A bald-faced lie.*

When it comes to nutrition, I try to nail the basics. I have a large regimen of supplements I take daily, I work hard to hit my five veggies per day, I drink the lawn clippings that are powdered greens, and I shoot for a minimum of 64 ounces of water (and no, sadly, I don’t count my coffee, otherwise I’d easily double that number).

While I try to focus on eating whole foods and avoiding processed stuff, I also have my 20% of the time (sometimes 30% or 40%) when I eat what I want. Usually on Friday nights.

And one of my favorite splurges is curly fries.

Looooooove me some curly fries.

Which is why, in perusing the internet for healthy recipes, zoodle curly fries caught my attention. Zoodles, if you’re unfamiliar, are strands of zuchinni that you spiralize into noodles. You can use them in place of pasta as a healthy alternative.

I’m not a huge fan of pasta, so I never mind the substitution. Which is why I thought I’d give the zoodle curly fries a whirl.

The end result?

Well, after dipping spiralized veggies in egg and rolling them around in a Parmesan cheese breading mixture, my hands were covered in something akin to baby vomit and the green strands on the baking sheet looked like a pile of grass-puke from my dog Vinnie.

Sheila popped out to the kitchen to survey my progress.

“Stop pretending that’s going to be a curly fry.”

I was hanging on to some optimism though. I mean they hadn’t even gone into the oven yet. I showed her the picture of the golden brown zoodle fries on my iPad and insisted that this was going to be a worthy, healthy alternative.

“Keep telling yourself that,” she said, walking away.

I looked from the picture back at my baking sheet of sadness.

Do you ever have that point in trying a new recipe when you realize that it’s going to be an epic failure? Every time you cook? No? Oh. Me either….

After an hour in the oven, I had baked baby vomit strands and the crushing realization that I’d been avoiding for so long.

It was time to call a spade a spade.

A zoodle is a zoodle. And nothing about a zoodle, baked, air fried (although I suspect this would be better), or otherwise is only ever going to be a zoodle. Nothing about a zoodle is going to come anywhere close to tasting like the hot, crispy deliciousness that is a curly fry.

I’m all for finding healthy alternatives when it comes to my nutrition. But, while I like habinaro baked chic peas and find them tasty, if I put more than three in my mouth at the same time they suck all of the saliva like the saltine-sponge that they are. And while I don’t mind them as a crunchy alternative, they are not Doritos.

Sometimes you want some variety and a healthy alternative to stay on par with your nutrition and zoodle fries, chic peas and soggy-home made kale chips are worth the effort.

But, as with putting cream in your coffee, life is too short to pretend that zoodle fries are curly fries.

Sometimes you just have to eat the curly fries.

*Most sources agree that the original expression, coined in the late 1600s, was actually barefaced lie. At that time, bare meant brazen or bold. At that time in history, almost all men sported a full set of whiskers, and it was considered quite daring or even audacious for a male to be clean-shaven, or barefaced. Eventually, the word for “hairless” went from bare to bald, and so did the description of a blatant fib.

I’m not going to sit here and tell you that I love vegetables.

I like them, but I will be forever traumatized by the canned gray peas that I eventually smeared with mustard so I could be excused from the dinner table. 

Don't judge. You do what you gotta do to go back outside and play more baseball.

Anyone else have these growing up? Somewhere I've still got the peach. 

I like vegetables just fine. I eat broccoli, spinach, green beans, peas and other veggies on a daily basis, but I still don't get enough. Especially on days when I practice intermittent fasting it can be difficult to get enough veggies. 

According to the USDA though, I need to try harder. Really, that’s exactly what they told me.

Dear Kim Lloyd,

Try harder.

Sincerely, the USDA. 

Recommendations vary based on your age, gender, and level of physical activity, but for me, and most of the other people on the planet, we should be consuming at least two and a half cups of veggies every day.

According to www.choosemyplate.gov, a serving of is one cup of raw or cooked vegetables. 

Consuming fruits and vegetables can help reduce, among other things, cardiovascular disease, various cancers and obesity. 

So if you’re coming up short on the veggie train on a regular basis, what can you do to help ensure that you are coming closer to your totals?

1. Sign up for your local farm share

Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) is a great way to get more vegetables and support a local farm in your area. Every year, we split a share with a friend and each week we get a hefty supply of whatever vegetables and fruits are in season.  

A share always includes a plethora of fresh greens, including kale, spinach, and swiss chard, and then a few servings of whatever is in season. 

It was through a CSA that I discovered kahlrabi for the first time. (Pronounced cool robbie. I mean it wins on name alone).  

Because we've already paid for the vegetables and need to use them before they go to waste, we come a lot closer to meeting our daily veggie goals in the summer. 

2. Add them to a smoothie

A lot of our summer CSA greens end up in my smoothies, and I don't even taste them. 

Sure it makes the whole thing turn green and sometimes I end up with spinach in my teeth, but at least I know I’m getting the nutrients.

A sample recipe might be:

2 c. unsweetened almond milk
1 scoop low carb protein powder
2 tbsp. chia seeds
1 tbsp. peanut butter
1 banana
1 c. of spinach 

Sometimes I throw a serving of PB Fit in place of the peanut butter to reduce the calorie and fat content, but either way, I never really taste the spinach. 

3. Make crunchy chips out of leafy things

When I eat Kale, I don’t eat it raw and I don’t really like it sautéed either. Sure collared greens are good for you, but the end result is akin to the seaweed you pulled out from between your toes at the beach last summer. 

So slimy. Just, so, so, slimy.

Instead, I prefer to bake my greens. And by that I mean Sheila bakes them. 

With kale, I like to:

Take a bunch of kale, drizzle it in olive oil, and feed it to the dog. 

Kidding. 

Kind of.

Seriously though, cut the stems out of the kale or swiss chard, and tear into bite size pieces. Wash and dry the kale in a salad spinner, drizzle with a tablespoon of olive oil*, sprinkle on some salt and bake on a cookie sheet at 350 degrees until the edges are brown or the smoke alarm goes off. 

Approximately 10-15 minutes for the first, and probably an hour for the second. 

Somewhere in those instructions I ask Sheila how to preheat the oven. 

* Don't overdo it on the olive oil. This is one of the more common ways to get more calories and fat than you intend. Measure out one tablespoon and stick with that. 

4. Use a lettuce wrap in place of tortillas or sandwich wraps. 

Sure it’s messy as a two-year-old eating spaghetti with no fork, but you’re saving yourself on some calories and adding a little nutritional value as well. The tortilla is really just a vehicle to get burrito filler in my face anyway. 

Boom. 

Plus it's crunchy. 

5. Add a raw green supplement

First and foremost a supplement is just that; something to supplement your diet. Whole foods are always your best option, but I know very few people who won't benefit from the addition of a green supplement. I'm currently using Greens Plus Superfood Raw which doesn't taste as bad as it looks. And by the way, if you're looking for a taste test, the folks at Precision Nutrition have done just that for you right here.

Greens supplements can help boost your energy and immunity and I notice a big difference in digestion when I use my greens. If you're hitting 10 servings of fruits and veggies a day, you probably don't need a supplement, but for anything less than that, adding some raw greens powder is a great way to meet those needs. 

If you want to read a little more on the benefits of using a greens supplement, check out this post, again from the folks at Precision Nutrition.