By 100 Days of Real Food, on September 9th, 2011 Winning over your picky eater is no easy task, but (in most cases) it can be done! Following is a list of tactics to hopefully convince your child that “real food” is good stuff. Also, don’t forget that it can take time for one’s palette to adjust to new tastes so if you experience some failed attempts at first don’t be discouraged!
 Whole-Wheat Banana Pancakes 1. Start by switching out the refined and processed ingredients in meals they love for healthier ones. Some recipes to consider: Whole-Wheat Macaroni and Cheese, Homemade Chicken Nuggets, Whole-Wheat Pizza and Whole-Wheat Banana Pancakes (pictured).
2. Give your child a good first impression of the real food you want them to try even if it means deep frying sweet potatoes to make French fries, making sweet zucchini bread, or coating fish in almonds and topping it with a butter sauce. Once your child thinks they like “fish” you’ll have a better chance of getting them to eat it next time (even if you cook it differently). Continue Reading »
By 100 Days of Real Food, on August 19th, 2011 Last week’s “real food” school lunch tips were so popular I thought I’d stay on that bandwagon for at least one more week. Whether you want to spend one Sunday afternoon cooking up a storm or make a double-batch of something new every few days…planning ahead is key when it comes to making “real food” school lunches easy! Last year I struggled almost every night to come up with a balanced, fun, and somewhat creative lunch for my daughter. I now realize it’s because my options were rather limited. Aside from a few exceptions, I could only pull from our pantry or fridge and that got a little boring after a while. If by chance I had some leftover boiled whole-wheat noodles I could throw into the mix it was like my lucky day.
So rather than making last minute lunches again this year I am going to start planning ahead because I know this will make things so much easier in the long run. And even if “cooking up a storm” sounds like an undertaking, I am excited to finally have a plan. I don’t know about you, but once I have the next day’s lunch figured out and packed it’s such a big weight off my shoulders (and also one less thing standing in the way of me and my bedtime)!
 Homemade Chicken Noodle Soup Frozen in Individual Serving Sizes
Cook Weeks Ahead….
- Jar Storage (pictured): Eight-ounce jelly jars are the perfect size for freezing individual portions of soups, leftovers, and other one-dish meals. Pictured are five servings of homemade chicken noodle soup that will each fit perfectly into my daughter’s Thermos container. All I have to do is take one out to thaw the night before, heat it up in the morning, and then add it to her thermos before school.
Ideas for jars: Chicken noodle soup with veggies, tomato bisque, chili, corn chowder, tortilla soup, jambalaya, peanut squash soup, matzo ball soup, spaghetti sauce, and gumbo
Hint: Don’t fill jars all the way because liquids expand when they freeze. Continue Reading »
By 100 Days of Real Food, on August 12th, 2011 This is the first post in my new “100 Days of Real Food Tips” series. Enjoy!
Think Beyond the Sandwich Bread…
- Pinwheels (pictured)
Rolled up whole-wheat tortillas filled with:
- Cream cheese*, thin cucumber slices, and dill
- Goat cheese* and roasted red bell peppers (sold as pimentos)
- Peanut butter* and banana slices
- Sunflower butter* and all-fruit spread (similar to jelly)
- Egg salad
- Hummus, cheese, and grated carrots
*Easiest to spread when the tortilla is warm…don’t forget the fun toothpicks!
- Apple Sandwiches (pictured)
I got this idea from Williams-Sonoma and all you have to do is slice the apple*, cut out the core with a small round cookie cutter, knife or corer, and fill with: Continue Reading »
By 100 Days of Real Food, on July 27th, 2011 To be honest, I never really liked lunch meat that much anyway so it was very easy for me to stop buying it. The main reason we gave it up was because (especially after watching Food, Inc.) we made a decision to only eat locally raised meats. And have you ever seen someone slicing off pieces of deli meat at your local farmers’ market? Shortly after writing off all lunch meat I soon realized other good benefits would come from this decision as well. Like helping us to reduce our overall meat consumption, which is better for our health and environment anyway. So this is the reason I haven’t bought a pack of deli meat in over a year (or even missed it one bit), and as you can see it was quite a simple decision for us!
 Grilled Caprese Sandwich with Balsamic Vinegar With that being said, this change opened up a whole new window of opportunity when it came to sandwiches. But with anything, I can sometimes get in a rut. So I recently asked my wonderful facebook community to share their most favorite sandwich combinations, which helped inspire this fresh list of sandwich ideas below. Please also feel free to leave your ideas in the comments at the bottom! Continue Reading »
By 100 Days of Real Food, on May 19th, 2011 With less than a month left of school I am trying hard not to give in to the simplicity and ease of having my daughter buy her lunch. While slacking off at the bitter end is tempting, these thoughts are thankfully short-lived. So my hope is that one more lunch post will help rejuvenate us all so even during these last few weeks we can continue to send our kids to school with healthy, creative, homemade school lunches that contain nothing other than real food!
In my first two posts about school lunch ideas (post I and post II) I shared that my daughter goes to a peanut/tree-nut free school. As a result the school has an “approved” snack list that shows what food products parents are allowed to send into the school. To me their little snack list not only shows what is approved, but it also serves as kind of a suggested list of items that you could and should send for your 6-year-old to eat at nine in the morning. Some of the items on their list that immediately jump out at me are Wendy’s frosties, skittles, oreos, fritos, airheads, cheese puffs, twizzlers, chips ahoy, and gummy bears. In fact, only 17 out of the 200 hundred items (8.5%) are what I would consider to be “real food” approved. And you know I pay attention to what the kids are eating when I volunteer in my daughter’s class (which happens to be during snack time!), and I see that some parents are unfortunately taking these snack “suggestions” to heart.
So rather than sitting here and complaining about it what better thing to do than to try to fix the list? Continue Reading »
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