Peter's Cross Station

How I Got My Kids to Eat Kale

I was gonna call it, "How To Get Your Kids To Eat Kale" but thought better of it.  Because kids--they're a mixed bunch.  You just never know.  Still, if you want your kids to eat kale and they don't eat it, you're welcome to try my technique.

Time was when Nat had leafy greens daily.  Remember Green Supper?  Ah the golden days of baby and toddlerhood!  These days, I sneak frozen spinach into mac and cheese, spaghetti sauce, under the cheese on the pizza--otherwise they'd never get greens at all.  (Selina might, but she suffers from second child syndrome and typically gets whatever Nat's getting, thus fewer greens than Nat got at her age.)

Anyway, I have some kale in one of my back porch window box planters.  It's a variety called "perpetual spinach" because it's mild and can be used as a substitute for spinach,but is easier to grow and just keeps going all season.

I have cut it, cooked it, served it raw--none of these things got a thumbs up from the kids (they did from Cole and me, though).  Instead, they'd chew it, spit it out, play with it, toss it on the floor and otherwise waste this awesome fresh green that should be in their little bodies fighting oxidants and making them super girls.

Until they were playing outside while I picked it.  "I want a leaf!" declared Nat.

"What?  This kale?" I asked.

"Yeah, the kale!" she said.  I gave her a baby leaf.  She gobbled it down.  "I want anther one!" she begged.

By now, Selina was at my ankles, whining "Me too!  Me too!" (her perpetual battle cry).
I stood there pulling them off one leaf at a time until my kale was cut back to the roots.  They ate it with gusto.  About every three days, I get enough mature leaves to repeat this and so far, they haven't caught on to the fact that this is the same thing they have rejected on a plate time and again.

Kale.  The new Ice Cream Truck.

Give it try with yours and let me know how it goes!

Garden Growing

  These are my squash.  It's difficult to see them, and yes, they are teensy, but there are four little squash on the vine so far.  This was taken two days ago and the "big" one here in the middle is already twice this size and the next biggest one is this big.

  My other squash died after being decimated by a sudden thunderstorm.  Its main stem broke and that was all she wrote.

  But I am somewhat surprised and definitely pleased by how well the remaining one is doing.  Next year, I'll probably plant four of these.

 This is the same plant, but I wanted you to see my nifty self-watering bottle.  It's a terra cotta stake that goes into the container and then you fill a bottle of water and stick it down in there.  These are mineral water bottles I painted to keep the light out so they wouldn't grow too much algae.

  Here's one of my tomatoes.  Except not really.  Fine, I broke down and bought two plants.  Both are doing well.  They had blossoms when I bought them, which I pruned off.  Soon they had more blossoms and now they have green tomatoes.  I have about four on each plant now.  My actual tomato seedlings are  still only about an inch tall.  What's up with that?  I started them in early April!  They are healthy, but only have four leaves each!

  Remember the silly milk bottle in the middle of this planter?  It's finally doing what I had planned and hiding under the wild flowers.  Some are getting buds, including the teddy bear sunflowers I put all around the outer rim.

The lettuce produced beautifully for a month and we had many delicious salads.  It's pretty much done now, so I planted carrots in that planter.  I also put carrots in the pots where the cucumbers bit it and in the space which held the short-lived and under-producing broccoli raab.

This has nothing to do with gardening.  It's Nat's picture of a guitar on her magnadoodle.  She was very proud and keen that I take a picture and preserve it forever.  I have to say, I am impressed.  It's pretty good for a magnadoodle, don't you think?  She drew it from life, copying her ukulele:

 

In Which Early Reading Becomes a Problem OR Nat Discovers We've Been Holding Out on Her

The scene: our favorite neighborhood restaurant.  I hand Nat the "kids'" menu and tell her to look it over and choose two things.

Nat: "oatmeal, scrambled eggs, yoghurt, fruit, (pause) pancakes with chocolate chips?"

Mama Shannon: (casually) "we aren't getting that."

Nat: "cheese pizza, grilled cheese sandwich, milk, (pause) chocolate milk???

Imagine the incredulous look in her eye.

The good news is she chose plain yoghurt, cheese pizza and water.  And then she got really, really excited when the water glass came with two straws.

Wonder how long these days will last?

Another Recipe (Mine this Time)

A sort of resolution I've made recently (not exactly but kind of a New Year's one, I guess), is to stop buying cans lined with BPA-containing plastic.  So I'm going through my extant cans of beans and tomatoes now, but buying only dried beans from now on.  Canned tomatoes are an absolute staple necessity around here, and I've been tipped off that Eden Organic tomato cans do not contain BPA, so I'm going to buy only those in future.

Anyway, this is all to say that I made the following recipe with canned beans, but will be trying it in the future with dried ones, which would change things.  If you're a dried bean user, please revise as necessary and add a tip in the comments about your revision, okay?

Black Bean and Collard Soup/Stew/Chili (it's pretty thick)

About half a clove of garlic

one onion (I used a red one)

a couple tablespoons of olive oil or thereabouts

one tablespoon of rice wine vinegar

4 or 5 large leaves of collards

one can of black beans (with the liquid)

one cup of broth (I used veggie, but chicken or beef would be good too)

salt and pepper to taste

In a medium saucepan, heat the olive oil while chopping the garlic and onion.  Put the chopped onion and garlic into the hot oil and  sautee it for a few minutes (about 5).  I put the garlic in first then chopped the onion so the result was an almost toasty brown garlic.

While the garlic and onion is doing its thing, wash the collards, strip the big veins out then stack the leaves on your cutting board and slice them into thin strips the width of the leaf.

Add the collards to the saucepan, add the rice wine vinegar and a tablespoon of water.  Cover the pan and let the collards cook down a bit for about 5 minutes.

Add the black beans and the broth.  Bring to a boil, then reduce the heat, cover and simmer for about 20 minutes.  Add salt and pepper to taste. (Red pepper flakes are good in this dish, added to the garlic and onions in the first step, but I didn't do that because of toddler/preschool palettes.)

Serves about 4 adults or a mix of kids and adults.  I think it would be good with cornbread, but didn't do it this time.

YUM!

Sharing a Recipe

My colleague, Keri, at Strollerderby was a chef before she was a mom.  Occasionally, she shares a kid-friendly recipe on the site.  I have to direct you to this one, which I've made twice already and am putting in the monthly meal circulation.  It's that awesome.

When I was a kid, C@mpb311'$ vegetarian ABC soup was one of my favorite foods.  Now I'm anti-MSG and a minimizer of canned foods with my own kids.  This recipe reminds me a lot of that childhood comfort food, but is, you know, healthy and natural.  The kids love it too, especially the letters.  You haven't lived until you've heard your kid announce "I just ate an R and it was delicious!"

Gardening Questions: I'm New at This, Please Weigh In!

1.  Please share your vermiculture experience.  I'm thinking of getting this.  Thoughts?  Advice?  Just to cut do-it-yourself advice off at the pass, I'm not going to do it myself.  Really.  I'm just not.  I have to keep this in the kitchen 6 months of the year, and I am willing to pay for a system that just works right without too much tweaking.

2.  Rain barrels: Can you use them when there are no downspouts at your disposal?  Would a barrel like this catch enough water just from the rain itself to make it worth it?  Because we don't have any downspout access on the balconies where I will be gardening.

I am doing a container garden with veggies on two balconies starting this spring.  I am really excited about it, but looking for ways to make it as efficient as possible, even if there's a little upfront investment.  But I don't want to go wrong with that investment.  Please share your experience!

Thanksgiving Menu

Individual Cornish hens stuffed with brown rice, raisins and apples, served on a bed of braised greens (whatever looks yummiest), baked white and sweet potatoes and southern-style biscuits.

Dessert is whatever the guests bring.

X 16-20 (all the RSVPs aren't in)

How about you?

Stuff You Might Like

Still haven't had time to sort out a sidebar with feed from my Strollerderby gig. Meanwhile, here are some recent posts that I thought readers here might find especially interesting if you haven't been keeping up with me over there:

Video from a Sarah Palin Rally in Ohio

Five Ways to Treat a Child's Cold without Medication

In Which I Find Myself in Rare Agreement with Sarah Palin (Sort Of)

My Baby

Selina is quite happy and handy with her foogo cups. We have two and I'm ordering two more. If you click that link, you'll note that many Amazon reviewers don't like it, but it is working for us. Basically, I don't give the kids cups on the go. We have a sit-at-the-table rule, and I am just training Selina to use a cup rather than a bottle. So she only gets the sippy (sans leak-proofing valve) in her chair, with an adult spotter to keep an eye out for spillage. Once she's got the hang of the flow in the sippy cup, I'll promote her to juice glasses and teach her to use real glasses and then we're pretty much done with sippys except for the canteen to take to the park, etc. For that, we'll use the Kleen Kanteens. (Nat uses them occasionally now.)

All this is really to say that I have given away all the baby bottles as of today and I am sad and blue. I weaned Nat from bottles cold-turkey a week or two before her first birthday and never thought twice about it. But this is probably my last baby and I had been holding onto the before-bedtime-rocking-chair bottle. I decided to hold out until she was eighteen months and then yesterday, she bit the tip off of the nipple and I decided it was a sign.

Selina herself is indifferent to the shift. She is pleased as punch with herself for being able to drink from her cup. She will even hold it one-handed, while drinking and signing "milk! milk! milk!" enthusiastically with the free hand.

So the bedtime routine will shift to be more about books and songs and not so much about bottles in arms.

But Selina is really starting to love books, which is nice. She will look at books all alone for extended periods, flipping the pages carefully and examining the pictures (all in the right order, too). The other day, I put up some dishes in the kitchen while Nat and Selina played in the living room and thus were sort of unsupervised for about ten minutes. When I came back, Selina was gone, so Nat and I went on a little hunt for her and found her in the kids' room, sitting in a corner, happily "reading" a book to herself. She was so engrossed, she didn't even notice we had come in. Nat and I decided it was very cute.

Selina gets her very own Mama Shannon book time before all sleep occasions, and I try to sneak one or two in during the day, but Nat tends to poach on those attempts. So Selina gets over-Nat's-shoulder book time then. Poor second baby.

She's still crawling with vigor and pulling up everywhere but not walking. She lets go with one hand regularly, and quite often lets go with two, then slowly sort of wafts down onto her bottom in a controlled way (versus a "real" fall). I think she'd be walking if she wasn't such a good crawler, but at any rate, it's coming soon for sure.

She is also starting to get a little more lingual. She can say (at her initiation, and in proper context) "eat," "hi," "yep!" (which doesn't really mean anything but it's cute) and "mama" as of today. She can sign "milk," "more," "hi," and almost "mama" (she will copy me when I show her, but hasn't initiated yet). I don't remember where Nat's expressive language was at this age. I have a sense that Selina is behind her, but I'd have to look it up. Second child and all that. She is well within normal range.

Yesterday, I kissed her cheek while we were looking in the mirror and she grinned big and made a "kiss" to the mirror. I kissed her cheek and she kissed at her reflection over and over. She thought this was the greatest thing ever. So now Cole is trying to get real kisses out of her. I'm not holding my breath.

Selina's hair is sooooo long. Even the back is pretty long (whereas the back of Nat's head was smoothly bald for a good two years). I put it in two pony tails and let the back that doesn't reach fall out and make a mess for now. I think it'll all catch into two hair bands within a month or two. She looks really cute when her hair is "done." All grown up. Nat has an annoying habit of taking Selina's hair bands out (of course), so that's a challenge. I usually leave it out until the minute we're leaving the house.

Selina still loves singing and music more than your average baby (and babies love singing and music in general, I know). When I turn music on for her, she looks at me like I just presented her with a chocolate cake. She has this look of utter joy and gratitude on her face. And she bounces in perfect time to the music and always has. And when I sing to her, she still always sings along.

She loves to eat. She gets very excited about all occasions for eating and has a mini tantrum every time she finishes a meal or a glass of milk. If I give her a piece of a bagel or a cracker or whatnot, she waves it aloft triumphantly and shows it to me proudly with a "look what I have!" expression on her face. She does this with other things too, like sticks in the back yard, or books or toys in the house. She will grab it, crawl up to me and wave it at me proudly.

I am still making most of her food, food-cube style. Breakfast is a combo of four whole grains, two fruit/vegetables, featuring something orange (like carrot+banana, or sweet potato+apple), blackstap molasses, brewer's yeast and ginger. (I make it all up together and freeze it like that, instead of freezing parts and mixing them up before meals, individually.) Lunch is yoghurt and a two or three veggie/fruit combo, like avocado+banana, onion+potato+carrot, apple+pear, cauliflower+potato, red pepper+yellow squash+zucchini, to name a few recent ones. Dinner is "green supper" which is breakfast, except featuring green, like broccoli+onion or spinach+potato or something. The breakfast and dinner cubes I only half defrost and then let her nibble with her fingers. I know this sounds really gross, but she is all good with the foodcicles. I think that lately she likes the cold on her teething spots (first molars coming up). Mostly her snacks consist of cheddar cheese or bits of tofu.

She definitely gets more "junk" food than Nat got at her age, though. Lots of "cracker bunnies" (as Nat calls them), rice cakes, instant mac&cheese, the aforementioned bagels or other white bread products (usually just at restaurants, though). I figure she is pretty set, nutritionally and can afford the occasional empty calorie. I am still giving her a half-formula/half-whole milk combo of about 24 ounces a day, so I am not going to introduce any vitamin supplements until she stops liking the formula. (In Nat's case, that was around age two.)

Another thing she gets more of (and I am less happy about) is television. There is no television consensus in this family, so I compromise my less-than-10-hours-per-week ideal and it is probably more like 20. Selina never watches t.v. expressly for her. But she gets a lot of second-hand t.v. chatter from Nat's shows. I am trying to not freak out about it, as long as she gets lots of active play and attention too.

As far as t.v. goes, I was thinking of posting a list of kids' shows I don't hate and why I don't hate them. Interested?

And with that, I must run, as nap time seems to have ended...

Spring Garden Soup

You will need:

one pound of fresh spinach
one head of cauliflower, coarsely chopped
one large onion (or two smaller ones), chopped
about 8 cloves of garlic, crushed and chopped
a pinch (or two, depending on your taste) of red pepper flakes
4 tablespoons or so of butter (you can sub olive oil)
6 cups of vegetable broth (chicken broth would work too)
fresh yoghurt (or sour cream if you must)
salt and pepper to taste

In a large, heavy saucepan, melt the butter then add chopped onions and garlic. Cook until the onions are translucent. Add the red pepper flakes and cook another minute or so. Add 1/2 cup of water and the spinach. Stir it around a bit, maybe put a lid on the pan for a minute until the spinach is cooked down a little. Add the cauliflower and the broth. Bring to a boil, turn down the heat, put on a lid and allow to simmer for about half an hour.

Blend the whole concoction until completely smooth. I used to use a food processor, but I am a total convert to the immersion blender now.

Salt and pepper to taste and serve in bowls with a dollop of yoghurt in the middle.

Beautiful and oh-so-tasty!

P.S. You can eat it chilled on the second day.