HOW TO PREVENT CANCERS

A few weeks back, we took our toddler to see Sesame Street Live - a groan-inducing rite of passage for many parents of toddlers. This year's subtitle was "Elmo's Healthy Heroes," and the show followed Grover in his efforts to locate his "superness," which he regained through 4 healthy habits: eating right (in this case, eating fruits and vegetables), exercising, taking a bath and sleeping. A good message. The irony came in that said event was at one of those big sports arena, which offered a kids meal for the event. Said kids meal contained: a hot dog, chips, a cookie, a crispy marshmallow rice bar and a juice. Now granted, there was a "healthy" kids meal option. It contained some sad (truly) looking celery sticks, a few slices of orange, an orange juice and one of those prepackaged peanut butter and jelly sandwiches that are crimped together with the crusts cut off. This was my first encounter with this particular food-like item and one I hope to not repeat (the peanut butter was of an unnatural consistency and there was about 5 times as much jelly as I think is reasonable for a sandwich all together on a really dry "bread"). My PB&J loving toddler ate about half and lost interest.

This got me thinking about the need for our behaviors to reinforce our words when it comes to raising kids who will make healthy choices and like healthy food. A number of food writers and bloggers (not to mention researchers, advocates and NGOs) have discussed that kids who participate in food growing and preparing are more interested in eating the food, even when it contains things previously considered "yucky". (For some resources on this, see this PDF from our colleagues at Planet Health & the Harvard School of Public Health)

With that in mind (and it being winter so we aren't growing anything), I wanted to make more of an effort to include my toddler in food preparations. I figured that the best way to start was to involve her in cooking something she DOES like. And my kid LOVES cake, which is, according to Cookie Monster post-2006, a “sometime snack.” That said, me being me, I wanted to find a cake that was healthier than the average standby. I found Martha Rose Shulman’s flourless carrot cake, which featured a few things I liked: it didn’t make a gigantic cake that would have us eating this “sometime snack” for days; it didn’t have a ton of sugar; it didn’t have any oil (other than what you use to grease the pan); it didn’t have white flour, relying on grounds almonds instead and instead; and it wasn’t covered in a sickly-sweet frosting. The last one being a significant “con” in my daughters eyes.

Sunday morning, we set up shop in the kitchen. It turns out the bags of whole almonds at the grocery store have 1 ¼ cups and the recipe calls for 1 ½ cups, so we tossed some sliced almonds we also had in the food processor. The recipe calls for turbinado (raw) sugar. We have white sugar and some demerara sugar so we mixed the two and hoped for the best.



Warning: pulverizing nuts in the food processor may scare the heck out of a small child.



but it looks tasty



(next time, I'd grind it a bit more, but we needed to cease the loud noise making!)

Toss in the flavor adding goodies













Shulman then has you grate carrots on the smallest holes of your grater. If I'm going to go through the trouble of getting the food processor out and washing all those parts, you better believe the carrots are getting grated in the food processor. So I dumped the almond meal mixture into a bowl, swapped in the grating attachment and we went to work. (My daughter didn't mind this noise - it wasn't quite as loud.)



Thankfully, we grated a lot of carrots as my daughter was quite interested in sampling at this stage and I was happy to oblige.



I tried to involve my daughter in as many of the steps as I could including measuring, pouring, grinding and mixing. Here she is adding the carrots to the beaten egg/sugar mixture (remember, this is healthiER food...)



When it comes out of the oven, it doesn't look super pretty



A quick shake of confectioners sugar solves this, but takes you one teensy step away from the healthy part of healthier. I like my desserts a bit pretty so I did it.



As you might expect with a toddler adventure, this one involved some clean-up, but we had so much fun it was well worth it.



The end result was fantastic. My whole family, including the most important voter, my daughter, LOVED it. I brought leftovers into the office, and it got good reviews there, too. This isn't the carrot cake you find in the dessert case at your local diner or coffee shop, but it is a tasty "sometimes treat" you can make with your kid.

CNiC recently gave a big endorsement of Mark Bittman’s new Food Matters cookbook. This week, we gave two of the recipes a whirl.

One of the things that appeals to me about Bittman as a food writer is that he appreciates fine complex cuisine, but pushes us to realize that every meal (or most meals) need not be complicated (in preparation or flavor) to be delicious.

Food Matters has a recipe for simply making grains. Bittman points out that there are lots of wonderful whole grains in the market (or your pantry) and you can often make substitutions. In an effort to clean out some of what is in our pantry and freezer in anticipation of the holiday cooking madness that will shortly begin, I decided to use up the barley we had following Bittman’s recipe. Cooking barley is as simple as cooking rice and Bittman’s recipe nicely points out the variations in cooking times for different grains, including different types of barley, along with tips for knowing how the grains are done. The directions were clear and the result was perfectly cooked barley.
The grain cooking instructions are followed with a nice list of suggested variations – essentially things you can add to the grains. Looking at the list, I realized our refrigerator contained two of the suggestions – tomato sauce and leftover meat, in my case, some left over roasted chicken from Sunday dinner. I tossed a couple tablespoons of marinara sauce
with some chopped chicken
and the barley and called it dinner. Served with a heaping portion of sautéed zucchini, it was a simple, but tasty meal and everyone seemed satisfied.
Cooked barley reheats nicely so I actually cooked that in the morning while we were getting ready for school/work and put it in the fridge. When I got home from work, I added the other ingredients and reheated.
It meant dinner got on the table in 5 minutes (which was basically the time it took to sauté the zucchini). Pretty great for a weeknight.

Later in the week, I gave his recipe for vegetable fried noodles a whirl. Plenty of food writers and chefs have pointed out that stir fry is a great way to get dinner on the table fast, but our house has never embraced this for some reason. I expect that will change. Again, Bittman’s recipe is designed as a template – with plenty of suggestions for variations. We went with the recipe as written – cook some soba noodles, toss with a little sesame oil. Sautee julienned carrots, sliced celery, chopped scallions and some snow peas with a bit of garlic and ginger in a smidge of oil.
Toss with a little stock or water (I had some homemade chicken stock on hand that I made from Sunday’s roasted chicken carcass).
At the end, toss with a bit of soy sauce and an egg. Toss all that with the cooked noodles and top with a few chopped peanuts.
Unlike fast food/take out fried rice or noodles – this wasn’t overly sauced. I could taste the vegetables – which was great because they were obviously where most of the money in the meal went – and because I bought some great fresh ones, it tasted great. Limiting the soy sauce also limited the salt content in the meal. This one was a big hit all around – and because the noodles are mixed with the vegetables at the very end, I simply separated out a bit of each before serving to my toddler, who is at that stage where different foods should not touch on the plate.

Food Matters isn’t a vegetarian cookbook, but it is about making meat (red or other color) an accent and not the centerpiece of your meals. Both meals included some chicken (one had a few chunks of chicken, the other used chicken stock because it was what I had and an egg, which was optional), but could have very easily been made vegetarian.

Food Matters reminds us that eating healthy food can be both simple and tasty.

In previous posts, we’ve talked about implementing the weekday vegetarian plan or moving from your farm share box to a meal plan. For those who don’t have a big pile of recipes in the kitchen (or who are at work trying to figure out what to make for dinner that night), the internet is a GREAT resource for just this type of meal planning.

Last week I realized I had a bunch of eggplant from my farm share that I needed to use up. I was at the office, so on my lunch break (of course), I went to a few of my favorite websites for recipes using eggplant. On Smitten Kitchen, I found a recipe for an eggplant and barley salad. I looked through the ingredient list to see how it aligned with my recipe goals:

- Whole grains? Yes – the recipe base is barley, a tasty whole grain. I think you could also substitute brown rice if that’s what you have, but we always have barley in the freezer (which helps keep it from going rancid in the sweltering swampy summer heat of St. Louis).

- Vegetables? YES! In addition to eggplant, the recipe calls for zucchini and tomatoes. Both are in season and were looking fantastic at the Washington University School of Medicine Farmer’s Market last Thursday so I grabbed both.

- Color? Lots of it! Nothing makes a healthy dish less appetizing than a sea of drab brown colors. But Deb’s recipe is full of color – green (zucchini and lots of fresh herbs), red (tomato), purple (red onion, eggplant and olives)

And of course, the ultimate test was the taste – which was delicious. I scaled back the oil, salt and sugar by about half and skipped the cheese and thought the result was fantastic.

Knowing that I was going to make this on the weekend and that my husband would appreciate some meat after a week of delicious meatless meals, I headed over to another favorite website, One Hungry Mama, for some ideas. I’ve found that one of the keys to keeping my sanity when cooking family dinners is to focus on one dish and keep everything else simple. Since the barley salad had a good amount of chopping involved, I was looking for a main course dish that involved little to no effort. As usually happens, Stacie had the perfect option – slow cooker ribs. While ribs aren’t appearing on any “healthy living” list anytime soon, they are a fine “occasional” food, particularly if that is your only red meat for the week! I’d never thought to do ribs in the slow cooker before but the ability to drop them in and forget them was hugely appealing. And, as Stacie notes, the slow cooker is a great resource for hot summer days when you don't want to turn on the oven (see above). My family’s favorite barbeque sauce isn’t sold in stores around here (hint hint Dinosaur guys), but thankfully, they have a cookbook that includes the recipe for their Mutha sauce. I like to cook up a batch at the beginning of summer and freeze it in 2 cup portions. Since I still have a bit left, I decided to use that instead of Stacie’s Asian BBQ sauce recipe (that I’m hoping to try another day). I knew I’d want to throw the ribs on the grill at the end as Stacie suggests to get that nice crisp edge so I scaled back the sauce I put in the slow cooker to about one cup (the sugars in barbeque sauce will burn on the grill and you’ll get too much char). When the ribs were done in the slow cooker (perfectly cooked, falling off the bone), I slathered a tad more sauce on them (about ¼ cup) and put them on the grill for about 3 minutes. When I took them off, I slathered on another 1/3 cup of sauce and served the rest on the side.

Last, I took some gorgeous sweet corn I picked up at the farmer’s market and cooked that. It was a great summer meal – full of flavor, whole grains and vegetables.