Helpful Healthy Eating Form from Health Canada

Our family wasn't eating enough vegetables.  The kids were eating a lot of wheat with cheese.  I was searching for a tool that would help us track our servings and make healthier choices.  By healthy choices I mean a varied diet of grains, vegetables, fruit, meat/protein and dairy.  In other words - the Canada Food Guide.

While I take issue that the Canada Food guide includes dairy as its own complete category and others have concern that there is too much emphasis on grains, its a pretty good starting point for healthy, balanced, sensible diet.

Now how to implement this?  I have, in the past, kept food diaries.  They are a great tool for weight loss but they made me crazy and obsessive about food so I don't think they are very healthy for me.  I figured that a food diary for the kids would equal an eating disorder in their very near future so that wouldn't work for them either.  Health Canada actually had the answer!

These are downloadable charts for different ages.  They have check boxes for the servings of an item you eat. For example:

I find this a very simple way to track what I eat without writing everything down. I'm not finding this to be stressful.  My youngest daughter loves tracking what she eats - she's very mathematically minded so this works for her.  My older daughter doesn't like tracking so she doesn't.

I really like this tool.  It is working well in our family.  What helps keep your family on track with healthy eating?

Glass jars are awesome.

I use glass jars in my kitchen anyway that I possibly can.  I love glass jars.

Dry goods

This the bottom drawer in the kitchen.  I use it to store most of my dry goods except flour, sugar and rice.  These are 1 litre mason jars.  They fit great and hold quite a bit of dry goods.  I used to have all of these items just in their original packaging and loose in my food cupboard.  It was awful.  I'd get frustrated trying to find stuff.  I'd buy duplicates.  Really a pain.  Now if the entire package doesn't fit into the jar - it goes onto the top shelf of the large corner cupboard for storage.  So I don't forget that it is up there, perhaps hiding behind the flour, I put an elastic band on the jar.  This reminds me that there is more in the cupboard and don't buy any quite yet.

spice drawer

The spice drawer is a little bit more eclectic. I love the symmetry of the dry goods drawer but that simply won't work for the spices.  It's a mix of original packaged items (like the soup mix), mason jars (like the cinnamon sticks), reused glass jars.  My favourite jars to reuse for spices are yeast jars (we make a lot of bread so these are starting to add up) and artichoke jars (I use them in my tartar sauce - so yummy!). This allows me to buy new spices in a bulk package and store them in a jar.  My favourite labeling material is green painters tape.  It sticks really well but not so well that it won't come off if I decide to re-purpose the jar.

the fridge isn't this neat

I also freeze in glass jars.  I have significant concerns about putting burning hot soup or chicken stock into plastic containers to freeze.  I am worried about plastics leeching into my food.  I could let the food cool and then put them in plastic to reduce the likelihood of materials leeching into my food but then I have to wait for the food to cool.  That just takes way to long - I want to be finished.  I'm sure that you're wondering how my jars don't all break in the freezer.  It's easy - simply freeze them without the lids on.  I put the lids in the freeze at the same time so the next day it is easy to put the lids onto the frozen jars.  I use mason jars for soup.  The 250ml size is perfect for 1 serving of soup.  My daughter will choose soup for a snack when it is available like this.  I like any re-used store jar for freezing stock.  They too are labelled with painters tape but on the lid so you can't see it.

This is how I use glass jars in my kitchen besides preserving.  Do you use glass jars in your kitchen?  If so, how?

Toronto Boat Show - Footprint Boats

The family and I went to the Toronto Boat Show yesterday.  It was so much fun!  We have gone for the past 3 years.  We always pack lots of food, slip on shoes (no shoes allowed on the boats so you take them off a lot), and water.  It is fun to day dream about the day when we can buy our own boat.  Cale is sold on a pontoon party boat and, if paired with a couple of jet skis for fast fun, I'm in agreement.  That is until we were exploring the sailboats and from the railing saw a tent trailer.  A tent trailer at the boat show!  What?

This is what we saw:

This is a Footprint Boat. As described on the website:

The Footprint Boat was created to revolutionize the boating world. It solves the problem of affordable family accommodation on the water. Using a form must follow function philosophy, this design focuses on what it must do, not how it should look. The Footprint Boat is a lightweight, low maintenance, fuel efficient, affordable “working man’s yacht.”

I can't say that we were immediately in love but immediately intrigued may have been the better description.  When we saw this boat it also had bikes on the roof of the tent trailer.  If our car below is any indication, packed for a camping trip out east, of how this family rolls, the bikes really caught my attention.

on our way to Grand Manan, NB, Bay of Fundy

We camp.  We love camping. We car camp. We also camp via aluminum boats with our friends.  This is the on-the-water version of car camping.  We load the boats with as much stuff as they can carry and boat to an island in northern Ontario and camp on crown land.  It's great - more conveniences than full back-country camping without the people and rules of a campground (we still love Killbear though:).  The problem is you have to load up the boat and then unload the boat and set up camp.  With this crazy contraption you could load it up at home, launch it, get to where you want and then simply run the front end onto a beach.  Done.  Stay one night if you want and then go explore some more.  This is incredible appealing to me.

The boat has movable pontoons so it is narrow enough to tow but wide enough to be stable on the water, it only needs 14" of water and sleeps 6.  This is pretty cool.

After the boat show we went for supper and talked about this boat. We love the tent trailer part and the concept but there are a couple of items we didn't like.  This is the prototype so I'm optimistic that all of our changes will be taken into consideration and we'll buy one shortly after I graduate.

Here are our thoughts:

• The front is ugly.  A lot of ugly. It reminds me of a SnowCat. I would love to learn why it was designed this way - if you know please share. 

• Perhaps a pontoon boat inspired front would be nicer. Add a full camper top enclosure to this puppy and its a winner.  The benches could still be used for sleeping but the option for a more open boating experience is there.
• A swim platform.  I didn't see any reference to a swim platform on the Footprint Boats.  As a family with little fish for children this is an important feature.  The pontoon boat front with swim platform would fix this problem too.
• Last but not least is that the tent trailer section and the front section enclose as 2 individual compartments.  If it is raining, I'm not going to want to run in between these 2 sections.  It's like going from the dining tent to the main tent.  If these 2 sections could be enclosed together for 1 giant party room - that would be perfect.

It really took us a long time to wrap our heads around this boat.  I'd love to hear what you think.

What to do with dried cherry tomatoes? Pesto-inspired pasta sauce!

(spoiler alert: the recipe is below but first the back story)

Some of you may know that I had a pretty substantial garden this summer. I had about 20 tomato plants - mostly Roma but I had a few heritage varieties, beef-steak and a couple of cherry/grape tomato plants too. Of course, cherry tomatoes are always immense producers resulting in a glut of itty bitty tomatoes. My husband and kids hates cherry tomatoes. I simply cannot eat that many tomatoes (actually I tried and just had terrible heartburn but I'll save you the details). Jonathon Wallace came to the rescue!

Well his YouTube videos did anyway. Jonathon Wallace is a British bloke who's goal is to be self-sufficient in suburbia. I love this! If it were solely up to me this is the direction I would go. Any way, I digress - he has a great video on how to dry your tomatoes in the oven. (my use of "glut" also came from him)

So, in August, I dried all of my tomatoes as per Mr. Wallace's instructions. Here are the results:


500 ml jar of dried cherry tomatoes.

Now what....these have sat in my cupboard since August. I had some vague idea of putting them on pizza but no concrete plans.

Last night I had a simple supper of ravioli pasta planned. I was going to use some pesto as a sauce but my oldest daughter has decided that she hates pesto even though she used to eat by the spoonful when she was a toddler.

That's when it hit me! The pesto provided the inspiration! Make a pesto-like sauce with the dried tomatoes.

So here is what I came up with:

Ingredients:
1/3c dried tomatoes
1/2 onion
2 cloves garlic
1/4c Parmesan cheese
olive oil
salt and pepper to taste
*as always quantities are approximate since I never measure anything when I cook so I'm really guessing at the amounts here*

Soak the dried tomatoes in boiling water for 10-15min.
Finely chop onions and garlic - saute in olive oil until soft.

Mix drained tomatoes with onions and garlic in food processor (I just used a little one). Add more olive oil if needed.

In a bowl combine the above with Parmesan.

Holy Cow! It is delicious. Even the little one ate it!

Dried tomatoes (not in oil) are pretty cheap in the grocery store so try it out and let me know how you like it.

Maybe next summer, you'll dry your own ;)

BSc Midwifery?!

I haven't posted much in a long time.  Frankly, I've never been a very dedicated blogger.  But I have been pretty busy in the past year and a 1/2.  September 2010, I started my journey to be a midwife as a full time university student at McMaster in the BSc Midwifery program. I'll graduate in 2014.

It's a road that I started on in 1998 but I stepped off the path for massage therapy when I wasn't accepted into the program.  It took me 12 years to come back to my passion - the career that I really have been chasing all along.

Don't get me wrong - I love massage therapy.  I love the variety of people that I meet and the relationships that we build.  I have had the most AMAZING conversations while massaging - crazy stuff like religion, politics, parenting - big issues that step outside the mainstream.  I also enjoy the quiet - the people who don't talk. The privilege of being present in someone else's peace - of helping create a moment of peace for another human being - is very powerful.  It's an honour that I am thankful for.

I'm not putting flowers in your hair.  More likely, I'm going to put your hair in a sloppy ponytail on top of your head.  Bring a hat.

Massage has its issues too.  I wish I could provide massage for everyone who needed it - not just those who can afford it or are privileged enough to have extended health benefits that cover massage.  I am so happy that midwifery is paid in full by the Ministry of Health.  It doesn't matter if you can afford it, have coverage, are a refugee or have OHIP coverage.  If you have a normal pregnancy then you can have midwifery care.

I'm off this term, January 2012 to mid-April 2012, I'll be providing full time massage therapy.  You're hopefully going to hear a lot more from me during these months.  Then I'll be on placement in St. Thomas, until August, learning how to catch babies and all other things midwifery related.  Thanks for being part of my journey.

Please visit our association's, Ontario Midwives Association, website to learn more about midwifery.

Frugal Kitchen Tip

Buy a whole chicken.

Fancy "trussed" chicken.
If you can buy chicken in a bag complete with yucky chicken juice - it'll be cheaper and I bet is less likely injected with saline or other crap.

Seriously. It's way cheaper and doesn't take much work to get 3 meals out of it.

I try to buy the biggest bird at the store. It usually costs $10 - 12.

To cook it I boil it in a pot of water with 1 carrot, 1 onion (quartered with skins on) and 1 chopped celery. Add some parsley, thyme and a bay leaf. You are now making chicken stock. Cook until the bird comes apart. I like to let it cool over night.

Next day. Skim the fat off of the top. Drain saving all the stock. DO NOT POUR THE STOCK DOWN THE SINK. That would be terrible to waste amazing home made stock. You now need to pick through the chicken. This is way less gross than you may be thinking as it is completely cooked and cooled. You should get 2 full chicken breasts and a pile of smaller pieces of chicken.

I can now make some awesome chicken soup with 1/2 of the stock and the chicken meat pieces. I freeze the rest of the stock. I often freeze the chicken breasts for later use too.

3 meals: soup, left over soup for lunches, chicken breasts + BONUS stock in the freezer.

New Years Resolutions

Love them or hate them New Years is a great time for self reflection. For me it's always time to get back on track with routine - sleep, eating, exercise.


Did you know that only 30 minutes a day of walking can prevent or lower your risk for many, many diseases? Loosing weight doesn't need to be the goal - just walk! Watch 23 1/2 hours by Dr. Mike Evans to learn more.