A Mama's Rant

Making healthy choices at the grocery store with Stop & Shop's Healthy Ideas

Have you noticed that your local supermarket is putting special shelf tags on items to denote if they’re healthy or gluten free? My local grocery store, King Soopers, has special “No gluten” tags, which makes shopping for my mother-in-law so much easier.

Well, the East Coast based Stop & Shop Supermarket goes one step further by launching Healthy Ideas, a new on-shelf symbol that helps customers easily identify foods that fit into a healthy lifestyle. I love this idea because making healthier choices begins in the grocery store and it takes the guesswork out of making healthy food choices.

Stop & Shop has placed the Healthy Ideas symbol on more than 3,000 items and shelf tags throughout its stores. The symbol highlights foods that have less fat, saturated fat and sodium. It also helps to ensure that the foods we select include a healthful amount of at least one nutrient, such as fiber, whole grains, calcium and minerals.

Print out your shipping list on the Healthy Ideas website

Don’t have a Stop & Shop by you? Well, you can still visit their website for Healthy Ideas recipes like Microwave Vegetable Lasagna and Stuffed Portobello Mushrooms. What’s extremely cool about their website is that you can check off recipe ingredients you don’t have in stock at home and print out a shopping list to take to the store. I wish more recipe websites used this feature.

This post was brought to you by Mom Central.

My two most favorite Audrey Hepburn movies - Funny Face and Breakfast at Tiffany’s

Paramount Home Entertainment just released two more digitally mastered and restored movies in their Paramount Centennial Collection - Funny Face (1957) and Breakfast At Tiffany's (1961) both starring Audrey Hepburn. (The first DVDs in the collection are Roman Holiday (1953), Sunset Boulevard (1950) and Sabrina (1954).)

Funny Face

If you are a fan of Audrey Hepburn or love late ‘50s/early ‘60s haute couture, you need to get and study Funny Face. In this movie, Jo Stockton (Audrey Hepburn) a bookish beatnik, is discovered by the Maggie Prescott (the fabulously funny Kay Thompson) of the Vogue-like Quality Magazine and Dick Avery (Fred Astaire), a photographer styled after fashion legend Richard Avedon.

(Avedon supplied several photographs seen in the film, including the stills for the opening credits, which were also used in the halls of Quality magazine. The musical also featured Avedon muses Sunny Hartnett, Suzy Parker and Dovima.)

Off to Paris they go – Jo to pursue her beat hero, Professor Flostre, Maggie to make fashion history, and Dick to take some pictures and fall in love with Maggie.

Brideshead Revisited one more time

I remember when Brideshead Revisited starring a young Jeremy Irons played on PBS television back in 1982. The BBC miniseries based on Evelyn Waugh's classic novel was a huge hit and even spurred fashion trends. So when a new movie version of Brideshead Revisited was released starring two-time Academy Award winner Emma Thompson, I wondered how it would do. Squeezing a novel into a miniseries is hard enough, but into a two hour movie? Hmmmm…

The story

Brideshead Revisited is the story of Charles Ryder (Matthew Goode), a young man of modest means but considerable talent and ambition, who has just begun his studies at Oxford University. He encounters flamboyant (i.e., gay) aristocrat and fellow student Sebastian Flyte (Ben Whishaw) and his flamboyant crowd.

Infatuated with his new friend’s hedonistic lifestyle, Charles eagerly accompanies him to the family’s opulent mansion, Brideshead, where he becomes entranced by the palatial 18th century estate. But when Charles falls for Sebastian’s beautiful sister Julia (Hayley Atwell), his friend reacts with jealousy and the siblings’ domineering mother, Lady Marchmain (Emma Thompson), rules out the possibility of marriage for reasons of class and religion. As Charles becomes further involved with the Marchmain family, he realizes that at Brideshead, everything comes at a price. 

The movie

Director Julian Jarrold transports us to patrician England in the 1920s using stunning locations in England, Morocco and Venice, and features fantastic period costumes and sumptuous settings. Like Charles, you do fall in love with Brideshead and the Marchmain’s decadent way of life – champagne, servants, and exotic travel.

Unlike the TV series, Charles and Sebastian are almost brazenly having a gay affair, what Sebastian’s father’s mistress calls a “romantic English friendships.”

It seems a bit unrealistic given the morays of the ‘20s and that the Marchmains were so reverently Catholic. Then again, Catholic guilt and his mother’s overbearing personality probably explains Sebastian’s decline into alcoholism and rejecting his family.

In the movie version, we also realize that Charles is not as nice as Jeremy Irons originally played him. While he probably cares about Sebastian, he’s using him to get access to the lavish lifestyle at Brideshead and eventually his sister Julia. After marrying one of his artistic patrons, he leave his wife for Julia and gives her husband a painting in exchange for an annulment of her marriage. What a cad!

In the end, Catholicism and the family bond draw the Marchmain clan (except for Sebastian) back to Brideshead and Charles realizes that he will always be an outsider to their world.

There are lots of threads going through this movie – love, religion, family, wealth, class, ambition, motherhood, marriage and sexuality. It makes for an interesting two hours and intrigued me enough to want to read the original novel and check out the Brideshead Revisited miniseries again.

For a terrific take on the movie, read Louise Bayard's review at Salon.com.

Swing Vote: What if only one man chose the president?

With all the election and inauguration hoopla, maybe you’re tired of politics. Not to worry, because while Swing Vote may seem like a political movie, it’s really about a father-daughter relationship and becoming your child’s role model.

Kevin Costner stars as Bud Johnson, an aging loser who’s content to coast through life in a dead end job and get drunk off his rear most days. Then his wise-beyond-her-years, politically active, 12-year-old daughter, Molly (Madeline Carroll), sets off a chain of events that results in a presidential election coming down to a single vote: Bud’s.

All of a sudden the eyes of the world are upon this apathetic slacker. Political operatives swarm his tiny hometown in New Mexico in an all-out battle for his ballot and there are no lengths the Republican incumbent Andrew Boone (Kelsey Grammer) and Democratic
candidate Donald Greenleaf (Dennis Hopper) won’t go to in order to curry Bud’s favor – including completely changing their political platforms – all of a sudden the Dems are anti-abortion and the Republicans are for gay marriage, go figure. As the underhanded antics of their campaign managers, played by Stanley Tucci and Nathan Lane, create hilarious consequences, Bud realizes that beyond the implications for the nation, this is his shot at winning his daughter’s respect.

Win a Super Bowl Party Pack from Pepsi

As you may know, Super Bowl XLIII is right around the corner. To celebrate, I’m giving away an Ultimate Super Bowl Party Pack valued at $250 thanks to the nice folks at Pepsi.

It includes:

• 1 Super Bowl XLIII football
• 1 beverage pail
• 1 snack helmet
• 2 key chains
• 2 hats
• 2 t-shirts
• 5 Pepsi 24 pack coupons
• 5 Frito Lay coupons

To enter my giveaway, please go to my blog, My Readable Feast to enter at Win an Ultimate Super Bowl Party Pack.

Get fit with this mama! Win a Warner Bros. "New Year New You" kit and get SIX workout DVDs

I’m holding a contest to win a Warner Bros. "New Year New You" kit and get SIX workout DVDs over at my food, diet and fitness blog, This Mama Cooks!

Enter to win a kit, which includes these six DVDs:

• Lisa Rinna: Dance Body Beautiful-Learn & Burn
• Lisa Rinna: Dance Body Beautiful: Jive, Jump, Ballroom Bump
• Skinny Bitch Fitness: Boot Camp
• Skinny Bitch Fitness: Body
• Abs of Steel: Sculpting and Toning 
• Buns of Steel: Sculpting and Toning

You have until midnight MT on January 17, 2009 to enter my contest.

My latest at the Rocky Mountain Moms Blog

I’m baaaaack in the mother’hood Colorado style at the Rocky Mountain Moms Blog.

You can see my first post, Holiday purgatory has been declared OVER and catch all my stories on my page.

Be Fire Smart this winter

I hope you’ve survived the holidays with no mishaps like burning down the deck while deep frying the turkey (happened to a friend once). Or setting the kitchen cupboards on fire from a grease fire (happened to my mom).

And I bet you’re not like me and forget to extinguish candles when you leave the room. (Ooops.) Of course, you never leave the house with the oven on. (Yes, I’m guilty of that, too.)

If you’re wondering why I’m thinking about fire safety, it’s because of Liberty Mutual’s Be Fire Smart campaign.

Skin MD Natural + SPF15 lotion - daily sun protection for dry skin

Yesterday, I wrote about how Colorado’s dry climate affects your skin. It’s also very sunny here and since Coloradans live and play at a mile high up (or more in the mountains), it’s a must to use sunscreen on a daily basis.

But you don’t want to wear greasy sunscreen on your face and under your clothes, right? Yuck! That’s why a product like Skin MD Natural + SPF15 is so great. It’s a shielding lotion, which helps prevent damage by bonding with your skin and not allowing irritating substances to penetrate it. Since Skin MD also has sunscreen, it absorbs the part of UV spectrum that contributes to premature skin aging and development of skin cancer.

That’s all very well and good, but it’s winter and you don’t need sunscreen, right? Wrong! Look at your grandma’s or grandpa’s hands. What’s the first thing you notice? Age spots, which is just another phrase for sun damage. By using a product like Skin MD Natural + SPF15 year round, you can keep damaging sun radiation away from your skin so that it looks youthful and healthy.

Vaseline Intensive Rescue Clinical Therapy Lotion - Great Stuff!

I live in Colorado, notorious for its dryness and the number it does on your skin. It’s so dry that I wake up in the middle of the night from my hands feeling like the skin is shrinking on them. It’s so bad that I have to get up and apply lotion. I’ve had bouts of hand eczema and cracking skin, too, and am always on the search for new creams.

So when Family Review Network asked me to try out Vaseline’s new Vaseline Intensive Rescue Clinical Therapy, clinically proven to be 60% more moisturizing than a prescription lotion, I had to try it. At $6-7 a bottle, it’s much more affordable than the other hand lotions and creams I used.