These are surprisingly low in sugar (~8g per serving), which is less than like a sugary kid cereal (which can run at around ~14g/serving). I don’t know if I’d categorize these as a breakfast food, more of like a much healthier alternative to a cookie but something that’ll satisfy your sweet-tooth.

And the Jury says: I’d definitely purchase these on my own. They’re a good thing to keep at your desk when you feel like raiding the office candy bowl. As we’ve mentioned, it’s not good to eat candy between meals because the sugar levels spike your insulin (the perfect environ for cancer to flourish) so we think these are definitely a better alternative. I mean what do we know? We’re not doctors (remember that! but we do take health seriously!)

So last week I told you about Food, Inc. a movie coming out by Robert Kenner in this post. Here is what we have to say now that we saw this praiseworthy film.

Seriously, don’t take another bite until you see this movie. It’s a horror- flick! Like I always do, when I see a scary movie, whenever I get scared, I comfort myself by saying it’s not real, it’s just a movie. Here though, the stories are true, the interviews with the farmers are with real people.  You will be horrified by what you thought was healthy eating. And it’s not like in Fast Food Nation where you could write it off by saying to yourself that you don’t eat at McDonald’s or Burger King. The point though isn’t to horrify you or use scare tactics, rather it’s just trying to show everyone what’s going on. It’s mind-blowing to me what I’ve been going on eating, munching and crunching, blissfully believing the government was effectively regulating.

After this flick this girl is going organic in every possible way I can. I’m not going to go overboard and not eat out, etc. but wherever I can make an effort to, I will. I think that any Smartypanty will see this movie. Your health is important. The meat you are putting in your body becomes part of you. Educate yourself and make a conscious decision to help change the system. It’s as easy as just buying organic. Do you know that Wal-Mart, WAL-MART people, has started carrying organic products? This is a huge step in making organic (aka healthier, uncontaminated, etc.) foods available to the masses and not just those of us who can afford to spend our Whole paycheck at Whole Foods (sorry whole foods we love you but you’re not practical for everyone).

Little things you can do to make a BIG difference to help us get healthier foods for everyone! Whatever we buy the most of gets cheaper and cheaper. So buy the good stuff!

~Stop drinking sodas and sugary beverages

~Buy Organic

~Visit Farmer’s Markets

~Tell Congress Food Safety is important to you

Visit Food, Inc’s Website for more ideas!

If you care about your health or your kids’ you will see this movie.

We’ve always been skeptical about whether fortified juices, sodas, protein bars, and the like are actually as healthy for us as the real food. We’ve never really believed that drinking vitamin water, packed with sugar is counteracted by the vitamins. Click HERE to read a Wall Street Journal article discussing fortified foods.

So, given our new health kick we’ve decided to start a new feature on our site all about healthy food and what we should and should not be eating, appropriately, it will be called Smarty-PANTRIES…like Kitchen pantries. We’re pretty proud of ourselves for coming up with this one…anyway, we digress.

This movie is what we’ve been waiting for! We think this is so important! Eating healthy and knowing just what you’re putting in your body is something everyone should take a minute and find out about.  You’ll be absolutely horrified to find some of this stuff out, but stop living in ignorance, Smartypanties!

The movie is produced by the author of Fast Food Nation, Eric Schosser (great book) and directed by Robert Kenner. They uncover just what’s in your supermarket and you’re not going to like what you see…so do yourself a favor and see this movie. Every item you buy an item at your grocery store you’re either voting for growth hormone induced meat or organic. For processed sugars or natural untainted fruits. Stop kidding yourself that the consumer is powerless! Do something about it! Learn what’s worth your money!

Synopsis: In “Food, Inc.,” filmmaker Robert Kenner lifts the veil on our nation’s food industry, exposing the highly mechanized underbelly that’s been hidden from the American consumer with the consent of our government’s regulatory agencies, USDA and FDA. Our nation’s food supply is now controlled by a handful of corporations that often put profit ahead of consumer health, the livelihood of the American farmer, the safety of workers and our own environment. We have bigger-breasted chickens, the perfect pork chop, insecticide-resistant soybean seeds, even tomatoes that won’t go bad, but we also have new strains of e coli–the harmful bacteria that cause illness for an estimated 73,000 Americans annually. We are riddled with widespread obesity, particularly among children, and an epidemic level of diabetes among adults Featuring interviews with such experts as Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation), Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma) along with forward thinking social entrepreneurs like Stonyfield Farms’ Gary Hirschberg and Polyface Farms’ Joel Salatin, “Food, Inc.” reveals surprising–and often shocking truths–about what we eat, how it’s produced, who we have become as a nation and where we are going from here.

We’ll let you know what we think once we’ve seen it. Comes out June 12, 2009 in select cities.

Here are some reviews by cool people who got to see the screening (one day, Smartypanties, one day!):

“Does for the supermarket what ‘Jaws’ did for the beach.”
- Staff, Variety

“More than a terrific movie-it’s an important movie.”
- Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly

“A riveting cautionary tale. This is one movie that truly provides food for thought.”
- Patrick Goldstein, Los Angeles Times

“A cleverly written and well produced documentary. Kenner crafts an intelligent, visually compelling argument grounded in old-fashioned investigative research and journalism.”
- Maria Garcia, Film Journal International

“Excellent in every respect.”
- Pete Hammon, BoxOffice Magazine

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