Your mom’s doctor had her work with a nutritionist after her heart attack. She’s good about eating plenty of protein and dairy, but she’s just not good at eating enough vegetables and fruits. This is pretty common, and it can be hard for an older adult to get all five cups of fruits and vegetables. Her senior home care provider can help her with this with food preparation and shopping.
With a little planning, there are things you and her senior home care aides can do to help her. Here are some tips to help boost the intake of fresh produce.
Use a Slow Cooker to Make Healthy Vegetable Soup
Senior Home Care Summit NJ – Simple Ways to Ensure Your Mom Eats Enough Fruits and VegetablesMake a large batch of vegetable soup. If your mom wants a warm drink, serve a cup of this soup. Mix a bag of frozen mixed vegetables with eight cups of unsalted vegetable broth. Stir in a pound of kale, half a cup of barley, diced onion, and a 28-ounce can of diced tomatoes.
Cook this soup slowly for six hours. You can store it in the freezer in single servings and thaw and heat it when needed.
Keep Vegetable Sticks on Hand
Wash, peel, and slice some cucumbers and carrots into sticks. Add some celery sticks, snow peas, and grape tomatoes. Keep those available for quick and easy snacks.
If your mom likes to have a ranch dip for her vegetables, make one using a cup of low-fat Greek yogurt, a cup of olive oil mayo, a cup of skim buttermilk, a quarter cup each of fresh dill, parsley, and chives, a teaspoon of garlic powder, a half teaspoon of onion powder, the juice from half a lemon, and one-quarter teaspoon black pepper. Blend that until smooth.
Make and Freeze Vegetable Pancakes
Grate two zucchini and squeeze out the water. Add one grated onion, a grated carrot, and a quarter-cup of fresh parsley. Mix all of that with two eggs and a quarter cup of chickpea flour.
Spoon these with an ice cream scoop onto a skillet and cook for three minutes per side. Cool the pancakes and layer them between pieces of wax paper. Freeze in a large bag. When your mom wants a snack, she can microwave a pancake for a minute or two.
Portion It Out
Help your mom keep track of how much she eats. When you purchase produce, prep it and store it in cup-sized containers or reusable bags. If she has 35 containers or bags with a cup of vegetables or fruit pieces in each one, she knows she needs to use up five of those containers every day.
Incorporate Them Into Favorite Treats
Your mom loves brownies and always has. You can add fruits and vegetables. Instead of sweetening the brownies with sugar use mashed bananas or dates. Pureed blueberries and spinach add to the produce in her brownies, and the chocolate masks the taste of the spinach.
Your mom loves chocolate milk. Make a chocolate smoothie with banana, almond milk, avocado, and cocoa powder. Add sweet potato if you’d like.
Senior home care aides help your mom prepare healthy meals that focus more on vegetables and fruits than starches or processed grains. Our senior home care specialist is happy to answer your questions and arrange meal preparation services for you.
If you or an aging loved one are considering hiring Senior Home Care Services in Summit NJ, call the caring staff at Helping Hands Home Care today at 908-418-4299.
After graduating from Seton Hall University with a BS in finance Helping Hands Homecare’s Owner / President, Robert D’Arienzo, went to work on Wall St. for six years. However, after Robert’s grandmother became ill with stomach cancer Robert and his family needed to find assistance in the home for her. After many trials and tribulations Robert could see that there was a great need for quality home care services here in NJ and loved the idea of being able to assist other families who were going through what his family went through with his beloved grandmother.
Thus, Robert had found his passion. After almost a year of preparation Robert opened Helping Hands Homecare in 2003. Robert wanted Helping Hands Homecare to focus on providing the highest quality of caregivers, exceptional customer service, and providing a service that familys could depend on in their time of need. Since then Helping Hands has assisted hundreds of individuals with the simplest of needs to more complex cases while preserving those standards set out many years ago.
Robert is a Google Verified Author
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