My life is blessed, which often means my days are busy.  Six days a week my day begins at 5:30 AM and ends at midnight. I am a nurse practitioner with my own practice (Connie’s Family Practice) and teach an online nursing program.  My family and I own and operate Bed and Biscuit Boarding and Faultine Athletics. My days can consist of seeing patients, being on call, grading papers, walking dogs, cleaning kennels, loading pitching machines, or updating Facebook pages.

It is difficult to eat healthy when there is very little time to prepare healthy food.  I love quick recipes that are easy to prepare, carry with me, and include fresh ingredients.  One recipe my family loves is Raspberry Quick Snack Muffins.

Did you Raspberries are good for you?
Here are a few of the health benefits of Raspberries:

• Raspberries are rich in effective antioxidants as well phytonutrients. These elements proficiently reinforce your immune system and help your body to fight disease
• Raspberries have high amounts of vitamin C, riboflavin, folate, magnesium, manganese, niacin, potassium and copper. This makes them a complete fruit to offer overall, health benefits.
• Raspberries have a negligible effect on blood sugar level.

Connie is a 50-something wife, mother, Nana, doggie mom, living in a small community in Arkansas, located in the far Northeast corner of the State. She shares a home with her husband aka The Big Man, 14 rescue dogs and 20 chickens. Collectively they have six adult near-perfect children, five perfect grandboys, 1 granddaughter, 2 god-daughters and 4 awesome granddogs.  Connie is a family nurse practitioner who runs a small family clinic, is a visiting professor in an online nursing program and manages a free health clinic (Great River Charitable Clinic). Her and the Big Man also own and operate Bed and Biscuit Boarding and Faultline Athletics. Connie is an active member of the Blytheville Humane Society. Her Blog http://scrapbookwife.blogspot.com/ chronicles her journey to live a balance simple life making her little corner of the world a better place to live.

Okay, let’s get real. It seems like 90% of the time that I write a Foodie Friday post, it is a salad. What can I say? I really dig a salad.

The thing is, I didn’t always feel that way. A salad was meant to be a garnish, a side dish, or a filler food that you put in a realllllly large bowl to make it look like you were serving guests a ton of food. It wasn’t meant to be the main dish or the meal itself. In fact, whenever I would go out to eat with teammates and they * gasp * ordered a salad as their meal, eye rolling would commence.

Now? Gimme a salad. I’m a convert.

This raspberry and spinach salad should be called the Raspberry, smoked turkey, feta, almond, and avocado spinach salad instead of Raspberry and spinach salad. You can’t put a salad like this in the corner. In fact, I may ask Debbie to rename this post the “No one puts Baby spinach and Raspberry salad in the corner.”  This salad was meant to shine on its’ own.

If you are craving something healthy, this is your salad.

If you do not want to prep tons of vegetables, this is your salad.

If you want a comfort food that won’t mess up your diet, this is your salad.

If you want a satisfying meal that is delicious, this is your salad.

And most importantly, if you want something eat while watching Dirty Dancing on your day off, this my friends, is your salad.