Lately I had a conversation with a friend about food.  She is frustrated because her family doesn't want to eat the diet that she wants to eat.  I won't go into details except to say that she is pretty committed to eating a lot of vegetables and raw as much as possible. I've been thinking about this ever since.  I think our diet is moderately healthy.  I try to include as many vegetables and fruits in our diet as I can.  I'm sure it could be healthier.  But it's caused to me to think about my philosophy towards family meals.  Meals are about so much more than just nutrition and I think it's easy to forget that, including me. Here are my goals for family meals: 1.  Help my children learn how to cook and prepare a meal. 2.  Serve nutritious food to my family--but if they won't eat it, it's not going to be do them any good. Which brings me to... 3.  Serve food that is enjoyable to eat.  Let go of the guilt involved with less-healthy food and

When I was about 8 or 9, I had a pioneer dress that my mother had made for me in honor of the American Bicentennial in 1976.  We were headed to church one Sunday and my mother got out an apron that she said was given to her by her grandmother and told me I could wear it with my pioneer dress.  It was a fancy apron that a pioneer might have worn with Sunday clothes.  Right away, I got the apron caught in the car door and I made a big rip in the handmade crocheted lace inset of the apron.  I felt terrible and my mother was pretty sad about it.  She got it fixed but the crocheted inset was very fine needlework and the woman who fixed it couldn't duplicate it exactly. Fast forward 35 years.  My mother had never figured out what to do with the apron so she gave it to me.  I had no idea what to do with it either but I kept it on a shelf in my closet and there it sat until a few weeks ago.  I decided the time had come to get it framed.  I carefully washed it by hand and ironed it and th

Lately I've been getting tired of my menus.  I have a 5-week rotating menu plan that I made a long time ago.  At the beginning of the month I plug in the menu plan with a few tweaks according to our schedule and then we always know what we're having for dinner!  Unless I'm tired of it... So at the beginning of this month I decided to try a few new recipes and hunted around for ones that looked promising.  Here is a recipe we tried last week that is definitely a keeper, especially since I'm trying to incorporate spinach into our menus more frequently.  Only one of my children didn't like it and she's frequently picky. The main drawback is that fresh cilantro is a really nice addition to the recipe and I usually don't have fresh cilantro in my refrigerator.  I think green onions would also be better than regular onions (which is what I used) but I usually don't have those either.  I'll just have to remember those ingredients when this recipe is on th

Recently I have been reading two books that talk about conditions in Africa.  I didn't do this intentionally; it just worked out that way.  Today I'll review the first book. The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind by William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer is about William Kamkwamba who is from Malawi and how he coped with the abject poverty he lived in.  His story gives me hope for the people of Africa. His family are poor farmers, like most of the people in Malawi.  They have no electricity and no indoor plumbing.  Even though it would be possible to grow crops year-round because of the climate, the farmers only grow crops during the rainy season which is the summertime for them (our winter).  They are very much subject to the whims of the weather because they don't have irrigation to deal with lack of rain or the dry season.  Because of this (and government corruption--a constant problem), in 2002, they suffered a devastating famine.  Many people died from starvation and Willi