Eating Mindfully: How to keep kids from getting fat by turning on to better food

Jul 22, 2009 by

Stock kid gourmet American parents today have just two main choices today: go gourmet or go unhealthy. You might be both, but you pretty much have to be one or the other.

Feeding kids is not for the faint of heart or uncommitted today.

If we home cooks serve our families foods that are healthy but that have nothing else to offer, we are going to fail. Healthy foods have to be as engaging as the tastily manipulated and temptingly marketed junk food in today’s battlefield for our tastes. We have to beat our opponents at their own game.

Processed foods today are engineered with salt, fat and sugar to be as seductive and addictive as possible, what food…

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Poached Eggs with Peach Salsa

Jul 20, 2009 by

Stock salsa 

Eggs with salsa was a new concept for me. I lived much of my life without ever hearing of salsa—all those wasted years! It offers unlimited variety and is the perfect partner to lots of foods. Salsa with eggs is such a great idea for an inexpensive, super easy, super quick, super healthy meal. It’s tasty as well, of course, and makes for an impressive and appetitizing presentation.

Rub or spray a little olive oil in small dishes for poaching eggs. I used little glass dishes. My mom has special stainless steel ones. Crack an egg (truly free range farm egg if you can get it)…

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Eating Mindfully: How to Keep Your Kids from Getting Fat

Jul 17, 2009 by

Stock scales

The human appetite, like the human conscience, quits working if you ignore it long enough.

According to Brian Wansink in his 2006 book, Mindless Eating, modern humans have learned to tune out the appetite and the body’s cues about what and how much we need to eat. Instead we are relying on external stimuli to regulate our intake.

We don’t stop when we get enough; we don’t stop until the container is empty, Wansink’s experiments reveal. If the container’s bigger we’ll eat more. If given bigger packages of ingredients, we’ll cook and eat it all. If the soup bowl is being secretly refilled from the bottom, we’ll just keep eating and eating because it never disappears. Like goldfish, we tend to eat whatever…

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Good Egg/Bad Egg?

Jul 14, 2009 by

Giving up eggs because of the fat in them is like leaving a good husband because he won’t let you get the plastic surgery or go gambling in Vegas, and using that as an excuse to run away with the more seductive, gun-toting gangster boyfriend.

Eggs played a limited but complementary and valuable role in the original human diet, which every human was eating up till about 10,000 years ago. This ideal diet provided for all nutritional needs.  This most basic, complete and primal diet, the first…

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Do-It-Yourself Thai Rice Soup for kids

Jul 12, 2009 by

Stock Thai soup bowl This tasty and unusual soup, called “rice soup” or “kao dom,” is a super simple Thai recipe that’s long been a favorite of our kids. This is the kind of meal that children especially enjoy: they can pick and choose among the condiments and make their own mix in their soup bowls, experimenting with different flavors and combinations. I especially like the ginger, green onions, fried onions and cilantro. The red pepper flakes are very spicy; just a few in a bowl of soup is enough for me.

8 C chicken stock

1 C (or more) raw ground turkey, venison or pork

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Slow food: the conversational, recreational artichoke for kids of all ages

Jul 11, 2009 by

  Stock artichoke

 

 My almost-19-year-old came home for a visit last weekend. Fresh out of high school and now on his own working a few hours from home, he had been away for three weeks.  My husband and I knew that we had competition for his time. So I did my best in my meal planning to conspire to keep him around as much as possible during his too-short stay.

First, I served food I knew he’d love all weekend. He’s mostly vegetarian, and I knew he’d eaten a lot of eggs since leaving home. So I…

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