Here’s a link to Hospital Food, a new blog that collects pictures of healthy, healing meals from hospitals from around the world.

Nothing smells quite like bread baking in your own oven. But, other than a short-lived bread machine I received as a Christmas gift back in college, I have never really attempted to bake my own. A couple of years ago I saved a bookmark on Mark Bittman’s NYTimes blog “Bitten” for a recipe for “No-Knead Bread” that promised perfect, yet easy to make bread. Basically, it takes time, but little thought.

Today I baked my first loaf, modifying the recipe a little using some guidance from a Cook’s Illustrated magazine article.

And it will not be the last!

“Almost No-Knead Bread”

3 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
1/4 teaspoon instant yeast
1-1/2 teaspoons salt
3/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons (7 oz) of room temp. water
1/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons (3 oz) of mild-flavored lager
1 tablespoon white vinegar

The secret to this recipe is using a pre-warmed cast-iron Dutch oven to cook the loaf in after leaving it to rise for 12-18 hours. The original recipe called for the flour, yeast, salt and water only. But some complained that, while easy to do, the flavor lacked a little complexity. Cook’s Illustrated modified the recipe by adding the beer–lager, specifically for reasons related to how this beer is fermented, contains flavor compounds similar to those in the dough starter, and boosts the flavor of the bread–and a little vinegar to add some tanginess.

You start by whisking the flour, yeasty and salt in a large bowl. Then you add the water, beer and vinegar and fold the mixture in with a rubber spatula until a shaggy dough ball forms. Cover it with plastic wrap and let it rise at room temperature for 8 to 18 hours.

Next you lay a sheet of parchment paper over a 10″ skillet and spray it with cooking spray. Transfer the dough to a lightly floured work surface and knead it 10-15 times, shaping it into a ball. Put it seam side down into the skillet and cover it loosely with plastic wrap and let it rise at room temperature again for about two hours. It will have doubled in size and won’t spring back readily when you poke it.

Thirty minutes before you’re ready to cook the loaf, put your oven rack at the lowest level, turn the heat on to 500 degrees and put in the Dutch oven (with lid) to warm up. Once the pot is nice and hot, you lightly flour the top of the bread and cut a 6-inch long, 1/2-inch deep slit in the top of the dough.

Here’s where the parchment paper and skillet does their trick. In order to get the dough down into the dangerously hot Dutch oven, you simply lift it using the parchment paper as a sling and lower the whole thing down into the pot. Replace the lid tightly, put it back into the oven, now lowered to 425 degrees and bake for 30 minutes. At this point, remove the lid and continue to bake until the loaf is deep brown and an instant-read thermometer reads 210 degrees at its center. This will be 20 to 30 minutes longer.

Finally, remove the bread carefully from the pot and transfer it to a wire rack to cool to room temperature, about 2 hours. All the while, standing around staring at it and holding a drool cup under your lips.

Swine flu or not, I love me some pig. However, the following graphic is amazing and speaks volumes as to our impact:

Here’s an interesting website I found today that shows in photos just how much sugar is in popular food items.

Maddux turns four this summer. He’s been our pickiest eater, by far. He would live on a diet of chocolate alone, if we were to let him. And we give in more then we should: chocolate chip pancakes, seemingly healthy chocolate-flavored “nutrition” bars geared towards kids, chocolate soy milk, or an “all natural” chocolate cereal from Trader Joes. Seems like chocolate is a frequently used to get him to compromise and eat something good for him.

What are we doing wrong?

Fussiness seems to be natural part of a child’s development. They distrust anything new. And it is a daily challenge to find something kids will eat. There’s a balance of concerns. On the one hand, obesity is a growing national epidemic, especially among kids. But most parents have an instinctual concern that kids will eat too little and end up with nutritional deficits. Most of us (parents) come from the “Clean Your Plate Before You Get Up From the Table” generation. We feel like it is our job to get the kids to eat, when really it is our job to offer the right foods for mealtime, exposing them to a healthy variety of foods.

According to Harriet Worobey, the director of the Rutgers University Nutritional Sciences Preschool, these are five mistakes that we as parents often make feeding the little ones.

Sending children out of the kitchen. We usually do not involve kids in preparing meals. With hot stoves, sharp knives, and boiling water, the kitchen doesn’t seem like the right place for them. It’s quicker and easier to cook when they’re in the next room and Spongebob is babysitting them. But studies suggest that getting kids involved can make them more interested in trying new foods.

Researchers at Teachers College at Columbia University studied how cooking with a child affects the child’s eating habits. In one study, nearly 600 children from kindergarten to sixth grade took part in a nutrition curriculum intended to get them to eat more vegetables and whole grains. Some children, in addition to having lessons about healthful eating, took part in cooking workshops. The researchers found that children who had cooked their own foods were more likely to eat those foods in the cafeteria, and even ask for seconds, than children who had not had the cooking class.

When children are involved in meal preparation, “they come to at least try the food,” said Isobel Contento, professor of nutrition education at Teachers College and a co-author of the study. “Kids don’t usually like radishes, but we found that if kids cut up radishes and put them in the salad, they love the radishes.”

Pressuring them to take a bite. I am often guilty of this. As an example, last night I made a healthy pizza of whole wheat dough, fresh tomatoes, mozzarella and basil. It was excellent. Maddux likes pizza, but he saw a “piece of salad” (basil) on his slice and refused to eat anything. We have ice cream in the freezer and I, strategically, announced that whomever ate their pizza could have ice cream for dessert. Did it work? Well, it did for the other kids! Not Maddux.

Demanding that a child eat at least one bite, tasting something new, seems reasonable, but it is likely to backfire. Studies show that children react negatively when parents pressure them to eat foods, even if the pressure offers a reward. In one study at Pennsylvania State University, researchers asked children to eat vegetables and drink milk, offering them stickers and television time if they did. Later in the study, the children expressed dislike for the foods they had been rewarded for eating.

“Parents say things like ‘eat your vegetables and you can watch TV,’ but we know that kind of thing doesn’t work either,” said Leann L. Birch, director of Penn State’s childhood obesity research center and a co-author of the study. “In the short run, you might be able to coerce a child to eat, but in the long run, they will be less likely to eat those foods.”

What we should do is put the food on the table and encourage them to try it, but don’t complain if they refuse, and don’t offer praise if they taste it. Just try to frame the event as a normal, daily ritual. Have a “It’s just what we do” kind of attitude and just ask if they want some more and try to stay neutral.

Keep the junk food out of reach. If we buy chips or cookies or a questionable food item like fruit roll-ups, we try to hide them on the top pantry shelf in order to keep the kids from binging on this stuff, or filling up before dinner. This probably leads to two unwanted consequences: the kids longing for these items, and unnecessary head injuries as Maddux climbs from stool, to dog food bin, to lower shelves and falls trying to reach the Oreos.

In another Penn State study, researchers experimented to determine whether forbidden foods were more desirable. Children were seated at tables and given unlimited access to plates of apple or peach cookie bars — two foods the youngsters had rated as “just O.K.” in earlier taste tests. With another group, some bars were served on plates, while some were placed in a clear cookie jar in the middle of the table. The children were told that after 10 minutes, they could snack on cookies from the jar. The researchers found that restricting the cookies had a profound effect: consumption more than tripled compared with when the cookies were served on plates. Other studies show that children whose food is highly restricted at home are far more likely to binge when they have access to forbidden foods.

The lesson is to not buy the foods that we feel like we need to restrict and instead offer healthy snack alternatives and free access to the pantry.

Serving boring food. Trying to eat right myself, I’m likely to prepare some fresh, steamed asparagus, with just a little seasoning only. Tastes great to me, and is obviously very healthy. But when I was a kid? No way. There’s nothing wrong with dressing up fresh vegetables with a little butter, ranch dressing (Jack will eat his shoe laces if we were to serve them with “ranch”) or cheese sauce. The added calories are worth the tradeoff of introducing the new vegetable.

Giving up too soon. Eating preferences change, and often a child’s refusal to eat something at one meal may not be due to taste anyway. It might just be an attitude thing or a power struggle. So we should keep preparing a variety of healthful foods and putting them on the table, even if a child refuses to take a bite. In young children, it may take 10 or more attempts over several months to introduce a food.

Susan B. Roberts, a Tufts University nutritionist and co-author of the book “Feeding Your Child for Lifelong Health,” suggested a “rule of 15” — putting a food on the table at least 15 times to see if a child will accept it. Once a food is accepted, parents should use “food bridges,” finding similarly colored or flavored foods to expand the variety of foods a child will eat. If a child likes pumpkin pie, for instance, try mashed sweet potatoes and then mashed carrots. If a child loves corn, try mixing in a few peas or carrots. Even if a child picks them out, the exposure to the new food is what counts.

“As parents, you’re going to make decisions as to what you want to serve,” Ms. Worobey said. “But then you just have to relax and realize children are different from day to day.”

It feels like the first day of Spring. The weather is glorious. The annual tourist migration has started. And the Old Salts have rolled boulders in front of their caves in the fashionable mid-island district.

So it’s time to celebrate, and share a recipe for pancakes. There is nothing fancy about this recipe, and yet it makes perfect pancakes, and is so simple it completely removes the temptation to buy pancake mixes. I found the recipe online several years ago and have made it many times.

1 cup all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1 large egg, lightly beaten
1 cup well-shaken buttermilk

You mix this up and make eight 3-inch pancakes in a big, medium-hot cast iron skillet with canola oil and/or butter. The secret to the recipe is the buttermilk which, if you’re like us, you never have on hand. But that is still an easy remedy. If you take a cup of regular milk (whatever fat content you have in the frig) and add a tablespoon of white vinegar or sour cream to it, stir it well, and let it sit for 5-10 minutes, you have buttermilk.

The Bush Administration apparently looked at Slim Fast and Jenny Craig diet plans to justify the calorie-restricted diets it fed prisoners who were being interrogated.

From the Huffington Post:

In a footnote to a May 10, 2005, memorandum from the Office of Legal Council, the Bush attorney general’s office argued that restricting the caloric intake of terrorist suspects to 1,000 calories a day was medically safe because people in the United States were dieting along those lines voluntarily.

“While detainees subject to dietary manipulation are obviously situated differently from individuals who voluntarily engage in commercial weight-loss programs, we note that widely available commercial weight-loss programs in the United States employ diets of 1,000 kcal/day for sustained periods of weeks or longer without requiring medical supervision,” the footnote reads. “While we do not equate commercial weight loss programs and this interrogation technique, the fact that these calorie levels are used in the weight-loss programs, in our view, is instructive in evaluating the medical safety of the interrogation technique.”

Rachel at the F-Word blog wonders what that means for those looking at such diets:

The fact that the same calorie restriction employed by commercial diet mongers is also used alongside such torture techniques as waterboarding, sleep deprivation and sexual and physical abuse is, in my view, even more telling.

During this past year I have made a lot of lifestyle changes. I am eating better. Eating less. And exercising more. Fortunately, this has resulted in significant weight loss, that a lot of people have noticed. Given that obesity is quickly becoming the epidemic of our age, many people are asking “How’d you do it?”

There is not one particular secret…no special new medicine, for example. I have found several online sites that help, however. I want to feature one in this post.

Using this site, you can track what you’re eating in amazing detail. Sure, you can look at a label and see how many calories a food has, and you can see how much is from protein and fat. But look up the same food at this site and you can see so much more depth.

For example, take a simple boneless, skinless chicken breast half grilled with 1/4 teaspoon canola oil. After selecting the ingredients and clicking to create a “recipe,” you will learn your entree contains 5 grams fat and 27 grams protein. But Nutrition Data (ND) goes much deeper. Glance at ND’s nutritional target map to learn that your chicken recipe has a fullness factor of 3.1 and it gets 2 1/2 stars out of five as a weight-loss choice based on the recipe’s total profile for how many nutrients per calorie it contains. You’ll also get other observations, such as the chicken is low in sodium, and exactly which nutrients it has (vitamin B-6 with 1/2 milligram, protein, niacin and selenium). Scroll down a bit further and you can see its glycemic load (0) and its caloric ratio. You can get an amino acid score (136) and learn what that means. And fat? You’ll get 5.3 grams total, including 1 gram saturated and 266 milligrams of healthier omega-3 fatty acids.

In all, a very useful site for anyone with specific nutritional needs, as well as for someone who simply wants to better understand what they’re eating.