Fruit Salad – Healthy and Fast Meal, A most common and ideal type of food besides meat. Ideal for everyone and everything for a lot of purposes. It comes in all shapes and sizes for all types of uses. Can be made to a healthy version as well as a sweet. All depending on a user’s preference and appetite.
Fruit Salad
Some breakfast meals can be made really fast, and with zero to none troubles. This is certainly one of them. Being a natural food ever since the dawn of humankind, the fruit has been serving early hunter-gatherers for energy preservation and a good substitute for meat. The problem that we know about today is that carbohydrates that come from the fruit are a good deposit for glycogen and energy expenditure. Not so much a muscle builder, since they don’t have nearly the same caloric value as meat. That would mean that meat was a more obvious choice in that period. Thankfully, we can now choose our food and we move much less than we used to do in those periods, and with the appearance of markets, we have a plentiful choice of what we want to consume.
Sugar, sugar
The recommended dosage of sugar is about 100 calories for women and about 150 calories for men. Sugar comes in four different types, which are
- Glucose
- Fructose
- Dextrose
- Sucrose
- High Fructose Corn Syrup
It is important to look at this distinction so we can understand with more clarity what we are talking about in this recipe. Not every sugar consumption is equal, as we have to distinguish between naturally occuring sugars and refined ones.
Glucose is sugar found in our blood. Dextrose is a simple sugar which we can usually find in starches such as corn. Corn was an abundant crop in the America’s, and the High Fructose Corn Syrup is commonly being used as a sweetener in a lot of soft drinks. Sucrose is what we call ‘’table sugar’’. It is derived from sugar cane or sugar beets. High Fructose Corn Syrup is made from corn starch and contains nearly the same amounts of glucose and fructose, and it is a chemically made sugar.
Why fruit?
The type that we are after here is called fructose, and it is mainly found in fruits. Fruits are beneficial to our consumption because they have simple sugars in them, and they are really easy to digest and absorb. Refined sugars don’t have the same properties, as they make insulin and blood sugar levels very high. On top of that, they also have:
- Sugar in the form of lactose is a very good source of vitamins and minerals, and it is a completely natural form of sugar.
- Milk has protein, and fruits have fiber; both of which keep us feeling full. Unlike processed sugars which are just empty calories.
- A person will most likely consume a reasonable amount of milk or fruit in order to feel full. But will binge with chips and other snacks. And because of that, will need to learn how to stop cheating on their diet.
Let’s get started
With this salad, no added sugars are needed. It can be made from any seasonal fruit, depending on the taste and preference of the dietician. Perfect for any dessert as well as breakfast, as well as for those with a tight schedule.
Necessary ingredients are:
- 2 oranges
- 2 cups strawberries (use regular ones if possible instead of frozen)
- 1 cup raspberries
- 2 cups blueberries
- 3 kiwis
- 2 medium peaches
- 3 apricots
2 ripe pears
Preparing the food
You cut the fruit into bite sizes, unless you are not adding raspberries and blueberries( this is just an example of what fruit you can use). After that, you rinse it, and put it on a dry towel. Cut a lemon, and grate the lemon zest and add the juice from 1 lemon in a large mixing bowl. Add the fruits of your choosing into the bowl. If you like your fruit to be mushy, don’t wipe the water off; if you don’t like it like that, wipe the water. Take an orange, segment it and squeeze it into the bowl. Another option is that you can cut the pieces and squeeze them with your hand, and add them after all the other fruit has been added in. Another option is to add sliced bananas.
Why is this the ideal food?
Other than being a dessert or a salad as mentioned in the example above; this can pretty much be a lot of other things. All of them, of course, according to your desires and wishes.
You can make a frozen delight out of these ingredients. Churn all the fruit in an ice cream maker if you have one, or use the electric mixer if you don’t have one. Just make sure to chop fruits more densely to preserve your mixer and your eyes. Or, if you are truly devoted to fitness and burning calories even when you are preparing a meal, you can use a whisk or a spatula as a handheld device for your smoothie. Use the jar into which you store your prefered fruit (make sure it is strong so it doesn’t break in your hand) and mix and batter it all together. This scoopable, but not frozen version of the fruit is called sorbet.
Cut the fruit on a parchment paper-lined baking tray. Make sure they are not on each other, so they don’t create a concrete mass. Freeze them after. When you are at your heart’s content, take them out and eat them. Another way is to add them into a food processor to chop them and freeze them. This takes away the aesthetic beauty of the fruit, but it is much faster.
For it’s similar brother, sherbet, you add milk to the process. Tools remain the same, and for those of you wanting to know more, sherbet differs from sorbet simply by the amount of dairy it contains. And sherbet has a creamier texture because of the milk. For sherbet, you can use various juices of various fruits (orange, pineapple, lemon) and add milk into the mix. Put all that into a plastic container. Stir all of that and put it into the freezer.
The last two are not as healthy as the salad, but should be consumed in moderation.