A mom in my toddler daughter’s pre-school sent an e-mail to the whole group of parents. Her son, wanting a cheez-it snack threw himself on the subway floor and screamed his lungs out when he spied those cracker products in a subway news stand. The mom was surprised that her son actually knew what a cheez-it was since she feeds her child a diet of healthy, real food free of highly processed food. “He must have had cheez-it at a play date in somebody else’s house or at the school for a snack” she was thinking.
Anyway, I jumped on the cheez-it wagon and digging deeper about some of the ingredients such as shelf life extenders, high levels of salt and sugar and bleached flour makes you think twice about incorporating it into your toddler’s diet. Granted the FDA puts a seal of approval on the product and it’s “safe” to be consumed in normal doses but why even go there especially when you are training the palate of a little person. We’re surrounded by plenty of food containing ingredients that are somewhat questionable especially for your kids. My spouse and I are constantly busy with reading ingredients on packages at the supermarket and making sure that the ingredients live up to our standards. We try to eat as healthy as possible with minimal processed foods, preferably organic.
I don’t mean to spread bad news and go off on a rant but just think about the following scenario. It’s fictional but familiar. Little Dylan gets up early in the morning and gets ready for school. Like so many of us he loves his milk and cereal and there’s a good chance that the milk is from a industrial sized dairy that gets milk from cows injected with r-BGH (recombinant bovine growth hormone or rBST recombinant bovine somatotropin). These growth hormones induce cows to produce milk. It makes a cow increase its milk output by +/-15%. A common side effect of that increased output is mastitis, an utter infection. Mastitis is very painful to the cow, results in puss in the milk and requires a cow be treated with antibiotics. Got milk! The paradox is that in the USA we produce too much milk already so what’s the point of r-BGH. More is better? Let’s move on to Dylan’s beloved cereal which crunches so nicely between his tiny teeth because it has a perfect shiny glaze of HFCS a/k/a high fructose corn syrup or plenty of sugar in different forms. See a list of more sugar . The average person in the US consumes too much sugar which of course leads to obesity. Best-selling cereals have up to 25% sugar! The sugar gets little Dylan moving in the morning. We’re lucky he is not allowed to drink coffee yet as he would literally climb up the walls. If the cereal is not organic you can be sure that the grain is GE or genetically engineered (a/k/a GMO which is a genetically modified organism). That is scientists getting into the DNA of plants and making them faster growing, resistant to pathogens, etc. There are pros and cons to the GMO subject but a good part of us worries that tampering with nature can result in mutant plants which will eventually harm us. It’s kind of digging our own grave. It’s only fair to us that any product made with GMO plants should be labeled as such. Another point we have to be worried about, even when a product is organic, is the run-off of synthetic pesticide and fertilizer treated produce fields contaminating our drinking water - liquid cancer anybody? A little advice here- it’s a good idea to get a water filter installed in your tap water supply.
Cheese Crackers
Let’s go back to our cheese cracker snacks. I’m a big defender of fresh produce and cooking versus opening packaged processed food for which you need an encyclopedia to decode (if you read the ingredients). The following recipe is simple and needs ONE ingredient.
Gourmet Cheese Crisps
(recipe yields approximately 12 cheese crackers)
4 ounces freshly grated Parmesan cheese (I used my Microplane grater for long cheese shreds)
1. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit.
2. Line a cookie sheet pan with a lightly oiled nonstick baking sheet such as parchment paper or silicon baking mat.
3. Mound 2-tablespoon sized grated cheese onto the nonstick layer. The cheese mounds should be spread into 2-inch circles. Also leave 2-inch space around each cheese mount.
4. Bake the cheese for 8-12 minutes. The cheese should have a golden-brown color. Take the cookie sheet pan out of the oven and put it on the kitchen counter for a minute. With a metal spatula scrape the melted cheese circles off the sheet pan liner and drape them over the edge of a dinner plate.
Serving Suggestions: break the cheese crisps into small pieces and sprinkle over salad. Steam asparagus and toss it with a bit of EVO and butter. Serve the asparagus in small bowls, season with black pepper from a mill and cover with cheese crisps.
