Writing about Food for Kids

Since my last post I've published a children's book "Hating Kapatid" on sharing among siblings. The sharing here involves food and so it includes a lot of descriptions of popular Filipino snack foods, such as the rice cakes puto and bibingka, fried bananas, mamon (sponge cake), and my daughter's favorite, the creamy rainbow-colored sapin-sapin.

Recently I read C.S. Lewis' essay on writing for children. He mentions someone commented re his detailed description of the delightful tea served to Lucy that he must have put that in because he knew children loved to read about good eating. Lewis denies it, saying that he enjoyed writing about good food because he enjoyed good eating himself! Well, who doesn't?

Certainly my book, which won a National Children's Book Award for Best Reads on 2014 appeals mainly
because children can relate to the situation, but I guess the food helps too. And certainly I enjoyed writing about the food. I plan to come up with a companion book wherein a child learns to enjoy different tastes of food. I was inspired by my first-grader's science lesson where they were asked to try different foods and classify them by taste. The classroom lesson tie-in of my first book is fractions. For the second it can be tastes.

I realize the difficulty in this is coming up with foods for some of the tastes that kids will like. Sweet--no-brainer. Even salty would not be hard (hello, French fries!). But what about sour, spicy, and bitter. Still, it can be done.

In fact, my son loves sour and somewhat spicy foods. My children both love pomelo. They'll eat ones that are too sour for my taste! And my son likes spicy ramen noodles. They both like wasabi-flavored potato chips and prefer dark chocolate to milk as I do.

It's clear from this how you get children to like different tastes. You have to show them you enjoy varied foods. Offer to share your food but don't force them to taste. Sometimes they'll ask to try it if they just see you eating it.

And avoid showing your aversions to healthy foods. Just because you don't like something doesn't mean they won't. My daughter brought bitter greens once from a farm where they had their field trip. She had picked them herself, so of course we had to eat them and show our appreciation. I didn't relish the bitter taste, but I kept quiet and smothered them with dressing. She, on the other hand, perhaps because she picked them, liked the bitter greens just as they were. She doesn't like salad dressings except honey mustard, which we didn't have on hand. So she ate them mixed with cucumbers and tomatoes. And liked them. She enjoyed their crunch and didn't seem to mind the bitter taste.

Children can really surprise you when it comes to what they will eat and what they won't. So just keep introducing new foods to them, and you may be surprised.

They'll love to eat if you show them you love to eat! And I certainly do. There's a lot of food in my other books as well. I'll share about them next time/

Eating for Feeding

As a breastfeeding mom, I have to eat, but I worry about overdoing it or eating the wrong thing.

So far, I'm pretty fit, but sometimes my milk supply is low. So I looked up my herbal remedies book for natural ways to increase milk supply. I've long relied on Herbal Medicine by Dian Dincin Buchman for natural remedies. Not that I have anything against drugs, but with children and when breastfeeding, very often you can't use drugs.

I found that parsley and mint lessen the milk supply, which is useful when engorged. Dill helps promote milk flow. Now I happen to have dill growing in my backyard, so I went right out to pluck some.

Whenever possible now, I use dill as a substitute for parsley in recipes. This works out fine for non-Italian Western dishes: coleslaw, cabbage soup, and potato corn chowder. Dill also adds a fresh, sharp bite to spinach soup. It has a stronger, more astringent flavor than parsley, which makes it not so appropriate for Italian cooking. I find its strong, fresh flavor is best appreciated when it is added after cooking. My dill is 100% organic, so I just rinse it before sprinkling on soup or stirring into salad dressing.

Here in the Philippines, moringa, called malunggay, is the traditional breast milk supply booster. It grows plentifully in our neighborhood, so we use it frequently. Typically, it is added to soups like chicken tinola, white corn soup, and sinigang or monggo guisado. I've also put it into a grilled white cheese sandwich. All you do is put it in pan de sal with some kesong puti and grill in the toaster oven. This is a much quicker way of preparing it than making soup, though luckily Lucky Me now has a noodle soup with malunggay, N-rich. There are also other malunggay enriched products, which I buy occasionally, like malunggay pan de sal. This month's Yummy also has a recipe for an oven-baked omelet with malunggay, which I intend to give a try.

Sure, there are capsules and teas that make use of moringa, but I find taking it in food is much more pleasurable, not to mention cheaper. When I have time, I make squash soup with malunggay. I tasted such a soup at an Ateneo High School fair once and have since worked out my own version. Here's the recipe for this soup that is so nutritious and soothing it will surely help increase your breast milk supply.

Squash soup with malunggay

Boil 1/3 - 1/2 k of cubed squash in enough water to cover with about a dozen shrimp heads (or a shrimp broth cube) and 1/2 cup malunggay. When squash is soft, remove from fire and let cool. Puree in a blender then return to pot. Bring to boil and stir in 1/2 cup coconut milk and 1/2 cup cream (optional). Season to taste with salt and black pepper.

First Food Trip in Makati in Years!

Because I live out in what qualifies as Metro Manila's boondocks (we do have a great view of the Sierra Madre range here), I rarely get to go to Makati. This year, we went twice in a single week! Last Sunday it was to watch Seussical, a delightful musical, well worth seeing. Hunger and nostalgia drew me to Wendy's for merienda. There aren't too many Wendy's around anymore, and certainly not where we live. Their baked potato with chili and cheese and now their terrific thick milkshakes are the ultimate in comfort food. I am always on the lookout for strawberry milkshakes, ever since McDonald's stopped serving them. Up to last year I could get a good strawberry milkshake from McDo at either the branch in front of Ever Gotesco Commonwealth or the one on Quezon Avenue that was near my hospital Capitol Medical. I often got my milk quota from those strawberry milkshakes while pregnant with my daughter, so it's not surprising she loves them too (pinaglihi as they say). We used to reward her with a shake after getting her shots from her pedia at Capitol. So kudos to Wendy's for making the shakes, though I miss their sour cream baked potatoes, which were my favorite in childhood.

That hardly qualifies as a food trip, of course. What I'm really referring to is our visit yesterday to see my mom's balikbayan friend at New World Hotel. I've heard of those who treat balikbayans by bringing them to expensive steakhouses and Italian restaurants, to have them protest that they get that kind of food often where they live. Clearly an excuse for the relatives to eat out in style for once, understandable these days when eating out is so costly around here. But in our family we always make sure to treat returning expats to a real Filipino meal. In this case, to a fusion Filipino meal, at Sentro 1771.

While waiting for our meal, we sipped their lemon pandan cooler. The mellow pandan flavor along with the hint of sweetness offsets the tartness of the lemon, making it a welcome refreshment even for my calamansi juice-wary daughter.

I had been feeling dizzy and had just learned from a blood test that I had a low red blood count. Even if it weren't for that, we would have ordered their signature corned beef sinigang, of course, with its stimulating combination of sour broth and salty chunks of meat.

The Chinese would consider the flavors of the meal well-balanced, for we also had catfish in a sweet, teriyaki-like sauce, the kesong puti salad with its zesty herbaceous dressing over tomatoes, onions, crunchy lettuce and mild pesto-laced white cheese, and an earthy, ketchup-laced tortang talong with bangus. The last was a smokier-flavored version of my three-year-old's favorite tortang talong, which I intend to try at home next time I have leftover bangus. My daughter has achieved fame in her pre-school for raving over tortang talong, insisting on buying eggplant during their grocery field trip while other kids were on the lookout for sweets. This just goes to show that the way to get kids to eat vegetables is to present them in interesting, kid-friendly ways. Of course, as far as my kid is concerned, the food at Sentro is kid-friendly, but then she has more sophisticated taste than most pre-schoolers. The only item she didn't take to was the catfish, but then she has an aversion to soy sauce and similar brown sauces these days for some reason. but my husband, who is not fond of either beef or fish devoured the sinigang and the catfish as well as his favorite crispy shrimps.

After our meal, our friend offered to treat for dessert, and full as I was I couldn't resist an opportunity to visit Qoola, which we'd gone to last year. My mom and daughter are fans of frozen yogurt as well, and delighted in the creamy flavorful swirls and the variety of toppings offered. My daughter always goes for blueberry with rainbow sprinkles and rice krispies, my mom favors plain yogurt with kiwi and almonds. As for me, I can never resist mint and chocolate ice cream or yogurt, so I swirled the too together and added raspberry, another favorite flavor of mine. With already a variety of flavors in my cup, I went easy on the toppings, just adding a bit of granola and chocolate-covered rice krispies for crunch. I was a bit at a loss as to which fruit would possibly go with all three flavors so decided to forgo fruits completely for once.

Then it was back to New World again to visit my mom's cousins at their furniture store, Domani. Surprise, surprise, we found the shop now had an adjoining cafe called Tutto Domani! It had been set up in May, but somehow we had missed the item in the Inquirer heralding the new cafe. They had just served someone a pasta puttanesca when we were there and the smell was tempting, a pity we had no room for a meal. But our gracious relatives insisted on serving us strong espresso, a souffle-like dessert called chocolate delight, and their unique warm pastry called crounds. The last selection was truly the crown of our merienda. Inspired by the little hot Japanese cakes, crounds are made from crepe batter, molded into balls and coated with Parmesan cheese. As much as we had already eaten, we could not resist these melt-in-the mouth treats.

All this good food made the long trip worth it. We hope to visit Makati again soon after the Christmas rush dies down to savor more good food, following the first and best food trip we've had in years.