Fix Me A Snack

Once or twice a year I am overcome by a mounting sense of desperation over what to feed my family. I just start coming up blank more often than I’d like. (I probably should just be keeping a dinner journal to help myself remember what has and hasn’t worked. That would be a good idea. It would be fun to use a 5-year journal.)

Last Spring I bought a copy of The Family Dinner while I was looking for answers. I ended up getting a lot more than I hoped for. While the recipes are great, I hadn’t counted on such a serious dose of inspiration and guidance for staging family dinner.

Family dinner sounds easy. Make dinner. Eat together. But the book opened up a new world of possibilities to me. We’ve always actively avoided after-school activities that cut into the dinner hour. But we still needed an extra push to make family dinner a strong part of our family’s routine where we would eat together but also linger afterwards. The book showed me how it’s done. It reminded me how inspired parenting and building a family can be. Along with her own examples, David shares stories from the likes of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Mario Batali about what their family dinners were like as children.

As a result of my reading the book, we started memorizing poems by Robert Louis Stevenson. Along with the list of recommended reading from the book, we have some general and nature reference books. These are kept by our dinner table at arm’s length and have proved useful when my kids started asking crazy questions like “What is electricity?”.

When I first read the book I was on a mission to make family dinner happen every night of the week. Now I just go with the flow and am happy if it happens more nights than not. We’ve become slackers in the poem memorizing department too. But the bottom line is that the book has had a huge impact on the health and happiness of my family. We’ve started building memories at the dinner table. Hats off to Laurie David and Kirstin Uhrenholdt!

Honey Salad is my new favorite way to use up Thanksgiving turkey leftovers. My youngest loves it because most of it is her favorite food color, white and beige, and the dressing is sweet.

Honey Salad Recipe

This salad is great sprinkled with chopped honey roasted pecans, if you have any handy. My kids refuse the addition. But, personally, I’m a big fan.

For the dressing:
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 tablespoons honey
1 1/2 tablespoons dijon mustard

For the salad:
2 medium apples, peeled, cored, and chopped
3/4 cup chopped sharp cheddar cheese
1 heaping cup chopped cooked turkey
1 tablespoon raisins (optional)

In a small bowl, whisk together the olive oil, honey, and mustard until well combined. Set aside.

In a medium bowl, toss together the apple, cheese, turkey, and raisins (if desired). Pour on the dressing and toss to coat. Serve immediately.

Yield: 2 1/2 cups
Prep-time: 15 minutes

It arrived a month late, but all is forgiven now that we’ve finally had our first egg from our hens.

I think I was feeding the hens too many of our kitchen scraps and they weren’t getting enough protein to produce eggs. A few weeks ago I cut the scraps way down. But I had still pretty much given up hope. The days are getting shorter here and supposedly output usually decreases during the winter.

But enough with the boring details….we have a hen that laid an egg! We’ve been feeding and tending these birds for months and months. The egg’s arrival feels miraculous.

No word from the hens (we’re down to only two from the original six – long story) yet as to which one of them finally stepped up to the plate. Regardless, one of them gave us a lovely egg. My taste buds were most likely clouded by the fact that the egg was from hens we had raised, but I’ve gotta say it was mighty tasty. (Don’t think I’m terrible and didn’t share it with my family, we all had a bite.)

The shell was thick which is nice. Thin shells bother me. It was a bit speckled which I’m chalking up to first time jitters. The yolk wasn’t as dark as I’d like. I’ll try throwing them some fresh parsley and see if that does the trick.

If you’ve got any other tips for me, please share them in the comments below. As you can probably already tell, I need all the help I can get.

Do you sometimes peek into other peoples’ shopping carts at the supermarket? Kathleen Flinn, a recent graduate of the Cordon Bleu,  took shopping cart voyeurism to the next level when she cornered a woman because her cart was full of highly processed foods. Before you knew it they were hanging out with the supermarket’s butcher learning how to cut up a whole chicken.

Flinn’s book about her ensuing experiences is called Kitchen Counter Cooking School: How a Few Simple Lessons Transformed Nine Culinary Novices into Fearless Home Cooks. This book chronicles her quest to heal the disconnect between people’s desire to eat well and their inability to function comfortably in a kitchen.

Apparently, some folks are two generations removed from anyone who regularly put a home-cooked meal on the table and they don’t have the time to teach themselves. Basically, it doesn’t do one much good to read The Omnivore’s Dilemma if you don’t know how to peel and chop an onion.

Inspired by her supermarket encounter, Flinn gathered a group of volunteers interested in reclaiming their kitchens and thoughtfully guided them through a culinary education during which they mindfully tasted salt, learned how to hold a knife, and how to use flavor profiles to make meals on the fly among many other things. Recipes related to specific lessons are included at the end of each chapter.

Kitchen fundamentals like how to prepare a roast chicken, cook vegetables, and make a cake from scratch are the kind of things we should be teaching our children so that the next generation won’t be so useless in the kitchen. There were plenty of moments in this book when I was shaking my head and made a mental note to be sure that my kids know how to cope in the kitchen when they grow up. Flinn’s students colorfully illustrated how much of a hole can be created in people’s lives in the long term if they can’t perform an act as basic as being able to properly feed themselves and their families.

I’ve made Flinn’s adaptation of No Knead Bread about fifteen times already. I used to pay $5 for fancy artisan bread boules. Now I make them myself and they cost us about 60 cents a pop. I love them.

Thanks to the folks at Viking, I’ve got a giveaway copy of Kitchen Counter Cooking School for you today.  All you have to do is enter a comment below and tell me who taught you how to cook? (if anybody) and I’ll use one of those random number pickers to select the winner. Comments will close on October 7, 2011 at 7pm.

Update – October 7, 2011: And the winner is Staci Rae! Thanks to everyone for your comments. I love hearing from you.

Excuse the lack of a snack recipe. Too hot to snack these days. I have a bunch of stuff in the hopper, but I don’t even feel like looking at pictures of food right now. Insects, oddly, seem much safer.

Here are a couple caterpillars we stumbled across recently.

This white fuzz ball is an American Dagger Moth. At least that’s our best guess. It’s in the fetal position here. Not having the best day apparently.

This green one below is a Red-Lined Panopoda Moth.

And here’s the icing on the cake, the first walking stick any of us have ever seen in the wild. Apparently, these can be kept as pets. But since it hardly moved for 10 minutes while I was taking photos, I’m sure the kids would be bored with it in about 3 seconds.

This one’s missing a leg. It got around just fine though. Cool little bugger.

And while we’re on the subject, here’s a giant millipead we found by our front door a while ago. Whenever we find them in the wood pile we get to harass my husband a wee bit because they turn out to be one of the few things in this world that completely freak him out. You think you know a guy…

I said the walking stick was the icing on the cake, but this Luna moth probably has it beat. At least ten of them showed up around our house on May 30th. There must have been a female nearby sending out her oh-so-magical pheromones. The males where thrashing around like crazy and crashing into all our outdoor lights. They were so beautiful when they finally took a rest. I took at least 8,000 pictures.

Did you know that these guys have no mouths? They live for about a week, mate if they’re lucky, and die. It’s so baffling yet marvelous.

I really hope they come again next year.

On a recent afternoon I heard, “Mama, can I have a Hershey Kiss?”

More often than not lately, I’ve been giving her a thumbs up. What harm can it do? But this time, more out of crankiness than anything else, I denied her request. I’ve been slacking lately. The junk has been creeping into our diet with increasing regularity.

My girl’s response was not a happy one to say the least. I dreaded having to listen to her protests.  But the pestering for sugar has gotten out of hand. And her diet has been dominated by beige foods for the past week or so. Instead of gently and lovingly parenting her back into a place of health and well-being, I quickly reached into the crisper drawer and dug out a neglected bag of carrots.

Despite her extreme displeasure with my decision, she was happily munching on carrots 10 minutes later. She’s not one to let go of a fight so easily. It seems that hunger got the best of her. And she actually ate a colorful food! Lots of it actually.

At dinner I was a lot more relaxed about her eating. The carrots had injected some much needed variety into the kid’s diet and there wasn’t as much pressure to make sure she consumed something resembling a square meal. I realized that I really missed being able to relax at the dinner table. The confrontation was worth it.

I guess my point is that even when you’re writing a flipin’ blog about healthy snacks for children, you’re not always bringing your A game. My new life rule is to stop buying little chocolate treats the minute they become routine or anyone in the family seems to be leaning a little too hard on the stash. After some moderately painful readjustments the family will see the light of day. And as long as there’s some fresh produce in the house, everything’s going to be okay!

A friend, I mean a real non-internet friend who I actually hang out with and talk about everything other than kids and eating, just asked me what the heck to buy for lunch boxes this year. I’ve been wondering lately too. The clock is ticking and school’s gonna be here before we know it.

First off, I’ve been thinking seriously of buying these cute little eco lunch boxes ever since I saw them mentioned on Burwell General Store.

But I think I’m going to take a leap and get this little jobbie instead. I’ve always wanted one of these. And as long as my kid doesn’t kick it across the playground after lunch, it should last forever! My practical side likes this one because it’ll be easy to clean and has a handle. At Amazon the price is $24.99.

And if all you’re looking for are containers these boxes from Lunch Bots look perfect. I might actually pick up some of these once my cheapo Ikea tupperware gives out, which should be any day now.

I have to admit, that I do have a couple of these dip containers still kicking around from last year. The kids love apples and carmel or carrots with yogurt dip. So I’m sure they’ll be pulled into service again. A good tip is to freeze any dip that may spoil in the inner well overnight and then pop the rest of the snack in in the morning. I usually see these at the grocery store or Target this time of year.

As you can tell, I’m trying to be done with plastic as much as I can. I deeply hate cleaning out the creases in insulted lunch boxes after all sorts of juices and food bits have been stewing in there all day. My kids’ food may stay cooler in an insulated lunch box, but its also living in close quarters with giant germ colonies. I’m psyched to give stainless steel a try this year.

BTW, Amazon isn’t giving me any kick backs for any of these links. It’s just the easiest place I’ve found to buy all this stuff. Let me know in the comments below if you’ve used anything like these products and what you thought. Or add a mention of your own lunch box favorite. Educate me!

Thanks!

One of my first and clearest memories is running around my house with my friends during my fifth birthday party. Therefore, with both of my kids, I felt a bit of extra pressure to make extra sure that we had a super cool fifth birthday party. Unfortunately, I always seem to forget that all the kids want is to play with their friends and drown themselves in frosting.

This year I didn’t have as much time on my hands as I usually do. We had recently moved their were many boxes still waiting to be unpacked. And to further distract me, we had a guest who is allergic to nuts. At first I thought it would be no problem to keep things safe for him. But if you spend enough time reading ingredient labels and worrying about whether or not your mixing bowls are clean, you start to get a little loopy. Lucky for me, the child’s mother was a real rock star helping me through the menu and responding to all the crazy little questions that came up at the last minute.

What I’m getting at is that the move and a guest’s dietary needs helped to keep me in check and compared to the some of the super high-stress, non-stop, cram-it-all-in parties I’ve planned, I was downright lazy. And you know what? I think it was the best party we’ve ever had.

I’ve made a list of tips to remind myself how to throw a non-crazy kid’s birthday party next time:

Keep the guest list short. We had a total of five kids, including my two girls.

Encourage any older kid(s) in your family to contribute heavily to the party’s decor. At the very least, make some tissue paper flowers together a few days before. Thank you Martha Stewart.

Steal cute and simple food ideas from genius bloggers.

Make exceedingly simple food and make of as much of it ahead of time as possible. We served crudities and deviled eggs as appetizers. Then the kids sat down to eat popcorn, fruit, and cheese strombolis before the cupcakes descended. More than one of the recipes came from The America’s Test Kitchen Family Cookbook which I love.

Keep activities and games to a minimum. We did a pinata and that’s it. The two hours flew by. Most of the time I was hanging out with the grown ups. The kids were running amok all over the house.

Have the kids decorate their own cupcakes! This saved me a ton of work. Best of all, it was the birthday girl’s idea. We stuck a candle in her creation and she could not have been more pleased.

Feel free to add your genius ideas for making kids’ birthday parties easier and more pleasant in the comments below. : )

The chicks are growing each day and their feathers are coming in in a hurry. They’re about of 3 weeks old now. I’ve doubled their living space by taping two boxes together and unintentionally provided them with a hurdle/roost to play around with. Aside from changing out their food and water twice a day and keeping their bedding clean, they require very little thought these days which is nice.

Well, we were supposed to be waiting until next year…

But you know how that goes. Hopefully, I’ll have more willpower when it comes to getting a dog. 

We have six Rhode Island Red chicks who are growing like wild fire. Here they are (above) at one week old fresh from the Tractor Supply Store.

And here they are at two weeks (above). Notice the wing and tail feathers already coming in!

Here are the reference books I’m using as guides.

But I still have very little idea what I’m doing. Anyone know of a rad website/blog that details raising chicks?? Right now I’m wondering how long they are going to be happy in a big box. They’re growing so quickly I just can’t picture them fitting in it a couple weeks from now.

But, luckily, so far, so good. If you’re thinking of raising some chicks, be warned that they produce a great deal of poop! It’s giving me flash backs to the days my kids were in diapers. I could share other details, but I’m such a novice I think I’ll just keep quiet for now. Fingers crossed.