Smoothie Popsicles

Ah, summer. There is nothing else quite like it. And though our summer has been incredibly busy this year (hence my negligence in posting!), it has also been lovely. What could be more wonderful than sitting in the sun out on the back deck with your munchkin? Well, perhaps sitting in the sun out on the back deck with your munchkin and popsicle!!

As the mommy of a typically picky toddler, I’m always looking for ways of getting healthy food into that cute little belly. This summer, smoothie popsicles have been the answer. Every time I make a smoothie for my daughter, I double the ingredients and pour whatever is left over into a popsicle mould. My little princess gobbles them up as though they were candy…and yet they’re very healthy and nutritious (shhh – don’t tell her that).

To make your own smoothie popsicle, simply blend together…

Yogurt (go for the plain, unsweetened kind –  it’s healthier, and your kids won’t notice the difference)

Whatever fresh or frozen fruit you have on hand

Pour well blended smoothie into popsicle moulds (available at most dollar stores) and freeze. Then simply serve and enjoy!

Helpful Hints:

·        This is a great way of using up slightly over-ripe fruit, or making use of yogurt that has almost reached its expiry date.

·         Be sure to make a few extra popsicles – mommies and daddies will love them too!

Healthy Honey Muffins

As a follow up to my last post on the ickyness of refined sugar for mommies, daddies and kidlets alike, I wanted to follow up with at least one of the yummier “ick-free” recipes I’ve discovered. This basic muffin recipe is healthy and delicious, and there are endless variations you can use to keep things interesting…

Healthy Honey Muffins

You will need…

2 cups whole wheat flour

3 ½ teaspoons baking powder

½ teaspoon salt

1 beaten egg

¾ cup milk

½ cup liquid honey

3 tablespoons melted butter or margarine (or substitute 3 tablespoons unsweetened applesauce for lower fat muffins)

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. In a large bowl, sift together dry ingredients. Create a well in the centre of the dry ingredients, combine wet ingredients in a medium bowl, and pour wet ingredients into the well. Stir until just combined (do not over stir). Fill greased muffin tin cups two thirds full, and bake for 20 to 25 minutes.

There are endless variations that work with this recipe. Use your creativity, or throw in roughly ½ cup of one of the following…

·         Raisins

·         Finely chopped apple sprinkled with cinnamon

·         Finely chopped pear sprinkled with nutmeg

·         Fresh or frozen blueberries

·         Fresh or frozen raspberries

·         Fresh or frozen cranberries

Helpful Hint:  If you don’t already own a mini-muffin tin, they are a must-have in any home with children. Kids are fascinated by all things miniature, and you’ll waste less food as the portion size is more appropriate. I pop a few mini-muffins into a ziplock bag in my purse – a convenient, healthy little snack for kids when you are out and about. Enjoy!

Pythons and Sweet Treats

This morning my munchkin and I went on a little outing to our local wildlife park. And as the early spring weather proved rainy and cold, we spent much of our time exploring the delightfully warm reptile pavilion. We happened to time our arrival perfectly to attend the reptile show, the highlight of which was a large python that the children were given the opportunity to touch. Now, I’ve never been one to run away screaming at the sight of a spider or even to harbor any real fear of snakes. But when the zookeeper approached with that big, slithery python, my stomach did a couple of nervous little somersaults, and my first instinct was to take a step back. But holding my daughter in my arms, I watched as she turned to me for reassurance, and forced myself to stand there and smile. And much to my surprise, my teeny tiny little two-year-old then confidently reached out and patted the snake, saying, “Hello python. It’s very nice to meet you!”



Mmmm...Sweet Treats!

 Delightful story, but what on earth does it have to do with sweet treats, you might ask. Actually, more than you might think. Watching my toddler confidently patting a python, I was reminded of how very responsible we are for setting the tone for our children. Instinctively, they look to us for guidance, and rely on us to help them as they form their outlook on the world. What a gigantic responsibility that puts on us as parents! And while they still look to us, how important it is that we not squander the opportunity!

Several months ago, my hubby became quite ill and we now observe a very strict new diet in our home. One of the things we’ve eliminated from the menu is all refined sugar – initially a seemingly insurmountable task, as I am a self-proclaimed sugar fanatic. But as the months have progressed, I’ve begun to miss sugar less and less. And when I sneak a little “treat” from time to time, I end up feeling so dreadfully ill that I often regret my choice. It is amazing the negative effect that sugar has on our bodies – an effect that often can only be really noticed when we stop pumping our bodies constantly full of junk.

It has been a powerful wake-up call for me. If refined sugar has that sort of effect on my body, imagine what it must do to the body and mind of my tiny, still developing child. I have no intention of entirely banning her for life from every sugary snack. But I am making an even-more-conscious-than-ever effort to redefine the meaning of “treat” in our household. Cutting down on sugar doesn’t mean depriving your sweet tooth. The world is full of naturally sweet, healthy options that don’t contain any refined sugar, and will leave mommies, daddies, and little ones feeling so much better about themselves. Here are a few yummy ideas to replace those sugary snacks…

• Try baking with maple syrup or honey rather than white or brown sugar (brown is just as processed and just as bad for you, contrary to popular belief). To use honey in place of sugar, use 7/8 cup for every cup of sugar, and reduce the liquid in the recipe by 3 tablespoons. To use maple syrup in place of sugar, use 3/4 cup of maple syrup for every cup of sugar, decreasing the total amount of liquid in the recipe by 3 tablespoons. These substitutions work particularly well when baking muffins, loaves, and hearty cookies (such as healthy oatmeal raisin cookies).

• Give your traditional peanut butter and jam sandwiches a healthy makeover. Replace peanut butter with almond butter with no sugar added, and replace jam with thinly sliced bananas or apples, or a little pasteurized honey.

• Say goodbye to Aunt Jemima and switch to pure maple syrup when indulging in a pancake breakfast. Switch to whole wheat flour and throw some fresh blueberries into the batter, and pancakes become a healthy, wholesome meal!

·    If your child is a juice junkie, think about investing in a juicer and making your own healthy juices at home. Store bought juices are often full of sugar and artificial flavours and colours, and even the “healthier” juice options are really devoid of most of their nutritional value by the time they hit your child’s juice cup.

·    Don’t forget the best sweet treat of all – lots of healthy fresh or frozen fruit. With the money you’ll save when skipping the snack food aisle, you’ll have lots of room in the family budget for more vitamin-packed fruits and veggies!

Happy healthy snacking, Joyful Mommies and tots! And stay tuned for some of my favourite “no-junk” treat recipes….





All-By-Myself Buns

This is one of those great two-for-the-price-of-one deals: a super fun activity to engage your little one, and a yummy, nutritious snack idea all rolled into one. I love this activity/recipe because it requires almost no prep work, makes very little mess, and is actually very healthy. My daughter LOVES making her own goodie-stuffed buns, and gobbles them up when they are finished baking (and my munchkin is generally more of a picker than a gobbler!). She’s taken to calling them “All-By-Myself-Buns”, a name that has stuck around our house. Hope you and your munchkins enjoy the idea too!

You will need…

Bun dough - any of the following will work...

• Pillsbury-type refrigerated bun or biscuit dough
• Store-bought freezer bun dough (preferably whole wheat), defrosted
• Homemade whole wheat bun dough (actually very quick and easy if you use a breadmaker)

Filling – use the following ideas or make up your own..

·     Peanut or almond butter and jam

·    Cream cheese with mashed bananas or berries (have your child help you mash the fruit and combine with the cream cheese)

·    Cheddar or mozzarella (cut into small cubes)

·    Other filling of your choice

Enjoying a cream cheese and blueberry bun

Give your child a ball of dough and show them how to pat it out into a flat pancake shape on a greased pan. Next, show them how to arrange or spread your chosen topping in the centre of the dough. Then step in to help, folding the corners of the dough into the centre, pinching shut, and placing pinched side down on the baking sheet. Bake according to directions for the dough you are using, allow to cool, and enjoy!

Pomegranates!!!

Like any mommy of a somewhat picky, tends-to-eat-like-a-little-bird toddler, I am always looking for new, healthy snack ideas. And this particular super food has become such a smash hit in our household that I simply had to share the “idea” with you…

I share this only because unlike other fruits and veggies, the lovely pomegranate does not seem to be a fruit that most mommies (including myself, for a while) consider trying with little ones (I mentioned the idea at playgroup the other day and the other moms looked at me like I was cuckoo!). I’ve happily discovered, though, that it about as close to the perfect snack food a mommy could hope to find. SUPER healthy, delicious, fun, and convenient. My daughter loves the brightly coloured, bite-sized little seeds, and gobbles them up as though they were candy.

If you don’t eat pomegranates regularly, getting at those shiny little gems inside can be a bit of a challenge. So here are a few tricks to try…

·         As with any fruit, be sure to wash the outer peel before cutting into it with a knife. I just use a little baking soda (a totally safe, natural cleanser) and scrub with a brush under warm water.

·        To avoid wasting seeds, don’t cut right into the pomegranate. Rather, use a sharp knife to divide the pomegranate in quarters, cutting just through the peel but not into the centre of the fruit. Then simply break the pomegranate into pieces along the cut lines.

·        To get at all those yummy little seeds, submerge the pomegranate in a bowl of cold water. The water will prevent pomegranate juice from spraying all over your walls (those tiny little seeds are juicy and can really make a mess!). As an added plus, the white pith will separate from the seeds and float to the top of the water.

And the best news about the juicy, delicious pomegranate? Mommies can dive into their little ones’ snack food and gobble it up by the handful without even the tiniest bit of guilt. Enjoy!

Adventures in Pumpkin Muffin Making

I realized late last night that we had a costume party to attend today. A potluck costume party at our favourite drop-in playgroup, and I had promised to bring something. To make things worse, last year I set the bar way too high, bringing what I thought to be a pretty adorable fruit platter arranged to look like a happy pumpkin. I guess that’s the problem with choosing not to just pick up a box of Timbits on the way in. The next year, people remember. There are expectations.

I am not the world’s greatest baker. But I have a couple of close friends who could easily vie for that title. One of those friends brought the most delicious pumpkin muffins to our costume party last week. So feeling ambitious (and perhaps a little desperate) late last night, I decided that I would attempt to tackle her pumpkin muffin recipe.

I don’t know what it is with me and baking. I just seem to have this strange inability to ever follow a recipe. And as a result, my baking is generally mediocre at best. Armed with that knowledge, I got out my friend’s pumpkin muffin recipe…and promptly began to alter it. While she had stayed up late into the night baking fresh pumpkins and making her own pumpkin puree (she is a much more patient baker than I am!), I just used the canned stuff. And since I was already making changes, I threw in a few more little twists.  And to my great surprise, they ended up being delicious! Wonderfully moist with a very festive flavor, these muffins are healthy and so easy to make…

Pumpkin Muffins

3 cups whole wheat flour

2 cups white sugar (you can reduce this to one cup if you choose and still have yummy muffins)

2 teaspoons baking soda

½ teaspoon baking powder

2 teaspoons ground cloves

2 teaspoons ground cinnamon

2 teaspoons ground nutmeg

1 teaspoon ground allspice

1 teaspoon salt

2 cups pureed pumpkin (I used canned, but I must admit that the fresh pumpkin my friend used was yummier)

2/3 cup applesauce

3 eggs

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease muffin tins or line with paper liners. Combine all dry ingredients in a large bowl. In a separate bowl, beat together pumpkin puree, applesauce and eggs. Add pumpkin mixture to flour mixture and combine until smooth. Bake roughly 20 to 25 minutes or until a toothpick inserted into the muffin comes out clean. Makes 24 small or 18 regular sized muffins.

These muffins are delicious on their own, but for a festive Halloween twist, I covered them with cream cheese icing (no recipe needed – just combine softened cream cheese, icing sugar, and a tiny bit of milk, using your best judgment as to consistency and taste). I tinted the icing orange (using red and yellow food colouring) and then added happy pumpkin faces using a little tube of black icing (available in the baking aisle of the grocery store – a great thing to have on hand in your cupboard).

And the verdict? The playgroup costume party and the pumpkin muffins were both a smashing success! The kids loved them, the mommies and daddies loved them, even the grandmas loved them! They make a yummy Halloween treat, but don’t worry if you run out of time. They’d be great for Christmas too! Hope you enjoy them…

Pumpkin Pizza

Yesterday I wrote that it appeared some sort of toy and snack food bomb had exploded in my house. Well, if we had a bomb explosion yesterday, then today we appear to have encountered some sort of toddler tornado. Today was costume party day, and for about three and a half hours this afternoon, our home was bursting at the seams with cookie devouring, costume adorned, messy, adorable, wonderful munchkins. Two babies, five toddlers, and two preschoolers, cleverly disguised as a colourful assortment of barnyard animals, bumblebees, butterflies and princesses.  It was total, absolute chaos. And I loved every minute of it.

For lunch we had one of my kid-party favourites – “decorate-your-own” mini pizzas. Kids LOVE making their own pizzas, so this is a fun activity for any party. But for Halloween, I decided to add a little twist…

Pumpkin Pizzas

Pilsbury pizza dough (or homemade pizza dough, if you are feeling ambitious)

Pizza sauce

Cheddar cheese, grated

Your choice of toppings:

Pepperoni (cut into triangles for a traditional Jack-O-Lantern look)

Red peppers (cut into long thin slices, for mouths)

Pineapple, mushrooms, onions, green peppers (cubed, for eyes and noses)

To make pumpkin shaped pizza crusts, roll out pizza dough and use a round cookie cutter (or almost anything round, such as the rim of a bowl or mug, depending on the size you would like your pizzas to be) to cut a round mini pizza crust. Use your finger to form a slight indent (as though making a heart shape) at the top of the “pumpkin”. Cut a small rectangle out of pizza dough and attach to the indented portion of the pizza crust to form a “stem”. Preheat oven to 400 degrees and bake crusts roughly 7-8 minutes on a cookie sheet sprayed with non-stick spray.  One roll of pizza dough yields roughly 2 adult-sized and 3 child-sized mini pizzas.

Prepare your pizza crusts ahead of time, then allow your little ones to decorate their own pumpkin pizzas! The cheddar cheese gives the pumpkins their orange colour, and toppings placed on top of the cheese will form your jack-o-lantern face. So simple – yet so much fun! Happy pumpkin eating!

Going Bananas

This week has been banana week at our house. After finally instilling a love of bananas in my fruit-wary toddler, I’ve been relishing my success and making bananas a snack time staple. I dreamed up this snack idea a couple of days ago, and it has become a hit. Healthy, convenient and fun, this snack might quickly find its way into your snack repertoire…

Banana Roll-Ups

1 small whole wheat or multigrain wrap

I large banana

Almond or peanut butter (I prefer organic almond butter – which tends to have less sugar, salt and other additives than peanut butter)

Raisins (optional)

Spread peanut or almond butter evenly on wrap. Place banana at the edge of the wrap, and roll. With a sharp knife, cut banana roll-up into thin slices and serve. For a fun twist, place a raisin at the centre of each roll-up slice to make an “eyeball”. I called this new snack creation “dinosaur eyes” (much to the delight of my dinosaur-loving daughter), but you can adapt the name to suit your child’s interests. Happy snacking!

Sticker Bananas!

Oh, what a day it was! It began with a 5 am wake up by an unhappy, teething toddler, and quickly progressed into one of those disastrous days in which everything that can go wrong does. By 10 am I was kneeling beside a toy-plugged toilet, frantically reaching for the shut off valve and trying to calm a perplexed toddler as toilet water literally gushed across my back. And by noon, I had witnessed one of the most terrifying sights I have ever seen – my sweet little 21 month old tumbling end over end down the stairs. She was unhurt, and clearly far less upset by it than I was. She wanted a snack. I just couldn’t stop shaking.

That was the kind of day it had been when I opened our snack cupboard and discovered I had none of my “stand-by” snacks on hand – nothing that I could easily convince an overtired, teething, and understandably cranky toddler to eat. But sometimes those crazy mommy moments lead to the very best discoveries!

Like many toddlers, my little one can be picky and often eats like a bird. The only foods she’ll always eat are prepackaged treats that I try to avoid. There is a reason that companies spend the money they do on developing the colourful, cartoon character adorned packaging used in snack foods. And the reason is because it works. There is an abundance of research out there that illustrates the power of marketing techniques on little minds. So why not use that knowledge to our advantage, and do a little “mommy marketing” of our own?

It’s an idea that I recommended often to the families I once worked with, but neglected to try myself until necessity became the mother of invention. It took a disastrous morning last week for me to discover the power…of sticker bananas! Rummaging through the sticker drawer, I adorned an ordinary banana with a few cartoon character stickers. Never before a fan of bananas, my daughter gobbled down almost the entire thing! And every day since, she has not only been eating bananas, but actually requesting them like she would a prepackaged treat. Such a simple idea. But HUGE in our little world.

Sometimes it truly is the simplest ideas that add the most to our days. My hope is to share many of those simple ideas with you over the coming weeks and months. Little things that make life simpler for you, benefit your little one, and add a little joy and sparkle to your day. Because it’s those little moments of joyful mommyhood that matter the most – to you, and to the little ones you love.