Canned Pumpkin Shortage is Over

…and just in time for the holidays!

Pumpkin is such a wonderfully low carb vegetable–fewer than 10 grams per cup of mashed, cooked flesh–that it really puts a crimp in your pie not to be able to find it. I love to make soup of it in the fall. It just sort of rings in the season. And like so many low-sugar, low-starch, high fiber foods, it’s also dense with nutrients, just chocked full of alpha- and beta-carotenoids, potassium, magnesium, vitamins C and E to name just the highlights.

I had the devil of a time finding some of the stuff back during the summer when I was working on recipes for the SousVide Holiday cookbook that will be coming out this fall. The recipes are not necessarily intended to be low carb, though I sneaked in one for Cauliflower Puree, but some are pretty easily adaptable.

Among the dessert recipes is one for Pumpkin Creme Brulee, made in the original with sugar, but completely delicious made with Splenda, Truvia, or stevia or whatever non-caloric sweetener floats your boat.

Here it is, pimped low carb and with instructions for traditional cooking in a bain Marie in the oven.

Low Carb Pumpkin Crème Brulee

Serves 6 to 8

1 – 2 tablespoons unsalted butter (for greasing ramekins)
8 whole eggs
2 cups heavy cream
1/2 cup granular sucralose (or amount of another sweetener equivalent to 1/2 cup sugar)
1 cup cooked mashed pumpkin
1 teaspoon pumpkin pie spice
½ teaspoon pure vanilla extract
2 tablespoons brown sugar (1/2 teaspoon each for finishing)

1. Preheat oven to 325F. Put a roasting pan on the rack and fill it with about 1 inch of water.
2. Liberally butter the insides of all the ramekins.
3. In a heavy saucepan, mix the cream and sweetener and heat until the cream begins to send up little tendrils of steam (thermometer should read 140F.)
4. In a medium bowl, beat the eggs until light yellow.∗
5. Slowly pour the warm cream into the eggs, a bit at a time, whisking all the while to temper them.
6. Add the mashed pumpkin, spice, and vanilla and whisk to mix well.
7. Pour the pumpkin custard mixture into each ramekin, almost to the top.
8. Carefully place each filled ramekin into the heated water bath in the oven.
9. Cook the custard for 45 minutes to 1 hour, until set.
10. Remove from the water bath, allow custard to cool to room temperature, then cover ramekins and refrigerate for several hours or overnight.
11. Before serving, let sit at room temp for about 30 minutes, then sprinkle each serving with ½ teaspoon brown sugar and caramelize the topping with a kitchen torch or under a preheated broiler.

At 5 to 6 grams of effective carb per serving, Pumpkin Creme Brulee is a real low-carb autumn treat. If you prefer, you can omit the caramelized sugar to save those 2.5 grams of pure sugar carb and simply top the custard with a dollop of artificially sweetened whipped cream instead. It won’t be creme brulee, of course, but it will still be finger lickin’ good!

The hardest part of these self-prescribed interludes on the wagon, for me at any rate, is not being able on a sleepy Sunday morning to lingering over a couple of Mimosas (or Buck’s Fizzes as Mike prefers to call them) on our sunny deck overlooking Lake Tahoe or the equally sunny patio behind our house in Santa Barbara.

But last weekend, I found a really worthy substitute. I’m calling it a Cham-plain Mocktail. Ain’t nothing like the real thing, as the song says, but it’s slightly sweet and just bubbly and cold enough to fill in as a stunt Mimosa.

Here it is:

The Cham-plain Mocktail

In a chilled champagne flute, pour

1 ounce Citrus Pomegranate or Orange low cal FRS healthy energy beverage
4 ounces very cold sparkling water or club soda
Garnish with orange peel and/or a juicy berry

One can of low cal FRS –rich in antioxidants and B vitamins, so the label says — is enough to make about 5 or 6 Mocktails. Plenty to get us through brunch and the Sunday paper, with our livers none the worse for wear.

An interesting article appeared in the New York Times online that caught my eye centered on the idea that we gain weight because we sit too much and that we can reverse that to some degree at least if we stand more.

Reading the article brought to mind another piece I had read recently, about how former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had gotten excoriated in the press for a note he jotted on a GITMO report about the detainees there being asked to stand for up to four hours a day. His hand-written comment in the margin of the report was “Only 4 hours?”

The note was seen by many in the press and elsewhere as proof of his approval of the use of cruel and unusual punishments for GITMO detainees. Whatever Mr. Rumsfeld’s feelings might have been on the subject of treatment of detainees (about which I am making absolutely no value judgement here pro or con) the ‘standing’ comment probably wasn’t proof of callousness or cruelty, because apparently it is Mr. Rumsfeld’s habit to stand all day long as he works. According to the article I read, he long ago had a special standing-height desk fashioned for himself and he works, standing at it, all day long. Thus, for a man who chooses to stand for 8 hours a day, the seemingly heartless ‘Only 4 hours?’ comment maybe wasn’t intended to be. Whatever else one may say about Rummy, for a man who will turn 78 this year, he’s in pretty darned good shape. He stands ramrod straight and is reasonably trim of frame and flat of ab, so maybe there’s something to this standing business.

For quite some time now, this very idea–standing more–has been something that Mike and I have discussed at length in our ongoing search for what changed in our lives (and the lives of our peers) during the quiet slide from 40 to 60. What happened that could account for the difficulty so many of us clearly experience in holding the line against weight gain (let alone losing weight) as we age, even in the face of a eating about the same amount of food and doing about the same amount of exercise as we did in our younger years.

One of the things that has changed, for us at least, is what we do for a living and the lifestyle differences that shift engendered.

Thirty years ago we first went into clinical practice and for the next nearly twenty years after that, our days were spent working 10 to 12 hours a day, 5 to 7 days a week, seeing patients in the clinic. A day in our lives as clinic doctors looked something like this: walk to exam room door, pick up chart, go into exam room, sit on a backless stool for about 5 or 10 minutes coning down on the patient’s chief reason for being there, stand to wash hands and examine the patient, sit again (or often continue to stand) beside the patient to discuss findings and recommend testing to be done, walk out of room, track down nurse to carry out the orders, walk to the x-ray suite to check developed films or to the lab to check results, all done standing, walk to the next exam room, repeat the process 50 or more times a day. We were in and out of rooms, up and down and up and down all day long, with a whole lot of it spent ‘up’ and not much spent sitting. Most of those years, we spent almost zero time ‘working out’ or doing any formal kind of ‘exercise’.

Contrast that with our lives of the last ten or so years, spent mainly as writers and researchers of the medical literature.

When we’re home, in our normal routine, our lives as full-time writers and researchers look something like this: sit down at the computer and work for three or four hours in the morning. Take a break every hour or so to walk to the kitchen to make a cup of coffee, then right back to the computer.

I go to the kitchen about 1 o’clock or so to fix lunch or we might hop in the car to go grab a burger someplace, where we sit to eat it. Mike usually works at the computer until time to eat.

Then it’s back to the computer to sit for two or three more hours, with maybe a break to get another cup of coffee, and right back at it, sitting.

Our level of formal ‘working out’ on average hasn’t really changed much over the years. If anything it’s increased. Some days we’ll do a Slow Burn weight work out, which takes just a few minutes. In summer or when we are in SB, Mike will take a break in the late afternoon to go walk a few holes on the golf course and he plays 18 a couple of times a week. I occasionally will take a walk on the beach or on trails, but not regularly. Sometimes I will do pilates. Or maybe I will just go to the kitchen to fix dinner, which is at least standing.

Most days, we’ll both go back to the computer after dinner to sit, working, for another hour or two. Sometimes we’ll work late into the night, depending on whether there’s a big writing project going or not.

Then we get up the next day and do that again.

While we haven’t really changed the amount of time we spend doing ‘actual exercise’ what’s really changed when you compare the last ten years to the twenty before them is the standing. As a clinical doctor, you do a lot of standing. Or at least we did. And it takes a lot more muscle work to stand than to sit.

If you’ve followed our writing in books and blogs, you’re probably saying, Hey wait a minute! You’ve said many times before that exercise is not a good way to lose weight. And that is absolutely true.

In our most recent book, The 6-Week Cure for the Middle Aged Middle, we wrote an entire chapter debunking the whole idea of ‘eat less and exercise more’ as an effective strategy for weight loss. And we stand behind that chapter.

What we also discuss in The Cure is the difference in EAT (exercise activity thermogenesis) and NEAT (non-exercise activity thermogenesis.) EAT is the energy cost in calories of exercise taken for exercise’s sake–i.e., running, rowing, the hour spent doing aerobics or pilates or yoga. NEAT is the energy spent doing every other sort of activity in the remainder of the 24 hour day–i.e., the fidgeting, wiggling, walking, standing, stooping, and squatting we do in the activities of daily living and the moving we do in our sleep. It’s easy to see that 30 minutes or an hour spent ‘doing exercise’ even if it’s pretty rigorous, is far outweighed by the amount of time in a day we don’t spend doing it. So as far as energy expenditure in the course of a day or a month or a lifetime, NEAT is the main source of guzzling calories, not EAT.

Let me illustrate. The average 150 pound person expends 720 calories in an eight hour day just lying quietly in bed. If sitting at a desk to work, he or she expends 912 or an additional 192 calories during that same 8 hour period. Standing to work, the caloric expenditure rises to 1176 or an additional 264 calories. So all other things being equal (and I realize that’s a pretty big assumption) just spending most of one’s work day standing instead of sitting costs the body an additional 1874 calories per week or the rough equivalent of a one-half pound of potential weight gain a week.

But the body isn’t merely a ‘black box’ into which calories go and out of which calories flow. A change in one area (expenditure) causes changes in other areas (intake) that can easily correct course and keep the body in balance. It’s not just eat more exercise less. Clearly it isn’t that simple, because if it were, taking a brisk 3 mph walk every day (which would burn 300 calories) would offset the difference occasioned by sitting all day to work. But it doesn’t, at least not completely.

As I wrote about in The Cure, when my weight began an inexorable creep upward as I passed 50, in spite of my knowing what to do and for the most part doing it, I undertook a program of daily walking of about 3.5 miles per day, six days a week for a solid 10 months, and didn’t lose a pound or an inch. There’s more than simply calories in and calories out as we normally think of those things in what drives us to store fat. If it were that elementary, we’d all be thin!

The kind of calories coming in matter. Hormonal balance matters. Stress matters. And maybe, just maybe, standing more matters.

At any rate, I intend to do the Rummy and give it a try. I’ll let you know how it works out.

*Rumsfeld photo – Wikipedia

I decided to cook them both. One I did the traditional baste, roast, turn, baste, roast, burn your hand, OUCH, turn method I’ve used for years. The other I did in pieces in my SousVide Supreme.

The comparison of the two was a revelation. You can read the whole story here.

We were first introduced to Epoisses several years ago, when our good friend and the editor of our book Protein Power, Fran McCullough, sent us a round of it for Christmas. We were at our home in Santa Fe that year and Fran dropped us an email inquiring where we would be for the holiday and saying she was sending us something ‘live’ and we’d need to be home to receive it. We’re thinking, live? A bird? A puppy? A plant? A guppy? Live? But we wrote back, promising to be around.

When the ‘man in the brown truck’ (as our youngest grandson calls him) showed up with the styro box, marked perishable, and we lifted out its contents, we were a bit confused. It was a small, round, balsa wood box containing some orange-colored cheese. Perishable, sure, but live? But knowing Fran, as we do, for the serious foodie that she is, we assumed it must be good and put it aside in the cheese keeper to enjoy over the holiday.

As it so happened, that year our friends, the Wolseleys, were coming from Santa Barbara to Santa Fe with their daughters for a visit the week between Christmas and New Year’s. Michael Wolseley is a professional golfer by day, but a foodie and an oenophile at heart. He grew up in Belfast, but lived and worked for many years in France, where he met his lovely wife, Marie Christine, who is Parisian. Her family’s country home (which she and Michael still own) is in a small village in Burgundy, about an hour and a half from Paris, and a stone’s throw from Epoisses, the village where the cheese originated.

Over dinner the day after they arrived, we began planning what we would have for our New Year’s Eve feast. When we showed Fran’s gift to them, they were over the moon. Turns out that when they were at home in France, Epoisses, being a locally made delicacy, was a holiday tradition and one they hadn’t expected to enjoy in New Mexico.

We need to take it out of the refrigerator now, Marie Christine said, so that it will be ready by New Year’s Eve.

Now? It was December 28. New Year’s Eve was 3 days away.

She carefully selected a spot on the counter, not too hot, not too cold, not in a draft, to ripen the Epoisses. Every day, several times, she tested its ‘give’ by pressing the surface through the cellophane covering the wooden container. She would poke and nod. Poke and nod. Poke, nod, and smile. It appeared that things were coming along on schedule. On New Year’s Eve, she pronounced it ready.

Our friend, Michael, then carefully unroofed the round of cheese, removing just the pungent, orange, soft top of the rind with a sharp fillet knife.

The cheese inside was a pale winter white and glistened like pearl in the soft candle and fire light. He stuck a spoon in and lifted it up; cheese ribboned off the spoon like hot caramel. Perfect!

He brought it to the table and almost reverently put a spoon of Epoisses onto a small thin slice of raisin, walnut bread and savored it. We all did likewise, transported by a taste like no cheese we’d ever experienced: nutty, runny, stinky, yummy! We vowed to never have another New Year’s Eve feast without it. And we haven’t.

After a rich experience like the taste treat of Epoisses, it’s hard to image needing more. But we still had room for a sweet treat: low carb Creme Brulee, the culmination of our holiday extravaganza, which will be the next (and last) post on the meal.

It involved lacing the mayo with thallium (a debilitating and potentially deadly poison) and then slathering the tainted mayonnaise onto turkey sandwiches and sending them to some of the world’s most notorious terrorists. Mr. Sokolov’s main motive (apart from dispatching a few nasties of the world) seemed to be finding a workable solution for disposing of the remains of what he terms:

…these desiccated, tasteless birds.

I have to agree that all too often he’s right. People tend to equate a good Turkey Day feast for a crowd with cramming stuffing into a giant turkey–a 22 pounder–straight from the fridge, sticking it into a roasting pan, and some hours later hacking it into dry slabs of breast meat that they plop onto a plate, drown in giblet gravy, and choke down for tradition’s sake.

Anybody who hates turkey (because they think it’s dry and tasteless) should have been here with us yesterday for our Thanksgiving feast. Besides the star of the show, our meal included all our standard Thanksgiving favorites with everybody lending a hand in the preparations.

Our daughter-in-law made the Eades family’s traditional Green Pea and Asparagus Casserole (recipe available at www.lowcarbcookworx.com) a traditional pumpkin pie, and her family’s favorite sweet potato casserole with just a touch of a butter and brown sugar topping. I made my sister’s Cranberry-Orange Relish, some Mashed Fauxtatoes with butter and cream, Mike’s mother’s traditional cornmeal mush dressing, which is our hands-down family favorite, and a Granny Smith Apple Pie.

Although in our house, as our long-time readers and viewers likely know, we usually substitute a nut crust or our low-carb almond meal version for the real one in pumpkin or apple pie and butternut squash or acorn squash for the sweet potatoes, since they’re lower in carb and offer much the same flavor, this time we elected to opt for portion control over ingredient control and go with the real McCoys. (Slivers of both pies and smaller mounds of dressing or sweet potatoes give the same pleasures as half a pie and a couple of cups of starch, without the aftermath of bloating, heartburn, and remorse.)

As our friend and colleague, Robert Crayhon, once said: Pleasure is also a nutrient.

Our eldest son took charge of the turkey, a naturally-raised, organic bird we hunted at the Whole Foods grocery store. His ministrations began 18 hours in advance, with the preparation of a brine–probably the most important step in turning out a juicy, succulent turkey–breast meat included. The second most important one is not to pick the biggest bird in the barnyard, since he’s sure to be tougher and even if he weren’t, it’s nearly impossible to cook a giant turkey (particular a stuffed one) evenly. That’s a recipe for the kind of turkey Mr. Sokolov wants to send to Kim Jong Il. If you must feed a crowd bigger than about a 12 pounder will cover, you’re far better off roasting two turkeys than a behemoth.

As far as brining goes, there are many brines to pick from; sometimes we elect just a simple Kosher salt and water variety, but this time, he opted for a honey, garlic, and thyme brine he had clipped several years ago from a magazine–either Food and Wine or Gourmet, I think. So, in this case, instead of just water and salt, he also added four or five sprigs of fresh thyme, eight cloves of garlic, a tablespoon of ground black pepper, and some honey to the gallon or so of water the bird bathed in overnight in the refrigerator. When it came time to cook, after a good rinse and a patdown, he stuffed more thyme and lemon halves into the cavity, slathered the bird with melted butter and popped her (it was a turkey hen) into the oven for an hour, breast down on a rack, over a pool of chicken broth. Then a flip, another coating of melted butter and another hour and a half or so in the heat, basting with chicken broth and butter every half hour or so until a thermometer in the thick portion of the thigh read 165 degrees.

While she rested out of the oven (an important step with meat of any kind, turkey included, to allow the juices to redistribute, so the meat will be moist and tender) we baked-off the veggie dishes.

Savory juices ran from the meat when he carved the breast; the meat of the thighs and legs was succulent and delicious–not the stringy stuff Mr. Sokolov spoke of sending on Operation Gobbler.

Paired with a dry Reisling and the just released Nouveau Beaujolais, we feasted like royalty and gave thanks for our family and the good food, good friends, good health, and good times we enjoy year round.

No way will our juicy Thanksgiving bird become a weapon of mass destruction. I have great plans for a leftover turkey, dressing, and cranberry relish sandwich on low carb bread for lunch today, while–if all’s right in the universe–we’ll watch the Hogs of Arkansas tromp the LSU tigers.

Serving size a pitfall for label-readers. Americans often miscalculate, eating too much.

The article focused on a study done at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, TN that looked into how well people can understand nutritional labels on products, a question for which, as it turns out, the answer is ‘not very well.’

Having been in the weight loss/diet/nutrition clinical trenches for twenty years or so, I could have saved them the money and told them in advance what the study ultimately proved: in the great majority, people don’t read labels on foods and even those who do read them often miss the part about serving number and serving size and even those who do recognize that a serving of beans as listed on the can is 1/2 cup will have the devil of a time correctly estimating the volume of 1/2 cup unless they measure.

Certainly all the blame can’t be laid on the consumer–although much of it must rest there–but also on the food manufacturers, who, in their desperation to make their products conform to the needs of target groups–low fat, low sodium, no trans fats, or low carb, to name a few–contort the serving size to suit their marketing need of the moment. I mean, a bottle of soda pop is a serving in the eyes of most consumers, not the multiple plus a fraction number of servings that lets the manufacturer slip under some pre-determined limit, adhering to the letter of the labelling laws, but not the spirit.

It’s all quite confusing to the av-er-age bear, as Yogi would say.

Veteran low carb dieters tend to be more conscious of the trickery employed by manufacturers than most consumers, I think, because experience has taught them to beware, but most of us have been hoodwinked at one time or another by a crafty labelers’ subterfuge.

That’s why, we always encouraged, urged, cajoled, and reminded our patients to:
1) read nutritional labels carefully for portion size, for carbs per portion, and for the presence of unhealthy additives, such as partially hydrogenated fats and oils, aspartame, MSG, nitrates, etc. in the ingredients listing.
2) measure portions carefully on carb rich foods, if they elected to eat them, so that the intended 1/8 cup of corn kernals doesn’t become 3/4 cup and with it the 5 grams of carb become 30.
3) keep a diet diary of all food consumed, at least when trying to correct a health issue or lose weight.

Yes, keeping a diet record is a pain in the keester, but like all worthwhile habits, it comes with rewards. Studies have shown that people trying to make a life change, in this case a dietary one, will be 4 times more likely to succeed if they record their intake and output honestly. We distributed a crisp new single sheet food and exercise diary each week to every one of our patients and expected them to do their part by entering everything that passed their lips each day–every bite, sip, prescription pill, or supplement–as well as all extra physical output. We, for our part, collected them and personally looked over every single entry every week, made comments, and returned them the following week.

If you’ve never undertaken the exercise of keeping a dietary record, I highly recommend it; if you’re like us and most of our patients over the years, it will prove to be an eye-opening experience if you do it with complete honesty.

These sorts of basic common knowledge tools or methods for success too often get shunted aside in the press to argue over the finer points of exercise or nutrition, but that doesn’t make them any less valid. Mike and I thought them so important for long term success that we included a 365 Day food/exercise journal (tailored, obviously, for a low carb diet) in our book Staying Power: Maintaining Your Low Carb Weight Loss for Good, published in 2005 by John Wiley & Sons and available at bookstores nationwide or from Amazon and other online booksellers.

If when dieting, you hit a plateau in weight loss or in control of health measures, such as cholesterol, triglycerides, blood pressure, or blood sugar, going back to these basics can often provide the kick that gets things going again.

As is so often the case, it is doing the little things well that matters the most.

Actually for one year, it was an “n” of 4, since during our oldest son’s senior year in high school, one of his classmates moved in with us for the year. His step-dad had been transferred to another state and his mother and younger siblings moved when the house sold, which happened to be at the very start of his senior year. Nobody wants to move in his senior year and start anew, if he can avoid it, so when our son came home the first week of school and asked if his friend could live with us for a year, we were more than happy to have him.

That year, in particular, the lunch sack assembly line grew, since this young man was a big guy, number one, and a big eater, number two. I dealt out an entire loaf of low-carb (light) bread every morning to make the requisite number of sandwiches for 4 hungry boys.

Would that during my tenure on the lunch line, there had been the variety of raw materials available now. For instance, low carb tortillas would have enabled me to make an endless variety of wraps and even lunch box “sushi” rolls for variety.

When you’re confronted with the empty brown sack or lunchbox, you long for something to break the monotony, even if your kids could content themselves with a plain ham sandwich, a bag of trail mix, and an orange every day of the year. For those of you currently packing a lunch every day for your kids, here are a few ideas:

Lunchbox PBJF ‘Sushi’ Roll
1 large low carb tortilla
2 tablespoons natural peanut butter
2 tablespoons low-sugar apricot or grape jam
8 fresh raspberries

1. Lay the tortilla flat and spread the peanut butter evenly to within about 1″ of the edge.
2. Spread the jam evenly over the peanut butter
3. Lay the raspberries single file down the side of the tortilla closest to you, about 2″ from the edge.
4. Carefully fold the near edge of the tortilla over the row of raspberries, going all the way over them, then tightly roll the “roll” across the remaining width of the tortilla.
5. Cut the “roll” into about 6 or 8 pieces, wrap it securely in plastic, Press’n'seal, or put into a reusable snap lid plastic Glad or Ziplok container.

This ‘roll’ is another of those stealth nutrition ideas that in this case sneaks fresh raspberries into their PBJ. You could also use blackberries or pieces of strawberries.

Lunchbox Chicken Caprese ‘Sushi’ Roll
1 low carb tortilla
1 cooked chicken tender (grilled, olive oil, salt, pepper, the night before and refrigerated)
1 large fresh butter lettuce leaf (or 2 smaller ones)
3 thin slices smoked mozzarella cheese (or provolone)
1 tablespoon diced tomato
3 large fresh basil leaves (optional)
1 tablespoon olive oil vinaigrette (homemade or your choice)

1. Lay the tortilla flat and lay the lettuce leaves in the center.
2. Drizzle half the vinaigrette on the lettuce leaves.
3. Arrange the cheese slices to cover most of the lettuce.
4. Place the chicken tender on the side of the tortilla closest to you, about 2″ from the edge. (Lay the basil leaves down the length of the chicken, if you’re using them.)
5. Sprinkle the diced tomato in a line just inside the chicken tender, from end to end and distribute the remaining dressing over the chicken tender and tomatoes.
6. Starting from the edge closest to you, roll the tortilla up and over the chicken tender and tomato line, then tightly continue to roll the ‘roll’ across the width of the tortilla.
7. Cut the ‘roll’ into 6 or 8 pieces of ‘sushi’ and wrap in plastic, Press’n'seal, or put into a reusable Glad or Ziplok storage box.
Although this roll doesn’t have any mayo in it, it does have chicken and for that reason, you should be sure to include a cool pak in the lunch sack or box for safety’s sake.

As the weather gets colder, you might want to beef up their lunchfare with a thermos of chili or chowder, too. You’ll find recipes for these and other hearty soups (as well as other kid friendly and nutritional stealth food ideas) in the companion cookbook to our PBS television show, The Low Carb CookwoRx Cookbook.

I have to say, as much as I complained about the daily grind of packing lunches, I sort of miss it. While you’re in the throes of the routine of school years, it seems as if the day will never come that you don’t start your morning by packing lunches. But, time passes very quickly really and the day does come and suddenly, it seems, your kids have kids of their own.

So, thought for the day: Enjoy your kids. Enjoy their lessons, practices, homework, last minute projects, scout trips, school plays, and yes, even packing that brown bag. Just be sure to put something good for them in it!