Daughter Makes Peanut Butter Pancakes

By Ed Bruske

aka The Slow Cook

With refined flour, sugar and grape jelly, these pancakes wouldn't appear at the top of my list of healthful foods I would wish for my daughter. But she made them herself, so I count this as a win. Anything that disabuses kids of processed factory foods is a good thing, in my book. Plus, this recipe does include protein-rich peanut butter. And making these pancakes from scratch means you know they're not like the processed food currently being served in D.C. schools, with all the chemical additives and preservatives.

You could even make them a little healthier by replacing some of the refined flour with whole wheat.

These pancakes come from a book called Gadgetology, by Pam Abrams, that bills itself as "kitchen fun with your kids, using 35 cooking gadgets for simple recipes,crafts, games and experiments." The gadget for this particular recipe is the old mechanical rotary beater. We had one when I was growing up. It's the same mechanism as an electric mixer, except you crank it by hand. When you're not using it to beat eggs, it's a fun thing to chase your sisters with. (Try to avoid getting the beaters caught in their hair.)

Around our house, we whisk things by hand. But as my daughter learned, when making pancakes with peanut butter in the batter it's best to use a big, loose whisk rather than a smaller, tighter one. With a tight whisk, the peanut butter tends to get caught in the wires and turn into a clump. In fact, I would advise starting your mixing with a spatula before applying the whisk (or rotary beater).

In a medium-sized mixing bowl, combine 1 cup all-purpose flour, 2 tablespoons light brown sugar, 2 teaspoons baking powder. In a separate bowl, beat together 1/2 cup smooth peanut butter and 2 large eggs. (You might want to start this process with a spatula to incorporate the peanut butter.) When the mixture is smooth, add 1 1/4 cups milk and 1/4 cup (1/2 stick) butter, melted. Beat until well blended. Using a rubber spatula, fold the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients.

Pour the batter onto a moderately hot griddle to make pancakes the size you desire. They are ready to flip when bubbles form on the top and then break. This recipe will make 6 to 8 regular-size pancakes, or more than a dozen smaller ones.

To serve, lay one pancake flat on a plate, spread your favorite fruit jelly over it, then top with a second pancake, forming a sandwich. Dig in.

Microwavable Kids

By Ed Bruske

aka The Slow Cook

Over at The Slow Cook, I've gotten a number of comments from readers saying either I should not be concerned about providing my daughter with a warm meal for lunch or that I may be permanently damaging her with foods re-heated in a microwave.

I try to argue that raising a child calls for flexibility and occasionally compromise. As much as we try to impose intellectual purity on our approach to parenting, the real world seems to get in the way on a daily basis.

What do you think?

Pop Tarts for Breakfast: Feeding Kids or Putting them at Risk?

By Zahara Heckscher

I'll admit it: I'm usually too disorganized in the morning to get my son to school early. In fact, we probably average about three minutes late.

But last week Max (who attends Hearst Elementary, a DC public school) woke up early. So we decided to go to school early and get breakfast there thanks to the free breakfast program.

Imagine my surprise to find the contents of the breakfast:
* Pop Tarts
* Graham crackers
* Grape juice
* Milk

Pop Tarts?

Strawberry Frosted Pop Tarts?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not an extremest who won't let my son have any sugar. He gets occasional treats and has inherited my predilection for chocolate consumption. But that's for special times, parties, and infrequent desserts following dinner. OK, and bribery every now and then.

But to start his day off with Pop Tarts? No. No. No.

It was amusing to see that they have added whole wheat to the Pop Tarts. But does that negate the 17 grams of sugar? High fructose corn syrup as the second ingredient? Plus corn syrup, plus corn syrup solids, plus sugar, plus dextrose? Two forms of food coloring? More salt than real strawberries? No. No. No.

Then add to that 17 grams of sugar, extra sugar from the gram crackers (4 or 8 grams, as far as I can ascertain), and 20 grams from the grape juice. I won't even count the lactose in the milk. Over 40 grams of sugar before 9 am. Is this how I want my kid starting the day? Or his little friends in his class? Or any child -- especially those who actually depend on these free breakfasts? No. No. No.

Don't tell me kids won't eat healthy food. They might not eat their broccoli, but most kids will eat fruit, cheese, eggs, peanut butter and plenty of other healthy breakfast foods.

My tax dollars going to Kellogg to give kids Pop Tarts for breakfast? No. No. No.

Pop Tart Ingredients, according to Kelloggs web site:

WHOLE WHEAT FLOUR, HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP, ENRICHED FLOUR (WHEAT FLOUR, NIACIN, REDUCED IRON, THIAMIN MONONITRATE [VITAMIN B1], RIBOFLAVIN [VITAMIN B2], FOLIC ACID), SOYBEAN AND PALM OIL (WITH TBHQ FOR FRESHNESS), POLYDEXTROSE, SUGAR, DEXTROSE, CORN SYRUP SOLIDS, CORN SYRUP, WHOLE GRAIN BARLEY FLOUR, GLYCERIN, CONTAINS TWO PERCENT OR LESS OF INULIN FROM CHICORY ROOT, WHEAT STARCH, SALT, DRIED STRAWBERRIES, DRIED PEARS, DRIED APPLES, CORNSTARCH, LEAVENING (BAKING SODA, SODIUM ACID PYROPHOSPHATE, MONOCALCIUM PHOSPHATE), NATURAL AND ARTIFICIAL STRAWBERRY FLAVOR, CITRIC ACID, GELATIN, CARAMEL COLOR, SOY LECITHIN, XANTHAN GUM, MODIFIED WHEAT STARCH, VITAMIN A PALMITATE, NIACINAMIDE, RED #40, REDUCED IRON, PYRIDOXINE HYDROCHLORIDE (VITAMIN B6), YELLOW #6, RIBOFLAVIN (VITAMIN B2), THIAMIN HYDROCHLORIDE (VITAMIN B1), FOLIC ACID.

Win-Win School Lunch

By Ed Bruske

aka The Slow Cook

After I spent a week in the kitchen at my daughter's elementary school and discovered just how bad the food was, daughter started taking her own lunch. It wasn't just what I wrote about the food that convinced her. Around that same time, she reported to her pediatrician for an annual physical. The doctor told daughter, who has grown around the middle lately, that she was eating too many carbohydrates. And she was sympathetic: Her own kids had gained 10 pounds when they started eating at school.

So now daughter is taking her lunch to school, just as she was doing when she attended charter school before enrolling in our neighborhood public school. There's just one problem. At the charter school, there was a microwave in the lunchroom. Daughter could heat her meals. In the local elementary school, there is no microwave. You either take what's offered at the steam table, or you're on your own.

I don't remember eating a hot lunch when I was a kid. I always brown-bagged it. I must have eaten a sandwich every day for years, even through high school. But kids these days expect a hot meal and the absence of a microwave in the lunchroom was the reason that daughter started eating school food in the first place. How to get the food we make at home warm?

My wife went out and bought some thermal containers for daughter's lunch box. But daughter complained that by the time lunch rolled around, the food packed in the morning had grown cold despite the thermal containers.

Recently we stumbled into a solution when we simply couldn't get our act together to prepare daughter's lunch in time for her to leave for school in the morning. I promised to walk it the four blocks to school during the lunch break. The delay proved to be an inspiration: We heated the lunch at the last minute, packed it into the thermal containers and hoofed it over to daughter, who was waiting for the hand-off of her lunch box.

Since then, we've started delivering hot lunch by foot every day. We now have our established rendezvous point. Daughter waits for me to arrive. Lunch might be soup or spaghetti or tofu and edamame. Whatever, it's been freshly heated and daughter can sit down to a warm meal. Meanwhile, I get eight blocks worth of aerobic walking (four blocks each way). And that's in addition to walking daughter to school in the morning. (Mom fetches her in the afternoon.)

So daughter gets her hot meal, I get some extra exercise. Granted, this isn't something every parent can do. We just happen to work at home. And although I kind of like this new routine, I have to wonder: isn't there some way D.C. Public Schools could make microwaves available for kids who bring their own lunch?

Time for a Second Look at Fat?

By Ed Bruske
aka The Slow Cook

A major new study has the mainstream media buzzing with news that saturated fat does not pose a significant risk for heart disease.

This is something we've known all along, and a finding that Gary Taubes published eight years ago in his monumental analysis of fat science, "Good Calories, Bad Calories." Taubes found that the incessant rant against fat was more religion than science. But now medical researchers are coming forward with the view that suppressing the consumption of fat--an essential macro-nutrient, along with protein--has simply delivered consumers to the sugar and high-fructose corn syrup industries and helped create the environment for an explosion of obesity and metabolic disorders such as diabetes.

Fat is not only essential for health, but is highly satiating--much more so than the cheap carbohydrates that have become a hallmark of the American diet. A little fat can go a long way toward bringing appetite under control and actually reducing the craving for more calories. This is why federal policies that encourage low-fat milk injected with sugar in school meals ranks as one of the dumbest ideas yet perpetrated on American children.

Much more important than the amount of fat in the diet is the type of fat. Americans consume far too many Omega-6 fats from super-processed oils such as soybean, corn and cottonseed--all cheap forms of fat that benefit U.S. agribusiness but were completely unknown to humans until recently. We should all be consuming more mono-unsaturated fats from olive oil, nuts, avocados--and yes, even canola oil--as well as Omega-3 oils from oily fish and flax. As the latest news points out, even animal fats are a mix of saturated, mono-unsaturated and poly-unsaturated lipids.

For a detailed analysis of the latest study on fat, see the article posted by low-carb diet advocate Dr. Michael Eades on his blog. It's long and detailed, but worth the time.