"mom" news and stories

When I was a kid, my mom would have a schedule of what dinners to make on each night of the week. It wasn't completely strict. She would be flexible sometimes, especially during certain seasons. But for the most part, Sundays were for pasta (or, as we called it, spaghetti), and either Tuesdays or Wednesdays were for The Hamburg Plate, which consisted of scrambled hamburg (side note: is calling it "hamburg" a regional thing?), mashed potatoes, and creamed corn. It was sort of a Shepherd's Pie, only all separated (side note #2: does anyone even eat creamed corn anymore? I think the last time I had it was in the 80s.) Other nights were set aside for a chicken dish, sandwiches, and another night maybe for some sort of soup/stew.

How about you? Did your family have certain nights for certain meals, and did you continue that sort of trend when you became an adult? I have frozen dinners and pizza a lot more than I probably should, but that's more about laziness and an addiction to pizza than anything else.

All the campaigns to encourage people to eat healthier are having an impact on mothers, but not necessarily in the way that you might expect. Instead of giving up fried foods or other things deemed to be unhealthy completely, some mums are not changing what they feed their kids - they're just lying about it. A new survey, which was sponsored by the British Potato Council, found that as many as 93% of mothers lie from time to time about what they feed their kids, and they mostly spin the tales to their own mothers and other relatives, since they make up the group that is most likely to criticize parenting choices.

The most commonly made claim is that the kids are not allowed to eat fried foods, followed by telling people that their children "eat mostly fresh food at home." Other untruths include assertions that the kids are only allowed candy at weekends, are never fed frozen food and get all the required servings of fruits and veggies every day.

Some are confused as to what foods are healthy, or simply give up due to lack of time or energy, opting for a TV dinner instead of frozen fish sticks with some fresh veggies. Fortunately, the kids aren't as confused as the parents, so it is possible that the "little white lies" won't be necessary any more. The study also showed that 58% of kids would question their parents about whether given foods were healthy or not, demonstrating that they are becoming more aware of healthy eating issues at a young age and will hopefully want to make better food choices as a result.

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Irritated by Jamie Oliver's sometimes preachy stance against junk foods and desire to keep kids eating healthy, some Yorkshire mothers are getting revenge - by "smuggling pies, burgers and fizzy drinks to their kids, as well as their children's friends, at a school." The foods are handed off through the fence at the school boundary.

A better, more logical way to get "revenge" would be to feed the children healthy foods, proving that neither mother needs Jamie's apparently unwanted help and advice to keep their kids fit and healthy. But the mothers seem to feel that trying to make their kids, who are about 11 years old, fatter, is the best course of action.

Hopefully the kids will figure out that this isn't necessarily in their best interest, since the mothers don't seem to be taking that into consideration.

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Lunch is often overlooked by busy, working adults, but school-age kids have time in their day set aside to make sure they eat. Sometimes they might buy lunch, but the best lunch is always going to be a homemade one. Making lunches day in and day out can be challenging, especially if you don't want to make the exact same thing over and over again. Most cookbooks are not set up to offer recipes that would be appropriate for school lunches, though they have plenty of lunch recipes. These books are, on the other hand, geared only towards brown bag lunches are a great way to get some ideas - for your own lunches, as well as for kids.

Brown Bag Lunch Cookbook is packed with healthy recipes that can be prepared in advance with easy to find ingredients and minimal fuss. It's as good for kids as it is for working adults.

Brown Bag Success has lots of menus to help you plan and creative ideas to put twists onto old favorites to make them more appealing and add some variety to lunch.

When kids are very young, they often want to emulate what their parents are doing. For example, if Mom and Dad are preparing dinner, Junior will want to be involved. Unfortunately, while cultivating an interest in food - especially homemade food, as opposed to fast food - is a wonderful thing for a child, they can occasionally get in the way of the chef.

An easy solution is to assign your child age-appropriate tasks that they can do with little to no supervision once they have been shown how to do it in the first place. Real Simple offers a helpful list of such tasks, sorted by age, so your kids can join in the cooking process. Here are a few of their suggestions:

5 and over

• Retrieve ingredients from the pantry or refrigerator.
• Wash vegetables and fruits.
• Stir together dry ingredients.
• Smash crackers into crumbs.
• Set the table.

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