Actually it’s mainly because I love Jeffrey Steingarten’s food column. And in this month’s issue (with Cameron Diaz on the cover) he writes about “the unforgettable taste of brown butter.” Just reading the article made my mouth water and want melted butter. The article included recipes as well, including one for what he calls “the best oatmeal cookies”. I couldn’t resist trying it out and they are SO yummy. Not healthy. No breastfeeding friendly necessarily. But really, really good, and not like any others you’ve had lately. They’re not the kind packed with nuts and seeds, or tough and tasteless. Instead their thin, crispy, crumbly and buttery. Mmmm…

The recipe – with a few small changes – is below:

Ingredients:

• 1 cup very soft, room-temperature butter (for baking unsalted butter is always best as it has less water content)
• 1 cup sugar
• 2 cups uncooked instant oatmeal
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 cup all-purpose flour (low-protein if possible. I have no idea what this meant and as I’d already splurged and bought instant oatmeal I didn’t want to buy special flour as well, so just used whatever regular all-purpose flour we had on hand and it seemed to work fine.)
• 1 tsp vanilla

Instructions:

• Preheat oven to 350 degrees. The recipe had no temperature so I just took a guess. If you have any suggestions let me know.
• In a large bowl, beat together the butter and sugar using a wooden spoon, not a mixer.
• In another bowl combine the oatmeal, baking soda, salt and flour.
• Still using the wooden spoon, mix the dry ingredients into the sugar and butter mixture. Mix in the vanilla extract.
• Line a baking sheet with parchment paper – we didn’t have any so I just buttered the baking sheet. With your fingers, shape the dough into 1 inch balls. Place them on the baking sheet 2 inches apart.
• Dip your fingers into a bowl of cool water and flatten each ball so it’s about 1 cm thick. Bake for 10 to 15 minutes, or until the cookies are a pale, golden brown. Don’t keep cooking them if they look more anemic than you’re used it, they’re supposed to be “paleish” as far as cookies go. Let cool for a few minutes, then remove to a rack with a thin metal spatula and let cool completely.

Once these start baking the smell will make your mouth water and I’m guessing you’ll find them very hard to resist. We did!

The article also contains recipes for Khun Pao’s Thai Butter Cookies, Solidified Brown Butter, Nearly Fat-Free Brown-Butter Nuggets & Brown-Butter Ice Cream. Hmmm…testing all these is not good for my waistline or my budget, but my tastebuds are very, very happy!

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!

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!

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!”

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. . .

* 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.

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’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.