Family Recipes: Cinnamon Sweet Potato Fries

Sweet potatoes are full of vitamin C and fibre. They're also loaded with carotenoids which help fight cancer, protect your heart, and boost your immune system. In addition, one single sweet potato gives you well more than the recommended daily amount of vitamin A and supplies you with copper, vitamin B6, potassium, iron, and manganese (which is good for your bones). With all these benefits, it makes sense to create some tasty dishes using the sweet potato. And so comes one of my favorite recipes: Cinnamon Sweet Potato Fries.

Ingredients

• 4 medium-sized sweet potatoes, washed and scrubbed but not peeled
• 3 tbsp olive oil
• 3 tsp cinnamon
• ¼ tsp salt

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C). Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.
2. Slice the sweet potatoes into fries. These should be no larger than ½ inch thick and should be as long as the sweet potatoes themselves. Think standard french fries. Rinse and place these in a large bowl.
3. Pour the oil over the sweet potatoes and mix well. Add the cinnamon and toss.
4. Arrange the sweet potatoes in a single layer on the baking sheet.
5. Bake for 15 minutes and turn over.
6. Bake for another 15-20 minutes or until the fries are golden brown.
7. Season with salt and serve immediately.

These fries are a favorite in our home. You can peel the sweet potatoes if you like, but since most of the fibre is on the skin or just below it, you want to keep as much as you can to maximize the health benefits of this simple dish. Store any extra sweet potatoes in a cool, dark place, but not in the fridge. They'll last longer in the bottom of your pantry than in the refrigerator.

Family Recipes: Sweet Blueberry Sauce

Blueberries are sweet and delicious, but they're also one of the healthiest berries around. They help aging memories and fend off free radicals to protect people of all ages. They're also packed with fibre, helping to prevent constipation, relieve diarrhea, and protecting against urinary tract infections. Any mother will love that. And children love them. Love them so much that they'll eat them straight out of the fields.

But not everyone has a blueberry patch in their backyard. Some of us have only the frozen blueberries you get at the supermarket. Kids may not like to eat them frozen, but you can do plenty of things to frozen blueberries to make children crave them. So if you have some frozen blueberries lying around, try this simple and sweet blueberry sauce.

Ingredients

• 1½ cups frozen blueberries
• 2 tbsp berry sugar (a little more if you like a sweeter sauce)
• 2 tbsp finely grated lemon peel

Method

Add all ingredients to a small saucepan. Warm on the stove at medium heat, stirring constantly. Do this for 4 minutes or until the sauce begins to boil. When the boiling occurs, immediately remove the sauce from the heat. Continue stirring for 1 minute.

This sauce can be poured over French toast, waffles, or pancakes. You might also want to blend it with vanilla yogurt for a quick snack or even use in in a smoothie. You can refrigerate this sauce for up to 2 weeks or freeze it for up to 2 months, so make a large batch and use it whenever you can.

We like to use it as a dip for fruit such as pears and apples. My boys like to dip whole bananas in the sauce and freeze them, making blueberry-dipped banana popsicles. It's a healthy addition to any dish.

Child Health: The Impact of Heavy Backpacks

We've heard it for years. Heavy backpacks are damaging our kids' spines. Pediatricians and chiropractors have been saying this for years. But if you need true evidence, you need only look back to a study done in 2010. American scientists scanned eight children using an MRI. Each child was scanned several times, first with an empty backpack, then bearing loads of nine, eighteen, and twenty-six pounds in the backpack. Backpacks were worn using both shoulder straps during every scan.

There were some interesting results that more than reinforced the idea that we're loading up our children past what's healthy. As the weight increased, the spinal discs responsible for absorbing shock slowly became squashed and were unable to do their job. In addition, the lower spine became more likely to curve to one side in an effort to accommodate the increased weight. Not to mention the fact that the children were in more pain with the heavier loads.

Of the eight children scanned, four of them showed the beginnings of significant curvature of the spine when wearing the eighteen-pound backpack. With this in mind, you should never load your child's backpack with more than ten to fifteen percent of his or her body weight. This is, of course, dependent on the age of the child, but don't stray from these figures too much.

So before you send your kids off to school tomorrow, grab their packs and throw them on the scale. Are they too heavy? If so, take steps to reduce the impact of a heavy backpack on your child's health.