When John Romano was younger his food allergies prompted him to research health and nutrition. Now that he’s the father of four girls — a 3-year-old and 4-month-old triplets — he and his wife, Kara, are taking feeding their charges pretty seriously. We visited Kara last week.
We make all our own bread. We buy the grain online at breadbeckers.com. There is hard wheat that needs yeast to rise and soft wheat, soft for baking stuff. We grind it here; you just pour the grain in the top [of the grinder] and it comes out ground for the bread. Pancakes, pumpkin muffins, tortillas, those are the main items that we make. For the tortillas we have a tortilla press.
We also use the juicer for carrot juice and apple juice, and we make our own baby food. We take organic fruits and vegetables, and steam them and freeze them in ice trays [and heat them up when it’s time to use them]. We also drink distilled water. We have a distiller in the garage.
We eat organic food for the most part. We have a book that tells us what the pesticide levels are for different foods, so bananas, for example — you can buy regular ones — but apples and other things it’s important to buy organic. It’s important to my husband and for children; they’re so small [that] a high pesticide level [affects them more] than adults.
I grew up on a farm and we had beef cattle and a garden, and we pretty much ate typical American food: beef and two vegetables every night. From his reading, John found that kids can’t digest [the most nutritious beef protein] until they’re 12, so for right now, Samantha [the 3-year-old] is on a vegetarian diet. She eats beans and pasta, lots of fruits and vegetables — we’ll see how long that lasts. And she doesn’t eat anything that has sugar in it.
People are coming here for Thanksgiving this year. I’ll do some, and everybody else will bring the rest. I have four kids — there’s not much time to do the whole dinner yourself. HS