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Superfoods: For Babies and Children

Boost your baby’s health with Annabel Karmel’s delicious recipes and creative advice for feeding your child in the first five years.
All parents want the best for their children, but choosing the freshest foods and preparing them in the most beneficial and appealing ways is not always easy. As a mother of three and author of more than twenty books on healthy food for children, Annabel Karmel knows better than anyone not only what children should eat but what children will eat.
SuperFoods is both a cookbook and a reference manual that helps parents recognize the nutritional value in even the simplest foods. In addition to a variety of tempting recipes and invaluable advice, SuperFoods includes:
- More than 130 easy recipes suitable for children of all ages—from the best first foods to balanced family meals.
- Menu charts to help you plan ahead—most recipes are suitable for freezing.
- Information on how to avoid food allergies and common childhood complaints such as colic, constipation, and eczema.
- Suggestions for healthy convenience foods to keep in the pantry.
- Tasty recipes that harness the power of SuperFoods to promote growth and energy and boost immunity and brain power.
And much, much more!

A few weeks ago we brought some lovely samples of herbs and flowers to the chef @ Castagna (SE 17th and Hawthrone). Recently, he sent me this pic of the salady units that he made w/ some of them.

Aren't they pretty? I do love to see what real cooks can do w/ our babies, as I am not nearly so artistic, being quite a pragmatist at heart (as I think all farmers are).

-->rant begins

As an interesting aside, while reading up through my OSU notes on some vegetables and their outcrossing potential w/ regards to seed saving, I was reminded that many veggies do have toxic components that are transformed into something less harmful during the cooking process. Moreover, in many (if not most) cases, these toxins (that may include neurolathyrogens, nitrites, calcium / potassium oxalate, thioglucosides, goitergens, hemagglutinins, solanoids such as solanine and tomatine, toxic levels of lipid soluble vitamins and pryimidine) are inactivated by the cooking process. Others need to be leached out for days.

That said, often the highest levels of these compounds, most especially the alkaloids, are contained in the young leaves and flowers of the plant. This raises the highly ironic possibility that the rich are slowly being poisoned by their own excess.

As a general rule, I don't harvest my veggies when they're in the embyronic stages (that some chefs seem to prefer them at ) for the simple reason that young plants use chemical warfare to discourage predation before the seed is viable. That's just ecology. I'm not interested in poisoning people, no matter how much they ask for it, and no matter if they're loathsome capitalist scum. I just can't do it.

There are pros and cons of tiny vs. "normal" sized veggies (which is defined as the biggest you can get them before they get too chewy or seedy). Smaller ones have more minerals that are not readily translocated within plant tissues, such as calcium. On the other hand, flavinoid development / balance and pigment carried (both lipid and water solube) vitamins are generally greater in more mature fruits.

Now, accidentally offending people is one of my super-powers, sadly. So, when I say that adherents to strictly raw diets are practicing a potentially dangerous form of eating disorder in my opinion, a lot of folks, some of them friends, are going to be offended. However, I do think everyone should eat something raw every day, and not just fruits. It's just that most people's veggie pallates are so limited, that there isn't room for many non-toxic-when-raw items among them.

So, Portland: cook your damn food and just practice some moderation. I'll let you know what is safe to eat in it's embryonic form, such as my favourite edible Poacian - baby corn! These salads, pictured here, are varied with many different crops and when eaten in moderation, are a gorgeous and nutritious addition to one's diet.

rant ends<--

But seriously, you'll have to admit these are good looking salads in their giant bowels. Is this done to keep people from spilling on themselves? I, for one, have never eaten a salad I didn't also end up wearing and have to wonder if the giant dishes would help.

As seen on MSN. Photographer unknown

Scientists unearth prehistoric 'frog from hell'

It dined on baby dinosaurs, was wider than a rugby ball and had a predilection for cannibalism: meet Beelzebufo, or the ‘frog from hell’ – the world’s most aesthetically challenged ancient amphibian.


Fossils of the 70 million-year-old giant carnivore have been unearthed by scientists in Madagascar, giving weight to the theory the island off Africa’s east coast was once part of a super-continent linking India and South America.


Wide-mouthed frog


A close relative of today’s Horned toads, the devil frog weighed a comparatively whopping 4kg and measured up to 40cm in length. Anything but svelte, it had a squat, bulbous body with a huge head and wide, gaping mouth.


Scientists at New York’s Stony Brook University and the University College London spent more than a decade painstakingly piecing together scores of fossil fragments to recreate the beastly looking aquatic behemoth.


Lazy predator


Professor Susan Evans, of the University College London, told MSN UK News: “For the past 15 years, boxes of bits have been passed back and forth across the Atlantic while we tried to piece together the jigsaw puzzle.


“We finally worked out it was related to today’s Horned frogs, but an awful lot bigger – and you wouldn’t want to pick it up.


“Beelzebufo was an ambush predator: short, stubby legs meant it wasn’t terribly mobile, but it was very well camouflaged and would lie in wait for food to walk past.


“Extremely aggressive, the devil frog would lunge at anything that came within reach – even if was substantially bigger than the frog itself.”


Cannibal instinct


Beelzebufo’s diet would most likely have consisted of insects and small vertebrates such as lizards, but scientists claim it is not impossible the frog might even have munched on hatchling or juvenile dinosaurs.


The discovery also has implications for the debate about how the earth’s land masses used to be arranged, lending new weight to the controversial paleobiogeographical model suggesting Madagascar, the Indian subcontinent and South America were linked well into the Late Cretaceous – substantially more recently than previously believed.


By Laura Snook, news editor
February 19, 2008

The Super Allergy Girl Cookbook contains recipes that are gluten, dairy, egg and nut free! Both children and adults will find pleasing recipes in this cookbook containing over 225 original and tested recipes. Cooking without gluten, dairy and other common food ingredients can be challenging, especially in terms of taste and texture. The Super Allergy Girl Cookbook enables you to make special recipes that taste great. In addition to the recipes, this cookbook contains over 100 pages of information that deals with special diet issues. Some of the topics included are: how to save money on expensive products and ingredients; how to save time when baking for people with food allergies; and special allergy ingredients and kitchen tools that can be purchased to make life easier.