Each individual food has its have nutrients, but sometimes consuming two or far more of them with each other can be beneficial to your physique. When we believe of healthy foods, the to start with factor that pops in our head is some green leafy vegetable. Obtaining it on your own is superior as well, but if you add tomatoes to it, it can be even greater, claimed an professional. This is not the only healthier food mixture that you can go for. There are lots of extra, so browse on to obtain out how to combine the substances to raise your health and fitness. Really do not worry as style will not be compromised.
Our eating plan need to be like our clothes. Just the way we mix and match out outfits, we ought to also club healthy substances and consume.
You have to try to eat healthy meals combinations. Graphic courtesy: Shutterstock
Health and fitness Shots attained out to Payal Sharma, Senior Dietician at Dharamshila Narayana Superspeciality Healthcare facility, to know extra about the nutritious food items mixtures.
1. Beans and rice
Both these food items by yourself are balanced decisions, but you can have them alongside one another way too. Sharma stated that a total protein foodstuff is the one that is made up of “all the amino acids which your overall body necessitates, and the amino acids discovered in rice complements those people that are in beans.” This makes it a food that is rich in large good quality protein, so take in the two collectively.
Also examine: What tends to make rajma chawal a comfort foodstuff that is also terrific for pounds decline
2. Leafy greens and tomatoes
Of course, leafy greens almost certainly tops the checklist of healthiest food in the environment. And why not? Following all, dim leafy greens these as kale, spinach, and collards consist of iron, but it’s tough to take in the iron from these eco-friendly vegetation devoid of the assistance of vitamin C. To get great combination of nutritious and tasty foods, basically blend fresh new or sautéed leafy greens with tomatoes, a splash or lemon juice or even items of strawberries if you adore the juicy red fruit.
3. Egg and cheese
A glass of milk is commonly sufficient to preserve solid bones. Apparently, calcium and vitamin D do the job in synergy to assistance in producing bones healthful. So, an egg and cheese sandwich, a frittata or an omelet are superior choices than just a glass of milk. Even though egg yolks comprise vitamin D, cheese has calcium in it.
Eggs are superior for wellbeing! Graphic courtesy: Shutterstock
4. Oatmeal and water
This may possibly by now be a part of breakfast for several, but you could be accomplishing it incorrect. Oatmeal cookies and a warm bowl of oatmeal are a very good blend for wellness, but be confident to consume lots of drinking water much too, proposed the skilled. She reported that the oats will need to take in water in buy to get the job done correctly and give their lots of rewards. Oatmeal is a superior source of fibre which aids in lowering blood cholesterol levels and aids in keeping you complete for a longer time.
5. Tomatoes and olive oil
Tomatoes give daily life to a lot of dishes. Cooked tomato solutions like handmade tomato sauce, tomato soup, and tomato paste are the very best resources of lycopene, which is an antioxidant. In accordance to Sharma, it can help in building one’s heart wholesome and might reduced the hazard of colon most cancers. Merely mix it with coronary heart-healthier monounsaturated olive oil for utmost absorption.
The moment you head to the kitchen area, make certain you get the wholesome foodstuff mixtures appropriate.
On August 7, National Review published an article lambasting the US Department of Agriculture’s decision, announced in May, to broaden the prohibition of discrimination in federally funded nutrition programs, including the National School Lunch Program, to include sexual orientation and gender identity. The writer’s argument centered on a Christian school in Tampa, Fla., that, he wrote, was being “forced by the government to choose between adherence to the laws of man and those of God.”1
There is disagreement over what the broader prohibition actually means, with the department insisting it is aimed only at ensuring that LGBTQ+ students and others are not denied access to these nutrition programs, either explicitly or through intimidation. But many conservatives say the change opens up schools and other institutions to lawsuits for not having gender-neutral bathrooms or for using pronouns that correspond to biological sex.2
There is much here to unpack, but that’s for another day. The relevant story, for our purposes, is in the op-ed’s headline: “A New Low in the Radical Left’s Culture War: The Weaponization of Food.”3
The “weaponization of food” is nothing new, of course. For as long as there has been human conflict, food has been used as a weapon. The Romans starved Carthage. The Germans starved Leningrad during World War II. The CIA force-fed hunger-striking prisoners at Guantánamo Bay. And just this year, Russia bombed the Ukrainian port of Odessa to disrupt grain exports.4
National Review, though, was getting at something different: food as a front in the nation’s ongoing culture war, a proxy for larger issues of character, morality, and patriotism.5
The magazine’s finger-pointing at “the radical left” notwithstanding, it was the right that pioneered the use of food to smear its opponents—in this case, to frame liberals and progressives as “elite” pushers of the nanny state. The strategy took hold in the 1990s and evolved over the ensuing decades, as what we eat and how it’s produced became a national debate, and as culture clashes—over affirmative action, gay marriage, school curricula, abortion, and so on—seeped into every corner of our lives.6
As the final decade of the 20th century dawned, the nation’s politics were changing. There was a growing clamor on the right, led by Georgia Representative Newt Gingrich and firebrand pundit Pat Buchanan, to abandon what they described as the “morning in America” pragmatism of the Reagan era and exploit the cultural divides that had opened up a generation earlier around the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, and the environmental movement.7
Buchanan summed up the sentiment in 1988: “The Republican moment slipped by…when the GOP refused to take up the challenge from the left on its chosen battleground: the politics of class, culture, religion and race.” Buchanan’s GOP convention speech in 1992, in which he invoked a fight for the “soul of America,” is often cited as the opening salvo in the modern culture war.8
While the right was reorienting around a politics of grievance, America’s relationship to what it ate was also undergoing a seismic shift. The 1980s had birthed the “celebrity chef” with the likes of Wolfgang Puck, Jonathan Waxman, and Alice Waters. “California cuisine,” a vegetable-centered approach that blew up at Chez Panisse, Waters’s Berkeley-based temple of seasonal eating, provided an earthy (and earnest) counterpoint to the fusty steakhouses and French restaurants that had long dominated the high-end dining scene. As Ronald Reagan enshrined trickle-down economics, kneecapped the federal regulatory regime, and unleashed Wall Street’s rapacious id, those who thrived in this greed-is-good era feasted on smoked salmon pizza at Spago in Los Angeles and truffled chicken breast at Jams in Manhattan.9
Over the next 10 years, this highbrow “foodie” culture spread beyond the scene-makers to become something resembling a national obsession. Whereas the main concerns at mealtime had traditionally been quantity, cost, and convenience, food was now—as David Kamp described in his book The United States of Arugula—“a fundamental facet of our cultural life, a part of the conversation, something contemplated as well as eaten.”10
Food, in other words, became cool.11
Signs of this shift were all around. The Food Network launched in 1993, driving an aspirational entertainment industry that turned cooking into a spectator sport. That same year, Chipotle was born, marking the rise of the fast-casual restaurant. Farmers markets cropped up around the country. Fusion cuisine, from fajitas to Chinese chicken salad, was everywhere. The food blogger crawled from the digital swamp, and people gathered on message boards to trade tips on where to find the best barbecue or tacos in town. The US Chamber of Commerce declared 1999 the “year of the restaurant.”12
To the right’s new Kulturkrieger, eager to recast themselves as populist champions of “real America,” all this gustatory fuss proved irresistible. Painting coastal liberals as out-of-touch elites rhapsodizing over French cheese and expensive wine was a natural extension of the “limousine liberal” line of attack used by earlier generations of culture warriors. In 1988, Rush Limbaugh launched his decades-long rant against brie-eating liberals as he took talk radio to the dark side and made it a force in conservative politics. That same year, foreshadowing what was to come, Dan Quayle, the Republican candidate for vice president, swiped at the Democratic presidential nominee, Michael Dukakis, for suggesting to Iowa farmers that Belgian endive was a viable alternative to corn and soybeans. “His idea of farm production is growing flowers in Harvard Yard,” Quayle said of the Massachusetts governor.13
It would have been easy to dismiss this new food fight as little more than a fashionable twist on routine political posturing. But as the conversation around food got bigger in the ’90s, the stakes also got higher. Mounting evidence that the American way of eating was causing serious health problems spurred talk of reform. Obesity, which had risen sharply over the previous decade, was deemed a national crisis. Rather than engage with reformers, however, the right simply broadened its culture war around food, politicizing the debate in ways that had significant consequences, not only for public health but, eventually, for the nation’s response to climate change. Indeed, the weaponization of food would escalate beyond partisan name-calling, becoming a matter of life and death.14
Obesity v. the Twinkie Tax
By the time Bill Clinton was elected president, in 1992, obesity was just emerging as a prominent public-health concern. Between 1980 and 1990, the percent of American adults who were obese jumped from 15 percent to 23 percent, and a series of reports had raised the alarm about the nation’s growing weight problem.15
Before long, medical authorities began using terms like “national crisis” and “epidemic” to characterize the problem. Rates of diabetes and other diet-related health issues also were rising, and the soaring cost of treating them became part of the argument for action. Dr. C. Everett Koop, the former surgeon general, launched “Shape Up America!,” a national campaign to get people to exercise and eat a healthier diet. “Smoking kills 500,000 people a year; obesity-related conditions kill 300,000,” Koop said at the time.16
Clinton himself played a role in the heightened attention to obesity. During the 1992 campaign, his weakness for fast and otherwise unhealthy food—and his corresponding struggle with his weight—was widely discussed and lampooned in the media, including in an iconic skit on Saturday Night Live. Clinton’s nickname was “Bubba,” and it was suggested that his love of chicken enchiladas (made with something called “smooth-melt cheese”), jalapeno cheeseburgers, barbecue, pie, and the like was integral to his regular-guy appeal with voters—kitchen-table issues, you might say.17
When he came to Washington, though, Clinton quickly ran afoul of the critics of the American way of eating. Before the president-elect even settled in the White House, a group of prominent chefs—led by Alice Waters—sent a letter urging him to eat a more healthful diet and set a better example for the nation. “Just seeing what Clinton eats is pretty distressing,” Waters told The Washington Post. “McDonald’s and Cokes. It’s a terrible image.”18
The retort to this tsk-tsking came quickly. A Boston Globe columnist told the “culinary busybodies” to “get out of [Clinton’s] kitchen.”19
US presidents are, of course, routinely picked at by all manner of interest groups. It comes with the job. But in this instance, the nit being picked had staying power, and the stage was set for a more consequential fight over fat.20
In December of 1994, Kelly Brownell, then the director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale, published a short op-ed in The New York Times in which he called for a tax on “foods with little nutritional value,” as part of a strategy for addressing the nation’s obesity problem. The focus on “personal responsibility” and “willpower” was misguided and punitive, he wrote, shaping a “view that the body can be molded at will and that an imperfect body reflects a flawed personality.” Instead, Brownell argued, we should treat obesity as a product of the physical and economic environments in which we live. Just as we taxed alcohol and cigarettes, a tax on fatty and sugary foods would, he claimed, reduce their consumption and “the revenue could be used for public exercise facilities—bike paths and running tracks—or nutrition education in schools.”21
The right’s culture warriors pounced, dubbing Brownell’s proposal the “Twinkie tax and Brownell himself a member of the “high-fat Gestapo.” Needless to say, Congress never embraced Brownell’s proposal, and the debate over taxing unhealthy food continues today. When Donna Shalala, Clinton’s Health and Human Services Secretary, was asked if she supported a “Twinkie tax” on junk food, she quipped: “Not with this president.”22
What could have been a moment of reckoning for a complex problem that cuts across political and socioeconomic lines instead became mired in the rapidly expanding culture war.23
It’s no coincidence that the Center for Consumer Freedom (known at the time as Guest Choice Network) rose up in 1995, backed by money from the tobacco and restaurant industries, and began inveighing against the “growing cabal of activists…meddl[ing] in Americans’ lives.” Its targets included the “self-anointed ‘food police,’ health campaigners…animal-rights misanthropes, and meddling bureaucrats” who “all claim to know what’s best for you.”24
Big government had been effectively demonized during the Reagan years (with Clinton carrying the torch into the new century). This response by the Center for Consumer Freedom to a 1997 Wall Street Journal op-ed urging the government to spend more money to fight obesity illustrates how the center leveraged the specter of the dreaded nanny state to defend the interests of the food industry:25
We know too well what happens when government gets an open invitation to go into its “I’m from the government and I’m here to help” role—more regulations. Can you imagine government regulation of menu selections or mandatory calorie contents by each menu item? This may sound unlikely, but the industry must pay attention when the Wall Street Journal devotes a half-page editorial to the public’s eating habits.26
Each year, it seemed, the rhetoric escalated. In 2000, when the latest installment of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, the federal government’s main source of nutrition advice, came out, Clinton spoke on the need to improve the nation’s diet. “We’re eating more fast food because of our hectic schedules, and we’re less physically active because of our growing reliance on modern conveniences, from cars to computers to remote controls.” In response, The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed that likened the president’s message to fascism. “[I]f Bill Clinton really wants ideas for a healthy eating crusade, he must surely look to the only political regime that thoroughly made them part of national policy: Nazi Germany.”27
Meanwhile, Americans kept getting heavier. In a 1999 report, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said obesity “spread rapidly during the 1990s across all states, regions, and demographic groups in the United States.”28
Can you libel a cow?
In terms of symbolic value, few foods can rival meat. Throughout history and around the world, the consumption of meat has been tied to virility and prosperity, even to our very human-ness. In the US, beef, and the culture that surrounds it, is iconic, the embodiment of how Americans like to see themselves: free, independent, strong. It has always been central to this country’s aspirational culture—getting ahead meant meat on the table—and we built a food system that ensured it remained abundant and cheap. Today, we consume more of it than any other country.29
It’s no surprise, then, that meat would figure prominently in the nation’s ongoing culture war over its diet. As the food fights unspooled in the ’90s, meat had yet to move to the center of the ring. Nevertheless, the decade still managed to provide a glimpse of what it would look like when it eventually did.30
It may be hard to recall, more than a decade after her eponymous talk show ended its 25-year run, just what a phenomenon Oprah Winfrey was in the 1990s. She was the biggest of stars, wealthy and beloved. On an average weekday, some 13 million people tuned in to watch her discuss everything from her own struggles with weight to formerly taboo subjects such as rape and incest. The Oprah Effect, as her influence was called, shaped everything from the business of television to book publishing to charitable giving. Her cultural power was unrivaled—and unbeatable. In 1997, some Texas cattle barons found this out the hard way.31
They had sued Oprah over a comment she made on her show the year before, during a segment about “mad cow disease”—or bovine spongiform encephalopathy—a brain disorder in cattle that can spread to humans via infected meat and tissue. It is rare, incurable, and fatal. At the time, the British government had recently acknowledged that people were dying from mad cow disease, after years of downplaying the risk, and even though no human cases had been recorded in the United States, concern was growing, along with media coverage of the issue.32
Among Winfrey’s guests that day was Howard Lyman, director of the Humane Society’s Eating with a Conscience Campaign. Lyman, a former cattle rancher turned vegetarian, insisted that the risk of mad cow infecting the US beef supply was high, because of the widespread practice of adding rendered animal parts—ground-up tissues and bones of cattle, sheep, goats, and other animals—into cattle feed as a cheap source of protein. Visibly alarmed, Winfrey said to her audience, “Now, doesn’t that concern you all a little bit right there, hearing that? It has just stopped me cold from eating another burger. I’m stopped.”33
The cattlemen sued under Texas’s False Disparagement of Perishable Food Products law, one of more than a dozen such laws—known as “food-libel” or “veggie-libel” laws—adopted in the early ’90s to protect the food industry against consumer advocates and other critics. The legislation was spurred by a 60 Minutes report, in 1989, that said exposure to alar, a chemical used to regulate the growth of apples, posed a long-term cancer risk, especially in children. Later that year, the Environmental Protection Agency banned alar, citing its “unacceptable risks to public health.”34
Panic ensued. Supermarkets pulled apples from their shelves; schools in New York City and Los Angeles—the nation’s two largest districts—removed apples and apple products from cafeterias; and apple growers lost a lot of money. In 1991, a group of growers in Washington State sued for defamation, but the case was dismissed because the growers were unable to show that the 60 Minutes report was false. The veggie-libel laws came quickly on the heels of the alar case, designed to make it easier for food producers to sue for defamation.35
Under the Texas version, it is illegal to knowingly make false claims about a perishable food product’s safety for human consumption. The cattle barons claimed that they lost more than $10 million in business as a result of Winfrey’s comment.36
The trial, a spectacle from start to finish, took place in the panhandle city of Amarillo, in the heart of Texas beef country. Texas Monthly described the case as an “uproarious Texas range war,” pitting “a group of rich Texas cattle barons, the classic symbols of old frontier Texas, against an even richer black Chicago talk-show hostess, a classic symbol of modern-day American success.” It drew “an array of down-home West Texans and East Coast-educated lawyers, solemn New York Times reporters and bubbly Entertainment Tonight correspondents, bombastic vegetarian protesters, courthouse demonstrators wearing cow costumes, and even a marching kazoo band that stood outside the courthouse one bone-chilling winter day to play the Andy Griffith Show theme song, allegedly Winfrey’s favorite tune.”37
If the plaintiffs were expecting a home-court advantage, they were mistaken. Oprah moved her weekly show from Chicago to Amarillo for the six-week duration of the trial, and the city swooned. Per Texas Monthly, “phone lines across the Panhandle temporarily shut down one afternoon after an 800-number advertising tickets to tapings of The Oprah Winfrey Show in Amarillo flashed across television screens. A spokesman for the show said 215,000 calls came in within 30 minutes.” One prominent local trial attorney grumbled, “I don’t know if our local cowboys are going to come out on top of this damn deal. We’ve already got wives of respectable ranchers sneaking around town, trying to get tickets to Oprah’s show.”38
The cowboys did not come out on top. Oprah and Lyman were acquitted, in part because the judge ruled that cows were insufficiently perishable to be covered by the Texas law. But for the meat industry, the case was not a total loss. In fact, it may have done exactly what the leaders of that industry wanted: intimidate. There was considerable discussion in the trial’s wake of the chilling effect the new defamation laws could have, given that most consumer-advocacy organizations, to say nothing of private citizens, don’t have Winfrey’s financial resources.39
And those laws remain in force today. In 2017, Disney, the parent company of ABC News, reportedly paid at least $177 million to settle a lawsuit by Beef Products, Inc., brought under South Dakota’s food-defamation law. At issue, you may recall, was a news report that questioned the safety and nutritional quality of “pink slime,” a low-cost filler used in mass-market ground beef that was officially known as “lean finely textured beef.”40
Here’s the beef
In recent years, the meat-driven culture war has reached new levels of absurdity, with right-wing Internet memes about “soy boys,” meant to denigrate men who choose a plant-based diet as insufficiently masculine, and claims that liberals want to ban meat. When Texas Senator Ted Cruz was running for president, in 2015, a campaign ad showed him cooking a strip of bacon on the muzzle of an assault rifle. Earlier this year, the Southern home-cooking chain Cracker Barrel was accused of going “woke” by outraged customers when it announced the addition of plant-based sausage to its menu.41
This nonsense is driven in part by the degraded discourse of the Trump era, but more so by the increasingly embattled state of the meat industry. A growing chorus of critics—including animal-welfare and environmental activists and health-conscious consumers—have begun filing lawsuits and posting damning videos that indict industrial meat production for everything from chickens reared in tiny cages to water and air pollution caused by the tons of waste that giant feedlots generate.42
Climate change, though, is where the game is really changing for meat. The food sector, top to bottom, generates nearly 40 percent of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. And the meat industry alone, by some estimates, accounts for nearly 60 percent of all greenhouse gasses produced by the food system. We cannot address climate change without changing how we produce our food, and that will likely involve reducing the amount of meat we eat.43
The issue of climate change began to emerge in the national consciousness in the late 1980s and early 1990s. But the role of agriculture in climate change, including animal agriculture, was not a significant part of the public conversation back then. In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, the 2006 book that galvanized the food movement in America, author Michael Pollan mentions climate change only in passing, observing, “We seldom focus on farming’s role in global warming, but as much as third of all the greenhouse gasses that human activity has added to the atmosphere can be attributed to the saw and the plow.”44
Over the last decade, though, as the effects of climate change became increasingly observable across the country, from extreme drought and heat to heavy rain and floods, it was no longer possible to ignore agriculture’s role. The wild weather hit farmers hard, forcing the conversation about climate change into areas of the country that have been most resistant to accepting its reality.45
At the same time, newreports, from the UN and other international authorities, drove media coverage of the myriad environmental problems with industrial meat. Cow burps, which release a significant amount of methane, a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, became a hook for endless news stories. Plant-based burgers and nut-milks began snatching market share, with proponents crowing (prematurely, as it turns out) about putting an end to the meat industry.46
The narrative around meat in America was shifting.47
The industry and its allies responded, adopting tactics used for years by the fossil fuel companies to fight the climate-change narrative: dispute the science, tar critics as radicals, and trumpet the essentialness of the product—meat feeds the world. Big Meat has even added an audacious new twist, declaring meat part of the climate solution. Meanwhile, state legislatures, from Wyoming to Mississippi, began making it illegal for the plant-based alternatives to use words like “beef” and “sausage” on their packaging. The Center for Consumer Freedom, still on the case, took out full-page ads in The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post attacking plant-based meat for its reliance on additives. In response to a UN report on climate change that urged a reduction in meat consumption, a Fox News host told viewers, “I don’t care because I want my meat and I believe that it was placed on here for us to eat.”48
The full force of this counteroffensive was on display in the wake of the 2018 midterm elections, when Democrats introduced the Green New Deal, a legislative blueprint for dramatically reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Among its various proposals, the resolution said the government should work “collaboratively with farmers and ranchers in the United States to remove pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from the agricultural sector as much as is technologically feasible.”49
The Green New Deal said nothing about meat consumption or vegetarianism or the problems with cattle ranching. Nevertheless, as the right ginned up its culture-war attack, dismissing the resolution as a “socialist manifesto,” there was a telltale focus on meat.50
At a press conference outside the Capitol, Utah Representative Rob Bishop took a page out of Rush Limbaugh’s playbook, deriding the resolution as the product of “Eastern urbanites without a clue what it’s like to live in the wide-open spaces of the West.” Then he did Rush one better, unwrapping a hamburger and taking a bite, claiming that such an act would be “outlawed” if the ideas in the Green New Deal became law. President Trump weighed in, of course, saying there would be “no more cows” if this agenda were adopted. And on it went.51
Two years later, in 2021, the culture-war crazy resumed when President Biden announced a plan to cut US greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030. As with the Green New Deal, Biden said nothing about meat consumption. But the right began spewing a preposterous stream of falsehoods. Fox News wailed that Biden’s plan would cut 90 percent of red meat from the nation’s diet, limiting people to one burger a month. Larry Kudlow, a former Trump adviser, said Americans would have to “throw back a plant-based beer with your grilled Brussels sprouts” on July 4.52
The existential food fight
Today in America, food arguably divides people more than it unites them, thanks in part to decades of manufactured controversy, done for political gain and corporate profit. The consequences are staggering: 42 percent of adults and nearly 20 percent of children are obese, at an estimated cost of $170 billion a year in health care spending. Thirty-seven million people have diabetes. One person dies every 34 seconds of cardiovascular disease.53
As awful as that is, however, it may not ultimately matter much. The USDA has projected that Americans will eat a whopping 224 pounds of red meat and poultry, per capita, this year; and—in yet another sign that the culture-war rhetoric is having its intended effect—research has shown a growing gap in demand for beef between conservatives and liberals. Still today in farm country, “climate change” is a political term, one that is mostly avoided. Instead of acting, we continue to argue about whether we have to change our relationship to food to avoid the mayhem of climate change—even as the mayhem is already underway.54
Including human varieties and animal-safe versions of magic reindeer food!
I am a Christmas FANATIC! Seriously, I’m the girl who loves to see the merchandise in stores as early as possible and would put my tree up in September if my husband allowed it. I adore everything about the holidays, but most of all, the traditions we have as a family are nearest and dearest to my heart.
Some of them I have continued from my childhood with my boys, and others are new ones the four of us have created. Plus, with the 12-year age difference between my boys, traditions the teenager has outgrown like the magic of Santa and The Elf On The Shelf is getting new life with his younger brother. Now we have one more to add to our list I know my little guy will flip over: magical reindeer food to leave out on Christmas Eve!
What holiday traditions do you celebrate as a family? Baking cookies, driving around looking at the beautiful light displays, sipping hot cocoa while watching Christmas movies…our family does them all! With all the fun activities I have found over the years to do with my kids, I can’t believe it has taken me this long to discover these recipes for reindeer food, but I am so happy I have!
Reindeer food is so simple to make, the kids can help with every step, beginning to end. Plus they will be so excited to leave something yummy out for Santa’s team! Be sure to think about what kinds of foods are in the mix before putting it outside though.
In this collection, you will find both human varieties and animal-safe versions of reindeer food. So if you’re going to go all out and sprinkle the front lawn with reindeer food (you know, so they can munch away while they wait for Santa), you will want to make sure you use the animal and eco-friendly recipes that are safe for other little critter friends who might stumble upon this jolly snack. These are animal-approved:
Some reindeer food recipes use pre-made ingredients that you can mix together at the last minute for a holiday party, classroom treat or leave out for Santa with his plate of cookies. If that is what you’re looking for, check out the Rudolph Reindeer Mix!
I hope you are looking forward to your family’s favorite traditions this holiday season. Maybe you can begin a new one with these whimsical reindeer food treats on the most wonderful night of the year and make this Christmas a little extra magical for all your little elves.
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Another day, another story about young people killing off a time-honoured tradition. First, they came for the Brussels sprouts (or are they cool again? I lose track). Now, Gen Z is cancelling Christmas pudding.
According to what can only be described as truly groundbreaking research, almost half of 10-25-year-olds say they don’t like the traditional festive dessert, despite more than a third admitting they’ve never tried it. Because of this, the traditional Christmas pudding could be extinct by 2025, the researchers declared.
I don’t know what I find more alarming about these statistics. That researchers who canvassed British 10-year-olds were astounded to learn that they don’t want a boiled fruit cake on Christmas Day, or that the blame for young people killing stuff off has finally passed to Gen Z. We ageing millennials carried the torch for so long – now we’re just as overlooked as Gen X and the boomers.
They’re hardly the first generation to be accused of killing it off. Just five years ago, I was editing pieces about my own cohort ruining Christmas – apparently we’re now wiping out marriage and the 9-5 working day. And we all know boomers are to blame for unaffordable housing and Brexit. It won’t be long before people born after 2012 will be taking up the mantle. That prospect is about as horrifying as setting a fermented, boozy pudding on fire and eating it after you’ve stuffed yourself with an enormous roast dinner.
Which begs the question: has Christmas pud ever been good?
The last time it was talked about with any reverence was at the Cratchits in A Christmas Carol, but even Dickens struggled to make it sound appealing. The smell when it comes out of the copper pot is “like an eating-house and a pastrycook’s next door to each other, with a laundress’s next door to that”, he wrote. When Mrs Cratchit finally serves it, it’s a weight off her mind, while Mr Cratchit regards it as “the greatest success achieved by Mrs Cratchit since their marriage”. Not one of the family dares to pass judgement. “It would have been flat heresy to do so.”
But there are still some modern-day Cratchits that might have a thing or two to say to our 10-year-old heretics. One is Lloyd Morse, head chef at The Palmerston, a reasonably traditional restaurant in Edinburgh. “The idea that Christmas pudding will be disappearing from British tables within three years like an endangered white rhino is utterly absurd,” he tells me furiously. “This is the food that normal, everyday people have in their homes, not the food that Insta-chefs and influencers present to the world.
“Go to any top British chef’s mum’s house for Christmas and I bet there’s a Christmas pudding on the table,” Morse insists.
It seems the Christmas pudding is as divisive as it is misunderstood. Some sources say it first appeared in the 14th century as frumenty, a type of porridge with cinnamon and saffron. Recipes from the time also added beef, mutton, dried fruit, wine and spices. Others believe it stems from medieval English sausages, where the ingredients were stuffed into animal stomachs and intestines to keep them fresh for longer. Like a fruit cake crossed with haggis. Sounds delicious. Wonder why we stopped serving it…
It wasn’t until the 16th century that it transitioned from savoury to sweet and became sufficiently associated with Christmas. In the 17th century, Oliver Cromwell banned the pudding along with a bunch of other silly traditions (maybe he was onto the right idea). Skip forward a few centuries and the Victorians – with a little help from Dickens – fine-tuned the recipe into what we know it as today, but with a strict set of rules that are as follows. First of all the pudding must be assembled on Stir-Up Sunday, the last Sunday before Advent, so-called because family members take turns stirring the mixture east to west (symbolising the journey taken by the three wise men) with a wooden spoon (symbolising the manger), then it’s boiled in a pudding cloth and kept in a cool, dry place for the next five weeks (symbolism… questionable). A true Christmas pudding should have 13 ingredients to represent Jesus and the 12 disciples; traditionally these are raisins, currants, suet, brown sugar, breadcrumbs, citron, lemon peel, orange peel, flour, mixed spices, eggs, milk and brandy. When it’s finally time to serve, you must steam or boil it for eight hours, then pour over the brandy and set it alight to represent the passion of Christ. I don’t recall him being boiled alive or burnt at the stake but I suppose any old symbol would do by that point.
A woodcut illustration of a Victorian woman carrying a Christmas pudding
(iStock)
Needless to say, it’s an arduous process. Is it any wonder that Gen Z, with their air fryers, 60-second TikTok recipes and Deliveroo Plus accounts dropping whatever food they want on their doorsteps with the tap of a smartphone screen, aren’t that enamoured by a religious cake you keep in the cupboard for a month – or, if legends are to be believed, up to two years? “Tastes change and fewer people like raisins, dried fruit and booze-soaked cakes anymore,” says Amy Poon, who resurrected her family’s famous Chinese restaurant chain and turned it into a series of pop-ups, residences and fresh wonton deliveries. “Now that we have Instant Pots, hacks and recipes that can be done in 15 minutes, people just don’t have the effort and time. But food, much like history, comes in cycles. For example, who would have thought that prawn cocktail would not only be acceptable again, but quite celebrated.” That said, to appease her youngest daughter, Poon makes crêpes suzette instead of Christmas pudding, “so that we still have some flambé drama”, and she herself prefers a “good, sharp sorbet” after such a heavy meal.
Ivan Tisdall-Downes, head chef at Native, an eco-conscious British restaurant in London, agrees and says that the ability to have whatever we want, whenever we want it has made us forget that a lot of our food traditions were born out of necessity. “The tradition of having spiced foods at Christmas was originally due to their price and difficulties in shipping to Europe, meaning they were saved for a special occasion,” he tells me. Nostalgia and the memory of setting the thing alight is what keeps the tradition alive for him. But, he adds, “a lack of tradition can also be a lack of joy in food, so it is quite important to hold onto – whether that’s a Christmas pudding or a Chinese takeaway on Christmas Eve”.
Even Bob Cratchit, who had to support a wife and six children on 15 shillings a week, wouldn’t think Christmas dinner complete without the pudding. But in the middle of our cost of living crisis, the same ingredients could set you back £30 at the average supermarket. That’s a lot for a small pudding when some people would be looking to spend no more than that for their entire dinner this year. When you can buy a half-decent pre-made Christmas pudding for a fiver or less without having to conjure Christ, it seems like a no-brainer.
Christmas pudding probably won’t be facing extinction any time soon
(iStock)
But, jesting aside – and I am mostly jesting – food is an undeniably important part of culture, and traditions like these are perhaps especially precious during hard times. Recipes passed down through the generations help to preserve the history of the people who cooked them. While I imagine very few British people feel any kind of connection with their Victorian or medieval ancestors in the same way other cultures do, I’d no sooner slate Christmas pudding from ye olde England than I would French baguettes, Ukrainian borscht or Chinese tea culture, to name a few.
“I always compare Christmas here with new year in Japan, which is all about traditional food and customs,” says Shuko Oda, head chef at Koya, an udon noodle bar chain in London serving authentic udon, donburi and Japanese small plates. She spent her childhood between London, Tokyo and LA. “Not everyone likes the food you eat on New Year’s Day (known as osechi), but I still believe it’s important to have them on the table. Food is a big part of each culture, and you can only own your identity if you grew up with it.” That’s not to say traditions must be centuries old and steeped in history, though. Oda will be spending Christmas in Tokyo this year, where sharing a big bucket of KFC with friends and family is the norm – not such a far cry from fish and chips.
If it’s survived the past 800 years, Christmas pudding won’t be facing extinction any time soon, but it’s good to remind ourselves of traditions that we might have forgotten about, even while we make new ones. As Morse tells me, “you can’t be ‘in with the new’ without the old.”
After all, he adds: “What else do you eat brandy custard with?”
(Scott Suchman for The Washington Post/food styling by Lisa Cherkasky for The Washington Post)
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With the turn of the calendar into December, we’re fully into the holiday season, an ideally joyful, but perpetually stressful time of year when social calendars tend to go berserk and shopping mall parking lots turn into a mixed martial arts bout, all while our rejuvenating supply of warmth and daylight dwindles and dwindles, darkening our moods and stealing our much-needed vitamin D supply.
This is not the time for a cocktail DJ to take requests and make each guest a bespoke drink. A crowd-pleasing punch is your most reliable winter wingman. This time of year, if we’re having people over, I’m either setting up a DIY bar so guests can manage their lubrication, or I’m making a punch.
The punch I wanted this year was something that would express — both visually and in flavor — that moment that’s — hark! — right on the horizon: the winter solstice. The shivery season up here in the Northern hemisphere is also the moment when, cold as it may be, we’re starting to climb back toward longer days and more sunlight. I wanted a punch that would taste like a break in the clouds when the sun comes through.
What I ended up with was a slightly more complex cousin to a Punch Romaine, an old recipe from the famed French chef Auguste Escoffier. That original rum and citrus concoction, served as a boozy sorbet, is best known for being part of the extravagant multicourse dinner served to first-class passengers aboard the Titanic on the night it sank, a palate cleanser between the Parmentier potatoes and the iceberg.
This version is gin-based instead, with a spectrum of citruses — from fresh juice and neon-orange Aperol, a bittersweet Italian orange liqueur — and floral and spice notes from Bénédictine. These liqueurs add not only sweetness, but more complexity of flavor to the punch, which you lengthen by adding a bottle of dry sparkling wine to add bubbles and keep the sweetness in check.
Once you’ve got the punch bowled and ready, to get an edible stand-in for those clouds for your sunny orange punch to break through, you top the bowl with a batch of floofy meringue (using egg whites if you’re comfortable with them, aquafaba if you’re not) scented with vanilla and Angostura bitters.
The foam serves as an adornment, but it’s also a soft bed for complementary garnishes, such as citrus wheels and fresh herbs and spices.
You want your topping to hold some shape, but still be swirly and creamy meringue that can be spooned in loopy swirls and spread across the surface of the punch, where you can use it as a blank page for garnishes. Anything you put on top of the meringue should be something that you would be content to flavor the punch if it sinks in. Think sage, rosemary, thyme, not cilantro, or any overly bitter greens. Pick spices that will contrast nicely with your citrus, liqueur and gin — juniper, allspice, cloves, star anise pods, grated nutmeg and cinnamon. And, of course, thinly sliced wheels of citrus for color and aroma.
How to enjoy your own holiday party: Set up a DIY champagne cocktail bar
How elaborate you want to get probably depends on how much you trust your artistic skills. I got the best results when I treated the garnishes as a sort of bouquet that would “sprout” from one edge of the punch bowl or as a wreath that hugged its inner edge.
This punch makes for an excellent aperitif, but should you wish to lean into the Punch Romaine history, you could join the many who have attempted to re-create dishes from that last first-class meal served on the Titanic (far fewer, I suspect, have tried to whip up the gruel and “cabin biscuits” offered to the third-class passengers). If you want to go that way, you can instead present it as a slushy intermezzo during a meal: Set out cocktail coupes or sorbet bowls, with a dollop of lemon or orange sorbet and some crushed ice in each one, then ladle the punch and meringue on top and serve with a dessert spoon, bringing the drink closer to the sherbet-style presentation the tippling scions would have enjoyed at their tables.
For a festive holiday bowl, this pomegranate and citrus punch brings the merry
Such a presentation is adding lacquer to an already well-gilded lily. And one could argue that sticking with just presenting the punch as it is gets much closer to the realities of that evening anyway. With the meringue and garnishes swooning all over the top, it’s certainly just as fancy, and much more in keeping with a cheery solstice spirit.
For the gin, you can use a standard London dry style, or something more citrusy; we used a combination of regular Tanqueray and Tanqueray Flor de Sevilla, its orange-flavored iteration. Use a brut-style sparkling white or rosé wine. The meringue topping is optional — the punch is delicious without it — but the topping increases the fancy factor and provides a soft landing for garnishes, as well as the “clouds” for the sunny punch to shine through.
If you prefer not to use raw eggs, you can make a fluffy topping using aquafaba, the liquid from a can of chickpeas. Substitute 6 tablespoons of aquafaba for the 3 egg whites, add 1/8 teaspoon of cream of tartar and then follow the recipe directions, but extend the whipping time to about 10 minutes. To get the aquafaba, shake the can of beans, then open and strain the liquid through a fine mesh strainer or cheesecloth. You should have 1/2 to 3/4 cup. Unused aquafaba can be frozen for future use.
If you want to serve the drink in slushier form, you can also make the punch a day ahead of time and freeze it (in jars or bottles) overnight, transferring it to the fridge half an hour before service and shaking it up when you move it into the punch bowl.
Make Ahead: The punch bowl ice will need to be frozen the night before you plan on serving the punch. The punch can be prepared, without the meringue topping, and refrigerated up to 1 day in advance.
Storage: Refrigerate the punch base, without the meringue, for up to 2 days.
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3 cups gin (see headnote)
2 cups fresh orange juice (from about 6 oranges)
1 cup fresh blood orange juice (from about 4 blood oranges)
1 cup fresh lemon juice (from about 4 lemons)
1 cup water
3/4 cup Bénédictine
1/2 cup Aperol
1/4 teaspoon Angostura bitters
One (750-milliliter) bottle chilled brut-style sparkling wine, such as champagne, prosecco or cava
For the meringue topping (optional)
3 large egg whites
1/4 teaspoon fresh lemon juice
2 dashes Angostura bitters
4 drops vanilla extract
1 cup confectioners’ sugar
Citrus wheels, star anise, allspice berries, sprigs of rosemary, sage and/or thyme, for garnish (optional)
Make the ice block: The night before you plan to serve the punch, fill a cereal bowl or food storage container with water and place it in the freezer.
Make the punch base: In a large bowl, stir together the gin, orange, blood orange and lemon juices, water, Bénédictine, Aperol and bitters until combined. Refrigerate or freeze (see headnote) until ready to serve.
Make the meringue topping: When you’re almost ready to serve the punch, in a medium-size bowl, combine the egg whites, lemon juice, bitters and vanilla and, using a handheld mixer on medium speed, beat until foamy and thickened, about 2 minutes. Stop the mixer, add the confectioners’ sugar and beat on medium-high speed until pale and creamy, about 2 minutes. The meringue should be not quite at the soft-peaks stage; the topping should be glossy and move like thick soup when you stir it — underwhipping is better than overwhipping here. (See headnote for making the meringue with aquafaba rather than egg whites.)
Add the block of ice to your punch bowl, then pour the chilled punch base over it. Gently pour in the sparkling wine and carefully stir to combine.
Ladle the whipped meringue over the punch, if using, spreading it gently across the surface like a cloud-cover, then garnish with the citrus wheels, herbs and spices. Serve, dipping in a swirling motion so that some of the meringue topping makes it into each cup.
I can’t tell you how many pounds of butter I’ve gone through in the past month making pies, cookies, sides and stews, but I can tell you that I’ve once again gained newfound appreciation for all the amazing cooking tools I’ve somehow stuffed into my tiny galley kitchen. I have plenty of love for affordable kitchen tools under $25, but right now I wanted to also shine a light on some of the key investment pieces (no, not like a standard oven) that have made all the difference in cooking during this holiday season.
I will even claim that this gorgeous kitchen equipment — from knives I’m obsessed with to the best electric beaters and apron I’ve ever used — makes me a better cook. When I love the tools I’m using, I notice I take more pleasure in the cooking process. And I’ll bet anyone who’s spent time making a meal can agree that tasks are a lot easier to accomplish with the right, well-crafted tool.
I’m sharing my running list of favorite kitchen upgrade items below — I hope, of course, that you love them too. And do keep an eye out for holiday and seasonal sales, whether you’re eyeing a gift for yourself or for someone else (lucky them). Happy cooking!
Breville
I had an inexpensive pair of electric beaters that always gave me trouble — ditching it for this Breville Handy Mix Scraper was one of the best decisions I made, especially during this season of abundant baking. This mixer seriously does it all: It comes with whisks, creamer inserts and dough hooks! It has a built-in light so you can see what’s in the bowl! There’s a stopwatch feature so you can see how long you’ve been mixing and a pause button that keeps track of your speed settings and time while you take a break to scrape down the bowl! The cord base can rotate to get out of your way! And it has a convenient storage situation where you can keep all the beater wands!
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Shun
I have lusted after Shun Premier knives for over a decade and finally bought two for my new kitchen: the 8-inch chef’s knife and a 3.5-inch paring knife. Over Black Friday, I added a 7-inch Santoku blade to the mix. I adore the way the rounded handles balance, and the stunning, wavy pattern on the forged blade boasts an edge designed to hold sharpness far longer than average. That’s good for me, because the sound of knife sharpening sets my every tooth, bone and neuron on fire.
Shun Premier knives come in gray and brown wood handle options. The Classic knives are cheaper and also very good (yes, I’ve tried them out, too). But my heart belongs to the Premier line for the way they feel in my hand, and the extra aesthetics on the blade (69 layers of Damascus steel, if you’re wondering). I store them in a drawer with a blade guard case to protect the knife sharpness (and my fingers). Here are other recommended chef’s knives as well.
Screenshot by Nina Raemont/CNET
I’ve owned an immersion blender for years, but recently upgraded myself to the Braun MultiQuick 7 for its robust design, powerful motor and fun extras, like a mini food processor attachment (like, for making quick work of onions and herbs) and a balloon whisk attachment for quickly whipping or whisking without having to go full-bore with the electric beaters.
I use this tool constantly, to process soups right in the pan, make salsa in the included beaker, whip cream into soft peaks and make quick work of pulverizing onion without hefting the food processor to the counter. It’s also wonderfully easy to clean and dry, and small and light enough to pull out from the pantry any time I need it. I can’t recommend it enough.
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I may have spoiled myself buying the Google Nest Hub smart speaker display for my kitchen. I have it set up on a riser shelf on my counter, next to a phone stand where I can also keep my phone away from the worst of tea splatters and flying onions. I use the Nest Hub for everyday things like checking the weather as I’m making my morning cuppa and playing music (with song lyrics!) while I cook. I use the two hands-free timers multiple times a day, and look up recipes on the screen (you can follow these step-by-step).
There’s also an extra function where you can program the Nest Hub to forgo the “OK, Google” or “Hey, Google” wake word when you look at it and start listening to you with just a glance (Google calls this Look and Talk). That’s ultra convenient for saving some time and breath every time you want to ask for unit conversion measures, adding to or canceling a timer and skipping to the next track.
Read our Google Nest Hub (2nd gen) review.
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Amazon
Zojirushi has an excellent reputation for countertop appliances that hit the high-water mark. I’ve been beyond happy with my Neuro Fuzzy rice cooker since I bought it earlier this year. My pantry is stuffed with six kinds of rice and at least four other grains I routinely cook up. The settings are easy to use and whether I wash the grains or not, whatever I’m making comes out evenly cooked. Plus, it plays a song when starting and ending a cycle, which is much nicer than a loud beep or buzz.
The Neuro Fuzzy in particular takes up more counter space than the most compact models, and rice can take an hour for a typical cycle of even cooking. But there are lots of settings, including a quick cook mode, and cleanup is easy. (Here are meals you can make in the rice cooker other than rice.)
Buying the Breville Smart Oven Pro Toaster Oven (BOV845BSS) was one of my best kitchen decisions. It toasts, it broils, it roasts. And since it has a convection oven function, you can totally skip the separate air fryer — and cook more stuff at once. I love the countdown clock that takes the mystery out of when your food will be done, and I love that I can bake a single batch of cookies or toast walnuts faster than a standard oven, and without having to heat the whole thing first. Plus, the brushed stainless steel body looks pretty great on my countertop.
You’re receiving price alerts for Breville Smart Oven Pro toaster oven: $260 (Save $90)
Screenshot by Nina Raemont/CNET
Le Creuset dutch ovens are all the rage (I actually really love my Staub Cocotte), but one of the best gifts I ever received was this Le Creuset casserole dish that can go straight from oven to table (to fridge!) while cooking food evenly and looking awesome. I would buy this all over again, and gift it, too. It comes in a range of striking colors, and shockingly cleans easily — with a little soak in soapy hot water and a dirt-cheap pan scraper. I’m the kind of person who excels at ruining dutch ovens with burned-on spots. After a couple years, this dish has remained spot-free, even after roasting dark, sticky stews (yum!).
You’re receiving price alerts for Le Creuset Stoneware Heritage Covered Rectangular Casserole, 4 qt. (12″ x 9″), Oyster
Screenshot by Nina Raemont/CNET
A workhorse apron is worth its weight in gold. I’m thankful I finally stumbled on Hedley & Bennett, which makes a seemingly endless supply of thick, sturdy aprons I now can’t fail to miss seeing seemingly any time I walk into a restaurant. If these aprons can handle the stresses of a professional kitchen, they can handle the flying sauces and batter in mine. I bought myself two styles, including a Cookie Monster print that never fails to make my inner child giggle. The apron’s neck loop is adjustable, there are a lot of pockets, and so far the waist straps haven’t gotten scrunched, twisted or mangled in the washer or dryer.
Screenshot by Nina Raemont/CNET
I’m not the kind of wine enthusiast who owns a different glass for every varietal — not yet, anyway. Instead, I opt for one all-rounder that will work beautifully no matter which bottle I open, erring on the side of big, bold reds. I’ve been using these “Burgundy” glasses from Schott Zwiesel for years, and my Amazon search history told me I bought them five times, twice for myself and three times as a gift. Yes, I do drink white wine, rose and sparkling out of them (gasp!), and they all taste terrific. Better in my mind to drink from a glass with a too-big bowl than a cramped glass that stifles all that great wine nose.
You’re receiving price alerts for Schott Zwiesel Tritan Crystal Glass Forte Stemware Collection Claret Burgundy Red Wine Glass, 25-Ounce, Set of 6
Screenshot by Nina Raemont/CNET
If you don’t use an electric kettle yet, drop everything and get yourself one. This indispensable kitchen savior rapidly heats water for tea, coffee and hot chocolate, and it gives you a head start on boiling vats of water for pasta, blanching or anything else you need. I’ve owned and gifted a lot of electric kettles, and most work about the same way. This Zwilling Enfingy Electric Kettle has a sleeker, more sophisticated look and variable temperature controls. I also like that it’s got a cool-touch exterior that won’t burn you when you pick it up.
There’s no viewing window for water height and you have to feel comfortable with capacitive controls that you press and hold, but these aren’t deal-breakers for me by any means.
You’re receiving price alerts for Zwilling Enfingy electric kettle: $120
For even more top kitchen picks, see our best kitchen gifts under $25 and best stainless steel frying pans.
