Granny's Drawers

When I was a kid I just loved going to my Bubbi's house. (Bubbi is a word for a Jewish Grandma) The minute we got there I would run over to her bottom drawer in the dinning room because I knew that is where she kept the Hershey Bars. She also kept a host of other chocolates and goodies in there, those sugary fruit gel slices that we only got on Passover.

My Bubbi also always had her famous chocolate chip cookies in the freezer; she was never without a batch.

My point is is that back in the day when people moved slower it seemed like they were prepared. If someone dropped by, or if the whole family was coming for a holiday they were ready. It always made us feel special, like she cared and thought about is when we weren't there.

Now we just run out and grab something prepared at a store because there is one everywhere you turn. I live between a Trader Joe's and Whole foods, with a peppering of other stores all around. It's fine for company and when it comes to your children's lunches it may be easy to just grab a pre made sandwich. If you are like me you want fast and easy, and there is nothing wrong with that, but adding personalization can make a big impact on your child and is is not too much extra effort.

My solution is to start by making your child's lunch very special. Some parents add a note, some draw hearts or smiles on the brown bag. Our kids are away from us all day and as much as they may resist hugs or kisses they really do need and want to be with us and know we care.

A really nice way to make them feel warm and loved is by adding a very small quick note, a drawing or stickers. Many schools are now requiring no waste lunches and in that case you may want to keep reading.

Now back to Grandma...a few years ago my husbands Nana died and she has an amazing collection of linens. She was a real collector, anything you can imagine, and she had a jar or drawer full of it. Lucky for us she had a whole collection of beautiful linen napkins. I don't mean a few of them I mean hundreds. I sorted through to find the ones I thought my daughter would love and I took about fifty of them home. They are from the 1940's, 50's, and 60’s so cute and and brightly colored. Every day I choose two to go in her lunch, one for snack and one for lunchtime. She uses them as a place mat or a napkin. She never knows which ones she will get; it’s always a surprise. Sometimes I try to match the colors of her clothing, if it’s a grey day I add a floral pattern. Are you getting my drift? They wash up beautifully; I just toss them in with the laundry, no ironing for me!

She knows that I pick them for her and she knows that they were her great grandma's, and that I put an extra bit of thought into her lunch. Getting away from paper napkins can make you, your child and the landfill feel good, and this is an easy way to get started. I was resistant because of the extra laundry but it is very easy to wash them.

So look in the drawers or ask your parents or grand parents if they have old linens or cloth napkins you could have. Any thrift shop should have a stack somewhere. So that is what you can gain from looking in Grandma’s drawers!

Finally Taking Control

Processed and sugary snacks at school, this topic has bothered me for a long time. A few years ago I met Ann Cooper our local shining star, whose life’s work is to transform how we feed our children in school each day, from highly processed to highly nourishing food. She is so inspiring and hard working and she cares about our kids. Now the government is taking and interest, well let's hope it works. The truth about what our kids are eating in and out of school has had been plaguing me. I believe everything in moderation, we make cake, we eat candy but starting school each day with a healthy nutritious breakfast is key. Most schools have taken away high sugar breakfast foods, but still have highly processed snack foods available. Anne has been working her hardest to change what our kids are putting in their bodies because she knows that kids need healthy food to think and concentrate. If she can feed a district of 10,000 with a tiny kitchen and one stove then it can be done. When all that is required in a school kitchen to make lunch is a box cutter and microwave, something is wrong. Don't even get me started on the physical aspect of what the junk the kids are eating is doing to them. A candy bar and a soda for lunch will not give you nourishment or brainpower.

The reason I bring this up is because yesterday in the New York Times there was an article called, A Federal Effort to Push Junk Food Out of Schools

"The Obama administration will begin a drive this week to expel Pepsi, French fries and Snickers bars from the nation’s schools in hopes of reducing the number of children who get fat during their school years." Finally it is being paid attention to like smoking or drinking....it is dangerous and America is killing itself one bite at a time. The sad truth is that most parents are not leading by example. We can't expect our kids make the right choices if we are not. If you want your child to sit still, to pay attention to be focused try starting with their diet. Our kids are the future and we need to teach them to respect themselves and take care of themselves. The fact that they can buy crap in school is just sending the wrong message. Thank you Mrs. Obama, I appreciate your focus and I hope people will start to listen.

Here are some healthy lunch ideas:

Soup in a thermos is a great healthy warm lunch. Send some whole grain bread and a soup. Add fruit for that sweet ending or child wants more food buy or make organic healthy muffins.

Beans and soups

Taste Testing Peanut Butters - Not Just for Kids!

I love peanut butter, maybe it’s that nostalgic icon the pb&j that brings back the memories. Although I was never a fan of the jelly part, I just preferred the sticky nutty spread all alone. A tasting comparison is a great way to get your kids eating foods they may not think about.  Any ingredient can work, whole wheat pasta, jelly, juice, cheese, tortilla chips, anything you can think of. Give each of them a plate with samples of one type of food item, have them taste it, smell it, and look at the color. Discuss or write down the findings and decide by voting which food they like the best.

This particular Peanut Butter tasting was all grown ups from the SFPFS. Our panel ranged from master taster to recipe developers to home cooks. We each had a plate with 11 samples of “oil on the top, natural peanut butter." I can’t say we were very scientific about the tasting, just that we tasted, and then yelled out our opinion across the room. It was a lot of fun, and I’d do it again, even with jelly!


Here’s our sticky conclusion:

8 votes – Trader Joes Organic $2.99
7 votes– Santa Cruz Dark Roast 3.99
6 votes – O Organics (Safeway) 2.50
5 votes - Laura Scudders 3.89
4 votes– Santa Cruz Light Roast 3.99
2 votes– Trader Joes regular 1.79
0 votes - MaraNatha Organic 3.15
0 votes - Adams 3.89
0 votes – 365 (whole foods) 1.69
The no-stir Skippy and MaraNatha products received no votes.


The overall winner was Trader Joe’s Organic at $2.99. The group agreed it had a focused peanut taste with mild salt and a bit of sweetness.

The second choice was Santa Cruz Dark Roast at $3.99, it was the most expensive. We all agreed that the deep peanut color and roasty flavor set it at second place.

The third choice was O Organics 2.50 (Safeway brand) it was considered to have mild flavor and a smooth texture a typical peanut butter.

Sunflower Butter is a great alternative for peanut butter.
There is also a new almond product called Barney Butter go to What's Cooking to read about it.

Play is Back

With school in full swing, I thought this was a good time to share this short post.
I am getting serious on you but don't worry regularly scheduled programming will return as soon as possible.

A while back I had the pleasure of listening to a fantastic author and researcher named Kathy Hirish-Pasek. She spoke about her book Einstein Never Used Flash Cards. Not only was she funny and energetic but a wealth of information on the subject of how our children learn. It was as if she was speaking directly to me, I breathed a sigh of relief for my school days past and my daughters future.
School for me was an endless struggle of failing miserably and succeeding superbly. Trying to fit inside a box of purple and white dittos, smelling the wet ink feeling the frustration before I even tried. Sitting in endless math classes feeling lost and knowing summer school was in my future.
I hid in the art room, throughout my years in middle and high school I retreated to the art room where the familiar smells of tempera and clay welcomed me. I was good at art I thrived there, I received praise there I was smart there I succeeded there.
My daughter at the wise age of five loves to play, make up stories and be in her fantasy land as much as possible. I do not feel the need to drill her on flash cards or force her to stifle her creativity. I was worried about her academic prowess. She is learning through her play they kids are designed for that, have you ever seen a four year old able to sit still for more that 10 minutes? Drilling her with flashcards may put my worries at ease but it is about her not me right? Hirish-Pasek says, " putting children in a rigid structure as young as two or three can create anxiety, hostility and fear." They need us their parents not tutors, she also states that, "children as young as nine are experiencing anxiety attacks," that is an outrageous statistic. We want our kids to be creative thinkers not robots, the system is an endless snarl of red tape and test scores, not designed for individuals but fore the group.

What does this have to do with food and your child you ask? Well, Hirish-Pasek is passionate about learning through play, touching, exploring, imagining and more and so am I.
Let them play and teach them while they are comfortable and relaxed. If your child needs to brush up on letters, serve alphabet soup. If they are having trouble counting, count and stack carrots, teach it out of context and see what happens. Our kids don't have to struggle just find out how they learn best and follow their lead.

Doof-a-Palooza was Fun-a-Palooza!

Yesterday was a fantastic day for us at the amazing Google campus. 

Toddler Café  and  What's Cooking 

teamed up to create a fun interactive booth at  DOOF. 

DOOF is a food show for kids with a mission to help fight childhood obesity. We made Happy Trails Mix from my book. The recipe helps kids with fine motor skills and teaches about recycling by using old bags.
Kids and parents cut circles out of brown paper bags.  The circles were then decorated, formed into a cone shape and filled with dried fruit and other healthy snacks.

We also gave away Boon Snack Balls, they were a huge hit. For the give away we put a bunch of healthy play food in a big stockpot and without looking the kids chose one. If they got the marked veggie they won!! We had lots of fun and made tons of noise every time we had a winner.

We handed out a recipe card with a recipe from Toddler Café generously printed by The Vegetable With More a website promoting beans and fiber in the American diet.

A big thank you to our volunteers, Jessica, Drew and Maria and sponsors, Boon and The Vegetable with More.

Stay tuned to see our gang on a cooking segment with  Joey Altman.

Below is a clip from the Show which is due to air sometime this all on PBS.

The Vegetables, They Talk to Me

I always thought I had some sort of culinary ADD. I’ve always had trouble sticking to a recipe. I’m always straying from the ingredient list and making substitutions. I thought it was because I was creative and curious but I have since found out that my actions go deeper than that. I think I am listening to the ingredients.

I start to hear them the minute I go into a store or stroll through the farmers market, “Hey you, the one with the curls… I’m talking to you. Don’t I look delicious, green, and crisp, and I’d be oh-so-good with caramelized onions and crunchy toasted almonds. You have those at the home right??” “Pick me, pick me!”

No, I’m not hallucinating. I don’t really believe in talking veggies, but I do believe that if we open our ears we can hear all kinds of important things.

I guess when I’m walking around the grocery store, I fall into a sort of culinary meditation, a trance-like state where I become like a kid in a candy store. Mouth agape, I pick up things, smell things, look closely at the spices and fruits. And my brain is quickly calculating whether anything in my pantry would taste good with this particular pear or with that ripe red tomato.

I listen to the people around me too. Being used to the high-pitched sound of my daughters voice, my ears perked up when I heard a similar voice nearby. Right next to me a child was begging for “rainbow” carrots–a beautiful bunch of golden, beet-red and orange carrots. I saw a few more moms and dads shopping with their kids and I heard their conversations clearly, “Dad, I want to try these tomatoes, please.”

I was so taken by these little ones who were so interested in the fresh produce section. It was such a departure from what I am used to hearing in the store–the frantic scurry to find the sweetest, most colorful boxed snack or lunch item. I smiled to myself and wondered if perhaps the vegetables were talking to them too?

Cookbook Publishers Try to Think Small

By KIM SEVERSON
Published: May 14, 2008



At a time when 2-year-olds take cooking classes, trick-or-treaters turn up in chef’s whites and a personalized child’s size spatula costs $20, it is no surprise that the children’s cookbook genre is enjoying a new life.

Not that it had much of a life before.
Children’s cookbooks have long been among the tiniest of literary niches. Rarely taken seriously or invited to the adult cookbook party, they usually end up stuck on the bottom shelf of the children’s activity section in the bookstore. With a couple of notable exceptions in the 1980s and 1990s, children’s cookbooks have made little impact, either in sales or attention.

But that is changing, as parents who have a keen interest in cooking encourage their young children to spend time in the kitchen and new titles take a more sophisticated approach to children’s food. Although no one tracks overall sales of cookbooks aimed at children, some retailers say that sales have shot up. Readers too young to drive don’t yet have their own “Joy of Cooking,” but publishers are looking everywhere for it. And a number of cooking celebrities have joined in, too.

“It’s not like the books didn’t exist five years ago, but they were very introductory, very dessert driven, or very one-size-fits-all,” said Melanie Rhodes, a children’s book buyer for Borders, where sales of children’s cookbooks have jumped by a third in the past year. “What we’re seeing now are publishers who are a little more tuned into the real food audience.”

In the last few years, the children’s cookbook market has moved beyond all-encompassing tomes from Betty Crocker or Better Homes and Gardens. Increasingly customized by age, books now teach toddlers to make lettuce wraps and older children to make entire meals. Some predict that cookbooks for teenagers will be the next break-out category.

The subject matter has been expanding, too. Nursery-school staples like macaroni and cheese, cupcakes and eggs on a raft are still going strong. But the new cookbooks reflect a trend toward better nutrition and health and toward ethnic dishes like sushi or bibimbop. Local and sustainable food are having their moments, too.

If there is a flaw in all this expansion, it’s that some cookbook authors have swung from the simple to the complex.

“We’re seeing some books that are trying to do too much,” said Gillian Engberg, an editor who specializes in books for young people at Booklist, the journal of the American Library Association. She said that some books contain so much information about nutrition or gardening that they might try the already limited patience of young cooks.

But she isn’t too critical of overly ambitious books, because they represent a return to the kitchen. “We are seeing more of these because people are growing more knowledgeable about food,” she said. “Cooking together represents a pause, a chance for families to come together.”

There are also less cozy motives, like money. Children’s cooking gear sells well, as Williams-Sonoma and Sur La Table have discovered. Television cooking shows seem to have a magic hold over children, and children’s cooking Web sites continue to pop up. All of that has book editors looking for the genre’s pot of gold. But a breakaway hit remains elusive.

“It’s an area publishers aren’t steady on the ground with yet,” said Bill LeBlond, the editorial director for food and wine at Chronicle Books. “We all have the sense that the audience is out there, but we just can’t figure it out.”

Chronicle recently published “Kitchen Playdates” by Lauren Bank Deen and “The Toddler Café” by Jennifer Carden, which hopes to inspire toddlers to eat more adventurously by teaching them to crimp the edges of an empanada.




Mr. LeBlond also has high hopes for “Cook It in a Cup!” by Julia Myall, which came out in March and is packaged with silicone rubber baking cups.



Celebrity chefs have been prodigious writers of adult cookbooks, and this year two Food Network stars have leapt into the children’s market.
Read more

The Sea-Saw - How feeding your kids can take you for a ride!

The sea-saw was never my favorite piece of playground equipment. It required two people, and you really had to trust the other kid not to jump off and leave you like the look of the Coyote in the Road Runner cartoon when he realized that he was running with no ground under him. Wide eyed you'd fall to the dusty ground with a disappointed thunk. Now me, I much preferred the swing, smooth, easy to control and you could do it alone but it was even better when a friend was swinging next to you. You could practice jumping off in mid swing and get good air, something to be proud of. Not like the run and dump of the sea-saw.

Feeding your toddler can be something like the sea-saw, first off, it takes two. One is usually very excited (that would be you) and proud of the food you made for this little experiment with a taste-bud studded tongue . "Let's take it for a test drive you say, this kid will love the elaborate recipe I have prepared, I am sure of it." So you set up, the kid is swathed in plastic so you can be sure not one drop of food will touch the tiny pristine shirt. You have worked so hard all day to keep it clean, it would be a shame now to get a stain on it, so close to bedtime. You have a wet cloth and a dry one close at hand, in case a drip or g-d forbid a morsel falls to the floor. You have spent the proper amount of time blowing on the entree to cool it perfectly for your little ones mouth. You approach the hungry one and place some of the food on the tray of the space ship capsule like highchair. You stand back and wait, nothing happens. You try again, snubbed, "don't like it mamma." You are flabbergasted, you feel the mercury rising, the look in her eye, she is going to get off the sea-saw and leave ME wide eyed in mid air. Don't you do it, don't get off, you think to yourself. The flurry of thoughts are bouncing around your head, no, what will she eat...how could she not like this...this is a personal attack on my culinary skills...maybe there is to much oregano, that's it to much oregano. You find yourself tasting it, "hey this is good, what is your problem kid this is delicious." Although you would never say it you are thinking it. (#$@!@#!) Ok, compose yourself, remember you are not on the playground, you are not eight and Jimmy didn't just leave you in the dust.
This is your child, they need to learn how to taste and enjoy food. You can't expect them to just eat every vegetable, or sip every soup just because you made it with love. They need interaction, remember the "airplane, open wide here comes the plane, " that works for a reason. The child needs contact, so put them close to you in a similar chair or even on your lap.
Swing with them, you go up, they go up and you can pass each other on the way down. Make eating like recess, play, talk enjoy and share.