The Potency of Potassium: Why Your Kids Need it and Where to Find it

from Super Healthy Kids

While many different food products and parenting magazines will stress the importance of well-balanced meals for your kids that include vitamins X, Y, and Z, one nutrient that often gets left out of the mix is potassium. While most healthy individuals have sufficient levels of potassium in their bodies, this can only occurs if an individual is regularly eating healthy foods. Potassium deficiency in children can lead to many diseases and conditions that are common to adults, like hypertension, heart disease, weight gain, and depression. A common symptom of potassium deficiency is fatigue. To keep potassium at the recommended levels here are a few foods that are delicious and kid friendly.

1. Bananas

Bananas are one of the best and most well-known sources of potassium, and kids can’t seem to get enough of them! A great combination that children find particularly delightful is peanut butter and banana, but you can also slice it up and throw it in virtually anything—from cereal to smoothies, to even the occasional ice cream, turning a treat into something somewhat healthy.

2. Baked and Sweet Potatoes

Both baked potatoes and sweet potatoesare vegetables that kids in particular enjoy, and they are both loaded with potassium. Instead of feeding your children grease-laden French fries, try slicing both baked sweet and regular potatoes, salting them lightly, and serving with a healthy fresh salsa instead of ketchup.

3. Carrots

Although carrots were never my personal favorite when I was growing up, I did find them palatable when combined with a dipping sauce. While ranch dressing isn’t the healthiest thing, kids can’t stop with this one dressing, so think of ways to make it healthier. Some grocery stores stock a yogurt-based ranch dressing, with a fourth of the fat and calories. What’s more, yogurt happens to be a great source of potassium, too!

4. Vitamin supplements

Many doctors stress the fact that potassium levels should be adequate with a healthy diet, and a vitamin supplement should only be used to, well, supplement, real food. Some children, however, may have a specific deficiency in potassium for some reason or another, which may require additional supplements. The only way you can actually find out about this deficiency is to talk to your pediatrician, who can recommend certain blood tests to discovery any inadequacies in diet.
While the foods listed above are some popular sources of potassium, pretty much every healthy food item will have a certain amount. Again, the most important thing to keep potassium levels adequate is to make sure you vary your child’s balanced diet as much as possible, to keep eating fun and healthy! For more information about potassium rich foods, check out this resource.


Author Bio:
This guest post is contributed by Leslie Johnson, who writes about health, green living, parenting related articles at masters in health administration

Substitute Dessert with Sweet Oaty Bites

from Super Healthy Kids



If anyone can have a freak accident, it’s Erica. She’s like a magnet for strange injury.  Yesterday, minding her own business, she was standing at a fence watching Nate’s baseball game.  Suddenly she turned, and her face hit a garbage can so hard she completely split her lip open.  There was blood everywhere!  Soaked through her sleeve as she tried to hold it together.  I couldn’t help but wonder how she didn’t realize the garbage can was there?  Anyway, she’s going to have a fat lip this morning!  I guess everyone has to have that kid that could run into a telephone pole on a wide open street. She’s that kid in our family.

On to our letter-O experiments!  Delightfully easy, gluten free, non-fat, and super good; your kids will love these little oatmeal cookies.  If your kids like granola bars, they’ll certainly enjoy this treat.

Sweet Oatie Recipe

• 2 cups oats (any variety)
• 1/2 cup dried apricots, chopped
• 1/3 cup chopped or diced almonds
• 1/4 cup white sugar
• 1/4 cup brown sugar
• 1/4 tsp. salt
• 3 egg whites
• 1 tsp. vanilla

Mix dry ingredients in large bowl. In small bowl combine egg whites and vanilla.  Whip with a fork for about 10 seconds.  Add the egg whites to the dry ingredients.  Form balls with dough and place on greased cookie sheet.  Bake at 350 for about 12 minutes, or until bottoms begin to turn brown.

Whole Wheat Yeast Breads – Why Me and Why You

from Adventures in Beanland


Part I – Why Me and Why You


 
Part II – Ingredients
Part III – Technique
Part IV – Recipes


Recently, I hosted four nights of “how-to” for whole wheat yeast bread baking for the women’s group of my church. It was a bit chaotic with so many women in my smallish kitchen, and I was incredibly intimidated to be in the spotlight as I explained each step and ingredient along the way. Together, these women and I tore up my kitchen, cranked out a dozen loaves of whole wheat bread, many batches of whole wheat rolls, hamburger buns, pita bread, and 4 homemade pizzas. Insanely fun.

I got myself into this because my Whole Wheat Bread in a Bread Machine is lovely. I won’t lie. It’s truly delightful. And, because I live a hermit’s life right now (working full-time from home and taking care of my girl and a med student husband)… I show love in one of the few ways I can: by giving away loaves of homemade bread.

Naturally, people who enjoyed the bread started asking for the recipe and tips on how to adapt it for their own bread machine. Well, soon friends who didn’t have bread machine wanted to know how to make it by hand or in a stand mixer, and they wanted to know where I buy my ingredients and if I made other things besides bread… etc.

I decided to make one of my monthly Healthy Minds and Bodies group meetings into a bread night. One night turned into four on the schedule and I started to panic. Because I had really only perfected the bread machine recipe, in preparation for these nights I dove into more hands-on bread baking. I love using the stand mixer, actually, but it’s hands-on in the sense that I’m constantly feeling the dough and making decisions as I go. I adapted the recipe and fine-tuned several others so I could share with confidence.

In the process, I discovered I truly do have a talent for this. My passion for healthy, do-it-yourself cooking drove me to lots of research, experimentation, and innovation. I’d like to share what I’ve learned so far with the 6 people who read my blog world.

Why Whole Wheat?

1. Whole wheat flour is a real food and nutritious. White flour? Not so much.
2. I buy wheat at a great price and it stores well. I grind it myself and get a lot of satisfaction from having food laid up in store in case of emergency (or rough economic times), and from creating something delicious truly from scratch.
3. I don’t have much experience with yeast baking with other grains. I hope to branch out, but I haven’t yet gone beyond a simple variation of my regular recipe with the substitution of rolled oats for some of the whole wheat flour.

Why Do I Make My Own Bread?

1. Because I can.
2. Because, in the long run, it costs less.
3. Because it tastes better and the smell makes me swoon. I grew up helping my mom make bread and it’s cathartic for me to work with dough and smell the yeasty goodness of the process. I want to pass on to my children the skills of self-reliance and the concept of being more in touch with food. They won’t need to go get plastic-wrapped bread that’s been trucked across the country. Yay!
4. The ingredients in store-bought bread are incomprehensible, like Sodium Stearoyl Lactylate . I don’t need that.

Intimidated yet?

Keep reading and you might be. I grind my own wheat. I make my own dough conditioner. I buy #10 cans of vital wheat gluten for a taller rise. We hardly ever buy bread from the store anymore, and I make nearly all of our pita bread, beanburger buns (because let’s be honest, there’s no meat in our house), rolls, and pizza crust. I’m very analytical and am constantly tweaking technique and proportions to achieve a better result (can you tell I wanted to be an organic chemist?)
However, I have some encouraging words for you:

1. You CAN do it. I didn’t make any homemade bread at all 3 years ago. And I don’t have oodles of time to sit around and make messes in the kitchen. I just kept trying and learning as I went. I made about a loaf a week for our family and it always came out (with two exceptions) edible, smelling great, and tasting good. A few times we ate it as toast. One time or two it went straight into breadcrumbs. But usually it made a good loaf of bread that continued to get better as I had more experience under my belt.
   Don’t try and you’ll still be eating store-bought bread 5 years from now. Try and who knows? You might find yourself enjoying making something healthy, cheap, and absolutely fantastically delicious for your family. And you can teach your children and your friends. Or just spoil your friends with homemade bread. They’ll thank you.
   It gets easier. And faster. And less messy. And cheaper. The more you do it, the more you can adjust things to fit your style. Prefer to do a loaf in the bread machine and skip the mess and time investment? Do it. Rather get your hands dirty but make 4 loaves at once to freeze and give away? Rock on.
   There will be a whole lot of info in subsequent posts. This isn’t required knowledge and you don’t have to be a bread expert to make a delicious loaf of bread. (This is a good thing because I definitely don’t consider myself an expert!* ) Instead, consider that the information you gather here and in other places constitutes tools in your toolbox. You can whip the info out if something goes awry or if you need to tinker, but you can certainly ignore my advice and still make excellent bread.
2. You do NOT have to do it the way I do it. Don’t run out and buy all the extra ingredients, a wheat mill, etc. Just start with a bag of whole wheat flour from the store and $5 loaf pan. Skip the dough conditioner and gluten. See if you actually LIKE whole wheat bread. (If you don’t, you should really learn to like it because it’s miles better for you. Ahem.) Get some successes under your belt and if you do decide to make this a habit, then invest in the nice-to-haves.
   Everyone has a different idea of perfection. My husband likes a light, soft, sandwichy loaf so that’s what this info is geared towards. That being said, the info should equip you to tweak as needed to achieve the result you want.
   You might decide you don’t want to make homemade bread all the time for your family. But, if you take the time to learn how, you’ll be able to use that skill when needed and you’ll be glad you have it.

Are you ready?
*Full disclosure: I have lots more to learn so it’s a good thing I’m only 25 years old. I haven’t yet tried: Freezing dough. Whole Wheat Sourdough. Other grains in my bread. Whole wheat tortillas (ok I tried ‘em and I failed). Homemade hummus to go with my pita (I know, I know). Whole grain artisan breads. The list is long, but as I tackle it, I will blog about it.
**My sources of knowledge: A mom and three sisters-in-law who bake homemade whole wheat bread. I shamelessly stole and modified recipes (including my dough conditioner recipe) from them and picked their brains for help as I stumbled my way along. I read lots online and in several cookbooks, notably The Bread Bible. In every case, though, I adapted recipes to fit our tastes, particularly those from the Bread Bible because they weren’t whole grain at all.

Next up: Part II – Ingredients


This cute little bucket is one reason I make homemade bread:

 



To continue reading parts II, III, and IV, please click on the links at the the top!

Chocolaty Pumpkin Bars

from Kids Eat Right

I’m a HUGE fan of all things pumpkin and it’s such a great source of vitamins A & C.  It is also high in potassium, manganese, copper and one of the B vitamins, riboflavin.  So I was really excited to find a healthy recipe that involved pumpkin and chocolate.

by Janice Bissex, MS RD and Elizabeth Weiss, MS RD
If you're looking for a nutritious, kid-pleasing snack for after school or the lunch box, this is the recipe for you. Thanks to the pumpkin (which, by the way, blends right in), each serving has almost half a day's worth of immune-boosting vitamin A. As for the nuts, they add heart-healthy fat and protein to each delicious bite.

Ingredients

1 cup all-purpose flour
1 cup whole wheat flour
1 cup pecans, very finely chopped
¾ cup granulated sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
½ teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon salt
4 large eggs, beaten
One 15-ounce can 100% pure pumpkin
½ cup canola oil
¼ cup 1% low-fat milk
½ cup mini semi-sweet chocolate chips

Directions

1. Preheat the oven to 350°F. Lightly oil or coat a 15 x 10 x 1-inch rimmed baking or jelly roll pan with nonstick cooking spray and set aside.
2. Whisk together the all-purpose flour, whole wheat flour, pecans, sugar, baking powder, cinnamon, baking soda, and salt in a large bowl until well combined.
3. In a separate bowl, whisk the eggs, pumpkin, oil, and milk until well blended. Pour the liquid ingredients over the dry ingredients and stir until just combined. Stir in the chocolate chips.
4. Spread the batter evenly in the prepared pan and bake for 25 minutes, or until a wooden toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Transfer the pan to a wire rack and cool for 10 minutes before slicing into thirty, 2 x 2½-inch bars.

CookingTip

For maximum freshness, store leftovers in a plastic container or zip-top bag in the refrigerator.

Servings: 30 (1 Bar Per Serving)
Nutrition Facts
Serving Size 1 Bar
Amount per serving
Calories 140
Calories from Fat 70
Total Fat 8g
Saturated Fat 1g
Trans Fat 0g
Cholesterol 25mg
Sodium 95mg
Total Carbohydrate 16g
Dietary Fiber 2g
Sugars 0g
Protein 2g
Vitamin A
Vitamin C
Calcium
Iron

Protein Scones

Found this great recipe and my two year old loved it!   The almond flour is a wonderful source of protein and the oatmeal adds fiber.  I think they turned out a little more like cookies than scones, but however you make them they are tasty (and easy to make)!  I doubled the recipe so I could have some for the freezer, and they went quickly so it’s a good thing I did.  I think chopped walnuts instead of the cranberries or chocolate chips or even in addition would also be wonderful.

1) Heat oven to 350 degrees.

2) Coat 2 large baking sheets sheets with vegetable oil spray.

3) Combine all ingredients in a large bowl and stir until well blended: 2 1/2 c. almond flour, 1 c. liquid egg whites, 3/4 cup vanilla whey protein powder, 1/2 c. granulated Splenda or 6 tsp. granulated Stevia, 1/2 c. old fashioned oats, 1/2 c. dark chocolate chips, 1/2 c. dried cranberries (or raisins), 1 TBS cinnamon and a dash of nutmeg.

4) Place 2-inch spoonfuls of batter on baking sheets and bake until peaks begin to brown, 15-18 min.