If you haven’t seen this yet, please watch it now. If there is any way you feel you can contribute to the effort in bettering food in our schools, homes or workplaces, then go over and join the forums on Jamie Oliver’s website and sign his petition …  http://www.jamieoliver.com/campaigns/jamies-food-revolution/petition

Every individual effort can make a difference in the food revolution!

It’s tomato season here on the southern side of the world, late summer, searing heat, bright red baubles ripening on the vines quicker than you can pick them. There are enough to spare for the tortoises and the birds, but even they can’t keep up with them.

We’ve been eating tomato and basil salads, tomato salsas, tomatoes with pasta. The girls take tomato sandwiches to school. The boy wouldn’t go near a tomato in any shape or form.

Most of these are gorgeous small tomatoes, some self-seeded, some planted deliberately: cherry tomatoes, rosa tomatoes and others whose name I didn’t quite catch when introduced. Most of the big ones are still to ripen, so we still have weeks of tomato fever to look forward to.

We just can’t keep up with them. I’ve taken to throwing a baking tray of them into the oven whenever I’m baking bread or anything else. Tossed in a little olive oil, with just a sprinkling of salt they bake to a wonderful deep flavour and gain a whole new dimension of gourmet heaven. Then they can be gobbled up with cream cheese in tortilla wraps, or spread on bread, tossed with pasta as another sauce variety or mixed with some steamed green beans as a side dish.

You don’t really need a recipe for this. Just halve the bigger cherry tomatoes, put small ones in whole, toss with olive oil and salt and bake at 200C/400F for 20-30 minutes until they are soft and some are beginning to be slightly caramelized at the edges. Eat hot or cold and tear some fresh basil over them once cooked for even more flavor.

Television watching for kids can be a controversial issue in many families. How do you decide how much your kids can watch? What they can watch? When they can watch?

We all know now from ample research that too much TV is bad for young kids. It leads them to inactivity both physically and mentally, and creates the wrong sort of brain development. But how much is too much?

Every family I know has different rules. Some ban TV altogether, others allow it at weekends, some once homework has been done after school, others just for certain programs and still others don’t regulate it at all. I have no idea what is right for everyone, but can only share what worked out more or less right for our family.

We started off resolutely anti TV when our first child was born. The slippery slope began when he was about 20 months and waking at 5.30 every single morning. We discovered that Sesame Street was broadcast at 6am, so after half an hour of reading stories to him, whichever of us was on duty could switch on the TV and doze beside him until a more normal getting up hour, when the TV went off again for the rest of the day.

Then came Thomas the Tank Engine, a boxed set of videos with a very repetitive theme tune after every 5 or 10 minute segment. Thomas became an after bath, before bed routine and when a little sister was born at home, it was Thomas who provided the distraction for her big brother and kept him out of the way until she was safely delivered.

When it came to exploring the wonders of Disney classics later on, he became his own censor. The fast forward button was reached for whenever anything dark or scary came on – the evil stepmother in Snow White, The Sea Witch in Little Mermaid, Bambi losing his mother, all were skimmed over until the movies became half length. We had a short watching time in the morning, a relic of the early waking, and a short time before bed-time stories. The TV stayed off for the rest of the day. It wasn’t exactly what we’d planned in our new parent idealism, but it limited the time spent watching, and having fixed rules meant that there was no fighting about it, a situation which has lasted even now the kids are much older.

The early morning session faded out once proper school started, to be replaced with a longer weekend morning watching session, primarily so that us parents could have an uninterrupted lie-in. Often now, when we are in the middle of reading a good book at bed-time, the children choose to have a longer story reading session instead of watching television first.

Now the oldest child is 11, I’ve noticed something else about their TV watching choices. He was always the one who was most frightened during the scary bits of Disney. All three children have progressed in their watching tastes together. They worked through most of the Disney  and classic children’s movies watching them again and again. When we got satellite TV, for a long while Animal Planet ruled and they didn’t realize there were any other channels. Then they explored a bit and had to be banned from the cartoon channels. Then we gave up satellite TV altogether so they are back to the Dvd collections.

Sometimes they still watch the Disney movies, but increasingly they are moving towards real family movies, like Dreamer, and even enjoy romantic comedies like You’ve Got Mail. Having a boy first also means that ‘girly’ TV like Hannah Montana, and High School Musical hasn’t even penetrated the household so far. The youngest at 7 is much more able to handle scary bits than her big brother was at her age. We tentatively let them watch Men in Black for the first time last week. I’d never have dreamed of letting the oldest boy watch it aged 7, but the youngest girl loves it.

I don’t know whether this is more indicative of parents getting more relaxed with subsequent kids, or that younger siblings just get exposed to more of everything by the older ones. It might not work like that in other families, but then each family is completely individual, especially when it comes to TV watching habits. Tell us what works in your family when it comes to TV watching. Any tips on good, child-friendly family movies?

Soup is great.  Simple to cook, nutritious and it comes in a hundred varieties… I just wish all my kids liked it. When my children were younger I used to watch other mothers feed soup to their young kids at every midday meal with amazement and envy.

My son has always been a single ingredient kind of guy. Preferably each ingredient should be presented on his plate without touching the next. So soup has always been a complete no-no for him. Who knows what could be hidden in there.

I hit gold with my youngest child though. She loves soup and is happy to eat up diced vegetables without examining each one for an identity tag. I’m holding out hope that when my son gets a bit older even he will be persuaded to do more than dip his bread in the broth and nibble disdainfully at it.

Whenever we have roast chicken I boil up the carcass for stock. The Christmas turkey has also been converted into stock and stashed in the freezer for making simple soups to fight winter colds and flu. There is also a stash of smoky gammon stock which makes the most wonderful bean or lentil soup. I’m all prepared to cook a whole host of healthy home-made soups for my family, but with only half of us eating soup, I only cook it every now and again, when I’m feeling robust enough to weather the groans from the older two kids.

This is the Italian lentil soup recipe that I use whenever I have gammon stock in the freezer. It’s great even made with just water, but the smokiness of the stock adds an extra dimension to it.

Lentil Soup Recipe
1 medium onion
2 carrots
2 sticks celery
3 tablespoons olive oil
½ tin tomatoes chopped with their juice
1 ½  cups brown lentils rinsed and checked for grit
4 cups  stock or water
salt and pepper

Chop the onion, carrots and celery quite finely. Warm the olive oil in a heavy based pan and sauté the vegetables gently till softened. Add the tomatoes and cook over a medium heat with the lid off until all the liquid has evaporated and you have a thick sauce consistency. Season with salt and pepper. Stir in the lentils and cook for a minute stirring, before adding the stock or water. Simmer for about 40 minutes until the lentils are tender. The cooking time depends on the variety of lentils, so you can check after 30 minutes. Add more water if the soup gets too thick as the lentils can absorb a lot of water. Serve with crusty bread and butter and perhaps a sprinkling of freshly grated parmesan on top.

When I was growing up all our recipes were made up of single ingredients. Spices came in individual jars, flour and baking soda were measured out each time. There weren’t any muffin mixes, or if there were my mother never bought them.

I still bake that way with my kids, not for any philosophical, thought-out reason, but because that’s the way I’ve always done it and it tastes good. One thing I’ve noticed when friends have brought packet mix cakes and muffins to a school bake sale is that they all taste the same. There is some lingering aftertaste and over-sweetness to them that doesn’t satisfy the taste buds.

I never really thought about it much more than that until I stumbled on The Slow Food Experiment , where Veronica, a blogger mom of four small children, has resolved to cook all her family’s food from scratch from single ingredients. Her adventures are documented in the blog and the most striking thing reading it is how her sense of taste has changed over the months. From happily eating junk food when pressed for time, she has discovered that it actually doesn’t taste good anymore and leaves her feeling bloated and uncomfortable.

It’s great to follow her observations about cooking and eating more naturally. By her standards I still use quite a lot of packaged foods: mostly crackers, pasta and tins of baked beans, which are my larder stand-bys. I’m not yet ready to move over entirely single ingredient home-cooked foods, but it is inspiring to see that it can be done, even with small kids underfoot.

In the mean time I’ll keep baking my own bread and buying a few packets of crackers for when I run out.

How about you… what do you feel it’s essential to bake from scratch? Can you taste the difference?