"bostonglobe" news and stories

Coffee is hip (actually, it's been that way for several years now), and everyone is drinking it, including kids and teens. When I was a kid, we never drank coffee. It was seen as a "grown-up" thing to do, right up there with having sex, smoking cigarettes, and mortgages. But now you see kids and teens with a Starbucks or Dunkin' Donuts cup in their hands, and coffee shoppes are the new malt shoppes.

The Boston Globe's Beth Teitell has an interesting piece on the trend, noting how we try to cut high sugar sodas and fat-filled candy from schools but we're not really thinking about high calorie/high fat/high sugar coffee drinks. Funny how coffee was always seen as an adult thing when soda has caffeine and sugar in it too.

Sometimes the best things to eat are the most simple to make. We can find a dessert that has a ton of ingredients and you have to have special equipment or a candy thermometer or a double boiler or a special pan. Or you have to preheat the oven or roll something into a shape or whatever. Sometimes it's great just to find a dessert that's two ingredients, you slap them together, and then you eat them 15 minutes later.

Take this recipe. It's for Chocolate-Stuffed Bananas, and it's pretty damn easy.

Ugh. Cauliflower.

I've tried to like it, but I just don't. And it's not like I hate vegetables. I even like the ones a lot of people don't like, such as yams and spinach and asparagus. But cauliflower...blah. I always get a little bummed when I'm in the store and I see a new frozen dinner that I might like, and for some reason they throw cauliflower in there. For a different color or something (it certainly can't be for the taste).

But for you cauliflower lovers, check out this recipe for Cauliflower Soup at The Boston Globe. It's not only warm and tasty (they say), but cauliflower is a good thing to eat after the holidays, when we're all trying to shed those extra pounds.

New York City has already done it, and other cities are thinking about them too. Now Boston is the latest city to consider banning the dreaded trans fats.

It's nothing that's going to happen overnight, since they are just beginning to think about it after meeting with New York City health officials about the issue. They could make a decision as soon as this February, but even if they do that the ban would not go into effect until 2008.

That's actually a wiseass headline. I'm sure there are a lot of kids who like vegetables. I loved them when I was a kid, even ones that kids are supposed to hate, like spinach and yams. But I think that a lot of kids like vegetables that you can make more "junk food-ish," like potatoes.

The Boston Globe asked three 13 and 14 year-olds to keep track of what they ate for two days, and then they showed the results to a nutritionists. The results are rather interesting. Their diets seem to revolve around pizza, french fries, mac and cheese, with some chicken and turkey thrown in. But they don't really like vegetables, unless it's corn or potatoes. Sometimes they skip lunch altogether and eat candy that they've bought at the store before school. And sometimes before school they go to Dunkin' Donuts. This is pretty bad in and of itself, but add to the fact that these kids spend several hours sitting at a desk and their computer all day (they're bright kids who do well in school and have a lot of afterschool homework and internships) and you have a recipe for bad health.

Another scary revelation? The nutritionist says that these diets are actually better than what she sees from middle-schoolers. Yikes.