Don’t you hate that feeling of struggling to come up with a dinner idea each day? Is your family constantly saying to you…”ugh, we just had that!” ? Or do you often find yourself in the middle of making a dinner when you realize you’re out of a key ingredient?! Sounds like you need a PLAN!

Perhaps you’re familiar with the saying, “If you fail to plan, you’re planning to fail.” This couldn’t be more true when it comes to meal planning!! Although it can be tough to motivate myself to do so, I find that my week goes much more smoothly if I take 10 minutes at the beginning of the week to plot out my plan of attack 😉

Then I make a grocery list for the week and make sure I have everything I’ll need before the week even begins. I’m a “once-a-week” shopper, so I usually plan meals earliest in the week that require the most perishable ingreidents, too!

We all know that going out for lunch carries with it certain risks (e.g., ingesting all sorts of food additives), but apparently even bringing your own healthy, whole foods lunch from home can be risky. Well, if you’re in a hurry…
Today, my hubby was packing his lunch quickly before heading off to work. He knew there was leftover chili in the fridge for him, so he grabbed the tupperware container and threw it in his lunchbox. Before he left for work, I noticed the chili was still in the fridge, so I went to put it in his lunchbox and found that he’d accidentally packed a bowl of mushed up, rotten veggies intended for our dog (click photo to enlarge)! Oops!

Dried mango slices should look like this! And they should contain “mango” and NO other ingredients! Yum!

You have a craving for some candy, but you hold strong and refuse to give into the temptation of all of those artificial colors and flavors. You reach for some dried fruit, instead, and rest easy knowing that at least you’re eating something “natural,” right? Well, kind of…maybe…..sort of….it depends – – You MUST read the ingredients list!

Let’s take dried mango, for example… because it’s my FAVORITE!! 🙂

You wouldn’t think you’d need to even look for an ingredients list on something like “dried mango.” After all, isn’t it just self-explanatory? You’d think so…and that’s how it should be….but that’s not how it is!

Here’s an example of some dried mango I recently purchased at Trader Joe’s in Omaha (not that Trader Joe’s is necessarily any better/worse than any other retailer – believe me, they also sell versions of dried fruit that are not so pure as this example).

(click photo to enlarge)

(click photo to enlarge)

Ingredients list shows that the product contains just “mango,” which is all that I would use if I were to dry some mango at home (click picture to enlarge).

Compare that ingredient list to the one on the bag  below. Granted, there’s still some “real fruit” in there, as the front of the package suggests. However, there are a few other things in there that you might not suspect. What makes this mango so much different from the others that it needs artificial colors, etc. to be added!?!? I’m not sure I want to know!!

(click photo to enlarge)

(click photo to enlarge)

My advice: Look for dried fruits that contain nothing but fruit in the ingredients list! They are out there!