Given the country’s obesity epidemic it makes perfect sense.

We never made the switch with our skinny and picky firstborn, simply because getting lots of fat into his rapidly lengthening frame seemed like a great idea.

Then as our family grew and his two sisters went from baby to toddler, it seemed easier to just buy the same gallon for everyone.

Now the youngest is 2 and not terribly picky, (I should say, wasn’t before the terrible twos hit!) it’s probably time to revisit the milk question.

It’s certainly easy enough to buy a gallon of this and a gallon of that, but I’ve also read some arguments that absent obesity concerns, full-fat might actually be best beyond the age of 2.

Parents, what did you do?

(Journal News file photo)

From Gale Gand, buttermilk as the secret ingredient. Click here for details.

Enjoy!

Photo by The Associated Press

A nice big turkey, pumpkin pie, football, family, more pumpkin pie, all those great leftovers, OK the last slice of pumpkin pie if no one else is going to take it…

It’s one of my favorite holidays. Everyone celebrates it, there is no mad rush to the mall because you forgot the Baby Alive, and there’s always some reminder on the table of your family’s unique history.

We usually spend Thanksgiving close to home, with my husband’s family, given my folks are a good 5 hours away and most of my brothers and sisters are scattered around the northeast. We have a great, great time, but a little part of me misses one of the Ryan family’s most unusual Thanksgiving traditions — Grandma’s lime Jell-O mold.

It’s not just any lime green Jello mold. No, this is lime Jell-O made in a Bundt pan with apples, celery and walnuts magically suspended throughout.

As a kid I thought it was just the most amazing, delicious thing. How did Grandma get everything to float in there? Sweet, crunchy and jiggly all at the same time.

Sure, some of you are thinking this is just plain gross (or wonder if we also skinned squirrels on the back porch with cousin Gomer) but I assure you, ours was not the only family to feature this sort of Jell-O concoction at the harvest table.

I haven’t subjected my in-laws to it — yet.

What’s your strange but beloved Thanksgiving tradition? What do you remember most from your childhood Thanksgivings?

A Tuesday afternoon at the car dealership, naturally.

I was just reading Hema’s great post about the healing power of ginger and it reminded me of a conversation I had recently with a fellow mom as I waited on an oil change.

We were both in the service-area waiting room with our children, her daughter roughly the same age as my oldest. With the two girls happily playing in the toy-stocked alcove with the baby, we began to chat about this and that. The gorgeous sweater she was knitting, mostly, (How I wish I could do that!) and the fact my 2-year-old’s nose had not stopped running for seven straight days.  I said I was beginning to worry about allergies, but she’d never shown any sensitivity before. Maybe it was just that time of year.

Then she offered a few things she does for her daughter’s colds, cribbed from old Polish family recipes. One, if I’m remembering correctly, involved boiling a raw onion in a little water and then sweetening the water-onion juice with a bit of sugar and spooning it into little mouths. 

“It tastes sweet,” she said. “The kids love it.”

The other home cure had you dabbing Vicks VapoRub on the soles of their feet, then covering with socks for the night. Who would have thought?

My daughter’s cold finally ran it’s course on day nine or 10 with little more than my usual saline nose spray-suction-elevate-the head-of-her-crib method, but I couldn’t get the idea of onions out of my head.

As a kid, I remember my Dad would eat onions raw with gusto, biting into them like an apple. Great for your health, he would say. (Or maybe that’s what I think he might have said amid all of our cries of “Eww! Gross!”) 

I Googled onions and colds and found a laundry list of cures involving onions — including my personal favorite for the sheer visual fun of it — putting a raw onion in a sock and wearing it around your neck at night. Which, incidentally, is also billed as a surefire cure for fevers and earaches.

I tried the raw onion cure myself a few weeks later, now myself stuffy and miserable, with a wicked sore throat. I chopped the onion and sweated it out with honey in a covered coffee cup. Then I gargled with apple cider vinegar and warm salt water every hour or so, another popular home remedy.

I felt perfectly fine 48 hours later and I’m always good for one bad cold every change of season.

So yesterday, when I noticed a little bit of, well, snot coming out of the 2-year-old’s nose I jumped into action — boiled an onion, cooled and sweetened the juice and mixed it in a sippy with ice and a little apple juice. She was none the wiser.

This morning?

Nose perfectly clear. 

Hmmmm….

What’s your favorite home remedy? Anything from your grandparent’s day?

Photo by Ricky Flores — the onion was part of the sofrito he made for pasteles. Yum!

Great idea by Amy for mixing healthy with fun (and gross!) this Halloween.  

It got me thinking, what’s the best low-GI, pre-trick-or-treating dinner you can think of to counterbalance all the sugar they are about to consume? (I know how I feel when I eat a lot of sugar on an empty stomach, ugh.) 

 I think this year I’ll go with poached or roasted chicken, some green vegetable (not the sugary ones they prefer like corn or carrots) and brown rice. 

 Then, they can go as crazy as they want.  

To me, Halloween is actually a great holiday for healthy eating — it’s full of natural consequences. I can tell them to take it easy on the candy all I want, but sometimes that Halloween bellyache is a far better teacher. (What a great lesson to learn at a young age: Just because one handful of M&Ms tastes great, that doesn’t mean five fistfuls plus 20 Tootsie Rolls and four Three Musketeers bars will.)

I can also talk about the importance of saving for a rainy day. But it’s far more powerful, I think, to see your sister still enjoying her Halloween stash two months from now when you ate yours all at once.

I’ve come across a great new bookmark — Chocolate and Zucchini by French foodie, blogger and author Clotilde Dusoulier.

It has nothing to do with helping you feed your kids or getting a healthy meal on the table in 30 minutes or less. It’s just pure enjoyment of food and leisure. I haven’t even tried a recipe yet — I’m still stuck on the gorgeous pictures from her trip to Croatia. Here’s a photo diary from the trip. Amazing.

You can almost imagine what it’s like to be a 29-year-old impossibly chic Parisian food writer (aren’t they all?) lazing about for a week or two on the shores of the Adriatic.

My enduring love of reality TV is not something I’m particularly proud of, but I always find in between all the horrifying preening and only-in-America emotive TMI, there is something useful, OK maybe just interesting, to take away.

Consider Tim Gunn of Project Runway. Have you ever encountered a sweeter, more calming figure? Watching him, hand resting thoughtfully on chin, gently encouraging an overwrought designer to “be your own editor” is like chamomile tea through the tube for me. 

And sometimes reality TV is great for reminding you of just how easy your life is compared to some. Jon and Kate Plus 8 falls squarely in that camp.

I’m sure you’ve  heard the story. This Pennsylvania couple has twins, then tries to get pregnant again and ends up with sextuplets. It’s insanity times 8. 

But what I love is how it makes three kids under 7 — which is what we have — seems so easy, so quiet, so calm. 

I’m also struck at how much the kids love, love, love having days alone with Mom and Dad. They simply can’t stop smiling. Jon and Kate allow them to choose whatever itinerary they’d most enjoy and they head off together, a blissful and rare outing as a family triumvirate.

A huge chocolate milkshake with lunch? Perfect. Ear piercing for one of the older girls? No problem.

It’s easy to forget amid all our day-to-day stresses how infectiously joyful the sight of happy kids can be. 

With that playing in the back of my mind, I decided to, at least for now, try the more challenging kid-cooking projects just one-on-one. I love to cook with my kids, but sometimes having to mind three pairs of hands and a bag of flour amid cries of “but her measuring cup is bigger!” is just too much drama for this mama.

So the other day, while the oldest was in school and the baby was napping (I wasn’t playing hooky, I promise — I work weekends so I have time off during the week), me and my almost-5-year-old tackled her most ambitious project to date — homemade meatballs and sauce. She did great! So careful mixing together the meat, the bread crumbs, the parsley and onion, expertly rolling it into little balls. We had a blast.

I actually got a bit emotional. I can only describe the sensation as a little catch in the heart when you realize you are doing something that women for centuries before you have done and also derived enormous comfort from, that place in time where domesticity feels nothing like drudgery. When the act of creating or giving sustenance feels like opening a gift and it cost you nothing.

I used to feel that way when they were babies, nursing them in the middle of the night, alone in a quiet living room, the TV on mute, throwing off just enough blue glow to light our way back to the crib. That’s not to say there weren’t blazing moments of impatience at the baby who wouldn’t nap more than 15 minutes at a time or those days when you believed in the core of your being that you were the only woman on Earth who couldn’t do this parenting thing right. There were just moments when I got it. When I realized this time was as powerful as it was fleeting and it needed to be recognized.

So there we were. A mother in a quiet kitchen on a cloudless late summer afternoon teaching her little girl how to cook, laughing at messy hands, wiping onion tears away with a little kiss.

Probably not a good sign.

It doesn’t help that over the summer we switched to a new daycare-slash-preschool for the two little ones that provides snacks, not lunches. (Our previous one offered lunch, not snacks.) So instead stuffing a few baggies with Goldfish and running out the door, I’m now on the hook for three full lunches — and naturally three different personalities and tastes.

I should listen more to my mother, who is firmly in the “night before” camp. (How else could she have gotten varying combinations of nine kids off to school each morning?) At the very least, it avoids all those last-minute arguments about what goes in the lunch box.

This morning:

Me: “We don’t have anymore of the apples you like, how about a pear?”

My 6-year-old son: “I hate pears.”

Me: “How can you hate pears? They taste just like apples.”

Son: “No they don’t.”

How exactly are you supposed to win that argument?

So with thoughts of one more lunch-making day to go before the weekend, I was happy to stumble upon this NPR piece by Betsy Block, author of “The Dinner Diaries: Raising Whole Wheat Kids in a White Bread World.” (Algonquin Books 2008)

I’m definitely making the pumpkin bread — that’s one thing I know all three will love.

What’s your secret for school lunches?

Photo by Stephen Schmitt / The Journal News

Colleague and foodie extraordinaire Liz Johnson has a great reader-submitted recipe for zucchini pesto on her blog, Small Bites. It looks like a slam dunk for veggie-averse kids — go Montebello mom Daniela Sepulveda! 

I’m going to try it this week and report back. And since we’ve been talking so much about eating cheaply and locally, this could be a hit on both fronts. My local farmer’s market is overflowing with zucchini right now. 

(And I already know the baby will love it—she was the only one to appreciate the fried zucchini “cakes” I made a few weeks ago and devours anything with basil pesto. I guess one out of three isn’t bad!)

(Poughkeepsie Journal file photo)