Healthy Eats for Kids

In recent years, I'll admit, I've developed a new soap box. What is it this time, you ask? Well, it's the kids' options on a restaurant menu. It's always the same: mac & cheese, pizza, or chicken nuggets. Yes, restaurants need to make money and feel they are forced to offer these things because kids are picky eaters. And YES my kids are some of the pickiest eaters that I know. But part of the skill of a chef is to take something people know and love and make it into something new and different right? Why can't they sneak in butternut squash with that mac & cheese?? Put spinach or zucchini on the pizza and offer fresh, homemade, whole chicken nuggets????? Don't answer those questions. Just let it stew. I've heard a good option is to order a lunch-sized portion of something off the menu for your kids. I just might do that next time. My son actually loves baked fish, non-breaded with just butter and some herbs. And this was a kid who it's taken 5 years for him to willingly eat chicken!

Okay, off the soap box now. This post is about finding alternatives for the same ol' same ol' that are healthy and delicious for kids. Every kid is different, and you know your kids best. These are some options that I have found that I am excited to try out. But first, here are a few tips I've learned:

1. Help your children grow some food.

My son was so much more excited to try basil on his pizza and as a pesto on pasta when he knew we had grown it ourselves and he had watched it sprout from a tiny seed and flourish as a wonderful smelling, beautiful plant. Also, my son has learned that there is nothing like picking your very own sun-warmed tomatoes or strawberries and popping into your mouth straight off the plant. Mmmm!

2. Involve your children in making their own food.

My son loves smelling all the herbs and spices I put into what I'm cooking or baking. Both my son and daughter love to measure and stir. Children naturally love to help and when they're able to stir, and knead, and make a mess (I've had to work really hard at putting my mess anxiety on the back burner!), they can take pride in having done something as big and important as creating their own snack or putting dinner on the table that the whole family enjoys. It's also fun bonding time with mom or dad in the kitchen which is usually the center of the home.

3. Have your food rules and stick with them.

It's taken my husband and I our entire son's life to develop rules for eating at the table. We're still working on it, and it's been a challenge with picky eaters. Some parents have the theory of "you have to eat everything on your plate" while others are more into experimentation on the child's part and they'll eat when they're hungry. I think we're somewhere in the middle. Lately, we've been having our son help with how much is going on his plate, so that he feels that he has some decision-making power there, but he doesn't get to choose what goes on his plate. I think educating him on what our bodies need for strength and energy has helped him understand that veggies, fruit, and proteins are more important than the dessert that may follow. It's a work in progress though. :-)

Whatever your feeding philosophy, I think when your kids know what is expected at the table, then meal times will probably go smoother.

Here are some great posts I found for kids' snack ideas:

45 Real Food Snacks for Kids

10 On-the-Go Healthy Snacks for Toddlers

25 Healthy Snacks for Little Ones

Also, I think having a few cookbooks in your arsenal can be a huge help. Here are two of my favorites:

Organically Raised: Conscious Cooking for Babies & Toddlers

Healthy Meals for Babies & Toddlers

One of my favorite ideas from the book Healthy Meals for Babies & Toddlers is for ready-made sandwich filling ideas. Most kids love sandwiches, heck, I love sandwiches and would try these super cool fillings any day:

Hummus
heaping 1/3 cup hummus
1 small cooked carrot, chopped
1 Tbsp chopped cucumber (you could substitute zucchini too)

Fruity Cheese Spread
heaping 1/3 cup lowfat soft cheese or ricotta cheese (I used neufchatal)
1 Tbsp. chopped pitted dates
2 Tbsp. chopped plumped dried apricots

Egg & Bacon
2 hard-boiled eggs, shelled and mashed
1 Tbsp mayonnaise (or Miracle Whip if you have my more refined taste buds haha!)
2 crisp-cooked slices bacon, chopped

A twist on the sandwich: my son loves a tortilla (white or whole wheat) with peanut butter and jam or honey and rolled up into a burrito. It's pretty good!

Felted Balls Tutorial

You know, I think this is my first real tutorial!
I got one request for it (Thanks, Holly!), and one is enough for me, so here we go!

The first part is making a felt ball using roving. Using roving makes felting go much, much faster. But if you'd don't have roving, that's ok. Just skip on down to Part 2 where I show how to do it using wool yarn.

Part 1 - Felted Ball Using Roving

1. Start with your cat/ferret jingle ball found at pet stores.

2. Hold the ball in one hand and start wrapping the roving around it.

3. Keep wrapping while trying to keep the wool even all around.

4. Keep wrapping...

5. Wrap enough roving around until you get the size of ball you want. Keep in mind that it will shrink some while felting, so you might want to make it a little bigger than what you want the finished product to be.

6. Get an old nylon stocking. It's easier if you cut it so it's only about 12" long. Gather the nylon in your two hands until you get to the toe.

7. Then shove the ball in, pushing it as far into the toe as you can.

Make sure the end of the wool is facing the toe or it could come unraveled a little.

We don't want that!

8. Get out your dish soap.

I promise this is not an ad placement!

9. Drizzle the dish soap on.

10. At this point you might want to get out some rubber gloves. I didn't which is why my fingers are red.

Twist up the end of the nylon like shown above, so that it helps maintain a round shape and hold the ball under hot water. You may also need to pull and tighten the nylon around the ball throughout this process. Scrub with one hand while rotating the ball in the other hand. Continue to get it wet, scrub it, get it wet again, and scrub it, etc. After awhile you'll need to add more soap. You'll notice the ball will get lumpy and uneven. It's okay! The wool is shrinking. Keep up the scrubbing and soaping and wetting under hot water for about 5 minutes. Then rinse and squeeze repeatedly to get as much of the soap out as you can.

11. Remove from stocking and you're almost done! Run the ball under water, perfecting the shape as much as you can. Squeeze out water as best you can. Set on an old rag or cloth to dry. If its dyed wool, there may be some staining to the rag. Let dry over night in a warm place.

Part 2 - Felted Ball Using Wool Yarn

Make sure you use 100% wool yarn that specifies that it is good for felting like the "Fisherman's Wool" line of yarn which is what I used in my project below.

1. Hold your yarn in place and start wrapping.

It may be a little difficult as the surface is slippery plastic.

2. Keep wrapping...

3. Try to keep the yarn evenly distributed as your wrap until it's the size you want.

I wanted a little one.

4. Finished ball.

5. Now get that nylon stocking (12" long), stuff it into the nylon (making sure the end doesn't come unraveled), and duplicate steps 8-11 above except increase the scrubbing/soap process to 10 minutes.

There will be some shrinkage, but not as much as the roving ball.

The yarn ball will hold its shape much better than the roving one too.

Beautiful!

Aaah! A completed set. I'm so excited!

Can you tell I love these things?

*Note: If you'd like a crinkle ball, replace the center jingle ball with a big wad of cut out bill envelope windows. What a great way to recycle!
*Another note: You don't have to put anything in the center at all. If you want just a plain ol' wool ball, just wrap the yarn or roving around itself in a tight ball and wrap to the size you want, etc.

Good luck and have fun! Let me know if you try this out and send pictures!

Felted Balls

Finally, some of the apples are on the stove, simmering down to soon become applesauce. It's a good thing too, because we've gone through half our applesauce from the last canning adventure. It's giving me a really realistic picture of the volume of applesauce I would have to can in order to feed our applesauce appetite around here. I truly think an entire wall of our basement would be dedicated to applesauce and we'd need to have at least 3 apple trees.

Okay, so on to the felted balls! I've been eyeing felted balls as they've appeared on various blogs I follow and the library books on felting I've checked out. It was my goal to make some for my daughter's first birthday which is next week. 

I bought some jingle balls at a pet store (The balls are meant for ferrets, but I'm sure they sell them for cats too). Last night I tried the felted balls for the first time and I was totally thrilled with how easy they were! I tried two balls with dyed roving and they, by far, felted up the easiest and fastest, although they did end up with some creases. I tried one with thick, one ply wool yarn and that felted up pretty well too, were very even all around, but the yarn lines still show. Not a big deal, though. It's for a baby! One of the balls also has a bunch of bill envelope windows wadded up inside, so when you squeeze the ball it crinkles. I'm really happy with the way these turned out! I'm planning on making a few more since I have some jingle balls left. If you'd like a tutorial, just let me know and I'll take step-by-step pictures when I make them next. 

Homemade Baby Food

As my daughter has gotten older I've been wanting to expand my homemade baby food repitoire from purees to baby snacks like teething cookies. And since her 1st birthday is coming up in two weeks (already!), I wanted to research out some baby-friendly birthday cakes that didn't have a lot or any sugar in it at all. I stumbled on this great website that has a lot of homemade recipes for baby foods from meats, to birthday cake, to snacks. Perfect!

Here it is: Wholesome Baby Food
And here's the link about the birthday cake.

I've avoided pureeing meat like the plague because of the hassle, but looking at their recipes I feel pretty dumb. It looks like it was never that big a deal!

First Cloth Diaper Thoughts

Today is the first day of my daughter wearing cloth diapers. Well, she's wearing her very first one right now and I have yet to change it, but I just had to share my first thoughts. Already, I love them! With the cloth diaper on, her little tush is so soft! Unlike the annoying crinkly paperness of the disposables. It's something so small, but it's amazing what a difference it makes. Just holding her wearing the cloth diaper makes me 10x happier. Who knew?! Maybe it's the cloth fiber vibes whispering "No more disposables in the landfill. Hooray!" haha!

It's taken me awhile to get our little girl into cloth diapers. I've been buying a small batch every paycheck until I've been able to build up enough to hopefully have some for a few days. Then I had to find the right detergent (unfortunately, my homemade stuff won't work). And finally, I had to wash and dry them 3 times to get them absorbent - just like you have to wash new towels a few times. I was a little nervous putting on the very first cloth diaper. Was I ready? Was I going to have a headache scrubbing the first messy diaper? Where am I going to put the soiled diapers? (Our apartment is much smaller than our last place...) Are they going to stink up my house? Was her diaper going to be completely huge and bulky? Questions to be answered shortly, I'm sure.

Well, I started to put the cloth diaper on - backwards. I laughed at myself and started over and even though my little girl was fussing and squirming I got it on and... it was beautiful! Hooray! Now maybe I'll get my husband to do the first cloth diaper change. Heh heh heh.

Goodbye, Plastic!

I am really excited about these thrift store finds of glass baby bowls (a.k.a. reclaimed ramekins. haha!) I've been contemplating my use of plastic and the recent BPA scare and I've realized that I rely on plastic a lot in my food storage and kid-dishes -- a lot more than I'd like to. So, I've decided that I'm going to slowly replace the plastic kids dishes with glass (for me to feed the baby from, not for her to eat out of on her own) and also to replace our plethora of plastic storage containers with as much glass and other safer alternatives than the cheapo Gladware stuff I've been using. I've really disliked how those plastic containers discolor and warp and get ugly from being microwaved. I really don't like to microwave in plastic containers. I just looked at what the food did to my containers and then I wondered what the containers were doing to my food. And then I thought, Yeah, it's time to switch over. I'm excited to start buying glass containers with lids for food storage in the fridge. And I already use canning jars to store bulk food items like couscous, rice, sugar, and my cornbread mix.

I've also read about a lot of fun products like stainless steel flatware for kids, cute wood and stainless steel baby dishes, and even stainless steel sippy cups! And at the store the other day I saw a cool, if rather heavy, glass water bottle with a silicone cover. It looked pretty cool. Not to mention there are those stainless steel water bottles that you see everywhere now. I'm glad I'm not the only one on this line of thinking! It sure makes it easier to find better alternatives.

Now I just need to be weaned off plastic bags and paper towels. I'm switching to cloth diapers, I might as well analyze the other "disposables" in my life, right. Do I need more cloth rags maybe to replace paper towel dependence? Can I use rags in the microwave? (We put a paper towel over food so it doesn't spatter everywhere.) Paper towels are great for cleaning up greasy stuff, but I suppose cloth could do the same.

I could see us coming off paper towels, but plastic bags? They're great for freezing stuff like meat, storing my bread, and for keeping food in the fridge fairly fresh. I do throw away any plastic bags I keep raw meat in. I used to wash my plastic bags, but it's such a hassle. I guess I just hate the idea of how much I'm throwing away, but I just can't think of any other realistic alternative for plastic bags. Any non-plastic suggestions out there?

Disposables = money + convenience - TRASH

1st Baby Food

Pea, Green Bean & Zucchini Puree

I am so proud of myself! Today I made my first baby food for my little 5-month old girl. She's been eating stuff out of a jar for a few weeks, but I have wanted to make my own baby food. So, I bought a hand-crank baby food mill and an electric baby food blender. It came in the mail today! So, with the blenders an hour fresh out of the box, washed and dried, I cooked and blended a yummy mixture of peas, and organic green beans and zucchini. I think it took me about an hour to prep, cook and puree everything. I was lucky in that I got almost all of it done between my daughter's naps. Yippee! I tested some of the cooled stuff on her right then and there. Success! She loved it. (She's definitely a veggie girl - hasn't liked bananas, and apples were okay, but were a bit sour for her.) I tasted the green stuff myself and I must say - way better than the jar stuff!

Anyway, I can't believe how empowered I feel! I know that probably sounds silly. But I did entirely jarred food for my 1st baby because my husband and I were full-time students and were both working. It was hard to be restricted on what I could feed him at the beginning. But I had to be realistic. Now, my cooking soul is super thrilled to try out new combos of veggies and fruits and grains that you can't get in a jar - especially organic stuff. My next idea is to cook some oatmeal with apples and raisins and puree that. Yum!