A Veggie Vacation

My family and I just spent a week vacationing at a remote, camp-like ranch in the woods. We slept in rustic cabins with minimal plumbing and electricity and spent the days swimming in the pool and nearby river, playing tennis, kickball and shuffleboard and taking pony rides. My husband and I had a great time and so did our two kids. But the one thing that comes with this kind of communal living is communal dining. All of our meals were served family style in the dining hall cabin. When it was time to eat, an enormous bell was rung and all the kids and adults came running from all corners of the ranch.


Don’t get me wrong. The food was great. It was brought in fresh, cooked in the kitchen cabin and served on big platters at large tables. I enjoyed the meatloaf supper, BLT lunch and fajita night. In fact, I ate so well that I probably gained a few pounds, never mind appreciated having someone else cook for me. But my kids are different story. If they don’t like what is on the table, they will eat potato chips and drink lemonade and call that lunch. Or, they will eat rolls and chocolate pudding and call that supper. I’m okay when that kind of “you get what you get kid-dining” occurs once in a while. But when it goes on for an entire week, we have a problem.
To be honest, it’s not the lack of nutrition that bothers me the most. It is the direct effect that poor nutrition has on my kids’ behavior. Cranky kids make cranky parents. If my kids start whining and crying at the drop of a hat, my mood goes south and so does my sense of vacation. I give my kids healthy snacks in order to ward off bad behavior. Sure I want my kids to eat nutritious food so they will grow up to be healthy kids and adults. But my immediate concern is more selfish than that. I want to get through the day with as few tantrums and meltdowns as possible. What’s my solution? Feed them healthy snacks BEFORE they fall apart.

So, here I was, about to embark on a week-long vacation of communal dining. I played out the scenario before it even began. The kids pick at the food during meal time and fill up on cookies, potato chips and ice cream afterwards. Soon their behavior deteriorates which requires me to yell more, administer numerous time-outs and eventually no one is having any fun, including myself. Before we even go down that road, I decide I need an alternate plan. In order to have a good time on this trip I need to bring my own supply of nutritious food that I know my kids will eat to supplement whatever is being served in the dining hall. But how can I do that if I won’t have a kitchen?

Well, I started with what I did have: my own family cabin with electricity, a mini-fridge and running water. I decided to purchase a small rice cooker with a steaming basket for under $15. I figured with this little gadget I could steam vegetables, cook pasta and rice with just a little water and an electrical current.

And so I did. In the evening after the kids went to sleep or during nap time in our cabin, I steamed carrots or broccoli and made rice or pasta and then packed it up to store in our mini-fridge for the next day. I gave the veggies to my kids for late afternoon snacks before dinner time and, depending on the menu, sometimes brought the pasta or rice (and sometimes a can of black beans) to the dining hall to add to their plate during meals.

My solution wasn’t perfect but it got the job done. My kids received their daily dose of vegetables via snacks between meals and always had something nutritious on their plate that they liked in the dining hall. This kind of home-made supplemental nutrition had the desired effect that I was going for. My kids’ junk food snacking was kept to a minimum and their over-all mood swings remained somewhat balanced. Okay, so you can’t solve all of your tantrum problems, but it is worth a try. Happy summer vacation!




VEGGIE VACATION TIPS:

1. Skip the fast food dining as much as possible when on a road trip. Try stopping at a rest stop instead. Picnic outside and make your own PB&J sandwiches.

2. After a potty stop, get the kids moving. Try leading 5 minutes of family stretching, jumping jacks and running in place. You will look very silly, but laughing is also a good way to get the blood flowing.

3. If you are not cooking your own meals, find a way to prepare veggie snacks to supplement in between less nutritious meals.

4. Don’t over-sugar your kids just because you are on vacation. Limit desserts to a reasonable number and proportion.

5. Remember that even on a road trip or at the beach, well-timed nutritious snacks can help ward off bad behavior and meltdowns. Whether the kids are watching movies in the car all day or very active outside, they still need nutritious snacks to keep them going.

6. When bedtime gets pushed later than normal, remember that kids still need to clock in their sleep. Enforce an afternoon nap time or rest time to keep them from falling apart with exhaustion. Or, adopt an early bedtime every other night to counteract the late nights.

7. Relax. This is your vacation too! Do what you need to do to make it fun for everyone.

Playground Snack of the Day

Snack time is an untapped opportunity to put real nutrition into young kids’ growing bodies. Some kids will pick at the food on their meal time plate but munch on snacks all day long. I’m not one for cutting out snacks. So then why not bring the nutritious food out as a snack if that’s when your kid is hungry?


What’s a nutritious snack? Snacks don’t have to be pre-packaged. Just pick a food that you might serve for a meal and present it as a snack. Steamed vegetables, raw vegetables, fruit and nuts make excellent snacks.

I call it the Playground Snack because it is a food item offered after the child has been running around working up an appetite. Now is the time to offer nutritious food – when your child needs it. Don’t wait until dinner when your child is tired and her attention span is diminishing. Offer real food throughout the day when your child turns to you and asks for a snack. Bring real food out of the kitchen and onto the playground for nutritious snacking.

Check out my Guest Blog at the W.H.O.L.E. Gang (Whole, Healthy, Organic Living Everyday)
for Steamed Sweet Potato Snack
Steamed Sweet Potato Snack

Forks On The Left

Meals aren’t just about the food. Nor are they just about the actual time it takes to consume the food. Meals include a before, during and after the actual eating. Meals are prepared for, the table is set, we come to the table, we eat, and then we clean up. That is a meal.
Getting my kids to sit down for a meal and behave themselves is not an easy task and is rarely pulled off without a hitch. But if I somehow combine my kids’ desire to exert their independence and contribute to the meal time experience, they are more likely to behave. If I do the simple act of letting my kids help bring the meal into existence, then they are proud of it and their role in its making.

I read a lot of blogs and books about getting kids to help out in the kitchen and let them cook with you. I think this concept is fantastic and my kids certainly love helping me cook dinner. But let’s be honest here, not every day is a “let’s all cook together” day at my house. I mean, letting my kids help me with the actual cooking is an activity in itself. I enjoy it and try to do it as often as possible, but most of the time I would rather just do it myself while my kids are playing in another room. Sure my son may run in to the kitchen and ask to give the pasta a stir, but there are other ways kids can help out without standing over hot pots or chopping raw vegetables.

Setting the table is the ritual where the table is prepared for the meal where food and family to come together to eat. It is a task that is rooted in traditions and governed by rules and etiquette. But setting the table, for a young child, also has room for interpretation, spontaneity, and individual flare.

“Mommy, can I help you make dinner?” my 5 year old will ask. “Mommy I am hungry,” my 3 year old will tell me as I am finishing up dinner preparations. “Why don’t you both set the table,” I often say to them. “You put out the plates and you do the forks and napkins.” Some nights this plan results in fights over who gets what plate or which fork or who is sitting next to whom. But most nights my kids go about their table-setting chores with a sense of responsibility and pride. Sure, sometimes not everyone gets a fork or the napkins are on top of the silverware. As a parent, I learn to overlook quite a few details for an overall positive effect.

Setting the table doesn’t only have to happen at the table. Sometimes I wonder why my kids enjoy tea parties and picnics so much. Certainly it’s not only for the love of tea or going outside. No, my kids love to play tea party and picnic because they enjoy setting the table. Whether it is with a play set of fine china or paper plates on a picnic blanket, my kids want to prepare for the food to come, even if it is just pretend. We have bottom drawer in the kitchen with plastic containers, plastic cups and paper plates leftover from previous birthday parties, etc. One of my kids’ favorite make-believe games is literally passing out plates and cups. Sometimes they will find a few birthday hats to go with the place settings. Now we really have a party!

So what does that have to do with food and dinner and eating as a family? As a parent, I spend a lot of time thinking about how to get my kids to sit at the table and behave themselves. At the end of the day, nothing I say or do will glue their rear ends to the seat and make them stop fidgeting. My other realization is that I cannot do everything myself. By combining my need for a little help in the kitchen and my kids' desire to do things on their own , usually we end up with a more pleasant meal. Mom is less frantic and the kids feel proud of their work. It would be nice if the forks ended up on the left, but if they are on the right or someplace in between, I smile at my proud 3-year-old and am thankful for whatever calm moments at the dinner table I can get.

I've Tried Something New: Oven Fry Medley

My kids love to eat my homemade oven-roasted French fries. My kids also love steamed sweet potatoes. But for some reason, when I add a little olive oil, salt and a fresh baked crunch to sweet potato sticks, my kids won’t touch them. “Huh?” I often think. “They eat sweet potato steamed with nothing added but they won’t touch it with a little crisp, grease and salt?” Go figure. But, the idea is to keep trying. So, I decided to mix things up a bit and offer a medley of oven fried root vegetables. Regular potato fries, sweet potato fries, parsnip fries and carrot fries. How was it received by my kids? Let’s just say I got our 5-year-old neighbor hooked on parsnips and my kids only touched the regular potato fries. Maybe you will have better luck with your kids. I will just keep trying.




Oven Fry Medley

Russet or Idaho and Sweet Potatoes: Peel and rinse. Cut into fry-like long rectangles.

Carrots and Parsnips: Peel and cut into sticks.

Toss vegetables in olive oil and spread onto a baking sheet or pan. Sprinkle with salt and bake at 400 degrees F for about 20 minutes depending on thickness of cut (flipping and turning at least once half way) or until desired crispiness has been achieved. Serve warm.

What Mom Had Right

I see a lot of food websites that claim to be “not your mother’s ______.” I get it. Perhaps our mothers didn’t cook with olive oil, or prepare fresh vegetables, or venture out from her weekly repertoire, or experiment with exotic spices. Sure, we can all relate to that. (No offense, mom.) This morning, as I was filling up the re-usable popsicle containers with organic yogurt, I got to thinking; what about all of those things my mother DID do that we may have underestimated at the time, or lost sight of, but now research is telling us that mom had it right. For example, my mother made her own popsicles. She was the Tupperware generation and so we always had apple juice, orange juice or yogurt popsicles in Tupperware popsicle- ware ready for snacking in the freezer. As an adult, I enjoyed buying pre-packaged popsicles until I had kids and started reading the ingredients. Sure, you can find all natural ones. But it’s much cheaper and less time consuming to read those labels to simply make them yourself. So when I fill up those popsicle containers, I think of my mother. She had it right.

What other things did she have right? I already posted an article about getting your nutrition from food rather than vitamin supplements. That is something my mother always told us. Now research is backing her up.

My mother insisted that every dinner was made up of a protein, a vegetable and a carbohydrate.

Breakfast and lunch were self-service at our house growing up but dinner was eaten together, as a family, every night.

My mother refused to accept the microwave. Although everyone had one, she insisted that there was something not right about the whole concept, and therefore unhealthy.

My mother bought frozen vegetables.  We now know that frozen vegetbles retain their vitamins almost as well as fresh ones.

My mother never trusted fresh fruit and vegetables that came from a large grocery store.  She always bought fruit and veggies from more locally-suppled markets. 

My mother bought fruit and vegetables that were on sale and therefore, in season.
Tell us what your mother had right all along.

Breakfast Boy and Grumpy Girl

Breakfast Boy and Grumpy Girl - that’s pretty much how it breaks down at my house every morning. I’m not commenting on a universal truth about boys versus girls. I am sure there are plenty of families with Get-Up Girls and Bed-Head Boys. But in our house my husband and my son wake up and immediately eat a big breakfast while my daughter and I need a little time to adjust to the fact that we are no longer sleeping. I think we are all wired differently when it comes to waking up in the morning.


According to many sources, breakfast is the most important meal of the day. I completely agree. But I also think the person who researched that one is a morning person. I’m not saying breakfast isn’t important, because it is. I just think with little kids we also need to recognize that different kids have different body-clocks. I am sure there is a more technical term for this, but I have noticed that not all kids consume food in the same way at the same time of day.

Let’s take my 3-year-old son, for example. He wakes up at around 7:00am and immediately comes into our room, demanding milk. Then he goes back in his bedroom, turns on his light, removes his pajamas, throws his pull-up in the trash can, chooses clothes to wear and gets dressed. Then he marches back into our bedroom (I have returned to a horizontal, under the covers position after getting my son a cup of milk), and says he is hungry. I give him a banana and then he sometimes comes back for a second one.

By now I am up and shuffling around with my eyes half open. “I want to help make your coffee, mommy,” my son says to me. I nod in agreement. My son stands up on his stool at the kitchen counter and counts the spoonfuls of coffee as he fills up the filter of my coffee pot. Then I’ll make him some toast and he will insist on spreading the cream cheese or butter all by himself. As he is munching down his toast, my husband comes into the kitchen, freshly showered and dressed. He sits down at the kitchen table for breakfast. My son comes running and the two of them have a bowl of cereal side by side.

By now I am slightly more awake because at least I am finally sipping my mug of coffee. As my husband and son are chatting away between spoonfuls, I notice a droopy 5-year-old leaning against the wall with her thumb in her mouth and her favorite blanket half over her face. It’s my daughter who has heard our bustle and slowly stumbled from her bed to the kitchen.

“Good morning, would you like some chocolate milk?” I ask her.
“Uh,” she grunts back at me.

I get her. She needs to sit in her pajamas for at least 30 minutes before getting dressed and she can’t talk until she’s had a glass of chocolate milk. Oh, and then there’s breakfast. My daughter has a very difficult time eating before 10:00am. I get that. I prefer to drink my coffee and THEN think about what to eat for breakfast.

What about that most important meal of the day? Do I let my Grumpy Girl skip it just because her grumpy mom feels her pain? My day can’t wait for Grumpy Girl to transform into Agreeable Angel. Even if I make her come to the kitchen table to eat breakfast, most of the time she just sits there and stares at it. It’s simply too early and she hasn’t gotten moving enough yet to eat. It is as if her digestive system, sense of smell and taste are still asleep. That’s not something I can fight and win.

As a parent of a Grumpy Girl, I choose not to fight my daughter’s body clock but to work around it. My breakfast solution is to let her eat a little later, when she is ready. If later means when we are on the move, then so be it. I always try to get my daughter to sit down and have a bowl of cereal, which she does on occasion. But if she simply can’t, then I pack her a breakfast to go. My favorite breakfast-on-the-go solutions are dry cereal without the milk and milk in a to-go cup or a breakfast sandwich of toast with cream cheese and some fruit. Even a regular old peanut butter and jelly sandwich also does the trick.

This gives Grumpy Girl time to adjust to the daylight without missing out on a little nutrition and energy before going about her day. I simply take the breakfast with us and let her eat it on the go as she gets hungry. Oh wait, I forgot. I also take a matching to-go-breakfast for my son, Breakfast Boy, for whom one breakfast is never enough.

I've Tried Something New - Kotlyeti / Roly Polies

This isn’t a vegetable. But trying something new isn’t only about vegetables – it’s about, well, trying something new. I am always on the lookout for new protein recipes that my kids might enjoy since they are pretty good at eating veggies, rice and pasta, but not so good with meat, fish and chicken.


This recipe for Kotlyeti is of Russian origin and was introduced to my kids by my sister. The Kotlyeti, in this version, is basically a meatball made with ground turkey and then lightly breaded. The fun part is that they are easy for little fingers to pick up and eat without a fork. Of course my daughter likes to dip them in ketchup. Now she jumps up and down in her seat with excitement when she sees me bringing Kotlyeti to the table. My son, on the other hand, ate them the first couple of times at my sister’s house but at home with me, he won’t touch them. If I put one on his plate he picks it up, carefully places it on the table, gives it a push, and then watches it roll off the edge of the table onto the floor. Good luck!

Kotlyeti  (My daughter also likes to call them Roly Polies after her favorite bug.)

2 lbs turkey
1 small onion, finely chopped
2 cloves garlic, finely chopped (or a few sprinkles of garlic powder)
A handful of chop dill – optional
1 tbsp. paprika - optional
1 egg, beaten
Mix in 1 tsp salt and some pepper

Mix in some breadcrumbs (instead of breadcrumbs I usually soak about ½ cup of cheerios or similar whole grain cereal in a bowl of water until they soften and then drain the water)
Mix ingredients well with your hands;
Form into balls or patties and dip your hands into a bowl of water and smooth them all over so there's no cracks (keeps the moisture in).
Roll each ball in breadcrumbs
Brown all sides of the Kotlyeti in a frying pan with a dollop of olive oil.
Then place a baking sheet and bake for about 20 minutes at 375 degrees, depending on the size of the ball.