OttawaMom

Archive for April, 2010

I have always been a big fan of Jamie Oliver’s, it started in his days of the Naked Chef. When I heard about his new show Food Revolution, I knew I would watch it and I also knew we would watch it together as a family. As much as I try to tell my kids how important it is to eat healthy, I thought it would help reinforce that idea if they watched the show.

As a family, we have taken Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution to heart and are trying hard to eat less processed food and eat more homemade things. We were already avoiding most processed foods but have taken it a step further and are making more things from scratch. I like knowing what is in my food and my kids are much happier with Mommy and Daddy’s cooking rather than boxed things from the store.

Making things from scratch may take a bit more time, but the effort is worth it to see my kids happily tucking in to their food. Even my son’s lunch box is coming home empty which is a huge feat!

The first big change we made was making all our bread from scratch. My husband is a wonderful baker, a trade he learned at the hands of his father. Watching him whip up a batch of homemade bread is amazing and our kids love to help him mix and knead the dough. In fact he loves making bread so much that he has built himself a bread oven for the backyard and sells homemade loaves at our annual garage sale, but I digress.

The next change we have made is to get rid of our boxed granola bars in favour of homemade ones. I thought I was giving my kids “healthy” granola bars, until I read the ingredients list. If I couldn’t actually pronounce some of the ingredients, why on earth was I giving them to my kids! So I searched the internet and found this recipe that is a winner with everyone (including my husband’s co-workers!). I did however tweek it a bit substituting whole wheat flour in place of all purpose, 1/2 tsp of cinnamon (instead of 1/4) and the first time I made it, I used 1 cup of chocolate chips instead of the dried fruit. I love the versatility of the recipe and plan to keep tweeking it to get my kids to try new things.

Homemade cookies, muffins and granola bars

So now we have baking Sundays at our house where we whip up batches of bread, muffins, cookies and granola bars for the week. Now instead of my pantry bulging with boxed, processed food, the freezer is bursting with yummy baked goods. When we need a snack on the go, we just grab a couple granola bars out of the freezer and they are good to go in 15 minutes.

These small changes are just the start of what I hope will be my own family’s Food Revolution. Are you watching the show and making changes too? Would love to know what other families are doing to eat healthier.

In a strange twist of fate, the family of the boy who had been bullying my son, has moved and the boy is now attending another school.  This just happened in the last week (apparently this move had been planned all along) and it was actually a teacher that told me about it, rather than my son. Finding out via a teacher didn’t really surprise me all that much because the tales my son would bring home about this boy had actually stopped, so he was no longer a source of conversation in our house.

I say had been bullying my son because as I said in my first update on the subject, the boy and my son had started to repair their friendship and the boy was no longer hurting my son. I find it ironic that just as my son was beginning to trust this boy again, he moves.  Now my son says he is going to miss him because “Mom he was finally starting to behave nicely toward me”.

My son and this boy may have been on a new path, but I am relieved just the same.  Now it is my hope that all the progress this boy has made is not lost as he tries to fit into a new school!

First trip to Disney World = $$$. Meeting one of your idols = Priceless