Even though it’s back to school time, it’s still fairly warm where I live (although we did have a hailstorm last Saturday, which is par for the course for crazy Utah weather). Here’s a fun, easy after-school snack to help kids cool off until the chilly fall weather settles in. It just uses two simple ingredients: freshly-squeezed orange juice and cream. You take 1 cup of juice, add 2 T of cream, mix, and pour into your popsicle molds. I got this from the The Healthy Home Economist. Here she is showing how to do it:
If you want a fancier recipe, here’s one that is much richer since it uses egg yolks, cream and milk. Enjoy!
I am so excited for my baby sister! She just gave birth to her baby, a GIRL! I was hoping it was a girl. She knew the gender but is so good at keeping secrets she didn’t tell anyone. This is her sixth baby! And she gave birth naturally! Woo-hoo! I got to go see new Little Miss B and hold her! There is nothing like new babies to give me a sense of wonder and belief in God and his power to create life.
I think she has the Simkins’ nose. The Simkins are an ancestral line on my mom’s side. My sisters and I and my girl cousins all have it. One time my sister was touring the Mormon Battalion visitors’ center in San Diego and a strange lady came up to her and asked her if she was related to (my mom’s name). She said she knew it because of my sister’s Simkins’ nose!
Last week was busy for our family: a birthday for my baby, Little Miss B’s b-day the next day, a wedding for my cousin, then a trip to St. George and back for a mission farewell for our nephew/cousin.
I was thrilled and full of wonder after this family-centered weekend when I found out that another new baby has been born, a baby who defied the odds given by doctors. She was born to Representative Jaime Beutler of Washington. Doctors diagnosed that the baby had Potter’s Syndrome and said the baby would not live after birth and the mom should abort the baby. Jaime and her husband refused to do this and with faith in God they proceeded with the pregnancy and birth. The baby lived, being the the first known baby to be born alive with Potter’s Syndrome. I love hearing stories about moms who trust their heart and fight for the life of their baby. This is a testimony of how God can work through parents to bring about life even when the doctors say it won’t happen.
Today’s recipe for Healthy Lunches for Kids, part 3 is homemade beef jerky. We took my homemade jerky on our road trip last Sunday to our nephew/cousin’s mission farewell and it was so yummy! This portable snack of protein with fat keeps moods stable. You can make it in a food dehydrator or in your oven at the lowest setting. It’s a great alternative to a sandwich for a packed lunch. Combine it with some crunchy veggies and dip and a beverage and you have a terrific lunch on the go.
Here is the recipe from Cara at healthhomeandhappiness.com. We also took this jerky on our trip to Arizona earlier this month. It’s partly what kept us so happy when we got our flat tire in the middle of nowhere and had to wait two hours for a tow truck.
You might ask, why not just use store-bought jerky? I have yet to find commercial jerky that doesn’t have artificial colors or flavors, or corn syrup. In Arizona I looked at least 6 bags of jerky at the health food store and every single one had one of those things. Beware of the term “natural flavor.” It means MSG. Here is a web site with links to resources where you can learn more about MSG and its dangers.The site has a link to a Kindle book of a man who lost his life to MSG. It’s so sad! Learn to be a label-reader so you can protect you and your loved ones! Nobody cares about you and them as much as you do.
Today’s tip for feeding a healthy lunch for your kids is to give them some raw veggies that are crisp and colorful with plenty of dip to make those veggies zip with flavor. Think bite-sized: cherry tomatoes, sugar snap peas, baby carrots, cucumber chunks. Put the veggies and dip each in a small separate compartment for easy portability if you pack the lunch. For the bento box effect, maybe put the veggies in a colorful cupcake liner and cut them out in fun shapes with mini-cookie cutters. Or you can learn to cut them with a knife like the carrot flowers in the second video on this other blog post I did here.
And for heaven’s sake, don’t worry about making the dip low-fat. Whole fat is what we all need, as it keeps moods stable and makes the vitamins and minerals in the veggies more assimilated by the body. Leaving fat off of veggies, or overcooking veggies is what gives veggies a bad name. We have all been sold a lie that low-fat or zero fat is best, when in fact, it makes us sicker and lines the pocketbooks of the low-fat and zero fat food manufacturers. I encourage you to experiment with this. One day, give your kids a lunch with veggies and no fat to go with it, another day give them veggies with lots of whole fat. See which day they eat more of the veggies. I think you will also find that the fat also makes them happy, less prone to meltdowns and anger.
Here is my favorite WHOLE FAT dip for veggies, homemade ranch dressing. I got this recipe from my beautiful friend Tara, who actually got it from her beautiful daughter, who made it up. And why would you want to do homemade ranch dressing? Because the store-bought stuff is laced with highly processed oils like soybean and canola oil that is not fit for human consumption. Your body can not digest it. You can also find hard-to-pronounce ingredients on the label of a typical ranch dressing in the store. That’s a big flag that the ingredient was made in a factory, not in nature. To quote a wise mom, “If it takes a laboratory to make it, it takes a laboratory to digest it.” It’s my personal belief that our bodies don’t know what to do with the laboratory/factory made stuff, so it just stores the stuff away and that stored, undigested stuff can eventually turn to cancer.
Homemade Ranch Dressing
1 pint jar 1 cup Daisy sour cream 1/2 cup cultured buttermilk 1/2 tsp Real Salt 1/2 tsp onion powder 1/2 tsp dried dill a bit less than 1/2 tsp garlic powder 1/16 tsp ground celery seed (just fill your 1/8 spoon half way)
Mix all the ingredients in the pint jar and enjoy! Keep refrigerated. Tara says, “I have no idea how long this lasts in the fridge as we eat it up too fast to tell!”
For a nice thick dip, omit the buttermilk and use 1 and 1/2 cups of sour cream.
If you do decide to make it thicker so it’s a dip instead of a dressing, here is a fun trick you can do. Did you know you can use a Mason jar instead of your blender jar on your blender base? That way you can mix the dip right in the Mason jar and then store it in your fridge without scraping it out into a storage container. Because the container is glass, it’s easy to see what’s in the container so you don’t have to label it.
If you pack the dip for your child for lunch, be sure to pack an ice pack with it to keep the dip cold.
Just screw the blender base right onto the top of the Mason jar. Make sure you have the rubber gasket and turn it real tight. Then turn it upside down and put it on your blender jar. Blend it up, and then you can take off the blender base and put on a regular Mason jar lid. I learned this tip from Cara at the Health Home Happy blog.
It’s a great web site/blog for learning about tasty GAPS-based recipes.
Today’s Naturally Healthy Cooking Class was on Healthy Lunches and After-school Snacks. I have oodles of recipes and ideas in a handout to post on the blog, but before I do, I thought I would do one blog post a day for a week with a picture and tip from the class on each day. The above video shows the celebrity chef Jamie Oliver touring a school and discovering that some parents definitely need some inspiration and help as to what to pack for their kids lunches.
Here’s a mom who knows what she’s doing. Watch her show you three ideas for packing quick, easy, non-junky lunches:
In the class today we talked about the Japanese art of bento box lunches. These lunches are a work of art. The idea is to make everything pretty, colorful, yummy, bite-sized, and easy to eat, using lots of little compartments and fun shapes, which fit into a bento box. That way the food looks small, tempting, not overwhelming, easy to eat, and organized. You can get little cookie-cutters to cut up vegetables and fruit to make fun shapes or molds to shape eggs and cute little grabbers to pick up the food. Here’s a video about it. I am not sure moms will want to feel like, “oh, no, now I have to make a packed lunch into a work of art!?! On top of making it healthy too so Jamie Oliver approves?” Just look at this as an opportunity to show kids how to make their own lunches that are healthy and fun to eat. They might be more likely to help make the food if they can use these fun tools. Here’s an American mom fluent in Japanese who shows you ideas and recipes on her blog here. You can also get some fun recipes for lunches at Grain Free Lunchbox if you order the ebook.
Here’s a recipe for whole wheat pancakes that are light, thin, and very digestible because they use natural yeast. They look like white flour pancakes! They don’t taste like them, though, because they are sourdough. Sourdough comes from natural yeast. The natural yeast makes the phytic acid in the whole wheat completely digestible so all the minerals are bioavailable. I got the recipe from The Bread Geek, Melissa Richardson, over here. She calls it a waffle recipe but I have found that it works great for pancakes too. I used the recipe to make the pancakes in these two pictures. For me, it works better for pancakes. My pancakes are thin and soft, whereas when I make the recipe into waffles, the waffles are hard and crunchy, and my nice family doesn’t complain much, but I can tell they don’t like sawing through the waffles. I’ll keep experimenting with the waffle iron, I must be cooking them too long.
Here’s a recipe for homemade “maple” tasting syrup. So now you just have to remember to keep buttermilk and sucanat on hand instead of maple syrup. I love maple syrup, it’s totally a real, whole food, but sometimes we run out and I haven’t bought any more and I want some kind of homemade syrup without using corn syrup. I got this recipe from my friend Tara. It’s so yummy!
Yummy Buttermilk Syrup
½ cup Butter
1 cup Sucanat
½ cup Buttermilk
1 Tbs. Molasses (optional)
1 tsp. Baking soda
1 tsp. Vanilla
Mix first four ingredients in a saucepan. Bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer for 2-3 minutes. Remove from heat. Add baking soda and vanilla. Stir and serve.
Naturally Healthy Cooking Class about Lunches and After-school Snacks for Kids!
If you are like me, what to have for lunch besides PB & J or last-nights’ dinner leftovers can be downright stumpifying.. That’s just for feeding my kids at home for an at-home homeschooling day. Then if you ask me to do something portable to take to our weekly homeschool group away from home, you have me doubly stumped. I haven’t been big on snacks at all beyond a piece of fruit.
No more friends, no more! Come learn some secrets about making healthful lunches that will make your kids the envy of all their friends and will even make them want to prepare and pack their own lunches!
Saturday Morning August 24
Farmington UT
10 AM
call or text 801-628-8753 or comment below for the address
I got roped in to loaning my 12 seater van recently. The loan also included loaning myself as the driver to take a group of youth from our Commonwealth School to Cedar City for the Shakespeare Festival. That’s a four-hour drive each way. Every year our Shakespeare Conquest group goes down. After watching my three oldest children each take their turn for two or three years in a row for each of them to go, without me, it was finally my turn! I got to continue this family tradition with my third oldest, because he was stage crew for the Shakespeare class. My two oldest went together four years ago for their last time and brought home gifts for all of us, including their newly born baby brother. They included darling socks with something written about the festival on them. That’s a sweet memory!
My older children are built-in babysitters and my baby is almost four years old so I am at the point where I can do this kind of thing with just a few days warning. I used to be buried in babies and breastfeeding and could not get away like this. The school paid for my gas and my tickets for two plays! We did a CRAZY thing and went up and back within 24 hours. Yes, I didn’t go to bed until 4 AM this morning, because the second play didn’t end until 10:30 PM and we didn’t leave until 11 PM. I got to ride with my friend Aneladee and we talked the whole fours hours down and the whole four hours back. FUN! Doing it this way made the planning a lot easier. We each brought sack lunches and then spent money on one dinner out and didn’t have to stress about lodging. It was nostalgic to visit the Pastry Pub on Center Street in Cedar, which is where I ate dinner five years ago while attending a TJEd conference. I was sad to see the vacant lot next door, where Classic Books bookstore used to be before its building burned down.
The first play was Love’s Labor’s Lost. Oooh, the girls in the play had such gorgeous costumes and hair. Aneladee and I were drooling over the main female lead’s blue gown with the slightly longish train. Here are some of my favorite lines from the play:
“As sweet and musical As bright Apollo’s lute, strung with his hair; And when Love speaks, the voice of all the gods Makes heaven drowsy with the harmony.”
“From women’s eyes this doctrine I derive: They sparkle still the right Promethean fire; They are the books, the arts, the academes, That show, contain and nourish all the world.”
Such is the power we have ladies!
For the evening play we watched Peter and the Starcatcher. This play is based on the book by Dave Barry. So of course, it was wickedly funny. Some of you youngsters probably don’t know who Dave Barry is. He wrote a funny column for the Miami Herald that got syndicated. He is so popular that his books sold well and he got a TV sitcom based on his column. He’s also rather crude and uses tons of hyperbole, so I stopped reading his column.
I didn’t enjoy the cross-dressing mermaid scene in the play AT ALL, the frequent vulgarities, and the taking of the Lord’s name in vain. But the good news is I do feel this play gave me a huge insight and increased my testimony of Jesus Christ.
The play is Dave Barry’s answer as to where Peter Pan, Captain Hook, Wendy, and Tinkerbell all come from. Just in case you have always wanted to know. I don’t know if the book has all the negative stuff that the play has, and wikipedia claims that Mr. Barry is an atheist. So it’s rather amazing that this play had the power over me that it did because it has a huge Christian insight.
Here’s why:
In the play, Molly, a teenage girl, and the Boy, who later gets christened by a pirate as Peter, have a running debate about what a leader is. Molly says you are a Leader if you save someone’s life. The boy says a Leader is someone who fulfills his mission. The play involves scenes when these characters have to show their allegiance to these beliefs. Molly had a mission, co-missioned (get it?) by her dad, to get the treasure chest he gave her safely through the sea and back to him. She ends up sacrificing the mission to save a life, because she gives up the chest to the pirates to get Peter back. Then later in the story, Peter sacrifices to free her from the pirates. So she put out good karma and got it back.
I have been thinking about this ever since. Fulfill your mission, or save a life. Does leadership always boil down to an either/or? Does it have to be a choice? Can’t we do both? Aneladee and I discussed it on the drive home and she rephrased it as “truth” (the mission, or being true to what you were originally told to do) vs. “doing what’s right in that moment” (saving a life).
After I caught some much needed shuteye, It hit me this morning that Christ did both! He was the perfect Leader! He did both of these things at the same time. In fact, his mission came from his father, just like in the play, and his mission was to save lives. What greater example is there? He is a double leader, fulfilling both Molly’s and Peter’s standard. I feel the Spirit as I think about it and feel my heart swell. He led the way, and I like to think we can follow Him and do both at the same time too, in our small and simple ways.
We went to Arizona a few weeks ago for a family reunion. In the middle of nowhere, between Wickiup and Wickenburg, we got a nasty flat tire. See the actual picture above. No problem though, my wonderful husband put on a spare. Then the spare went flat. The one time we really needed to be able to count on our cell phones, we couldn’t use them because we had no cell phone service. We had to flag someone down and use someone else’s phone who had Verizon because that service was available where we were.
We called AAA and ended up getting towed to Wickenburg to the closest tire shop. They were closed, so we had to call a taxi service to drive us to a local motel for the night. Then the next day the taxi service came and picked up my husband and he rode to the tire shop to get two new tires. Then we were back in business and happily drove to join the rest of our extended family in Phoenix.
The remarkable thing was, that even though we had to wait several hours in the hot Arizona sun, nobody got mad or whiny. I like to think it’s because I had packed food for the road trip that had fat it it. I had made homemade beef jerky with the yummy recipe found here, cheese cubes, and boiled eggs. We also had some pistachio nuts and some carbs like baby carrots and sugar snap peas. Fats really do make you happy, even when you get a flat tire in 100 plus degree weather!
Hooray for big families! Here’s something you won’t hear from the typical mainstream media about how to be more healthy. It’s not, drink less alcohol, don’t go drunk driving, say no to drugs, get vaccinated, eat less cholesterol, read Deepak Chopra, go meditate, or even to recycle…, it’s (drumroll, please….):
FWI recently shared this earth-shattering news in the most recent newsletter, with two news stories, one from Germany, one from Canada.
Here is the word from their latest newsletter, written by president Sharon Slater:
This past week two interesting articles highlighting new statistics and studies on family structure came out; one from the World Congress of Families regarding the health benefits of large families and the other on the front page of the New York Times about the serious problems Germany is facing due to shrinking families.
I come from a family of 14 children. My mom bore nine children, and then my parents adopted five more as teenagers. My parents now have over 72 grandchildren (at last count). They also took in many foster children—mostly teenagers.
My husband Greg and I have seven children, three which we adopted from Mozambique as has been reported before in the Family Watch. No grandchildren yet, but we are looking forward to that phase with great eagerness.
I guess you could say we have done our part in multiplying and replenishing the earth.
So would social science data tell us this is a good thing or a bad thing? Are we a drain on the economy and the world’s resources?
According to the New York Times article, Germany Fights Population Drop, Germany’s most recent census shows that they have lost 1.5 million inhabitants and that “by 2060, experts say, the country could shrink by an additional 19 percent, to about 66 million.
Germany is a stark example of what is happening across Europe where fertility rates have significantly declined. The article explains that this problem “has frightening implications for the economy and the psyche of the Continent.” It then highlights a city where many houses remain vacant and unsold, schools are being shut down, and one mayor has already “supervised the demolition of 60 houses and 12 apartment blocs.”
In short, Germany is heading toward economic and social disaster unless they can get women to bear more children or more immigrants to come in and fuel their economies. They have been failing on both accounts.
Yet at the UN conferences we participate in, Germany, along with other aging and shrinking European countries aggressively pressures developing countries into drastically limiting their populations and to make abortion an international right for women.
The New York Times article also presents this bleak statement, “Demographers say a similar future awaits other European countries, and the issue grows more pressing every day as Europe’s seemingly endless economic troubles accelerate the decline. But bogged down with failed banks and dwindling budgets, few are in any position to do anything about it.”
If the authors of the New York Times article were less politically correct they might have come right out and said that larger families are the solution to much of Europe’s problems.
On the other hand, the World Congress of Families, in their Natural Family News and Research publication, Thursday, August 15, 2013 highlighted new research from Canada showing some of the benefits of larger families, not to the economy, but for health. The Canadian researchers, “not only confirmed that children are healthier when living with both parents but also established that these children are usually freer from illness when living in a home with a large number of siblings.” The newsletter also highlighted another study showing that children with more siblings are less likely to divorce as adults.
Pro-family Europeans are working hard to reverse the negative trend of shrinking families in Europe. I am honored to have been asked to speak in September at a conference in Hungary sponsored by The National Association of Large Families (Hungary), which is organizing the General Assembly meeting of the European Large Families Confederation in 2013.
I am excited to participate in this important event to support the pro-family movement in Europe.
I am also honored that we have been invited to screen our documentary, “Cultural Imperialism: The Sexual Rights Agenda,” at the upcoming, first ever Black Conservatives Summit to be held in St. Charles, Illinois Sept 29-31. The main organizer, Dr. Wallace, was so impressed that he told me he has given up his speaking slot in order to be able to show our documentary in a plenary session. He feels it is that important that American black leaders understand what it exposes, and he is right. I am looking forward to this conference as well, which is a World Congress of Families event. If you have not yet viewed “Cultural Imperialism,” I encourage you to do so and to share it with others.
Sincerely, Sharon Slater President Family Watch International
Thank you Sharon for this wonderful news! Here is more from the Duggars. Every time I watch their show, I want to go live with them. Their life looks so wholesome and happy! Let’s do all we can to support big families, small families, and every family of any size. Families are the environment to save, big or small. Big families are not the enemy to the earth’s health or people’s health. When you have a big family, you are much less lonely, you have more fun, and your mental health and physical heatlh are better. I encourage you all to listen to the talk Joyce Kinmont gave at my Tree of Life Mothering conference 4 years ago. She shares her perspective about the blessings of having lots of children, it’s found here.
If you think that having a big family is too hard, please know there is lots of help from God, angels, the Weston Price diet for pregnant and nursing moms, and other people out there to make it look easy. This is my favorite book on the nitty-gritty logistics of running a large family, endorsed by Michelle Duggar. It’s at my local public library, it’s probably at yours! If it’s not, request that the librarians buy a copy!
Tree of Life Mothering 