Behind the kitchen door: sweet potato wontons

April 26, 2015 by Leave a Comment

Unless you’ve worked in a restaurant, or are really close to someone who has, you probably have no idea what goes on behind the kitchen door.

Serving, bussing tables, dishwashing—these are all physically demanding jobs but they can be rewarding if the restaurant treats its staff equitably. Unfortunately, too many don’t.

I had my eyes opened recently when I attended a program, sponsored by seven local Jewish organizations, at Restaurant Opportunities Center (ROC) Michigan.

ROC Michigan, along with 14 similar state organizations, is affiliated with ROC United. The first ROC, in New York, was started after the 9/11 terrorist attacks to provide support for restaurant workers who lost their jobs when the twin towers fell.

Guaranteed wage: $2.13

I knew that servers are paid below minimum wage, with the expectation that they will make it up in tips. But I had no idea the federally guaranteed “tipped wage” is only $2.13 an hour, an amount that hasn’t increased in 22 years! (In some states it is higher. Michigan’s tipped wage will rise to a whopping $3.10 this year.)

It is possible to make a decent living from tips, especially in higher-end restaurants. But I didn’t know that there are no laws guaranteeing tips, and that few restaurants even have policies about tips. Unscrupulous managers can easily skim their staff’s tips with impunity.

I didn’t realize that bussers can be paid the same “tipped wage” as servers but without the opportunity to get a fair share of the tips.

Nor was I aware that restaurant workers don’t have to be paid overtime, or that managers can make the staff stay on the premises but clock out when the restaurant is empty so that they don’t get paid for all the hours they’re on duty.

Like most minimum wage workers, most restaurant staff don’t get paid sick time.

Saru Jayaraman, one of the founders of ROC, has written a book on the difficulties of restaurant workers, Behind the Kitchen Door (Cornell University Press).

Generally, servers and bartenders make more than those who work “behind the kitchen door,” said Alicia Renee Farris, director of ROC Michigan. That’s why she’s developed an innovative training program to prepare adults for careers as bartenders and servers in nice restaurants.

For six of the 10 weeks of the course, the students work at Colors, a full-service restaurant run by ROC Michigan in downtown Detroit.

ROC Michigan says their raisons d’etre are organizing for workplace justice in restaurants, research and public policy advocacy, and “high road practices,” which means fair and sustainable work practices for restaurant staff. At Colors, for example, the wait staff are paid $10.10 an hour and all staff share the tips.

(Last Thursday I heard a piece on NPR’s “On Point” program about how the tipping economy is changing. Bob Donegan, the president of Ivar’s Seafood Restaurants in Seattle said his company increased its menu prices by 21 percent, asks that customers do not tip, and pays all hourly staff at least $15 an hour. It hasn’t hurt them; indeed the number of diners and the chain’s revenue have skyrocketed, but Donegan admitted that could be due to all the good publicity they’ve been getting!)

One of the speakers at our program, a graduate of the Colors training, had a few suggestions for diners. First, ask your server if he or she is happy with the job. If the waiter hesitates at all, you’ll know that working conditions there are not what they should be; you might want to avoid that restaurant in future.

He also suggested handing your server the tip personally, rather than putting it on your credit card, to ensure that the server receives the entire amount. If you want to put the tip on your card, he said, ask the server if he or she will get the full amount if you do so. Again, if you see any hesitation you can suspect some fishy business.

Colors provided program participants with a lovely vegetarian soul food luncheon, which included sweet potato wontons, one of their signature dishes. Chef Alex Amdemichael was kind enough to share the recipe. It’s great as an appetizer, a party food or even as a savory dessert.

 

Chicken Soup Redux

April 20, 2015 by Leave a Comment

Song and Spirit Institute for Peace is a marvelous organization based in Berkley, Mich., not far from my home. One of its founders and directors, Steve Klaper, is a neighbor. In a previous life, when I worked in corporate communications, he did a lot of graphic design work for me. Now Steve, a Jewish cantor, his wife, Mary Gilhouly, and co-founder Brother Al Mascia, a Franciscan friar, run an interfaith organization that offers not only religious (and inter-religious) services but also a wide variety of community services. Steve sent this piece out to his email list on March 31.

It began (like many scathingly brilliant ideas) as a short conversation in the hallway at Song and Spirit. Brother Al was carrying a large can of powdered chicken bouillon and stopped for a moment to talk about a new initiative he had in mind.

“Chicken soup for the hungry!” he said with great enthusiasm.

He continued, “A fellow I used to work with downtown found a recipe that uses canned chicken and chicken bouillon and we just have to add water, noodles and a little seasonings and we’re good to go.”

Hmmm… he’d lost us at “canned chicken’”…

“Don’t we have friends at area synagogues who might want to pitch in to make ‘real’ chicken soup? Who better to make chicken soup than our Jewish friends! All the Temples have such active Social Action committees and Teen Youth Groups – maybe they’d like to pitch in?”

Temples to the rescue

Within hours, we had firm commitments from two area temples with whom we had worked on many other projects. Both were delighted to find volunteers of all ages who wanted to participate in making homemade soups of all kinds to help their neighbors in need.

So nearly every week – for more than four months now – Song and Spirit picks up 5-gallon containers of hot, homemade soup made by volunteers at Congregation Shir Tikvah in Troy and Temple Emanu-El in Oak Park. (A third temple is coming on board soon!)

Serving as the hands of God

Outreach Coordinator Greg Allen works tirelessly with Brother Al to deliver the huge, heavy pots to area shelters struggling to find enough to feed lunch to the many in our area who are in need.

And Greg never ceases to be amazed at the sincere gratitude of those he serves.

“You know,” he said after returning from a soup run on a frigid, winter afternoon, “all they had to offer for lunch today at the shelter was a single hotdog on a bun, and then we came in with five gallons of piping hot soup. Honestly, I don’t know who was more excited, the people who got to serve the soup or the people who got to eat it.”

He paused, thinking, “Then again, maybe it was ME!”

What’s so important about having an Outreach program at the Song and Spirit Institute for Peace? We allow everyday people the opportunity to act as the hands of God – and they become people who make a difference in the world.

From the editor:
This week’s recipe is something I call Cheater’s Chicken Soup, because you don’t start from scratch, which can be expensive. Making soup from powdered bouillon is disgusting (as Steve notes above). This is a cheap and easy way to get home-made flavor without sacrificing a chicken.

It’s not a normal recipe because you have to start by roasting a chicken, which you can enjoy for dinner. You’ll make the soup another day. So this is more of a method than a recipe – but it makes a great soup! One chicken carcass will make enough soup for two. Want more? Freeze the chicken carcass until you have a few of them; with three chicken carcasses, and three chickens’ worth of “juice,” you can make more than a half-gallon of soup!

Add some cooked egg noodles and maybe some of the carrot you cooked with the soup before serving.

Note: you can cook this soup a long time. Once I put it on the simmer burner at 6 p.m., planning to finish it at 9 when I returned from a meeting. Well, my husband and I both totally forgot about it until the next morning, so it had simmered more than 12 hours. No harm done – the soup was very flavorful!

All about bagels

April 13, 2015 by Leave a Comment

I spent my junior year of college at The Hebrew University in Jerusalem. When I went through the gate to the campus, I’d pass by a wizened little man holding ring-shaped rolls on a long pole. “Beigele, beigele, beigele,” he’d shout, trying to attract buyers.

I realized that these baked goodies, which tasted rather like soft pretzels, must be the forerunners of the American bagels my family enjoyed almost every Sunday morning with cream cheese and lox (smoked salmon), and which weren’t available in Israel at the time.

In fact, it was hard to find a bagel outside of Jewish neighborhoods. When my brother went to graduate school at Vanderbilt in Nashville, he and his wife would lug back a dozen ore more bagels every time they came home to Philadelphia for a visit.

In the late 1950s, bagel baker Harry Lender and his sons figured out a way to freeze bagels, making them available in supermarkets. Even though the frozen things are just awful and barely worthy of being designated bagels, non-Jewish Americans learned what they were.

Now fresh bagels are available almost everywhere, though purists will scoff at the soft-textured variety offered by most chains (Einstein, Bruegger’s, Dunkin Donuts, Panera) as “rolls with a hole.”

Real bagels are boiled

True bagels need to be boiled in a pot of water before they’re baked, to develop the hard crust and chewy interior texture. Most modern chain-store bagels are baked in ovens with a steam injection system; the steam creates the softer texture most of us have grown used to.

Many of us old-timers, myself included, feel only certain varieties of bagels should be allowed: poppy, sesame, onion, garlic. Cinnamon-raisin is stretching it. But the types of rolls-with-a-hole calling themselves bagels today – granola, cranberry-orange, blueberry – to these I say “Feh!” And green bagels for St. Patrick’s Day are just an abomination.

Bagels have also gotten huge. When I was a kid, bagels were half the size they are now, maybe even less. In my family, each of us would normally eat two bagel-and-lox sandwiches for Sunday breakfast. My brother once ate five!

A European import

Bagels originated in Krakow, Poland. Leo Rosten, in The Joys of Yiddish, says the first mention of the word (bajgiel) is in the Krakow “Community Regulations” in 1610; they were given as a gift to women in childbirth. The round shape was considered to be lucky. The Yiddish word bagel comes from a Middle High German word, “bougel,” meaning ring or bracelet.

Polish Jewish immigrants brought the bagel to New York – and also to Montreal. Apparently there’s quite a distinction between “New York style” bagels and “Montreal style” bagels, which originated with Russian Jewish immigrants. The latter have bigger holes and are crustier and less sweet, and they’re baked in a wood-fired oven – probably more like the “beigeles” sold by the vendor at Hebrew University.

Bagels have even gone into outer space. Canadian American astronaut Gregory Chmitoff brought a batch of Montreal-style bagels with him on a 2008 Space Shuttle mission.

Try making your own

If you are among the poor souls that have no easy access to a bagel bakery, or if you’re just feeling adventurous, try making your own.

The traditional bagel contains high-gluten white flour, salt, water, yeast and a sweetener. L.V. Anderson, writing in a blog on Slate in a series called “You’re Doing It Wrong,” says the secret to good bagels is barley malt syrup, but I think that would be rather difficult to find.

I chose a recipe that seems easier, since it uses plain white sugar for sweetening. It appeared on the Allrecipes website, where it earned 4.5 out of 5 stars from hundreds of reviewers.

Purists will say you should create the bagel shape by rolling the dough into a rope about eight inches long and forming it into a ring, pinching the ends together in a rather complicated maneuver. It seems much easier to form the dough into balls and then poke a hole into each one, widening the hole to the right size (about two inches wide) before boiling.

After boiling, and before baking, would be the time to add flavorings by dipping the bagels into poppy seeds, sesame seeds, chopped onion or garlic or coarse salt.

Enjoy your bagels with cream cheese (AKA “shmear”) and lox, garnished with sliced tomatoes and onions. (Photo below by David Lebovitz via Flickr Creative Commons.)

An embarrassing intro to Easter eggs

March 30, 2015 by Leave a Comment

Even though I was raised as a completely non-observant Jew–the only holiday we celebrated at home was Chanukah–that doesn’t mean I knew anything about the surrounding Christian culture.

Christmas and Easter simply weren’t on my radar until I got to first grade. And then the learning curve was a little steep.

In the spring of my first-grade year, the students were told to bring in a hard-boiled egg to be dyed.

Brown eggs don’t dye!

My mother must have been as clueless as I was about Easter eggs, because she sent me to school with a hard-boiled brown egg. Which turned an even muddier brown after being immersed in the dye pot, unlike the pretty pastel greens, pink, blues and purple hues on everyone else’s formerly white eggs. My classmates had a good laugh at my expense.

When I was in first grade it didn’t occur to me to wonder what eggs have to do with a holiday celebrating the resurrection of Jesus. But the connection is actually stronger than it may at first seem.

Of course eggs are a symbol of spring, fertility and rebirth used in many religions. We Jews include an egg on our Passover seder plates.

Ancient cultures often decorated eggs,  so early Christians were probably repurposing existing pagan customs when they used the egg as a symbol of Christ’s tomb – it looks like a stone, but gives birth to new life, as Jesus’ tomb gave way to the resurrection. Early Christians also began staining eggs red as a symbol of Jesus’ shed blood. The Ukrainians made egg decorating into a highly developed folk art, called pysanki.

Eggs soon became a traditional Easter food. An early Christian blessing, recorded in the 1700s, mentions eggs: “Lord, let the grace of your blessing come upon these eggs, that they be healthful food for your faithful who eat them in thanksgiving for the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with you forever and ever.”

Easter meant candy

As a child I had little interest in the spiritual aspects of Easter but I loved the fact that the most widely observed custom seemed to be eating chocolate eggs and jellybeans.

Every spring the TV shows we watched on weekend mornings had numerous ads for Plantation Dainties chocolate coconut cream Easter eggs, a Philadelphia tradition. (The Plantation Candies company still exists in suburban Philadelphia, selling mainly to groups holding fundraisers.)

Some years my father would bring home a large coconut cream Easter egg, covered with chocolate and gaudily decorated with colored sugar icing. The egg weighed at least a pound, and we sliced off small hunks to eat. Gourmet chocolate it was not, but to us kids, anything sweet was delicious.

At school we made Easter baskets out of construction paper, filling them with cellophane grass on which we would place our dyed hard-boiled eggs along with chocolate eggs and jellybeans.

Jellybeans – my fave!

I still love jellybeans – probably the only thing I ever had in common with Ronald Reagan.

Jellybeans can trace their lineage back to Turkish delight, a sticky, jellied confection, but the earliest mention of the term may be in 1861, when Boston candymaker William Schrafft urged customers to send his jellybeans to soldiers fighting in the Civil War.

Jellybeans – sometimes called jelly eggs – weren’t linked with Easter until the 1930s, probably because of their somewhat egg-like shape.

Now there’s even a Naitonal Jellybean Day, April 22.

For today’s recipe, I wanted to find something using hardboiled eggs that’s a little more imaginative than egg salad. This recipe, for vegetarian chopped liver (paté), is a good dish for Passover as well as Easter, or any other time. It works well as an appetizer course, served on a bed of lettuce, or as a party dish, served with crackers.

I had seen this recipe, or variations of it, many times and was always grossed out by the combination of ingredients: green beans, walnuts, onions and eggs – really? Then I tasted it at a cooking demo by Annabel Cohen, a wonderful cook and Detroit-area caterer, and became a devotee. I think I like this spread even more than actual chopped liver.

You can substitute a similar amount of canned peas, roasted eggplant or sautéed mushrooms for the green beans.

 

 

Selling chametz and enjoying a pineapple kugel

March 30, 2015 by Leave a Comment

 

I have a recurring Passover fantasy. One day, in the middle of the eight-day holiday, there will be a knock at my door. I’ll open it to a grizzled old man who will say, “Give me the chametz!”

Jews are forbidden to own chametz (rhymes with “DUMB bits” in Yiddish and “Rockettes” in Hebrew) during Passover, based on the Biblical commandment found in the Book of Exodus 12:15: Seven days shall you eat flatbread. The very first day you shall expunge leaven from your houses, for whosoever eats leavened bread, that person shall be cut off from Israel from the first day to the seventh day. (The holiday is eight days everywhere except Israel.)

Five grains

Not all grains can be leavened, and so only certain grains are regarded as chametz. In Biblical times, chametz meant several varieties of wheat and barley. Later, the rabbis decided to include spelt, rye and oats. These five grains will rise when they come in contact with a leavening agent, such as yeast or baking powder, or even water, which often contains the spores of wild yeast.

Other grains, such as rice and corn, will rot, rather than rise, when they come in contact with water.Coincidentally, the grains regarded as chametz are those that contain gluten.

Getting rid of chametz

In the weeks leading up to the holiday we clean and scrub, ridding our dwellings of every crumb of chametz. I described this in my Feed the Spirit Passover column last year. But what does not owning any chametz mean, practically speaking?

Well, starting about two months before the holiday we stop buying foods containing chametz except for the absolute necessities. We try to use up open packages of flour, bread, cookies, crackers and cereal that we have in our pantries, and throw out what we can’t eat. Some folks throw away all opened packages, even foods that would otherwise be acceptable for Passover. So it’s a balancing act of trying to eat up all the stuff you don’t want to keep over Passover while having enough food to take you right up to the start of the holiday.

But what to do with unopened and sealed packages of cereal, pasta and mixes that include any of the chametz grains in their ingredients? Or the very expensive stuff, like a half-bottle of single-malt Scotch, which is made from grain considered chametz and thus taboo for Passover? For many of us, especially those of us who regularly stock up when we have coupons or the stores have good sales, it would be financially difficult to throw everything away or even to donate it all to a food pantry.

The solution? Sell it!

The solution is to sell the chametz to a non-Jew. That way we can keep it in our homes, stashed away somewhere out of sight, but for the duration of the holiday, we don’t legally own it and we cannot use it.

Most congregational rabbis act as agents, selling the chametz on behalf of members. My rabbi does this, and also sells any chametz owned by the congregation itself – like the huge boxes of frozen cookies we use for our post-Sabbath-service receptions. He sells it all to our non-Jewish custodian.

In Israel, since 1997 a Muslim Israeli, Jaaber Hussein, has been buying chametz owned by the government and state institutions – prisons, hospitals, the armed forces – in a deal brokered by the chief rabbis. The sale has an estimated value of $150 million. Hussein, who works at a Jerusalem hotel, gives the government representative a check for NIS 100,000 (about $25,500) as payment for the chametz.

After the holiday, the rabbis buy the chametz back.

Some people of means have been known to “sell” their entire house for the duration of Passover. Then they simply lock the door and decamp to a kosher-for-Passover resort or cruise ship without even having to do the insane cleanup.

Legally binding

The document for selling chametz is legally binding, which is why I started wondering what would happen if someone actually tried to enforce it.

My rabbi, Bob Gamer, says he’s never heard of a buyer actually trying to lay claim to purchased chametz, as in my fantasy.

“If they did they would have to arrange a time to come and get it and then pay the fair market value of whatever they take,” he said. “If you have an $80 bottle of Scotch, then they have to pay the balance. The contract is a down payment, with the remainder due if the person collects the items.”

Some organizations will handle the proxy sale online. Here’s a link to one of them.

Here’s a nice, easy Passover recipe for pineapple kugel (pudding) from my machatenista Joy Gardin – that’s a good Yiddish word for which there is no English equivalent; it means my child’s mother-in-law. You can serve it as a side dish or as a dessert, and it’s one of those Passover dishes that we like to say is “good enough to eat all year” because it doesn’t taste like matzoh. Because it contains no matzoh, it’s also a good dish for anyone avoiding gluten.

 

 

 

The Mystery of the Passover Potato Gnocchi

March 21, 2015 by 1 Comment

From ReadTheSpirit host Bobbie Lewis:

Passover will soon be upon us and I’ve invited my Australian friend, Andrea Cooper, to share a column for the holiday. We met nearly 20 years ago in a “bulletin board” (remember those?) for public relations professionals. When we discovered that we were both Jewish we started emailing privately and have been in contact ever since. Andrea has done a couple of interesting pieces for Feed the Spirit, including one about the Pavlova wars between Australia and New Zealand and one about an unusual family recipe.

The most-observed Jewish holiday

As Andrea points out, almost all Jews around the world observe Passover in some way.

“At a basic level it may mean attending a Passover seder meal or abstaining from bread or other wheat/grain based products over the full festival eight days,” she wrote. “Jewish cooks take up the creative challenge of the Passover food laws and find inventive ways” to make palatable meals.

“In Australia, I participate in two strictly orthodox kosher Facebook pages,” she wrote. “With Passover only a few weeks away, the discussions are currently full of diverse ‘kosher for Passover’ food questions.

Making pasta without grains

“One interesting thread has been about pasta and how one might make this without wheat or other grain flour. A question was asked about pasta made with potatoes. I quickly responded that I make Passover potato gnocchi. A couple of requests quickly surfaced for my recipe, which I proudly provided.”

Then Andrea started to wonder if she should have published the recipe online.

“You see the recipe is not mine. It sits hand-written in my Passover notebook titled ‘Bobbies Pesach Gnocchi.’ My online, also kosher, friend from across the world gave me the recipe many years ago. I have no idea where she got the original from but it’s great!

“Though Bobbie and I have never met, for almost 20 years we’ve shared many aspects of each other’s lives.

“What should I do now? Would Bobbie mind? I then thought, oh, she edits the Feed The Spirit food pages. Why don’t I just write up this as a story for her?

“So Bobbie and all readers, here it is!”

A mystery recipe

But here’s the funny part about Andrea’s gnocchi recipe, which she makes every year to rave reviews: I have no recollection of it!

I have a manila folder, similar to Andrea’s notebook, stuffed with Passover recipes and notes. Some are dishes I make just about every year. Other recipes have been in that folder for more than 30 years and I have yet to try them. There are kugels (puddings) and cakes galore, but no gnocchi.

It’s a mystery. Perhaps Andrea and I were discussing recipes and I sent that one to her because it sounded like something she’d like and then neglected to keep it myself. Or perhaps it came from another Bobbie altogether!

This year I’m copying it and putting it at the top of my pile so I will try it for sure.

And by the way, in case you have concerns similar to Andrea’s, there’s no problem sharing a recipe you find elsewhere; recipes cannot be copyrighted. The commentary about a dish, and any detailed instructions that aren’t part of the recipe itself, are covered by copyright laws. This is something I was careful to check before starting this blog.

I do try to credit the person or publication where I got the recipe, if I know it. Unfortunately, in the case of “Bobbie’s” Passover Potato Gnocchi,” I have no idea!

 

 

 

 

Food for thought: Tongue-tied infants (and an easy cheese souffle)

March 16, 2015 by Leave a Comment

 

I will give you a recipe eventually but first I want to  give you some food for thought.

I couldn’t resist the opportunity to use this blog as a bully pulpit to alert you to a fairly common problem in newborns that is easily diagnosed and easily fixed—but for whatever reason in our crazy medical system often isn’t. If you’re planning to have children or grandchildren or know anyone who is, this could be very useful information.

Many babies are born tongue-tied, which means something way different than awkward with words. Others have a related problem, lip tie. These ties are thin cords of tissue connecting the bottom of the tongue to the floor of the mouth or the upper or lower lip to the gum. If the ties are short  and tight or in the wrong place they can interfere with feeding. Later in life they can cause eating, speech and dental problems.

A crash course for grandma

I feel like a minor expert now because my four-month-old granddaughter was born with a tongue and a lip tie. The tongue tie was noticed in the hospital but no one felt the need to do anything about it because the baby seemed to be nursing well.

Unfortunately, she wasn’t nursing properly. She wasn’t getting enough milk. Because her anatomy forced her to work extra hard and misuse some of her facial muscles, she would get fatigued easily and fall asleep halfway through a feed. With the baby demanding less, my daughter wasn’t producing as much milk as she should have been. And since she wasn’t getting sufficient milk at each feed, the baby wanted to eat every few hours. My poor daughter was completely exhausted and at her wits’ end.

The doctors’ first thought, as usual, was to suggest bottle-feeding. In my granddaughter’s case, this wasn’t suggested until the baby was three months old, by which time she had zero interest in a bottle. She wouldn’t suck on or swallow anything that didn’t come directly from mama.

My granddaughter was born on the small side — 6 lb., 11 oz. — and both her parents are small, so no one expected her to be in the 90th percentile for weight. At first she gained slowly but surely, but at three months, she simply stopped gaining weight. Her parents knew something was wrong but had not idea what it was.

My daughter found the solution almost by accident. She had gone to a lactation consultant in her insurance network, who recommended using a “supplemental nursing system.”  This involves putting pumped breast milk or formula into a small bottle that the nursing mother clips to her top; a very thin tube leading from the bottle is taped next to the mother’s nipple, so that the baby can take in extra food while she’s nursing.

A chance meeting and a diagnosis

The only place to get the supplemental nursing system was from another lactation consultant. The second lactation consultant asked my daughter why she needed the system. After she heard my daughter’s story, and asked a few more questions, she said, “I don’t want to mix in, but this really sounds like a tongue tie to me, and it can easily be fixed.”

The next day, when she looked at my granddaughter, she could immediately see a tongue tie and a lip tie, which were preventing her from getting a good “latch” on the breast.

The lactation consultant referred my daughter to a dentist who uses a water laser to cut the ties, and three days later we were in the dentist’s office. The procedure was fast and painless.

My son-in-law was skeptical; how do you know it’s painless? he asked. They know because they also do this procedure on adults, without anesthesia; the adult patients report some minor discomfort but no pain.

My granddaughter was immediately able to get a better latch on her mom and started eating better. She quickly started to gain weight again: more than 3 ounces in a week! It doesn’t sound like much, but when you weigh only 9 pounds, every ounce counts.

Why a dentist? The lactation consultant told us dentists are at the forefront of developing effective ways to treat oral ties because they see the ongoing problems ties can cause in older children and adults. Many have trouble eating, and prefer only soft foods. Some have trouble controlling saliva. Some ENT physicians do the procedure, but most use a scalpel, which requires anesthesia, rather than the laser.

Lawrence Kotlow, a pediatric dentist in Albany, N.Y., is one of the leaders in the movement to identify and treat tongue tie.

Speech pathologists are also strong advocates for better treatment because they work with children and adults with speech impediments and swallowing disorders that can be traced to tongue ties.

Easy to diagnose

Tongue tie very easy to diagnose. I was easily able to see my granddaughter’s ties myself. And as her experience shows, the condition is easy to treat. So why isn’t it diagnosed more promptly and treated more often?

The lactation consultant told us that before 1950 or so, snipping ties was common. By then, bottle feeding was becoming increasingly popular. Bottle-fed babies with ties often  don’t have the same problems as breastfed infants, because sucking on a bottle is so much easier. It’s quite possible that with tongue-tied babies eating well on the bottle and gaining weight, the health care practitioners didn’t see any need to treat the ties. If nursing moms had a problem, physicians simply suggested switching to the bottle.

This article provides a good historical overview.The International Affiliation of Tongue-Tie Professionals’ website also has good information, particularly in the FAQ section.

Frenotomy, as the tie snip is called medically, is not taught in most medical schools, and most pediatricians pooh-pooh the idea of correcting ties in infancy, even though it’s such a simple procedure. A friend of my daughter’s, whose child has a lip tie (and speech problems), was actually told by her pediatrician not to worry, that the child would one day fall down and rip the tie. The lactation consultant told us this is a common “solution” — though of course the child might not fall down and rip the tie, or the tie might rip in the wrong place, or the ripped tie might grow back.

As I said, food for thought.

And now, in honor of anyone who prefers soft and easy-to-swallow food for whatever reason, I offer this recipe for an easy cheese souffle made with stale bread.

I usually decide to make this a few days before I actually do. I make the bread cubes first and keep them in a large bowl, tossing them occasionally until they dry out. If I have bread that’s getting stale, I often make it into bread cubes and keep them until a purpose reveals itself – this souffle, or a bread pudding, or bread stuffing. The bread cubes will keep for many weeks as long as they don’t get wet!