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Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Breastfeeding

Here's a book for those of you that have a little tot.

The Politics of Brestfeeding

Looks really interesting but my breasts are no longer working in the milk production business so no need to stock up with that book in my limited space on the book shelves.

I guess the main point of the book is that modern culture has gone way overboard on "breast sensitivity", alienating us from the real conception of what female breasts are all about: feeding babies, the most natural thing in this world.

Here the author in her own words:


So the first thing they flew into Haiti after the earthquake was babyformula. Hmmm. Interesting. Clean water and food to the mothers would have seemed more logical, don't you think?

Monday, November 28, 2011

Dino-meal

My book-shopping geene was just triggered!
Wow! This seems like a book that both son AND mom would like!


Too bad its only out in March 2012, would have made an excellent Christmas gift.

In the mean time, I will browse the authors' blog when I have the time. I found their "before-and-after" story by mistake and to me the story is nothing of a surprise by now but there are probably a lot of insights in other blog posts as well. Here is the link: Paleo Parents: Our Before and After Story
I'll also add it to my blogroll - when I have the time....

Off to work!


Monday, November 21, 2011

Autumn recipes

The past few days, I have been the chef de la chef in the kitchen and got around to a whole bunch of new recipes suitable for all those delicious ingredients available at the autumn market.

Beetroot burgers

Crushed raw beetroots
Cooked and mashed pumpkin
Carrots
Onion
Egg(s)
Buckwheat flour
Spices (salt, herbs, pepper)

Mix and fry in lots of coconut oil. My dough was quite loose, it worked out fine in the frying pan, just had to let them fry long enough on the first side.

Beetroot smoothie
Rice/oatmeal/soy milk
sesame seeds
banana
flaxseed oil
Raw beetroots
Frozen mango cubes
Cinnamon

Mix thouroughly in the mixer and enjoy!


Pumpkin spinach salty muffins

2 cups diced pumpkin (cooked)
2 tbsp oil
1 handful baby spinach (or 3 frozen cubes)
2 tbsp parsley
3 tbsp sunflower seeds
half a handful of semi-crushed walnuts
feta or goat cheese (leave out if you want non-dairy muffins)
2 tsp non-wheat mustard
2 eggs
1,5 cups buckwheat flour
3 tsp baking powder
salt and pepper

Cook the pumpkins. Mix all ingredients except sunflower seeds, walnuts and cheese, which you add at the end. Poor into muffin-molds and bake in oven for 15-20 minutes at 200 degrees celsius.



Carrot Pumpkin B'day Cake

2 dl almonds
1 dl buckwheat flour
1 tsp baking powder
2 tsp cardamom
1 tsp cinnamon
2 carrots
2 apples
2 eggs
1 dl pumpkins, previously cooked together with a cinnamon stick (yammy!!!)
coconut oil to the mold

Ground almonds, buckwheat in the mixer. Add all other ingredients. Oven, 200 degrees celcius for 40 minutes (check the situation at 30 minutes).

For decoration:
Frozen mangos and strawberries mixed in mixer into frozen powder. Add on top of the cake. On top of that  you can go with whipped cream but I actually prefer oatmeal cream spiced with vanilla powder for this cake. Today I decorated with some frozen blueberries. Kids and hubby went wild on this cake! 


Sunday, November 20, 2011

LOL - Modern Time's Ice Age




The pig reminds me of the squirrel in the Ice Age movies.... and in real life, well the closest character I come to think of is my son, who is incredible witty when it comes to reaching up to the food in the kitchen. And he is definatelly more successful than the pig in getting what he wants. Luckily, there are no cookies around over here but he already knows how to open the cashew nut jar, or how to get his hands on the dates, and he likes playing around with raw eggs, knifes and hot food...go figure why I get nervous when he pulls out his chair and climbs up to the table...

Grains once again

This is exactly what I am suspecting:  Grains, gluten and its affects on (children's) body. It's what the book Wheatbelly argues and now also what this other blogger, who  has a serious track record within nutrition advice, puts forward.

But I cannot proove it, cannot get a certificate for it, cannot get myself to do something about, because simply completely eliminating gluten from a non-celiac-child feels too complicated. Especially as long as medical doctors in this country keep repeating that, since the tests are negative, there is no reason to worry...So we do not eat gluten or grains at home, but outside our home we have somewhat more relaxed rules, just because wheat is basically everywhere and without an excuse it is very hard to be hardcore.

But I do worry. I do. Was it really all about natural 2-3 year's tantrum those mega-outbursts we used to see in our today very well-balanced girl? Why do we see rebounds always after a long week of daycare food? And if it is only about being tired, why do we see similar reaction after having been at a party? What about the sudden length growth last summer? Pure coincidence?

Or is the sensitivity just connected to the low exposure to wheat and sugar these days, and that has taken away some level of body tolerance. Kind of like the effect of alcohol, I am not going to name quatities here, but let's just say that my head is not trained for parties like it used to be back in the days (grateful for that actually)... Would seem logical that sugar shocks (wheat is sugar, or glucose) in untrained bodies would have similar effects... This is the explanation I am using to keep calm and continue as usual... but what if what the blogpost above is true? Then really, I should be standing on barricades, screaming for my children's right to a grain-free childhood, both in daycare and later in school...Somehow I am still too mainstream to do just that.

So please scientists out there: do your job! Get this sorted out, fast. And make sure all medical doctors around the world know what they are supposed to give advice on. The way things are going it's not only fake doctors jeopardizing the credibility of the medical profession here in Finland. All those incredible stories of improved health being told on food blogs around the world - that is where Finnish medical society should place their efforts, not in disclaiming these stories (as they are doing now) but trying to find out the scientific truth to how we can improve health through what we eat.

Until then, the best advice I can follow is what Michael Pollan calls "Eat nothing that your great grandmother would not have recognized as food", remembering that food culture is what our mother's (or father's) taught us to eat before industrialization took over the cooking and transferred the responsibility of nutrition to state authority dietary advice.

Tuesday, November 8, 2011

My point exactly

This editor in chief at the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet has an admiror in me:

The liberty to choose ends at the lunch table


What else can I say than: my point exactly! Get rid of the sugar, the wheat and the fake fat for our children's daily intake of food at daycare and school! Or at least give us, the parents, the opportunity to have a say in what our children are supposed to eat to become bright and healthy as adults!

Right now special diets in daycare or school are only allowed based on religious beliefs or medical evidences of allergies. Well, the latter is next to impossible, partly because the majority of all doctors are still convinced that animal fat kills (although studies are coming out everyday that this is a misconception) and partly because metabolic syndrome, diabetes, heart deseases, celiaki, do not appear in small children - it appears much later in life.... But still, after all the evidence out there, I believe there is a direct link between both sugar, wheat and low fat to what later become all those illnesses referred to as endemic deseases in modern Western society today.

Therefore, since I believe maybe it isn't so far fetched to consider my thoughts on sugar, wheat and fake fat as something religious and therefore justify the need of a special diet for my children. And this although, I am not even a fundamentalist... I do not think a little bit of sugar (wheat debatable) is bad. Neither do I think small amounts of the wrong kind of fat once in a while will lead to serious complications. But eating it daily, repeatedly, from the age of one until the age of 18... well that is not what I define as "a little bit". Problem is, although I have a slight feeling (to say the least) of having experienced salvation with the impacts that both the low carb high fat and later the wise choice diet have had on both myself and my family, these food lifestyles are far from being religious movements...

If you want more thoughts on this issue, check out the Swedish post on the blog Naturlig mat i skolan Harder to get real butter (in Swedish) or the Finnish post from a lowcarb blogger: School Food (In Finnish).

Note: I have to confess, I have not been very active myself in improving my childrens daycare diet. There are several reasons for this - mostly very very complicated issues. And therefore, this post should not been seen as any kind of distrust in the people that take care of my children. They are doing a great job! And yes I am very happy that our kid's daycare is blessed with a super-chef-a-la-Jamie-Oliver that manages to spice up all these premade powder-based pots and boxes that he receives in the daycare kitchen each day. Things could be worse...

Sunday, November 6, 2011

Chocolate mousse

This is what the kids had in the evening yesterday after a day filled with loose principles from my side (spagetti, bread/croissant - thanks E&R, it was great, and I mean it! - then pizza and ice cream). No surprise that 10% fatfilled yogurt was rejected firmly just before bedtime...What these bellies were screaming for was more sweet stuff... So instead I made some use of the avocados that were anyway on the brink of going bad, and I spiced them up with some more nutrious ingredients as well.

Chocolate mousse: (adapted from "RĂ„smart Familj")

2 avocados
1/3 of middle sized zucchini (this ingredient was included to make more out of the two avocados)
1 frozen organic spinach button (30g?)
1,5 bananas
0,5 dl cacao
1 tbls coconut oil
tiny bit of salt and unsweetned vanilla powder

Mix all ingredients with a mixer and serve as such. This mousse is still eatable the next day, as in contrast to smashed avocado, it doesn't matter if it goes brown - nobody will notice.

You can add some nuts to the mousse if you want to make it even more nutrious. cashew and maybe walnut should be good choices. We just sprinkled some dried berry flakes on top; Kidone chose pink cranberry flakes, Kidone was served yellow buckthorn berry flakes - for the sake of the c-vitamines, he's still got a cough!

Saturday, November 5, 2011

Goodbye Agave!!!

For those of you who thought Agave is the answer to your sweet tooth.... please read this blog post:

Goodbye fructose


This gets me thinking about fruits... hmmm.... probably not a good idea to overconsume fruits either...

Better just forget sweet taste all together and get your tastebud appreciate other sensations instead. Easy to say, hard to implement... I know... because come on - how far can you go on only nuts and cheese?

Wednesday, November 2, 2011

Finnish Food Evolution

Check this out!

Finnish dietary advice

It shows clearly the changes in the (recommended) Finnish food diet since the 50's.

Alarming to me is how wheat as pushed itself into many of the different parts: white wheat bread from the 70's (before that we where only recommended to eat rye and oatmeal grains!), sausages in the protein section from the 80's (they contain usually 70% of wheat), and pasta together with potatoes (!!!) and those other roots kicked out of the root section and into vegetable section...hmm....and as from the 80's sugar is also including in those (wheat-based) cinnamon buns in the bread section. This leads to my question: Once again - why are we getting fatter in this country? Is it because of the banned real fat or could it be the combination of wheat and sugar?

Other parts that I find interesting:
- the locally wild grown antioxidant-filled berries have diminished (and even disappeared in chart from the 90's) and been replaced by exotic fruits (year around - berries in the fifties probably mostly only in the summer).
- Increas of lacteos
- how industrialized food has made its entrance: yogurts, liver casserole, salami and of course: the evil margarine.
- juice in the veggies as from 90's

If we were to follow Michael Pollan's "eat only what your great grandmother would have considered as food", then I guess the best bet of them all is the recommendations from the 50's - especially if it should be locally produced...

Old cold porridge - recycled.

Ok, so the kids got tired of porridge for breakfast (they usually have oatmeal/buckwheat porridge with coconut oil/ butter for breakfast). It might have been that my attempt to pimp it up with some crushed almonds, apples and cinnamon was a big mistake yesterday. But really, can't blaim them - have been surprised for how long we've been able to feed them with that stuff without any whining.

So left was a big pot of porridge, mixed with almonds, apples, cinnamon and coconut oil, which I stored in the fridge while thinking of different solutions for the leftovers.

Solution 1: Never underestimate cold porrdige as an afternoon snack disguised as "pudding"

In the afternoon I mixed some of the porridge a bit more, added some cinnamon, apple and coconut milk to it and asked the kids if they cared to try out a new sort of afternoon snack.  I left Kidtwo in the kitchen, with a bowl of "pure pudding" and another one with pudding mixed with Greek yogurt. When I returned 5 minutes later, he had eaten it all and was about to attack Kidone's bowl as well. I was a bit skeptical to whether kidone would like this stuff. After all, she was already chewing a carrot. Well, with confindence in my voice I introduced the new snack to her as well. She tasted it, said "this is good" and some spoons later she looked at me with a suspicious look and asked "mom, is this porridge?". Damn, I thought, busted! But answered calmly "no my dear, its pudding." And with that affirmation, she as well finished her bowl.

Solution 2: You can make pancakes out of almost anything - as long as you have eggs

The rest of the batch came handy this morning as I added three eggs and some baking soda and fried 5 pancakes in coconutoul for breakfast. Kids had two each, and I made an exception from my lowcarb breakfast policy and ate one as well. Yummy.

Recipee for this (adapted from Wise Choice cookbook):
1 dl oatmeal
0,5 dl buckwheat
3 dl water
10-15 grinded almonds
half an apple
coconut oil
cinnamon
3 eggs
1 teaspoon baking soda

Make porridge out of oatmeal, buckwheat and water. Add grinded almonds, apple, coconut oil and cinnamon. Mix. Add eggs and baking soda and mix again. Fry in coconut oil.

Enjoy with some mashed bananas or berries!

Hey, give me some credits for doing this early in the morning...especially considering the zombie that I found occupying my body as I dragged myself out of bed this morning (and jumped straight back in as soon as kids had been placed in front of pikku2 on telly. And no, I am not going to bed at 10 p.m. right now - I am working to compensate for my day job preventing 2xcough from evolving to neumonia...).

Tuesday, November 1, 2011

Off topic - but still important...

This is why I prefer second hand these days:

Dangerous clothing (in Finnish but also in French and German)

Better let some one else be poisoned before I take a garment into possesion. In the past 4 months I have bought two second hand jackets - both good once!

Shoes is a problem. Big one. So far I have solved that problem with not buying any shoes at all...

But maybe favoring local is the solution, just as with food: local, organic, fair trade...whatever guarantee that is...

The French jeans representative in the movie: "Maintenant c'est tres contolĂ©". Citing hubby:  "yeah right....."

Hold on... not even organic is safe...

The Indian dyer (dye is not organic!) regarding how they control that normal cotton does not get mixed up with organic: "This is India", laughs....

Natural food in school

Excellent iniciative in Sweden: Naturlig mat i skolan, a blog about trying to raise awareness of current school food and advocating for natural food back into the school lunches.
I have previously blogged about my opinion on the subject, but under my old blog. You can check for example: Patiperra: Operation Dagismat, or my last post on that blog: Patiperra: Another brain release.

I could talk/write for hours on this topic...but right now I have limited time, as always these days. So that is why I am happy that some one else is doing it for me... if it only was directed to a Finnish audience as well... Another two years left before we start school in this family, is it enough time to get a shift in politician's priorities and state dietary recommendations?