Organic Back to School

Is organic living and eating easy for you – until the school year rolls around? Do you despair of how to keep your kids on a healthy diet, knowing they face standard cafeteria food fare every noon? Most of our local schools offer salad bars and healthy choices – but even so, children are bombarded daily with advertising seductions to go for the fad of the day.

Here are a few tips to make it easier:

1. Make your own.
This sure seems like a good idea – until the reality of time crunch hits. Or the fallout from peer pressure seeps in the front door with whining protests. If everyone is chowing down on Sloppy Joes and French fries and your child is the lone carrot-cruncher, she’ll feel isolated as a matter of course. It would take a huge personality to overcome this disparity.

2. Make it easier.
Find out what the going “thing” is currently – and duplicate it as much as possible: Sloppy Joes? Easy enough to make this in advance from good, organic ingredients to send along. Or – if you prefer vegetarian, how about tofu in a tomato sauce over a bun? Why not? Some might not even notice the difference. You get the idea. Be creative!

3. Involve others.
Gather with like-minded adults who have children of your child’s age. Agree in advance what the “menu” for your select little cooperative will be. Three – or five children eating the same thing constitutes a peer group too, and protects them from the isolation factor. You may find others who’d like to take turns, and form a rotating round of responsibility for the day’s fare. Imagine that – only prepping once a week for five children. Voila – you’ve addressed the time crunch, too!

You should also know about a few programs and the efforts that your local school is making along the lines of “keeping it healthy” for the sake of the kids who attend. There are individuals dedicated to making this challenge easier for us all.

The local “Farm to Table” program features a different farm each month. Participants make presentations and focus on local, healthy, organic foods, inspiring the youngsters to develop a taste for what’s good for them by making it interesting. .

The “Interfaith Farm and Food Partnership” is funded by a USDA grant and offers ongoing education in the realms of nutrition and food – eating, preparation, and origins.

Additionally, many schools make a concerted effort within the confines of their own halls to make a difference for the sake of the youth who attend. Marcy Hermens at Hoover Elementary comments, “We try to create relationships with healthy vendors for donations. For example, we offer yogurt instead of ice cream for snacks when we are able.”

Reach out at the next parent’s gathering. Connect with your neighbors. Make an effort to get to know your child’s favorite friends. Form that mini-cooperative. Call your school office and ask about the need for volunteers or connections for the programs they participate in. And take it from there. Your child may become part of a growing collective for whom healthy is the norm!

full article at: www.maryannwallace.com

Dill It Up!

Mary Ann Wallace, MD
www.maryannwallace.com

We gardeners share certain maladies of abundance. If you garden, I’m sure you’ve encountered at some point in your illustrious efforts a full-bore attack of zucchini glut. I’ve been struggling of late with keeping my attitude of gratitude for abundance in the face of ever growing hordes of ever-enlarging zucchini.

You know what I mean.

Leaving completely out of this conversation the question as to whether I have a sufficient supply of good natured friends willing to divest me of this so-called bounty, I will steer us along the lines of a few good discoveries I’ve made about how to work up all this good stuff. (See? Am I displaying a great attitude or what?)

We often have zucchini for breakfast, lunch, snack and dinner! In one exemplary day recently, we had zucchini bread for breakfast, sautéed zucchini with zucchini flowers and basil and zucchini pickles for lunch with zucchini cookies for dessert, dried zucchini rounds for a mid afternoon snack and zucchini frittatas for dinner. That wasn’t all we had – but you get the idea.

I have, thus far, steamed, sautéed, minced, mashed, baked, broiled, boiled, dried, breaded, lasagna’d, omelette’d, cookie’d, cake’d and mixed zucchini with every imaginable combination and spice. Even zucchini juice is tasty. And – of course – we all know that a requisite in every Christmas basket from those such as us is a nice (un)frozen loaf of zucchini bread.

And then I found the standard recipe for dilly beans in one of Rodale's time honored ancient texts. My beans and I are getting along fine, thank you. But the zucchini. That’s where I’m in a pickle! Hmmm. Why not? It just so happens the renegade dill volunteering all over the garden and associated pathways are also rampant. Replace beans with squash and call them Dill Zucchini.

It worked! So – here’s the recipe only slightly modified with gratitude to those who have gone before us, bearing the fruit of their labors:

Dill Zucchini

4 pounds zucchini
1 garlic clove per pint jar
¼ tsp. crushed red pepper per pint jar
5 cups vinegar
½ tsp. whole mustard seed per pint jar
5 cups water
½ tsp. dill seed per pint jar
½ cup salt

Wash and cut zucchini into slices to fill pint jars. Pack slices into clean, hot jars; add pepper, mustard seed, dill seed, and garlic.
Combine vinegar, water, and salt; heat to boiling. Pour boiling liquid over the zucchini, filling jars but leaving ¼-inch headspace. Seal and process in a steam bath for 5 minutes.

Yum - What a dill!

Eating with Care

I am often asked for advice about "how to" change eating habits. Below is a short list of suggestions:
1) Slow it down
- Notice what you are eating, and that you are eating
- Pay attention to how your body feels as it is satisfied with just the right amount of food
- "Fast foods" is an oxymoron
- Stop eating when you are satisfied. Boxing up leftovers is OK - even at home
- Be sure to notice if you're actually thirsty - try water first
- Brush your teeth right after you eat
2) Make it special
- Sit down. Prepare the meal for a guest (you qualify as a guest)
- Use smaller plates and serve yourself only the food you need - with care
- End a meal with a ritual - whether it be a dab of dessert, tea, an after meal mint
3) Notice what is driving the eating
- Ask yourself if you are really hungry - or feeling anxious or some other charged emotion that you are uncomfortable with
- Have a list handy of other things you can do to meet the actual need. Make it easy
- Know your difficult times and act preventively
- Enlist the help of a friend
4) Focus on gratitude
- Thankfulness is just what it says: being full of thanks. It is the fast track to not feeding an emptiness that doesn't really need food
- Expressing gratitude before a meal helps the mind engage in the right framework for eating in the most nourishing way possible

Above all else - be mindful. If you are stuck in a pattern of eating you don't like, chances are that either: a) it's just a mindless habit, or
b) there is a recurring inner anxiety (be it from loneliness, stress or whatever that is "gnawing" at you) - and you are feeding it with food instead of dealing with the underlying root.
In either case, increasing the capacity to notice - or be mindful - will help to open up the space to deeply and authentically make change.
Please note: There is a list of suggestions in Appendix D of my book, "Mindful Eating: Mindful Life"
www.maryannwallace.com

Squashed

June, 2010

Last year was one of those harrowing times designed to make us better characters – or squash us in the process. My husband and I moved. Twice. Then, before we could see the end of the row of our own boxes, we got an urgent call from my parents. In their 80’s, Mom and Dad were not able to handle Idaho winters any more. Moving to balmy Oregon seemed like just the right retirement plan, so they had put their place on the market earlier in the year. There were apparently no hordes of folks lined up for the opportunity of backwoods living, however. Just as they were giving up hope of a sale and hunkering down for another few months of strenuous snow plowing, a buyer suddenly appeared and they needed help to get out in a hurry. Since our last home was recently vacated and not yet sold, could they stay there?

So, off we trucked to Idaho to gather folks and their 56 years of accumulations. They arrived just in time for us to rush Mom to the hospital for emergency surgery. It was a grim cluster of days, during which we resigned ourselves to saying good-bye to our beloved mother and wife. And then one day, Mom opened her eyes, bright blue and very much alive, and said simply, “Hi”. Five grueling weeks of rehab later, we finally settled them in to their new home.

This spring, it was truly time for US to settle in to OUR new home and experience the joy of seeing our pictures on the wall, and finding the clothes we were looking for in drawers. We turned our minds to planting a garden with the sigh of relief of being deeply rooted in one spot. We envisioned gardening here for the remainder of our days. I decided, as part of the “big move” of the year I would empty all old seed containers – sort of as a symbolic gesture of starting anew from all we had accumulated before. It seemed fitting.

Every true gardener knows a garden begins the year before – and so it was with this garden. Last year was, in keeping with the general theme and tone, wet and cool deep into the summer months. It was the year of the clammy clay that stuck to boots, fingers and hair, the drizzly gray skies that circled over June and even stretched into July with their perpetual arc. The year in which only 6 of the 20 squash seeds I planted came up – and even those sort of petered out in the yucko weather.

I should say here that I save seeds. I simply cannot bring myself to throw away any living or potentially living thing. Or old tools, clothes or kitchen towels, for that matter. (This also explains the 23 tomato volunteers tenderly lifted and given their own spot in this year’s garden.) So these seeds I had planted were the cumulative collection of the innards of every kind of squash we had eaten the fall before.

I also usually don’t mark what I put where in the garden, enjoying the bit of mystery when the seedlings announce themselves. (There may be some laziness factor in there, too.) Anyway, of the squash seeds I had planted last year, I had no idea which were the duds and which might produce, maybe, given the right climatic conditions. They all deserved a chance, in my book. So, just to provide a sense of completion to all of the former year’s happenings, I scattered all the squash seeds throughout our new garden plot.

Imagine our joy when we first saw two little squash heads popping up to wave hello at us. And – the elation when 6 more raised their lovely bonnets. And then another four. And, another, and ---
It became my husband’s early morning delight to stroll through the garden beds and then announce to me at the breakfast table the latest victorious number. “Yup.”, he would grin triumphantly, slathering a dollop of butter on a piece of toast. “46”. And cackle.

Let me explain a bit more about my husband. He loves big. He’s a sucker for any seed packet that boasts some gargantuanly dimensioned cucurbit or other fruit. This explains the six pumpkin seeds we put in that will, if they live up to their forbears’ portentous reputation, be bearing 200 pound pumpkins at garden year’s end. This is the man who, when I first introduced him to the delights of gardening, wanted “big zucchini”. As we pored over the latest seed catalogue, with me extolling the virtues of first this, then that zucchini option, I had watched his face getting ever longer. Finally, I closed the magazine and asked what was wrong! His mournful answer? “But – I want a GIANT zucchini. All these descriptions say to pick them when they’re only 8 inches long.”

Ahem.

Back to our winter squash patch. They ALL came up. Really. Every single seed that went into the ground poked up as a little plant in its due time. So far, 86 winter squash, 7 zucchini and 3 of the giant pumpkin plants are up and dancing in the balmy spring air.

It’s too bad that every friend to whom I’ve related this story has their family vacation in fall this year. I think we ARE better characters - we certainly feel generous and would gladly share if they were only here!

www.maryannwallace.com

Using What You Have, Where You Are

Although this sharing is about a lovely recipe I created by using the produce I found in our own back yard here in Oregon in late spring, the principles apply to so many dimensions of life. My husband and I like to eat local, seasonal food because it is a healthy way to live. It supports our thesis that reducing trucking emissions is good for the planet and us all, and the food is often tastier and feels like “real food”. What’s not to like?

I’ll share the recipe for your pleasure, should your back yard be producing something similar.

Cress and Oregano Pesto

Grind in a blender:

3 cups of a mixture of garden cress, garlic scapes and oregano
½ cup olive oil
2 large cloves of garlic
roughly 2 T. butter
3-4 T. walnuts
½ cup Parmesan Cheese
½ t. salt

It’s that simple, and the premise is that you can use whatever you have for those 3 cups of green material. It is YUMMY good! Try some spread on a piece of toast, or – the usual – with pasta.
The moral? Use what you have, where you are. It’s good for us all.









www.maryannwallace.com