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Wednesday, September 1, 2010

Easy Peasy Lunch

I pack my kids lunch every day. And my oldest girl has carried a lunch with her since she started daycare at 14 months old, so its been quite a few lunches now! I have run into several lunch time dilemmas and here is how I solved them. First of all, remember to pack the lunch the night before, make sure you have lunch items on your weekly shopping list, and always look to see what comes back untouched from the kid's lunch box. No sense in packing something your kid won't eat, right?

1. Out of bread

Send in peanut butter crackers as a change from the usual PB and J. These can be made on many types of crackers including graham crackers, saltines, Ritz or even smear a bit of peanut butter on a rice cake! Other "non-sandwich" sandwich options include rolling peanut butter, jelly and banana in a tortilla, sending in a generous slice of banana bread (w/ or w/o a nut butter of some sort). You can always forgo PB and J completely by sending in sandwich meat rolled in lettuce leaves or cheese or both. Simply lay out a slice of sandwich meat, layer a slice of cheese (my kids like provolone) and roll up. I stash these in a reusable sandwich container. One time I started a "trend" at my daughter's school by smearing peanut butter on a hot-dog bun and putting a whole peeled banana on the bun. I called it, "Monkey Hotdog" and all of her little friends quickly followed suit.

2. Can't find the Ice-pack

It is hard to keep the contents of the lunchbox fresh and cold without the little ice packs that many lunch boxes come with, isn't it? I have used double baggied bags of ice, frozen her juice box the night before (it thaws by lunchtime) or even resurected old teethers from the back of the freezer and sent those in as well. Do you have a re-freezable "boo-boo" bunny? He has served as a lunch time ice-pack on more than one occasion here!

3. Out of Juice Boxes

I have packed water bottles, small sippy cups of our own juice (cheaper too) and when she was "too old" for sippy cups, I bought her a sports bottle we could fill at home. I hardly ever buy a true juice box anymore. Refillable containers are cheaper and create less waste. If all else fails your child can usually buy milk or water at school too!

4. What side dishes?

Baby carrots or small broccoli florets, with a separate container for ranch dressing, cheese sticks, small boxes or baggies of raisins, bags of granola, frozen grapes (help keep lunch cold too), a banana, cherry and grape tomatoes, slices of salted cucumber (also great with ranch dressing), whole wheat crackers, small container of cottage cheese. I sometimes send in a small baggie of potato or corn chips, just for fun. Everything in moderation, even moderation!

5. Dessert?!

To be honest, I love, love, love dessert and it is something we have at home quite a bit, but at my daughters' school they often have cookies for an after school snack, so I usually don't pack anything sweet in her lunch. But after Halloween (for several weeks) I put one small candy per day in her lunch box, or sometimes homemade oatmeal or peanut butter cookies (I'd send chocolate chips, but sometimes the chocolate melts). A piece of fruit is usually all my girls need, but sometimes we get them jello or pudding cups too. Don't stress this one!

6. My kid won't eat sandwiches at all!

Well, mine sometimes doesn't either. I have been known to send in greek style vanilla yogurt with some granola as a "main dish" or some cheese sticks and assorted fruits. My kid has taken a green salad with cubed chicken on top, soup in a thermos, trail mix (included cheerios, peanuts, raisins, sunflower seeds, and a few M&M's) cottage cheese and fruit, cold, cut up chicken strips, Babybel cheese and carrot sticks, and even a lunch called "Make your own Lunchable" where I cut up lunch meat and cheeses into little circles and let her eat those with Ritz crackers. Just make sure they get an opportunity to eat some protein, carbs and fat in every meal and that they have plenty to drink and your kid will have the energy to get through the day!

Monday, August 16, 2010

French Onion Soup "recipe"

It really is more like a french onion soup "technique" than anything.

Here's what you'll need:
Onions (if possible different varieties)
vegetable oil
butter
salt
pepper
broth (chicken, beef or veggie or combo)
garlic
marjoram

Heat oil in a stock pot over medium hugh heat. Cut onions into halves and then cut halves into thin strips. Put the onions in the oil with 1 TB (more or less) of butter. Salt and pepper generously and cook over medium heat stirring often until onions begin to brown. After 25 minutes or so (you may need to reduce heat) onions should be taking on a lovely brown color and be mostly softened and lovely smelling. Add 1 tsp or so of marjoram, stir. Add some chopped fine garlic and cook for maybe 3-5 minutes longer. Then simply deglaze the pan with some broth, scraping the bottom of the pan with a wooden spoon to get up any browned bits. Then add more broth to make soup. Simmer for 15 minutes. Serve by ladling into oven proof bowl, topping with hearty bread and cheese and broiling until cheese is brown and bubbly.

Okay amounts, right? How much broth? How many onions? I'd say six medium onions to a quart container of broth should do it. The onions get pretty small after cooking so add broth till you achieve your preferred onion to broth ratio! I usually use whatever homemade broths I have on hand be they chicken beef or vegetable, and if I don;t have enough of one I will add some of the other. The flavors meld in a nice way during the simmering phase.

My get up and go just got up and went

Motivation. This is what I lack. I think I am going to be glad when my oldest returns to regular school this fall. Homeschooling was fun and educational for both of us and I am glad we did it, but the structure of the school year helps me focus and that in turn gives me better motivation.

Also, she will be glad to have Mommy be Mommy and Teacher be teacher. I think having me be both ended up stressing her out.

Things I have to do this week:

*Clean dining room
*Sweep and Mop floors
*Issue invitations for Sunday night dinner
*Plan and prep Sunday night (Back to school) dinner

WISH ME LUCK!!!

Thursday, August 5, 2010

Stress cleaning

My great grandmother died this summer... just two weeks ago actually. There was a flurry of panicked trips back and forth from my home 5 hours away from her home. I managed to get there in time and say good-bye. Today, I got some bad news about a friend, it was sudden, completely unexpected. He leaves behind 2 daughters and a loving wife. They live several states away, so I am not headed there yet, but I probably will be soon. Today I am going to get in the kitchen and clean the hell out of it. It needs to be done yes, but I need to be doing something and there is nothing I can do for my friend right now. So I am going to clean and I am going to pray.

So if you want to walk this through with me, here is the game plan.

• Load and unload dishwasher until all dishes are done.

• Put away everything on the countertops,.

• Wipe down countertops with borax and water.

• Sweep floor.

• Mop floor.

• Put down area rugs.

• Sort through all of the papers/odds and ends on the fridge. Toss expired coupons and the like.

• Wipe down all appliances.

• Wipe exterior of cabinet doors.

• Put away food.

• Clean out refrigerator.

Thursday, July 1, 2010

Waste not, want not

I have been dying to get back here and write some long and involved bit of culinary wisdom, or some funny anecdote about my life as a Mom, daughter, volunteer, sex kitten (part-time), domestic engineer. But the actual Moming, daughtering, volunteering, sex-kitten thing got in the way. I'd like to say my duties as a domestic engineer got in the way too, but frankly, you'd just have to look at my house to know that ain't true.

Ahem.

So today I am going to write about something near and dear to my heart recently and that is making sure you do not waste food. Food is a pretty big part of my limited budget and nothing irks me more than having to throw away my hard earned money with food that has gone past its prime.

The biggest things that go bad for me are fruits and vegetables. I have very little time to write today, so this post will focus on the vegetables and the next one will be about fruit. *Note: I have never had any ice cream go bad.

My best tips for preventing food waste are:

• Make a list, not only of what you need to buy, but also how you are going to use it. So you need to make a menu for the week, noting what side dishes you are making to go with what. Try to use your most perishable veggies first, but be flexible, if that broccoli is starting to "bloom" early (it develops a yellow color) then use it up quick.

• Make substitutions. Tonight's dinner was going to be chicken and rice plus broccoli and squash, but oh look a tomato is going bad (Attack of the Killer Tomatoes bad!) and needs to be used up. Cut off the bad spot and chop it up into the rice side dish. Chopping it and adding salt helps break it down and by the time it has cooked with the rice it merely becomes a flavoring agent for the rice. Good times.

* Make soup/stock. I have a freezer full of old bones. No, I am not a serial killer with grisly trophies (but you know I totally would be on Criminal Minds). I just love to make stocks. I therefore have LABELLED ziploc freezer bags of chicken and beef bones and very occasionally fish bones and crustacean shells (shrimp and lobster mostly). Now to these animal parts one must add vegetables. Do you have wilted celery? Put it in the freezer. When you cut off the tops of the onion, put it, skin and all into the freezer, more garlic than you can use all at one time? It freezes beautifully. Very pungent vegetables, like broccoli or asparagus get frozen in separate bags also LABELLED for use in what I call the "Great Green Soup" (featured elsewhere on the site, keyword green soup).

* Make a meal of them. If you find yourself, late in the week with a bevy of quickly aging produce, make fajitas or stir-fry or even a casserole or two. Cook finely shredded carrots into a tomato sauce, chop zucchini into zucchini bread, roast an entire pan of assorted vegetables with sea salt and olive oil.

* Make a rescue attempt. Sad, wilted greens can be briefly revived using the scientific principle of turgor pressure. Basically those lettuce leaves have dried out in your refrigerator. Give them a brief rinse and set them stalks down in a large container of ice water that you have dosed with a liberal slug of white vinegar. They will be perky and presentable in 20 minutes or less. Then spin dry or pat dry the leaves and serve yourself a great big salad that night.

* Make compost. Sometimes despite our best efforts, stuff goes bad. Return it to the earth by starting a simple compost pile. I had one on my balcony that was completely contained in a large rubbermaid tote. Besides vegetable matter I added egg shells and coffee grounds, plant clippings, shredded newspapers, paper towels, grass cuttings and the like. I was rewarded with dark rich compost for my container garden. You can also google search for how to start your own "vermiculture" composter (worms) and something intriguing I read about called a "bokashi" bucket.

Vegetables are cheap and abundant this time of year, so take advantage and buy up your summer favorites. This summer I am going to be investigating some home canning options, (yay strawberry jam!) and maybe even parching my own sweet corn. Wish me luck and I will keep you posted.

Sunday, April 11, 2010

Broth : A Primer

So my daughter decided to be a vegetarian this week. We naturally eat a lot of vegetarian food, sometimes by accident and sometimes be design (e.g. "oops I forgot to defrost something" or many times during Lent.) Vegetarianism is not an everyday thing here though. Today my limited options (needed to go to the grocery store but couldn't due to baby's nap schedule) led me to ask Darling Girl if she wanted soup or macaroni and cheese for lunch. She said, "Soup please."

This required some thought. Seeing as Darling Girl is only 7 years old I could have made her some soup with my packages of free-range organic chicken broth, she would never have known. But I decided to make a vegetable broth and stick to the spirit of this experiment. When I chop the ends off of a carrot, I stick the ends in a plastic bag that lives in the freezer, same things with the tops off of onions, or the ends off of celery. I don't keep discards from cabbage, cauliflower or broccoli as these flavors would not suit most broths. I moved recently so my usual hoard of frozen soup veggies was sadly lacking. All I could roust out of the recesses of its frosty heart were some tough ends of asparagus, half a carrot, two parsnips, a couple of onion tops and a pint sized yogurt container of mushroom water. Here's the thing, when I am paying exorbitant rates for CSA organic vegetables, I want to get my money's worth. When you bend and snap an asparagus to remove the woody parts you lose quite a bit of what you paid for. However boiled in water, they add lovely additional flavor to asparagus soups. I had been hesitant to try them in a general vegetable broth, but now I really had no choice. And mushroom water is simply what you get when you rehydrate dried mushrooms, like porcini. You freeze the steeping water and use it to give a wonderful layer of flavor. It isn't excessively "shroomy" but adds richness.

I put everything in the stock pot with an additional fresh onion (quartered), a bay leaf, 2 cloves of smashed garlic and some salt and pepper. I used enough water to cover everything and let it all come to a boil. I reduced it to a simmer after a few minutes and let it go for an additional 30 minutes. After everything cooks together nicely, you just strain out the veggies and retain your lovely broth.

I made a soup today (recipe follows) but you could freeze the broth in quart sized baggies (after it has cooled) or even in ice cube trays, because there are myriad uses for broth. Bullet points!

* use broth instead of water for rice
* broth added to mashed potatoes for flavor/fluffiness
* a cube of broth to deglaze a pan
* make/thin gravy
* add a bit of broth over top of rice before reheating to prevent drying out
* use as a base for some sauces
* cook pasta in broth
* make soups/stews
* steam vegetables

The pasta in broth is an absolute gimme, just cook the pasta as normal in the broth, drain, toss with butter and top with parmesan cheese and voila an easy week night side dish.

Today's soup was adapted from The Complete Italian Vegetarian Cookbook by Jack Bishop. The title of this post is a link that will take you to Amazon to buy this wonderful resource or to learn more about it.

Pasta and Black Bean Soup with Garlic and Rosemary

Extra Virgin Olive Oil
4 garlic cloves, minced
2 tsp minced dried rosemary (there abouts, I didn't measure.)
1 14.5 oz can of diced tomatoes, drained
salt and freshly ground pepper
7 C of vegetable stock (see above)
6 oz of small pasta (I used elbow macaroni)
4 C of cooked black beans

Heat the oil in stockpot, add the garlic and rosemary and sauté until fragrant. Add the tomatoes and lotsa salt and pepper. Simmer till soft. Add the stock, simmer for 5 minutes. Add the pasta and cook according to package directions, add your cooked beans in the last couple of minutes of cooking time. Portion out into bowls and drizzle tops with jarred pesto or a sprinkle of real parmesan cheese.

Hints and tips: I chopped the garlic and the rosemary at the same time on the board. I sprinkled both with salt, it helps break it all up. In the future, even though the pasta was delicious cooked in the soup, I might cook it separately in the future and add it to the individual bowls, if you are going to have leftovers (and this makes a lot of soup) then pasta doesn't do that well leftover in soup, it can get mushy and swollen! I ended up storing the broth separate from the solid ingredients of the soup in the fridge. This soup, served with a salad and a crusty loaf of bread would be a perfect dinner.

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

A Moving Experience

I recently moved from one house to another. From a three level house to a one level, from a great big kitchen to an itty-bitty kitchen, from 2 big bed rooms to three medium sized bed rooms, from 2 and half baths to 2.

We have driven CARLOADS of stuff to the Salvation Army, I have taken huge rubbermaid totes of toys and construction paper to the local preschool. We had a gigantic garage sale on Saturday and Sunday. People took so much stuff away. They bought things I was planning on throwing away! I sold an empty box that used to hold stationery for a dollar.

Last night hubby and I cleaned out the last of the debris and detritus of a mostly empty house. We found another load of stuff for the Salvation army, a few boxes for the Domestic abuse shelter, and another box for the school. We threw out several cardboard boxes last night, 2 huge contractor's bags of garbage, and three 40 gallon trash cans FULL of trash. It actually was breaking my heart.

I try so hard to recycle and give leftovers to charity and honestly I don't buy a lot of stuff. I feel like I am undermined by a wonderful, but frankly, more materialistic husband, loving but over-gifting grandparents and a culture that cannot conceive of a simple children's party without freaking gift-bags. I am not a paragon of virtue when it comes to "Ooh, shiny!" but I need to do better and inspire my family to do better.

Because as much as I need to organize, the best way to have a clutter-free life is to not have clutter in the first place!

What are your tips, tricks, ideas for living more simply?