Today we watched a video that was introduced to Katie in her nutrition class last term: "Supersize Me." It was about as sickening as I expected. The premise was that a healthy young man, Morgan Spurlock, decided to feed himself only McDonalds food for one month. His health was assessed beforehand and afterward and the vast difference that transpired in that one month shocked even the three doctors he consulted, all of whom kept urging him throughout to quit, or to modify the diet in some way or another so as to assure that he would not cause permanent damage or bring about his own death in the process.
Our family occasionally eats fast food, but most of our meals are at home. Still, when I consider the nutrition of our homemade food, I go through peaks and valleys in the nutritional effort of making it healthy. I think overall that I do pretty well; however I still have a weight problem, but I think that it is primarily due to insufficient exercise. There are a number of nutritional components that we have paid attention to for years, and a few that we have added as a result of Katie's nutrition class. I thought I would enumerate these here so that if you wanted you could implement them for your family's good health.
1. Look for low-fat and high-fiber recipes. Look at the nutritional assessments of the recipes you find. If the fat content is 9 grams per serving or less, I consider that to be low-fat. The higher the fiber, the better. Fiber binds up fat before it is absorbed into the bloodstream and helps keep a person feel full for longer.I rarely serve a recipe that is listed to have over 15 grams of fat per serving.
2. Add any vegetables you can that are suitable to the recipe. I found a recipe that had ham, pineapple, and brown sugar. This would be too sweet and too low in nutrients, but not so bad if one adds bell pepper, onion, celery, and carrots. If you can add canned beans, drained, to a recipe, that will add a great deal of fiber--I find many Mexican recipes are receptive to black beans, which take on seasonings nicely. I also look for any opportunity to add parsley to a recipe. It is very high in minerals and other nutrients. Adding vegetables also minimizes the opportunity for fat and salt to prevail per serving, and raises the fiber content.
3. Avoid too much use of beef or pork and include more recipes that call for chicken. Beef and pork fat is nastier than chicken fat; it is more solid at a lower temperature, and therefore more harmful. Beef and pork are also very likely to have a lot more fat within the muscle than chicken does. If you skin the chicken (best before cooking, but flavor is improved if you wait until after cooking) that helps lower the fat a great deal as well.
4. Skim or blot the fat before serving. First of all, I remove fat from the pan after browning the meat, pouring it out or blotting it with a paper towel. I don't brown meat and vegetables together, because I don't want to coat the vegetables with meat fat; I brown the vegetables in canola oil or cook them in water. Sometimes I even rinse the browned meat under water, but that will reduce flavor somewhat. You can use a paper towel and squeeze the fat out of ground beef or pork. Fat tends to rise to the top, especially after a dish is simmered and/or refrigerated. You can skim it from liquid using a ladle or spoon, or a thin layer of floating fat will stick to a lettuce leaf which you can rinse off in hot water a few times in the sink. If you simmer a meaty dish and see fat pooling in areas, it is a good opportunity to take a spoon and remove the fat. I throw the fat if significant into the wastebasket because when it hardens in the drain it will clog it (but it's better in the drain than in your arteries!). If I serve a casserole or pizza coated with cheese, I take a napkin or paper towel and blot it until very little comes off. It's amazing how much there is; cheese is a very fatty food!
5. Avoid using too much cheese. I still probably use too much, but I try these days to use it more for flavor than for a main source of protein or filler. I don't make main dishes calling for cream cheese, and if I use a recipe of any sort calling for cream cheese, I use Neufchatel. I don't find that it has any distinguishable difference except in fat content. For main dishes, you may get a satisfactory similar effect by adding sour cream (which you can get in reduced fat form). I don't find that no-fat hard cheese substitutes are acceptable; you need a saw to cut them when they have melted.
6. Use non-fat milk (also known as skim or fat-free). I started drinking it at age 7, when my dad had his first heart attack. Even though 2% sounds like only a little bit of fat, somehow this 2% is a major misnomer. In an 8-oz. serving, 2% has 5 grams of fat! Non-fat has none. The 2% has 120 cal.; non-fat has 90. Non-fat has 9 grams protein; 2% has only 8. You can easily wean yourself off higher fat milk by mixing it more and more with non-fat.
7. Lately, we have started to avoid high-fructose corn syrup. Katie learned that the liver turns it directly to fat. And we discover it's in almost all prepared food! Pop, jam, canned fruit, gel fruit snacks, barbecue sauce, peanut butter, yogurt. But there are often alternatives that don't have it; still you may have to do some searching.
8. Don't think that other forms of sugar are healthier than white. They're no different, not even honey. Your saliva immediately breaks sugars down; that's why honey is no longer sticky when your saliva hits it.
9. Mix extra egg whites in when using eggs. Or when baking, substitute two egg whites for every whole egg. The fat and therefore extreme cholesterol is in the yolks, and you won't miss the density of flavor if you start with one egg white and add more of them as you get used to it. And while we're here, brown eggs have no inherent advantage in nutrition over white eggs; the shell color makes no impact.
10. Replace some of the oil with applesauce or pureed prunes in baked goods. You can find low-fat cookbooks that specialize in this at the library, or experiment around with some of your recipes. Start with a little and gradually increase the substitution each time until you maximize its good effect.
11. Serve oats whenever possible; add flax seed to oatmeal for breakfast and to some baked goods. Oats are high in soluble fiber and are beneficial for reducing cholesterol; flax seed reduces cholesterol and is high in fiber. This is another opportunity for experimentation. I make our meatloaf and meatballs using oatmeal rather than crushed crackers or bread crumbs.
12. Use whole-grain breads and flours, brown rice, and wild rice rather than white. These have much advantage over the white refined versions, in that the most nutritious elements are still there. They are higher in fiber, b vitamins, minerals; they are more filling, too as they're more slowly digested. Don't expect that "enriched" flour replaces it all--it doesn't.
13. Buy the lower-fat versions of ice cream rather than the full-fat version. In doing so you can eat twice as much! Just kidding. After a while you become used to the lower-fat type and they become more appealing than the high-fat version.
These are the things that come to mind. I might think of others later! I hope you find all these things helpful. Enjoy and eat in good health, and with thanks to God for His abundant provision of all this beautiful variety to which we have access. Is He not good, and are we not greatly blessed?
Sunday, April 22, 2007
Saturday, April 14, 2007
The Value of a Mom in the Home
When I came to know Jesus Christ as my Savior and Lord at the age of 29, I was working at Boeing, and the mother of Katie, almost 2 years old, who hated Boeing because she wanted to be with her mom. It didn't take long for God to impress upon me that it was more beneficial to my family and to my own health for me to stay home than it was for me to work full time. This in spite of the fact that at the time Gary was trying to break into sales after 12 years of office work; he would start a job as a sales rep at a food brokerage, and within a month or so they would put him on part-time so they would not have to pay him benefits. This happened three times; so at the time I was realizing the need to stay home he was earning $9.50 an hour, part-time. This wasn't very promising! Yet circumstances too complicated to relate made it very clear that it was the best option. So I quit, but I gave just enough notice, 3 weeks, to quit on the first day of August so I'd have just one more month of medical coverage. (A year and a half later he got a steady job that paid better than any he'd had before, with full benefits; that's a funny story in itself, for another time. Meanwhile we scraped by and learned to save like never before!)
It wasn't financially easy, but it hadn't been easy before, either. At that time, I was paying $250 per month in daycare. That sounds cheap by today's standards and I think it was fairly cheap then but not cheap like it would be now, and not cheap to me even then! I was earning about $9 per hour at Boeing after 4 years there when I quit. As one example of how desperately broke we were, we used only cloth diapers rather than disposable to save money, the wash-your-own kind, even though I was working. By the time I paid daycare, the cost of driving to work, higher car insurance, higher income tax, the various conveniences I no doubt purchased for the sake of sanity, the birthday presents and occasional bought lunches because of office festivities, the cost of dressing up, and with the inability to shop for sale prices with the remaining time I had, I didn't have much to spare by the end of the month anyway. At the time I quit I had more exact numbers than I have now, and I estimated that I earned about $80 per month by the time I paid for the expenses of working.
These days most women who work probably earn more than I did; but they are no doubt paying more for daycare unless they have a kindly friend or relative doing it as a favor. (I remember one woman at Boeing who paid more in daycare than she earned, because she had two boys; she said the daycare people could do a better job of raising her kids than she could.) If a woman has more than one child I would like to challenge her to show how it could possibly be financially smarter to work than to stay at home.
For that matter, there is the matter of stress and sanity. My health was at a low ebb by the time I quit; I had allergies that were ever-increasing in spite of taking shots, and I was constantly exhausted. My home was in dreadful disarray for lack of time and energy, and I had no significant time to spend one-on-one with Gary or Katie by the time I'd made dinner and had cleaning still to do.
I read an article that is entitled, US Mothers Deserve $134,121 in Salary. (If you are interested, go there! It will try to quantify the value of the work you do at home; in fact, if you work, it doesn't discount the value of that.) While it offered the role of daycare teacher as one facet of a mom's workday, the role comparable to homeschool teacher wasn't provided, such as private tutor or private school teacher, for which I could probably claim higher pay. It also assumed that the husband does the yard work (Gary does mow the lawn but the rest is mine), and doesn't say anything about home repairs. Well, between painting, working on plumbing and electrical and so forth, that's a whole additional category that is mine! The categories it offers are housekeeper, day care center teacher, cook, computer operator, laundry machine operator, janitor, facilities manager, van driver (chauffer sounds a little higher pay and is more like the custom-applied driving of a mom, rather than a corporate van driver), CEO and psychologist; in previous years it also included nurse. Now I don't consider myself a CEO or a psychologist (though I do try to use verses from God's word for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training; give practical aspects regarding behavior; and also apply discipline where needed)."Laundry machine operator" and "janitor" each seem so specific a segment of my time that they ought to be included in housekeeping. Many functions I do are those of a nurse. What about personal shopper, too? The list is hardly comprehensive or perfect. Still, anything in the realm of $134,000 brings a smile to my face. Mom's presence in the home counts for a lot!
And yet, the money value on paper doesn't account for all of it. What about just the comfort that a mom's presence at home provides? The fact that a child has a parent always ready to be at home with him if he's sick, or to help make a car for the Grand Prix? Not only that but the accountability for his behavior after school. I mention that because out of about 17 kids on our street, most of them have mothers who are still at work when they come home from school, and who don't make it home until 5:30 if by then. These parents have no idea of the things their children do while they're gone. A child needs someone to account to, someone who will be his mentor, his confidante, his defender...the value of a mom's presence is impossible to quantify in dollars, but according to what I experienced and what I read in that article, a mother's value is definitely highest at home.
It wasn't financially easy, but it hadn't been easy before, either. At that time, I was paying $250 per month in daycare. That sounds cheap by today's standards and I think it was fairly cheap then but not cheap like it would be now, and not cheap to me even then! I was earning about $9 per hour at Boeing after 4 years there when I quit. As one example of how desperately broke we were, we used only cloth diapers rather than disposable to save money, the wash-your-own kind, even though I was working. By the time I paid daycare, the cost of driving to work, higher car insurance, higher income tax, the various conveniences I no doubt purchased for the sake of sanity, the birthday presents and occasional bought lunches because of office festivities, the cost of dressing up, and with the inability to shop for sale prices with the remaining time I had, I didn't have much to spare by the end of the month anyway. At the time I quit I had more exact numbers than I have now, and I estimated that I earned about $80 per month by the time I paid for the expenses of working.
These days most women who work probably earn more than I did; but they are no doubt paying more for daycare unless they have a kindly friend or relative doing it as a favor. (I remember one woman at Boeing who paid more in daycare than she earned, because she had two boys; she said the daycare people could do a better job of raising her kids than she could.) If a woman has more than one child I would like to challenge her to show how it could possibly be financially smarter to work than to stay at home.
For that matter, there is the matter of stress and sanity. My health was at a low ebb by the time I quit; I had allergies that were ever-increasing in spite of taking shots, and I was constantly exhausted. My home was in dreadful disarray for lack of time and energy, and I had no significant time to spend one-on-one with Gary or Katie by the time I'd made dinner and had cleaning still to do.
I read an article that is entitled, US Mothers Deserve $134,121 in Salary. (If you are interested, go there! It will try to quantify the value of the work you do at home; in fact, if you work, it doesn't discount the value of that.) While it offered the role of daycare teacher as one facet of a mom's workday, the role comparable to homeschool teacher wasn't provided, such as private tutor or private school teacher, for which I could probably claim higher pay. It also assumed that the husband does the yard work (Gary does mow the lawn but the rest is mine), and doesn't say anything about home repairs. Well, between painting, working on plumbing and electrical and so forth, that's a whole additional category that is mine! The categories it offers are housekeeper, day care center teacher, cook, computer operator, laundry machine operator, janitor, facilities manager, van driver (chauffer sounds a little higher pay and is more like the custom-applied driving of a mom, rather than a corporate van driver), CEO and psychologist; in previous years it also included nurse. Now I don't consider myself a CEO or a psychologist (though I do try to use verses from God's word for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training; give practical aspects regarding behavior; and also apply discipline where needed)."Laundry machine operator" and "janitor" each seem so specific a segment of my time that they ought to be included in housekeeping. Many functions I do are those of a nurse. What about personal shopper, too? The list is hardly comprehensive or perfect. Still, anything in the realm of $134,000 brings a smile to my face. Mom's presence in the home counts for a lot!
And yet, the money value on paper doesn't account for all of it. What about just the comfort that a mom's presence at home provides? The fact that a child has a parent always ready to be at home with him if he's sick, or to help make a car for the Grand Prix? Not only that but the accountability for his behavior after school. I mention that because out of about 17 kids on our street, most of them have mothers who are still at work when they come home from school, and who don't make it home until 5:30 if by then. These parents have no idea of the things their children do while they're gone. A child needs someone to account to, someone who will be his mentor, his confidante, his defender...the value of a mom's presence is impossible to quantify in dollars, but according to what I experienced and what I read in that article, a mother's value is definitely highest at home.
My Pantry and the Abundance of Food
I am blessed with a walk-in pantry. I have to admit I kind of take it for granted--in fact, I am ashamed most of the time of the mess therein; there is such an abundance of food stocked that it often flows to the floor especially if my 9-year-old has been there. People come over and comment on how great it must be to have a pantry, and it reminds me to be thankful.
I keep it stocked out of a long-ingrained habit, buying groceries on sale, with coupons, and we eat well for a minimum of money. Grocery shopping is serious business for me; to get the best price on food is my way of making a good investment, because I can readily save about a third of the regular amount by being careful. My mom had six kids and kept lots of food on hand; I probably outdo her. But we went out fairly often as a family, whereas our family does so far less. We usually eat at home, except once in a while at Costco or a quick dollar-menu fast food item here and there. Being homeschoolers we are home most of the time.
This is something that for the most part doesn't seem strange to me; I prefer eating at home. Once in a while, though, I realize how unusual it must be, such as when a friend of my son came to stay for a few days and was astounded at the quantity of dishes we had in the dishwasher. (I sometimes think a second dishwasher would be a good thing.) I run it once or twice per day and it's always stuffed. And then Katie who took a Nutrition course at the community college comes home with statistics about how few times the average American family eats together at home, or how often they eat fast food; then there is an appalling ad for KFC chicken that makes take-out food as if it were an "at home family meal" and though I like KFC well enough, I realize all the more how much we are blessed. We get to eat home-made food together most nights of the week, except when Katie is working, and then three of us are here!
It's a blessing in terms of family togetherness, in finances, in nutrition, in efficiency. I love it so much more than when we eat out! I would so rather make the meal than have it made for me; in fact, I was thinking the other night that just as Eric Liddell, the Gold Medal runner and missionary to China (whose Olympic feat was the subject of the movie Chariots of Fire) said, "When I run, I feel God's pleasure," the same is true of my cooking. I feel that I am fulfilling a good part of God's purpose for me: to provide for my family (and perhaps guests or a family in sickness); even though it may not evangelize the lost too well unless I feed an unbelieving family, it still might glorify God in His provision for His own. (That is, if it tastes good.) I doubt I'll ever get a gold medal for it though.
I used to feel guilty about the abundance of groceries I keep on hand, feeling maybe it wasn't good stewardship; when I go visit people they don't seem to keep as much food around and it's so much tidier. But if they go out more, or don't cook from scratch as much, then it stands to reason they wouldn't need as much. I don't feel guilty about it like I used to. Sometimes it goes to waste; but not so much of the time. It's good not to have to go to the store every day, or go out to eat. It's God's blessing on our family to have an abundance and to be equipped for that good work.
"I will bless her with abundant provisions; her poor I will satisfy with food." Psalm 132:15
I keep it stocked out of a long-ingrained habit, buying groceries on sale, with coupons, and we eat well for a minimum of money. Grocery shopping is serious business for me; to get the best price on food is my way of making a good investment, because I can readily save about a third of the regular amount by being careful. My mom had six kids and kept lots of food on hand; I probably outdo her. But we went out fairly often as a family, whereas our family does so far less. We usually eat at home, except once in a while at Costco or a quick dollar-menu fast food item here and there. Being homeschoolers we are home most of the time.
This is something that for the most part doesn't seem strange to me; I prefer eating at home. Once in a while, though, I realize how unusual it must be, such as when a friend of my son came to stay for a few days and was astounded at the quantity of dishes we had in the dishwasher. (I sometimes think a second dishwasher would be a good thing.) I run it once or twice per day and it's always stuffed. And then Katie who took a Nutrition course at the community college comes home with statistics about how few times the average American family eats together at home, or how often they eat fast food; then there is an appalling ad for KFC chicken that makes take-out food as if it were an "at home family meal" and though I like KFC well enough, I realize all the more how much we are blessed. We get to eat home-made food together most nights of the week, except when Katie is working, and then three of us are here!
It's a blessing in terms of family togetherness, in finances, in nutrition, in efficiency. I love it so much more than when we eat out! I would so rather make the meal than have it made for me; in fact, I was thinking the other night that just as Eric Liddell, the Gold Medal runner and missionary to China (whose Olympic feat was the subject of the movie Chariots of Fire) said, "When I run, I feel God's pleasure," the same is true of my cooking. I feel that I am fulfilling a good part of God's purpose for me: to provide for my family (and perhaps guests or a family in sickness); even though it may not evangelize the lost too well unless I feed an unbelieving family, it still might glorify God in His provision for His own. (That is, if it tastes good.) I doubt I'll ever get a gold medal for it though.
I used to feel guilty about the abundance of groceries I keep on hand, feeling maybe it wasn't good stewardship; when I go visit people they don't seem to keep as much food around and it's so much tidier. But if they go out more, or don't cook from scratch as much, then it stands to reason they wouldn't need as much. I don't feel guilty about it like I used to. Sometimes it goes to waste; but not so much of the time. It's good not to have to go to the store every day, or go out to eat. It's God's blessing on our family to have an abundance and to be equipped for that good work.
"I will bless her with abundant provisions; her poor I will satisfy with food." Psalm 132:15
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