We so rarely go out to eat at a restaurant with Nora. We have probably been out with her about 10 times since she has been on the diet, and I can only think of 2 occasions when she ate some of the food at the restaurant–only when we have been at the coast eating seafood. Usually we pack her food and bring it into a friendly place. Last night Nora started asking to eat at a restaurant out of the blue, and as it was the last day of winter quarter and spring break is here, we decided to go out for a sushi celebration and honor her request.
Going out for sushi feels pretty safe because the food is minimally prepared. Both of our kids love salmon sashimi and edamame is awesome for Nora. Have I mentioned that before? Edamame is awesome! I forgot about it for a long time until I found some in the freezer earlier this week. Here’s the nutrition snapshot of 30 grams of Cascadian Farm shelled edamame. It’s not high ratio but it’s low carb, and you don’t find even that much fat in most veggies. This is fairly representative of the nutrition information from other brands and generic versions that I can find listed online.
Edamame in the shell is also awesome because it keeps Nora busy and happy. Last night she got 30 g of edamame, pretty much all of her dinnertime carbs. We calculated her portions before leaving home then brought along the gram scale to measure it out. To serve it, I estimate the number of beans she can eat in 30 g then count out the beans in the shells.
After the edamame is ready, I pop some beans out of the pods and add them to the scale until I get up to 5 g (it’s usually 6 to 7 beans, depending on the size). To serve 30 g, I need 6 times that number of beans. Then I count out the beans in the shells for her. Last night she got 40 beans, so at 2 or 3 beans per pod she ended up with about 15 pods. Doing it that way is an estimation, but it averages out the variability in the bean size by weighing a sub-sample of the beans in the serving. Nora loves popping them out of the shell and it keeps her busy at the restaurant or kitchen table.
For the rest of her meal, she got about 1 slice of salmon sashimi (25 g). We brought some flacker (6 g) with butter (7 g) and some “hot chocolate” (steamed cream and cocoa powder) to round out the fat in her meal. Everyone was happy. Anders loves sashimi too. We got 1 order of sashimi to split between the kids because Nora gets only 1 slice. We could have weighed more for her and compensated with more fat when we got home, but she was feeling “fat and satisfied.” Anders ate the rest of that order of sashimi, the miso soup, some edamame, and most of another order of sashimi because he was still hungry. He’s not a cheap date!
Then we went home and finished off our Japanese-themed evening by watching Ponyo together. A fun and easy night was had by all and Nora was happy to go to a restaurant. She loved the room with the traditional short tables. She kept exclaiming that the room was so small. She felt like a giant! And the waiter was super tall and skinny because he had to crouch down to serve us! It’s always fun to see the world anew through a child’s eyes.
