Persimmon was more a color to me and not a food I prepared or paid attention until I received two persimmons from the farm. I am the first to admit that my family lives in a fresh food rut. Carrots, green beans, broccoli, strawberries, bananas and the like keep working their way into our meals. I enlisted the help of the csa for all the good reasons (local, organic, surprises) but also because I knew that I wouldn’t select foods that were out of my safety circle and needed a higher power to do it for me.

My 91-yearold nutritionist a few years back insisted that variety in produce is the key to being healthy; the Japanese strive for 31 different foods each day. Every fruit and vegetable offers a unique set of nutrients that our bodies need and use. And if nutrition isn’t your hook, complexion might be. The more variety and color in your produce, the brighter color in your cheeks.

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Spinach didn’t make it back into my diet until about ten years ago when I learned that there was more to this vegetable than the stringy, processed, canned version Popeye raved about. The one time we had a cartoon character pitching healthy foods and it had to be canned. Me thinks Popeye was a just well drawn spokesman by the folks at Del Monte. Looking more like lake weeds washed up on my plate, spinach did not attract my young eyes. Then my nose got involved. The canned spinach smell was so strong that I could taste it before I tasted it. I gulped tiny bites down with large amounts of milk, much like swallowing an iron pill. I would not consider it again for many years, until I realized that fresh spinach is like a completely different food before processing pirates get their hands on it.

This isn’t any news to you longtime spinach lovers, it’s more a lesson in how to introduce foods, real foods, to young ones, who have very sensitive palates, and to us old sensory-scarred types.

Armed with fresh spinach from the farm folks, I looked to incorporate it within the foods already on the foods-we-won’t-object-to list which led me to another fine recipe from a cookbook I use often for fresh, fast, healthy meals- South Beach Diet. I have three cookbooks from this team of cooks who are not renowned restaurant chefs or cooking show hosts, but plunk out a stack of recipes that taste read more

It’s Friday, one day from being up to our shoulder pads in football both on the sidelines of my son’s rec league and on the sofa yelling bad and good things as Defensive Coach ofremote controlfor a Big Ten alma mater. Further, the teenager will be sequestered with a laptop, three books, and her will to upgrade her English performance before taking the keys to Saturday night in Los Angeles – church choir and volunteer work right? Hunger will be everywhere. No more than one hour on a Friday to prep the fresh and cook up something re-heatable to make our weekend real.

Relying on a few foods from the farm people and the wonderland, I cleaned, chopped, and stored the lot below in about 40 minutes and somehow a turkey chili was made in between peeling and rinsing. Before you think I should be locked up with a serious case of marthastewititis, for which nothing but disorganization therapy can cure, weekend prep works, it really really works, to make fast food out of real food – real food that your Grandmother would recognize – to quote our food hero. read more

Getting real food on the table isn’t our only challenge. How we speak about food to our families is just as important as how we prepare it. We are up against the billion dollar packaged and fast food marketing budgets. You don’t see anyone making a song and dance number about bok choy or putting a prize in a head of broccoli or creating movie tie-ins with spaghetti squash – despite the obvious promotional co-branding with Disney’s Tangled.

In the meantime, we have mouths to feed which brings me, by a circuitous ranting path, to granola bars. To you and me, they will be whole grain-fiber-mixed with natural oils and protein-w/out much sugar bars, but to everyone else – granola bars, because it just sounds tastier, or still better – happy bars. This isn’t one of those deceptively delicious tactics of sneaking in foods that kids don’t prefer, but rather it’s more a repositioning of our food’s image. Usually I opt for telling the kids why the good food and what it does for them, but in this case, they don’t need to be reminded that fiber will keep their bowels clean, come to think of it neither do we. We know that grains, wheat germ, dark chocolate, nuts, and oats – satisfies some of our daily food requirements while giving our bodies some ammo for warding off nasty illnesses and that’s enough.

Also of note, we like having ready snack food and these bars freeze well and last forever – at least no one has ever become ill in my house from month-old granola bars. I swear they are made without preservatives, but somehow they last without losing crunch. read more

If you’ve never made your own pumpkin from scratch anything before and always relied on canned purees to fill your pies and nourish your muffins, then perhaps you too didn’t realize that jack o lantern pumpkins were not to be cooked with. Motivated to make something good out of our surplus of carving pumpkins, I would make pumpkin soup. The baseline recipe I would be using from one of my favorite Alice Waters cookbooks called for sugar pumpkins and I knew those orange orbs perched on our stoop would not suffice. I learned that sugar pumpkins are darker orange, have vertical stems and are less stringy than carving pumpkins. I learned that Whole Foods didn’t have any in stock and I learned that Bristol Farms only had small pumpkins at 1 lb each. Good grief.

The hardest part of this recipe was slicing the pumpkins horizontally. The skin was very tough and I was certain that in the Halloween spirit, I would lose a finger. I stabilized each pumpkin in the metal cup that sits within my cutting board and then pierced the flesh with a ghoulish stab and finished the job by slitting the beast in half until the innards wept out – too much Freddy? After that task, it was a matter of scooping, roasting, scooping, cooking. All done with about 30 minutes of my actual attention.

While the sugar pumpkin roasted, I figured on a way to warm my kids to the idea of eating pumpkin soup while giving them a little whole grain nibble. read more