Winter is Awesome, by Mollie

Yeah. Enough said. Lots of people complain about winter - the cold, dark, and transportation difficulties... But it's really a great time. Just think about: you get to enjoy so much good food and not feel guilty at all! Besides, since winter is so cold, our bodies need more food anyway - so we get to eat more - and eating helps us warm up. The largest reason for all this good food, it seems, is that there are LOTS of holidays in the winter months! As I've discovered through a bit of research, it seems that all cultures have some sort of celebration around this time. It makes sense - winter would have been a really hard time to get through without heaters, lighting, ovens, TVs, etc, so people would have needed something they could count on. Holidays come around every year, so they're a perfect time for bringing people together and helping them to forget the harsh circumstances they're faced with.

However, as your stomach is probably still recovering from, most holiday food - nowadays - is not so healthy. Okay, not at all healthy. My parents were a little ambivalent about having a month focusing on holiday food, seeing as we're trying to eat healthier. I continually assured them that the point of having a holiday food month was to discover healthier versions of the foods we're used to. And I think we did a very fine job.

Some things we've discovered:

Chocolate is absolutely necessary. (I read recently that eating a square of dark chocolate in the morning provides you with just enough caffeine to get a kick-start but not too much to cause a crash later, along with antioxidants. I am definitely taking advantage of that. I also discovered that some chocolate (and coffee) really helps my ailing shoulder. Oh yeah.) Okay, that was really just my discovery.

Baked potato latkes can be better than fried ones, because they get cooked all the way through and, if left in the oven long enough, get crispy around the edges. Greek yogurt is also a perfect replacement for sour cream to have with the latkes.

Candle wax is fun to play with. (I know, not food related. Shush.)

An alternative to our usual cinnamon roll Christmas breakfast is a mango, pineapple, and banana fruit salad with mango cream dressing (made with Greek yogurt!) with shredded pineapple and raisins on top. (The recipe can be found in the cookbook The Green Way to Healthy Living, and a picture of it can be seen in my last post, "Happy Bean Day! and Some Pictures.")

If you like peppermint, adding some to a drink or some brownies is a great way to really holiday-ize your food and make it a little more exciting without adding a ton of whipped cream or ice cream to it.

I came away from the break feeling full but healthily so, and with lots of excitement for what next year's holiday season can bring in the way of food!

Sadly Skipped September

Who knows what we were thinking when we assigned September - the first full month of school and seriously cold weather - to be raw food month. You just don't want frozen raw cheesecake or a salad when it's forty degrees outside and you've had to go through the entire day at school without warm food. (Actually I take that back - frozen raw cheesecake is just too good to not want.) And you also don't have time to make raw stuff when you don't get home until 6:45 every night starving and still with a ton of homework. That's just the way of things....

So, unfortunately - tragically - we've had to skip September as a raw food month. We still made a lot of really good food - Radical Raspberry made dinner almost every night for a very grateful Magnificent Mango, both of whom did a very good job at packing healthy lunches for themselves everyday. And we finally have the best-est ever apples from Peifer (an orchard on the edge of Yellow Springs)! Other things we ate: a good number of creative and soothing soups, most of which used the many green tomatoes from our garden, beans (of course), rice pasta and homemade pesto with garden basil (Raspberry picked a whole basket of it to save it from the frost), and some really pretty striped squash. Mango also made some (vegan) chocolate chip cookies for play rehearsal (since it was the director's birthday) with less sugar and replacing half of the butter with banana; those were a big hit.

In short, we're always on a family food adventure, even if we don't follow the schedule. But October is Indian Food Month, which sounds much more appealing in this cold weather than raw food! So let's spice it up!

Notes:

Despite the fact that Stunning Sauerkraut posted his blog post significantly late, no punishments were administered due to the fact that Mango was being lenient since it was the first month (a word which she wrote on the kitchen calendar board because she kept wanting to tell him she was being lenient when she reminded him to write it, but couldn't remember the word); and also because Mango sort of neglected to actually write a punishment for late blog posts.