Health

Demystifying the Mediterranean Diet with Debbie Matenopoulos

02/09/2021

The Wellness Experience

For some reason, weeknight dinners just seem harder to do than most other meals.

Breakfast can be a banana, lunch is easy to grab, but dinner, at the end of the day when everyone is tired and no one wants to cook… Hands up if you’ve given up and done cereal recently.

Debbie Matenopoulos is a four-time Emmy® nominee who has successfully sustained her career as a compelling journalist, talk show host, food and lifestyle expert, and bestselling cookbook author. She is currently the Co-Host of Hallmark Channel’s Home & Family and a Special Television Host Correspondent for Entertainment Tonight on CBS. We invited her to our 2019 Cincinnati event to talk about easy weeknight dinners, and not only did we get some easy, healthy and delicious ideas, we also learned a bit about Greek food, and what is really meant when we say “Mediterranean Diet”.

Dinner can be both easy and nourishing. Debbie shows you how.

Join Debbie as she shows how she whips up quick & healthy dishes for the whole family. Debbie will be making lemon grilled chicken with tzatziki, spaghetti with greek yogurt & oven-roasted broccoli, and proving to us that carrots and cabbage together are actually quite yummy.

A few things to know up front about Greek cooking: Debbie rightly points out that most meals are very simple, with few ingredients. There’s no elaborate sauces, and most of the salt used can be substituted with lemon juice. She’s also quick to quip that although the meals are easy and inexpensive, most restaurants would give the very same dish a fancy name and charge an equally fancy price. And as for the oft-repeated phrase “Mediterranean Diet”? The key, she says, is to eat seasonally. It’s telling that when she went to Greece to do research and photography for her cookbook, some items she wanted to photograph, and not even cook with, were off limits, especially the cabbage. She learned that in Greece, the farmers won’t even sell a cabbage until after the first frost – then they know it’s seasoned and full of the nutrients cabbage is best known for.

The “Mediterranean Diet” is all about eating in season.

We also learn some tidbits about gut health, and that if you are making a pasta sauce, keep some of the water from the pasta – it helps with the creaminess of the sauce.

The meals Debbie outlines are easy enough even beginners (or frazzled, distracted parents) can have a healthy, hearty meal on the table in no time. All the ingredients are basic and easy to find, and they’re all budget-friendly too.

You’ll find this video, and others from our 2019 Cincy event on our You Tube channel. Feel free to share any of it, and use the hashtag #ShineOn when you do!

The Wellness Experience by Kroger, is a virtual wellness platform and multi-day festival experience designed to inspire physical, emotional and mental health through interaction, education and entertainment. The new Wellness Experience Platform provides healthy-living resources to help customers take actionable steps toward making their lives healthier, easier, brighter and a bit lighter.

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