Sylvia's Scenario

Here is a super easy recipe for your Super Bowl Sunday enjoyment.  Since we are not having our Super Bowl party  this year, we can still eat in a festive manner.  Pandemics do not stop me from eating well!  In fact, I'm eating better.  I started following  The Freese Method  during the pandemic and feel so much better thanks to Hannah Freese, RD.  This recipe falls right into the plan so why not? I eat a lot of nuts following The Freese Method and a lot of dark chocolate...since sugar is off the menu.  (The plan allows dark chocolate that is >70% cocao which is easy for me to eat and totally satisfies my sugar craving.)  There are a lot of spiced nut recipes but I think this recipe has just the right amount of spiciness.  My sister has been serving these nuts at family gatherings for at least 20 years and I am finally posting it. She doesn't even remember where she got the recipe!  I buy the nuts from Trader Joe's and even t...

Before the month of March comes to a close, I want to dedicate a post to Sophia Elie, a dietetic intern who did a portion of her clinical rotation at our hospital.  On her last day, I did this interview and she agreed to be a guest on my blog.  So, here is my first interview on Sylvia's Scenario in honor of National Nutrition Month. Sophia was born and raised in San Diego, California and she had more experience than most interns we've gotten in the past which made my job a lot easier!  She worked as a physical therapist assistant so she was very comfortable around patients and easily established rapport with the ones in our hospital.  She currently has her own consulting business where she provides individual nutrition counseling for a fee, custom meal planning, and medical nutrition therapy. Needless to say, there was very little we had to teach her when it came to providing nutrition education to patients.  She worked a year in the Washington D....

My job in our office this year was to make an Advent Calendar for the dietitians.  My boss came up with the idea and it seemed easy enough to me.  I immediately thought of the calendars that Bruce makes for our Mariner season ticket parties when he prints off the whole baseball season on big wall calendars so people in our group can select their games.  One month would be a cinch for him!  So, he printed off the month of December and brought it home for me to decorate. The question was how to recognize each day as it passes by getting closer to Christmas.  I had an idea that the dietitians could write something down each day that passes using cute little symbols of some kind.  I found these gift tags that are blank so they can be written on.  Those are hard to find because most tags have "To" and "From" on them but these are blank. I suppose we will tape them on the calendar each day until the 25th.  I am thinking about how to do t...

June marks the first anniversary of MyPlate  which replaced the Food Guide Pyramid last year in an  effort for the government to simplify how to tell people to eat or at least provide an icon that supports the Dietary Guidelines for Americans. The guidelines divide 23 recommendations into four categories: 1) Balancing calories to manage weight 2) Food and food components to reduce 3) Food and nutrients to increase 4) Building healthy eating patterns (You can read all 23 guidelines at the end of this post) So, I guess you could say it's pretty hard to get all 23 recommendations in one little icon and there has been a lot of criticism about MyPlate but overall I think it's been good. I know from experience at my job where I do a lot of educating people with chronic illnesses that we need to keep things as simple as possible and with the people that I see at work, even the smallest change can make a big difference. If you really look at MyPlate, how many people ac...

I just returned tonight from our state's dietetic meeting in beautiful Sun Valley, Idaho - couldn't have been a better place to have it.  Just beautiful. The town was very quiet because ski season is over and summer hasn't started yet.  It was very different when we were there in February for a little ski trip with Lauren and her boyfriend, Kevin, who came to Idaho for the first time. Since Kevin hadn't been to Sun Valley, we had to take him skiing.  For our state meeting,  all the dietitians stayed at the Sun Valley Lodge, a historical place with all kinds of photos posted of the famous people who have visited.  It was built in 1936 and is just gorgeous inside and out.  The rooms are rather lovely, too, I must say.  (white robes, slippers, walk-in closets! Nice!) It looked very different than when we were there in February.  The snow sculpture isn't there anymore... It was a little warmer ...

I recently returned from attending our national conference for dietitians in San Diego on September 24-27 and was refreshed to get updated on all the latest research, as well as having a little fun in San Diego!!  This is a good event for all of us dietitians to go to because it keeps us abreast of current recommendations backed up by studies.  For example...have you see the blogs going around about "Unprocessed October" where they are trying to get people to eat "unprocessed" food for a month?  Well, I think its a fun idea, however, I went to a session called "Fresh Look at Processed Foods" and basically, the definition of "processed foods" is everything we eat unless it's pulled straight out of the garden!  Even bananas are considered a processed food!  The home grown tomatoes we can ourselves  are "processed foods".  So, as a dietitian, this conference is good at keeping us grounded with the scientific community so we don...

This week is the Idaho State Dietetic Association's annual meeting and our pre-conference event was a Farm to Fork tour.  There were 50 of us who toured around the Treasure Valley visiting local farmers starting with a feed lot that raises "natural" beef.   Next was a dairy with 3,000 dairy cows, quite a production.  Then we had lunch at a local winery which was absolutely DELICIOUS!  It was all locally grown/produced foods catered by Brick 29 in Nampa, complete with wine tasting, of course.  On the road again to an organic farm which grows greens all year around in 12 green houses.  Remarkable!  Every little garden was so perfect!  We ended the day at another winery, this one was organic and more beautiful scenery!!  It was such a gorgeous day with such inspirational stories from all these remarkable farmers! Our first stop was a feed lot with 4700 head of cattle.  It really didn't stink that much and wasn't as depressing as I antic...