From CULINATE

You want the little darlings to eat what’s good for them — and like it. You know power plays, bribes, and other control efforts don’t lead to healthful eating habits in the long run. So what’s a parent to do? Here are some great sure-fire options.

Shrink it. Kids tend to appreciate things on a scale that makes them feel larger. Every now and then, let your children eat from tiny dishes. No need for a tea set; you probably have the right sizes in your cupboard. Use the smallest appetizer plate for a dinner plate, a custard cup or ramekin for soup or cereal, and a shot glass or other tiny vessel for milk or juice. Baby forks and spoons are perfect miniature utensils.

Smaller dish size automatically scales down portion size, meaning kids will actually have room for second helpings. Encourage them to serve themselves. They can refill glasses using a tiny pitcher, creamer, or even a small measuring cup with a spout. I know teenagers who still think that eating with tiny dishes is a hoot.

Focus on companionship. When eating is about companionship, it builds positive associations between healthy food and togetherness. We also de-emphasize who eats how much of what. Kids who eat family meals regularly tend to have better dietary behavior as teens. And family discussions also boost brainpower.

Offer fruits and veggies for the first course. This is one way to take advantage of hunger to develop lean eating habits. Fruits and veggies are brimming with nutrients but low in calories, so a first course of produce makes sense. Plus, studies show that this method spurs kids to eat more veggies during the meal as well. Try offering different fruits and veggies while you’re cooking, or whenever appetite hits. Liven it up on occasion with a variety of dips and spreads.

Make faces. Paint distinctive “face” plates at one of those decorate-your-own pottery places. Put nothing more on each plate than a simple outline of eyes, nose, and mouth. That way, when the plate is fired and ready for use, each meal’s food arrangement will create a different face: spaghetti hair with a green-bean mouth at dinner tonight, or a tortilla beard sporting black-bean lips and salsa eyebrows at lunch tomorrow…

Full article here
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From DELICIOUSLY ORGANIC

I finally found the breakfast to end all breakfasts. When friends and family come to visit, I’m usually stumped as to what to serve for breakfast. I want something that doesn’t pull me away from my guests, but is good enough to make them want more. My family loves bacon, I love anything savory, and protein is a must in our house for the first meal of the day.

The beauty of this dish is that you can make it ahead of time. This way, instead slaving over a hot stove in a kitchen dusted in flour and filled with dirty mixing bowls, you merely pop this baby in the oven and visit with your guests.

Accompany this with fresh fruit, coffee, and maybe milk for the kids. It’s filling, so no one will be itching for a snack an hour later.

Remember if you buy from good sources of eggs, butter and bacon (organic and grass-fed or pastured) they provide healthy amounts of omega-3 fatty acids and linoleic acid. Sourdough made the old-fashioned or artisan way contains probiotics that are beneficial to the digestive system.

Packed with healthy fats, protein, and flavor – this ultimate breakfast dish really satisfies.

Recipe here
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From GENE LOGSDON

Furious arguments sweep back and forth over the landscape about whether pasture-raised meat is better or worse than corn-fed meat. I think pasture-raised might be healthier food depending on the quality of the pasture, but when the debate focuses on taste, oh my. Years and years ago, a similar argument was popular: whether hogs fed on steamed slop (garbage) tasted better or worse than corn-fed hogs. A butcher could supposedly tell by finger-punching a hog carcass, whether the hog had been slop-fed or corn-fed by how soft or hard it was. We farm boys had a sort of ritual. We would finger-punch each other and, if praise were in order, pronounce the boy so punched as “corn fed.” If he were deemed soft and sissified for whatever reason, a finger punch would draw forth a derisive “slop fed.” In that kind of culture, pasture-raised meat was never going to have a chance over corn-fed even if the hams had no more give in them than anvils.

Then along came my father-in-law who raised and butchered his own hogs and smoke-cured the best-tasting hams in Kentucky, so everyone who ate at his table claimed. He told me that the way to do it right was to feed a hog for two years (none of this modern four to five-month wonder stuff) mostly on acorns and then cure the hams by his own special mix of salt (had to be a particular kind of moist salt he bought by the barrel), brown sugar and pepper, rubbing the mix into the meat every day for the first month of the curing process. He even specified how many rubs (ten) each ham should be given at each rubbing. Then he smoked the meat with hickory just so-so and left it hang in the smokehouse to age a month or more. Corn, or lack thereof, had very little to do with it.

I was out in Nebraska once talking to a tough old cowboy type whose flesh was as dark and sinewy as father-in-law’s hams. He sort of snorted at my praise for a corn-fed beef steak I had eaten in Omaha. He declared that a really tasty filet came out of the back strip of a four- year- old range cow that wouldn’t know an ear of corn from a watermelon. “Takes that long to develop real taste to the meat,” he drawled, “and that kind of steak is just about as tender at four years of age as at two.”

In time I raised and cured my own hams on a diet including corn, acorns and all the food garbage our family generated. I followed my father-in-law’s instructions to the letter. I made good meat, but not as good as his hams after mother-in-law worked her magic on them in the kitchen. More Gene Logsdon…

From JASON PETERS
Front Porch Republic Blog

There’s a story (if memory serves) about a little spat that affected the greatest and best-dressed rock band ever.

(I confess that, given the inveterate mendacity of consciousness, one never knows for sure whether one is being ironic or sincere.)

During a rehearsal or a sound check or something, Neal Schon was wailing away on his guitar, as was (and is) his wont—and long may he wail—when the ever-humble Steve Perry came over and turned his amp down. “They want to hear the voice,” Perry said, pointing to himself. “The voice.”

Divorce was inevitable, and eventually it came, and I, like many whose musical tastes are impeccable, regretted it. But still there are days when, standing in my kitchen, inching toward the vital late-afternoon decision as the lights go down in the city, I want to hear both the wailing guitar and the soaring pinched voice. And that can mean only one thing: I’ve decided to feed the troops some carbonara (and maybe hope for some lovin’, touchin’, and squeezin’).

That this culinary delight (not to mention this melodious word) is not on the lips of more people is a mystery, given how good it tastes and how simple it is to make. Of course you can make it more complicated if you want to, and that’s okay by me (first rule of cooking to music: more time in the kitchen is better than less). Any way you want it, that’s the way you need it.

Carbonara makes use of two important staples that, were I the head of the USDA, would be food groups unto themselves: bacon and eggs. (Bacon! Is there anything it can’t do? And, O, thou egg! How noble in design, how infinite in flavor! In form and moving how express and admirable!) (more…)

From GENE LOGSDON
The Contrary Farmer

That’s what a recent (Jan. 20) article suggested in the New York Times. After a few more provocative captions like that and a liberal use of the subjunctive mood to convince us of the dangers of burning wood, the article simmered down to saying what most of us already know: if you use dry seasoned wood and a certified low-polluting heating system, burning wood is as safe as heating with anything, but perhaps not in areas of heavy population like New York City. It is questionable whether automobiles are appropriate technology for New York City either and many people there in fact do not own one. I wonder how the Times would be received if it voiced a notion that driving cars is an eco-crime.

I don’t know the statistics but I will bet anything that the airplanes flying high above us belch out more pollution in a day than the fireplaces and woodburning stoves of New York City emit in a whole winter. I am certain that the millions upon millions of cars, buses, trucks, tractors and bulldozers in this country emit more pollutants every second than all the woodburning stoves do in a year. Furthermore, have the people who think burning wood is an eco-crime ever stopped  to consider how many millions of tons of coal and natural gas and fuel oil are burned every day to provide them with heat or to generate electric heat that they think is so much “greener” than burning wood? Then add on the vast amounts of these fuels that are burned to manufacture the appliances that deliver that heat to all those businesses and high rises and oversized suburban mansions. Then add on the whole energy consumption and infrastructure it takes to air condition all those buildings. If a fireplace is an eco-crime, what is an air-conditioner? More Gene Logsdon…