vegetables

In honor of Earth Day (next Monday, April 22), we want to take this week to appreciate all of the colorful, nutritious, flavorful produce that we get to enjoy. With that in mind, we scoured the shelves of our local Whole Foods Market for the most colorful ingredients, from bright red bell peppers to deep purple cabbage. We're going to be taking a look at all of the colors of the produce rainbow and chatting about our favorite ways to enjoy them. Keep checking all week long for lots of colorful culinary inspiration.

A common suggestion to lose weight is to eat salads for meals. While the fresh veggies are healthy and delicious, the tasty toppings of cheese and nuts can really add up — your simple salad could end up containing half a day's worth of calories!

Check out the list of popular salad toppings below, and be extra aware that the more toppings you add, the more calories are going into your body. Salads definitely make excellent meals, but hopefully this nutritional breakdown will help keep your bowl healthy.

Keep reading to see the nutritional info for other salad toppings.

Asparagus is delectable whether roasted, steamed, blanched, or in one of our favorite preparations: raw and ribboned. Remove heat from the equation, and asparagus's true nature shines, tasting grassier, lighter, and crisp. Moreover, willowy ribbons are visually pleasing, an important consideration, as — let's face it — we all eat with our eyes first.

Thankfully, this elegant preparation is extremely simple, and requires naught but a very sharp vegetable peeler and a small amount of patience for prep work. To begin, rinse the asparagus stalks and snap off their woody, desiccated ends.

Keep reading to learn how to shave asparagus.

Unless you're working with asparagus that's freshly harvested from the garden — and sometimes even then — one must discard the woody, slightly dried out ends for enticingly tender results. The problem is knowing how much to discard in order to waste as little of the oft-pricey vegetable as possible. Conventional wisdom will have you bend each stalk till it snaps, as they're more flexible in their tender parts, but this can become tedious fast. Instead, snap two stalks out of the bundle, line up the remaining asparagus with their tips flush, and cut through with a sharp knife between the snapping point of the two. If your stalks are particularly thick, take a few passes with a vegetable peeler on the ends, otherwise you're good to go whether the asparagus will be blanched, roasted, ribboned, or steamed.

Sweet potatoes aren't just for Thanksgiving — eating this smooth, orange-colored flesh can help you fit into that bikini by Summer by assisting with controlling your appetite and keeping you feeling full. Here are three ways sweet potatoes can enhance your favorite meals:

Breakfast: Sweet Substitute
Oatmeal in the morning is hearty and filling since it's already a great source of fiber. But add a little more by mixing in a half cup of mashed sweet potato, and you'll not only gain 3.3 grams of fiber and two grams of protein, but it's so sweet you won't need to add a high-calorie sweetener like maple syrup (100 calories).

Lunch or Dinner: Lower-Calorie Burger Complement
French fries are to burgers like jelly is to peanut butter. Too bad a small three-ounce serving is a whopping 267 calories. While opting for fried sweet potatoes can offer more vitamin A, they're still deep-fried in oil, which makes them equally high in calories. Skip the fries dipped in ketchup and go for a small baked sweet potato with the skin (90 calories) instead and you'll save over 200 calories.

Dessert: Butter Replacement
Cooked mashed potatoes can be used to replace butter or oil in cake, quick breads, and muffin recipes and you'll save an astounding amount of calories. One cup of sweet potato contains 180 calories while the same amount of unsalted butter is — get ready for this — 1,628 calories! It's especially delicious if the recipe calls for cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, ginger, apples, bananas, carrots, or pumpkin. Replace half to three-quarters of the butter or oil, and if the batter looks too dry, add a bit more mashed sweet potato. You'll save on calories, but will also reduce the dessert's cholesterol and saturated fat.