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The Ten Most Recent Comments By scraig3673

From Required Eating

Cooking With Kids: School Lunches

Let me start by stating that I agree 100% that this is a problem. Schools should offer healthy and well-rounded meals to all students.

That being said, I resolve the issue by making my daughters' lunches. They get to choose one day a week to eat at school. Otherwise, we send a lunch. I realize that not everyone has the economic or home-life to make this decision, but I would be willing to bet that a lot of families could.

If you read Pollian, you realize how deep the problem is. Why is corn, soybeans and meat subsidized but organic apples not? To really solve the problem we need to address our farming priorities.

scraig3673 at 4:29PM on 09/24/07

From Required Eating

What's Your Favorite Local Ice Cream?

Dinky and Coco's - stupid name, excellent Italian gelato.

14383 Metcalf Ave
Overland Park, KS 66210

scraig3673 at 2:01PM on 06/13/07

From Talk

How do you get toddlers to eat Vegetables?

Sorry for the double post, but after living with a French family for 6 months, I know that their children are not always paragons of great eating. I know that they often struggle with the same issues of getting kids to eat their vegetables.

The thing that they do that helps is that they typically get fresh vegetables (rather than frozen) and they sit at a table as a family.

scraig3673 at 2:11PM on 05/09/07

From Talk

How do you get toddlers to eat Vegetables?

My kids (6 and 3) are good vegetable eaters. Here is what works for me:

1) They go grocery shopping and choose the vegetables that they want to eat.
2) We don't try to get them to eat vegetables that they just don't like. Neither likes lettuce, so we don't serve it.
3) Let them help with the cooking. They like to help cut the food and put it in the pan.
4) My kids like their vegetables cooked fairly well, softer than I like; so I overcook them a little and always add a little salt and pepper.
5) Make it clear that it is part of a healthy dinner. If they don't eat them, they don't get any dessert or other snacks after the meal. That tends to resolve most issues.

scraig3673 at 2:08PM on 05/09/07

Responses to Comments by scraig3673

From Required Eating

Cooking With Kids: School Lunches

Jamie Oliver is great. I will look for that show by any means necessary.

Wendy, I will definitely send leftover pasty in Iris's lunch after our Thanksgiving pasty blowout.

mamster at 9:59AM on 09/25/07

From Required Eating

Cooking With Kids: School Lunches

Leftovers are what I survived on for years as a student (grade school through college). My Mom always had a box in the fridge for snacks. I could dig into it any time I wanted. It had serial bars, carrot sticks, hard boiled eggs, celery sticks ... anything easy to grab and eat all properly portioned out. Every day at least one of these would go into my bagged lunch. In place of an ice pack, I used a reusable bottle of frozen fruit juice.

Ketherian at 9:51AM on 09/25/07

From Required Eating

Cooking With Kids: School Lunches

We have a bunch of things that go into the kid's lunchbox. He particularly is fond of nuts (peanuts or cashews), a variety of cheeses, apples, dried apricots or raisins. Also whole wheat pasta is a big hit as is home made pizza. Meat-wise, cured meats such as ham and salami are unsurprisingly a big hit, but leftover pork chops, chicken and beef are also popular. He's tried the school provided lunch a few times and has uniformly hated it, which I am very grateful for.

DM at 9:14AM on 09/25/07

From Required Eating

Cooking With Kids: School Lunches

Any school lunch diiscussion should mention Jamie Oliver's school dinner campaign in the U.K. While there's a web site : http://www.jamieoliver.com/schooldinners but it's the the series of shows that are incredible. I think the only way to see it in the U.S. is to download them via bittorrent, but it's an eyeopener. I watched it about the time Sicko had hit the theaters. Instead of seeing someone whine about how things were bad and "someone" should fix them we saw multi-millionaire Jamie Oliver spending months trying to figure out how to serve kids healty lunches for about $0.75 a day that was also something they would want to eat and enjoy. He worked with the teachers, administrators, parents and the kids to try to make it work.

IdeaRat at 3:38AM on 09/25/07

From Required Eating

Cooking With Kids: School Lunches

I can't think of many things that would really be in danger from sitting out for three hours; it's more that some aren't as good anymore (say, pudding).

Since I stopped eating bread in first grade, my mom probably has a bunch of creative lunch ideas. A favorite that I remember is thin slices of turkey wrapped around celery sticks.

The day I brought chips and salsa for snack, I had a crowd of kids around me. This incident was finally eclipsed several years later when Mike and I took leftover pasties to school, wrapped in newspaper and still hot; you could smell them all the way down the hall, apparently.

Kids like things cut up in a funny way, or at least cut up (like, apple slices instead of whole apples). They also like to eat out of a bunch of different dishes, dim sum style.

Nicole successfully teamed up with the school nurse last year during standardized testing to get the kids' special test snacks changed from Pop-Tarts to apple slices. They already had a bunch of "bad" snacks, so one day they offered kids a choice of cookies or apple slices, and more kids chose the apples.

Wendy79 at 12:06AM on 09/25/07

From Required Eating

Cooking With Kids: School Lunches

Ice pack it is! At Iris's school they're happy to reheat in the microwave, but they don't have fridge space, I don't think.

mamster at 11:41PM on 09/24/07

From Required Eating

Cooking With Kids: School Lunches

I avoid worrying by putting a small ice pack in Izzy's lunchbox..I used to do it when I was in school and it seemed to work. Some preschools will refrigerate the lunches if you make a request. I would be delighted to find bulgogi in my lunchbox too!

izzy's mama at 11:33PM on 09/24/07

From Required Eating

Cooking With Kids: School Lunches

Izzy, I was just writing something about the value of turning tonight's dinner into tomorrow's lunch. It's something I need to put into practice more often. Tomorrow night we're having bulgogi for dinner; I'm sure Iris would be delighted to have that at school.

So how much should I worry about the lunch sitting unrefrigerated between 9am (when we leave for school) and 12:30pm (lunchtime)?

mamster at 11:20PM on 09/24/07

From Required Eating

Cooking With Kids: School Lunches

The best way to pack lunches is to use tried and true foods that your child has eaten at home. I wrote a post about using leftovers...

http://izzyeats.blogspot.com/2007/09/last-nights-dinner-lunchbox-key.html

Make extra dinner and your child is sure to be happy at lunch. Another tip is to prepare the lunch together with your child if possible. Some lunch favorites: leftover pasta, goat cheese/fig spread sandwich, tomato/mayo/greens sandwich, roast turkey sandwich, hard-boiled eggs... also add fruits, baby carrots, yogurt etc..

izzy's mama at 11:07PM on 09/24/07

From Required Eating

Cooking With Kids: School Lunches

My last child (now a college sophomore) simply would not eat the school food. He took his lunch which we put together the night before, and put it in the fridge, from 5th grade thru high school. He took cheese nearly every day - brie, cheddar, goat cheese, some baguette, a leftover artichoke and homemade mayonnaise, cut up fruit, sometimes meat (fried chicken breasts were a favorite), a hard-boiled egg with a tiny vial of salt and pepper, salad and homemade ranch or vinaigrette, a few cold shrimp. When he had a helpful teacher who had a microwave, he started to bring reheatable leftovers. What amazed me was how popular his lunches were with other kids! And what amazed me was that they and their parents kept buying lunches at the school cafeterias, even though most of it got thrown away every day!

He spent the summer studying in France this year, and he cooked his dinner every night on his little 2-burner stove. He saw "cheese crumbs" in a supermarket, and tried fried brie, he cooked artichokes as big as his head, he ate a baguette for breakfast with coffee and one with dinner, made pesto from scratch. All of his friends, when they weren't eating at his place went out and paid for meals (with the dollar at @1.40 to the Euro!!!). He found a not just decent, buy pretty damn good red wine for 2 Euro for 1.5 liters (waaay cheaper than coke!), and found a tagine at the flea market and cooked and ate tagine for the first time. He had fresh cherries and white-fleshed peaches for dessert, and then went and did his homework in a cafe or brasserie with wi-fi, nursing a glass of wine or a bier presse.

It starts at the top AND at the bottom. We need to slow down our food preparation and our dining, we need to teach our kids what good food tastes like, and we need laws that help us ensure safe, nutritious food in this country.

dksbook at 5:17PM on 09/24/07