Tag Archives: food

Baby Food

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Becoming a mother for me was an overwhelming experience. I wanted to do it right. No, I wanted to do it perfectly. And when I say “do it” I mean be a parent. I refer to parenting as “it” because it felt like a project to me. It was this task that I had to accomplish. I took breast feeding classes and learned how to swaddle and read books about sleep. But as any mom knows, the “parenting degree” I obtained prior to giving birth did not make becoming a parent any easier. Because to sit in

a class and learn about breast feeding is quite different than actually getting that baby to latch on to your breast. And getting that perfectly tight swaddle is a little harder when the kid is kicking and screaming at the top of his lungs. Then there is so much to worry about. The nursing, the routine, the sleep, colic, vaccines, milestones, the list goes on and on…and all this worry is really exaggerated when you’re working on drastically interrupted sleep.  So when the time came for my first son to start solids, my brain was overloaded. I really didn’t feel that I had the capacity to take on the task of making baby food. And to be honest, I also didn’t know any better. At the time I did not know what I know now about food. I’m not even sure I knew that I could make baby food. It is difficult to explain just how foreign and overwhelming the whole thing was.

But I am a rule follower and I wanted to “do this” right…So I followed the books and started my son on cereal followed by a series of gerber veggies one at a time, etc. I did buy Earths Best organic baby food because one of the only mommy friends I knew at the time had bought those for her son.  Funny (true) story: our cousin was graduating from law school in Washington, D.C. I wanted to pack my son’s baby food for the trip but my husband didn’t let me. He said “Caro, surely there is a grocery store in Washington DC where we can buy his baby food. Its kind of ridiculous to travel with all this stuff. I conceded but not happily. When we got to dc, we were in a college town. Much to our surprise there WERE NO local grocery stores to buy baby food. We didn’t have a car. There was only little specialty places and a cvs type place. I remember walking in  and seeing in one little corner a few jars of baby food. They had sweet potato and banana. My poor son ate nothing but sweet potato and banana for 3 days because it never dawned on me that I could actually give him real food in soft pieces or mashed. I’m not sure what exactly I thought would happen to him if I gave him adult food but being the rule follower, paranoid first-time mother that I was, if it wasn’t made by gerber or earths best, he was not having it.

Wow!!!!! I’ve come a long way.

It wasn’t until Justin (my second son) was born that I was able to wrap my head around this baby food concept. I’ll never forget when my paradigm shifted. I was talking with a girlfriend of mine and I casually mentioned to her that I was curious about people who made their own baby food. She told me she made her own baby food and immediately offered me a book that helped her get started ” Top 100 Baby Purees”

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(This is yet another example why it is so important to have a community of people around you to offer you ideas and support and help you grow)

When she brought me the book, I was expecting nothing short of a science project. To my defense, I don’t cook at home and I am (WAS) intimidated by the kitchen. When I opened the book and realized that to give my son “baby food banana” all I had to do was peel a banana and mash it with a fork, my world literally opened up. Its that easy. Really? On one end I was totally relieved, and on the other end I was totally embarrassed. How did this not dawn on me before? Talk about some serious tunnel vision.

I began with the easy stuff first and then I moved on to the more challenging meals like cooking with raw chicken. Yuck – but doable. Pretty soon I was buying more advanced baby food books and giving my son food was exciting and fun. My possibilities were endless.

Making my own baby food changed my life. Not only was I offering my son a much wider variety of non-processed foods but I believe that this was the first baby step I needed to move into my own healthier life style. Making baby food involves combining single ingredients and whole foods. When I was ready for my own transformation I thought about food very much in the baby food sense. I moved away from the boxed foods and the never ending ingredient lists that had more science words than food words. My salads, smoothies, soups, and snacks were nothing more than baby food with stronger spices. Something that may seem so simple to someone else, lifted a veil off my eyes and allowed me to see a whole new world.

By the time my third son was born, I had learned so much and grown so much that his very first solid food was egg yolk and avocado. Wacky huh!!!!! Turns out cereal is not the best first solid to offer your kids contrary to popular opinion. You’ll have to wait for another blog post to learn why!

 

 

TGIF!!!!

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We all look forward to the weekend so we can relax, sleep in (if we don’t have children!), and do whatever we want to do. But if you’re new to eating healthy, you might be a little afraid of the weekend because with the routine goes the packed lunches, the planned dinners, and the smoothies for breakfast. We used to feel the same way. We didn’t want to eat completely unhealthy but we also didn’t want to feel like we were on a diet and couldn’t eat a pizza if we wanted to. So we do a little bit of both.

One of our favorite weekend things to do used to be going to Chili’s for lunch. Lunch is good for us because our kids are little and we like to put them to bed early. Then we looked up the nutrition guide online for Chili’s and that was the end of that.  The queso dip, which was my favorite, is scary bad for you!!!!!! So we stopped doing that, and that kind of sucked.

But then we found an alternative.  There is a new little place we found that we love:

Green Shack Juice Bar

Categories: Vegetarian, Juice Bars & Smoothies, Gluten-Free

9818 SW 77 Ave
Miami, FL 33156

(305) 279-1955

This place is tiny and doesn’t have a lot of options. But its owned by a young, married couple with their 6 kids and we like them a lot. The food they have is good. My favorite smoothies they have are The Crazy Monkey (I ask for NO agave) and The Hulk.

They also add their daily menu on Facebook so you can see what they have on Saturday and choose whether to go there or not.  Unfortunately they are closed on Sundays.

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Green-Shack-Juice-Bar/224242410971869

For the rest of the weekend, our suggestion is try to pay attention to your choices. If you go out to dinner and eat pasta maybe try to avoid the bread. Or add more veggies to your meal than you normally did. Instead of having a mixed drink with tons of sugar in it…have a glass of wine instead. Or if you go to a cuban restaurant, try to avoid the rice. We have grown to love black beans as a soup instead of on top of rice. Orlando can confess he thought that would never be possible and yet he loves it now!

If you’re having dinner at home with friends, experiment with a cool new meal like the cauliflower pizza. http://www.recipegirl.com/2012/01/16/cauliflower-crust-hawaiian-pizza

And don’t forget to carve out a little time this weekend to plan your meals for next week. Maybe even visit a local farmer’s market and check out some interesting vegetables or fruits that you can try.

Have a great weekend!!!

Salads for Lunch

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Anyone that knows me knows that i’m not a cook. I depend entirely on my husband to make dinner and I’m not good in the kitchen. For years this has limited me to the point that its easier to eat cereal from a box or go out to lunch than make my own food.

But I’ve discovered that we don’t have to know how to cook to succeed in Piling on the Greens. In fact, eating Raw vegetables is the BEST way to consume your veggies because you are not eliminating any vitamins and nutrients with heat.

So here’s what I do with my salads.

I’ve established a few staple ingredients that I put in my salad every time.

  • Organic Girl 50/50 greens mix or the super greens mix or the spinach. (I like them all)
  • Sliced almonds
  • Corn
  • Craisins

DISCLAIMER:  Craisins have added SUGAR!!!! I literally sprinkle 5-9 craisins in my salad because I absolutely love the taste that it gives the salad. They are not necessary and if you can find a healthier alternative that tastes good, please comment on this blog. Occasionally I skip them now, but when I started making my salads they were a must.

Besides these basics every day is a new day for my salad. I include ingredients such as:

  • mini red, orange and yellow peppers
  • sliced carrots
  • tomatoes
  • raw broccoli
  • raw red onions
  • mushrooms (raw or cooked if we have leftovers from dinner)
  • avocados
  • cubed roasted butternut squash (when we make it for dinner I make a separate batch to include in my salads)
  • raw pecans (not glazed!!!!!! like those salad toppers ones sold at the store. Buy plain raw pecans)
  • walnuts
  • sliced apple
  • sliced pear
  • sliced pineapple
  • mandarin oranges
  • raw cabbage
  • red beets
  • sunflower seeds
  • grilled chicken
  • salmon
  • steak
NOTE: I do not put animal protein in my salad everyday. We have greatly reduced the amount of animal protein we consume because our society tends to over-consume animal protein. We never eat it twice a day – either lunch or dinner. And we try to go 2-3 days a week without any animal protein. But if we know we’re going to have a light soup for dinner then I’ll plan a heavier salad that includes chicken or steak or salmon. And the steak or salmon is only used when it is left over from dinner, then I put it in lunch the next day or a couple of days later.

For dressing I use simply:

  • Olive oil and Vinegar
  • Lemon (which is actually quite delicious and eliminates the need for dressing)

You can pick and choose any of these ingredients and make a delicious salad. Obviously I don’t use all these ingredients all at once and sometimes it really depends what I have left in the fridge, especially towards the end of the week or what we made the night before. But you start getting combinations you like more than others. For example, I love combining the butternut squash with grilled chicken and lemon instead of olive oil and vinegar. And my husband’s favorite salads are the ones with avocados, or the ones with pineapple and sunflower seeds.

Between your smoothie for breakfast and your salad for lunch you are consuming more vegetables and fruits than you probably consumed in a week before. This eliminates the need for fiber supplements and solves constipation issues. It helps lower cholesterol, lower your sugar levels, and clean out your liver. In my husband’s case, it actually took away his acid reflux completely!

NOTE:  The avocados and nuts provide the GOOD FATS that we ALL need in our diets…even those trying to lose weight.

  •  Once again, this is a perfect meal solution for those who are in a rush in the morning because it can be prepared the night before.
  • Taking your lunch to work is a lot cheaper than eating out every day, so it offsets the additional cost of buying some items Organic. (And it is way better than ordering a salad from a restaurant which is much more expensive and you really don’t know the quality of what you’re eating)
  • If you have a good work group and a kitchen at work, you can all pitch in and buy ingredients and make group salads for each other instead of ordering pizza or chicken kitchen. You can make some extra chicken the night before and bring it for the group the next day, and your co-worker can bring the roasted butternut squash another day.
  • BJ’s and Costco are adding a lot of organic bulk items that are great for salads such as the greens, carrots, broccoli, tomatoes, apples, pears, etc. I also buy my plain nuts there. Its a good way to buy cheaper and in large quantities for the whole family.

FOR THE KIDS: Kids need to start eating salads from as little as possible. My 1 1/2 year old and 3 year old eat salads all the time. I chop up the greens into tiny tiny pieces and make sure to always put a fruit in there to entice them to eat it. In my experience, what helped my 3 year old the most was to watch me eat it. Kids want to copy their parents, so whenever I ate my salad my son would sit next to me and ask me if he could try it. He was picking off of my plate which didn’t make him feel like he was being force fed. The result was that now I serve him his own plate because i’m sick of him eating all my food!  PARENTS WE LEAD BY EXAMPLE!!!! LET’S GIVE OUR CHILDREN GOOD EATING HABITS!

If I can make these smoothies and salads, anyone can. We can not hide behind the excuse that we are not good in the kitchen to avoid eating healthy!!!!!

The Principles We Live By…

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We have found that instead of dieting, it is much more sustainable to apply principles to the way you eat. If you adopt certain principles, and choose to live by them, it is much easier to apply them in any situation you’re in. Furthermore, sometimes you may choose to deviate from some principles, if for example, you’re eating out at a restaurant. But what we have found is that once you really start applying principles, you may deviate from one, but still follow the others.  These principles will help you make better choices, even if they are simple choices…and those simple choices will affect your life in big ways.

So here are some of the principles we live by.

1. PILE ON THE GREENS … this has been the most impacting principle of all the ones we’ve learned. Add vegetables any time you can. If you’re going to eat an omelette, add mushrooms, green peppers, spinach, onions, red peppers, etc. If you serve yourself a plate, make the largest portion the veggies. Eat a salad every day. You have the opportunity to add veggies to your breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks- sometimes you don’t even taste them but the benefits are astounding.

2. TRY NEW FOODS… most of the time, people are afraid to try certain foods because they are afraid they won’t taste good, or they look weird, etc. The path to becoming healthy is a path of learning new things. The only way you can break away from your old habits is if you adapt your palette to new flavors. They say that kids need to try a new flavor 10 times before they can really start liking or disliking it. Adults are the same way. You may think you don’l like broccoli because you remember the mushy, bland broccoli your mom made when you were little. Well, there are a ton of ways to make broccoli. Try it roasted, or steamed, try it mixed in with other veggies you like … you’d be shocked to discover that maybe you didn’t dislike broccoli, you just disliked the way it was served to you.

3. READ THE INGREDIENTS… People nowadays have become much more label aware. So they get a box of cereal or chips, or anything else and they say “oh this only has 2 grams of sugar, or it has 0 grams of fat” those numbers comfort you and you eat the product guilt-free. Well there is a lot more to that product then what you’ve just read. For example, maybe the only reason it has 2 grams of sugar, is because it is sweetened with aspartame. Or it has no fat, but it has high fructose corn syrup.  What you really want to look at is the part under the Nutrtition Facts …The INGREDIENTS. That fine print will shock you what the product contains…which leads me to my next principle.

4. EAT WHOLE FOODS… In an awesome documentary, Hungry for Change, Kris Carr said, “if it takes a laboratory to create it, it takes a laboratory to digest it.” We try to eat foods with as little ingredients as possible. That leads us to eliminate a lot of boxed foods, and eat lots of fruits and vegetables. An apple has 1 ingredient “apple.” We look for foods that don’t include contents we can’t pronounce. Every whole food…bananas, pears, spinach, asparagus, melon,berries, nuts, cheese, fish, chicken, sweet potato, olive oil…etc, has a little bit of everything. These whole foods have sugar, fiber, protein, fat, etc, but because they are “Whole” they are digested in your system the way they are supposed to. Of course depending on your dietary goals and/or needs,  you may choose to consume higher quantities of one whole food as opposed to another. But they are different from processed, boxed foods or “diet” foods that  are not digested properly in your system. They go straight to your liver and prevent your body from functioning properly. Eventually, these diet foods can actually make you gain weight instead of lose weight.