Healthy Eating Homestyle

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Eating healthy has always been a top priority for my family. Every Saturday we visit our local Farmers Market. We also all work in the vegetable patch my dad started four years ago at the community garden, and we are part of a farm share, where we can get meat and eggs.

I’ve learned that eating healthy doesn’t always mean doing without sweet breakfast cereals or beverages. It just means finding other, just as good, food.

It’s awesome to visit the Farmers Market. We have gotten to know the farmers and we get to see other people from our community. In other words, we get to buy delicious food while visiting with friends!

As part of a farm share, my family gets some of the crops as they are harvested. Depending on the season, we get different food. For example, in the summer we get kale and—my personal favorite—watermelon. In the winter we tend to get granola and meat.

My mom loves to make apple pie during the fall, and guess where we get the best apples? At the market!

Whether you love helping pick out the fruits that will go in your lunch, or you like to get involved in your community, everyone loves the farmers market.

In our home garden, I especially love when we grow tomatoes. We are really successful with those. In the summer my friends and I help collect the hundreds of juicy, red, vitamin-c-filled fruits. We eat them all the time after that. We can put them in anything: salads, sandwiches, salsa, and sometimes tomato sauce!

We plant cucumbers that turn out really big and really good. We plant lettuce and basil, which we always turn into pesto. We have a really big chard crop every year as well.

I have loved broccoli since I was 4 years old and we grow that as well. This year we are growing cilantro, too. We even have mint leaves that we can turn into a really good tea. Later this afternoon I am planting rosemary for us to use in tomato sauce later this year.

I enjoy growing our garden and shopping in the market. We get to have fun and stay fit and healthy. I have learned important skills and information about food as well.

I also want to share a recipe with you.

My Favorite Salad

Ingredients: Lettuce, Tomato, Half a Cucumber, Olive Oil, Vinegar

How to make it:

    1. Wash your lettuce, tomato, and cucumber half.

    2. Cut your lettuce leaves into a bite size for your salad. Make sure you off cut all rotten parts of the leaves.

    3. Cut the tops off of your tomato and then cut the tomato into slices.

    4. Peel cucumber half and cut it into slices.

    5. Put tomato slices, lettuce leaves, and cucumber slices in a salad bowl.

    6. Season the salad with olive oil and vinegar.

    7. Enjoy!

—Ana Deluca-Mayne

PHOTO: Ana's homemade salad, using ingredients from her garden! (Photo Courtesy Ana Deluca-Mayne)

Fiddlin' In West Virginia—Literally!

Summer fun from fish camp to music camp to a giant observatory.

I am learning how to play the fiddle, so each summer I go to a camp in West Virginia called Allegheny Echoes. The camp’s goal is to teach old time music to the next generation. This was year was my fourth year at Allegheny Echoes and my third year playing the fiddle there.

I recognized some familiar faces at the camp and knew my teacher from the year before. The first day we played a song I had learned before called “Boil Them Cabbage Down.”

After the lesson (which seemed to go by quickly), my aunt and I had lunch and then went swimming. In the afternoon we went to the Masters’ Jam, which is where a bunch of old time music geniuses play. Then my grandmother came and we went back up the twisting road to fish camp. Every day we drove from the fish camp to the music camp on this winding road. (It would have made my friend sick to ride on that road.)

Thursday night was concert time. Yikes! I was so nervous. We played an awesome song called “Liberty.”

The next day was Friday and I was sad that it was the last day of Echoes. I made some really cool friends and I was going to miss them. I learned a lot at Allegheny Echoes and I can't wait to come back next year.

Although I was sad Allegheny Echoes had to end so soon, I had a really fun time at the rest of my stay in West Virginia. My cousins from North Carolina came and so I had a fantastic time swimming in rivers, playing in creeks, and watching fireworks with them.

Then, we visited the National Radio Astrology Observatory, which is operated by the National Science Foundation. It operates three large telescopes that explore the universe. Researchers also detect and study radio waves emitted by astrological objects. At this very moment, researchers there are picking up signals from space that are billions of years old.

The observatory has made many important discoveries, including blackholes and double stars. Surrounding the observatory is something called a quite zone. People who live in the quite zone can only have certain electronic items that won’t interfere with the radio signals being sent and received from space.

All in all, I had a great time in West Virginia swimming, hanging out with my cousins, visiting the observatory, and most importantly of all listening and playing fiddle music.

—Ana Deluca-Mayne

PHOTO: Ana Deluca-Mayne on her fiddle. Photo courtesy Ana Deluca-Mayne