Dim sum for Thanksgiving—not as unique as it sounds

It turns out that neither going to the Smithsonian nor going out for dim sum for Thanksgiving is such a unique idea after all.  The American History Museum was packed with families yesterday and we had to take a ticket and wait in line at the dim sum restaurant, which was still overflowing at 12:30 even though it seats 150 people.

I would love to make dim sum a new Thanksgiving tradition. Dim sum personifies my number-one reason for eating out: to eat things I cannot (or will not take the time to) make at home. (Perhaps I could master one or two of the dishes there, but the beauty of dim sum is the constantly changing variety). We ate sticky beef noodle crepes, taro root dumplings filled with mushrooms and a savory sauce, radish cakes (which don't taste like radishes at all, more like sticky rice and bacon), steamed buns with pork, shrimp dumplings, stuffed bean curd, and more. It was fun to get to select the little trays of food off the carts the Chinese ladies wheel around the tables.

There's one little problem: PE sat through most of the meal with her eyes moist, her lips puckered.  We thought she would like dim sum since she loves tofu (but only if bland and uncooked), rice and dumplings. And she has loved the idea of dim sum since reading Dim Sum for Everyone when she was in preschool. Alas, the food was just too exotic for her.  She wouldn't touch the sticky noodle crepe, which was really just a long steamed dumpling; she ate the steamed bun until she hit the center and found a slice of onion; and we had to keep the shrimp dishes on the other side of the table so she wouldn't have to smell them. The only thing she finally ate was the stuffed bean curd, whose center was like the center of a meat dumpling. She pulled off the bean curd skin and ate the inside.

It's hard to enjoy a meal when one of your fellow diners is unhappy and hungry.  And, though he ate a share of the food, TA was soon stuffed, leaving D and me to eat more radish cake than we wanted; we were too full for the steamed Chinese broccoli when it finally came around (our meal was missing a vegetable).

I'm not sure there is a lesson in any of this, if this means we'll have to crawl back to more traditional fare from now on, so that everyone will eat and be happy. Maybe we'll try again at Thanksgiving in a couple of years, when PE might not be so picky, or we should go there some other time, with more adventurous eaters as our dinner companions.

Thanksgiving dinner in a Chinese restaurant?

Despite what I said in my last post, how cooking Thanksgiving dinner usually gets me out of my post-summer cooking doldrums, a few days ago I decided that I really don't want to cook on Thanksgiving this year.

Though I've loved making Thanksgiving dinner in the past—mostly because I can't think of a better flavor combination than turkey-cranberry-pumpkin—I haven't be able to bring myself to buy a turkey or even a turkey breast at the grocery store this year, much less order an organic turkey from the local Amish market or natural foods store weeks in advance.

My hesitation became clear last week when I read the comic Brewster Rockit: Space Guy! in the Sunday comics. (See the whole comic at:  http://d.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/p/uc/20081123/ltmrkt081123.gif ).

I already spend a portion of most evenings in the kitchen cooking dinner and another portion of the day cleaning the kitchen (I don't have the cleanest kitchen in the world, but I manage to get the dishes off the counters and loaded or washed by the end of the day). How can it be a true holiday if I am in the kitchen most of the day? And with just the four of us for Thanksgiving this year, it was hard to justify so much work for just four portions. Plus, I always find Thanksgiving pots and pans the worst to scrape and wash, taking longer than a normal day's wash.

So we are planning to head to the Smithsonian's newly reopened Museum of American History, then out for dim sum (if we can find it), or anything else that might be open. I am thinking this might be a new tradition for us, a thankful-to-be-liberated-from-the-kitchen day.

Still, if the weather turns out to be horrible, or I change my mind and become suddenly nostalgic for a more traditional Thanksgiving, there is a can of whole berry cranberry sauce and a small can of pumpkin in my cabinet, and part of a frozen chicken in the freezer, from which I could surely pull something together. Maybe I only need to know that I don't have to stay in the kitchen all day this Thursday before I can head back there with a spring in my step and a sense of freedom in my heart.

The kitchen (cooking blog) is still open, but operating under more limited hours

I haven't been posting once a week, as I promise I will in the "Frequency of Posts" section on the right of this blog.  That's because I am in a cooking rut. This occurs almost every year, somewhere between the last basil harvest and Thanksgiving, kick-started by the lifting of daylight savings time and the earlier darkness that ensues.

As long as I could make fresh pesto (and this year's final harvest was only four weeks ago), I could prolong the idea that the kitchen was operating under summer conditions—which means more fresh food, less time spent in the kitchen and a greater likelihood of  throw-together meals. Only in the summer can some version of salad be dinner.

On many dark winter afternoons, when the temperature is dipping below freezing, I've said wistfully to anyone who will listen, "Why if it was July we might be leaving for the pool right now, and we'd still have the afternoon ahead of us."

A kind of desperate feeling sets in for me when the days get suddenly shorter and I realize a whole winter of staying in—with serious cooking and baking—looms ahead.  Once winter gets going (kick-started by Thanksgiving dinner making), I'm usually at peace with it. In fact, I really do like to bake bread and make stews. 

But I cling to the idea of summer long after my summer swimsuit and SPF 45 sunscreen have been put away. I only seem to be able to face winter by continuing to look back at summer, backing ungracefully into the long, cold nights ahead.

Should we be scared of that "Product of China" label on food?

Recently I've noticed that some of the food I've brought home has been stamped "Product of China." First it was (supposed) organic frozen spinach; then, garlic; finally, bay scallops. I probably wouldn't have brought any of it home had I noticed the label in the store because I worry about food grown in China. Why?

• Much of the press before and during the Bejing Olympics discussed how polluted that city and other Chinese cities are.
  
  
• Chinese food and food supplement regulations and inspections are more lax than those of our own government, and more subject to corruption, as the recent scandals on contaminents in human food, pet food and infant formulas have shown.
  
  
• I hate the idea of my food coming all the way from China. It's one thing to buy oolong tea since it's in small quantities, and is dried and easy to ship, but frozen spinach? How much energy did it require to freeze it, ship and truck it frozen from China to Maryland?
  

Looking around today on the Internet to see if my worries could be verified, I easily came upon the article, Grown in China, by Ralph Nader. Although I've often found Nader alarmist and a little hysterical in recent years (I wish he would stop running for president), the article contains some information that is worth noting. He says that the United States imports 80 percent of its seafood and China is its major seafood supplier—and  fish grown in China is often farm-raised, grown in contaminated ponds and fed antibiotics because of the putrid conditions. 

The FDA has issued assurances on its Seafood Safety Program,  in which they have testified that the "FDA currently screens electronically-submitted information on all incoming shipments, and then uses a risk-based approach to target our inspectional resources at products having the greatest potential for causing harm to public health." But Nader says that the FDA is able to inspect only about 1 percent of food shipments into the United States, which is hardly reassuring.

But the worst thing that Nader conveys is the information that: "except for the required labeling of seafood from foreign countries (consumers take note), all other food in your supermarket is not required to have a label of the country that exported it."

So, while I can avoid seafood from China and start buying fruit grown in the U.S. (easy to see since almost every banana, apple, etc., is labeled with place of origin), there's no way of knowing where the chicken in my frozen potstickers was raised. That leaves me with three choices: learn to make potstickers from scratch (very unlikely since I once spent a whole evening—prior to having children—making cabbage-stuffed pierogies), forego them all together or just get used to eating food products from China. 

I'm not happy with any of these choices, yet since potstickers are not a major part of my diet (they're only an occasional/emergency snack-meal for us), I'm not all that worried about eating them. What's more worrisome are the foods that compose most of our meals, the supplements we take, the green tea I drink everyday. What's in them? Where did they come from?

Three tiny ways to save on your grocery bill...and sometimes help the environment

I am not going to pretend that I am the thriftiest shopper in the world. 

Despite my declaration that I wouldn't buy organic grapes again (see July 29 post), I've broken down and bought them a couple of times (on sale). And despite my continued efforts to clip coupons, I almost never manage to use them; a few days ago I cleaned out a whole drawer of coupons that had expired in 2005.

Still, there are a few things I do here and there that help a little. The added benefit is that such measures sometimes have eco-benefits. Here are three of them:

1. I make my own yogurt. A half gallon container of milk makes 2 quarts of yogurt, with a little milk left over. (For instructions on how to make yogurt, see May 11 post).

Cost benefit: A half-gallon of organic milk costs around $3.50, while 2 quarts of organic yogurt costs $7-8. (A gallon of organic milk is currently going for around $6, which offers greater cost advantages).

Eco-benefit: I'm not using or throwing away plastic yogurt containers. I make the yogurt in glass jars I wash again and again. (Making yogurt uses a minimum amount of electricity).

2. I make my own foaming liquid hand soap. "Make" is relative—I don't make soap from scratch, but refill foaming liquid soap containers with water and dish soap. It works fine and most people can't tell the difference.  Here's the recipe:

• 1/4 cup unscented liquid dish soap (I use Seventh Generation Free and Clear)

• 3/4-1 cup of water

• 1 tsp. of glycerin (you can get glycerin in bottles at the drugstore)

• scented oil, if desired (I've been using either lavendar oil or grapefruit oil)

• In the winter, I add a squirt of aloe vera gel, for my chapped hands.

Cost benefit: This is about $.25 soap, $.20 of glycerin and maybe $.10 of oil (at the most), compared to a store-bought container that costs $5-8.

Eco-benefit: You're not throwing away all those soap containers. HOWEVER, the foaming capability of most re-used containers seems to give out after 4-6 uses, so this isn't something I've been able to keep going perpetually; I have to buy new soaps occasionally.

3. I buy some of my household goods and bulk items through a wholesale distributor, Frontier. Some friends and I put our orders in together so that we don't have to pay postage (postage is free is you spend $250 at a time). The downside is that it gets pretty time-consuming for the person who puts the order in and sorts through all the items that are shipped since they are not separated per individual order.

Cost benefit: I just purchased 16 oz. of Frontier bulk Irish breakfast tea for $12.95 vs. ~$3/oz. in the natural foods store; 48 oz. of Seventh Generation dish liquid was $5.05 compared to $7-8.00, retail.

Eco-benefit: There's some slight benefit in that I don't use gas to drive to a natural foods store for the specific things I can order through the coop.

In praise of boneless, skinless chicken

Boneless, skinless chicken has saved me many a night from having to serve frozen pizza or "freezer-surprise leftovers" for dinner.

I buy them in multi-packs and freeze them. Often is the evening that I've realized,  too late,  I've planned nothing for dinner. Into a bowl of lukewarm water the plastic-wrapped double breast goes (sometimes I'm running so late, I don't bother to dunk it in its defrosting bath). Then, if still frozen, I can cut them sideways into one-inch thick slices and, if there's time, lay them on a plate to defrost a little more.

Even when frozen, they can be sautéed in a pan if cut into smaller chunks.

I generally use the directions for "Sautéed Boneless, Skinless Chicken Breasts (Basic Recipe)"  from the All New Joy of Cooking (p. 587 in my edition). The great thing about this recipe is that it can be adapted wildly.  I've used their basic recipe and then added sherried mushroom sauce (recipe on the cookbook's next page); I've added broccoli and made pasta with broccoli and chicken in a white/cheese sauce; I've added broccoli and ginger and made stir fry.  Even simpler, the sautéed breasts can be served with a squeeze of lemon and a dash of garlic powder over white rice, with a salad on the side.

The other beauty of this recipe is that after the chicken pieces are sautéed, I can set one or two aside for PE and put the rest into a sauce for everyone else.

I also buy boneless, skinless chicken thighs, which are cheaper, and keep them on hand. They're a little darker and meatier, and do better in more stew-like recipes.

Sometimes I miss chicken skin and the good juices that come with it. So, every three or four weeks, I'll make an effort to buy a whole chicken or I'll defrost a cut-up chicken a couple of days in advance in the refrigerator. With that little bit of planning ahead, a whole chicken is faster to prepare than skinless breasts since usually the only preparation required is salting the outside, rubbing it with butter, and sprinkling it with dried herbs before popping it in the oven.

I'm glad that there's a choice (skin or no-skin). Thinking back to my grandmother's day, when preparing a chicken began in the afternoon—chopping off its head, plucking the feathers, and stewing a tough bird a long time—I try to remember to appreciate how easy it is to cook chicken (or almost anything else) now.

Another thing to worry about: canned food

I used to avoid canned food because of the lead in the soldering of the seams. But then the FDA finally spoke out against lead soldering and U.S. manufacturers quit using it, so I thought there were no more worries. After all, people have been eating canned food for decades.

Along comes a dispatch to my Inbox yesterday from National Geographic's Green Guide (Kick the BPA Can), which discusses the hazards of Bisphenol A (BPA), the hormone-disrupting chemical that is used to line cans in most commercial food.  The article states that Eden foods is the only manufacturer that they know of that absolutely doesn't use BPA in its cans. 

I went to the health food store today and happened to run into the marketing representative for Eden, who stopped to speak to me when he saw that I had Eden Soy Extra in my cart. I asked him about BPA and he said that Eden avoids using plastic in any of its products. The manufacturer of its cans uses a vegetable-based compound in the interior instead of plastic.

What makes me angriest about all this (besides the fact that I just bought a whole case of non-Eden canned cannellini beans from a food warehouse) is that manufacturers keep using chemicals and products that are harmful until there is enough noise from consumers (and/or the government, usually prompted by consumers or other outside entities) that they have to withdraw it or make it a new way. How many more food products and packaging chemicals are out there that someone already knows is harmful, but which hasn't been withdrawn yet because not enough people know about it or are angry enough about it yet?

Grocery shopping as the new luxury experience

After going grocery shopping last night, I'm not sure that anyone is going to be able to shop cheap anymore. Why?

A large jar of mayonnaise was ON SALE for $7.90. I bought the small jar, which was on sale for $3.59. I think that is what I used to pay for the large jar. 

Worse, most of the pies in the freezer case were $10. Ten bucks for a pie? I bought one on sale for $7.99, only because I needed a quick dessert for a get-together the next night; otherwise, I would not have paid $8 for a pie.

We are a middle-class family and in the past, I've never worried about buying the occasional pie when we were having guests over. In the earlier part of the year, the price of pie was hovering around $5.99, and I stopped buying them then because I thought that was too much. 

It's even worse at the natural foods store. Last week, at the funky health food store I go to every now and then (because it seemed cheaper than many of the slicker natural food stores), a 5-lb. bag of whole wheat pasty flour was $12. Organic milk was $7/gallon. The cheapest apples were $2.99/lb. I used to squirm (even last spring) at spending $5 for a 5-lb. bag of organic flour. I left with few things in my bag, mostly bulk organic teas and other things I can't get elsewhere.

This has me fleeing more and more to BJs, a wholesale club I belong to, where prices are a little better for things you buy in bulk, as long as you're not particular about whether something is organic or not. It looks like the 50/50 organic/non-organic compromise I wrote about in my Sept. 1 post is already giving way to something more like 40/60 or even 30/70.

But the worst thing in all this, for me, is that it's starting to hurt to go food shopping. Buying food used to be the one thing I could spend money on fairly guiltlessly—new clothes for me can always wait, furniture can wait, the latest DVD can wait. But food was a necessity and healthy/organic food was a reachable goal, for the most part.

Maybe it would be easier to adjust to this new price scale if our electric bill hadn't doubled this year (due to state restrictions on pricing being lifted, not on our suddenly using more electricity), gasoline wasn't hovering around $4 a gallon and our first heating oil bill of the winter is expected to be somewhere near the cost of a semester of college tuition in the 1980s.

There's something wrong when you have to examine your budget in order to buy a frozen pie. We can still manage to put wholesome food on the table, for the foreseeable future, simply by avoiding such old luxuries as high-end cuts of meat and expensive wine, and such new luxuries as frozen pie and organic grapes. Yet, we're still going to be struggling just a little bit to pay for groceries in the coming months—and we're not poor. What are poor people going to eat?

An unsuccessful showdown with Picky Eater

Maybe because some people I know have read this blog and have commented that their children like vegetables (because they gave them vegetables, etc.), D. and I were inspired to make an ultimatium to Picky Eater (PE) a few nights ago.

We told her she would have to eat what was on the table or was already in the refrigerator as leftovers (which would only require warming up); we would not make her anything else. Dinner that night was tamale pie, which contained three things she doesn't like—cornbread, black beans and visible tomato chunks. We thought we might have success that night because she had been complaining how hungry she was before dinner was served.

She sat at the table and her eyes welled up. "I don't like beans," she said. We told her she would have to try at least one spoonful of the cornmeal crust and the meaty interior of the casserole before we would go to the fridge and see what we had for leftovers. We were firm but not anxious or angry. Several choking sounds later and with only half a spoonful of cornmeal successfully swallowed, she escaped to a living room chair where she puckered up and felt sorry for herself.

We tried to leave her there and told her that was it for the night since she didn't even eat a whole spoonful. But I felt terrible. This is a child who is very skinny and who has always had a problem eating anything that looks exotic or which has sauce or spread on it. She doesn't seem to have any food allergies or sensitivities (except maybe to red dye, which we avoid), so I don't think that she is subconsciously avoiding food that would make her sick. I tried not to chide or bother her, though at one point I reminded her that in the Little House books they ate cornmeal mush every night.

I asked her to go ahead and finish her homework, without her having eaten any dinner. It was a pitiful scene. If it had all been put-on (as in a spoiled kid wanting three desserts and nothing else), I probably wouldn't have felt so bad. Finally I asked her if she would like some sushi rice, which was in the refrigerator, cooked a couple of days before. She brightened up and said yes. Without telling her beforehand, I threw in three Trader Joe's chicken potstickers. This was met with authentic joy when it was set on the table. I added carrot sticks and a glass of milk, and she ate everything up.

That was it, I didn't give her a dessert. Still, I have a little bit of doubt whether I was a bad parent for having given in, especially since we'd already issued the ultimatium. She is one of the nicest kids I've ever been around, so I don't think an occasional give-in like this one is going to make her a spoiled brat. I know that some parents would condemn me for the give-in (especially the kind who insist that they potty-trained their kids by their second birthday and never fix anything separate for their kids, etc.). Maybe the problem is in issuing an ultimatium in the first place, in a circumstance in which it probably wasn't going to be successful.

Where are the "what we ate" food logs?

In case there are any readers out there wondering why I haven't been posting my weekly food diary of what my family eats (and how we manage to make the same meal/food work for varying tastes), the answer is a little complicated. Read on if you're interested...

It all began the week I posted my essay on the avoiding-cancer diet. One of the suggestions was to avoid smoked meat; another was to avoid beef. The same day it was posted, we had grilled steak for dinner. D. splurged and bought steak and grilled them outside as a last hurrah to summer. So, I put off writing up what we had eaten that week, thinking I'd sneak it in later, when the two posts might not sit next to each other.

As I held off posting my meal log, I wondered what good it is doing anyone. It is sometimes so repetitious that it is not inspiring that many new meal ideas. Then I realized the thing that would help me would be to chart the repeats, to try to see what I am primarily serving the family, notice patterns (too much pizza on Fridays?) and see if I can schedule a little more variation. To do that I would have to cut and paste each entry into something like an Excel database. But that's just too much work at this point, especially for questionable returns.

Then it hit me—-Blogger is essentially a database, with labels that show frequency of post topics. If I create a separate database/blog just for meals, and log each one as a separate post, the labels would start to show the patterns. In one month, I would be able to see that I served foccacia five times, etc. Plus, taking the food log out of Cooking for Four would leave more room for essays on food and the sharing of shopping tips, etc. I can still write a review of the week's offerings with "why this didn't work" posts/comments.

So I've started a very minimal blog just for 2008 meals. It's called What We Ate in 2008. http://cffwhatweate2008.blogspot.com/. It's not really worth your time—I'll be using it as raw material for this blog in the coming weeks. It may evolve into something a little less minimal; if it does, I'll suggest you look at it then.

How much sugar...?

The first thing you need to know about sugar is that one teaspoon is about 4.2 grams. With this information, you will be empowered (and amazed and horrified) when you start to look for sugar content in Nutrition Labels on food:

• One cup of Stonyfield Vanilla organic yogurt contains  contains 30 grams of sugar—that's 7 teaspoons. 
  
• 8 oz. of Pepsi has 28 grams, according to the Pepsi web site. But a can of Pepsi is 12 oz., which means that there is 42 grams of  sugar in a can, or 10 teaspoons. 
  

The second thing you need to know is that one teaspoon of sugar has 15 calories. 

I haven't been able to find a recommended intake/limit of sugar except on weight loss web sites, which isn't helpful for me since no one in my family wants to lose weight.  So the only thing I have to go on is the MyPyramid.gov's Discretionary Calories page, which says that in a 2,000 calorie/day diet, you have 265 discretionary calories—that includes fat, alcohol and sugar. So, I guess, you could eat unsweetened and fat-free food for breakfast and lunch (yuk) and  blow all your discretionary calories on a can of soda (105 calories from sugar alone), a little gravy on your dinner entree and a dessert.

The problem with the Discretionary Calories guide is that, at least on first glance, it doesn't distinguish between calories from good fats (like olive oil) and simple sugars (like soda). And it doesn't distinguish between different kinds of sugars. I still believe that some sugars are better than others—that real maple syrup is better than a syrup made primarily from high-fructose corn syrup; and that sugar can be used appropriately—that a tsp. of honey in unsweetened yogurt is better than a tsp. of sugar on top of already-sweetened cereal. MyPyramid doesn't seem to make any distinction. 

In my effort to reduce sugars and fats in accordance with a sort-of cancer-avoidance diet I've been following (see previous post) I've cut out most sweets and desserts.  I rarely eat ice cream now; the only sweet/indulgence I have on a regular basis is a few squares a day of really dark chocolate; and I haven't drunk soda in years, except a few sips at parties when nothing else is available. 

I haven't cut out all sugars, nor have I tried to do it too rigidly. If you told me right now that I absolutely had to stop eating sugar, then I'd want it more than I do now and I'd think about it all the time. That's one reason I could never be a nun, and why I think weight-loss diets are so difficult for most people. The more you say something is off-limits, the more most people want it—which is why the diet industry is  always guaranteed to perpetuate itself. 

Sugar has a usefulness. Who wants to go through life eating bitter and sour food all the time? Figuring out when it's useful and when it's harmful is the tricky thing.

Reducing your risk of cancer through what you eat (hopefully)

For various reasons,  I (M) sort-of adhere to a diet that is supposed to put me at lower risk for cancer. This somewhat changes what I cook for everyone else. For instance, they eat bacon when I don't and they probably eat more sugar than I do.

These guidelines come from no one source, but from the advice of two nutritionists and several doctors who have given me sometimes conflicting advice, from which I've had to pick and choose.  I share them with the disclaimer that neither these guidelines nor any product/lifestyle/supplement can absolutely guarantee that you won’t get cancer. I offer them realizing that they may prove to be no more than whistling in the dark, but I'd rather whistle than cower there, helpless.

• Strictest: Be a vegetarian and avoid all animal fats.

• Less strict (this is what I'm doing since I would find it hard to be vegetarian or vegan because of my range of food sensitivities and dairy allergies, and my need for high calorie intake in order to maintain weight): 

• Eat beef no more than once a week  (I’m wondering if this is true only of hormone-enriched, non-organic beef, but I haven’t found a source that justifies it)
• Don’t eat pork (I don’t follow this strictly, especially in the presence of N.C. BBQ, but I've pretty much quit eating bacon except on special occasion; I'm trying to learn to love turkey bacon as a substitute).
  
• Avoid smoked meats.

• Drink green tea, up to 4 cups a day
(You can decaf it naturally if you pour hot water just over the tea leaves, wait 20 seconds, pour off, then refill. In the winter, I pour my green tea into a thermos and then drink it warm all day. In the summer, I don’t mind it cold, or at room temperature.)

• Avoid fats.
(I avoid trans and hydrogenated fats, but taking the advice of a nutritionalist I knew a long time ago, I always use whole-milk dairy products. Her theory, which she backed up with research done in Germany, is that non-fat dairy products cause digestive problems, food sensitivities and other health problems. And I think whole milk products are healthier for growing children—it’s the fake fats and the high fructose corn syrup sweeteners that are worse for their health).

• Eat five servings of fruits and vegetables a day.

• Avoid sugar. (I can't say how much is too much sugar and I'm probably still eating too much, but I've  cut out store-bought sweetened yogurt and cut most of my sweets/treat intake down to only super-dark chocolate. I'll address sugar in a separate, future post).  

• Avoid food additives, preservatives and dyes.

• Eat whole grain products. (I hate whole wheat pasta and I mostly eat white rice, so I'm not reaching 100 percent on this one.)

• Take some supplements to support health (but don’t go overboard). For women, some studies have shown that coenzyme Q10 helps prevent breast cancer; I take 200 mg/day. Other supplements can include coral calcium, mushroom derivatives, and flax seed oil or fish oil.

• This is my own suggestion: don’t take any diet or dietary guideline too seriously or think that any diet will kill you. I think it’s far healthier to enjoy a juicy hamburger than it is to chomp down a raw salad with a sense of bitter longing or defeat.

In defense of pampering a picky eater

There's been some press lately about how parents shouldn't give into picky eaters. A recent Newsweek article, Help Kids Overcome Picky Eating commands: 

"Don’t fix separate meals. It’s hard to resist when kids are refusing to eat. But it only reinforces their biases."

The article helpfully suggests such strategies as pureeing cauliflower to look like mashed potatoes and concealing as many as eight puréed vegetables along with wheat germ "in a tasty meatball."

Well, that's great, but Picky Eater (usually referred to in this blog as "PE") won't eat mashed potatoes or meatballs. She'll only eat potatoes when they are french fried, on one of our occasional fast food forays. She will eat ground beef only as hamburgers.

For the last couple of nights, I have tried to make meals that would nudge PE towards eating what the rest of us like. The first night I made what I told her was "noodle pizza"--penne noodles squished into the bottom of a casserole dish, topped with pizza sauce and lots of mozzarella cheese.  (I made a separate pan for me, topped with goat cheese and artichoke hearts). PE tore into enthusiastically for the first couple of bites and then began to pick at it, saying she wasn't really hungry.

Last night I made Satay Chicken Stir-Fry with Snow Peas and Cilantro (from RealSimple.com), substituting the snow peas and broccoli with tiny slices of green onions and celery.  When PE asked what the green stuff was I told her "chives" ("chives" is my code name for anything small and green since she likes fresh chives from the garden, for some reason). I served it with sushi rice, which PE only seems to like when we go to Asian restaurants (there not being anything else she will eat there). 

The peanut butter sauce was a little sweet for my taste, so I couldn't see how she wouldn't like it since pb and sugar are her two favorite flavors. But she pushed at it with a worried look on her face and only ate the tiny serving I gave her when I said she absolutely had to finish it if she wanted milk.  (Demanding that kids eat is something the Newsweek article says is a no-no, but I was getting a little desperate). I think she would have drunk the milk and eaten nothing if I had given it to her with her meal.

We are listening to the "Little House" books on tape in the car right now. I was hoping that hearing about the Ingalls family's limited diet would make PE grateful for the abundance of food we have now. But if the Ingalls had had to dine on chicken nuggets and french fries every night, I'm not sure that PE wouldn't have wanted to join them.  That the child is as healthy and energetic as she is, fortunately or unfortunately, attests to the fact that maybe such things aren't so horrible, at least for the few years that she insists on eating them. At least I hope it's a few years...

A 50/50 (organic/non-organic) compromise

I’d like to eat only organic food, but I don’t (as I've said in previous posts)--not only for cost reasons, but also for lack of accessibility and convenience.

Some organic foods are more expensive (see post about organic grapes) than I can justify for the health benefit--I’m not sure it’s all that healthy to buy a couple of pounds of organic grapes and then munch on them with clenched jaw, stressed over the hole they’ve put in the family budget.

And, if I insisted on only eating organic food in restaurants, I would have to travel to downtown D.C. and eat at Restaurant Nora (America’s First Certified Organic Restaurant) or some other such fancy-pants restaurant, meaning that our family of four could only go out to eat once or twice a year. (And PE probably wouldn’t eat anything anyway, unless they offered organic chicken nuggets). Or I wouldn’t be able to eat out at all when traveling to rural North Carolina, where I’m from.

If I only ate organic, I'm afraid I would be like I was after I returned home from my first semester in college--I was a militant vegetarian and a pain in the neck to all. I refused to eat most of my family’s Christmas dinner. I didn’t eat ham or turkey, I wouldn’t eat the rolls because they were made with bleached flour. I probably ate the cooked vegetables (not even knowing the difference between organic and non-organic produce since it wasn’t readily available in N.C. in the 1970s) and maybe one of the whole wheat carob brownies I was always making and carrying around with me then. I remember my grandmother’s hurt look at this or another family dinner, when I again lectured her about the danger of bleached flour and she said, “I thought all food was good.”

Just that one comment had a huge effect on me later in life. I have tried to approach grocery shopping and restaurant eating with that philosophy. In the grocery store, I may steer my way past corn-syrup-laden food (except for cranberry sauce at Thanksgiving…) but I will buy non-organic, canned pinto beans since the organic beans there often run a dollar more; I buy regular whole wheat sliced bread for school lunches when organic bread isn’t available; and I justify eating what I know is not going to be organic chicken or meat in a restaurant because I usually eat organic or free-range meat at home.

I call this approach the 50/50 compromise—what is, essentially, a half-a**ed approach to organic shopping/eating/living (but 50/50 is a nicer tag for our family readers). It allows me to eat almost anywhere (when we occasionally go to McDonald’s, I’ll guiltlessly eat salads or fish sandwiches there, not worrying where the vegetables or meat came from) and to buy groceries from almost any store. There are only a few items I rarely compromise on in the grocery store, like organic milk and free-range eggs. Out of the house, though, I’ve eaten frozen custard and IHOP pancakes, never giving it a thought about where the eggs and milk came from.

Fifty percent (or somewhere thereabouts) organic is better than no organic at all, I tell myself. Maybe only the super-rich and super-sheltered (or people who live on organic farms) can truly afford to be all-organic. The rest of us can do what we can, arriving at whatever ratio of organic/healthy food we can afford or muster, whether it’s 60/40 or 25/75 percent, etc. The 50/50 compromise has helped me think, within certain boundaries, that all food is good.

What We Ate: Aug. 25-29

I am toying with a new format for these meal logs, trying to make them more succinct, with info easier to find. They may continue to evolve over the next few weeks, especially as I get busier with other things...

Monday - smothered chicken leftover from Sunday night's dinner

• recipe from Dori Sanders' Country Cooking

• PE ate plain broiled chicken (1 piece, set aside with no gravy)

Tuesday - chili made with ground turkey, pinto beans and crushed tomatoes, with noodles

• PE ate cheesy noodles

Wednesday - leftover chili with more spices added

Thursday - Chicken Bites with Potato, Sausages and Vinegar (variation)*

• recipe from Lidia's Italian American Kitchen

• PE ate Trader Joe's chicken potstickers

* Why this didn't work: the recipe is fine  and I've made it before but the Whole Foods basil sausages I had on hand, which were marked "Sell by Aug. 30th" smelled bad when I unwrapped them on Aug. 28. So, this was just chicken and potato, with broccoli thrown in. This is my second bad experience in the last 10 days with WF sausage...

Friday - a ripe avocado calls for guacamole, which calls for refried beans (from a can!) in burritos, and rice and corn

• no recipe needed, duh

• PE ate a quesadilla

The dairy dilemma

For a long time, I kept dairy out of my diet. I had been allergic to dairy products as a baby, and I became sensitive to milk products again after a chronic illness as an adult, so I figured that all dairy was bad. I bought into the idea that milk is for baby cows. And, to a certain degree, I still believe that. I still can't eat cow's cheese (except Swiss, occasionally, for some unknown reason) and I have a hard time digesting nonfat milk products. But gosh darn it, I love whole milk yogurt and eat it almost every day.

Back in the day when I believed that milk was evil, I kept it out of my son's diet for the first couple of years after he was born. His milk intake was restricted to breast milk, supplemented with goat's milk after I went back to work (which I fortified with iron and calcium, since he didn't seem to tolerate any commercial formulas). When he hit preschool age, I sent a box of soy milk for him to drink during snack time, so he wouldn't be drinking the skim milk than the other kids drank.

All this was an effort on my part to keep him from developing an allergy to milk. The result, according to a broad allergy-panel blood test he took a few years ago, is that soy is one of the few things that he is allergic to but milk is no problem at all. That's good, since he now hates tofu and won't drink soy milk. So, maybe this effort paid off in a backwards kind of way.

By the time my daughter was born, my feelings about dairy products had swayed since my own dairy allergy was waning. Even as a baby she begged me to taste the maple-flavored yogurt I was eating. (Yogurt was one of the few things I could eat that wouldn't give her an allergic reaction when I nursed her--her worst reaction was to wheat). After a certain age, I let her have whole milk and she never showed any signs of a sensitivity. Now she begs for a glass of milk or a banana-milk smoothie at least once a day. She is very healthy, so I see no harm with this. In some ways, I have made my peace with milk.

My biggest concern with dairy products these days is with bovine growth hormone (rBGH or BGH). It seems unnatural to stimulate cows' udders to produce more milk than they would naturally produce. I won't be surprised if a link is found eventually between BGH and breast cancer in women who drank BGH as children--I don't see how it might not have some effect on developing breasts. Some people on the Internet are also worrying it could cause prostate cancer.

Even if that doesn't prove true, the other worry about BGH is that, according the Christiane Northrup and others, milk produced with it is allowed to have more white cells than non-rBGH milk, which is, in other words, pus. Yuk. Because cows given BGH have a higher incidence of udder infections, they're also more likely to be given antibiotics.

If you can't always buy organic milk, you can check which U.S. dairies are rBGH-free on the Organic Consumers Association rBGH info page.

If I had the money (and time to run around shopping only at health food stores), I would only buy organic cheese, ice cream, sour cream, cream cheese, etc. Right now, I will spend $6 on a gallon of organic milk at the grocery store (I can get it cheaper at Whole Foods usually), but not $6 on a small hunk of organic cheese. I console myself with the idea that I make my own yogurt from the organic milk I purchase, and that most of the non-organic dairy products I purchase are BGH-free. Maybe BGH-free is a meager consolation, at best, since it ignores the pesticides, other hormones and antibiotics in non-organic milk--as well as the probably inhumane warehousing of the animals forced to produce most commercial milk. But given that BGH-free is hard to even find sometimes, it's a meager consolation that is better than no consolation at all.

What We Ate: Aug. 18-22

Monday

(One of our desperation/last minute dinners--see May 15, 2008 posting)

Shared by all: Trader Joes orange chicken with jasmine rice

What PE ate:

TJ chicken with rice, carrot sticks, milk

What parents ate:

some TJ chicken, mixed in with sauteed broccoli and tofu

Tuesday

Merguez (spicy lamb) sausage [made at Whole Foods--a real disappointment]; sauteed potatoes with fresh chives and sour cream; salad

What PE ate:

leftover TJ chicken, buckwheat noodles (leftover from M's lunch), celery sticks with peanut butter

Wednesday

Foccacia - one small pie made with goat/sheep's cheese (for mom); one large pie made with shredded mozzarella.

Additions: sauteed brown mushrooms and green onions (put on all of M's and one-fourth of mozzarella pie); pepperoni (one-fourth of mozz. pie); fresh basil leaves (one-fourth)

PE ate the slices with fresh basil

Thursday

Non-dairy enchilada casserole -- made with layers of corn tortillas, leftover enchilada sauce (see recipe), browned ground turkey with one can of pinto beans--no cheese added so M could eat; corn.

Friday

TA birthday party, sub platter catered by Quiznos. (M ate leftover enchilada casserole).

Finding Your Inner-Julia Child

[This essay originally appeared in a very small magazine, issue 23]*

More and more American men and women are discovering that there is an angry, hurt "inner-Julia Child" inside them, an "inner-Julia Child" which has been abused by a culture that cares more about calories, convenience and cholesterol than it does about (in Julia Child's words) "wonderfully good eating".

Your inner-Julia Child may have been wounded in any of the following ways:

• By adherence to the too long-lingering, low-fat, non-cholesterol dietary fad of the last decade.

• By your worrying more about what your food might do to your waistline than how it tastes; as a result of this, you have been far more likely to drink diet sodas all day than to let yourself have one satisfying glass of dark beer; to glop chemical goo on your potatoes rather than risk the extra but pleasurable calories of real sour cream; to forego the unique richness of butter for the plastic taste of margarine.

• By your inability to plan or shop ahead, causing you and your family to rely upon your microwave to quickly cook or, more likely, to thaw out your frozen dinner.

• By your so readily accepting the great cultural lie that a night at McDonald's offers a great evening of dining, or that pizza, hot dogs, and french fries constitute the extent of our national cuisine.

While you fill your belly, meal after meal, without truly savoring anything you chew, your inner-Julia Child is secretly yearning for gigot en chevreuil, filet mignon with madeira sauce, triple chocolate mousse. It is begging you to roast a succulent pig, to whip a cup of heavy cream and ladle it onto a bowl of sweet red strawberries that have been lovingly and lightly dredged with confectionary sugar.

There is no way to free your inner Julia Child but to cook, and then, to eat. But nothing prepared in a microwave, nothing labeled “low fat/low-calorie” will satisfy the yearnings of the inner-Julia Child. Your inner-Julia Child may be starving, which may be why you keep eating, growing fatter and fatter, all the while praising yourself for avoiding sugar/red meat/milk/cholesterol or complex carbohydrates. Deep down, you are achieving no real satisfaction or pleasure, no real nourishment.

There is no way out of such toxic habits but through our rich, twelve-course program in which we teach you to cook AND to eat. We don't call it self-help, but "Help Yourself!" Once you begin a pattern of eating truly delicious, satisfying and sometimes rich food, you may find yourself not needing second or third helpings. You will be sated on both a physical and spiritual level. There are many variations to the 12-Course menu to free the inner-Julia Child; the ingredients or the center of the menu is not as important as achieving the goals outlined in the examples below; the menu might include:

• COURSE (STEP) 1 - Pate (en croute) -- ("We acknowledge our fear of cholesterol")

• COURSE 2 - Lobster Bisque -- ("We believe that Julia Child and/or the power of French cuisine can restore our senses")

• COURSE 3 - Braised duck with chestnut stuffing -- ("We have made a brave and conscious decision to eat delicious and nutritious food, however long it takes to prepare and eat it")

• COURSE 4 - Asparagus with Butter and Egg -- ("Fearlessly, we continue to eat, even as we loosen our waistbands and belts")

• COURSE 5 - Dandelion, Spinach and Bacon Salad -- ("We realize that Course 5 is here for no other purpose than to give our palates a break") ... and on and on into:

• COURSE 11 - Chocolate soufflé -- ("We have sought through eating well and much to improve our contact with the gods"); and

• COURSE 12 - Fruit (in season) -- ("Having had our taste buds reawakened as the result of this meal, we will henceforth strive to eat only delicious food, in quantities and qualities that nourish and delight us, trying to use our microwave ovens no more than twice a week, for anything other than the thawing of food, the melting of butter, or reheating something we ourselves have lovingly prepared").

If you are on a budget and/or are a vegetarian, an alternative menu might include vegetables served as separate courses, each in its own, unique butter- or wine-based sauce, with fruit as the final course.

For more information on finding and pleasuring your own unique inner-Julia Child, contact us at: cookingforfour -AT- gmail.com. (The full course menu, along with individualized meal plan, is available for $99.95).

For those who can't afford a private consultation, please study Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volumes I and II.

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* Reprinted with permission (M wrote the essay and published the magazine).

We're reprinting this essay because, within certain boundaries, it represents our family's food philosophy. We eat to enjoy food--not to lose weight, avoid cholesterol, etc.--although, to be honest, we rarely cook French food anymore given that PE and TA probably won't eat it and it takes too long to cook.

What We Ate: Aug. 11-15

Out of town all week, so we ate with family and in restaurants. When in North Carolina, eat... sushi?

What we ate: Aug. 4-8

We were out of town Aug. 7-8 and ate out a lot. So this is an abbreviated week...

Monday

PE and D not here

TA ate: chicken garlic sausage, tomato sauce, penne, shredded cheese (leftover from Sat. night dinner)

M ate: omelet with goat cheese, chives, a little ham

Tuesday

PE and D not here again

TA and M invented a tortilla layer cake:

In a pan, saute lots of garlic cloves (we chopped up 10), add 1 can pinto beans, some salsa

We took 3 medium sized tortillas

First layer: tortilla, sauteed beans, cheese (we used slices of Swiss since it's the only cow's cheese M can eat, but shredded cheddar would taste better)

Second layer: tortilla, cream cheese, beans, more salsa

Third layer: guacamole

Tip:

We should have reheated the whole thing in the oven or microwave so the cheese would melt, then added the guacamole.

Wednesday

(Eating what's left in the fridge before our trip)

broiled salmon marinated in lime juice and olive oil; leftover rice (salad served but too mooshy to eat)

Thursday

On the road...

Friday

TA's birthday; we all at Applebees in M's hometown in NC.