Healthy Mum, Happy Baby

At long last, here’s my follow up to the post on cooking with kids, with a great selection of books from Barbara Jo’s Books to Cooks on cooking for kids:

Whining & Dining: Mealtime Survival for Picky Eaters and the Families Who Love Them by Emma Waverman and Eshun Mott - more than one family I know is starting to rely on this book. We’ve tried the custard (yum), the corn fritters (bland and the kids wouldn’t touch them, which I was surprised by because really it should be hard to go wrong with pancakes and corn, two kid-friendly foods), the pad thai noodles (all but my super-picky preschooler loved them) and the teriyaki salmon (as with pad thai, an almost all the family favourite). There are some good tips on dealing with picky eaters as well, definitely worth looking into if you’ve got some picky eating issues.

The Kid-Friendly Food Allergy Cookbook by Leslie Hammond and Lynne Marie Rominger, with over 150 recipes that are Wheat-Free, Gluten-Free, Dairy-Free, Nut Free, Egg Free, and Low in Sugar. If you’re faced with cooking for a child with allergies (like we are - our oldest has a nut allergy, and our youngest a soy sensistivity) then this will be a great resource.

Nora’s Dinners by Nora Sands (the lunch lady on Jamie Oliver’s program on school lunches in the UK) - this British book uses metric weights for most of its measures, but if you’re used to cooking the British way this book purports to inspire seven - 12-year0olds to cook healthy food, and teaches them basic cooking skills with a focus on fun.

If you’d like a cosmopolitan child who’s at home with the varied flavours of the multicultural food, you may want to check out Food Adventures: Introducing Your Child to Flavours from Around the World by Elisabeth Luard and Frances Boswell. Plus you’ll find out what the Greek equivalent of mashed bananas is and get some great ideas.

If you are interested in Socially Conscious Consumption and would like to be part of group I’m hoping to create through Healthy Mum, Happy Baby that looks a socially conscious family eating, email me!

As a promised follow up to my post on Grow Your Own, we went right to the source and asked the fine (and knowledgeable) folks at Barbara Jo’s Books to Cooks for their favourite books for cooking with and for kids. I’ll start with cooking with kids and post later on cooking for kids.

Mark Bittman himself (author of one of my most used and recommended cookbooks How to Cook Everything) recommends KIDS COOK 1-2-3: Recipes for Young Chefs Using Only 3 Ingredients, By Rozanne Gold, Illustrated by Sara Pinto. You can read his review of a few different kid’s cookbooks in the New York Times, you’ll need to sign up for an account, but it is free.

Kitchen Garden Cooking with Kids by Stephanie Alexander is definitely in keeping with the whole idea of getting your children interested in their food and where it comes from. Because it’s Australian it uses metric measures and temperatures, but Barbara Jo’s still recommends it because Stephanie Alexander is (and I quote) “wonderful” and the book is chock-a-block with project ideas for getting your kids interested in food, gardening, composting, etc. There’s a great website that goes along with the book that’s definitely worth checking out.

Sam Stern’s Cooking Up a Storm: The Teen Survival Cookbook by Sam and Susan Stern, this is a British book, but all the measurements and temperatures have been converted to North American standards. Now, I’ve yet to start thinking about the teen year issues, my feet are still firmly planted in toddler and preschooler survival mode. Share 14-year-old Sam Stern’s recipes, and try them yourself if you’re a teen cook or cook wannabe.

Barbara Jo’s has also created a list of great books on Socially Conscious Consumption, which includes two of my current favourites, Marion Nestle’s What to Eat and local phenom The 100 Mile Diet. I’m thinking of starting, either in tandem with Barbara Jo’s or as an offshoot of Healthy Mum, Happy Baby and yoyomama a . If that sounds interesting to you it would be great if you could comment on this post or send me an email - I’m thinking books around food and gardening and going green and eating locally that are either aimed at kids or their parents. So let me know a) if you’re interested and b) what you think the focus should be!

I am on Barbara-Jo’s Books to Cooks email list, so I got quite a jolt when I got an email today from Books to Cooks entitled New Mums & Creative Kids Get Cooking and included was:

On Wednesday, May 16th at 6:30 pm local author Annemarie Tempelman-Kluit will host a class focusing on the nutritional needs of busy new mums and their babies (nearly mums are also welcome to attend, of course). Her book Healthy Mum, Healthy Baby is full of deliciously creative ideas for make-ahead meals, pantry suppers, and healthy snacks. Good cooking doesn’t need to make your life any more stressful, as Annemarie’s menu for the evening will demonstrate. The cost of this event is $70.00.

It’s not that I didn’t know the event was coming up, it’s in my events calender after all, it’s just that in the same way that seeing a real copy of the book made me go, “Wow, I actually wrote a book!” seeing the announcement made me go, “Wow, I actually have to stand up in front of people and cook and talk about my book. Argh!”

I was talking with another friend with a one-year-old and a three-year-old last night and she said, “Parenting is relentless!” And she’s right. She was talking about the bedtime routine, night after night, day in, day out. I was thinking washing the high-chair tray at least 3x a day, every day…I think it’s a cumulative thing too - with your first you have more energy (ie. less accumulated sleep deprivation) but by the time your second is into their second year, you’re worn down.

Hence my going on about The Balanced Mom and Breaking the Good Mom Myth. We can’t take care of our little ones if we don’t take care of ourselves! Another great book I was reminded about last night is the Three Martini Playdate - one of my favourite chapters is titled along the lines of Children’s Music, Why? Although I’d never have discovered Elizabeth Mitchell if it wasn’t for Madeleine. . .

If there are any other fans of Milly Molly Mandy* out there, or who at least remember her fondly from their childhoods they’ll remember she spent a lot of time going blackberrying. Which in light of recent research is apparently good news, as blackberries may be the healthiest food around.

* I’m scared that if I reread MMM I’ll find it hugely unPC, rather like Noddy (although apparently they have or are sanitizing it), or Curious George or even the newly released Peter Pan on two disc DVD. We just got it for Madeleine only to discover it’s got some horrible stereotypes in it and Tinker Bell’s just nasty, which hasn’t seemed to lessen Madeleine’s fairy fixation. . . It’s not that I think kiddielit should be all happy and lovely, and I had no idea what I was reading when I was little, but still…It’s kind of like when you reread the Narnia books when you’re older and suddenly you get all the biblical stuff. Anyhow, this was supposed to be about blackberries.

I’m a big fan of parenting books, I figure I can use all the help I can get, but last night I realized that a good solid 12 hours a day spent parenting should be followed up with chocolate and a glass of wine (and cleaning the kitchen, and sorting laundry and packing diaper bags to you can start the morning running) but spending all evening reading about parenting as well as all day doing it is adding insult to injury - which is in NO way to imply parenting is an injury. . .

Obviously I need a happy medium which is what? Only some nights spent reading parenting books, or being more selective in my reading?  I picked up two books from the library the other day. The first, Sippy Cups are not for Chardonnay by Stefanie Wilder-Taylor is kind of like Chick Lit parenting (maybe Mummy Lit/Parenting Lit?) light & fluffy but without enough info or helpful advice to be worth reading. The second, Mother Styles, Using Personality Type to Discover Your Parenting Strengths by Janet P. Penley (with Diane Eble) seemed more promising. Her premise is that there’s no one “right” way to parent and we have to accept our strengths and weaknesses and work around them rather than try and be perfect. So far, so good. But then you had to spend about three dense chapters figuring out your Myers Briggs personality type and maybe your partners’ too (I didn’t get that far) and how you related to each other and your children and OMG I didn’t have the energy, time or inclination. Admittedly I’m a bad sleeper and I have a three-year-old and a one-year-old so maybe someone more rested than I would have jumped at the chance but it’s not that I’m not willing to put work into my parenting, but not that kind of work.

I think obviously I need to be more selective, so I’m open to suggestions. Use the comments section to let me know what books you found helped with with parenting - which could be everything from sleep issues to discipline.

And at least I did take away the thought that none of us is a perfect parent or even can be a perfect parent and we’ll all parent differently according to our natures.

I attended an event at Barbara-Jo’s Books to Cooks a few weeks ago by the two authors of Ultimate Foods for Ultimate Health that was full of good info. One author, Liz Pearson, is a registered dietitian, while the other, Mairlyn Smith, is a home economist. Pearson does the research and then lets Smith know what foods to focus on and Smith creates the recipes. We were served a three-course meal and it was all the kind of food that left you feeling virtuously healthy afterwards - I was also still a little bit hungry, but then I’m still breastfeeding, so I’m still often a little bit hungry - but also with a happy tummy.

I’ve tried a few of the recipes since - two were hits (an immune boosting mushroom soup for Andrew and I, who seem to pass around whatever the girls have, and kid-friendly salmon cakes) while a supposedly kid friendly cheese and broccoli soup didn’t thrill any of our palates, even Lucy who’ll basically eat pretty much anything and enjoy it.

The best thing? The authors advocate eating chocolate and drinking red wine. Plus the book is full of heaps of info on flax, soy, croccoli, pomegranate juice, berries, green tea, red wine, healthy fats. It’s not child-oriented, although there are lots of recipes marked kid-friendly but I think some of them are for slightly older kids than our one-year-old and three-year-old.