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About Baker City herald. (Baker City, Or.) 1990-current | View Entire Issue (Sept. 8, 2020)
B Tuesday, September 8, 2020 The Observer & Baker City Herald NUTRITION: IT’S ALL GOOD Satiating Students When They’re Learning At Home ANN BLOOM Staying healthy when times are uncertain If this was another time, this column would be about how to make healthy school lunches and afterschool snacks for children. But this is not just another time. Although children returning to school in the fall is still an uncertainty, or how that will all look, nutrition has, and will continue to be, important in the lives of all children and their families. Some families are experiencing food insecurity for the fi rst time. Food insecurity is defi ned as not having consis- tent access to enough food to provide a nutritionally substantive diet, with questions about where the food for the next meal will come from, due to lack of money or other resources. For other families food insecurity is their normal; there is nothing new about it. Hunger is defi ned as not having enough food to eat, and going without food for some portion of the day, or days. Food security is when there is enough food for everyone in the household, at all times and in suffi cient amounts to provide for the dietary needs to live a healthy life. Budgeting and watching every penny to see where it goes in the family’s food budget is more important now, than perhaps ever before. See Healthy/Page 3B BETWEEN THE ROWS Mariah Tauger/Los Angeles Times/TNS Brown sugar cookies with maple drizzle can brighten everyone’s day. S CHOOL L UNCHES , S ERVED H OMESTYLE WENDY SCHMIDT By Genevieve Ko Los Angeles Times On behalf of the bees Very sadly, the bee population seems to be declining. Our two most common bees are the bumblebee and honeybees. Yellowjackets are not truly bees, they’re predatory social wasps. Yellow jackets (and wasps in general) are carnivorous, whereas bees consume nectar and pol- len. Wasps and bees are social insects, all living in colonies founded by a queen, and having workers and drones. Honeybees are the stars when it comes to surviving winter. The whole honeybee colony lives through the winter. Sadly, only the queen bumble- bee and yellow jackets survive winter, founding or starting a whole new colony every spring, some even building or locating a new nests in new locations. Bumblebees are rock stars as far as pollinating. Bumblebees of various species have varying tongue lengths, so they effectively pollinate a tremendous variety of fl owers. Honeybees commu- nicate so well among themselves that they frequently pollinate only a single nectar source, ignoring others in the area if the nectar is plentiful in that one source. We need all kinds of pollinators. Bumblebees are the best pollinators for fruit orchards as they won’t leave the area until all the fl owers are pollinated. Honeybees are more selective, but with bees of all kinds, the job gets done. Fruit is much sweeter and more productive when pollinated. In fact, some trees make inferior or no fruit if unpollinated. To maintain the status of our popula- tion of pollinators and prevent further decline it would be wise to plant food and fl owers for them, making our landscapes havens for attracting them. Also, it would help their population to use biological controls to prevent plant damage and control disease insects instead of herbicides and pesticides and other toxic chemicals. If you have garden comments or questions, please write to greengar- dencolumn@yahoo.com. Thanks for reading! I love cooking — that’s t’s why I don’t like packing school lunches. It’s no fun making king food that inevitably tastes subpar after hanging out in a brown bag for hours. Online schooling eliminates that issue but ut invites countless other mealtime aching “school lunch” the same way problems, so I’m approaching re, not a joy. (And yes, I’m writ- I always have: as a chore, al cook and more as a working ing less as a professional mother of three who is very, very tired.) The tips below come from years of optimizing effi cien- est kitchens and in my kitchen at cy in restaurant and test home as well. They also o address the cooking questions ed me since quarantine started mom friends have asked y’ve shared. Feeding and the challenges they’ve children is as much a mental and emotional struggle as it t is a logis- tical one. Here are some e ways to make it easier: Go easy on yourself You don’t need to stack ack artisanal sandwiches or fashion Hello Kitty faces on onigiri rice balls lls concocted from ham and seaweed. d. If you have the desire and energy for that next-level lunch-making, go for it. If not, don’t feel bad about it. There have been days when I’m so exhausted from work (ironically, cooking) that I’ve simply popped open a can of beans, cut up a pepper and tossed string cheese packs on the table for a “meal.” My kids are still alive. Genevieve Ko/Los Angeles Times-TNS One-pan pasta with tomato sauce. meal.) Make everyone happy by estab- lishing a regular lunch repertoire: You can keep dishes in rotation to eat when cravings strike or assign cer- tain lunches to certain days. My youngest always looked forward to “pasta Mondays” in her school cafeteria, so I’m going to re-create that for her, both to make her happy and to eliminate the stress of decision- making for me. Leftovers are the best If there’s a silver lining to school-at-home, it’s the ability to reheat left- Don’t make three meals a day; batch cook for future meals overs for your kids midday. Popping a plate in the microwave takes less In April, one of my friends told me how wiped out she was from time than slapping together a grilled cheese sandwich, and it feels special cooking breakfast, lunch and dinner — and doing all the dishes in to eat a steaming not-steam-table hot lunch. between. My response: That’s crazy. Unless you actively want to be Prepare dishes that hold up or even improve post-chill, such as roasted doing all that, don’t. vegetables or anything stewed or braised. Rice, whether fried or seasoned Instead, cook a lot when you feel like it and save leftovers for the with cilantro and lime, still tastes great after zapping. While pasta usu- times you lack kitchen motivation. Morning people can make huge ally doesn’t reheat well, this one-pan number does. Toasting the noodles breakfasts that last until lunch; folks with evening meetings can prep fi rst keeps them al dente forever. enough lunch to stretch to dinner. If you’d rather not eat the same Assemble a ‘lunch box’ for the fridge thing for two meals in a row, refrigerate or freeze leftovers to reheat If you’re more of a cold-lunch family, make last-minute assembly easier for future meals. by keeping all the ingredients together. Once you’ve fi gured out your rep- If you don’t want to do breakfast, buy cereal or make a big pot of ertoire, group what you need in an open container in the fridge. When it’s oatmeal to last all week. If your kids insist on eggs every day, teach time for lunch, simply slide out the box full of sandwich or taco or salad them to fry or scramble their own if they’re old enough to deal with fi xings. It saves a little time and a lot of frustration digging around for the stove. Otherwise, boil half a dozen at once and keep them in a that pack of sliced provolone. Do the same for any pantry items dedicated grab-bowl in the fridge. To streamline daily lunch prep, prepare big to lunch, keeping the box easily accessible wherever you have space. batches of building blocks, such as grains and beans, and keep them If you’re adding leftovers or other unmarked ingredient containers to ready-to-scoop in refrigerated airtight containers. either box, use painter’s or masking tape to label them. So when someone Create a lunch routine who knows how to read keeps asking, “What do we have for lunch?,” you A lot of kids are perfectly content eating the same lunch most days can simply gesture toward your lovely labels. or prefer the regularity of a scheduled menu. (And most home cooks fi nd that deciding what to make is half the struggle of preparing a See Homestyle/Page 2B
