Obama Salad & Berry Cakes

First Lady Michelle Obama takes an end-of-term garden work-day to offer some thoughts on healthy food and healthy bodies…

The volunteer students from D.C.’s Bancroft Elementary School who have put some backbone into the First Family’s organic kitchen garden this season enjoyed a fresh lunch salad topped with sweet, fat peas that they’d helped to grow and harvest. For dessert, they got cupcakes topped with berries, also grown in the garden on the South Lawn.

Thus far the well-tended organic garden, which sports various cultivars chosen by the White House Chef to compliment the cuisine served both to the Obama family and to their guests – with a majority of the bounty going to local D.C. food kitchens – has thus far produced 80 pounds of fresh food. And it’s still June, not even tomato time yet! As the First Lady says in this clip, getting involved in growing, harvesting and preparing fresh, organic food can help with a number of health-related issues that plague this country’s citizens…

Obesity, diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure are all diet-related health issues that cost this country more than $120 billion each year. That’s a lot of money. While the dollar figure is shocking in and of itself, the effect on our children’s health is even more profound. Nearly a third of the children in this country are either overweight or obese, and a third will suffer from diabetes at some point in their lifetime. In Hispanic and African American communities, those numbers climb even higher so that nearly half of the children in those communities will suffer the same fate. Those numbers are unacceptable.

A. Siegel of Get Energy Smart blog does a little math and comes up with an intriguing scenario related to gardens just about a quarter the size of Michelle’s. If just five million Americans were inspired to create a Victory Garden in their yard (or in containers on their deck or patio, in window boxes, inside by a sunny window, etc.) that produced 20 pounds of food each year, it would amount to 100 million pounds (50,000 tons) of fresh, healthy vegetables and fruits grown right at home or in the neighborhood. That’s 50,000 tons of good food that would not have to be grown with chemical intensive agriculture, harvested by third world peasant/slaves, shipped to your local market using fossil fuels, and costing a hefty chunk of the shrinking household budget.

The added incentive is of course getting people outdoors instead of parked in front of the television when they get home from work, bending, digging, hoeing, tending and simply enjoying their garden. Even that little bit of exercise and simple enjoyment can help reduce a tough day’s accumulation of stress, and reducing stress has its health savings dividends as well.

Kudos once again to our beautiful First Lady, her helpers in the kitchen, the Obama girls and the students of Bencroft Elementary for a tasty job well done. Things like this are a fun and healthy chunk of the Change We Need!

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Favorite Snacks: Stuffed Grape Leaves

Since our daughter and grandson got back from their sojourn to Florida and Costa Rica, I’ve again had cause to prepare the kind of labor-intensive foods I didn’t bother with at all when it was just hubby and I here by ourselves. One of our favorite cold munchies are two-bite sized stuffed grape leaves, so I thought (since I made a big batch today) that I’d go ahead and give the details on this delicious delicacy.

The key ingredient, of course, are the grape leaves. These should be gathered in the late spring (May-June), when the vines are barely blooming. The newest leaves and the leaves near the bloom clusters are the best, they should be as large as your spread hand at the base. Wild fox grape leaves work too, though they are only about half the size of good vineyard leaves. They also have a tarter flavor of their own, so these can even be the preferred leaves if you’ve got some growing in your immediate area.

When the leaves are gathered, you can freeze or brine them. I usually freeze enough to add to every jar of dill pickles that I produce during the cucumber harvest (July-August), as they help lend crispness to the pickles. Those leaves that you want to preserve for stuffed leaves are best put into brine. For this, use kosher or pickling salt, 2/3 of a cup of salt to two cups of water. I use the “cigar” method, which is pretty easy.

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Summer Challenge: Feeding the Grandkids

…what they mostly won’t eat at home

I don’t know about all grandmas, but I know from my own experience with other people’s kids that they often come to spend a week or two expecting to be fed precisely what they usually get fed at home, and can be positively horrified to find that Grandma doesn’t stock chocolate cereals or big bags of candy or white bread and baloney for sandwiches, and there’s not a McDonald’s or Wendy’s in sight.

Now, it’s not that I don’t make some concessions to the basic kid-diet. My non-vegetarian grands and nieces/nephews and such do have the option of a can of beef-a-roni or a frozen pepperoni pizza here and there. I’ve even been known to purchase some turkey-dogs to roast over the campfire. But the grilled burgers are black bean, there will be no “Happy Meals,” and no bacon bits for the baked potatoes.

I also stock lots of fruit, whatever’s available when they’re here. I grow strawberries in the garden, those usually get eaten as soon as they’re picked, and they only last so long into the season. I have some cherry tomatoes that went wild one year, show up in unexpected places all over the garden. Those get eaten as soon as they’re picked as well, one granddaughter swears they’re sweeter than cherries! None of the kids seem to like cooked greens very much, but they’ll eat as many peas raw from the pod as I can possibly pick on any given day.

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Best Reasons to Go Vegetarian

Under the general heading of “nutrition” we’ve examined how to get the kids to eat vegetables, taken a look at how big food producers subvert our best nutrition goals through targeted advertising, how those same corporations once subverted the AMA to claim there’s no relation between diet and health, and how the best “animal protein” for infants comes comes directly from Mom.

The great blog One Big Health Nut has a post entitled Ten Great Reasons to Become a Vegetarian that just might help to push some of those kids who are toying with the idea all the way over the line. If Mom or Grandma were to help reinforce these reasons at home, that is. Why, a Grandma just might end up with a grandchild (like a couple of mine!) who eats bell peppers and whole tomatoes like apples, shuns any bread with no color, and subverts their school, scout and summer camp buddies to veggieburgers and veggie dogs.

Of Health Nut’s reasons, the ones that have worked best with my kids and grandchildren were #4: Save the life of many animals, #8: Help the environment, and #10: Vegetarian diets are healthier. Mad Cow and e.coli infection (Health Nut’s #1) are great reasons to avoid meat, but kids generally don’t tend to worry about such things much. They worry about obesity – they all know fat kids in their schools, and don’t want to be them – the environment, and (most of all for primary schoolers) animal welfare.

Go on over to One Big Health Nut and get the whole list! It’s worth printing out and putting up on the fridge with magnets. I did!

Ten Great Reasons to Become a Vegetarian

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Getting the Kids to Love Veggies

Good Nutrition is a Mom-Job!

It’s true that one of the many ‘important’ jobs Moms do is to direct the proper nutrition of their families. Some Moms do better at this than others, as the growing obesity epidemic demonstrates. There are a surprising number of working Moms out there who don’t cook, and families that somehow manage to survive on pizza and hamburgers.

I was a singularly lousy cook back when I got married. Knew how to make exactly one thing – Campbell’s Bean with Bacon soup (add a pat of butter and a dollop of ketchup to the pot, eat it when it’s hot). I’ll never forget our first breakfast – I did so want to impress him! But I fried that bacon and fried that bacon until it shrunk to nothing and turned char-black, but it just never would get stiff! Brave and loving soul that he is, my hubby ate it anyway and even pretended to like it.

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