How to get your kids to eat liver

Sep 9, 2009 by

The French seem to be quite oblivious to the American understanding of liver as the stereotypical despicable food, the quintessential really good-for-you, totally gross food.
The French like liver as much as they like anything. Americans, on the other hand, if they eat liver, it’s usually not for enjoyment. It’s out of duty. There’s work and there’s play, and this is work. Our prejudice against liver is rooted, I believe, in our tendency to overcook it into a hard, dry slab.

Making liver enjoyable may seem almost cowardly or unethical, like making church interesting or accepting pain killers during childbirth.  Or you may think that if it’s tasty, it can’t be good for you.  That pleasure…

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Training Kids to Tune Out External Cues, Tune in to Internal Ones

Aug 17, 2009 by

Stock girl looking in fridge

How do we humans know when it’s time to eat? Or how much to eat?

It starts well: in the beginning, our hunger perfectly regulates our eating.  A baby cries when she’s hungry and we feed her the optimal food—breast milk—or the best baby formula we can buy. It’s a simple as that.  Parents, who know best, feed the baby only those foods that will benefit her, and she learns to like them. So far, so good.

Getting civilized

It all becomes considerably more complicated as we grow up. In part, it’s a matter of becoming more civilized in our eating habits. Learning to follow some external cues…

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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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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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