Super Healthy Tomato Sauce

Feeding your family is one of the most important jobs a mother has. Good nutrition in the first few years of life will help establish healthy life-long eating habits and condition their taste buds to enjoy food that is good for them. But if a child (or adult) won’t eat healthy foods, it doesn’t matter how nutritious they are.

I found this tomato sauce recipe by Jamie Oliver in the April 2011 issue of Parenting Early Years and made some adjustments to meet my family’s tastes. It features nine veggies, but your kids will never know it. To be honest, I didn’t think it looked or smelled very good when I first started cooking it, but when it was finished, it was very tasty. There is a little time involved in prepping the veggies, so this makes a big batch for you to freeze and have on hand to make a quick supper later.

Supermom’s Tomato Sauce

Yield: About 13 cups

Prep time: 15-20 minutes

Cook time: 1 hour

1 large onion

1 small leek

2 stalks celery

2 red bell peppers

2 medium zucchinis

2 carrots

2-4 cloves garlic

1 T olive oil

2 T Italian seasoning

1 small butternut squash

2 – 28 oz cans whole tomatoes (best quality)

1 – 8 oz can tomato paste

2 c water

Salt and pepper to taste

Prep veggies (everything is going to go into a blender at the end, so no need to make everything look pretty and small): chop onion, slice leek lengthwise and cut into ½” slices then swish in a bowl with cold water and let sit, chop celery, de-seed and chop bell peppers, slice zucchinis lengthwise twice then slice, peel and chop carrots, smash garlic with the side of a chef’s knife.
Put oil in a large pot and add all the prepped vegetables except for leek. Spoon the leek out of the bowl with a slotted spoon. Do not pour off the water because it is full of all the dirt that settled. Discard water and add leeks to the pot. Cook over medium heat, covered for 20 minutes, stirring occasionally.
Meanwhile, peel butternut squash, slice in half lengthwise and scoop out seeds. Grate squash on a large box grater and add to sauce along with remaining ingredients and bring to a boil.
Reduce heat, cover and simmer for 40 minutes. Remove from heat. Put 2 cups of sauce in a blender and blend until completely smooth. Pour into quart size freezer bag and remove as much air as possible when sealing. Continue until all sauce has been blended. Lay flat on a shelf in the freezer to keep until needed.

Serving suggestions:

• · Serve over pasta
• · Use in lasagna or manicotti
• · Pizza sauce
• · Add a little cream or milk and serve as a soup
• · Use anyway you would use jarred spaghetti sauce

Natural Clues to Health

Have you ever cut an apple in half and seen the star inside? What about a carrot? Did you see the “eye”?

I’ve heard of some of these before. I don’t know if all the claims can be substantiated, but I still find it interesting. Nature is purely awesome.

A sliced carrot looks like the human eye. The pupil, iris and radiating lines look just like the human eye. Science now shows that carrots greatly enhance blood flow and function to the eyes.

A tomato has four chambers and is red, just like the heart. Tomatoes are shown to be good for the heart and blood.

Grapes hang in a cluster that has the shape of the heart. Each grape looks like a blood cell and research shows that grapes are profound heart blood vitalizing food.

 

A walnut looks like a little brain: A left and right hemisphere, upper cerebrums and lower cerebrums. Even the wrinkles or folds mimic the neo-cortex of the human brain. Walnuts help develop over three dozen neuron-transmitters for brain function.

Kidney beans actually heal and help maintain kidney function and yes, they look exactly like human kidneys.

Celery, bok choy, rhubarb and more look like bones. These foods target bone strength. Bones are 23% sodium and these foods are 23% sodium. If you don’t have enough sodium in your diet the body pulls it from the bones making them weak.

Eggplant, avocados and pears target the health and function of the womb and cervix of the female. Today’s research shows that when a woman eats one avocado a week, it balances hormones, sheds unwanted birth weight and prevents cervical cancers. And how profound is this? It takes nine months to grow an avocado from blossom to ripened fruit.

 

Figs are full of seeds and hang in two’s when they grow. Figs increase the motility of male sperm, increase the numbers of sperm and can overcome male sterility.

Sweet potatoes look like the pancreas and actually balance the glycemic index of diabetics.

Olives assist the health of function of the ovaries.

Grapefruits, oranges and other citrus fruits look like the mammary glands of the female and actually assist the health of the breasts and the movement of lymph in and out of the breasts.

 Onions look like body cells. Research shows that onions help clear waste materials from all of the body cells. They even produce tears which wash the epithelial layers of the eye.

Pretty amazing, right?

Pink Madness

This weekend, my step daughter's and I recreated one of their bedrooms. We bought our house over a year ago and have slowly made improvements, but this one was way over due.

Before the changes, the room was a typical beige-neutral (aka really boring-blah). I would imagine that's because the owner's before us had it set up as a guest room. Having been a teenager myself once, I realize the importance of having your own space that represents your taste where you feel comfortable spending time. Although we had discussed this project many times, my middle step-daughter, Angel, and I decided it was to get it done.

 We started Saturday afternoon by picking out the paint colors:



Cotton Candy Pink

Budding Romance

While we were out, I was looking for these circle foam things. I didn't know what they were called, but I had seen them at Home Depot and Michael's. They look like this:

But alas, the fates were against us that day. When I asked the associates if they knew where I could find them, they all looked at me like I had three heads. Very discouraging. However, while at the craft store, we found a great back up plan: Styrofoam circles. More on what we did with these in a minute.

We originally decided to do a two-tone color scheme. We were going to do the light pink on top and dark pink on the bottom. Angel taped off the wall and we started painting. About half way through the top section, I thought it would be cool if we did a faux-wainscot look on the bottom half by painting contrasting pink stripes. At the time, this was a great idea and all the girls were very excited. However, once we started taping off the rows one by one, we thought maybe we were in over our heads. An hour and a half later, we were ready to go with the first color. In hindsight, we should have painted the whole room light pink first, then done the dark pink stripes over the top.

Peeling the tape away after the paint dried was like magic. Beautiful, lovely contrasting lines of pink covered the wall. I was so delighted! I think I was more excited than Angel.

To add the finishing touch to the paint, we added a one inch black border between the solid color on top and the stripes on the bottom. It was then we realized the room looked very much like a Victoria's Secret shopping bag. But that's ok. Those bags are so cute.

As I mentioned before, I wasn't able to find the foam circles I originally wanted to use for the wall. So, using the Styrofoam stand-in's, we picked out varying sizes as well as some 3" spheres. We cut the spheres in half so they'd stick on the wall, then covered them with the same fabric I used to make her quilt and pillows last Christmas. Her bed doesn't have a headboard, so we made a "headboard illusion" by placing the covered Styrofoam in random spots above her bed.

I also hung up some of the leftover paper lanterns in the corner from the bachelorette party I had hosted a few weeks before. Because the room had so much pink already, we chose a dark purple curtain for the windows accented by a white curtain with bright colored dots and circles. I bunched the white curtain with a hair tie and slid in a large blue Gerber daisy.

We added some stickers under the fabric circles to frame the pillows on the bed...

...And voila: Here is the final product: