How do you stack up?

We have way too much sugar in our Standard America Diet (SAD). In fact, the consumption of sugar in the U.S. per person has risen exponentially. Historically, sweets came in the form of fruit and honey. Sweets, as we know them today, were reserved for the wealthy as sugar was very expensive. In the 1700s, the average American consumed less than 20 pounds of sugar per year. By the end of the 1800s, Americans consumed about 63 pounds per year per person (this had everything to do with the new availability of a cheap sugar source as the slave trade in the Caribbean made sugar production possible). Today, Americans shockingly consume over 150 pounds of sugar per year per person! That is the weight of an average adult in sugar!! Just plain freakish, don’t you think?

Well, consider this: Today, school-day breakfast might be a Pop Tart or sugary cereal. In many schools across the nation, vending machines crank out Snickers bars and Coke. There was a time when dessert after dinner meant a handful of cherries in the summer or a sliced apple in the Fall. Now, a sweet cake or ice cream seems to be standard dessert after dinner. We are bombarded with sugar!

And to complicate matters, if you are a label reader (and we encourage you to read labels and more importantly, to read the list of ingredients), you might not even find the word sugar in the product you buy. Why? Because sugar comes in about 41 different names! For example, these ingredients are all sugar: barley malt, beet sugar, brown sugar, buttered syrup, cane-juice crystals, cane sugar, caramel, carob syrup, corn syrup, corn syrup solids, date sugar, dextran, dextrose, diatase, diastatic malt, ethyl maltol, fructose, fruit juice, fruit juice concentrate, glucose, glucose solids, golden sugar, golden syrup, grape sugar, high-fructose corn syrup, honey, invert sugar, lactose, malt syrup, maltodextrin, maltose, mannitol, molasses, raw sugar, refiner's syrup, sorbitol, sorghum syrup, sucrose, sugar, turbinado sugar, yellow sugar. PHEW!!

Finally, even if we do understand that we are eating or drinking something with sugar, do we really appreciate the amount of sugar in that food or drink? For example, you might know that Coke has about 40 grams of sugar. But do you know what 40 grams of sugar looks like? Check it out!

And did you know that the amount of sugar in your Pop Tart when stacked up, looks something like this?

Check out Sugar Stacks to get a sense of the amount of sugar you consume in the foods and drinks you enjoy.

Everyone knows or has at least heard that too much sugar causes an array of health problems like rotten teeth, diabetes, obesity, heart disease and cancer. It even causes fatigue because your blood sugar levels rise and crash when you eat too much sugar. So how do we kick our sugar habit? Sweet treats (food or beverage) should be a treat, not a staple. Michael Pollan recently spelled out a good rule of thumb in his new book, Food Rules: "No snacks, no seconds, no sweets - except on days that begin with the letter S." Replace desserts with a luscious seasonal fruit after dinner. Replace sodas and fruit drinks with fresh water, tea or coconut water. Replace sugary breakfasts with hearty, complex carbohydrates, good fats and proteins such as a whole grain tortilla with peanut butter and banana. You will all-around feel better! And, eating whole foods rich in the following nutrients will help stave off your craving for sugar: Chromium, B-complex Vitamins, L-Glutamine, Manganese, Panthothenic Acid, Vitamin C, and Zinc.

So, simply put, leave sugary treats for a birthday party or a weekend splurge. Don’t make it an everyday habit.

Resources:

Overconsumption of Sugar Causes Fatigue

Profiling Food Consumption in America

Sugar: Toxic Invader #1

Who You Calling Sugar?

NO LABEL IS GOOD

The week in Washington, D.C. and New York City was fun-filled. The snow in D.C. didn’t detract us from all we were destined to do. CJ spent time outside in the snow with his great friend, Fred, and my friend, Nina, and I cooked and talked, talked and cooked – a perfect way to spend some relaxing days away. We even got a chance to make sushi with a group of 6th grade boys!

In NYC, we walked and walked. We went to the top of the Rockefeller Center and looked out at the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty. We even got our 15 seconds of fame – our picture on a billboard in Times Square!

In both cities, I kept my eyes peeled for how the locals eat. Do New Yorkers and people on “the Hill” eat differently from us here in the SF Bay? At Nina’s, we ate wonderfully, but then Nina is a wonderful cook. Our first morning there, Nina made delicious and light Danish puffy pancakes and filled them with fresh berries! One evening we ate brown rice with sautéed mushrooms, dark leafy greens, grilled tempeh and topped with a marvelous tahini-parsley sauce. It reminded me of a dish I love so much at Café Gratitude in Berkeley that I made it for dinner last night. For dessert one night while watching the Olympics, we had a wonderful apple crisp made from the apples we bought the day before at the local Farmer’s market (see recipe below).

At the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, I was so pleased to see signs up throughout the museum cafeteria, like these above, outlining the need to be conscious of our health and of the health of our environment - our motto!

On Thursday, we were off to New York City where we joined my cousin and her two wonderful boys for 36 hours of fun. You can find anything and everything in NYC. I found two very cool things – street-side produce vendors right next to the hotdog venders and Pret A Manger, a chain deli originating in London (UK) that makes all their food fresh, with no preservatives or additives and posts great signs about eating well, such as the one above (click on the photos to read what it says).

All in all, it appears that Americans on the West Coast and East Coast are becoming more conscious of what and how they eat. Next, maybe a trip to St. Louis or Detroit. What will we find there?

Farmer's Market Apple Crisp by Nina L.

Ingredients
2-3 large Farmer’s Market apples, quartered, cored and sliced thin (the vendor suggested we use a variety of the larger apples for a pie or crisp)
2 tsp fresh squeezed lemon juice
1 cup rolled oats
½ cup whole wheat or spelt flour
½ cup turbinado* or brown sugar
½ cup chopped walnuts
2 tsp cinnamon
6 Tbsp butter, melted (3/4 stick)

Directions
Preheat oven to 350°F.
Place sliced apples in a bowl with the lemon juice. With your hands, mix thoroughly. Transfer apples to a shallow, round baking dish and evenly distribute.
In a bowl, add all the remaining ingredients. With your hands, mix until everything is evenly incorporated and some clumps form. Spoon mixture evenly onto apples.
Bake for approximately 35-40 minutes. Let cool about 10 minutes before serving.

*Turbinado sugar is often called “raw sugar.” It is brown in color and has larger crystals than does refined, white sugar. Organic turbinado sugar is made by crushing the freshly-cut sugar cane to squeeze out the juice, rich in, vitamins and minerals. The cane juice is evaporated and spun in a centrifuge, or turbine, to produce the large sparkling golden crystals. http://www.wholesomesweeteners.com/brands/Wholesome_Sweeteners/Organic_Turbinado_Sugar.html

CHEW ON THIS: DOES EATING HEALTHY COST MORE?

I know you kids don't need to wonder much about the cost of the meals you eat. But your palates are broadening, you are cooking more and cooking well so you should know how much the meals you want to prepare and eat cost. After all, it will not be long before you venture off on your own and then...believe us, you will be eating on a budget. Here are some things to consider when you want to eat healthy yet have limited resources:

COMPARING APPLES AND APPLES

If you were to only compare the cost of an organic apple against the cost of a non-organic apple, you would never eat organic. Organic produce costs more than non-organic produce (more on this below). But when making your choices you have to ask a few more questions and make a few more comparisons.

COMPARING APPLES AND AVOCADOS

When you must make a choice between buying organic produce and buying non-organic produce, you should consider each fruit and vegetable individually. There are two good ways to choose:

• The thicker the skin of the fruit (and chances are you will peel the skin before eating), the safer the bet that you will not be eating a lot of the chemical pesticides. Take for instance avocado. You take the skin off an avocado before slicing it on your sandwich or making a spicy guacamole with it, right? The same for mango and banana. You can't eat the skin of those fruits. So if, for reasons of cost, you have to buy some fruits or vegetables that are non-organic, go for those. But peaches, nectarines, strawberries and cherries are all eaten with the skin! Bell peppers are eaten with the skin. You may be able to wash off some of the chemicals but the skin is thin enough to allow the pesticides to penetrate into fruit itself, and you can't do anything about that. For those kinds of fruits and veggies, opt for buying organic.
• Check out the Environmental Working Group's Website. The EWG's Shopper's Guide to Pesticides provides you with a wonderful, downloadable pocket guide to what fruits and vegetables are "cleanest" and which are the "dirtiest" so that you can shop wisely at the store.

COMPARING GROCERY STORES WITH FARMER’S MARKETS

If you live near a farmer’s market, it always makes good money sense to shop there. There are many hidden costs when shopping at the grocery store. Included in the cost of peppers is the cost of the electricity needed to run the store, the cost of paying the checkers and baggers, the cost of the bags used when shopping, and even the cost of paving the store parking lot! There are none of those hidden costs when shopping at a farmer’s market. There, you pay for the produce and the farmer’s eggs. In other words, the money you spend at the farmer’s market is money directly related to the cost of growing that pepper – not on the other stuff unrelated to growing the pepper itself. So, buying organic food at the farmer’s market will be a better deal than buying it at the grocery store.

COMPARING BULK WITH NON-BULK ITEMS

Buying items in bulk, whether it be nuts, grains, pasta, or beans, is always a smarter money choice. You are not paying for packaging, which ends up in recycling, or worse yet, the trash! And for things like beans, if you soaked them and cooked them yourself, it is pennies for a serving instead of...well...way more than pennies.

MEASURING THE QUALITY OF FOOD, NOT THE QUANTITY OF FOOD

In general, Americans eat way too much. We are engaged in portion distortion. Did you ever really look at how big that bag of popcorn is or that soft drink that you are buying at the movie theatre? A family of 4 can easily satisfy themselves with one of those super-sized sodas and yet one person will drink it all during a two-hour movie. Why? Because “for only 25 cents more, you can get the large.” The small is already really huge. The medium is gigantic and the large is actually gargantuan! But what a savings to get the gargantuan one for only 25 cents more! You probably would have saved something like $1.50 if you got the small, which is to say huge, and not been tempted by the sales pitch!

Our portions have increased substantially over the last 50 years. A slice of pizza 20 years ago was 500 calories. Today, a slice of pizza is 850 calories! If you went to the movies 20 years ago, you would have gotten 5 cups of popcorn (270 calories). Today, the popcorn an average American gets at the movies is almost 400 calories more (11 cups)!

If you buy quality food, such as organic produce, grass-fed beef and sustainable fish, and eat less of it, you will be spending no more money than if you ate huge portions of a low-quality meal. And, if you eat fresh fruit instead of a sugar-laden piece of cake or chocolate for dessert (except on special occasions – Michael Pollen includes Saturdays and Sundays in that mix of special times), you will be saving money.

COMPARING ORGANIC JUNK FOOD WITH JUNK FOOD

Junk food is junk food whether it is organic or not. As a society, we eat too much junk food. Just because the potatoes in the potato chips you’re begging your mom to buy are organic, doesn’t make them any less potato chips! The same can be said for a lot of other boxed and bagged foods in the middle aisles of the grocery store. If you check out the labels of many of those packaged foods which you think are good for you, you might be surprised! Many of them still contain preservatives, lesser quality oils, trans-fats and too much salt. Next time, buy a whole potato, slice it thin and roast them with a bit of olive oil, salt and pepper until they are crispy. That will cost a heck of a lot less than your bag of chips. And your house will smell divine!

FACTORING IN THE COST TO THE ENVIRONMENT AND TO YOUR HEALTH WHEN CHOOSING BETWEEN ORGANIC-SUSTAINABLE OR NOT

Unsustainable and conventionally grown foods, many of which travel thousands and thousands of miles to get to us are often consumed at a cost to our health and to the environment. Someone has to pay for the damage done to both – and it will surely be each and every one of us in the long run. If we continue to eat foods laden with chemicals, we have a greater chance of getting sick from them. If we continue to pollute our air as a result of conventional farming methods or the transportation of produce from thousands of miles away, we have a greater chance of getting sick and of sickening our Earth. If we continue to catch fish in a way that is bad for the oceans and causes the extinction of fish, we will eventually need to pay more for all fish. This final point goes to the question of whether we want to pay a little more money now or pay a lot more money later. It's a question we must all chew on carefully.

We'd love to hear from you about how you make your food choices when shopping. Do you consider the cost of food? Do you consider what goes into the price you pay for food? Would you spare no expense when it comes to food but cut your costs on other luxury items, like music or games?

Help! I have Food Neophobia!

FOBBELKNOCKERS! How did you get it? Did you catch it at school? Did you catch it from your little sister who is always crawling around on the kitchen floor? Or maybe your dog passed it on to you - you know how he always eats the food scraps from the dining table?

Well, there is good news! Food neophobia is not catchy and you can actually do something about it. The word "neophobia" (also known as "caitonophobia") comes from the Greek words "neo" meaning "new" and "phobia" meaning "fear." Yeah, you got it - fear of something new! As it relates to food, it is the fear of trying out new food. Or more simply put - a super-picky eater. Not so scary after all, right?

So, we've got to ask, what do you do when you are afraid of trying our something new in ordinary life - say for example - trying out a new summer camp - or joining a new soccer team? Do you just walk away and say, "NOPE, not gonna do it!" Do your parents let you just take a pass and not experience what might be the greatest thing you've ever done?? I doubt it. So why do you do it with food? Well, for starters, we are not born to want food other than sweet food because our mother’s milk was sweet. We must learn to like savory foods. And, scientists think that, for some people, a fear of trying new foods is genetic. Finally, there’s this thing about the texture of food. It might not even be the taste of the food. Some foods are crunchy; other foods are soft or even squishy. How you prepare the food might have a lot to do with whether you might give it a try or not.

Food neophobia is not uncommon. Tons of kids have it. Many overcome it and become great food adventurers. Others stick to what they know and miss out on a world of fantastic stuff - like roasted cauliflower, salmon burgers or mango salsa. When it boils down to healthy eating, not surprisingly, kids who are afraid of eating new things eat less vegetables, fruits and protein - the stuff that makes your mind and body grow and be strong.

SO HOW CAN YOU TAKE CONTROL OF YOUR PICKY PALETTE
AND BECOME AN ADVENTUROUS EATER?

Scientists have studied this issue and have found that children who are exposed to a food over and over again (up to 50 times) will eventually eat that food. Here are a few ideas:

(1) PICK UP AND TOUCH NEW FOOD: Ask your mom or dad to take you to the farmer’s market or grocery story. Let your imagination run wild! Choose your favorite color and go find fruits or vegetables in that color that you have never tried before. Pick them up. Touch them. Find out the name of that fruit or vegetable. Maybe even ask your mom or dad to buy it so you can try it out!

(2) SMELL NEW FOOD: Even if you don’t want to eat a vegetable on your plate, pick it up and smell it. What does it smell like? Would it smell different (better) with mustard or butter or cheese or hot sauce? Maybe ask your mom or dad to find a recipe next time that will incorporate some other ingredient you love, like peanut butter or tomatoes (not both)!

(3) LICK NEW FOOD: At least give a new food a chance at you eating it! Sometimes smell is deceiving. Broccoli smells DISGUSTING! But it tastes fabulous. Papaya smells super gross too. But have you ever had papaya with lime juice squeezed on it? It is so delicious and it is one of the best fruits around for tummy problems.

(4) HELP COOK NEW FOOD: Like picking up and touching new food, cooking new food helps familiarize you with it. When your mom brings celery root home for the family dinner, ask her if you can scrub and peel that knotty-looking veg. Notice how sweet it smells (and how much like celery it smells)? Ask her if you can sauté it or cook it in the stock for your soup. What other vegetables might taste good with it? Perhaps you can ask if you can find a recipe on-line for it that interests you?

(5) TASTE AND EAT NEW FOOD: Finally, take a deep breath and give it a go! Everything you do today that is routine was once new to you. That’s the same with food. Food that you will enjoy when you are a teen or an adult will once have been a new food that you might have been afraid to try. So try it out. If you don’t like it this go-around, politely ask your mom or dad if you can “take a pass today.” But don’t close the door on tasting it again next time!

So kick your neophobic habit. Like trying to boogie board or meeting a new person, trying a new food can be scary. But if you don’t try it, you might never know how wonderful it is! And you might never benefit from its amazing nutritional benefits. Take the challenge: If you don't eat the following foods already, ask your mom or dad to put them on your next week's grocery list:

• cauliflower
• celery root
• beets
• anchovies
• kiwi
• plantains
• coconut milk or coconut water
• quinoa
• pumpkin seeds
• dates

Tell us what you are afraid to eat and what you have done or will do to try and overcome your fear. Maybe we can pass along a tasty recipe for you to try!

Does what you eat impact the environment?

Today is "Zero-Waste" lunch day at one of the schools where we teach cooking. The challenge is to serve up lunch which results in no trash - just compost and recycling. This is a great goal for the kids, their families and the school. The next step is to look at the actual food you eat and see how that food impacts your carbon footprint. Here are a few things to consider:

Where does your food come from? Eating foods that are grown locally reduces the carbon footprint significantly. Food that must travel from far-away places, like Mexico or Chile, has to travel by plane and truck to get to your grocery store. Planes and trucks use up a lot of fuel and emit a lot of carbon dioxide into the air. Buying your fruit and vegetables from the farmers market from farms within a 100 mile radius is far more earth-friendly. Buying foods that are only in season will ensure that you are buying locally. Eating a peach in the winter can only mean that peach was grown on a farm in a warm climate. Because it is summer in South America when it is winter here means you can bet the peach you are buying in February comes from South America or another far-away, warm place. In addition to local food, supporting your local organic farmer means that you are supporting his or her method of not polluting the soil and the plants with hazardous chemicals. Those chemicals are not only bad for you (it is impossible to wash off all the pesticides and herbicides that are sprayed onto plants) but bad for the environment.

Is your food packaged? Packaged foods have a number of hidden ecological costs. The packages (boxes, paper, plastic bags) must be made in a factory. The factory uses a a lot of energy, such as electricity. The packaging materials must be shipped to the final users, meaning that fuel is used and carbon dioxide emitted. Some of the packaging cannot be recycled and must be thrown away. Trash ends up in landfills, wasting our precious and every shrinking open land, which could be used for green spaces like parks. Trees absorb carbon dioxide. Buying less packaged and processed food means using less packaging. Also buying your whole food in bulk or buying your produce at the farmer's market means you use less packaging. Take a cloth bag or reuse a paper bag when going to the farmer's market or store to conserve even more!

How often do you eat red meat? People are eating more red meat today than ever before. In the U.S., people eat on average over 200 pounds of it! This may have a lot to do with people eating in fast-food places like McDonalds and Burger King. To raise cows, you must have land. As a result, many forests are being cleared for pastures, robbing the planet of trees, which (again) absorbs carbon dioxide. Cattle and sheep also release a lot of methane (yes, burps and farts)! Methane is a potent greenhouse gas. In a recent recent study by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, it was found that the animals' burps, the nitrous oxide gases from their decomposing poop and other factors, including the energy needed to store and transport meat, were responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions! WOW!!! We're not saying don't eat meat. We're saying you can maybe eat less of it.

Do you know the history of the fish you are eating? Poor fishing practices in the last 50 years have threatened our oceans and caused near extinction of many fish, like shark, swordfish and cod. In response, fish farms have sprung up but even those can be hazardous to our environment if the right types of fish are not properly chosen for the farms or if the method of farming is not eco-friendly. Learn where your fish comes from that ends up on your plate for dinner. Ask the fish seller what he or she knows about the fish you are buying. Also, log on to the Monterey Bay Aquarium Sea Food Watch page. There you will find gads of information about sustainable fishing practices and what fish are currently endangered and/or hazardous to eat.

Kuddos to those of you already paying attention to the impact your choices make on our environment. Keep up the good work! If you haven't taken the challenge yet, why not start now? Reduce the carbon footprint in your household by just making one of the above-changes. Gradually, you can incorporate more of these changes. If we each take one small step, we will make big changes!!

Take the challenge: To see how much of a carbon footprint you are leaving, go to the Zero Footprint Kids Calculator and fill out the questionnaire. See how you compare to the average child in other countries. Good luck!

School mornings are annoying so how could I possibly eat a good breakfast?

School mornings are annoying. You've got to get up at an hour decided by someone who doesn't really, really understand how tired you still are; you've got to put on clean clothes, which might require that you find some clean clothes. You may be one of those unlucky kids who has to make his bed in the morning. Then, you've got to brush your teeth and comb your hair, maybe wash your face if you obey mom's shouting instructions, maybe help out a little brother or sister tie his or her shoes and finally, you've got to pack the back pack that mom asked you to pack last night all the while quietly running around in search of your Social Studies notebook which you find under the couch, thank god. So where's the time for a good breakfast, you ask. Moreover, why should I eat a good breakfast anyway?

We can't help you get ready for school in the morning (although we can tell you that some of that stuff can get done the night before, but I bet you've heard that a time or two, right?) but we can explain WHY it is important to eat a good breakfast and we can give you some good suggestions for breakfast on the go (let me guess, sometimes you have to eat breakfast in the car, right)?

BREAKFAST FOOD SHOULD HELP YOU

THINK BETTER AND

GIVE YOU SUSTAINED ENERGY

In order to get the most out of a school day, your brain has to function at it's absolute best so that you can understand and absorb your teachers' lessons and your body has to have enough energy to get you through the day, because sitting still and listening to your teacher takes just as much energy as recess!

So, what foods will help you perform your best and why:

• Whole grain foods. Whole grain toast, muffins or tortillas, brown rice, sweet potatoes. These types of foods give you sustained energy. What that means is that, unlike sugary pastries or commercial cereal, these foods release sugar into your blood stream slowly, giving you energy throughout the day. Technically said (in case you want to impress your parents), these foods help regulate your blood sugar.
• Nuts and Seeds. Nuts and seeds provide your body with good quality protein and fat, both essential for regulating blood sugar and essential for muscle and brain development. You should always try to eat some protein and fat in the morning with your whole grains so that the sugar is evenly and slowly released in your body. Again, that translates to sustained energy. In other words, you won't feel ready to take a nap during 3rd period Science and you won't feel like you will absolutely keel over when you have to run the mile in gym class. Also, sesame seeds are a great source of calcium. Don't want to drink milk? Sprinkle sesame seeds on your toast or on a bowl of brown rice.
• Omega-3 fat. You should definately have some of this in the morning. It's brain food, pure and simple. BRAIN FOOD! Yes, they sell Omega-3 gummy bears and that's fine, but you should also get this from your food, because after all, that's where Omega-3 comes from. Eat a handful of walnuts in the morning. They have lots of Omega-3. If you remember that walnuts look like brains, you'll remember they're brain food. You can also add flax seeds or flax seed oil to your smoothie in the morning or even chia seeds! Ask your mom or dad to buy flax oil or flax and chia seeds at a healthier food store like Whole Foods or Berkeley Bowl.
• Fresh fruit. Fresh fruit can help satisfy your desire for sweets and it's whole and natural. Fruit contains vitamins and minerals which help prevent you from getting sick, and which help make you think clearly and calmly (aka BRAIN FOOD). Again, eat your fruit with some protein and fat so that you prevent the sugar in the fruit from going into your blood stream too quickly.
• Veggies. No one said veggies are off-limits in the morning!! Like fruit, they provide great vitamins and minerals. In many cultures, last night's dinner is this morning's breakfast. Try it out next time you have leftover fried rice or chicken noodle soup. You might be pleasantly surprised.

BREAKFAST IDEAS

• Whole wheat tortilla with peanut or almond butter and banana
• Slice of whole grain toast, 1/2 an apple and cheese
• Quesadilla with a side of sliced fruit
• Yogurt and homemade granola (see recipe for granola below)
• Egg and cheese sandwich with whole wheat English muffin
• Hard boiled egg, whole grain crackers and handful of berries
• Protein-rich fruit smoothie with flax or chia seeds

GRANOLA

Ingredients

2 cups rolled oats

3/4 cup coconut flakes

1 tsp cinnamon (or to taste)

1/4 cup raw almonds, rough chopped

2-3 Tbsp honey (depending on your sweet tooth) or maple syrup

2 Tbsp coconut butter, melted

Zest of one orange

1/4 cup pumpkin seeds

1/2 cup dried cranberries (or other dried fruit)

Directions

Preheat oven to 275 degrees. In a bowl, add all ingredients except for coconut butter and dried fruit.

In a pan, melt coconut butter, making sure not to burn the pan or butter! Allow to cool for a few minutes, then add to bowl with mixture and mix thoroughly with a rubber spatula. If the butter is cool enough, you can mix with your hands, which is alot of fun.

Put granola on a cookie sheet and spread out evenly. Place in oven and bake for 20 minutes or so. Pull out, add the dried fruit, toss evenly and spread out again. Bake for another 10-15 minutes. Let cook before eating (the cooler it gets, the crunchier the granola).

We're excited to start blogging!

Finally, we're going to blog! We started this blog a year and a half ago, as you can see from the one and only entry from 5/08, but it never got off the ground. I should say, I started that blog before Christy and I even partnered up to start Small Steps Cooking. Christy shouldn't have to shoulder any blame for that. But now that we are officially a business, Christy and I want to use this blog as a way to connect with the children and young adults we teach, their parents and the many, many, many family members, friends and fans across the globe who want to vigilantly follow us here. We promise to mention you all when we receive our Academy Award for Best Picture...oh, that was another food blog. I digress.

We hope that this blog will supplement our classes because, as much as we'd love to, we cannot cover everything we want to teach in a 1-1/2 hour or 2 hour class. Information about the health benefits of a key ingredient flies about the kitchen while the students are chopping, slicing, roasting and whipping, all the while, we keep an eye on the clock to make sure our dishes are ready on time, just as a chef in a restaurant kitchen would do. We also include a great deal of interesting historical, cultural and nutritional facts about ingredients on our recipes but again, the question becomes when to find the time to digest it (pun intended)! We hope that this blog becomes the go-to place for adults and kids alike who want to go beyond the classroom-kitchen and cook from the many other recipes we offer or who want more information about food, health and what we call food politics (i.e., what are our legislatures doing about food safety, school lunch programs, bio-engineered foods, and many other issues which affect our right to clean, sustainable and nutrient-dense food).

We especially invite kids to post comments or questions on our blog related to food and health. The computer is the new generation's pencil and paper. We hope you will engage in our discussions about wholesome cooking and eating. Perhaps there is a food you love but know isn't good for you? Maybe we can offer suggestions as to how to make it better for you by exchanging the unhealthy ingredients for healthier alternatives. Just a thought...

In sum, we are excited for this new venue. We hope you will share this experience with us.

Marirose and Christy