Ellie is a carbaholic. If she isn't asking for french fries or pop corn then she is looking for chips and crackers. As a person with DS she already has a tendency to be heavy, so I am trying to improve her diet. We, ok, I, didn't pay to much attention as she packed away a lot of goldfish and crackers and snacks in general last year. This year I have become the snack scrooge. For several months I got her eating bananas if she wanted a snack. Her second favorite food group is meat. I used to think she was a carnivore.
On top of her desires to carb-out I struggle to find low-salt, low-fat healthy alternatives for the rest of the family to avoid issues with heart disease that are genetic in nature. Such an easy thing to do with kids. Ha ha! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Oh, hold on and let me catch my breath there.
I've been lucky though. My oldest is an amazingly healthy eater. His favorite snack is organic granny smith apples. He shuns the food at the school for homemade sandwiches, and he absolutely REFUSES to eat fast food. This includes most, but not all, pizza places. If he totally refused pizza I would wonder if he's an alien. The mom & pop pizza shops are cool with him, and he loves calzones with lots of different meats in them, so he has to be human.
Unfortunately Ellie doesn't always follow her brother's example. Veggies are a word we "whisper" in our house. Hopefully she won't realize she's actually eaten any. It may turn her to stone. I'm not sure what she's got against them. She does occasionally lick a carrot or a tomato, then she realizes it's going to kill her and she dumps it like a hot potato. Now, that's a veggie she will eat, in french fry format. Assuming there's lots of ketchup. In fact the ketchup to french fry ratio has to be just. so.
Tonight was a good night though. I made a family favorite: sockeye salmon two ways. That's actually two different recipes. One is our original favorite. I modified a recipe I got from a store in Alaska. I call it Dianne's Hawaiian Sockeye - well, that is till I come up with a better name! The other one is a recipe I got from the American Heart Association (I think) for a very low sodium salmon dish. There's about 70 mg of sodium per serving! The kids don't care for that one as much, but they love my old salmon recipe. I serve it with fresh steamed white rice, a salad and a glass of milk. All the food groups are covered, lots of omega-3's, low fat, and for the grown-ups it's also very low-salt. After that we headed to the gym for swim team and a work out for me. Finally - we are getting on track for our resolutions. Ellie loved the salmon and the rice, the salad - not so much. We'll keep working on that, we've got 11 1/2 months!
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