Food

Ever since tea was first “invented” by the Chinese emperor Shen Nung in 2737 B.C., the beverage that would go on to become the world’s most popular has been at the center of a hell of a lot of political controversy. Think of the 1773 “incident,” aka the Boston Tea Party, and last month’s situation at the National Tea Party Convention with Sarah Palin and a certain set of crib notes on her left hand. But with the bad comes the good …

Mama Tea, an herbal, caffeine-free tea designed for pregnant and nursing women, has hit the UK. MT has many different varieties: Morning Mama for morning sickness, Cool Mama for heartburn, Ready Mama for birth preparation (not recommended for pregnant women before 38 weeks) and New Mama for breastfeeding moms. Mama Tea founder Anna Louise Simpson, a mum of two young children and former corporate lawyer, is based in Scotland and calls her product “an evolution in herbal tea.” She worked with a master tea blender (to get the stuff to taste good and not bitter) plus a medical herbalist who wrote a book on using herbs during pregnancy. Simpson is hoping to bring her Mama Tea stateside by next fall.

Looking forward to a cuppa.

To learn more about Mama Tea, visit mamatea.com.

It’s 6 p.m. and the kids are screaming they’re hungry before you even throw your keys on the counter. What, oh what are you going to be able to whip up in a just a few minutes that they’ll eat and won’t fill you with a paroxysm of guilt? Note: a bowl of cold cereal, now matter how vitamin-fortified, need not apply.

The new Greenie Tots line of frozen meals are custom-made for the occasion. The meals come in three flavors: Stage One, purees for the bitty ones, Stage Two, self-feeding faves for toddlers, and Stage Three, heartier and more challenging meals for older kids (up to age 12). The meals are meatless, minimally processed, and contain no hormones, pesticides, or high-fructose corn syrup. And they’re good: we tried the apple and pear purees for infants. Both have strong, clear, natural fruit flavors. We also tried a Stage Two meal, a “chicken” (really Quorn), cheese, and spinach quesadilla with carrot ‘n’ pea-centric mixed vegetables on the side. The Quorn tasted like chicken, the spinach flavor was masked by the high-quality cheese, and the vegetables are fresh and zingy.

As of yet, Greenie Tots aren’t available in stores. Mail-order packages of six meals are available for $24-30 a pop, plus shipping, which is steep at about $20 and up. They have to stay frozen, you see. Visit greenietots.com for more information.

Monday morning pop quiz -

Pigs in a blanket. Caviar and blinis. Chicken satay. Nachos. Bruschetta. Spring rolls. Quesadillas. What do these all have in common? They represent some of our most beloved finger foods.

Now Junior can sample the equivalent of these tasty morsels (sans the typical accompanying cocktail) with nutritious dishes that are appealing to teething tots, pose minimal choking hazards and put Cheerios to shame. Annabel Karmel, the cookbook goddess for parents of babies and toddlers, is out with Top 100 Finger Foods: 100 Recipes for a Healthy, Happy Child. Karmel’s newest book picks up where her Top 100 Baby Purees leaves off; the finger foods are for kids who are about nine-months-old and ready to start branching out from baby food. Top 100 Finger Foods includes recipes for Potato Pizzette Bites, Vegetable Tempura, Apricot-Dijon Drumsticks, Chicken/Turkey Sliders and Sweet Corn Pancakes. Best-selling author Karmel divides the book into categories for breakfast, veggies, fish, chicken, meat, snacks and, of course, dessert. So it’s easier for you to guide your little one on a road to healthy eating.

The first lady would be proud.

Available at amazon.com.

If you haven’t taken a good look at your kids’ school lunch menu lately, Fed Up: School Lunch Project may literally shock you. This blog chronicles the lunches of one Illinois schoolteacher, who orders, photographs, and then eats the school cafeteria lunch daily, and reports on the results. They’re not pretty. Cheap, empty carbs galore, a desperate lack of vegetables, mystery meat, a tidal wave of sugar: Is this what we’re feeding kids just before they’re expected to absorb algebra?

The National School Lunch Program is administered by the USDA under the Child Nutrition Act. Every four years, the act is re-examined, and reauthorized. Even now, Congress is poring over a budget that allocates $10 billion towards improving the nutrition content of school lunches. But will that be enough? After all, we have built a program that’s a dumping ground for commodities purchased by the USDA, including meat rejected by fast food operations. It’s no surprise that horrified parents are banding together to fight the power, through groups like Better School Food and Edible Schoolyard.

One thing’s for sure: today’s group of informed, annoyed parents would never let the President get away with classifying ketchup as a vegetable.

Like many of us, Charlotte Hume despaired of her son, Freddie, eating his vegetables. But unlike many of us, she convinced Freddie to undertake what she called the Great Big Vegetable Challenge, trying each vegetable from asparagus to zucchini in alphabetical order. Freddie had to try at least two recipes with each, and Charlotte endeavored to find recipes that she thought would appeal to her seven-year-old’s kidlike appetites. The result: a kid who tried dozens of new vegetables, and an incredible blog full of kid-friendly veg recipes and Charlotte’s priceless commentary.

If only the blog archive was organized by vegetable instead of by date! Use Google to do your searching for you; searching for “zucchini great big vegetable challenge” brings up “zucchini turkey burgers;” a similar search for butternut squash brings up a canneloni recipe. It’s a little clunky but for vegetables that your kid might actually eat, it’s worth the extra Googling.

So typical. The cold/flu makes its way through your family. You pull a few all-nighters nursing various members of your brood, posting a play-by-play on Facebook and taking in a healthy dose of late-night TV (and the drama of rotating hosts). Then you get sick and there’s no one to mother you. So you can empathize when your BFF (cousin, old college roomie, etc.) is in a similar situation in need of some pampering.

Enter Spoonful of Comfort. It’s an online chicken soup biz. The point? To send your loved ones the gift of homemade chicken soup, the ultimate comfort food. Marti Bowes Wymer came up with the idea following the unexpected death of her mother in 2007. Wymer had just returned home to Florida after visiting her mom in Canada. A day later, her mother called to say she’d been diagnosed with lung cancer. With two young children in school, Wymer couldn’t just head North again. She wanted to do something, but, somehow, sending flowers or fruit seemed inappropriate. The lightbulb went off, the soup was on. Wymer’s mother passed away six weeks later, so she never had the opportunity to sample Wymer’s soup. In her mother’s honor, Wymer wants to help people reach out - to a grandchild with an ear infection, a kid in college who’s caught the flu- with some culinary TLC. The homemade soup is packaged with a gel pack and stored in a special insulated liner so it stays cold for 2-3 days.

And the taste? Never again will the canned stuff suffice. Bound to be a palate pleaser.

$32 per jar at spoonfulofcomfort.com.

Mid-January is just about the time when reality intervenes and we start to lose momentum with our New Year’s resolutions. Your enthusiasm to adopt a healthier lifestyle was at an all-time high on January 1st. But you (and your family) could use some assistance the other 364 days of the year to make good on your promises. Time for reinforcements. The following may help:

Rhythm for Life: The Prenatal Belly Dance Workout DVD is a great way to mix it up when it comes to your prenatal exercise regimen. Choreographer and mother of two Suzanne Caesar takes you through gentle stretching exercises to ease pregnancy discomfort zones and build core strength. She also leads you in “firm & sexy” movements to condition thighs and hips, meditation and the highlight - Latin belly dance fusion, a low-impact dance routine. If nothing else, the sensual dancing will remind you that, even pregnant, you’ve still got it! Available at marchofdimes.com.

Bean Appetit elevates food to a true art form … literally. It shows you and Junior how to make a keyboard sculpture sandwich out of bread, honey, chicken, apples and yogurt; a palm tree using chicken, spinach and pineapple; and a dragonfly from whole wheat pita, turkey and fruit. The point of the book is to have fun and celebrate food and nutrition - a departure from recent kids’ cookbooks which advocate “hiding” and blending in the healthy stuff. Hence, the emphasis on presentation (food sculptures). Bean Appetit also includes games (”Bean-go”), activities plus amusing convo topics to encourage family dinner discussion. A great way to develop healthy eating habits. Playing with food encouraged. Coming late February. Available for pre-order at amazon.com.

Warning: This book is for a highly organized and disciplined cook. The premise - cook once a month, create enough dinners for 30 days and save money. Choose from recipes for lime-grilled mahi-mahi, gnocchi with turkey ragu, Texas-style lasagna and much more. Mary Beth Lagerborg and Mimi Wilson’s book is divided into various cycles, with each cycle listing a menu chart, pantry list, shopping list and recipes. There are even gluten-free, summer and gourmet cycles. Available at amazon.com.

For the lowdown on many of the most popular diet programs, visit UB sister site moneywatch.com. Diet Plan Review: Best Ways to Lose 20 Pounds gives you the skinny on each diet and even breaks down what it will cost you per pound lost.

For many families with toddlers, a fine dining experience, sans three-quarters of the meal ending up on the floor, is out of the question. But a finer dining experience? Definitely doable.

Tinytongs can help your DC clean up her act. The child-size tongs are easy to manipulate (via a pincer grasp) and perfect for “bridging the gap” between the time a kid eats with her fingers and the time she can actually master traditional utensils. Tinytongs have proper tensioning for a child (12 months and up), gripping ridges and a non-slip grip. Made from polypropylene and TPE over-molding, they have all the right “frees;” they’re lead-, BPA-, Phthalate- and PVC-free. Another plus - you can throw these babies into the dishwasher. No special cleaning rituals required. Lastly, tinytongs are available at recession-friendly prices: $7.99 for a single, $24.99 for a four-pack.

Bon appetit.

Available at tinytongs.com.

Big, tempting containers of blueberries for sale at Wal-Mart…what could be the problem? Maybe that those blueberries might have been picked by little kids.

The problems were found by the state of Michigan, working for farms that supplied the Adkins Blue Ribbon Blueberry Co. with berries. Kids as young as age five were found working on the farms. Here’s a priceless quote on the child-labor scandal from the Independent: “The children were being put to work because their small hands are more efficient at picking the tiny fruit.” NPR says that farm checks also found hazardous sewage leaks and infestations of bugs and rodents in the migrant settlements.

Footage of the wee blueberry pickers was featured prominently on Nightline last week. Kinda makes those berries not taste so sweet.

In his article “Eat Your Peas. Or Don’t. Whatever,” New York Times food critic and author Frank Bruni describes the extremes to which young children are straying - obesity on one end of the spectrum, an obsession with being thin on the other. These are subjects Bruni knows something about. In his recent memoir, Born Round: The Secret History of a Full-Time Eater, Bruni, a man who makes his living eating, chronicles his bouts with bulimia and struggles with fluctuating weight. In the Eat Your Peas article, he discusses the challenge for parents in this age of extremes. It’s “how to coach children away from unhealthy eating without sowing panic; how to make them conscious of their intake without making them too self-conscious about its consequences.”

We asked Lynn Grefe, CEO of the National Eating Disorders Association, how to accomplish this. She offers the following advice:

Dieting
A parent who is constantly dieting isn’t setting a good example. “The right example is to eat in a healthy fashion and not to set up food as the culprit … There’s really no such thing as bad foods. It’s about the moderation of foods.” (The exception: You truly do have a health issue and need to be on a diet.)

Liquid detox/Cleansing diets
A quick word on these fad diets of the moment which promise a “cleanse” after a certain period of drinking various concoctions. “It’s not healthy. It’s not the way that we’re supposed to be living.”

Talking the talk
A parent who is always asking if she’s fat or whether certain clothes make her butt look big is sending the wrong message. The focus is shifted to weight rather than “ who we are as people.” Teach kids that they should be healthy for the size that fits their body.

Walking the walk
“If a parent is on a treadmill for three hours watching TV, then what kind of signal is she sending to her child? That’s not moderation.” (The exception: You’re training for the marathon.) “People who are doing extremes in their own life, then, of course, those extremes are going to run down on the kids.” Obviously, exercise in and of itself is fine and part of a healthy lifestyle.

Enjoying food
Put the joy back into mealtime. “It’s terrible that people are setting food up as the enemy. Food is supposed to be a joyous time. We sit down to meals. We break bread. It’s supposed to be a nice time where we meet and compare notes and ask, ‘How was your day?’”

Adding perspective
If your DD comes home and tells you her BFF won’t eat any sugar, explain that that’s not a healthy approach. Try not to criticize the friend but rather the behavior. You might also want to suggest that the food restriction in question may be related to a health issue.

Being aware
“No child should be losing her self-esteem over this. And that’s what’s happening. Even if they don’t develop an eating disorder, girls think they’re never perfect. They never feel quite right. We should be measuring the size of our hearts and not the size of our hips.”

For more info., visit nationaleatingdisorders.org.