Healthy Tips Video: Choosing Fresh Produce

Video Transcript

Hi, my name is Lisa. I'm one of the dietitians here at the Healthpark. And today I'm going to talk to you a little bit about how to pick fall produce. Fall brings a lot of great, fresh fruits and vegetables, things like apples, and pears, and beets, and brussel sprouts, broccoli, turnips, pumpkins.

And so knowing how to pick the best fruit or vegetable for your money is really important. And so I was going to just go over a couple of the vegetables that are available to you. Besides the look of the vegetable, fragrance is really important. So if something smells good, it's probably going to taste good.

So first we're going to talk about fresh beets. I have some golden beets over here. You want them to be small. The smaller the beet actually the more tender it is, the better it tastes. I know a lot of times we tend to go for the bigger vegetables only because we want to get the most for our money, but when they get large they really don't taste good.

And then you want to look at the beet, make sure that it's firm, and that there's no cuts, or mold, or anything on it. And you want the leaves to look really bright green and not wilted. And so when you get your beets home, you don't really want to wash them if you're going to store them in the refrigerator.

But what you do want to do is cut off the greens at least an inch above the beet the bowl so that it doesn't draw the moisture out of the beet and make it taste bad.

The greens you can use in a couple of days. You cook them like you would any other greens, they're really delicious. The beets you can store in plastic in the refrigerator for up to a week and they're great roasted, sautéed, and stir fry.

And actually beets are really delicious. A lot of people think beets taste terrible because they're used to the pickled beets in the store or the canned beets. But fresh beets really have a nice sweet, savory flavor.

The other thing that we have here is some brussel sprouts. And so when you're going to buy brussel sprouts if you can get them loose that would be better than the package because you have more control over what you're buying.

You want the head of the brussel sprout, you want them to be small and compact. You don't want to get the really big ones because then they're not as tender. And then you want to look for the brussel sprouts to feel firm and the leaves to be bright green. If the leaves are yellow then that means that it's probably dehydrated, if the leaves have black on it then it probably has some mold or fungus.

If you see little holes in the leaves, then a lot of times that might mean that it had insects and the insects could even still be in there. Yeah, and then another thing is you want to try to make sure that they're all the same size because when you go to cook them they'll all cook at the same temperature and some won't get real crispy and other ones won't be very tender.

When you're cooking brussel sprouts or you're using them raw, you just definitely want to cut off the end stem of the brussel sprout. And then you can use them whole, you can slice them in half, however you want. They're great roasted, sautéed, toss them with a little olive oil and some seasoning, you can stick them in the airfryer.

They're actually really good in salad. You can shave them down and cut it really tiny and then mix it in with your lettuce and it gives it a nice crunchy actually flavor for that. So those are just a couple of the fall vegetables, a couple things to keep your eye out for when you're shopping.

And so check out the farmers markets and the fall produce. And if you haven't tried some of them, give it a shot because there are really some great vegetables out there that you might learn to really like. Thanks for your time and have fun eating. For information on this topic and other nutrition topics contact the Healthpark at 270-688-5433.