Yesterday was Cereal Boy’s birthday. 10 years old!  His favorite breakfast is pancakes.   This time I used my Homemade pancake mix, but added some extra grains to make multi-grain pancakes.  I replaced 1/2 cup of the mix, with 1/2 cup of a variety of grains. I used oats, corn meal, and the 7 grain hot cereal I still have lot’s of.  You can also use, cracked wheat, flax, wheat germ, or any leftover grains you may have in your cupboard.  I also replaced 1 TBL of the oil, for 1 TBL of blueberries puree’d.   They’ll go for fake blueberries in fake mixes, but real blueberries they tend to pull out.  So I puree’d them instead, and we had purple pancakes, but no chunks.

The verdict:  SUCCESS.  They each had several before they left for school on a full stomach.

Challenge of the day: Toss out any breakfast food that contains artificial food coloring (including Froot Loops, Emily..love ya!) Recent studies show kids under ten displayed an increase in hyperactivity after consuming foods with Red No. 40 and tartrazine (yellow no. 5).  What a horrible way to start the day.  Check your labels in cereals and yogurt for these offenders.  Your child’s teacher will be glad you don’t send them to school after eating this.

In my adventure to make half of each meal fruits and vegetables, and get away from making meat the central part of dinner, I knew I needed the kids to be involved in planning meals.  Although when I asked the flip-flopper to help me plan a menu, she assumed we were going to make a menu for the family to choose from at each meal (much like a restaraunt).  She immediately began scouring the cookbooks and creating an actual menu.  Then she told the boys we were going to start having choices at dinnertime. 

Good thing I was listening to them talk to eachother.  “WOAHHH!!! Slow down, flip-flopper.  I didn’t mean a menu of choices for each meal.  I mean, let’s make a list of meals you like, and we’ll assign each meal a day during the month.  Not all in one night.” 

Anyway, she ear marked a cabbage salad she thought looked good.  And boy was it GOOD!  We changed it up a bit, and came up with this recipe.  The dressing was some greek yogurt (thanks to Kristi for introducing us), brown sugar, and vanilla.  The flip-flopper thought it tasted almost like caramel apples.  Cereal boy liked it, and ketchup boy accidently let his ketchup touch his apples, and then wouldn’t eat it.  When I make this again, I’ll use more cabbage. The shredded cabbage clinged to the apple’s so well, you almost didn’t realize it was there.  Definitely a repeat!

Today’s product to review was sent to me by the makers of Chysalis Cookies.  You all know about my love affair with cookies! I LOVE cookies. 

Every time I take my kids to the grocery store they always ask if they can get a donut from the bakery.  EVERY TIME!! I usually say no, but they still try.  Well, imagine your grocery store with cookies that were dairy free, low in sugar, no transfats, no preservatives, no artificial flavors or colors, and they tasted GREAT.  That would be Chrysalis cookies.  We tried each of their 5 cookies, and liked them all.  My favorite was Chewy Cranberry Oatmeal.

Of course, I can’t do a review without reviewing the price as well.  So, I got details from the company themselves.  It would be most cost effective if your grocery store carried these cookies rather than order them online.  “The stores are selling the cookies baked in 6-packs for $3.99.  That comes out to .67 per cookie and is the best value.  People could certainly direct stores to the website.  To make things easy, there is actually a letter to print off the website requesting their bakery department to carry the cookies.”  .67 per cookie is actually cheaper than my store sells donuts for and of course much healthier!  It would be nice to be at my regular grocery store and have this option.  So visit the website and tell your local bakery in your grocery store that you want more healthy options.  Or just buy some online!

Ketchup boy hasn’t cared for canned, or frozen green beans for that matter.  But we found out Wednesday night, that he loves them fresh!  I cut the ends off of some green beans (that we found at Sunflower Market for 0.77 lb). I boiled them for three minutes, and sprinkled some olive oil and salt on them.  He almost ate the whole bowl himself. No ketchup even.  It did help that my kids were pretty hungry.  That always makes food taste better.

On a side note, Jamie (a fellow reader) suggested adding 9 grain cereal (or other hot cereals) to your bread recipe.  This is such a great idea. I buy the Bob’s Red Mill Cereals with intentions of having a healthy hot cereal for breakfast, but then I never get around to using them.  I have two different bags in the fridge.  So I took a cup out and added it to my bread recipe for bread to go along with our green beans and spaghetti.  It turned out great! It looks professional and tasted like it came from some sort of special healthy bakery.  Thanks for the idea Jamie!!

Green smoothies don’t have to actually be green. I’m gradually adding more and more leafy greens to our smoothies for a nutrient packed start to the day.  An advantage to blending up your greens, is that it makes it more readily available for our bodies to absorb all the nutrients.  If your kids are guilty of not chewing their food thouroughly enough, they may only be absorbing about 20% of the nutrients in the food they are eating.

When Cereal boy was maybe two years old, we did not know he wasn’t chewing his food very well. It wasn’t until my husband and I were walking through a parking lot with him in tow and he threw up in the middle of the parking lot. And you know what we saw…. Entire pieces of macaroni and cheese!  Not one had even a bite into it.  He was swallowing his lunch whole without chewing any of it.

Back to smoothies, sorry if I ruined your appetite.  Adding spinach to our morning smoothie has not changed the taste at all!  I haven’t shown the kids that I’m putting spinach into the smoothies yet… but I plan to soon.  I’ve been making my own that way, and I feel great about getting some extra nutrients.

I add soy milk, frozen strawberries, frozen blueberries, and about 10 baby leaves of spinach. That’s not enough, but even I’m working my way up.

I know I don’t have enough posts about getting active with your family, and it’s because I feel like all we ever do is hike together. But in my defense, it’s because we live in the mountains of Utah, so we must take advantage. 

We took a two mile hike round trip to Stewart Falls above Sundance. The leaves are changing and it is beautiful.  We took a few leaves for an art project for later.  The kids did great with one draw back. We let them take their CamelBak’s for water.  This has proven a huge mistake. Both Ketchup boy and the flip flopper had to pee 4 times in an hour and a half!!!  After the fourth time my husband said to ketchup boy, “You are not to drink any more until we are back at the car!”  A minute later, he’s got the Camelbak hose in his mouth again! Finally my husband took it away from him. Luckily they can pee anywhere, but it just slows us down.

I need more get active ideas.  Anyone? What does your family do?

Guess how much I paid for some organic, sugar-free, low-salt tomato sauce?  Free-ninety-nine.  Let me explain.  We have two tomato plants that are producing more tomatoes than we have time to eat.  So Saturday, I had Ketchup boy find me all the tomatoes that were really red. About 10 in all.  I dunked them in boiling water.  As soon as the peels began to crack I plunged them in icy water.  Pulled the peels off, chopped and pureed in my mini food processor ($24 at Costco). This would have been much quicker if I had a large food processor.  Once pureed I poured all the tomatoe sauce into a crock pot and added seasonings and shredded carrotts. I can add more vegetables when I’m ready to use the sauce.  Then after it was thick and delicious, I bagged it into one cup portions to freeze for later.

The Pro’s: 

• Super good! It tasted so fresh and so good, and a great way to get vegetables.
• Did I mention, IT was FREE!!!
• It didn’t take much time.  Really! This is  a great weekend activity and much faster than canning. If you can tomatoes only to use it on pizza or spaghetti, skip the canning process and go straight for the sauce.  It freezes well.
• It was so much thicker than the store bought kind.
• So Healthy!!  Like I said, organic, low-salt, full of veggies.
• I’m ready for Whole Wheat pizza night at a moment’s notice.

The Con’s

• Tomato sauce is cheap anyway (the plain 8 oz can kind).  On sale I get it for $0.33 a can, and I can get no salt, no sugar for that price. And for ten tomatoes I only got 2 1/2 cups of sauce after it simmered down.
• It was messy.  (especially when you let the kids help).
• It burned the side of my crock pot.  But somehow I let everything burn the side of the crock pot.
• It used precious freezer bags which I’m running out of quickly, with no sale in sight.

Bottom line; if you have a tomato plant or someone has given you tomatoes, this is a great weekend activity and you can have some ultra healthy tomato sauce in your food storage.  If you have to buy tomatoes to do this, I would just stick with some canned tomatoe sauce, add a fresh tomato or two, some seasonings and other veggies and let simmer.

Not literally, but none of you are losers!  But, since I only have 1 lb of apricots, I could only choose one of you.  And to be fair, I finally used random.org so Emily can stop accusing me of playing favorites.   I loved your comments.  Thanks SPC for the link.  Thanks Karla for the recipe idea.  Thanks Mary for teaching me the acronym S.A.D.  I hadn’t heard of it, so googled it.  Standard American Diet! I love it.   And Kristin, your comment went to my spam comments AGAIN!!! The forces of evil are working against us.

But, without further ado, random.org chose Brenna’s comment.  We just tried the dried mango at Costco yesterday. My boy….the difficult eater one, loved it! We’ve tried banana chips, dried apricots, dried pineapple and of course raisins, but so far dried mango was the best!

Thanks everyone for playing!  If you aren’t already reading cakewrecks, you must check out this post! It’s shocking what people will eat.

Dried fruit is such a great, portable food to have around.  We have dried fruit for snacking, for road trips, lunches, hiking, etc.  I’ve tried to make my own cause it will get so pricey.  But, I have never been able to make dried apricots as tasty and as tender and chewy as the store. Mine always turn out so tough you need shark teeth to get through it. And somehow it loses it’s flavor.  At my regular grocery store dried apricots are 9.29 per lb. That is why they normally sell them only a few ounces at a time.

So, last week, Oh! Nuts asked if they could send me some nuts and dried fruit to try and review!  I first was concerned about the price.  I can’t in good conscious recommend expensive food.  And Oh! Nuts is well priced! For their apricots; 4.99 per pound (but less if you buy 5 lbs or more).  They were HALF as much as my regular store.  The almonds, 5.99 (which is less than Macey’s, and only slightly more than my health food store or Costco). So if you don’t have a health food store, this is a good way to go. ) They sent us 1 lb each of dried apricots, dried mangoes (we LOVE DRIED MANGOES!!!), cashews, and almonds.  My husband took the almonds to snack on at work.  The flip flopper almost finished off the dried mangoes single handedly, I’m working on the cashews (as a snack, and made cashew chicken last night), and I’m giving away the apricots (which is a huge sacrafice for us)!  Everything we have tried has been absolutely, quality, delicious.  Plus they have hard to find dried fruit like dried kiwi, dried blueberries, cherries, dried cantaloupe, dried nectarines, pears, etc. 

Leave a comment today, and tonight I’ll pick a winner.  Thanks Oh! Nuts. Check out their website for store locations (only in NY) and for prices.

If you noticed on my shopping list from Friday, I bought 4 loaves of bread.  I do prefer baking bread, and wanted to put up this post to share the recipe I use most often, courtesy of Lisa.  The problem I have with baking bread however, is we don’t eat it twice as fast.  We eat it 20 times as fast.  Slice after slice, straight from the oven. We can’t stop. Store bought bread on the other hand lasts through sandwiches, toast, and the occasional morning of french toast when I feel like cooking breakfast.

I was just reading through some old posts though and found a story from January that I forgot about.

Funny Story: I  do have a friend who is attempting the leap to whole wheat.  Her five year old refused toast this morning when she offered the whole wheat version.  He claimed he had just eaten breakfast, a muffin and a yogurt.  Upon further investigation she found out his “muffin” was actually a cupcake, and his “yogurt” was in fact a pudding!  Ha, ha.  I thought this was hilarious.

If you haven’t already made the switch from white to whole wheat bread, there is no reason to wait.  I believe this is one of the easiest changes to make.  My kids have always eaten whole wheat bread so it’s never been an issue in our home.  One day however I decided to buy some white bread, and ketchup boy refused to try it.  He said, “I only like the brown kind of bread.”  I was surprised he liked wheat bread so well. I didn’t realize we had never bought white.  However, they are still hesitant to try any multi grain type whole grain bread.  You know, the kind with seeds and nuts.  The flip flopper literally tried to pick out every single nut and seed, leaving the slice of bread a big holey mess. So I guess my tip of the day would have to be, start with smooth whole wheat bread and look for one high in fiber.