Archive for the ‘Health’ Category

Second Harvest

So far, our experience with the CSA is helping us make the exact changes we hope to make.  In the book In Defense of Food, Michael Pollan promotes the manta: “Eat food, less of it, mostly plants.”  (I need to tattoo this to my forehead to force myself to follow it!)  Our CSA deliveries have definitely increase our plant eating.  Our first two harvests included mostly greens, so we’ve eaten a lot of salad.  Before the CSA, we would eat salad maybe once a month.  Lately, we’re averaged at least three times a week.  This week, I’ve made fajita salad and taco salad.  We’ve also had a simple green salad.

When we got this week’s CSA delivery, my oldest son asked, “I wonder if there’s any ruby-red chard in there.”  Ha!  How many eight-year-old boys know what ruby-red chard is?  We watched Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution and were shocked by the class of kids who couldn’t even identify common veggies, so I was thrilled my boy remembered ruby-red chard.  Yay!!  Unfortunately, he liked the looks more than the taste (it IS a beautiful veggie with deep red veins flowing through the dark green leaves–which even I didn’t know until last week).  To answer his question, no ruby-red this week.  Instead, Swiss Chard, with leaves so gigantic they resemble elephant leaves.  It look so freakin’ healthy you just knew it had to be packed with nutrients!  On tap for tomorrow, sauteed chard.  Last week, the sauteed kale wasn’t a big hit, but I think the chard might be less bitter.  Keep your fingers crossed!  Here are some pics of our ruby-red and Swiss chard.

Ruby-red!

Swiss Chard

At the CSA, we were able to sample raw milk from a local farmer.  I have only recently heard about consumers buying raw milk, after a farm faced some legal trouble for selling some in an illegal manner.  This whole situation made me think:

WHAT?

Do the local police not have better sting operations to set up?  Shouldn’t they be approaching some drug dealers, instead of farmers’ daughters?  Maybe the cops could work on the recent rash of robberies instead?

This made me imagine raw milk was a very dangerous substance because it has to be so strictly controlled.

So, is it?  I’ve read several articles on the Internet, and I’m still not sure.  There are plenty of articles saying it is more nutritious and more flavorful, and I’ve found some articles about salmonella outbreaks.  However, haven’t there been plenty of e-coli and salmonella outbreaks occurring in supposedly safe foods?

This situation makes the police look like they are attacking the little guys while the big corporations get to pass off whatever they want.

I’m going to enjoy our lovely glass jar full of pure milk, despite wondering a little about its safety.  For now, bottoms up!

What do you think about raw milk?

My oldest son doing some veggie cleaning.

We were able to pick up our first ‘green bag special’ today.  We were excited to officially be starting our journey.  The CSA had planned a bonfire and potluck, but the April May showers drowned out that plan, so members were invited to the farm to pick up their shares.  Despite the less-than-stellar weather, we enjoyed the beautiful view from the farm.  We were able to see the raised beds, already overflowing with the plants that will eventually bear dozens of different vegetables.  Today’s share included several types of lettuces and salad greens, as well as green onions and radishes.

We brought home our healthy haul and proceeded to investigate.  My oldest son jumped right in to help clean.  I was pleased to see him so eager to be involved.  We had towels lined up along all of the counters, so the washed leaves could dry (see below).  Though we have a half share of vegetables, it felt like a good amount.  We could make two huge salads, at least.

Remember my references to mystery veggies?  Well, we had some mysteries on our hands tonight.  Luckily, a couple of friends had joined the same CSA, and we were able to confer on Facebook.  Google Images was also handy tool.  Several times tonight I googled things like “green leaves, red veins” and “green leaves, purple veins.”  Thank goodness for Google!

Our bounty

After washing all that produce, we were ready to eat.  I was partially interested in taking on this change in our lives in order to inspire my sons to eat more healthful foods, and tonight, I couldn’t have been prouder.  After volunteering to clean the vegetables, my oldest son continued to jabber about the bounty.  He was very interested in learning about each green leaf and willingly sampled them.  We decided upon a salad for dinner, starting simply with our first harvest.

While preparing the salad, my oldest even recommended a type of salad dressing he enjoyed: Honey French.  Our friend Google led us to a recipe, and we created homemade salad dressing to accompany our locally-grown foods…yee!

Salad, with locally-made sourdough bread

The salad was delicious.  You cannot compare the pale, watery lettuce in bagged salads to what we ate.  Our salad had a multitude of interesting flavors.  Yum!
So, overall, I’m feeling pretty good right now.  We ate well, we have a drawer full of greens for the rest of the week, and we are still excited about the weeks to come.

What about our youngest son, the picky one, you might ask?  Well, he was at his grandma’s house tonight, enjoying a ham sandwich.  He’ll get to participate in the next green haul.

Farm fresh!

After deciding to eat more locally-grown foods, we thought through our options for obtaining these foods.  Here are two we didn’t choose:

1) Growing our own foods.  As discussed previously, I am not equipped for this.  While we may try our thumbs at gardening for fun this summer, I don’t want to rely on this as a major food source just yet.

2) Buying vegetables at a farmer’s market.  The farmer’s market has great appeal.  It is a fun place to visit.  Our problem, however, is our location.  We live 20-25 miles from the nearest large-scale farmer’s market, meaning it would require a special trip each week to get fresh vegetables.  We found a CSA that could deliver to our town, which would save us from committing to traveling to town to pick up our vegetables.  If you don’t know what a CSA is, read my description here.

What makes the CSA appealing?

1)  Someone knowledgeable does the work.  By supporting a CSA, we are helping a local person who has an interest in farming.  Perhaps they can even earn a living from it.

2)  We get a bag of vegetables!  Visiting a farmer’s market would require us to pick out vegetables.  I think I would limit myself and not take a variety of items.  The bag of vegetables will force me to think and cook creatively and will open us up to new experiences.

3)  We participate in the process.  The CSA involves visiting the farm to help with the harvest.  We can show our kids how food is grown.  Barbara Kingsolver’s book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle talks about how disconnected Americans are from our food supply.  When I was a kid, my parents thought it was hilarious that I didn’t realize they could make french fries from potatoes.  I had no clue!  I thought french fries came from a bag…where else?

Look! He ate green things!

To encourage all members of the household to try out our many veggies this summer, I’m planning to create a bingo board with names of various vegetables filling the boxes.  We’ll mark off a square each time we try something on the board.  First person to hit bingo gets to make plans for a family outing to places he/she wants to visit.  Hopefully, this will make the mysterious veggies more appealing and will make the whole adventure more fun for the kids.

My youngest is a very picky eater.  He eats these things: cheese, bread, peanut butter and jelly, apples, cereal, bananas, graham crackers, chicken nuggets, sausage, pancakes, chocolate milk, and apple juice.  And that’s about it.  Literally.  Yes, you are reading that correctly, not a single vegetable on the list.  He doesn’t just not like vegetables, not a single one has passed through his lips his entire life (edited to clarify: I was a good mama and fed him vegetables when he was eating the mushed-up kind.  Somehow, it trailed off after that as he became picky).

How did we get here?  I don’t know exactly.  If he were our first child, we would have tried harder to encourage him to eat a wider variety of foods.  However, he is the blessed second child.  The one who gets fewer photos in the baby book and less stifling attentive parents.  With two young boys and two full-time jobs, we felt lucky to get dinner on the table with the four of us around it, so we weren’t all that into dinner time battles over food.

It didn’t seem to be a big deal to give our toddler a piece of cheese or bread instead of a dinner plate, but somehow that toddler turned into a pre-kindergartner in a blink of an eye.  In the meanwhile, he developed a very limited palate.

Right now, he thinks vegetable is a bad word.  Maybe a little vegetable bingo will entice him.

We all know there’s a lot of marketing to children.  Usually promoting the exact things we don’t want for our kids: annoying toys and junk food.  However, I’m proud to say our school district is participating in a big promotion that has already piqued the interest of my oldest son.  A recent grant gave our community money to start a community garden and to do outreach in the schools.

This week, my oldest son brought home several packs of seeds and an already-planted bean plant.  He wanted to start a garden out back.  That night.  Immediately.  Now, my husband and I tried gardening once, and we failed to produce squash.  Failed to produce squash.  Yes, that’s what I said.  I had heard that squash grew like dandelions.  Well, not for us.

Do you think this is what we’ll have in our backyard this summer?

So, while I’m excited about eating vegetables, I’m not excited about growing them.  However, when your son gets excited about something, it’s good to take interest, too.  Especially when it doesn’t involve Nerf guns, Star Wars, or video games, and instead focuses on healthy foods.

Before planting a garden, I’d like to do some research.  But, Farmer McDonald wouldn’t wait for research, so I finally sent him outside with a shovel and told him to mark a spot to plant the garden.  He used some grass clippings to square it off.

This weekend, we’ll be buying some top soil and making it official: In addition to our green bag special from the CSA, we’ll be trying our hands at growing some veggies, too.  We’ll hope for some success.

Ultimately, I’m thankful for the promotion my son’s school has done.  He is excited about vegetables!  And this is much better than a Happy Meal toy.

Welcome to Green Bag Special! My family is changing the way we eat, and this blog will be a place to share some of those changes as we go through this evolution.

Our thoughts and course of action are being influenced by various media. We are reading books by Michael Pollan, such as In Defense of Food. We are watching Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution on television, and we viewed the movie Food, inc.

Why? First and foremost is health. We were shocked to learn that this generation of children may have as many as 1 in 3 become diabetic. As parents, we have scrutinized almost every decision we made regarding our children’s care; however, we didn’t deeply scrutinize our diets.  We’ve tried to stick with the Middle Path for them, allowing some junk while promoting the good stuff; however, the Middle Path occasionally veers too far to Golden Arches Parkway.  Now, we want to redirect our family’s food choices for their sake as well as our own.

We are concerned about our own health as we head toward middle age (maybe we’re already there–yikes!). When you start having your cholesterol and blood pressured scrutinized, it becomes real that our diets influence our health.

We are also heading down this path to help ourselves lose weight. My husband and I have struggled with weight for most of our adult lives. We know what we need to do: eat less and move more. However, in the day-to-day struggle to keep up with our jobs and families, those simple lessons are hard to follow.

This spring, we are making a major change to our diet, which leads us to the title of this blog: The Green Bag Special. We have joined a CSA (community support agriculture) farm, which allows us to receive a bag of locally-grown organic veggies each week. The contents of the bag of veggies will vary based on what’s in season. I have always enjoyed a wide range of vegetables, but I can’t say the same for my family (especially my youngest child, who only eats a range of about five-ten foods). The weekly Green Bag Special will encourage me to find new recipes to enjoy the wide variety of vegetables we receive. I plan to use this blog to share what’s in the bag and what I plan to do with it.

So, welcome. I hope to make this an interactive blog where others can share their recipes and thoughts, so feel free to share.