As any of you that follow us already know, we view celebration times as a great opportunity to encourage, promote and enjoy healthy eating.  Celebrations are also the perfect time to develop and build on relationships with the families and whanau, and encourage their participation in your healthy food culture. 
We have created a whole range of healthy, delicious and straightforward recipes that could be made with children in the centre or given as ideas to parents to bring in for a potluck style party.  By giving the suggestions to parents, you can invite their participation and demonstrate that celebration foods can be healthy and tasty.  An effective way to achieve this is to print some recipe options they can choose from. Not only parents will thank you for helping them decide what to bring, you'll also end up with a range of healthy and appetizing choices at your gathering! 

To ensure you end up with a variety of foods for your celebration, we have included a range of baked, fresh, savoury, sweet and even drinkable options.  For instance we prepared our guacamole recipe with a Christmassy twist by cutting the tortilla crisps with a Christmas tree shaped cookie cutter!

We created a pair of smoothies, red and green, a duo of mini muffins, savoury and sweet, and our vegetarian snack, Xmas Roll-ups; as well as a range of fresh fruit preparations that are sure to be a hit with the children!

Creating healthy foods is not only preferable in a centre setting, it's a valuable opportunity for the children and families to learn and share plenty of other great skills.  Getting the families involved will enable them to recreate these ideas at home, for their own celebrations, or allow them to share some fabulous, healthy ideas of their own!
We wish you all a happy holiday from Clean Plate!

This is one of the questions we get asked the most by teachers, cooks and parents, and the short answer to this is an emphatic “NO!” This is because, even though fruits do contain the natural sugar fructose, they are also really good for us, children and adults. Fruits offer several benefits to our health and provide us with vitamins, minerals, carbohydrates, fibre and essential nutrients which all play an important role in our body, and therefore should be included in our daily diet.

Other benefits connected to eating fresh fruits include:

• strengthening our immune system and helping us fight infections;
  
• maintaining a healthy digestive system;  
  
• helping to maintain a healthy weight, as they are low in calories;
  
• providing a nutritious and affordable addition to meals;
  
• reducing the risk of chronic diseases such as heart disease, lowering cholesterol and certain cancers.
  

Dried fruits should not be included in our daily servings of fruit and should be treated as ‘sometimes’ foods, as these are high in sugar and offer less nutritional value. Dried fruits have also been linked to tooth decay in young children as they can easily stick to teeth and are hard to remove. In the centre and at home, we should limit how often we serve dried fruits (a few times a week is fine) and offer it in smaller amounts.
Commercial fruit juices found in shops are very high in sugar and often have added flavourings, so should be avoided. Natural fruit juice, as opposed to eating the whole fruit, has had all the fibre and pulp removed through the juicing process. A smoothie, for example, where the whole fruit is blended and no fibre is lost, is a much better choice.