True Confessions: Do you Sneak Healthy Stuff into your Family's Food?

Do you have any trouble getting your kids to eat what is good for them?   We do at our house some of the time.  I am amazed at how much time and angst I go through as a mom trying to make sure my kids are not wasting away of scurvy or some other disease caused by lack of fruits and/or vegetables.

To be fair, our kids do eat a fair amount of interesting things, like pesto and black olives and broccoli, and some are more adventurous than others.  But our youngest, in particular, has a true aversion at the moment to nearly any visible fruit or vegetable.  So I find myself getting creative in finding ways to get said child (and children) to eat fruits or vegetables.

A year or two ago, I picked up from the library "new book" shelf a copy of Deceptively Delicious: Simple Secrets to Get Your Kids Eating Good Food, a cookbook by Jessica Seinfeld (interestingly, the wife of comedian Jerry Seinfeld).  I thought this might be my way to ensure that kids were getting good doses of hidden fruits and vegetables in their meals and snacks.  But I didn't like the idea of being "deceptive," so I left the book in plain view and told the kids that we would try some of the recipes.  Unfortunately, most of them were not hits at our house, though I do still add in extra tomatoes to our taco meat.

Another cookbook, also with an unfortunate name, is more successful at our house:  Sneaky Chef:  Simple Strategies for Hiding Healthy Foods in Kids' Favorite Meals by Missy Chase Lapine.   She has a number of "purees" of nutritionally powerful fruits and/or vegetables that she recommends mixing into various foods.  I have successfully mixed in the "white puree" (zucchini and cauliflower) into mac & cheese and mashed potatoes.

Even before reading these books, I have been fond of putting extra "nuts and twigs," as my husband calls them, into my home-baked goods.   My Texas sheet cake recipe, which gets raves whenever I make it, is full of unusual flours (teff, anyone?) and my current favorite uber-healthy ingredient, flax.   Texas sheet cake is not exactly health food, but because it is dark, a lot of good things can go unnoticed and therefore eaten.  

Lately I've been making a family favorite crumble muffin.  The original called for raspberry (this was my very "nuts and twigs" adapation of an old cookbook recipe I had), but the visible-fruit-averse child in our house was driving me crazy by not eating these super yummy & fairly healthy muffins.

So I confess that I did resort to subterfuge.  Currently, I make a double batch of these muffins, one with fruit (usually raspberries or blueberries)--the "fruit muffins," and one batch with shredded or pureed zucchini, and these are called "plain muffins."  Everyone gets to eat their favorite  muffins, and everyone gets a little bit of fruit and/or vegetable.  The muffins freeze beautifully, making for super quick breakfasts.

And so far, no scurvy at our house.

Here's the recipe.  Care to share you experiences of getting kids to eat more fruits & vegetables? Or any "secret" recipes that are popular at your house?

Raspberry Crumble Muffins

Mix together dry ingredients:

1.3 cup flour

1/2 cup flax

1/3 cup oat flour

1.5 teaspoons baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

3/4 teaspoon cinnamon

Wet ingredients:

Melt

1/2 cup butter

1/3 c. sugar

1/3 c brown sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla

1 egg

1/2 cup milk

Mix dry into wet; add in 1.5 cup raspberries or other fruit (or 2 cups shredded or blended zucchini).

Scoop into 12 muffin tins that have been greased.

Crumble for topping:

1/3 cup brown sugar

pinch cinnamon

1/3 cup flour

3 T melted butter

mix together and crumble atop muffins

Bake at 350 for 15-20 minutes.

Father Leo's Fusion Fajitas: Why I Am a Book Blogger and Not a Food Blogger Will be Evident Here

All month long, I've been promising to myself make the fusion fajitas that Father Leo Patalinghug beat Food TV Chef Bobby Flay on the "Throwdown" show.  We have watched the episode plenty of times at our house, especially after Father Leo appeared at our parish in May.  What an exciting time we had meeting him in person.

Read the rest of this article on my newer website, Reading Catholic. Click here to visit the full article on ReadingCatholic.com, and I invite you to visit and follow me over there!

Are We Too Plugged In?

I haven't even finished this article from the New York Times about scientists who left their cellphones and Internet behind for a week, and I want to turn off everything and go off for a week into the wilderness.

I've thought a lot about the relationship we all have with being "plugged in" after I wrote about Nicholas Carr's new book, "The Shallows" on what the Internet is doing to our brain.

I think rather than continue to do "research" on what's best, I'm formulating an idea of a plan to have certain times that are Internet-free.  That already happens for me pretty naturally with taking care of a household and three busy children.  But I do find my checking e-mail or just clicking around on the Internet to be seeping into lots of time that could be spent more interestingly.  Do you have a time or day when you do not connect with the world in any way?  What do you do with that time?

Grace Before Meals: What are Your Food Rules?

First of all,  Happy Feast of the Assumption!   What a great mid-summer feast.  I have very specific childhood memories of being on vacation with our family at Wildwood, NJ, and the priest blessing the ocean waves on this day.  I always want to be at the beach on this day, but it rarely happens.  Maybe next year?


This spring, as I was preparing to take on this role of book page editor and blogger for the Catholic Post, I had a number of discussions with my editor Tom Dermody, about future books to feature.

I had just finished Michael Pollan's slim but very intriguing book, Food Rules, and I suggested this one as a possible one for a summer month.  Fortunately, Tom pointed out the challenge of a month-long discussion on this one book, and he's right.   That's why he's the editor, and I'm the editee.  Thank you, Tom.

Food Rules is a compendium of different rules people shared with food writer Pollan about how they eat healthy.  Most of them are great basic advice for eating well, though some are very appealing to me personally. Sweets only on days that begin with an S? I don't think so, Mr. Pollan!

But the book an interesting starting point for talking about food rules--we all have them, and defining them can be a fun exercise.

Here are some of my food rules:

Almost always, I eat the same thing for breakfast and lunch every single day, and I don't mind a bit.   This one I learned from my Dad, who didn't mind it, either.

This one, also from my Dad:  there is no such thing as too much fiber.

Coffee can make you feel better.  This one was from my Mom, and I only learned this later in life and not in time to thank her.

Dark chocolate makes you smarter (even on days that don't start with an S).

I wish I had some good food rules for children, but for now I just keep putting out whatever good stuff I can and hope some of it sticks at some point, either literally or figuratively.

What are your top food rules?

Grace Before Meals: Family Meal Rules?

Fr. Leo's ministry Grace Before Meals is all about gathering families around the dinner table for good food and good conversation, in order to foster the great connections that the domestic Church that is the family.

But I had an interesting discussion some weeks back with a group of moms about if the "family dinner" was so important.  One mom argued that other mealtimes, like breakfast, could be a time to gather, and pegging it to dinner was too restrictive.   Another mom argued that perhaps even mealtime was not necessary for connection when there are other opportunities for connection as a family, and that "forcing" everyone to participate in family mealtimes could be counterproductive.   It made for an interesting conversation.

I do think there is something important about eating together that is unique in a family's experience.    But I also know some people don't have great memories of family mealtimes.  Also, there can be different seasons of life, such as busy sport or work schedules and young children just learning table manners, that can make family mealtimes a challenge at best.

As I wrote in my review of Fr. Leo's book, our family's mealtimes often break some of the common "rules" for dinner time.  I was partially joking, of course, because there are no rules in Canon Law for how mealtimes should look.

But we do try to make an effort to have family mealtimes and interesting conversations to go along with those, and I find that as our children get older both the discussions and the food get more interesting.  That keeps us committed to trying to make those times a priority, even as schedules get busier.

What are some of your family meal rules?  Any suggestions for

Grace Before Meals: Your Favorite Cookbook, Food Magazine, Blog or Recipe Website?

Care to share your favorite website, cooking magazine, blog or cookbook to help you cook at home?

I tend to "google" a recipe if I'm looking for, say, a recipe for something in particular, like soba noodles in peanut sauce.

But the sites I tend to trust for accurate, turns out most of the time, recipes is Epicurious.   I enjoy getting recipes off of various people's blogs, but I find the recipes frequently don't come out as good as the photo!

Cookbooks?  I have two versions of the Joy of Cooking, one my mom got me when I lived in my first apartment in the 1980s.  When a new edition came out in 1997, she gave me that one as well; for some reason, even though I purge cookbooks from time to time, I still keep them both on the shelf.    They are both such a wealth of information about all kinds of cooking and food, and a good base to learn about basic techniques and cooking methods.  Armed with the information

I love cooking magazines, and I used to have a tradition a friend recommended of subscribing to one cooking magazine per year and then rotating; so I did "Cooking Light" one year, Cook's Illustrated the next, and so on.  But though I love to page through them, I found that they piled up alarmingly, so  I don't subscribe to any at the moment.   The one cooking magazine I did frequently try recipes from was Cook's Illustrated, and they tended to be pretty great recipes.

What are your favorites?

Grace Before Meals Question: Favorite Faith-Based Food Traditions?

One of the best things about Fr. Leo's book Grace Before Meals is how it is divided by different seasons, from religious holidays (the Feast of the Sacred Heart) to sports team gatherings.  The recipes and "Let's Talk.. Let's Listen" portion of each relate to the  of each of these times through the year.  He suggests great ideas to help 


One recent one I can recall is from July 16-- we try to have something with caramel on the feast of Our Lady of Carmel.  I know, it's not "Our Lady of Caramel," but it does help us to remember Our Lady that day in a "sweet" way.


Since we are Italian at our house, we've got lots of food-based traditions that relate to the liturgical year.  My husband makes his family's Sicilian savoiardi (ladyfingers) recipe on St. Joseph's Day, and we serve both fish and pizza on Christmas Eve.  (I'm not sure why the pizza, except that traditionally Christmas Eve was a day of abstinence from meat; both my family and my husband's family had this tradition).


What are some of your favorite faith-based food traditions?