salad for lunch

Yesterday a friend came over for lunch.

I tucked into my standard lunch of tuna and toast and a cup of tea.

She said she wanted a salad.

“That’s not what you should be eating” she told me, pointing to my sandwich.

She sliced up tomatoes for her salad and said:  “This is what you should have.”

(Which I thought was interesting because I have noticed that people who habitually have salad for lunch generally struggle with body image)

My friend knows a lot about dieting.  She’s pretty much an expert.  Ask her about how many calories are in an egg, for example, and she’ll ask you fried or poached.

But I know something that she doesn’t know.

I know how to eat in a way that honours my body.

She has spent her life believing that salad is the answer and that dieting is the only way forward. And that her desire for food is the thing that she must conquer. And that she is a failure because she cannot conquer her desire.  And that if she tries harder, she will be successful.

She has another choice. She could let go.  She could stop trying and berating herself for failing.

She could stop believing in magazines that tell her how Jennifer Anniston achieves her bikini-body. 

She could tear down the eating-plan taped to the wall in her kitchen. 

She could stop trying the Dukan diet or the no carbs after 5 rule or the substantial protein for breakfast rule.

She could stop having salad for lunch and buying bags of sweets to eat in the car.

She could make life easy for herself.

She could live with ease in a world of alluring food.

She could eat only with dignity, and never with shame. 

She could accept that only she is responsible for what goes in her mouth.

She could have the pastry or not have the pastry, without a drama.

She could stop believing them, and start believing herself.

Breakfast

On Thursday afternoon, while running down the aisles for a quick food shop, I asked my daughter to choose the breakfast cereals. She was taking ages so I doubled back to see what the problem was. She couldn’t decide between Cookie Crisp (40% sugar) or Frosted Flakes (41% sugar) or a new one from Kellogg’s called Krave (30% sugar)

The boxes told the whole story. They looked yummy, fun and sugary. I told her another story. I said no.

There was a stand-off in the cereal aisle at Waitrose. As I was paying, I felt I had the right to the final choice. I choose Rice Crispies (10% sugar), Shreddies (14%) and Weetabix(4%)

The new guidelines by the US government want to limit cereals to 8gm of added sugar. (Froot Loops contains 12 grams of sugar a serving. That translates to 48% sugar)

I sympathise with my daughter. Sweeter is yummier. There is something about sugar that calls its sweet siren song. Just hearing the word fudge or chocolate is enough to make me want it.

Offer me a piece of cake or a slice of bread, offer my daughter chocolate spread or unsweetened peanut butter, offer my son ice-cream or vegetable soup, and you know which way the cookie’s going to crumble.

We want sweet before we even see any advertising. But it’s not good for us.

And it’s not good for our children.

I’m not asking for Kellogg’s to stop making Krave. I just want them to stop advertising it to my children. (In the USA the food industry spent nearly $2.3 billion to advertise to children.)

The huge advertising budgets of the food industry normalises unhealthy eating.  

There are no messages out there that say anything else in a language me and my daughter understand.   

There’s no fun TV commercial that says water is a better choice.

There’s no exciting on-line game for toast and peanut-butter.

There’s no beautifully illustrated billboard for oatmeal porridge.

And without messages that tell the other side of the story, it feels like I'm fighting a losing battle for what my children eat for breakfast.

Is there anyone out there on my side?

A free meal

I was in Cape Town last week and I saw an exhibition at the National Gallery by a photographer called Ernest Cole.

His pictures powerfully document the dehumanising effects of apartheid and the mining industry that funded it.

One picture particularly stopped me in my tracks.

The caption read:

“Kitchen helper dumps food on men’s plates with shovel. Diet is nyula, a vegetable mixture, and maize-meal porridge served twice a day”

 I don’t know what Nyula is.  I’ve never eaten it although I lived in South Africa until I was 23.

I grew up on a weird hybrid of Litvak Shtetl food, International Classics and Cape Malay dishes -
Spagetti Bolognaisse, sardines on toast, Tomato Bredie and Tzimmes.

It doesn’t really matter though. All food is basically just chains of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen.

What matters though is how we serve it and how we eat it.

It is dehumanising to have food dumped on your plate with a shovel.

Food prepared without care and slopped on a plate, feeds a sense that you are a person without value. 

This is food not eaten with a knife and fork, but with shackles.

And it makes me wonder about how food is served in prisons, schools, old-aged homes and institutions of all kinds. And what that says to the adults and children standing in-line, waiting their turn for their food.

I took comfort from another picture in the exhibition.  It was of three men sitting around preparing their own food. One is playing the guitar. There is no table or plates and probably no electricity either. 

The caption reads: “On Sundays many prefer to give the “pig’s food” a miss and will cook something themselves.  Whenever possible, the men go outside the compound to buy some extra food – corn meal, for instance – which they cook themselves”

It may still be just cornmeal, but these look like free men, and forty years later, in a black and white photograph it still shows.

Eight cruel truths about getting into shape

   

·         Dieting is cruel because diets don’t work and then you think it’s your fault.

·         The food industry is cruel because all they want is for you to buy more of 
their stuff so they make it easier for you to eat more food faster.

·         Scales are cruel because you are not good or bad depending on a number.

·         Magazines and television featuring too thin models are cruel 
because they stop you seeing your own beauty.

·         Diet Coke is cruel because water is better.

·         Snack shops are cruel because they tempt you with ice-creams, popcorn 
and muffins which spoil your appetite for supper.

·         Super-sized portions are cruel because no-one is going to stop 
eating halfway.

·         The way we live now is cruel because we don’t have enough time 
to cook properly and sit down at a table with plates and knives and forks 
and loved ones to enjoy food together.

The only way to get into shape is to decide to be kind to yourself 
moment by moment, 

starting with this moment.

Stuffed peppers

Ingredients

6 large red peppers

2 tablespoons olive oil

2 cups chopped onions

6 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley

3 garlic cloves crushed

3 cups cooked rice

1 tablespoons paprika

1 and a half teaspoons salt

1 tin chopped tomato

1 egg beaten

500 grams minced meat

Method

Chop of tops of peppers and put to side. Clean out insides and put 
peppers in large cooking dish.

Fry onions till soft, add, parsley and garlic.   

Add meat and cook till brown. Add cooked rice, paprika, salt tomatoes 
and egg. Stir. Cook for twenty minutes.

Scoop mixture into peppers and put extra mixture around the sides.

Put the lids on and put dish in a 200 degree oven for 20-30 minutes.

·      

How to get children to eat well.

Everything I know, I’ve learned from books.

Every meal I’ve eaten, I tasted first in words.

I’ve waited for breakfast with Wilbur in Charlotte’s Web (E.B. White): “Skim milk, crusts, middlings, bits of doughnuts, wheat cakes with drops of maple syrup sticking to them"

I’ve eaten dinner with Heidi (Johanna Spyri): “...hungrily beginning her bread, having first spread it with the cheese, which after being toasted was as soft as butter."

I’ve made candy with Laura and Mary in the Little House in the Big Woods. (Laura Ingalls Wilder):  " Pa and Ma showed them how to pour the dark syrup in little streams on to the snow.  These hardened at once and were candy. Laura and Mary might eat one piece each, but the rest were saved for Christmas Day.”

I’ve shared potato latkes with the family in Ten and a Kid. (Sadie Rose Weilerstein):

“...soon the first pancake was sizzling in the hot fat. It covered the whole bottom of the pan. The children stood by watching and sniffing, each with an earthenware plate in hand."

This is what I learned as a child from hours of reading about lives far away from mine:

• Sometimes you have to eat leftovers
• Bread and cheese and milk equals a meal
• You can't eat all your sweets in one go
• Hunger makes food taste better.
• There is not abundance for everyone.

That’s what I’ve tried to teach my children.

I cook whatever I think is delicious and serve it to them like they are the luckiest children in the world.  When they try something new and tell me they don’t want mushrooms or beetroot or lentils or whatever, I ignore them, giving them a tiny look of “are you joking me?” 

In the evening and in the morning, meal after meal, day after day, I show them what I know about food and eating. There is pleasure and conversation. There are rhythms and occasions. There are no short cuts.

Here is how I make potato latkes.

Ingredients:

1 kg potatoes

1 onion grated

2 eggs beaten

30 g flour

Salt and pepper

Sunflower oil for frying

Method:

Peel and grate potatoes. Squeeze out extra water.

Mix all ingredients together.

Heat oil one finger deep.

Drop dessertspoons of batter into oil.

Fry. Turn. Fry some more.

Drain on paper towel.

My favourite books years 0-4

When you’re pregnant with your first child, the list of things you think you need seem endless.  (And I’m not even getting to the second circle of madness, which includes things like a baby bath)

But the truth is, you don’t really need it all.

All you really need for your baby are your boobs and these 17 books.

Reading to your kids and breast feeding do more than just reduce clutter though.

They’re also both nourishing and most important of all, they’re both best done lying down.

These are the books I enjoyed reading over and over and over again:

*Where’s Spot - Eric Hill

*Dear Zoo - Rod Campbell

*The Very Hungry Caterpillar - Eric Carle

*One Fish, Two Fish - Dr Seuss,

*The Sneetches and other stories - Dr Seuss

*Fox in Socks - Dr Seuss

*The Cat in the Hat - Dr Seuss

*Are You My Mother – P. D. Eastman

*A Fish Out of Water – P. D. Eastman

*Go, Dog. Go! – P. D. Eastman

*We’re Going on a Bear Hunt - Michael Rosen and Helen Oxenbury

*Madeline - Ludwig Bemelmans

*Where the Wild Things Are - Maurice Sendack

*The Story of Barbar - Jean de Brunhoff

*Ant and Bee - Angela Banner

*Best Word Book Ever - Richard Scary

*Bread and Jam for Frances - Russel Hoban

Meat Roll

Ingredients: 

A roll of puff pastry

500 gm minced meat

Tin of chopped tomatoes

Small tin of tomato paste

Teaspoon sugar

Salt and pepper

Oregano

Chopped onion

Sunflower oil

One beaten egg

Method:

Fry onions in oil till brown, add mince and fry till brown, add tin of tomato paste and tin of chopped tomatoes. Add salt, pepper, sugar and oregano. Cook for 30 minutes.

Unroll puff pastry and roll it a bit flatter on floured surface. Cover with meat sauce. Roll up from one side. Brush with egg. Put in 200 degree oven for 20 minutes.

Serve with rice and peas and salad.

Worried that your daughter is overweight?

I have friends who worry their daughters are overweight.

But you know in that polite way friends have with each other – on some subjects, you can’t say what you’re really thinking.

So I see fruit and vegetable star charts.  

I see mothers taking their daughters to dieticians and paying for personal trainers and putting their daughters on “eating plans”

I listen to mothers transmitting all their years’ of accumulated expertise in dieting to the next generation.  

Ultimately, I hear about daughters crying in their rooms, because they think they’re fat.

And this is what I want to say:

Stop worrying and start cooking.

Show your daughter the delights of food transformed by fire and knife.

Create daily occasions of coming together around the shared pleasure of a good meal.

Don’t make children’s food that you wouldn’t touch yourself like fish-fingers, boiled veggie sausages, or pasta and ketchup.

Give your food every advantage and cook with butter, olive oil, sunflower oil, salt,  sugar, fresh herbs, ginger, spices, garlic, lemon, vinegars, chicken stock, vegetable stock, toasted sesame seeds, capers and anchovies (although not all at the same time). 

Show them that food is wonderful and not forbidden.

Show them that our appetites are good and not shameful.

Teach them to eat at the table.

Throw away the scales, and don’t talk about diets or have diet books in the house.

Instead tell your daughters that their bodies are gorgeous and strong and capable.

Tell them how beautiful they are.  Because they are. And you are too.

Then tell them to lay the table because supper is ready.

Limor’s turkey drumstick casserole

This is the best way I know to cook turkey drumsticks. It is truly delicious, plus thrifty. One drumstick has enough meat for two hungry people.

Sprinkle paprika on drumsticks and roast for an hour each side in 200c oven.

Shred meat from the bone then add meat to mix of balsamic vinegar, Worcester sauce, soya sauce, teriyaki sauce, lemon juice, olive oil and honey.  Cook for another hour and a half with sweet potato cubes and chopped carrots that you’ve peeled and pre-nuked for 5 minutes. Serve with rice.