Category: food

Sesame Street Rolls out Food for Thought: Eating Well on a Budget

by Jen Rabulan-Bertram

‘Tis the season for  joy, giving, graciousness…and eating well.  And by eating well, I mean making healthier choices, and helping others make healthier choices, too.

To further underscore the importance of healthier eating among families, Sesame Workshop announced that they’ve partnered with UnitedHealthcare and The Merck Company Foundation, to roll-out  a new outreach program, Food for Thought: Eating Well on a Budget.

At the Capital Food Bank in Washington, DC, celebrity chef and author, Art Smith, joins Elmo in a healthy and affordable cooking demo during the unveiling of Food for Thought: Eating Well on a Budget. Photo credit: Gil Vaknin/Sesame Workshop

Food for Thought: Eating Well on a Budget, part of the company’s on-going Healthy Habits for Life initiative, is a free bi-lingual (English-Spanish) multimedia outreach program designed to help support families who have children between the ages of two and eight, cope with uncertain or limited access to affordable and nutritious food.

According to Sesame Workshop, Seventeen million American children—nearly one in four—are food insecure, meaning they do not receive food that meets basic nutritional needs due to financial instability.  Of these children, more than half (9.6 million) are under the age of six, which is all the more reason to help spread this message.
As the country’s economic status continues to take its toll, the number of young children confronting food insecurity continues to increase, as do the subsequent effects on children’s health, school performance, growth, and development, Sesame Workshop said.

As part of this outreach program, 400,000 Food for Thought resource kits will be distributed through UnitedHealthcare, The Merck Foundation and other key organizations including National WIC association, Feeding America, Head Start, Meals on Wheels and other key organizations. The initiative will also include two public service messages promoting trying new foods.

I hope to do my part by continuing to share healthier eating and snacking ideas for kids, including ways to eat well on a budget.

White House to Bring Salad Bars to 5,000 Schools

by Jen Rabulan-Bertram

According to Grist.org, the White House is expecting to announce an initiative that will bring salad bars to 5,000 public schools nationwide.  Underscoring Mrs. Obama’s LetsMove.org campaign for making healthier choices, this salad bar concept is sure to mix things up.

salad bar

 

One potential obstacle to the program is the refusal of many school districts to install salad bars for food-safety reasons and because of cumbersome USDA rules governing the federally subsidized school lunch program that feeds some 31 million U.S. school children every day.

With cost, food-safety and the way some kids are conditioned to feel about veggies, I have no doubt the salad bar concept in schools will bring as much criticism as it will bring praise.  I loved reading that Whole Foods partnered with a coalition that teamed with the produce industry to raise  $1.4 million from customers to establish a grant program that would place salad bars in qualifying schools.

One important statistic I found while researching this topic: according to a UCLA study done in 2007, elementary schools can significantly increase the frequency of fruit and vegetable consumption among low-income students by providing a lunch salad bar.

Now, that’s food for thought.

I appreciate the idea to bring more salads to kids, but can it be executed in a way that works all around?  Again, the actual announcement isn’t expected until Monday, but I’ll be watching for the official news.

Snack Nation: Package Your Own Healthy Snacks

by Jen Rabulan-Bertram

In case you haven’t heard, apparently, we’re raising a generation of constant snackers.

As Wendy Sachs recently wrote in the Huffington Post, “From cleverly packaged organic cookies to crisp 100 Calorie chips, we offer snacks as distraction and entertainment.”

Those prepackaged snacks are so easy to grab and just throw in a bag when you’re on the go…or to alleviate meltdowns. I’m guilty of it, too.  No judgments here!  But on a different note,  just because it’s organic doesn’t necessarily mean it’s that great of a snack for the kid, especially if they’re having tons of it, all day long.

A lot of kids are devouring those prepackaged snack foods, which are high in calories and low in nutrients, as pointed out in a MayoClinic.com article.

So, why don’t we nip these bad habits in the bud, and go for a healthier, old-fashioned route: snacks that we package ourselves?

Grapes, cheese and crackers

Instead of grabbing for cutesy prepackaged and highly processed “fruit” snacks, why not put together fresh fruit and add a little protein like low-fat cheddar cheese?

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Good Eating: High Plains Bison

by Jen Rabulan-Bertram

Like many of you, I’m a bargainista—or at least I try.  I have always said that the driving force for me nowadays to shop for discounts and clip coupons is so that I could use the money I save and put it towards buying “better” meat for my family.  After reading so much about food recalls and watching Food Inc., it’s a fact that, as parents, we have to be cognizant of what’s going on with our food and how we feed our families.  And for me, it’s one of my priorities to overhaul how I shop for groceries all together.


On that end, I recently had the chance to taste a sampler of Bison meat from High Plains Bison.  If you’ve ever had bison, then you know that its taste is distinctively different from beef and has less fat.  (You can see the marbling in the bison ribeyes below.)

Doing some research for this post, according to Bison Basics, grass-fed bison has less calories and more protein than lean beef, turkey and pork.  And according to High Plains Bison, while bison may not be considered health food, it is healthier.  Bison is low in cholesterol, low in sodium, a good source of iron and also contains a healthy dose of Omega 3 fatty acids too.

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Yum Food & Fun for Kids: New Resource for Food Revolution

by Jen Rabulan-Bertram

Magazines: I know many of you love them as much as I do.  There’s truly nothing like flipping through glossy pages and indulging in feature stories, cool products and advice columns.  In my case, I’m always looking for inspiration, whether it’s for writing, design or to just shop.

DSCF5403

On one of my recent trips to Target I found a new magazine called Yum Food & Fun for Kids.  Always, in search of new ideas on how to improve my efforts in the kitchen and at the dinner table, especially where the kid is concerned, I think this new publication fills a void at the newstands.

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Skip Hop Adds Frog and Zebra Zoopacks and Lunchies

by Jen Rabulan-Bertram

NKT fave, Skip Hop has added more fun animals to their cool lineup up of animal-themed backpacks and lunch bags   Frog and zebra designs are the latest animal designs available for Skip Hop’s Zoopacks and Lunchies, joining faves such as the owl, dog and penguin.  Zoopacks, durable and kid-sized, are ideal for back to school and yes, the last few weeks of summer, too!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I personally can’t get enough of Skip Hop gear; we could often be found toting our penguin Lunchie.  What’s so great about Skip Hop’s Zoo Lunchies, is that they’re so easy to just clip onto a stroller, bookbag strap or they can just as easily be slipped onto a kids’ wrist. But above all, I love the playful, but modern designs that Skip Hop is so well known for; and at just $20 for the Zoopacks and $13 for the Lunchies, you really can’t go wrong with Skip Hop gear.

Freezer Fruit Pops Make for Healthy Summertime Snacks

by Jen Rabulan-Bertram


Summertime snacks for our family are often synonymous with fresh, ripe fruit and chilled frozen yogurt or ice cream.  Actually, with all this heat we’ve been enduring this summer, anything cold sounds good right about now!

This post and activity was inspired, in part, by Healthy Child Healthy World’s weekly twitter party, and by a recipe I stumbled accross on one of my favorite kiddie cuisine sites, Weelicious.

Since we’ve been staying with family for the past few weeks, with three kids in the house and a Costco down the street, we’ve been stocking up on all the delicious fresh fruit.  And fruit from Costco…you know what that means.  We had a ton of it!

 

We had a surplus of strawberries and mangos; meaning, we had more ripened fruit than we knew what to do with!  Cue in Weelicious’ yummy recipes!

With all the extra fruit that was on the cusp of getting too ripe, I enlisted the two bigger kids to help me make some fun homemade popsicles!

I used:

1 set of Tovolo Groovy Pop molds, which yield 6 bigger fruit pops
2 ripe mangos, sliced into thirds and then cubed and pureed
1 cup of ripe strawberries, pureed
1/2 cup of blueberries, pureed
1/2 cup of Mott’s Medley’s juice

I mixed and pureed fruit for each pop, personalizing each flavor for each kid.  Since these fruits had so much of their own fruit juice, I only had to add a few splashes of the juice to help solidify the mixture once frozen.


It was fun to get creative with the kids and let them mix, then help pour each pop.  The making of the pops was a fun outdoor activity, and I’m sure it’d make a great (albeit messy) indoor or rainy day activity too.

 

The beauty of the Tovolo freezer pop molds is that each container is a good size and actually stays put.  I’ve used other molds in the past that used questionable plastic and the sticks never stayed in place.  Plus, Tovolo has a bunch of great shapes to choose from.

Looking for more healthy summer snacks?  Check out Healthy Child Healthy World’s Twitter Party (tonight at 9-10) and their site for more great ideas!

 

 

Let Them Eat Cake!

by Jen Rabulan-Bertram

Last weekend, I had a fun mini-party that I billed an NKT playdate.  It was a super small gathering of some of my friends from back home, some of whom I hadn’t seen since we embarked on our own crazy adventures of parenthood.

At the playdate, I showcased a number of toys and product samples that I’ve received, but haven’t had the chance to write about on NKT.  It was a great way of getting the products into my friends’ hands, and getting a different perspective while sharing some cool kid finds.  I’ll be sure to write a more thorough post on what I shared and what some of them had to say.  Since it was my birthday earlier this week, naturally, I still have cake on the brain!

 

One of the cool activity sets I featured was the Girl Gourmet Cake Bakery from Jakks Pacific, which came out last fall.  The Cake Bakery is one of those fun activity sets that’s quite timely in relation to the ongoing cake craze.  With the rise in popularity of cakes from hit shows like our neighborhood favorite, Carlo’s Bakery of The Cake Boss fame to the ever-inspiring Ace of Cakes, cake-making and decorating has never been so sweet.

This set allows kids to create cakes with a little help from Duff of Charm City Cakes, the bakery which is chronicled on the Food Network’s Ace of Cakes.  With the Girl Gourmet Cake Bakery, kids can create a mini 2-tiered fondant cakes. Kids just add water to one of the cake flavors, stir and pour into the cake molds, and then place into the container and microwave for 30 seconds. To create one of the fondant mixes, water is added and then can be rolled out onto the non-stick mat. The cakes are then removed from the mold after they cool, which are then ready to be covered with the fondant. The mini cakes can be placed on the decorating turntable and can be fancied up by using the air powered gel decorator gun.  Need more embellishments? Add the included candy garnishes!   How sweet it is!

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Pack This: Laptop Lunches

by Jen Rabulan-Bertram

Always a fan of promoting healthier eating choices, I spotted Laptop Lunches, these fun lunch containers over on today’s Eco Baby Buys.


I was recently asked to review the toys from the latest happy meal, and as much as my kid is obsessed with the show that said toys are promoting, I had to decline the review opportunity.  I appreciate convenience as much as the next person, especially when we’re traveling, but as we all know, fast food isn’t always the best choice. With the unlimited selection and creative possibilities of packing fun and healthy meals, I think Bento Boxes are the new happy meal.

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Tips on Avoiding Pesticides in Fruits and Veggies

by Jen Rabulan-Bertram

On Monday, CNN via Health.com reported that a new study revealed what many of us already speculated about pesticides being linked to ADHD in children.

photo credit: maistora

 

 

The article said :

Children exposed to higher levels of a type of pesticide found in trace amounts on commercially grown fruit and vegetables are more likely to have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder than children with less exposure, a nationwide study suggests.

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