"family" news and stories

As I've mentioned before, my dad typically makes a vat of gravy for Thanksgiving that nears the one-gallon mark. This means that in our house, gravy is not a scarce resource. It flows abundantly and when the gravy pitchers (boats are too puny for our purposes) run dry, it is easy to hop and refill them from the stock pot on the stove. However, I've come to understand that in other households, gravy is a valuable commodity, not to be wasted.

The first year I realized that not every family does gravy the way my family does gravy was when one of the pitchers accidentally slipped from my mom's fingers as she was passing it around the table and let loose its contents all over the green table cloth. An old friend of my parents had joined us for dinner that night and as soon as the gravy spilled, he leaped up, grabbed a teaspoon and started bailing the gravy back into the pitcher. When he was growing up, there was never enough gravy and so each drop was like gold to him, not to be wasted. He could not be calmed until we reminded him of the four quarts of gravy still waiting in reserve. Once he realized that there would be enough, he laughed, let us sop up the spill with some kitchen towels and we all settled down to eat again.

This story, of the night a friend tried to save the spilled gravy, has become one of my family's classic Thanksgiving stories. Whenever my mom and I start talking about it, we inevitably end up laughing, feeling affection for the friend and warmth from the memory.

Just about everyone I know has some Thanksgiving event that was unfortunate when it happened, but has become part of their holiday lexicon. What's yours?

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Thanksgiving brings with it a whole host of wonderful things. Delicious food, a couple of well-deserved vacation days and visits from far-flung family members. I have always gotten along really well with my family, both the immediate version as well as the extended clan. However, after appetizers, multiple plates of turkey, three wedges of pie and several glasses of wine, conversation can sometimes get, well...a bit honest.

Those situations call for carefully planned comebacks and the girls over at Elastic Waist have got you covered. They've put together a list of Top Ten Comebacks for Well-Meaning but Obnoxious Relatives. They are mostly food-related, including such gems as

• Oooh, do you really think you need another biscuit? "I don't need it. I WANT it."
• Do you know how many calories that has? "Yes, and I'm looking forward to every one of them."

If your family meal is a potluck and someone looks askance at your offering and asks, "Well honey, what is in that, exactly?" Barring food allergy inquiries, you can always just reply, "It's gourmet!"

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Late last week, the Washington Post's Kim O'Donnel wrote a post on her blog, A Mighty Appetite, about the food that makes you cry. The food that evokes memory in a way that is bittersweet or layered and complex. She recounts a friend's tale of his mother's post-Thanksgiving turkey sandwiches and her own experience teaching a young friend to cook Joe's Special (the recipe is at the end of the post) while in Zambia.

For me, the foods that make me cry are linked to simple joyful times. During the years when I was in college, I always went home to live with my parents for the summers. On weekend mornings, my dad would often cook breakfast for us, concocting vast egg scrambles bursting with spinach, zucchini, tomatoes and basil from his garden. Having breakfast made for me always made me feel so cared for, a true sign of love through food.

What are the foods that make you cry? (Tears of joy and sadness are both welcome).

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Now that the kids are going off to school, it's time to tear the little monsters away from the video games and force them to buckle down on their studying, right?

Right. As in "Yeah, right, like you're really going to get them to stop playing video games."

Be not discouraged, parents. Instead of banning video games completely, you can turn it into a family activity. You still have to do family Quality Time during the school year, right? Cooking Mama, the video game we've mentioned before that lets you cook without having to get into the kitchen, has a new version out for the Nintendo Wii called Cooking Mama Cook-off. What a great way to train your kids so that in a few months, they can cook dinner for themselves. Of course, when they head off to class, you can use the Wii to do a little workout before you have to rush out to pick them up from soccer practice.

P.S. Nintendo Wiis are hard to get a hold of, but you can win one from CoolHunting and ThisNext.

With trans fats in the spotlight most of the time, it is easy to overlook saturated fats, which have long been the nemesis of the health-conscious. They have been linked to atherosclerosis and coronary heart disease and are found in butter, ghee, suet, tallow, lard, coconut oil, cottonseed oil, palm kernel oil, dairy products (esp. high-fat ones like cream and cheese) and in meats.

One other place that saturated fats are found is in parents' diets. A study at the University of Iowa College of Medicine found that adults who live with children (just about all parents) ate more saturated fat than their childfree counterparts. The study looked at adults who lived with children under 17 and those with no children. Those living with kids ate an extra five grams of fat per day, including almost two grams of saturated fat. The extra fat came from snacks, cheese, ice cream, cakes, processed meats and bacon, high-fat and often high-calorie "convenience foods."

The problem, according to the study's lead researcher, is that parents are not influencing their children's eating habits enough and are allowing theirs to be influenced. If parents don't take the time to make dinner for their children, then they aren't going to eat a nutritious dinner themselves. To make up for this, especially when part of a very busy family, researchers recommend keeping healthier snacks (fruit, low fat milk, etc) in the house and fewer high-fat frozen/convenience foods, which will help compensate for less healthy meals.

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