Fun Ideas to Connect Kids With Food from Rocky Mountain Flatbread

Fun Ways to Connect Kids with Food

There are lots of fun ways to connect kids with food – below are a few ideas and web sites to get you going. To keep in touch with the freshest ideas, follow us on our blog, facebook and twitter (www.rockymountainflatbread.ca.)

Growing Food with Kids

Pick your own strawberries, blueberries, raspberries and more on one of our many farms in Ladner, Richmond or The Fraser Valley. Visit www.pickyourown.org.

Grow your own food. It’s easy and a great way to get kids to appreciate the cycle of growing food. Snap peas, tomatoes, salad, herbs, potatoes, and strawberries can all be grown in pots or small spaces in your garden. Visit www.gardenwiseonline.ca for lots of useful tips. And pick up a free copy of West Coast Seeds magazine (from your closest garden center) for all the knowledge of what to plant when.

Take your family on a community garden tour in Vancouver. There are now over 40 official community gardens in Vancouver – local people having fun growing their own food. Visit www.vancouver.ca.

Visit UBC student run working farm to buy your fresh veggies, visit or enroll your child in one of their summer camps, Farm Wonders, ages 6 – 11 years. www.landfoodubc.ca.

Compost you greens and show your kids how to create “black gold” for your pots and garden. You can get into worm composting or old-fashioned composting. Visit www.cityfarmer.ca.

Food Shopping With Kids

Shop at your local farmers market and your kids can “meet their maker.” – www.eatlocal.ca.

Buy a local food box or join a CSA so your kids can get acquainted with the foods and their seasons. Visit www.organicsathome.ca or www.cityfarmer.org/csa

Play games while shopping – look for hidden MSG ingredients (autolyzed yeast and hydrolyzed proteins), high sugar content (45grams is the daily allowance), salt content (24,00 mg is the daily allowance) on packages, and transfat content.

Cooking and Eating with Kids

Enroll your kids in cooking classes to get them excited about food preparation and to expand their curiosity about flavours, flavour combinations and new foods. Imagine your kids cooking you dinner for a change! Summer cooking camps with Julia are being held at Rocky Mountain Flatbread July 6, 7, 8 and August 3, 4, 5.

Create healthy baked goods with your kids at home. Switch refined grains to whole grains and simple sugars to complex, alternative sweeteners. Do blind taste tests to see which alternative sweeteners you like best. Try real maple syrup, brown rice syrup or turbinado sugar.

Experiment with health snacks – you may be surprised by what your kids respond to. Hummus, artichoke dip and guacamole with veggie sticks or apple slices with pumpkin seed butter are some surprisingly kid friendly options.

Choice is key when it comes to involving your child in eating healthy foods. Offer your child their own cupboard or fridge drawer and fill it with parent-approved foods and snack that your child can choose from when hungry – raw nuts or trail mix, healthy granola bars, fruit, veggie sticks with dip, whole grain baked goods or crackers, seed or nut butters are all healthy, kid-friendly options.

Recipe: Spinach Hummus , Julia Iman O Loughlin, RHN

Ingredients:

4 -5 cloves of garlic

14 oz can of chick peas

5 tbsp olive oil

3 tbsp orange juice (freshly squeezed)

3 tbsp tahini

1 cup of fresh spinach

Instructions:

Place all of the ingredients in a food processor or blender and blend until creamy and smooth. Use as a dip with rice chips or carrots.

For Earth Day - Rocky Mountain Flatbread Diners Share Ideas To Reduce Our Carbon Footprint

At Rocky Mountain we have been collecting ideas from our diners of how to reduce our carbon footprint while living and working in Vancouver.

It turned out to be a very resourceful activity and gave me many inspirational ideas on further simple actions I can personally take with my family as well as in our restaurant and I am hoping it may give others inspirational ideas too.

Join one billion people in 190 countries in taking further actions in your daily life to build a healthy, prosperous, clean energy economy now and in the future. Happy Earth Day Everyone!

Here is the list of diners’ ideas to inspire you:

Ideas for the House!

ü You can recycle all plastics at multiple locations on the 3^rd Saturday of the month. Pacificmobiledepot.com.

ü For the average four bedroom family home, if you use a low flow shower head you can pay back the investment for the shower head in as little as 2 months from the savings on water and electricity.

ü Switch from GOOGLE to BLACKLE (A black screen uses less energy.) blackle.com powered by google.

ü Reuse old envelopes for sorting and filing documents at home.

ü When shaving, turn off the water. Put enough water in the basin first to clean the razor.

ü Give clothing, household items no longer used to the Salvation Army on 4^th and Cypress.

ü Install programmable thermostats in your home. Cutting power, bills and consumption by 55%.

ü Use cloth diapers, wash yourself and line dry. (when it’s not raining.) Plastic diapers take 1000 years to biodegrade in our land fills!

ü Have “no tech” or “low tech” days when you use no car, no phone and no computer.

ü Do all sunbathing at Wreck Beach – less laundry!

ü Hug a tree daily!!

ü Use face clothes instead of wipes for children’s meal messes.

ü Hang your laundry to dry! Dryers use far too much energy.

ü Unplugging all appliances when you go to bed and leave condo. You can save up to 10% on your energy bill.

ü Reuse your water bottles/ drink bottles.

Ideas for Shopping

ü Stop buying stuff.

ü Walking to Rocky Mountain Flatbread for local organic delicious dinner. Eat local!

ü Buy as local as possible – especially food.

ü Buy organic food only and support local farmers.

ü Use less plastic made products.

ü Be conscious of packaging your food from the grocery store comes in. Use cloth produce bags.

ü Use handmade fabric grocery bags that are washable, so you can reuse over and over and over.

Ideas for The Garden

ü Get a worm composter for your home apartment and or workplace. For info: visit City Farmer, 2150 Maple.

ü Fertilize your garden with crushed egg shells and coffee grinds.

ü Grow your own veggies!

ü For folks with no space but a balcony, start a wormery! Simple plastic storage box from Canadian Tire – order worms on-line and off you go.

ü Put tea leaves on your plants – particularly Rooibos on indoor plants.

ü Rain water collection for watering plants. (www.watertiger.net)

ü Join a CSA (Community supported agriculture): You will get the best, local produce; support organic food (which is 80% of carbon footprint of food) and save money!

ü Use garden stalks for mulch under your raspberries.

Ideas for Transport!

ü Stagger work schedules so that there’s time to walk kids to school most days.

ü Take a Staycation every year. Keep the money within the province. Save on air miles and diesel fumes.

ü Walk from the West End to Rocky Mountain Flatbread on 1^st Avenue for the best pizza!

ü Stop idling.

ü Take public transit

ü Close major streets downtown to cars on weekends – Robson and Georgia – have people take transit or a bike

ü Commute via bicycle! Celebrate living in a city where it’s warm enough to bike year around!

ü Live where you work and play so you can just walk and or take public transit.

ü Carpool to work.

Lots of Earths? - Rocky Moutain Education Society

Yes we only have one earth, so we must conserve it's resources! At the rate we're consuming, we'll need 5 earth's worth of resources to sustain our lifestyles in the West. Learn more about how much STUFF we are consuming at www.thestoryofstuff.com


Trafalgar Elementary is learning and educating their community about energy saving tips and climate change. This week they finished making mini globes as key chains and necklaces to sell for Earth day next week! Stay tuned for energy saving tips...

How much plastic do you recycle? Rocky Mountain Flatbread Green Tip

Only 7% of Canadians recycle their plastic!

Pacific Mobile Depots now have 3 Vancouver locations to drop off all of your plastic (styro foam, soft plastic, hard plastic, computers, etc...) on the third Saturday of every month. Check out their web site for your nearest location. http://www.pacificmobiledepots.com.

Growing Potatoes - Rocky Mountain Flatbread Education Society

It's potato growing season!

Students at Lord Tennyson Elementary School started growing their own potatoes in tubs on a rainy day in April.

They followed a few simple instructions and are hoping to harvest lots of potatoes in a few months time!

The simple instructions:

1. Buy some seedling potatoes and make sure the eyes (sprouting bits coming out of the potato are about 1 inch - you can do this by spreading them out on a baking tray and spraying them with a little water and leaving them near sunlight).

2. Put a layer of dirt at the bottom of a large container.

3. Put 1 - 3 potatoes in your container and cover with dirt. For a smaller container put 1 potato for a larger containers put 3 and for a super large container like a garbage bin put 4 - 6.

4. Keep the container indoor by sunlight and the soil moist - not wet.

5. When the shoots grow through the soil just keep topping up with soil. So the stem is fully covered with soil. Don't cover the leaves with soil.

6. Plant outside after about 4 - 6 weeks. If your container is big enough - you can just move the container outside.

If you are trying this in summer months you can plant your potatoes directly outside in containers or in garden beds in trenches and follow the same simple instructions as above.

We shall keep you up to date with our progress. We have already made a few mistakes - but hoping our potatoes will grow anyway! We didn't let our potato eyes sprout 1 inch and we left our poor potatoes outside on their first night.

For more professional advise on container potato growing visit: container-gardening-tips.com/container-vegetable-gardening/growing-potatoes-in-containers.html.

Other things you can start growing outside in April include snap peas, salad, strawberries, asparagus, chard, onions, rhubarb and herbs!! We are trying our green fingers with that too!

Share your responsible business ideas!

With a little help from Rocky Mountain Flatbread Education facilitators and big funding from Vancity, Responsible Entrepreneurs have been creating environmentally and socially conscious products right here in the elementary schools of Vancouver, BC, and Canmore, AB. Students from grades 2 to 12, have successfully developed, manufactured, packaged, marketed and sold socially and environmentally responsible products to their families and communities. This year in Vancouver, students from Lord Tennyson, Queen Victoria, Queen Elizabeth Annex, Charles Dickens elementary, and R.C. Palmer Secondary school, made some amazing environmentally friendly products. They created green cleaning kits, healthy snack bars, funky belts made from bike inner tubes, beeswax candles, potted plants, beds of lettuce, lavender bags, organic crepes, and much more!



DO YOU have any ideas of responsible businesses that kids could create? Our young responsible entrepreneurs have found ways to turn what we call 'junk', into something new; like turning bike inner tubes into fashionable belts, dog collars, and skate guards! They have also created and sold alternatives to unhealthy and environmentally harmful products, like green cleaning products. They love to incorporate what they've learned about climate change into their sales, for example, selling stainless steel water bottles to educate their customers on the harmful aspects of plastics on our health and the environment. We look forward to hearing your brilliant ideas!  

Time to get clean with green!

Thanks to funding from Vancity, this Spring, students at Queen Victoria Annex, and Charles Dickens Elementary in East Vancouver, learned about responsible entrepreneurship through successfully launching their own green cleaning businesses.

Students learned about climate change and actions they can take at home to reduce their carbon footprint. Some actions these students took were; taking shorter hot showers, turning the lights off, lowering the heat, not using plastic bags, using cold water to wash clothes, and many more. What do you do to reduce your carbon footprint at home or at work?

"Can we sell our responsible products to the whole world" was one student's response, after hearing about how harmful toxic cleaning products are for our health the environment. Here are some cleaning recipes that Queen Victoria Annex and Charles Dickens Elementary wanted to share with you! Please SHARE your green cleaning recipes!

-----------------------------------------------------------------

Essential Oil Air Freshener

~ 1 cup of water
~10 drops essential oil of your choice
- Spritzer Bottle

Mix the essential oil and water together in the spray bottle and tightly screw the cap back on. This can be spritz in the bathroom, kitchen, or any room to freshen. Also can mist on face for relaxation.
-----------------------------------------------------------------

All Purpose Spray

- ½ tsp washing soda (available in laundry section of grocery store)
- 1 tsp of lemon juice
- water
- (optional) 3 drops of essential oil of your choice (lavender, tea tree, rosemary…)

Combine the ingredients in a spray bottle and shake until the washing soda has dissolved. Essential oil adds extra anti-bacterial properties. Use this on your shower walls, kitchen counter tops, and for spot washing on the floor!
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Abrasive Tub and Tile Scrubber

- ¾ cup baking soda

- ¼ cup salt
- 2 drops of tea tree oil

Combine ingredients in a bowl and mix. Using a funnel fill the jars with the mixture. Use as you would Comet.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Window/Mirror Cleaner

- 1 tsp of lemon juice in the bottle
- Fill ½ the bottle with vinegar
- Fill ½ the bottle with water.

Test the nozzle to make sure that it sprays. Then tighten it so that it won’t leak. Use as you would Windex.