Healthy Mum, Happy Baby

In my capacity as yoyomama I was on CityTV today with tips & tricks for getting kids ready for preschool. All the info’s on the site in the archives: www.yoyomama.ca and you can sign up for a free daily email with helpful, hip info for mums to be sent directly to your inbox as well.

I’m an avid Epicurious fan. It started when we used to get boxes of organic veggies and I’d be faced with a sunchoke and no idea how to cook it. All I had to do was plug in sunchoke to their search box and something would come up.

Today I found a great section on their site with tons of info on back to school eating. Everything from nutritional lunches to fast dinners: School Days @ Epicurious. It also has healthy snack ideas, nut butter alternatives (which is key for us with M being allergic to nuts) and my personal favourite section – leftovers for lunch, which I espouse in the book. Why prepare two meals when you can prepare one and not bother having to make sandwiches, instead just pop something yummy in the microwave.

Plus Ideal Bite has some good info on why organics are good for little ones, with some organic snacking suggestions: Organic Snacks.

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!

Gastrokid is a blog devoted to kids and eating in a witty, informative way, rather than a “my child loves arugula” way. Their most current post references the chef of one of my most used cookbooks, (see previous post) Mark Bittman with his recipes for quick & easy meals, how can that not be enticing? Check out their recipe for cupcakes using my favourite, Green & Black’s organic chocolate. If you’re into kids and eating you’ll want to cruise around Gastropod or add it to your RSS feed.

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!

Did you know that breastfeeding, on top of all it’s other benefits, is sustainable and has no environmental impact? I found a great site today called TreeHugger that’s all about going green, so if that’s up your alley you’ll want to check out their ten tips for How to Green Your Baby, which includes breastfeeding.

It’s the kind of site that’ll entrap you when you start drilling down and jumping from link to link.

From the July 8th issue of the Vancouver Province:

It was three in the morning.

New mom Annemarie Tempelman-Kluit found herself wandering around the house, ravenously hungry, wondering if she could stand to eat another container of yogurt or another healthy cookie or bowl of cereal. Again.

“It’s awful!” she says. “People tell you a lot of stuff about having a baby, but nobody tells you what to do after you have the baby. Nobody told me I’d be that hungry, or that thirsty. You don’t realize how little time you’re going to have. I thought there had to be a better way.”

>> Read Full Story

From the July 5th issue of the Georgia Straight:

Hands up anyone who’s breast-feeding. Something of a challenge when one arm is around the little one and the other is propping open your eyelids. Local author Annemarie Tempelman-Kluit has been there and done that, which is why she penned the enormously practical Healthy Mum, Happy Baby: How to Feed Yourself When You’re Breastfeeding Your Baby (Random House Canada, $25) for the real–rather than the mythical–yummy mummy. Mother of two youngsters, Tempelman-Kluit brings honesty and humour to a neglected topic: how to keep you and your family well – fed when you’re starving and sleep deprived. Breakfast smoothies to almost-instant pizzas–it’s all here, along with reassurance from other moms and even light-reading lists. Skip the hand-embroidered diaper bag and give this to new parents, along with the URL of Tempelman-Kluit’s hip new, locally focused and reality-based newsletter and Web site, Yoyomama.ca, aimed at those who don’t plan to put their two-year-old in a designer bikini.

We thought it would be colour appropriate to go strawberry picking today. We were tempted by more festive celebrations, but after seeing how mellow (& sleepy) the girls were after we visited the UBC Farm yesterday morning (an aside – we highly recommend the Saturday morning market to all parents, bring a picnic and stake out one of their table, and bring lettuce for the chickens.) we thought another agricultural outing might be more fun, and guarantee good napping.

We met my Dad and the girls went for it. M preferred filling her bucket from strawberries my Dad had already picked over picking her own. Lucy was in her own private strawberry heaven – eating them, squishing them in her fingers, and stomping on them…who knows how much dirt and pesticides she ingested, but I’m hoping the whole picking locally thing will mean they’re not as bad as strawberries from farther afield. Plus M, who’s not previously been a strawberry fan, now says she loves them, which gives credence to the whole theory behind getting your kids involved in growing their own food!

Our berry picking tips for going with the very young include making sure you have a ratio of one adult per child, don’t plan to stay for more than 45 minutes or an hour, make sure everyone has their own basket for picking, bring lots of wet naps, sunscreen, sun hats and refreshing beverages.

If it wasn’t for yoyomama I wouldn’t be tracking all the goings on in town as much as I am, so it’s a great offshoot of the site that we’re exploring our city more than ever.

In light of all the news of late about the benefits of Vitamin D I’ve been wondering if I should start supplementing with it or mainlining it or not worrying about it at all. . .Health Canada has just updated their recommendations around Vitamin D and Health and they’ll be participating in a conference in September of 2007 to review the efficacy and safety of Vitamin D – in the meantime, they recommend that for now “all Canadians over the age of two consume 500 mL (two cups) of milk every day for adequate vitamin D and in addition encourages everyone over the age of 50 to take a daily supplement of 400 IU of vitamin D. ”

Remember – too much Vitamin D can be as bad for you as too little – I’ve made a mental note to update this in September once they’re newer recommendations are out.