Month: May 2011

The Food Chronicles

Picture this:

18h30.  Supper time in the Roux Household.  Everyone is gathered around the table and dinner is almost done.  Well no, not really.  These days the kids are going for seconds and thirds.

We have had our fair share of fights about food.  You know the script:  “eat your food OR…”, “If you don’t eat your food there will be no snack/TV/friends to play” etc etc etc,  so this has come as a real shocker.  I mean, what will we do now for kicks?  Is it even possible to have amicable meal?  Suddenly there is dialogue, not threats and fights and begging.

And you know what the worst thing was that crossed my mind about 3 seconds after I felt really grateful that they were actually eating?  “OMG, my kids are going to be fat.”

How ridiculous that you fight for years to get your kids to eat their food and then, when they finally do, all I want to do is rip that second piece of chicken out of their hands and shout NO!

Speaking of grabbing food out of a child’s hand that is the precise fight we are having with Daniel at the moment:  not eating with his hands.  When you have a small baby it’s quite easy to measure their milestones.  You know they will start smiling at about 6 weeks.  And you know what their poop will look like once you stop breastfeeding.

But when is a child supposed to comfortably be able to eat with a knife and fork?  Where is the handy week-by-week guide to the 5 year old boy?  And don’t think that any 2 websites will give you the same information about milestones.

All we mostly have is our gut and a lot of faith in our child’s abilities.  And the intense need not to see our child eat his rice with his hands.  And much as we ask him to use his fork to eat his food he will still use his other hand to scoop the food on to the fork or hold on to the one end of the chicken and the fork in the other.  Makes us giggle every time.  But he tries and that’s all that matters right now.

He has also decided that he wants to bath with his sisters and apparently they sprint for the bathroom when they walk in the door and Etienne has to bath them all at the same time, so it’s wet chaos when I get home.  We seriously need a bigger bath..

Wet Chaos

 

MFM: Butternut and Cashew Curry

I decided to give this recipe a try tonight as I couldn’t face anything cold.  I really wanted something warm and filling.  As usual I did my own thing, but the original recipe is here.

I couldn’t find any proper red curry paste the recipe asks for so I used medium curry and left out the fish sauce.  It meant that the flavours of the cinnamon and cumin blended really nicely.  Yum.

  • 600 chopped butternut (medium-large butternut)
  • 1 chopped onion
  • oil for frying
  • 1/4 teaspoon salt
  • 2 teaspoons curry powder
  • 1 teaspoon ground cumin
  • 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
  • 1 teaspoon ground cloves
  • 1 tin lite coconut milk
  • 1/3 cup water
  • 1 pack baby spinach (I used a 90g pack and it was enough for me)
  • 1/2 cup chopped roasted and salted cashews

Heat a little oil and fry the chopped butternut, cumin and salt for about 6 minutes or until brown in a large pan and tip into a plate.  Use the same pan, heat a little more oil and fry the onion for about 2 minutes.  Add 1/2 cup of the coconut milk and boil for another 2 minutes.  Add the curry powder or paste and boil for a further 2 minutes.

Then add the butternut, water, remainder of the coconut milk, cinnamon and cloves and boil for another 8 – 10 minutes until the butternut is cooked but firm.  Lastly add the baby spinach and cashews, stir in and boil for another minute until the spinach is wilted.

I had it with brown basmati and am taking it with to work tomorrow.  I suspect I’ll have to beat people off with a stick!

If you make it please let me know what you thought?

Hope

I was lucky enough to interview some amazing women this week that are applying for work.  Women that each overcame a serious set of personal challenges to be where they are today.

And they each want to pass on their determination to people in similar circumstances and live as beacons of hope.

I have interviewed many people over the years and I am probably a bit of a cynic, but these women really stood out for me.

This made me think of all the amazing women that I have known for many years or met either IRL (in real life) or online.  There are so many, so I will just briefly share some of their stories and link to them.  This is my small contribution to giving hope to anyone that might be reading this and going through something difficult at the moment.  These women are all very special and have each overcome their own set of circumstances.  They are fighters and survivors, because that what we need to do:  Fight and Survive.

My friend Camilla is a breast-cancer survivor.

My friend Tertia is a fellow infertility survivor, amongst other things.

My friends Candice and Caz have both lost babies (and so has Tertia)

My friend Sally has recently had her third baby and home-schools.

My friend Tracy recently started a support group for young Moms that have no support.

My online friend Hanlie is busy with an amazing self-discovery journey.

And last, but not least, my online friend Melanie is the brain behind the Twitter Blanket Drive, an amazing initiative.

At the Willowbridge Slow market today I came across this necklace and I simply HAD to have it.  This is my message of hope to you.  On the back of “hope” it says “love”, because what is the one without the other?

Hope you can read the message on the card!

If you want to contact the lovely lady that makes these beads you are welcome to email her on beaditforward@webafrica.org.za or contact Marieta Fichtner on +27 82 976 5885.

 

Nostalgia

After supper tonight I had one of those whoooosh flashbacks to my childhood and decided to make “Melkkos”.  It probably directly translates from Afrikaans as “Milk food”..

All I know is that it is the comfort food that comfort food would have eaten if comfort food could eat.  Or something 🙂

I only had a vague recollection of how to make it so I dug out my MIL’s 1973 Kook en Geniet (that iconic book of Afrikaans cooking) .  I have lots of memories of eating this as a child and specifically remember once when we had a power failure in Durban my Mom confused ground cloves for ground cinnamon in the dark and it tasted horrible over my favourite dish!

My Mom’s recipe involved rubbing butter into flour, but I found a much easier recipe that I tweaked:

  • 1l milk
  • 1tbsp butter
  • 1 cup flour
  • 1/4 cup castor sugar
  • pinch of salt

Heat the milk and butter either on the stove or microwave.  Meanwhile, mix the castor sugar, flour and salt.  When the milk is hot, pour about a cup into the flour mixture, stir very well (I used the hand blender) making sure there are no lumps and pour the flour mixture into the milk mixture.

Stick back on the stove/microwave and let it boil for about 3-5 minutes until thick-ish and creamy, stirring often (once again, I used the hand blender for this).

Pour into bowls and sprinkle some sugar and cinnamon to taste over.  It took a whopping 15 minutes to make and was better than I remember it. (Sorry Mom!)

What was your childhood comfort food?

Here’s a pic of the kids’ bowls, they loved it!

Fun and games

Etienne and I take turns to read to the kids at night and make lunches for the next day.  It generally takes longer to prepare lunches, but the chance of injury is considerably less.

This is how it goes:

At the appointed time we have a race down the passage to the bathroom where we fight to brush teeth and end up wiping toothpaste off every available surface.  After shouting because Daniel scraped his dropped toothpaste off the floor with his toothbrush.  Or because someone tried shoving their toothbrush up the spout of the tap.

But I digress.

We then arrive in the girls’ room where we put their pillows on the floor.  (At this point I need to add that this whole lying-on-the-floor-reading-thing was not my idea.  I blame Etienne for this incredible lack of judgement.)  We then have an extended negotiation about who wants what book.  Followed by another extended negotiation about who gets to go first.

And this is where it gets dangerous.  Reading to the child in question entails the child being read to lying on Mommy/Daddy’s back.  Which is more of a bouncing repertoire of knees to the parental kidneys on a good night.  This is after hopping up and down on your back.

The children that are not directly being read to ask where things are in the book.  They specifically ask about things that are in plain sight on the pages of books that they have read approximately 400 000 times before.

The children that are not directly being read to are also always keen to brush hair. Specifically the hair of the parent that is trying to read whilst being used for a trampoline whilst fielding questions on the picture content of the book.

You know what’s the saddest about all of this?  I absolutely love the chaos of reading time.  I love being in such close proximity to my kids so I can rub my cheek against that of the child lying on my back or tickle the back of one of them lying next to me.  I love that they love books and don’t fight about being read to. I love that they love being with us.  And I love their clean just-bathed-ready-for-bed smell.

So, much as I whine about chaos I love it.  Do I really want angelic children that sit quietly whilst being read to? Hell. No.

Just a quick pic share for posterity even though they were posted on twitter and FB:

Yesterday morning in our bed just before the morning chaos
Mignon asked for pink nails so we had a little pamper party before bedtime

MFM – Magic soup from tins

One of my favourite people on twitter is Jane-Anne Hobbs.  She is a foodie with a difference:  she makes food I can actually copy and she explains it so well that I have never (touch wood) had a flop making any of her recipes.

She featured this recipe in her latest newsletter and I just HAD to try it.  And good thing I decided to make it tonight as I was late getting home from work and it took a whopping 5 minutes to chuck together!

1 tin peeled and chopped tomato

1 tin butter beans

1 tin chickpeas

1 tin lite coconut milk

I rinsed the beans and chickpeas and added fresh water to the original brine level, added it to the tomatoes in the pot and liquidised it with our hand blender, added the coconut milk and spiced it with some salt, pepper, cumin and turmeric.  Then I let it bubble for 15 minutes and ate 2 whole bowls of it.  Seriously nom and ridiculously quick to fling together.

Thanks Jane-Anne!

Some feedback..

I got some lovely responses to my questions about children and medicine yesterday here and on twitter and FB, thanks so much!  Here are my responses, please feel free to comment and add your thoughts.

  1. At what point do you medicate for a fever?  And what do you give for a garden-variety fever? We usually wait until the fever hits 38 degrees if the child isn’t unhappy before we medicate and even then we take it easy on the medicine, usually Panado unless we are really battling.
  2. When you get a script from a doctor, do you take all the medicine prescribed and charge it to your medical aid or do you interrogate question what everything is for and what it’s meant to do. We totally question every single thing on the script.  We had a paed that overmedicated Daniel so much and sent us home with a BOX of duolin once.  True story.
  3. Do you question the quantities of medicine that gets dispensed so you aren’t stuck with weird and wonderful stuff that just fills your medicine cupboard? We always check the quantities that are needed and confirm before it is dispensed. We will often ask for the entire script to be loaded and if we need the rest of the stuff we can always have it dispensed at a later time.  Otherwise a lot of money and medicine is wasted.
  4. Do you have MSA? (Medical Savings Account)  If you do, do you believe it is the best way to manage your medical expenses? We cancelled our MSA when the girls were born because our medical aid would have jumped with more than R1000 per month if we kept our MSA.  It’s the best thing we’ve ever done.  It forces us to be careful about the medical help we seek and the medicine we buy.  When there is a big problem and we end in hospital we are taken care of by our hospital plan anyway.  Win.  I would much rather have a cupboard full of homeopathic remedies than cortisone and other yucky stuff.

We each have to make decisions that fit into our families and we only want to do the best for them and it’s HARD sometimes.  This is why I love bouncing things off you so much.

Thanks!

 

Children and medication, a question

The latest in the Isabel tummy bug saga: Salmonella.  And another R230.00 worth of medication.

And no, it’s not about the money, it’s about the confusion.  First it was a tummy bug, then it was constipation and now it’s salmonella after they grew a culture for 48 hours.  And we would have known it wasn’t constipation had we only taken an x-ray.

Which reminded me of something I wonder about often: do we overmedicate our children?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m the first one to run to the doctor (more homeopath these days) with a sick child and nothing leaves me feeling more powerless than not being able to ‘fix’ a sick child.  But are we not creating sicker adults by wanting quick fixes to common childhood ailments by pumping our children full of medicine?

I also often wonder of the predicament doctors are in and the pressure us worried parents put on them to ensure our children get better sooner.  And whether this pressure doesn’t lead to more children being over-medicated as a result.  I grew up believing that doctors are the be all and end all, but since I’ve had children I have realised that they are also only human.

Consider this:

  1. At what point do you medicate for a fever?  And what do you give for a garden-variety fever?
  2. When you get a script from a doctor, do you take all the medicine prescribed and charge it to your medical aid or do you interrogate question what everything is for and what it’s meant to do.
  3. Do you question the quantities of medicine that gets dispensed so you aren’t stuck with weird and wonderful stuff that just fills your medicine cupboard?
  4. Do you have MSA? (Medical Savings Account)  If you do, do you believe it is the best way to manage your medical expenses?

These are some real questions we have had to deal with the last 5 years and we all just want the best for our children, but are we really acting in their best interest?

I’ll come back tomorrow and tell you what we do 🙂

 

Voting day

Today we voted in the local elections and until now it’s never been a big thing for us, but now that we have twitter etc it’s amazing how important it’s become and I absolutely love it!
I refuse to raise apathetic children and will do my best to encourage them to vote, always.
Etienne and I voted in shifts (him in the morning and me late avie as the queues were hectic mid-morning) and we went to friends for lunch. These friends moved to Cape Town recently and are expecting their first baby. Their house is beautifully pristine and nothing has been moved to adult eye-level yet. There are no unidentified stains on their carpets and furniture, their house doesn’t smell like pee and they have lovely, non-functional, purely decorative stuff on low tables. I don’t know whether I should feel sorry for them or envy them. But they are such nice people I might just invite them over to shock them into what lies ahead
There were quite a few adults and children running around and for a brief, slightly inebriated moment I sat back and realised that these kind of gatherings makes life special.
Tonight I am feeling lucky and blessed and full of gratitude for all the amazing people in my life.
Thank you!
Ps, just to prove I did vote:

20110518-091541.jpg

Doctor Doctor!

I mentioned yesterday that we’ve been worried about Isabel’s stomach and by this morning we were really worried and waiting for the outcome of a stool sample I made my Mother get yesterday.

The Paediatrician’s rooms called this morning to say that the tests are back and there are no funny bugs, but to please bring Isabel in as they were also concerned about her.  And to bring a urine sample.

Which I completely forgot about of course until I arrived and was asked for the sample.

Have you ever tried getting a (sick) 3 year old to pee on demand?  Let me tell you, it’s not for the fainthearted. I dragged her off to the public bathrooms clutching the sample bottle and had to leave the cubicle open so I could plonk her down on the seat, go down on my knees and wedge in the little bottle at an appropriate angle.  And start begging.  I distinctly heard someone passing by and giggling, but I couldn’t turn around to glare at them as I was staring at my child’s vajayjay hoping for a drop of pee.

Needless to say it wasn’t very successful, so we (me) dragged our heels back to the doctor’s rooms.  No, he REALLY needs a urine sample. Thankfully they have a potty in the rooms so I proceeded to engage in promises of extended use of games on my phone.  And Volia! just enough drops to check that she was, in fact, not dehydrated as we feared.  Such a champ.

As it turns out she probably had a bug, but because we gave her medicine to stop the squirts it apparently uhm blocked everything.  Which apparently is pretty backed up anyway at their age.  So we were doing the complete opposite of what we were meant to be doing. (cue accompanying guilt trip soundtrack)

After the doctor’s I took her to my Mom’s house to drop her off, still not convinced that she would be ok, but Madam was having none of it today.  She’s not normally a very clingy child, but I think she just had enough of not being with Mommy or Daddy when she’s sick for the 4th day and she just cracked.  She literally cried hysterically and I just couldn’t bear to leave her again.  So I stayed and we cuddled on the couch for the afternoon.

So now she is pumped full of all kinds of things to make things progress a little more smoothly and we await an imminent explosion.  Pardon the pun.

Man, she’s really full of shit full of it. Okok, I’ll stop

ps:  Just curious, I’m very tempted to call the doctor that gave us the wrong diagnosis and let him know what the end of it was.  What do you think?  I don’t want to fight, I would just hate for someone else to go through the same as us.

pps: Here’s why I love Cape Town so much.  Pure autumn gold.

Autumn in Cape Town