susiej/reviews

I have this theory, that if the kids eat more protein, they will whine less, sleep better, and be more relaxed. My kids don’t eat enough protein. Still, I’m teaching them what protein is, how much they should eat, and the wide variety of ways there is to find protein. For example, I just learned from the Yoplait Kids website, that if your child weighs 44 pounds, he needs 19g of protein per day. If you’re wondering, Yoplait Kids provides 5 grams of protein per cup of yogurt and 2 grams of protein per bottle of yogurt drink.

Yogurt is the one stand-by high-protein food I always have in the fridge so the kids can give themselves a quick burst of protein whenever they need one. Yogurt is such a great, easy convenient snack food for kids.

I just learned from the Parent Bloggers Network that Yoplait Kids yogurt contains 25% less sugar than other kids’ yogurts, and it contains that vital omega-3 DHA brain-power combination nutrients. DHA can be found in fish and eggs; but whenever I serve that, the kids run away. Now, serving those high-quality nutrients to my kids is as easy as dipping a spoon. Plus, yogurt contains live and active cultures to help kids maintain a healthy digestive tracks.

My kids are very picky about lumps in their yogurt; nor do they want their yogurt to be too watery. Yoplait Kids is creamy and thick enough to stick to the spoon without a dripping mess… and no mess.

PBN asked me to try out Yoplait Kids and they also sent me a Yoplait Kids cooler, a My First Brain Quest game, and a coupon for a free six-pack of Yoplait Kids. If you’d like to win this, just leave a comment here, and I’ll draw the winner on September 8, 2008.

Plus right now, you can go to the Yoplait Kids website and print off your very own $1.50 off coupon — go click, and see.

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I’m always willing to direct my friends to my favorite meal planning website, soscuisine, but only when I’m asked, “What are you doing for dinner?” I love soscuisine for three good reasons:

1. The menus are constantly updated to take advantage of produce that’s currently in-season. This does save money, but the real plus is that this guarantees that I won’t miss out on anything each season. Like, I’d hate to miss fresh peaches.
2. It uses fresh foods; no broccoli casseroles.
3. It’s French… actually it’s Canadian… but French. (Sometimes I like to have a little fun with myself and see how far I can go deciphering the whole site in French. Then I realize I have four boys to take care of, and I don’t have time for this, so I click that “ENGLISH” button in the very, very top right hand corner, and move on.

Tonight, I followed the farmer’s market menu and had pork chops marinated in brown sugar, garlic, and soy sauce, with plain basmati rice, FRESH apples and a tomato basil salad… which I amazingly grew myself.

But sometimes, I improvise… A lot. First, I will explain that I pay very close attention to the grocery list. I buy everything listed that I don’t have. Then, when figuring out what to make for dinner, I scan the menus looking for anything that strikes my fancy. For example, I’m looking at the roasted red pepper soup. I have the red peppers in my fridge, but there is no way my kids will eat that soup, no matter how good it is.

So my mind starts whirring, and soon, I have a meal in my head, based on the red pepper, and a few of the other items on the soscuisine grocery list for the week. Here goes:

1. Cook pasta
2. Cut red peppers and red onions into small pieces
3. Sauté red peppers and onions in olive oil and salt in skillet on stove until perfectly browned – just a tad charred.
4. Add black pepper.
5. Drain pasta; reserve one half of pasta and cover with fresh parmesan cheese.
6. Pour the other half of pasta into the skillet with the red peppers and onions.
7. Add feta and parmesans cheese to skillet… maybe some fresh herbs too.
8. Cut up any fresh fruit available in fridge and put in bowl.
9. Serve plain pasta to the kids; but demand they taste the red pepper onion mixture.

So, instead of red pepper soup that my kids would have hated… we had red pepper pasta. I should probably be a little more cautions about sending people to a meal planning website that I don’t technically use as a meal-planning website. I use soscuisine simply for inspiration. And sometimes, that little spark is all we need in the afternoon.

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Hats off to Nabisco for paying attention to what kids really want: the box. A toy comes with the current box of Ritz Crackers; there are no crackers to dig through to find the toy; there are no hazardous leads or plastics, and no choking dangers. Just a simple box that can be transformed into a simple make-it-yourself toy; the kind kids love best.

And kids, be sure to check out the games on the Ritz web site.

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No matter how rough of a day I’ve had, the chances are pretty slim that any of my male loved ones will look me in the eye and say, “You look so tired. Let me fix you something to eat.” However, in the cyber world we’re living in today, the comfort of having help in the kitchen could change with just a click. Relish! is a meal planning and shopping list service run by three wonderful women, (click here to see their comforting, smiling faces) who not only plan your meals for you, but they also create a printable grocery list, along with a step by step menu plan to carry you through the week.

You can customize your Relish weekly menu by kid-friendly, vegetarian, super quick and simple gourmet. All dinners, they promise, require no more than 30 minutes prep time. There is also a section to help you create monthly freezer meals and slow cooker meals. What I like the most, however, is that the meals are in-season. When I clicked on my menu last week, I was pleased to see “The Beet Goes On” with a stunning picture of my favorite vegetable, and a recipe that included walnuts and blue cheese.

Relish! takes full advantage of family fun, and works hard to please picky eaters, with recipes like sweet and spicy drumsticks, cheddar mashed potatoes, and corn tortilla crisps. However, the Kid Friendly (KF) choices are limited each week. I was disappointed when I logged in to create my 5-meal menu plan, and only saw 5 out of the 15 menus that were offered were KF — and I know my kids would only like two of those. So, I switched over to the slow cooker section, and found 11 intriguing recipes (French onion soup with beef, and pulled pork sandwiches) in a PDF format. There was no way to select one of them to be added to my weekly menu plan, and so the ingredients would not be included in the printable shopping list. However, some crockpot meals were located in the 15 meal choices for the week.

Now the freezer meals were different. I clicked there, and found 10 meals that are updated each month. The recipes include broiled soy and ginger salmon, pistachio-stuffed chicken breasts, some soups. I could select 5 out of the ten recipes, and menu plan and shopping list were included. However, again, this was still not part of the weekly menu plan.

The dinner and a movie section includes the title of a kid-friendly movie, with the perfect food. “How about Ratatouille with Alfredo Linguine with Remy’s Eclairs? These meals too require a seperate meal plan and grocery list.

As I’m working my way through my free Relish! trial subscription, thanks to PBN, I am surprised that a subscription-based service imposes limits on how many menus you can select. Why only five per week? As nice and beautiful as the site is, I doubt that I will pay the monthly $7 fee to renew the subscription when mine expires. There are other weekly menu sites on the web that are free, with fresh ingredients that are in season, that generate printable menus, meal plans and grocery lists each week. I use one quite frequently. There are some weeks when I don’t have the time, or the need, to generate a cyber menu. — even when it’s free. I know how crazy meal planning can get. So, knowing that some weeks I won’t use the site, the $7 monthly fee would hang over my head on the weeks I didn’t have time to use the service. I know, seven dollars isn’t much, but it’s just a hassle, and that’s one less thing I need when it comes to meal planning.

Relish! does offer a free trial, and you should try it out for yourself and see what you think. The site incorporates fresh ingredients, and innovate presentation that will definitely liven up any drab same old, same old meals. I know the biggest problem all of us have is this one, “I just don’t know what to fix.” Relish can solve that problem for you with just one click.

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but that’s not the only reason to drink this ancient beverage. (See below for your chance to win your own copy of this book.) Full of scientifically-based research, Mark Ukra’s new book, The Ultimate Tea Diet: How Tea Can Boost Your Metabolism, Shrink Your Appetite, and Kick-Start Remarkable Weight Loss explains how tea fights cancer, helps you stay mentally focused, and reduces stress, among other things. Just the justification I needed to pour myself an extra cup of the beverage I’ve always loved the most, tea. Thees benefits apply to ANY tea — green, black and white teas — as long as the tea comes from one plant - the Camellia Sinenis plant. Herbal teas that do not contain leaves from this plant are called tisanes. If you have an herbal tisane you love, simply add a green/black or white tea bag to the cup to reap all the benefits of tea.

The Tea Diet gives you important how-tos for brewing tea (never boil the water) and how to use flavored teas as a substitute for many of your food cravings. There’s even a tea flavor called Dr. Tea’s Candy Bar Black Tea. He also explains how to re-use tea leaves, several times, which washes away much of the caffeine (water soluble), while maintaining all of tea’s health benefits.

You don’t like tea? Then try one of the many yummy recipes in the The Ultimate Tea Diet, like Frostea. Mr. Ukra shows you how you can use tea leaves, much like herbs, to create marinades and rubs for meat, and other foods, such as tea oatmeal, creating a dramatic boost in the food’s nutritional component.

Here are 13 more facts I’ve learned about tea’s benefits from The Ultimate Tea Diet.

1. Straight caffeine will arouse the nervous system and speed up your heart rate and an increase in calorie burn. When you drink tea, there is a protective ingredient in the tea (L-thenine) that prevent an increase in your heart rate, while still burning calories. (American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 1999.) This fat burning process is called thermogenesis, the biochemical process by which fat in the body is burned to produce energy.
2. Tea’s L-thenine naturally relieves stress, anxiety and tension, and activates neurotransmitters in your brain to promote a state of calm relaxation. (Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at the University College of London, January 2007.)
3. Tea contains EGCG (Epigallocatechin-3-gallate). a chemical compound that cleanses the blood of additional triglycerides before they’re deposited into the fat tissues, which gets more oxygen into your blood, and more energy.
4. EGCG reduces Insulin production, (Journal of Biological Chemistry, April 2006), a critical factor in weight loss.
5. Tea is not dehydrating. Dr. Carrie Ruxton (lead author of the 2006 European Journal of Clinical Nutrition tea-based studies) says you should fill up your water bottles with tea, as “drinking tea is actually better for you than drinking water. Water is continually replacing fluid. Tea replaces fluid and contains antioxidants…”
6. Tea drinkers, not coffee drinkers, had an increased of important disease-fighting protein on their T-Cells. Tea acts as sort of a natural vaccine that “teaches” immune cells to recognize markers on the surface of invading toxins. (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2003).
7. Arthritis-prone mice, when given the human equivalent of four cups of green tea a day, halved their risk of developing arthritis.
8. Tea lowers bad (LDL) cholesterol. (Archives of Internal Medicine, 2003 study.)
9. Drinking as little as a half-cup of green or oolong tea per day may lower the risk of high blood pressure by nearly 50 percent.
10. Tea’s antioxidant power is about 100 times greater than Vitamin C and twenty-fie times greater than vitamin E in protecting DNA from free radical damage — the kind that increases cancer. (University of Kansas, 1997.)
11. Women who consumed 26 ounces of green tea leaves each year (less than one cup per day) had a 39-percent reduced risk of breast cancer compared to non-drinkers.
12. A 2005 Swedish study of more than 61,000 women showed that women who consumed two or more cups of green of black tea everyday lowered their risk for ovarian cancer by 46 percent.
13. Preliminary studies have shown that tea enhances the results of some chemotherapy drugs by preventing cancerous cells from rejecting the drugs after the drugs have entered the tumor cells. Also, tea helps to minimize the side effects of these drugs.

To win your own free copy of The Ultimate Tea Diet. Simply leave a comment below stating why you’d like to read this book, and create a link back to this post (click on the post title to get the html code for this post in the address bar above. If you don’t have a blog — don’t worry about that step.) Then, using Random.org, I’ll select a winner on January 31, 2007.

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The book, Deceptively Delicious,  by Jessica Seinfeld has done more to take stress out of my life as a Mom than any parenting book I’ve read. A big thank you to PBN for sending me this book. As Mothers we are hard-wired to care about the health and safety of our children. Getting good nutrition into our kid’s diets has never been harder. Junk food tastes really good; it’s very convenient; and it’s everywhere. In the forward, Dr. Mehmet Oz, a heart surgeon at Columbia University refers to the alarming treatment of “too many young patients with early blockages of the arteries.”

Bribing our kids to eat their vegetables does more harm than good. My wish is for my children to grow up enjoying good nutritious food; I want the short time I have with them at my dinner table to be pleasant; I want my children to eat healthy meals, without stress. Using the recipes from  my wish has come true. Like Seinfeld says in the book, “I had begun to dread meal time.” Those days are over, thanks to this amazing book.

During the last several weeks that I’ve had the privilege to work with Deceptively Delicious, I’ve found that this cookbook is more like a how-to manual. Yes, there are amazing recipes in the book, but that’s only part of the gift this book brings. Follow one or two of Jessica’s recipes, and soon, you’ll know how to sneak nutrition into anything your kids are eating — including hot cocoa. (The secret? Just add sweet potato puree. “It makes the cocoa thick and creamy, even made with skim milk.” )

For example, her recipe for pink pancakes is simply a basic pancake mix, with the addition of pureed beets. Lots of vitamins; and no one can taste the “beets” in the finished product. Using Jessica’s method, I took a simple white box cake mix, and added the pureed beets to the cake. The cake was an instant hit — even without the icing. My kids HATE beets. But they are FULL of vitamins — I REALLY want them to like beets. So, instead of serving them a plate of beets, and pleading with them to “just try one bite!” I served it in a cake. The loved it, and asked for seconds. Thanks to Deceptively Delicious, beets are now a part of my kid’s diet. No bribing involved. And now, our blueberry pancake recipe includes a 1/2 up of beets.

Seinfeld’s book has an introductory chapter that shows you her four-step method to make the purees for 20 different vegetables and fruits. These purees are then stored in the freezer in zip-lock bags. This is one weak spot in the book. I can easily see many Moms not having the time to puree the veggies every week, but more importantly, not having the time to defrost the veggies for a quick cup of hot cocoa. So, I offer you this. Just keep baby food jars on hand. Already pureed, the perfect serving size, and full of nutrition. Baby food, like most frozen and canned vegetables, has not been sitting on grocery store shelves, and then in your vegetable bin. Seinfeld also offers this short cut in her book; canned vegetables. Just puree them in the food processor. And did I mention the book has a hard-wire binding? The book is built for the kitchen. It is awesome in every way.

So, here’s my only complaint about the book. Despite all the emphasis on nutrition, there are no nutritional numbers for any of the recipes in this book. How much am I gaining by adding one or two tablespoons of pureed cauliflower to our mac and cheese? I’d like to know.

For some kids, it’s the “texture” of food that makes them “repulsed.” Pureeing foods they don’t like makes the vegetables go down much easier. For years, I’ve tried to get my 9-year old to eat my chicken noodle soup. He prefers the Campbell’s soup variety instead of mine. This time, I tried the Deceptively Delicious method and pureed the vegetables — all the onions, celery and carrots. (Seinfeld adds pureed butternut squash). I added the broth and the noodles, and finally I had a hit. So simple. So logical.

There are many recipes in her book that are so completely off-the-wall, that I just had to try them, out of curiosity. I did not expect to like a chocolate chip cookie made with un-mashed garbanzo beans. But, these cookies were nothing short of awesome. My kids ate them before I could help myself to thirds. I found myself wanting to make a second batch, because, if it’s full of healthy garbanzo beans one more cookie won’t hurt the waist line that much. Right?

But my favorite “recipe of deception” of all is the chocolate fondue. The “fat” in this scrumptious dip is avocados. Avocados, pureed carrots, cocoa powder and powdered sugar make the most amazing chocolate fondue you’ve ever had. How ingenious to figure out that avocados also turn brown when they’re mashed — just like chocolate.
So, when you pick up your own copy of Deceptively Delicious, your biggest problem will be stopping yourself from eating up all that fondue. Because, after all, you can eat as much as you want, because it’s SOOOO healthy. Right?

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If you watched Oprah today, you learned about Jessica Seinfeld’s (Jerry’s wife) new book, Deceptively Delicious: Simple Secrets to Get Your Kids Eating Good Food, and what that secret ingredient is in those pink pancakes; which also makes them taste so good; and also VERRRRRY nutrious. They sent me an advance copy of the book to try out on my kids. Now, it’s finally available on Amazon, at 40% off. Now, you can get your own copy — just click the photo.

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in the mail? Something besides that one diaper wrapped in cellophane with coupons? A new service by the Procter & Gamble Company, Vocal Point, wants your feedback. They want your ideas to help them refine their marketing campaigns and enhance their products. To get your thoughts, they’ll send you free product previews of their latest products. These products will cover entertainment, fashion, music, food, and beauty.

Vocal Point is actually an ingenious new P&G marketing tool — they’ve given us an open forum to voice our complaints, praise and ideas. Smart companies know the best place to get insight from their products is from the user. The service is free to Moms with children ages newborn to 19 years old.

To sign up and start receiving your samples, simply fill out a short survey by clicking here. You can opt our any time. While you’re a member, they will contact you about twice a week via e-mail to tell them what you think about a certain product.

I just joined last week — so hurry up and join so your mailbox will start filling up with surprises too.

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If you’re like most families, the number of vegetables you serve is smaller than you’d like. I know you want to cook nutritious meals for your family, and you intend to give them many servings of fruits and vegetables each day, but your schedule is crazy. If you need help, read on, because cooking veggies just got simpler.

If you’re really busy, skip the produce aisle and head straight for the frozen food section. Those vegetables were actually picked and frozen at their peak, so they are fresher than the vegetables that have been sitting in the produce section (and on the truck, etc.).  And, the frozen veggies will be waiting in your freezer indefinitely, for your convenience, and not rotting away in your produce drawer.

Now, for the hard part. Actually cooking them. Three Glad® SimplyCooking™ Microwave Steaming Bags arrived in the mail — free, and I was asked to try them out and tell you what I think. After telling my friends what I thought about them, (they work, but you have to throw them away every time), their eyes lit up. You see, the very feature I don’t like about this bag – it’s disposable – was the one feature they did like.

They were intrigued with the idea of being able to cook vegetables, without dirtying another pan. “Anything that’s quick and easy, I’m buying,” they said.

If simple is what you’re after, then this bag is for you. I mean – simple. Pictures of vegetables are printed right on the bag, along with the cooking times. Your kids can even do this. The word “steaming” is in the product name — the bags actually steam your vegetables, requiring no added water. Nutrients are sealed in, and nothing gets washed away.

Plastic in the microwave? Yes — this kind of plastic is OK. Glad does not use polyvinyl chloride (PVC), but instead uses plastics that are approved for use in high temperatures. And, no, there are no dioxins in plastics. Read this study from Johns Hopkins to learn more.

I will buy a box of these — but I probably won’t use them everyday. I’ll use a pan instead. But on crazy nights, and especially during holiday dinners, I’ll pull one of these Microwave Steaming Bags out just to save myself a few steps.

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