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"It wasn&amp;#039;t a typical Tuesday afternoon meeting, and it will forever be my best. First Lady Michelle Obama on my left, Sam Kass, White House Assistant Chef and Senior Policy Advisor for Healthy Food Initiatives, on my right, and decades of presidential china adorning the walls. No white board or PowerPoint presentations or written agenda. Here I was in the White House residence at a &amp;quot;round table&amp;quot; discussion \u2014 literally at a round table, white tablecloth and all. The topic: The Partnership for a Healthy America, The First Lady&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;Let&amp;#039;s Move!&amp;quot; campaign and &amp;quot;MyPlate&amp;quot; initiatives. The goal: To make healthy recipes easily identifiable and readily available to parents.   In June 2011, First Lady Michelle Obama and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack introduced a new food icon, MyPlate, which is designed to remind consumers to make healthy food choices. The icon highlights the correct intake of different food groups and was designed to help parents fill their children&amp;#039;s plates with the recommended nutritional balance. The United States Department of Agriculture is working with the First Lady to promote MyPlate alongside the First Lady&amp;#039;s Let&amp;#039;s Move! initiative, which aims to solve the epidemic of childhood obesity in the U.S. &amp;quot;The idea of eating meals as a family has been lost,&amp;quot; Mrs. Obama said. &amp;quot;Now we feed the kids one thing, the adults something else, and that&amp;#039;s part of the reason why healthy family meals has eroded over time. But it&amp;#039;s easier to feed the family all at once, and it&amp;#039;s better for everyone.&amp;quot; I get that. I find myself cooking something for one kid, something else for the other, then a third meal for my husband and me. It&amp;#039;s annoying. Typical weeknight dinners consist of various pastas with meat and cheese, pre-cooked chicken nuggets (organic yes, but still, what a cop out!), roast chicken, steak every now and then, with oven-fried potatoes, an orange and a few baby carrots that find their way back to the refrigerator most nights. And when that&amp;#039;s too much to manage, I order a pizza and call it dinner for all. C&amp;#039;mon, there&amp;#039;s Vitamin D and calcium in the dairy, and complex carbohydrates, and the tomatoes in that sauce are a fruit, right? I toss myself a salad while the boys simply watch. I&amp;#039;m a food editor, I love to cook, and my plate definitely needs work. It would be easy for me \u2014 or anyone else \u2014 to make that meal a healthy one, and the First Lady keeps it simple. She suggested using whole-wheat crust, adding cheese in moderation, topping the pie with chopped tomatoes and some fresh veggies. She had other ideas too, like cutting broccoli into tiny pieces so the kids were better able to eat them, using healthy dips, identifying each kid&amp;#039;s favorite vegetable and offering it alongside something new. But even Mrs. Obama admits that as a working mother, it was hard for her to figure out ways to feed her family healthy meals; that she sustained herself on bagels throughout law school; that like so many people in our generation, she never really learned how to cook. After a visit to the kids&amp;#039; pediatrician that resulted in some nutrition advice and a good look in her own kitchen, she changed that. Now she wants to help all Americans change that too. So what I really wanted to know during this once-in-a-lifetime roundtable was what the First Lady, a role model mom in every way, cooked for her family. Turns out her specialties are baked crispy chicken legs served with couscous and steamed broccoli, or saut\u00E9ed shrimp, broccoli, and garlic atop whole-wheat pasta. Both meals are quick, easy, and about $4 a serving. Now I get what MyPlate is all about, and it&amp;#039;s pretty simple: Make sure half the meal has fruits and vegetables. Choose lean proteins and whole grains. My meals now have some assortment of green beans, apples, kale chips, berries, and snap peas. The chicken nuggets are homemade and baked with a little hot sauce instead of ketchup. We&amp;#039;re still working on fish\u2026 I&amp;#039;ll get there. But I can honestly say that now we eat like the Presidential family \u2014 and you can too.  Elizabeth Shepard is the General Manager of Hearst Digital&amp;#039;s Food and Home Group. Delish is working with the Partnership for a Healthier America and USDA&amp;#039;s MyPlate to give anyone looking for healthier options access to thousands of recipes that will help them create healthy, tasty plates. For more information about creating a healthy plate, visit choosemyplate.gov. Find recipes at pinterest.com/MyPlateRecipes. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.delish.com/cooking/nutrition/news/a21053/myplate-roundtable-michelle-obama/>