Your Fruity Duty is to make it a point to eat fruit every day. Who doesn’t like fruit? Juicy peaches, crisp apples, bright yellow bananas–yum! Fruit not only tastes great, but it’s also good for your health, your digestion, and your waistline. Fruit is loaded with vitamins, minerals, and fiber. Those are important at any age, but in our thrifty retirement, they gain increasing importance.
No matter how we try, the simple fact of aging tends to slow our metabolism, and without any change in diet or exercise, we will almost inevitably gain weight. Making fruit a larger part of your diet can help offset that. Fruit can become part of every course and every meal you prepare.
Fruit for breakfast might be easiest. Top your cereal, hot or cold, with fruit. If you’re having pancakes, waffles, or French toast, top it with berries or chunky applesauce. For those on the run, grab a banana or apple as you head out the door.
For the rest of the day, let’s start with fruit in salads. Yes, there’s the common fruit salad. We all used to open a can of fruit cocktail, add sliced bananas, and call it fruit salad. Of course, there are tons of options to that today. You can cut up virtually any combination of fruits and it will be delicious. That’s a great idea to take to a family dinner or a potluck, where gooey casseroles and fatty desserts often rule.
But fruit in salad doesn’t stop there. The mandarin chicken salad, popular for over 25 years already, is just the beginning of a wonderful world that has opened up lately. Try a basic mix of greens with a fresh orange and a fresh apple diced into it. Add toasted pecans and you have a delicious salad. Add diced chicken and you have a main course that is wonderfully healthy, as well as tasty.
Dried fruit, grapes, or fresh berries can be added to a number of salads. Think as simple as raisins or dried cranberries, to as exotic as dates or dried mango. All these work well with a bit of diced celery and bell pepper in tossed greens. Your thrifty retirement likes the cost of these juicy salad ingredients, too.
Fruit works surprisingly well when added to a main course. Cook a beef roast with prunes. Serve chopped apples and pecans over pork chops. Combine dried cranberries and apricots in a sauce to serve over salmon. Glaze chicken with orange juice and honey, and surround with slices of fresh orange.
One element of the Mediterranean diet that is often overlooked is fruit as dessert. Everybody knows about the red wine and olive oil parts, but fruit as dessert is a critical component. Let’s face it: most American diets don’t include grapes and brie as a last course. We choose cakes, cookies, brownies, and other sweets. A single serving of “death by chocolate” can destroy a week of careful eating. Instead, try fruit. Core and quarter a bright red apple and serve it with a tablespoon of caramel sauce, or serve a luscious pear with chocolate sauce. Add the tiniest dash of nutmeg for garnish.
An elegant dessert that is much simpler to prepare than it looks is chunks of fruit served in a martini glass. Cut up cantaloupe, honeydew, pineapple, bananas, kiwi, berries, peaches, or almost any fruit and pile it in a stemmed glass. Drizzle it with a tablespoon of rum, Grand Marnier, or Chambord, and your whole meal has new flair. It’s a show-stopper that will light up the table.
It seems that each week we read about a new super fruit: first, cranberries, pomegranate, and blueberries, followed by exotics like gogi berries, açai, and noni. Claims have been made that this fruit or that fruit can fight urinary infections, promote prostate health, prevent colds, retard coronary vascular disease, or stave off cancer. There seems to be promising evidence to support some of those claims. But until science shows us proof, what we know for sure is that fruit is full of fiber to help regularity and promote digestion, and loaded with vitamins and other compounds that are essential to good health. So do your Fruity Duty and eat fruit every day!
