If you were wondering whether healthy eating means that you have to give up being greedy, I present this picture. It's not enough to say that this is my fall lunch, it's my new favorite lunch of all time. You will see this again soon, properly recipified.
I meant to show the fruits and vegetables all piled on their half of the plate, but they wouldn't fit without falling over. So fine, three-quarters of my lunch plate is fruits and vegetables. Which is to say, half my lunch plate is vegetables and a healthy quarter is fruits. You know that avocado is a fruit, right? Mango is the other fruit, remember when I made that green salad with salmon and mandarin oranges? I was going to make that again and just couldn't get over the light syrup, and mangoes were on sale and around the same time I stumbled upon a tutorial for how to cut up a mango. Yatta! So now I'm obsessed with mangoes and sort of can't believe that eating avocado and mango together is even allowed, it's so good.
The fruit taking over the grains corner actually fairly represents my carb strategy, which perhaps I will write up as well.
You may have noticed, fats are not represented on MyPlate. I'll tell you where the fats are here, the kale is dressed with vinaigrette made with olive oil. A recipe of vinaigrette uses a quarter cup of olive oil, I think I got six servings of salad out of the whole bunch of kale; so something less than a tablespoon of olive oil in the salad. And that is a whole avocado, which honestly is more fat than fruit. And then whatever fat is in the turkey meatballs. So basically all the avocado you can eat—well, I limit myself to one avocado a day—and a little bit of other fat here and there, and you're covered for fats.
If I were to upgrade this, I could do tomato instead of mango. I mean, I have done this with tomato instead of mango and it's also very good. Tomato is also technically a fruit, but we don't have to get hung up on that. It's lower in sugar than mango, so that would be a way to cut my sugar further if I wanted. Or I could conceivably eat half the avocado and half the mango, grrr... easy, girl...
