Mother’s Day is this Sunday, and while you can show your appreciation with a card or a bouquet of flowers, making her a delicious, healthy brunch from scratch is a terrific way to let her know how much you care. Plus, it has other benefits—eating in is often more  budget-friendly than dining out, and home cooking lets you control the nutritional content of the meal you’re making! You can even tailor the meal to suit your mom’s favorite flavors.

Whether your mother loves savory goodies or she has an unstoppable sweet tooth, our brunch menu ideas have got you covered!

To some, March 17^th is merely a day to wear green and drink Guinness. But to others, particularly those of us who come from a long line of Celts, the holiday ranks up there with Christmas. Between handfuls of chocolate coins, generous servings of corned beef, and an endless flow of green beer, the shamrock spirit will be in full force this weekend. It’s a festive and fun celebration, but health-conscious, it is not.

Here are a few twists on the traditional St. Patty’s Day menu so you can stay healthy and still get your Irish on!

Skinny Green Smoothie

Instead of sipping on soda or beer, opt for a delicious green smoothie to keep you energized all day long. IIN grad Holli Thompson’s recipe from her blog, Nutritional Style calls for detoxing, immunity-boosting ingredients such as kale, cucumber and grapefruit.

You’ve heard all the excuses before: from “I’m too busy to cook at home,” to “I end up overeating when I cook for myself,” there’s always a justification for what keeps people from taking control in their own kitchen.

These are exactly the challenges that Integrative Nutrition graduates Quinn Asteak, class of 2010, and Robyn Youkilis, class of 2009, set out to tackle. Both have thriving health coaching practices in New York City and share a passion for whipping up healthy, delicious meals. After meeting at the Fall IINto Action Conference last September, the two got to chatting and decided to team up and create a program to teach people how cooking can make all the difference. Thus was born {Healthy} Cooking Camp, an online, interactive 4-week workshop designed to take the totally confused to total connoisseur in the kitchen.

I recently caught up with the pair to learn more and get the scoop on their exciting new project. Quinn and Robyn are fun, energetic and enthusiastic - check out a preview from the series below! With such a zest for healthy cooking, it’s no surprise that they’ve got big plans for the future.

{Healthy} Cooking Camp launches Wednesday, January 25, 2012. For more information and to register, visit the website.

Special bonus: Members of the IIN community can receive $50 off the regular cost of $199 by entering the code “primaryfood” when registering!

We’re bringing you a special edition of our graduate Q&A this week, as we take a look into the life of not one, but two Health Coaches! Jeff and Cindy Berkowitz have been married for 26 years, and both are 2011 graduates of the Health Coach Training Program. They live in Pittsburgh, PA, with their three children.

Cindy was working in a high-pay, high-stress position as a family law paralegal when she took a fall that injured her back and ruined her knee. She underwent total knee replacement surgery, which left her unable to live a normal life, let alone go back to work. That’s when she enrolled at Integrative Nutrition, the start of a major life transformation.

With a background in physics and food chemistry, Jeff was a chef for 25 years before he began suffering from a variety of inflammatory diseases. At age 48, he was on 15 different medications, plus narcotics to treat the pain. He enrolled at Integrative Nutrition hoping to gain a sense of control over his own life. One year later, he is off all medication and 40 pounds lighter! 

Cindy and Jeff graduated together this year and now find themselves leading a completely different, significantly healthier lifestyle. They’ve discovered a new career as Health Coaches in their practice, Intuitive Holistic Health. The couple specializes in autoimmune diseases, inflammatory diseases and endocrine problems, working to help clients take control of their health. In addition to their practice, Cindy and Jeff teach cooking classes, hold corporate workshops and wellness programs, develop healthy recipes for commercial production, and write a food blog. Read more about this dynamic duo below!

Choosing whole grains, like brown rice, quinoa, or oatmeal, can benefit your heart, your blood sugar levels, and your waistline. Here are a few tips from Joshua Rosenthal's book, Integrative Nutrition, to help you get the most out of your grains.

1. Use organic, unrefined whole grains. Quality matters.
2. Store your grains in an airtight container.

Before cooking:

3. Gently wash your grains in cold water. This reawakens dormant energy.
4. Soak them anywhere from 1 to 12 hours. This will eliminate phytic acid and help with digestion.
5. Dry-toast grains in a skillet over medium heat until they smell nutty. This enhances their natural flavor, allows them to cook more evenly and decreases bitterness.

Are you or anyone you know trying to change your diet and eat healthier? Checking labels and asking what’s in the food on the menu? That’s great, but there’s a simple healthy habit that many American’s are forgetting about when it comes to eating better.

Food and health journalist and author of Food Matters, Mark Bittman, brings up a good point in his recent New York Times article looking at American eating habits—we hardly cook for ourselves! In his words, “Real food is cooked by real people!” It doesn’t seem surprising that real people are cooking less than ever before.

Cooking is becoming a skill of the past and many Americans barely know where to begin. Not knowing the basics of cooking sets us up for perpetuating the “convenience” habit of getting take-out, fast food and relying on heavily processed foods.

The easiest way to eat healthfully and control your diet is to make or prepare the food you eat for yourself (and/or your family). This way you know what you are putting into your body and you also can focus on eating combinations of whole foods (items with the least amount of processing). The average American clocks in 35 hours of television a week (ironically much of it spent watching cooking shows), so it doesn’t appear that lack of time is the real reason why people don’t cook.

If you don’t feel confident about cooking in your kitchen or living space, try to figure out how you can increase your cooking habits. You might even find that you get great satisfaction and actually enjoy preparing your own food. There are plenty of resources online that offer great recipes and educational videos on how to properly cook different kinds of foods and simple ways to prepare whole meals quickly. Check out this video of graduate and Top Chef Andrea Beaman!  

It can often be more gratifying to eat something that you’ve made, plus you can make something exactly how you like it. Cooking your own food doesn’t need to be complicated and it doesn’t need to take a lot of time. Check out Integrative Nutrition’s recipe collection for some simple, delicious recipes that will nourish your body and make your taste buds happy.

In the end it will save your health and your money!

Do you have any cooking tips to share?

One of the main reasons people don’t cook is because they think they don’t have the time. Can you relate? How many times have you opened a cookbook and seen a recipe for lasagna that looks delicious, but calls for a lot of ingredients and hours of labor? The good news is good food does not need to be complicated. If you want a fancy, tasty meal, go out to a restaurant. You don’t need to be a gourmet chef at home; you need to be able to feed yourself and those you love in a nourishing, convenient way. Feel better?

It takes under five minutes to prepare a piece of fish or meat, two or three minutes to prepare greens and an additional five minutes of cooking time for each. If you decide to make a more complicated meal, make your main ingredients, like grains, vegetables, from scratch, and complement them with canned or frozen foods.

You don’t have to start from scratch at each meal. Why not cook once and eat two or three times? Whenever you cook, make extra. Take grains as an example. You can cook your favorite grain in the morning and use some for a hot breakfast cereal, perhaps adding some sweet flavor, like fresh fruit or raisins, and something hearty, like tahini or nut butter. Then you can add some different flavor to the leftover grains, or put them into a soup and take it to work for lunch. In the evening, you can add vegetables and protein, and stir-fry the remainder with oil to give it some extra sizzle. You can also put leftover food into the fridge in small containers for a great, healthy, wholesome snack in between meals.

Cooking nutritious meals can be quite simple and delicious. If you have a favorite recipe that you think others would enjoy, please share them here.