If you’ve ever known the disheartening chore of pumping breast milk at midnight after your only night out in three months (a wedding, no less) and then pouring said milk down the sink because–for god’s sake they had not one, but two custom cocktails created for the event, and who wouldn’t want to try both?–and then had the baby start wailing from her crib, well then you know that breastfeeding, though healthful and bonding, isn’t always fair. Some times it just feels a little like a run-on sentence (see above).
The latest in unfairness, although I confess the Times article wasn’t the first time I heard about it, is that there’s ongoing concern among pediatricians about vitamin-D deficiencies (including rickets) in breastfed babies. The article cites a recent survey of studies that estimates up to 78% of breastfed babies who are not supplemented in wintertime may have Vitamin-D deficiencies. Breastfeeding is still the preferred method of feeding infants (if it’s possible for the parent (s), but human milk is very low on vitamin D, which helps in the absorption of calcium and is crucial for strong bones, among other things. The American Academy of Pediatrics now recommends a vitamin D supplement for breastfed babies to help prevent bone-bending rickets, and other more common, but less critical levels of deficiencies.
Read the rest of this entry »
Filed under Uncategorized.
Sheer heaven. In the world of commercials, the only thing keeping moms from drowning out the cruel world with bottle of sleeping pills with a buttery chardonnay is a dinnertime round of approval from dad and the kidz. Thank heavens for microwave meat chunks.
via daddytypes. (again!)
Filed under Uncategorized.
With my seven month old daughter chowing down with gusto, I am once again facing the battle between goodness and laziness on the baby food front. Sure I’ll mash a banana for her, but I’m not quite enough of a pioneer wife to shell and puree peas for her. So far, I’ve been buying yuppie bait, that is, frozen high end baby food (I know I know, but it really does taste better than the jarred stuff) and supplementing with one or two weekly batches of a homemade puree–whatever comes in our weekly CSA basket. Her pleasure in the home-cooked food reminds me why its worth the extra work: so far the kid thought that yellow wax bean puree was heaven on earth and greatly enjoyed her purple carrots puree and the rakish beard it made on her face too. Meanwhile kid number one took 30 minutes to eat a single yellow wax bean (raw and reluctantly, the only way he’ll eat veggies).
When I saw this little device via daddytypes, it looked like a great motivator to make more of the homemade stuff: The Beaba Babycook is a (yes pricey) little gadget that steams and purees food for babies all in one device. It’s sold by Williams-Sonoma here in the states. But theres a little question of what kind of plastic it’s made out of and another little question about how forthright WS is being with inquisitive customers. See thingamababy comments for the outrage.
Tags: baby food
Filed under Uncategorized.
With its cluttered décor and obligatory friendliness brilliantly lampooned in movies like Office Space and Waiting, upscale casual dining seemed as permanent as a cockroach—but the recent economic downturn has left those hungry for mid-priced family meals in the local strip mall, well, hungry. The parent company of Bennigan’s, (Think Applebee’s, only Irish-ish with Jameson’s in the barbecue sauce) has declared bankruptcy, shuttering its own restaurants, though the fate of its franchises hangs in the balance. It’s sad news for hundreds of employees, and distressing news for the restaurant industry in general—people, it seems are actually feeling the pinch enough to –gadzooks—do things like cook at home and grow their own vegetables. How much our new habits will stick around is another question. My guess is that we’ll all get a collective craving for cheese fries and bad cheesecake sometime in the second quarter of 2009, but maybe by then our kids’ll be hooked on lentils and brown rice.
Tags: economy, restaurants, strip malls
Filed under Uncategorized.
The NY Times ran an interesting, but kind of unhelpful piece this week on how various methods of cooking affect the nutritional content of vegetables. According to the piece, tomatoes seem to be more nutritious cooked, spinach loses lots of Vitamin c in cooking, and carrots are a crap shoot—you gain carotenoids when cooking carrots, but lose polyphenols. It’s the kind of information that you don’t really need, since the point is to eat more vegetables, not to eat more lycopene or niacin.
But since we always pick and choose which bits of nutritional advice to heed, I’ll take this one: the article says an Ohio study found that salads were more nutritious served with avocados or full-fat dressing than plain or with low-fat dressings. Right on, right on.
Despite the research into the niceties of various cooking methods, the basic message is still—eat more vegetables, and if you need to add a little salt or fat to make you eat them, so be it. In addition to being very pro-butter/salt/and olive oil in modest quantities, here are a few of my own veggie-boosting tricks: some of them might not be appropriate for kiddie purists like my son, who insists that any vegetable matter be raw and plain, but it’s not just your kids who need more veggies in their diets. And if they see you enjoying them they might just get curious.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: cooking, health, vegetables
Filed under Uncategorized.
If, as it has been written again and again, the internet and peer reviews are destroying the careers of movie critics, then surely food criticism can’t be far behind…first came restaurant review sites like Yelp that amalgamated community opinions on local greasy spoons and sushi joints. Now Zeer has come along to apply the community-review model to grocery-store items. The beta site has nutritional information on all sorts of products, from frozen edamame to the newest Dorito flavor, plus community reviews of said products.
I’m not sure how helpful it is.
First of all—there’s the issue of price. Yes groceries are getting stiflingly expensive, but individual items don’t involve the same financial commitment as say, a night out at a restaurant. Restaurants are expensive enough, and babysitting hard enough to nail down that one really doesn’t want to waste a night at an overrated restaurant, and so I think there’s some value in community restaurant reviews. Some comments might be bat-shit crazy, but usually trustworthy themes of rude service, soggy fries, or fabulous chocolate cake emerge from them. In general, I think the amount of money you’re thinking about spending is proportional to the amount of time you’re going to spend researching a product. I might be pretty careful about my next hotel reservation, but I’m less easily convinced by a group of strangers on my decision to buy my next box of pasta.
Read the rest of this entry »
Filed under Uncategorized.
Slate is afire with coverage of PETA’s rift inducing million-dollar prize for the person who can perfect lab-produced in-vitro chicken meat; thus making an end run around the cruelties of the whole animal industrial industry. It’s hard matter for vegetarians (is meat itself the problem, or killing and mistreating animals to produce meat the problem); and it’s tough to swallow for those of us who have embraced a small/more humane/more sustainable farming approach to the meat we eat. Lab-grown meat rubs against all our fears of genetic-modification and monoculture, and yet in theory it could be a more humane way for us to satisfy that primal urge to eat flesh. But all this is still speculative–nobody’s making chicken in a petri dish yet.
The ethics of meat eating have been on mind a lot lately–the environmental load of our meaty desires is pretty overwhelming, but I still feel compelled to find a responsible way to include some meat in our family’s diet.
I’ve talked to my three year old about what kind of animals provide him with meat. “Yes chickens in the farm and chicken on your plate are the same thing,” I’ve found myself arguing as he tries to convince me they are not. As he gets older, I’ll talk about the kinds of farms we choose to buy our meat from; and when he asks I’ll let him know that yes, animals die for our diets.
I also struggle not to overemphasize the meat in his meal; I confess there is still a small part of me that thinks of meat or seafood as the defining quality of a dinner, even though I know this is hooey. I doubt I’ll ever become a vegetarian, but I do like the idea of shifting the focus of the meal away from what we euphemize in the restaurant industry as “the protein.” Here it would help if the boy ate vegetables…
Until then, what do you teach your children about meat? Do you blast the Smiths “Meat is Murder” at any available moment–are your children vegetarians while you eat meat? Are you a vegetarian with carnivorous kids? If you do eat meat–do you talk about where it comes from with your kids?
Tags: kids nutrition, meat
Filed under Uncategorized.
And it hurts.
Apparently E-Hass was shivering on The View last month, and she explained that she was suffering from mastitis–just like me! (Frankly I’m suprised that Barbara Walters allows her employees to talk about such matters on TV, given her knuckleheaded comments on public breastfeeding a few years back.
In general, I’ve had very few problems with breastfeeding this second go-round (I have a 3 1/2 month old girl), but then I got a pain in my breast that felt something like an all-day mammogram with a sprinkle of flu-y fever, which turned out to be mastitis. The worst part of it? You’ve still got to nurse or pump throughout, despite the pain, and despite the fact that the baby seems to hate the milk that’s coming out of the sore breast.
The doctor prescribed antibiotics which took care of the worst of it pretty quickly, but I’ve been struggling to get my milk production up again, and I’m still feeling under the weather–I’ve probably just got a bug from my son’s preschool, but I can’t help wondering if there’s something still lingering from the original infection.
For more info on mastitis here’s La Leche’s Faq page and Dr. Sears.
Tags: breastfeeding, infants
Filed under Uncategorized.
So, I’ll take my triumphs where they come. Sometimes they’re small. Sometimes, they’re fishy.
A couple weeks ago, my 3 year old and I sat down to eat the same meal for the first time since 14 months or so, when he turned picky about food. (this does not count the moments when I scarf down one of his IKEA meatballs). I offer him plenty of not-explicitly kid food, but when it comes to eating, he refuses almost everything new.
The triumphant meal in question wasn’t high-end fare–it was fish cakes–a british nursery classic, but it included: salmon–which I can occasionally bribe him into eating, but not without complaint, potatoes, which he only likes in french fried form, and scallions, which, in case you hadn’t noticed, are green!.
The way I make them, it’s pretty good background cooking. Recipe after the break; the parenthetical instructions are optional.
Read the rest of this entry »
Filed under Uncategorized.
It’s always been hard to make sure my boy gets enough nutritious crackers and cookies into his diet—sure broccoli and kale are easy—who could resist all that greenery? Fruit’s a natural—he’d never complain about a microscopic fragment of skin on his otherwise totally peeled apple slices. And fish, well I can’t give hime enough sardines. But those cookies and crackers are hard to convince him to eat—that’s why I’m grateful that I’ve found Nabisco’s kids’ recipe site, which lets me sneak in Teddy grahams that he might otherwise reject in favor of carrots.
Who but Nabisco could think of a cobbler topped with Teddy Grahams, or an oreo parfait made out of chocolate cream cookies, diet cool whip and orange sherbet. Yum! He won’t even notice he’s eating cookies!
Thank heavens for Nabisco!
Tags: healthy snacks, nabisco
Filed under Uncategorized.
9 comments
Add our feed
Offsprung Columns