 All right. Well, welcome everybody. Hello, my name is Scott Swanson. I'm usually the one hanging out in the background, kind of monitoring things on Zoom, so you may not have seen me before, but today I get to be your host for the Field of the Fork webinar. As always, it's brought to you by North Dakota State University Extension. This is the ninth year we've done this series and we are so glad you've joined us today. And a special shout out to our welcome, our special welcome to our watch parties we have out there. So glad you're getting together and joining some fellowship along with some of the learning you're doing. We have archived all the webinars from the previous years and the links to those are on the Field of the Fork webinar page. We also are providing a certificate of attendance on the website and that is posted with the recording. On the next slide, we will show the upcoming webinars. We hope you can join us for those as well. And the slide after that we have the webinar controls and because of our large number of our participants, we invite you to post your questions and comments in the chat. So let's go ahead and practice finding that as many of you already have been doing. You guys know the routine fairly well, but go ahead and look at the bottom there and see the chat button and ignore the Q&A box. If you click chat to open up the chat, you can go ahead then on your right hand side and type in your city and state. I see many of you are doing that already. Our next slide we provide the acknowledgement. So as you're typing in your city and state, we want to mention we have a special request. The program is sponsored in part with grant funding from the USDA's Agricultural Marketing Service. So we're going to ask you to complete a short online survey that will be emailed right after today's webinar. As a thank you, there will be prizes provided to the lucky winners of the random drugs. When you do get that survey, you're going to need to scroll down a little bit to find today's dates because we are combining the data from 2023 and 2024. So again, welcome to today's webinar. I am pleased to introduce today's speaker, although for most of you you probably don't need an introduction. Julie Gard Robinson is a professor and food nutrition specialist for NDSU Extension. She does research and outreach in the areas of nutrition, food safety and health and coordinates the field of work program. She writes she has written a weekly column called Prairie Fair for almost 27 years. Julie, take it away. Thanks, Scott. We're kind of switching roles today. So glad to have everyone here and you're from all over the place. We love to share our resources from NDSU Extension with all our North Dakota friends as well as all our new friends from around the country. This is our non-discrimination statement. And I'm going to go ahead and get into my talk. And we're going to be using the chat and we're going to use some other features of Zoom today. So Scott is going to help me out a lot. But today we're going to talk a lot about fruits and vegetables in the diet. I am a registered dietitian. What counts as a serving or a cup of vegetables? What are some of the health benefits? What are some ideas for using fruits and vegetables? I think you might be surprised at the current statistics on fruit and vegetable consumption. So I want you to just ponder real briefly how many fruits and vegetables have you had today? So did you have any an orange for breakfast or some juice or maybe you had a smoothie with vegetables and everything in it? What do you have for lunch? And in this presentation we are including dietable beans like black beans, kidney beans, all those sorts of beans as a vegetable. They can either be a protein or a vegetable. So I'm going to give you just about 30 seconds to think about how you're doing so far. All right. So are you thinking? Let's go on. And this is how we count fruits and vegetables in the current MyPlate guidance that we use, which is based on the U.S. Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which comes out every five years. Every five years we get recommendations and a lot of times they don't change a whole lot. Most of the time they at least hold even on the amount of fruits and vegetables we eat and a lot of times it increases. So as you can read, a cup of raw or cooked vegetables or vegetable juice or two cups of leafy greens can be considered as one cup from the vegetable group. And I'll be covering very shortly just how many cups each of us should be consuming to meet the guidelines. So pretty soon in the world of North Dakota and probably in your states as well, we're going to see a burst of color coming from nature. I haven't seen any grass popping up in my yard yet. I live in Fargo. But the more colorful your plate, the healthiest, healthier it is for you. So take a cue from nature. Take a look at all those flowers. This happens to be a, I think it looks like fall. And anyway, that is a good cue that we should be having more colorful fruits and vegetables, not skittles, but colorful fruits and vegetables on our plate for a lot of reasons. This is one of our guides. I wrote a number of years ago, but it's really been a very popular publication. It's called What Color Is Your Food? It is available on our website. If you simply Google that title and NDSU extension, it'll probably pop up pretty easily, but this kind of goes through in more depth. All the information about pigments and so on and some of the health benefits of different colors of fruits and vegetables. So we are going to take a brief look at the current guidelines for nutrition for all of us. And this is also colorful, but it includes more than fruits and vegetables because we need a balanced diet. We need a lot of different types of foods on our plate. If you look at the red and green items, fruits and vegetables, really that should be half of your plate. That's the current guideline recommendation. Make half your plates, fruits and vegetables. And then a little over a quarter grains, especially whole grains. And then another quarter protein. And proteins can be from a variety of sources, both plant and animal or both. And dairy is the last food group. So this is a pretty good synopsis of a healthy diet. And you can kind of think about that as you're planning your own diet. So in the world of fruits and vegetables, we used to say servings. And some of you might remember Eat Five a Day. That stood for five servings of fruits and vegetables. Well, about 10 or actually more than that, more than 10 years ago, this my plate appeared. And we've been using it. We use it for children and adults, people of all ages. And it's a really good visual, I think, for the recommendations for a healthy diet. So now we consider items in cups instead of servings. So that has taken a long time to help people figure that out. So now on this slide, you can take a look. If you're a woman, ages 51 plus two cups is the recommendation for vegetables. Now go down the line a little bit more for younger women, males out there. Three cups up to age 50 and then two and a half cups for 51 plus. Because you might notice if you keep eating a lot of food as we get older, it's much easier to gain weight. So we kind of relax the amount of food. You can certainly eat more than this. That's always a good thing to eat more fruits and vegetables than what is recommended. Here are the fruit recommendations. If you're female, on 19 to 32 cups, 31 plus, one and a half cups. If you're male, two cups all the way from 19 till forever. So how are you doing? Some days I do really well and some days I don't. Even with all my background in nutrition. So I'm going to ask Scott to launch our first poll. And I don't think we've used polls before. So before you write anything in the chat, if you have access, go ahead and vote. This is like phone a friend on one of those game shows. Pull the audience. And it looks like 10% one. And now I'm going to not tell you the answer quite yet. But we will tell you shortly because I have another poll for you. On average, what percent of children meet the fruit and vegetable recommendations? Is it 5, 10, 20, 30 or 40? And that should be an E, I guess, instead of a three. If you have kids, you can think of your own kids. Maybe your kids are a head of the curve. And we'll go on. It looks like most people majority thought 10%. So a little bit more information that I'm going to tell you what the answer is to that. First of all, we're going to shift into categories of vegetables. My plate divides vegetables into numerous categories. And you can see they're based on color. And again, for a reason because each of these colors give some indication of the nutrition that's present. And I will tell you that most people short change themselves on these dark green, which include dark green, leafy vegetables, broccoli, cooked or raw, lots of different things that are green. And the other group within vegetables that people short change themselves on are the orange vegetables. And we clump together red and orange. And they include all fresh frozen canned red and orange vegetables. So you can think tomatoes, red peppers, carrots, sweet potatoes, winter squash, pumpkin. So think about your own consumption. That's this webinar is a little different than some of the previous ones, because I really want you to personalize this and think about what you could do and set a goal. I'm not going to collect your goal, but based on what you hear today, are you meeting the recommendations or is there something you could change? But these two groups that are green, red and orange are the ones that people are short changing themselves on. And then we have other categories, beans and peas. Those include all cooked and canned beans, peas, including lentils, chickpeas, pinto beans. This category does not include green beans or green peas because they're green. And then we have starchy vegetables. That includes white potatoes, corn, green peas. And if you've been watching the news lately, there is a movement, so to speak, to move potatoes to be a grain. I'm not sure that I would agree with that because they have a lot of attributes such as high potassium levels of our vegetables, but we'll have to see what happens. Another category are other vegetables. So all fresh frozen and canned things like, I guess that's where the green beans go and onions and iceberg lettuce. So they're in that other category. Iceberg lettuce, if that's your leafy green, I guess, that you prefer, I would encourage you to go with the dark green like the spinach, the romaine, because there are many more nutrients in those dark green leafy vegetables than say our iceberg, which is very low in calories as a little vitamin C, crunchy, but not nearly as healthy for you as those other darker greens. And then we finally have our fresh frozen canned and dried fruits and fruit juices. So there you go. All those things like bananas, grapes, melons, berries, raisins, they're all very good for you. And I'll try to divide up all your fruit and vegetable intake to include different things on different days. If you find yourself going to the grocery store or the farmer's market or whatever, wherever you shop, try to pick something a little different now and then to make sure you're getting all this nutrition that your body needs. So I'm giving you some homework. So tomorrow I want you to write down all your fruits and vegetables that you have throughout the day. And also I didn't include snacks. So there's your homework. I'm not collecting it, no grade, but you're on the honor system. And I hope that you take this as a launchpad to meeting your recommendations for fruits and vegetables, because so many of us are short. I still haven't told you the answer yet, have I? It's coming. I promise. Why should we eat fruits and vegetables anyway? Why is everyone always telling you? Why are there all these messages everywhere? Well, it's because they provide so many nutrients. They provide vitamins A and C. And one note, if you pick up a nutrition label on any product, almost any product will have a nutrition label. They no longer include vitamins A and C, because those two nutrients are often fortified in other products, maybe juice products, those sorts of things. So instead they've added vitamin D and potassium as replacements, because they couldn't make the nutrition label to cover the whole box or bag or whatever it's in. So there is a change, but I do encourage you to compare nutrition labels one to another when you're making your selections for whatever you buy. Fruits and vegetables also provide fiber. And then we have a fancy word there phytochemicals. Phyto means plant, natural plant chemicals. And many of these act as antioxidants. They're like the boxing gloves that go in. And if there are free radicals that could promote cancer or other diseases, these natural phytochemicals, which all those colorful fruits and vegetables contain in abundance, can fight off those invaders in your body. So that is where a lot of the research is going on right now. So some of the nutrients out and many other things that, you know, we probably don't even know yet in the world of nutrition. There's ongoing research. So because we are trying to promote eating more fruits and vegetables, we are trying to help protect people against a lot of chronic diseases. Cancer, diabetes, heart disease, even being overweight or obese, can be helped by a diet high in fruits and vegetables. And I bet everyone listening has had a direct experience, maybe yourself, maybe a family member who's had or has one of these diseases. And if it's something as easy as eating more fruits and vegetables that could help lower our risk, why not do it? But wait, there's more. Eating more fruits and vegetables also supports muscles. It helps our immune system. It helps our bones and joints because there are many nutrients that our bones and joints need as well. And our eyes. And it's not only the carrots, folks. It's those leafy greens and corn. And there are pigments within those vegetables that can help promote good vision. I can't remove your need for glasses or contacts, but it can certainly help prevent macular degeneration, which is a leading cause of blindness. Fruits and vegetables, the nutrients contained within also keep our skin healthy, our digestive system healthy, and even our teeth healthy. So there's a lot of good reasons to eat more fruits and vegetables. And you find that, gee, I'm short. I'm not consuming as much as I want or need. So I do have something else that I want you to know about, and you can still sign up. And maybe I'll ask Ada, who's helping out today, if you could pop the link for our nourish website into the chat. We're actually going to launch another course. If you've already taken it, it's the same ones. We're working on some new ones, but we're going to launch April 8th. It's free. There are prize opportunities, and you can still sign up. It takes 30 or 40 minutes to do these online modules. They're kind of like what you're watching right now, except they're recorded, not live. And you'll have about three months to do the seven modules. And they cover topics like getting better sleep, because nutrition does play a role. And not getting enough sleep can affect your nutrition, because you may think you're hungry when you're actually tired. And another module that we're covering includes skin, eyes, bones, joints, heart, brain, digestive system. Muscles is in the works. So if you're interested and you have, you know, 40 minutes a week for yourself, and I hope you do, please consider signing up. Our participants so far have really enjoyed it. And some of our county offices, actually several, are offering the live classes. And you'd go to a place and take the class. Thank you for the nice comment over there. So I have some handouts that we have posted on our field to fork website. And one of them is creative ways to use vegetables in your meals. There's a pocket guide that goes directly with this presentation. So as I go through in short time, some of the hopefully creative ideas, maybe things you've never thought about ways to prepare fruits and vegetables. You'll be able to download that and you can go through and circle it because all the information is there. You don't have to take a lot of notes today. We also have a growing together cookbook that my students and I created a couple years ago in conjunction with Fargo Moorhead gardeners. And we can also post a link to for that on the field to fork website. So we'll we'll work on that. I don't think it's there quite yet. And then we have a Facebook site that has daily posts. So I just want you to be aware that these webinars are not the only thing. And our field to fork website has a lot like dozens of handouts with recipes. If you prefer to cook with recipes and people like to, you know, make it up as they go. But we have a lot of resources and I hope you check them out. As always, they're free. And, you know, I'm also looking for your ideas as you hopefully fill out that survey that we send out to you after this. These programs because that's how I as a coordinator of these decide what topics are going to be featured from year to year. Okay, here's the answer. Who how much how many people meet the fruit and vegetable recommendation. So if we average this, you know, it's right around, I'll just say closer to 10. So about 11% of adults, meaning that almost 90% of us do not meet that recommendation for about four to four and a half cups of fruits and vegetables in total. And children are not doing very well. You can see it, if you combine those two numbers, it's about 5% of kids in the United States meet the fruit recommendation and, you know, in total fruit and vegetable recommendation. So we're not doing too well as adults or as children. So there's a lot of things that we can do it to change this. So some of you, if you are parents might have children who were selective eaters, sometimes we call them picky eaters, that's not the best term. I call them selective. And these are some tips that experts have for people who are trying to entice their children to eat more fruits and vegetables and come closer to those recommendations. One is to set a good example. We always tried to, I have three children and we always tried to provide a lot of different vegetables. And I remember one time I made Brussels sprouts, and my husband referred to them as little brains. And guess how many Brussels sprouts were left on plates after that comment. So not always a good idea to try to be funny. Another idea is don't force the issue. You have to keep providing these opportunities to taste things. For kids that takes 10 or 12 exposures to a food, and we never want to make them eat food. I mean, that might have been the way some of you, some of us were raised, but then food becomes a fight and a struggle. So make it available, let them choose. And then another piece, and I'm actually doing a workshop with a lot of childcare providers this weekend, is to encourage gardening among children. And also at the grocery store or the farmer's market, having them help select something and prepare it. Because researchers have shown that if kids help garden, if they help select the food at the store, and if they help you cook, prepare the food. They're much more likely to eat it. And another tip real common in the world of nutrition is when you're introducing a new vegetable, whether that's a Brussels sprout or something else, offer it with something they already like, like maybe macaroni and cheese or something that you know they'll consume. So familiar and less familiar, not everything unique. Try different prep methods, and we'll be talking about those today. And of course, you always want to make mealtime pleasant. It should be a nice opportunity for people to get together and, you know, just talk. So I want you to think as I go through these next ideas, after I talk about food safety, what are some ideas that you might want to try? What have you not done to prepare fruits and vegetables? But first, we're going to talk about safety. And we do have a handout all about produce safety. It's called fight back for bacteria. And it should be with the archived section of the field to fork site. So they come up with a few steps to think about to make sure that produce is kept safe. And for those of you who are growers, doing this more on a commercial level. Periodically, we offer the class called the Food Safety Modernization Act Produce Safety Course or FISMA. That gives you a lot of depth about food safety. So I'm just giving you one slide. So when you go to the grocery store, you want to check for damage and bruises. Most of the time you can cut that away and use the rest of the fruit or vegetable. That's not going to hurt you. But technically, where the bruises located, that's more likely where you're going to have the microorganisms growing. So as I said, most of the time you can just cut it away. Of course, this goes without saying, but within this handout and this comes from the partnership for food safety education. You always want to use clean utensils and just rinse with water. We don't recommend using soap. Unfortunately, that message got out earlier, you know, back in 2020 during the start of the pandemic and people were washing their fruits and vegetables with soap. No, soap is not meant for us to consume. So there are some produce rinses that are certainly safe, but plain old water, use a brush if necessary. That's the current guidance. Keep fruits and vegetables separate from any contaminants. So that could be raw meat juices or, you know, other items such as that all the way from your grocery cart in the store to your home. So be real cautious. And then our recommendation, once you cut up fruits and vegetables, it becomes perishable. So we have this two hour timeline that comes from US Department of Agriculture or USDA, where you keep that fresh produce that's been cut, peeled, or even cooked. You have about two hours, serve it out, get it in a shallow container, put it in the fridge. And if you are not going to cook fresh fruits and vegetables and they become contaminated, maybe you're making, you know, a salad and you're also making something that's going to be cooked. You really do need to either cook or toss fruits and vegetables that have touched meat juices and will not be cooked because you can kill microorganisms through cooking. But it's not a good idea to consume raw meat juices, as we all know. So now I want you to go to the chat again. Which fruits or vegetables are linked with the most outbreaks of foodborne illness? What do you think? I'm seeing lettuce and melon, romaine lettuce. What do other people think? Canaloupe, spinach, spinach lettuce, apples, bean sprouts, very good. When these outbreaks happen, that means that at least two people have gotten sick and it's been tied back to the same food. That's sort of the definition of an outbreak. So I'm going to show you the next slide. This is sort of a compilation of many years of the FDA outbreaks. So you can see and someone, a couple of people got this or several people got this, right? Leafy greens and someone else talked about sprouts. And then we look at melons. Tomatoes appear here. Berries. And often the berries have been contaminated with like the rinse water or where they're growing, that kind of a thing. Herbs have been linked to some foodborne illness outbreaks. Cucumbers, green onions. We heard about those a few years ago. And in some cases you can see it's unknown. But leafy greens, sprouts, and of course I just told you to eat more leafy greens. So you want to be especially cautious about those. And one comment I'll make about leafy greens is when you buy them in a package that says triple rinsed, ready to eat. It truly is ready to eat. Food safety experts are more worried about consumers taking the safe stuff out of a bag and then rewashing it and maybe contaminating it. Then just dropping that content of that leafy green, pre-grinst bag into a bowl and eating it. So they are safe to eat from the bag if it says they are safe to eat. Trust me, those food manufacturers do not want you to get sick. Foodborne illness outbreaks can be very costly from a legal standpoint. So now we're going to just go through A through whatever I can get through in the next 20 minutes or so. So fresh apples, we certainly can enjoy those fresh. You can boil them and make apple sauce. Have you ever tried grilling apples? Just slice them into slices, brush with butter, place on a grill, and you can top with cinnamon or honey. Really nice side dish, especially with something like pork or chicken or any other food you like. It makes a tasty dessert and much lower in calories, of course, than having apple pie. If you haven't tried drying, that's another area where we have a lot of guidelines put together in our food preservation section. So very simple. It's a good idea with apples because they are high in antioxidants and that's what causes them to turn brown. So you have to do an antioxidant treatment such as lemon juice or citric acid or fruit fresh. But you can dry things in a food dehydrator. That's probably the easiest way, but you can also bake in the oven at a very low temperature and let the oven or let the apples sit in there for a couple hours and they'll get nice and crisp. So you can check that out. Bell peppers. Well, just like anything else, you can rinse them, chop them or julienne them, make those thin strips. Great for topping fresh salad. It's a good way to build in some vegetables. And by the way, we do call a bell pepper a vegetable, but botanically it's technically the fruit of the plant where the seeds are located. But in my world, we call it vegetable. Try sauteing bell peppers, cut them lengthwise in the strips. You can heat olive oil or your favorite oil. Any oil is going to be a little bit healthier than a solid fat. Then you add your peppers, cook about 10 minutes. There you go. You have a really tasty thing. And one of the red bell peppers in particular are very high in vitamin C. They're one of the best sources of vitamin C, even better than oranges, for example. And again, grilling. We're coming up to grilling season. I'm hopeful that it's going to be warm soon in my world. But again, it's very simple to grill both fruits and vegetables. You just cut them up, brush them with your favorite oil. And it doesn't take very long. It depends on how hot your grill is. We do have a handout on our website. It's called Grill Something Different. And it includes some really tasty recipes if you prefer to work from recipes. But, you know, don't only grill meat when you're using your grill. And I bet there are a few grill masters out on the call today. Broccoli, just like the others. Of course, we can eat it fresh, uncooked. One of the really good ways to cook food is, without adding calories, is to steam it. And it keeps that beautiful color. And there's also steamer bags of vegetables. Of course, you can buy in the frozen food section in most grocery stores. So that's another way that's actually considered steaming. But, you know, try steaming broccoli, sautéing, just like the other definition. Just add some oil to a skillet. Let it heat up a little bit and then add your cut-up broccoli. And when it turns that beautiful bright green, that's chlorophyll, and gets tender to your liking. You don't want it to be mushy. You want it to a little bit kind of to the tooth almost like pasta. And then it's done, ready to go. I love to roast vegetables. Broccoli florets on a baking sheet with a little oil and some desired seasoning. It takes about 20-25 minutes. It's a pretty hot oven, about 425 degrees, but really delicious. And brings out lots of flavor and your kids might think they're eating candy, okay? Here's my beloved Brussels sprouts. One of my very favorite vegetables. So roasting them is also a delicious way to prepare them. It takes 35 to 40 minutes in this hot oven. You want them to be kind of crisp on the outside and tender on the inside. So you might have to do a taste test and see how you like it. And you do want to brown them evenly. So you're going to just keep moving around a little bit. Shake the pan from time to time. And like with the others, you can also steam them. There's a lot of really nice steamer baskets that are available. It doesn't take very long, 5 to 8 minutes. You want them to be a little soft and tender. And of course, Brussels sprouts are readily available also in the grocery store. And I helped with a children's garden I have for a number of years. And anyway, they were absolutely amazed when they saw how Brussels sprouts grow. There's a big stock and they were like, what is this? And that's the Brussels sprout. So I think they were quite intrigued and they were almost at war about who would get to take the Brussels sprouts home and make them. So I think we just had to divide them up. Another way to prepare Brussels sprouts again is to do the sauté method. Kind of lightly coat them with oil and allow that to caramelize a little. That's the development of the sugars with the heat and there's natural sugars within all of our fruits and vegetables. It takes about 6 or 8 minutes. And a good way to finish is to have some fresh lemon juice or lime juice if you like and a little garlic and some salt and pepper to taste. So really a delicious thing. You probably have seen Brussels sprouts more often on restaurant menus. They're very delicious. Cabbage. I love cabbage. I grew up growing lots of cabbage. I'm from Minnesota originally and it grew really well where I grew up. Anyway, of course fresh, you can make coleslaw and so on. Delicious in soups. You can boil it. It will have an aroma. But actually the flavor is not very intense in cabbage once it gets into a soup. You can also roast it. This was one of the recipes that we tried when we made the Growing Together cookbook. We actually made wedges and we made almost like cabbage steaks. And we roasted those and they were very good. So that is another way to think about doing this. And I will say that what I'm sharing with you now is part of a pocket guide. So it falls up into like a little map and many extension offices have it. And it's also on our website so you can look at the big map on your screen, I guess. Carrots. Carrots, as I said, are good for your eyes. They're really necessary for helping us prevent night vision loss. So they feed a portion of the eye that helps support night vision. You can't see in the dark completely but certainly helps support our night vision. So eat more carrots. And certainly again, you can roast them. Just cut them up into coin size pieces. Use some different flavorings. Try some cinnamon or chili powder for slightly hot. Some salt and pepper. Some people like a little glaze of honey or a little butter. And it takes about 25 to 40 minutes and a pretty high oven, about 400 degrees. And roast them until they reach your desired tenderness. Boiling. As you'd suggest, it only takes seven or nine minutes. So pretty quick to boil. And if you have the opportunity, you're cooking something else. It's really easy to add some carrots. Just chop up some carrots. If you're making chili or you're making soup, it's a good way to fortify those other fruits and vegetables. Or other menu items with fruits and vegetables. Cauliflower, same as the others, fresh. But some more novel things besides the roasting, I'm mentioning how to do it. Sauteing, steaming. But one of the, I was really surprised by this one time. My daughter was in probably junior high or middle school at the time. And she had learned how to make mashed cauliflower. And that's all she wanted. But if you're going to eat cauliflower and all I have to do is mash it with some potatoes. Hey, let's have at it. So it's a really nice combination. You can either do the cauliflower just boiled and mashed or you can add it to mashed potatoes. So worth a try. And certainly try these other methods like sauteing and steaming as well. Chickpeas, actually considered a vegetable. Most of the time we would probably buy them canned. And an easy thing to make with chickpeas is hummus. And if you've never tried making hummus, it's very simple. Just takes a can of chickpeas, about a tablespoon of lemon juice, some olive oil, fresh garlic if you like, and cumin, salt and pepper and blend it up in a blender or food processor. And I will guarantee that you can make your own hummus for a lot less than what you'd pay to buy the commercial hummus. And it doesn't take more than a couple minutes, you know, a few minutes to make this. So try that out. Try making your own hummus. You can also roast canned chickpeas, so rinse them off, toss them with olive oil, salt, pepper, cayenne pepper if you want a little kick. Spread on a baking sheet and roast for 30 or 40 minutes. If you have someone in your family who can't have gluten, for example, roasted chickpeas, which become kind of crisp can be a substitute for croutons and salads. They also are a really tasty snack and you can make, we have a lot of recipes for these as well. We have a whole collection of pulse related recipes because chickpeas is in that pulse family. Cucumbers. Can't wait for some fresh cucumbers. Of course, we can eat them fresh. Have you ever had cucumbers in a smoothie? It's kind of has a nice green flavor, I'd call it. But it's a good way to incorporate some very low calorie ingredients into a smoothie. And we also tried making a spread with finely chopped cucumbers could be chopped up in a food processor. You can mix in some cream cheese and seasonings and suddenly you have a really tasty spread for, you know, for your sandwich. So you could add it to your bread. Add some egg salad or chicken salad and you've got this extra little crunch, this extra flavor. Dry beans. Can't emphasize how good they are for you. They are really one of our best sources of dietary fiber. And if you've ever been to the doctor or whatever your healthcare provider's license is, you probably are telling a lot of us that we should be eating more fiber. That is another nutrient lacking. Well, if you want to take care of it, eat more of our pulse foods like beans and chickpeas lentils. They're very high in fiber. And of course we can use beans in many ways from soups, canned ones go really well in salads, tacos. You can use all of these as meat extenders so you can add some lentils, for example, or beans to tacos. You can even make black bean brownies and we have a pretty good black bean brownie recipe on our website. If you go and look at our overall website. How about grapes? Well, we are starting to grow more grapes in North Dakota. In fact, one of our speakers that was on previously, we talked about garlic. She actually does a lot of work with grapes. So maybe we'll have a grape industry that is very large in North Dakota someday. But of course you can eat grapes fresh. And if you want something that's almost like candy, you can put them in the freezer and you can have a very refreshing snack. And you also can roast grapes, believe it or not. So add a little oil, salt, pepper, whatever seasonings you like and roast for about 30 minutes. And you can even use that because it gets almost a sweet like flavor. You can use it as a topping on ice cream or enjoy it as a side dish or put it in a salad. So herbs, lots of things with we have we have five handouts all about each of these herbs. So we have basil and here's a little tip for basil, which is great on fresh pizza, which you could even grill. You can make your own margarita pizza with basil, fresh mozzarella and fresh tomatoes. But if you want to explore an easy way to cut up basil, you just use a knife to cut thin strips. And after you roll up the leaves and suddenly you have these nice long strips of basil. It's a nice little tip. And you can put that as I said on pizza. You can add the salad, soups, make your own pesto, cilantro. This is a love or hate relationship. A lot of people have with cilantro. To my daughter, cilantro tastes like soap. She's a super taster. But you know, a lot of people certainly like cilantro, very common in Mexican foods. You can chop it up, add it to pasta salad, rice, salsa, anything, you know, any way you like it if you happen to like cilantro. I love it in fresh salsa. Dill, some tips on how to use that want to remove the large stems cut into smaller pieces. You can mince and use in side dishes and add your potato salad, seafood, or even if you make your own salad dressings, it just adds that fresh flavor. And all of these herbs and we have a handout I worked on several years ago with a former horticulture specialist. It's called harvesting herbs for healthy cooking or something like that. Name escapes me, but we do have a handout that talks all away from growing the herbs to using it. Mint. Again, you can cut them up similar to what I described with basil. Roll them up, cut into strips. And here's where you can explore the Mediterranean diet. Make a tabbouleh salad. You can add to lemonade. You can make your own mint tea. And they grow like wild. So don't plant a lot of mint in your garden because it might take over, but there's lots of different flavors of mint available. So a lot of fun. Good starting item for young children. They like to watch these grow and and so on. And you can also dehydrate your herbs. And you can bring some of these into the house and over winter them and have them as little house plants. Little culinary house plants. Rosemary. Really good in chicken, turkey, pork and beef. My rosemary grows into giant bushes, but it's a really tasty addition to macaroni and cheese pizza. You can add it to your roasted vegetables. You're all going to try now. So really tasty way to improve, you know, the flavor of foods. Leafy greens. Hit some of the high points because I'm almost out of time. But you can certainly add spinach, swiss chard, kale to soups. You can saute spinach. You can make kale chips. So again, these directions, everything I'm saying is on the handout that is with our archived items. Onions. The main thing I'm going to talk about now is try caramelizing them. They are delicious. You can make your own homemade onion soup, but you have to be patient when you're caramelizing onions. And some people actually use their, their slow cookers to do the caramelizing for them because it's a slow heating process. Of course, you can grill them and you can sautee onions. Potatoes. We're working on a potato guide right now. One of the former speakers was Susie, who is our potato breeder. So my students and I have been working on some brand new potato recipes. And yesterday they made the potato brownie recipe and it was a huge hit. So in coming time, there will be a potato recipe for brownies available. Very tasty. I'm sure you've all had many of these, but one thing I'm going to highlight. I have an air fryer. I wasn't a big fan of air fryers for a while because I had a convection oven at the time, which does the same thing, but I changed ovens. And now I have an air fryer and it's pretty handy. You can heat up French fries that maybe you, you ate at a restaurant and it'll taste just like when you were having them at the restaurant. You're just portion controlling yourself as we were the other day and air frying for about 25 minutes works really well. Pumpkins. Pumpkins, again, they're one of our dark orange. They're very high in fiber, very high in carotenoids, which our bodies use to make vitamin A. Good for our eyes, good for our skin, but you can also roast pumpkin. And yesterday, one of my students made a delicious pumpkin soup with apples. So that will be worth coming in the 2025 field of work calendar. So again, similar to the other ways that you can roast, but very delicious and a different way. You just need to blend up that roasted vegetable and apples in our case and it made a very tasty soup. So something to look forward to. We're almost to the end. We raspberries, of course, fresh and raspberry sauce is very delicious. For each cup of liquid, you're going to use about a tablespoon of cornstarch. And you can use this as a sauce over ice cream, cheesecake or pancakes. So raspberries, again, high in antioxidants. Well, I grew up really liking rutabagas, believe it or not, because we grew them and I love to dig them up. And I was like, wow, they're really weird looking, but they can be mashed. They also can be roasted. And, you know, as I said, I hope that you're seeing some things maybe you've never tried. Have you tried mashing rutabagas? If the flavor is too strong, try blending your mashed rutabagas with mashed potatoes and make a mix. Snap peas, again, lots of different ways. Fresh, you can saute them and you can eat the whole pod. Very common in Chinese cooking to have pea pods. You can boil them and you can also roast them. So make use of your oven for some of these different items. Strawberries, one of my favorite ways when fresh strawberries come into season, which usually in May, we start seeing them in high quality in stores, try making a strawberry sauce or a freezer strawberry jam. When fruits and vegetables are in season, they're at their lowest cost and highest quality. Someone I saw was asking about squash. And actually we have two handouts on our website and they are linked within our field to fork collection. One's about summer squash and one's about winter squash. And they include lots of recipes and ideas. So again, sauteing, roasting, steaming, and you can also try making chips out of summer squash, such as zucchini. So add a little bit of olive oil or another oil you like, some seasonings, maybe a little salt if you like that. And then you just bake them, flip them over, and it all takes about 18 minutes to make your chips. And we couldn't have a session about fruits and vegetables without talking about sweet corn. So delicious comes in a little about mid to late summer in North Dakota, Minnesota, probably much earlier for some of you on this call. But we do have, we have some recipes that show you how to grill and it's a simple process. Putting them on the grill, cooking about 10 minutes, you can add whatever seasonings you like and get a little bit of char because that brings out that sweetness, that caramelizing that can happen during the heating process. Tomatoes, people love tomatoes. They always ask us lots of things about tomatoes because of course we can eat them fresh. We can roast them as well. And one thing I don't have on here is you can grill tomatoes. They're actually pretty tasty on the grill and you can stew them and you can preserve them. We have many guides about how to make salsa and can and freeze tomatoes. So if you're looking for ways to, you have a bumper crop of tomatoes, we can help you. Just check out our website or many of you are, you know, you all have access to a cooperative extension in your states as well. How about winter squash? Well, try roasting it. Try adding some extra ingredients. Really simple, put the flesh side down after you cut it in half and roast until it's to your softness that you like. I've never tried growing turnips. I've tasted turnips, but those can also be roasted. And this is so simple. Roasting is such a simple thing and it's so on trend with some of the culinary uses of foods lately. You can also saute them and it doesn't take very long really to make all of these things. So that brings me to the end and I've used up my time, but you'll see my contact information. What I want you to take away is that most adults and children do not meet the recommendations for fruits and vegetables. They're really, really healthy for us. And we do hope that you aim for a variety of colorful fruits and vegetables from all the subgroups because that will help you meet your nutrition needs and you probably will not even need to take any kind of supplement if you eat all of these different fruits and vegetables. Be creative. And I hope that you check out our free resources. And there is my email and my direct phone line because I'm sure we're not going to get to a lot of questions. So Scott, any questions? Well, there is a few. Obviously, you probably saw them popping in. We can try to go through them fast, see how many you can get through, decide how long we want to stay on. Yeah, let's take a few. We'll go back to the top. First one was wondering about swapping cups of fruit and vegetables. Like maybe can you eat more fruits than have the vegetables to try to even things out? Yeah, you certainly can. If you prefer one or the other fruits, well, they're pretty similar. They're a little bit naturally higher in sugar, so they might be a little bit higher in calories. But if you would like to eat more fruits than vegetables, have at it. Aim for four or four and a half cups in total per day and less juice. I'll jump to the juice one then. So does juice qualify as a vegetable on the chart you were showing back when you had that? Depends on what the juice is. So tomato juice is a vegetable. Orange juice is a fruit. But juice in particular typically doesn't have as much fiber. And some of the other, it tends to be higher in calories and has less fiber. So what we really recommend is that you eat more whole foods instead of juice. But it still counts. And it depends on what the starting point was. Sure. A couple of ones on measuring. So one was, what is the recommended way to measure leafy greens? Just use a cup and push it into a cup. If you go to, I saw some questions popping in and I won't know the answer to, how many clementines does it make a serving or whatever. But if you go to my plate, choosemyplate.gov, that has charts of every possible fruit or vegetable that you can think of. But again, for the leafy greens, you know, you don't want to push them down. But you'll, if you want to see how big a cup or two cups would be, take out a measuring cup and then take out another one, put it on your plate and just see what it looks like on your plate. All right. This one said that her family eats a lot of spinach and she was recently told that a 14 year old should not be eating a container of it within a couple of days. Thoughts? Oh, because a container. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, you don't want to focus so heavily on one thing. The main rule of thumb with spinach and dark leafy greens is to look at what medications you might be on. Those are, like, say, spinach is going to be particularly high in something that could interact with vitamin K, with kumadin, like a blood thinner. So if any of you happen to be on a blood thinner and they've said really watch your intake of leafy greens, listen to that because those can interact. But, you know, if my kid was eating a whole bunch of spinach, I'd probably try to, you know, buy a smaller container of spinach and spread it out over time. I think I've heard this question before. So is corn a vegetable or a grain? For our world, corn is a vegetable. Like corn on the cob is a vegetable. You know, the whole kernel corn is a vegetable. If it's in the form of cornmeal, is it going to make cornmeal muffins? That's a grain. For some of the recipes you were showing, when you mentioned Brussels sprouts, this person was wondering, can they use frozen Brussels sprouts for the recipes? Absolutely, use frozen. In some cases, you might want to thaw them in the microwave first so they don't get overcooked during, you know, your cooking time. So thaw them and then you can proceed. Are there any resources that tell you the vitamins and minerals in each fruit or vegetable? Hmm. If you really want to dig into depth, USDA does have a nutrient data base. And you can, it's searchable. And you can type in spinach or Brussels sprouts or whatever you're interested in and buy the cup and it'll tell you exactly what is in that. We have a more condensed version. We have a group of about five handouts about vegetables. And it kind of condenses down a lot of this information into a simple chart. But if you really want to go in depth, then you would go to the USDA, you know, database and look it up. Sure. I think I know this answer, but I'm going to want to hear your thoughts. So do you actually need to peel carrots? You really don't. I would scrub them off really well. But you really wouldn't need to. And no one asked me about baby carrots. Baby carrots started out as bigger carrots and they're cut down. And mini carrots are, you know, mini, they're small. They're petite. Yep. So there's two different things. Caramelizing. Does that take out all the nutrients? No, not at all. It just is a way, you know, you're going to probably lose some of the nutrients from the extended cooking time. Heating time like vitamin C is a little bit fragile. But you still will have, you know, certainly the fiber, the flavor, you know, most of the phytochemicals. So enjoy some. We have a really good onion soup recipe under the onion section of the field to fork resources. All right, there's just a couple more here. Do you need certain kinds of pumpkins for cooking? Yeah, very good question. Most of the time we want to go with the small pumpkin. They're usually called sugar pumpkins. There's some, you know, if you're buying the giant jack-o-lantern, big carving pumpkins, those tend to be stringy and not good for culinary use. So what's of the pumpkins that you can buy at the grocery store and the produce aisle? They have selected those to go to the, you know, the produce aisle because they can be used in our cooking. Sticking with pumpkins quick. Why can't we can them? This person's been told that it has to be frozen, not canned. Good question. Technically, you can, can chunks of pumpkin. But not mashed pumpkin. So under our pressure canning resources, or if you go to the National Center for Home Food Preservation, there is a way that you can can the chunks. Never a water bath canner. Don't ever can these sorts of things in a water bath canner. You need a pressure canner and you need to follow the current guidelines, times, pressures and all that. But you can't can mashed pumpkin like what you can buy in the grocery store because we wouldn't have, we wouldn't be able to achieve the safety in the center of that mashed pumpkin inside a jar at home. Those, all of those, you know, if you buy Libby's pumpkin or whatever brand, they have many, many food scientists who are monitoring that that is a safe product with home canned items, we have to go with what has been tested by USDA or by universities or the National Center. So even if you, even if you see something on the internet from Pinterest or, you know, something like that that says, oh yeah, I do this. No, you want to go to a reliable resources, resource that has been tested and is safe. So chunks okay, mashed knot. Good, good information. Got one last one, and I think it's a good one to talk about because it's about MSG and extra salt and healthiness. And so this person read an article that lists ways to make vegetables taste better drizzling with various citrus juice and a dab of vinegar or red pepper flakes. But it finally, at the end, it added a half a teaspoon of MSG for four to six servings of veggies. What do you think about the added MSG? Well, adding MSG probably not our best idea. You know, it's sodium monosodium glutamate. It is considered a flavor enhancer. Some people get really bad headaches or major reactions and they often associate MSG with they call it Chinese restaurant syndrome. So I think there's better ways to add flavor. You mentioned the really good ones, the fresh citrus, some, you know, maybe fresh herbs, your favorite spices. I would go with that. If you don't have a reaction to MSG and sodium is not an issue for you, you know, maybe try it. But I would go with the other avenues first. All right. Well, that was the last one. There was a couple of other ones in there, but I'm pretty sure you touched on a lot of the kind of some stuff related to it in your talk and a lot of good comments in there too from most of the folks too. They threw in some different recipes or ideas that they have for certain fruits and veggies. Some really interesting ones that I'm sure most people saw in the chat. So thanks for all the communication today, folks. Yes. That is it, Julie. Good job. All right. Thanks, everyone. And join us next week. You asked some questions about food preservation. So I'm bringing in another expert of one of my colleagues. She's from Kansas State. And so save up all your questions about safe food preservation because she also works with a lot of entrepreneurs in Kansas. Thank you, everybody. And you can this presentation as I presented it is available as a PDF on the field to fork website.