Here’s my take on the Six Deadly Sins Parents Commit in the Kitchen , according to the New York Times. Yes, I know this does not have anything to do with children’s books (my usual bread and butter), but for some reason - call it “last night’s dinner” if you will - I was moved to comment:
1. Sending the kids out of the kitchen. In a perfect world, kids would be eager kitchen helpers, learning to dice and fold and learning to try new foods in the process. But I don’t live there. In my world, my kids use their kitchen time to make potions involving milk, orange juice, coffee and food coloring. Throwing my kids out of the kitchen most (though not all) of the time ensures that most (though not all) of our meals actually get cooked and don’t turn artificially blue and curdled in the process. Guess that makes me a bad person. Oh well.
2. Pressuring them to take a bite. Conceptually, I agree that this is bad, too. But who’s going to cast the first stone? Not someone who, say, has gone to the trouble of making jambalaya from scratch with no seasonings except salt because of her kids’ stupid bland palates and then has had to endure them rejecting it anyway because the ingredients – all of which are things they like - are mixed together. Am I – I mean, is she - actually going to say, “No problem. More for me”? As IF!
3. Keeping the “good stuff” out of reach. Oh, please. The good stuff isn’t for them. It’s for me and Daddy, when we collapse at the end of a long day and need to take the edge off. Wait, the Times means ice cream and cookies? That’s what they’re for, too.
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This time of year, I have a serious blackberry problem. Once I start picking, there is no stopping me. I keep on plucking until a child yanks me away, or until my hands can hold no more fruit.
Here in Seattle, the blackberries are weeds—their brambles rampage over fences, scramble up other plants and shrubs and spill down over embankments. They pop up on every hike, walk and run I take this time of year. Blackberries I purchase at the market are inevitably too bitter, far inferior to raspberries and tayberries and loganberries. But by the side of the road, but they are exquisite picked at the height of their ripeness—look for plump deepest black fruit, no red at all, and shiny—if they’ve become dull, they are over the hill. Inevitably the good berries are the ones just a little higher than your reach—reach higher. It’s almost a moral imperative to gather them because a day from now, they will be too old, and they will slip into decay, unappreciated.
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Tags: found fruit, fruit
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My son’s just made a lunchbox breakthrough: He will now eat wrapped sandwiches –ham and cheese, all rolled up in a whole wheat tortilla. It’s not a nutritional dream meal I know, but at least it’s portable and contains three different foods in one; a sign that his resolute refusal to combine foods may be breaking down. Now it’s only a matter of time before he’ll eat my ratatouille as enthusiastically as a fistful of animal crackers. I know it.
While I’m waiting for that day, I thought I’d round up some resources to help keep you from burning out on the daily lunchbox routine.
Chef Ann Cooper brands herself the renegade lunch lady, and is hell-bent on bringing fresh local and organic food to masses of kids (she’s currently runs the Berkeley school lunch program). If you’re not lucky enough to send your kids to Berkeley public schools, you can look to her for great ideas on healthy lunches for kids with her book Lunch Lessons: Changing the Way we Feed Our Children.
Of course, with kids, form matters as much or more than content, and no one packs a better lunch box, with cuter thermoses, containers, and utensils than the Japanese. You can visit Lunch in a Box for super kawaii Japanese-inspired ideas for yummy lunches (not just for kids by the way), and go to jlist’s bento page (note that thanks to the manga jlist sells, some of the site is NSFW, though the bentos are) to find the cutest straight-from-Japan lunchbox equipment. More pragmatic bento-style lunchboxes include this deluxe lead, bpa, and other yuckies-free kit called the laptop lunch kit.
If you’re looking for a deeper meditation on the lunchbox, check out the very beautiful book: The Aesthetics of the Japanese Lunchbox, in which designer/philosopher Kenji Ekuan sees the lunchbox as no less than a metaphor for Japanese civilization. ”the spirit of form, and the aesthetic ideal in which the many are reduced to one.”
Tags: lunchbox, nutrition, school lunch
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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.
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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!)
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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
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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
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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.
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Tags: cooking, health, vegetables
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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.
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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
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