Author: OP2

Enriching Lives

Family and Consumer Sciences Newsletter

Wildcat Extension District
wildcatdistrict.ksu.edu facebook.com/wildcat.extension.district

Barbara Ames, FCS Agent -MG 620-331-2690 Kylie Ludwig—FCS Agent—LB 620-784 5337
Chuckie Hessong—FCS Agent CR 620 -24-8233
Martha Murphy—EFNEP CR 620 –232-1930

April 2017

Insurance Matters
Kylie Ludwig
Family Resource Management

Kansans with years of experience watching the weather know that when March rolls around, it’s time to turn our attention to the skies and to the weather reports. March is the month when many state residents begin preparing for potential severe weather problems. That includes checking your insurance policies on personal property to make sure you have the coverage and information you need. Recent weather data from the National Weather Service (NWS) supports the continuing need for preparation. In 2016 there were 102 tornadoes in the state. The month of May last year had the most tornadoes, 63, with 34 occurring on one day. But twisters are only part of our potential weather problems. Kansas Insurance Department (KID) statistics, through the years, indicate that during the spring and summer there is hardly a day when hail damage is not reported somewhere in the state. Factor in the ever-present wind, and our citizens contend with weather issues almost daily from March through August and sometimes beyond. The following questions and can help determine whether your insurance is ready for the Kansas spring and summer. Do you have the right homeowners or renters insurance? Do you know what your policy covers? Is the amount of coverage adequate? Does it cover new additions or recent remodeling? Check all limits, including coverage for contents. Keep your insurance agent’s name and number available and easy to find, and periodically discuss coverage options with him or her. Know your policy coverage exclusions. Not all policies cover the following: Water damage, including flood and surface damage, whether driven by wind or not; backup of sewer or drains; and sump pump failure. These are the most common exclusions. Riders for these problems may be available to add to your existing policy. Also, check your auto policy. Comprehensive coverage (other than collision) usually pays if damage is caused by wind, hail and/or flood.

Inside this issue:

Insurance / Matters	1
Parents and the Struggle with Screen Time	2
Grow / Vegetables and Savings	3
Food Tossed is Money Lost	4
Crispy Broccoli Carrot Fritters	5
Clean Out the Fridge Potato / Salad	5
National Festival / of Breads	6
Upcoming Events Calendar

Nuts & Seeds
Choose unsalted nuts or seeds as a snack, on salads, or in main dishes to replace meat or poultry. Nuts and seeds are a concentrated source of calories, so eat small portions to keep calories in check.
Choose My Plate
DG Tip #6

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Enriching Lives

Parents and the Struggle with Screen Time
Chuckie Hessong — Aging Specialist

The emergence of smartphone and tablet technology has brought the notion of screen time, once only applied to television, to virtually every aspect of modern life. Smartphones and tablets have become part of the culture, and parents need to make decisions about appropriate screen time for their families. While limiting children’s screen time is important, adults also should limit their screen time during family activities. Children and adults can benefit from being conscious of the amount of time they spend watching screens.
Recommendations: Families with very young children
Screen time should be severely limited for very young children. Ideally they should have none before age 2. Young children’s brains are developing rapidly, and they benefit most from interpersonal communication with others. Research shows that screen time, regardless of whether it is from a television, a tablet, or smartphone, is not nearly as stimulating as interaction with other humans. Moreover, this is not just an early childhood phenomenon — adults are likewise more stimulated by interacting with others. However, adults’ brains are not developing the number of connections, nor at the rate that young children are, and thus human interaction in early childhood is much more important.
Families with children aged 6 to 17
The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommends that parents create “screen-free” zones at home for all their children. Most importantly, children’s bedrooms should have no screens, including tablets, computers, and televisions. About half of children from age 6 to 17 have televisions in their bedrooms. While at first this might seem like a punishment, the reality is that children of all ages can benefit from alternate activities to screen time. Crossword puzzles, reading books, hobbies such as model building or learning to play a musical instrument, and playing outdoors are all tremendously beneficial alternatives. These activities stimulate the child’s brain in ways that no screen technology can come close to mimicking. With the AAP recommendations, K-State Research and Extension further recommends that if adults decide to have screens more incorporated into their children’s lives, that they do everything in their power to use screen time together in an active way. Sitting together and watching a TV show is very passive. However, if you can use the TV to interact, then you have a chance to play with your child. For example, if people on the TV are dancing, then you can dance with your child. Additionally, tablets and smartphones can be used to find performances of your favorite music, and you can sing and dance to these while watching
Whole family screen time at home
Limiting all children to one to two hours of screen time is recommended by the National Institutes of Health. Important ways to limit screen time beyond removing them from a child’s room are: •
Do not watch TV during meals. •
Do not text or talk on the phone during meals or when outside with your family. The phone is for your convenience and nobody else’s. •
Do not leave a TV on for background noise. Using a radio, streaming audio, or even white noise is a much healthier choice. You can even talk about the songs you are hearing and/or let each family member choose a station on a rotating basis.
If you must watch TV or use the computer, decide in advance what you will view. To make sure time does not slip away, you can set a timer on your watch, phone, computer, or other device. For TV, you can use the sleep timer to make sure it turns off. Remember that you are the model for your children. If you do not control your screen time, it sends a strong message that they need not control theirs. While intermittent screen time is tempting for adults, things such as “I am just going to check my email” often turn into more time on your devices. This, in and of itself is not so terrible, but when you factor in that the cost of paying attention to email means that you are not paying attention to your children, the impact is clear. Your children deserve your attention, and your email, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Buzzfeed, texts, and phone calls can wait.
The New Screen Time: Beyond Television and Into the Future, Bradford B. Wiles and Ph.D., Laura Schachtner. K-State Research and Extension, http://www.ksre.k-state.edu/

(continued on page 3)

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Parents and the Struggle with Screen Time (continued from page 2)

Grow Vegetables and Savings
Martha Murphy
Agent—Pittsburg EFNEP office

Spring has nearly sprung! Are you sprouting ideas of starting a garden this year? You can reduce your grocery expenses by growing your own vegetables. It’s also easy to spend a small fortune if you don’t plan correctly.
If you are new to gardening, consider these tips before getting started. Have fun enjoying your garden’s great tastes and the physical activity and savings benefits you reap!
Grow well-suited veggies. In Kansas, good choices when garden space is limited are bush cucumbers, eggplant, green beans, kale, lettuce, onions, peas, peppers,
radishes, spinach, summer squash, Swiss chard and tomatoes. On the other hand,
cabbage, melons, potatoes, pumpkins, sweet corn and winter squash typically require more growing space. Nearly all vegetables need full sun and well-drained soil.
Grow veggies that are expensive to buy. To save more money, grow more expensive vegetables, such as leafy greens, peppers and tomatoes, or grow large quantities of the vegetables that you purchase most regularly.
Grow veggies that you can store or preserve after the harvest. Onions, sweet and white potatoes, and winter squash can be stored for several months if you can keep them at the appropriate temperature. Other vegetables can be preserved if you dry, can or freeze them, such as corn, cucumbers, green beans and tomatoes.
Start with a written plan. Decide what you want to grow and find out how it should be planted, how to maintain it, and how to harvest and store it. Plan your garden on paper first. Ask your friends, and call your local extension office, for advice on gardening and food preservation. Especially good resources are online at
http://www.rrc.k-state.edu/preservation and www.ksre.ksu.edu/bookstore/pubs/S51.pdf
Reduce gardening inputs. Saving money by growing vegetables means keeping your costs as low as possible while still growing productive plants. For the first year, consider container gardening. Or, rent a plot in a community garden to find out if you like to garden before you need to invest in much equipment. Ask for advice about what to do from people who have gardened there for a few years. You could learn how to collect rainwater for irrigation and how to compost to improve the soil.
Start small. Like many activities worth doing, gardening takes practice. Crops require regular watering, weeding, harvesting and preservation/storage. Limit yourself to a few containers or to a small plot and just a few types of vegetables the first year. Expand as you become more experienced

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Food Tossed is Money Lost
Barbara L. Ames - Family and Consumer Sciences Agent

What is going into your trash? Per the United States Department of Agriculture, USDA, about 40 percent of the United States food supply (1,500 calories/person/day) goes uneaten. Discarded food in homes and foodservice accounts for 60 percent of this total food loss and is mostly avoidable. The remaining portion is lost or wasted during food production. (Photo by Nick Saltmarsh/Food Waste)
Preventing food waste saves money and resources. Resources used to produce uneaten food include: 30 percent of fertilizer, 31 percent of cropland, 25 percent of total fresh water consumption and 2 percent of total energy consumption.
As our population grows and feeding the world becomes more difficult, developing habits to save more of the food we already have will put less strain on the resources associated with producing and buying food. Reducing food waste will result in money saved for families to use for other needs.
Alice Henneman, Extension Educator at University of Nebraska Lincoln, offers these suggestions to help consumers reduce the amount of food wasted.
1. Shop the refrigerator before going to the store. Use food at home before buying more. Designate one meal weekly as a “use-it-up” meal.
2. Move older food products to the front of the fridge/cupboard/freezer and just-purchased ones to the back. This makes it more likely foods will be consumed before they go bad.
3. Keep your refrigerator at 40°F or below to prolong the life of foods. Foods frozen at 0°F or lower will remain safe indefinitely but the quality will go down over time.
4. Freeze or can surplus fresh produce using safe, up-to-date food preservation methods. Visit the National Center for Home Food Preservation website (http://nchfp.uga.edu) for freezing and canning instructions.
5. Take restaurant leftovers home and refrigerate within two hours of being served. Eat within three to four days or freeze. Ask for a take home container at the beginning of the meal if portions look especially large. Remove take home food from your plate at the beginning of the meal so leftovers are as appetizing as the original meal … rather than the picked-over remains. Or, choose a smaller size and/or split a dish with a dining companion.
6. Dish up reasonable amounts of food at a buffet and go back for more if still hungry.
7. Compost food scraps for use in the garden. Visit Nebraska Extension for direction on creating compost for your garden (www.ianrpubs.unl.edu/sendIt/g2222.pdf).
8. Check product dates on foods. The United States Department of Agriculture/Food Safety and Inspection Service (USDA/FSIS) defines them as:
• A “Sell-By” date tells the store how long to display the product for sale. You should buy the product before the date expires.
• A “Best if Used By (or Before)” date is recommended for best flavor or quality. It is not a purchase or safety date.
• A “Use-By” date is the last date recommended for the use of the product while at peak quality. The date has been determined by the manufacturer of the product. Do not buy or use baby formula after its “use-by” date.
9. Buy misshapen fruits and vegetables at farmers’ markets and elsewhere. They taste just
as good and are just as nutritious as those with a “perfect” shape, but are more likely to get thrown away.
10. If you have several foods that might go to waste at the same time, try adding them to such adaptable recipes as salads, soups, pasta and casseroles.
11. Rather than buy a food for use in only one recipe, check if there might be a suitable substitute already in the home. The Cook’s Thesaurus website (http://foodsubs.com) gives thousands of ingredient substitutions.
Check out “Clean Out the Fridge Potato Salad” on the next page.
Find more about reducing food waste at: http://food.unl.edu/14-ways-consumers-can-reduce-food-waste, or https://www.choosemyplate.gov/lets-talk-trash#.

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Enriching Lives

Crispy Broccoli Carrot Fritters with Yogurt Dill Sauce Makes 8 Servings:

2 cups broccoli florets, grated
1 cup carrots, grated
1/2 medium onion, grated
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1/3 cup grated Parmesan Cheese
1/2 tsp salt (optional)
1 large egg
2 Tbsp olive oil
Sauce:
1 cup plain low-fat yogurt
1 teaspoon chopped dill

Nutrition Facts: Calories, 90; Fat, 5g; Sodium, 220mg; Total Carb, 9g; Fiber, 1g; Sugar, 1g; Protein, 4

1. Finely grate broccoli, carrots and onion.
2. Place this mixture and flour in a large bowl, stir to coat.
3. Add cheese, salt, pepper and eggs, stir to combine.
4. Heat a large nonstick skillet over medium high heat.
5. Add oil to pan; swirl to coat.
6. Spoon 1/4 cup of broccoli mixture into measuring cup.
7. Pour mixture into pan; flatten slightly.
8. Repeat to form 8 fritters.
9. Cook 4 minutes on each side or until golden brown.
10. Combine yogurt and dill in small bowl and serve as dip.
(Ranch dressing could also be used)

Healthy Food, Healthy Families—EFNEP
Expanded Food and Nutrition Education Program

Clean Out the Fridge Potato Salad

Have you ever looked in your refrigerator and found a little bit of this and a little bit of that? And it should all be used — SOON! When that happens, make potato salad! (Note: Potatoes should be stored in a cool dry place in your house for best quality — not in the refrigerator.)
Follow these quick "1, 2, 3" steps!
1. Begin with cooked, diced potatoes (1-inch cube). Let them stand until cool enough to handle. Tip: You can leave the skins on young, tender potatoes and other varieties of potatoes with a thin, delicate skin.
While the potatoes are cooking/cooling, clean and prepare potential still-edible foods that might soon go in the garbage. Also, look for jars and packages of other still-edible foods that have been lingering in your refrigerator. Use your own preference as to amounts of ingredients. Ingredient suggestions include: red peppers, peas, onions, carrots, radishes, fresh dill and pickle relish.
3. The last step is combining the potatoes and vegetables with mayonnaise. Or, use your favorite homemade or purchased potato salad dressing. Then, chill your potato salad for about an hour before serving, to let the flavors meld. Some other foods you can add to potato salads include: hardboiled eggs, celery, cheese, parsley green pepper, grape or cherry tomatoes (halved), capers, olives and chives.
Recipe and photo from University of Nebraska-Lincoln Extension: http://food.unl.edu/14-ways-consumers-can-reduce-food-waste

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Enriching Lives

National Festival of Breads

Lots of baking has been taking place at the Wheat Innovation Center to select the top finalists for the 2017 National Festival of Breads! Mark your calendar now for June 17, 2017 to come and enjoy the festival in Manhattan, KS at the Hilton Garden Inn.
New this year is the Enrich Your Life 5K & 1 mile Fun Run. A portion of the event proceeds will be donated to the Flint Hills Breadbasket.
Admission to the festival is free with a donation of a canned or nonperishable food item. These donations will also go to the Flint Hills Breadbasket. The tentative schedule and link to sign up for the 5K is at http://nationalfestivalofbreads.com/hints-and-happenings/2017/06/17/festivalschedule

April
18 Grow Your Own Salsa, SE Research & Extension Center
Aging with Attitude, Iola, KS
26 Stay Strong, Stay Healthy, April 26—June 28 Frontenac, KS
May
3 Dining with Diabetes, Labette Health, Rector Center, Parsons
4 Walk Kansas Poker Walk in Parsons at Forest Park (more info coming)
9 SE Area FCE Program Day, Pittsburg, KS
Wildcat District Website—Anytime—Anywhere www.wildcatdistrict.ksu.edu

It is the policy of Kansas State University Agricultural Experiment Station and Cooperative Extension Service that all persons shall have opportunity and access to its educational programs, services, activities, and materials without regard to race, color, religion national origin, sex, age, or disability. Kansas State University is an equal opportunity organization.

Satisfy your sweet tooth
in a healthy way.
Indulge in a naturally sweet dessert dish—fruit! Serve a fresh fruit cocktail or a fruit parfait made with yogurt. For a hot dessert, bake apples and top with cinnamon.
Choose My Plate DG Tip 7

If our office can be of further assistance to you, please stop by the office or give us a call at 620-331-2690. And don’t forget our informational Web site www.wildcatdistrict.ksu.edu and like us on Facebook page at facebook.com/wildcat.extension.district.
Sincerely,
Barbara Ames Wildcat District Extension Agent Family and Consumer Sciences Agent Montgomery County
Sally Adolph
Office Professional sadolph@ksu.edu 620-331-2690