Bread, Wine, Salt

The frozen blueberry makes regular appearances on the four-year-old's breakfast dish. Oatmeal and plain yogurt, both breakfast staples, are almost always topped with frozen blueberries, and if breakfast isn't quite ready yet, a bowl of frozen blueberries is requested as an appetizer. Naturally, blueberry pancakes are quite popular around here. (The blueberries are on the bottom, waiting to surprise you with their juicy deliciousness.) This is a very thick batter, so the pancakes will take a bit longer to cook than you may be used to, and don't expect popping bubbles to tell you when they're ready to flip. Just keep an eye on the sides, and don't cook them too hot. By the time I get to the second round I generally have my skillet on the lowest setting. (My stove-top runs a tiny bit hot, so aim for medium-low and adjust as necessary.) Blueberry Yogurt Pancakes yields ~16 4” pancakes 1/3 cup butter 12 ounces (about 3 cups) white whole wheat flour 3 teasp...

I don't have many hard and fast rules for feeding my children. Kids are all different and they keep changing and you just don't know what's going to happen from one meal to the next. One rule I do keep is this: if your four year old, who has been rejecting broccoli out of hand for three years, suddenly agrees to eat the trees of a broccoli forest so long as you make some carrot people to go with it, then you make that child a broccoli forest with carrot people in it. As you can see, the carrot people are very tall, so we dubbed them carrot giants, which is fitting since the four-year-old has been talking about giants a lot recently. The four-year-old not only ate his carrot giants and broccoli trees, but announced that he would like to eat broccoli “more times than this.” Whee! This is a slight variation on Mollie Katzen's “Enchanted Broccoli Forest” recipe from the book of the same name. You can buy it new, find it in a used bookstore, or do what I did, and ...

...and anyone else who needs a fast, hearty breakfast. We all have days when we don't have time to sit down and eat a bowl of oatmeal. I used to have them all the time, days when all I had time for was an apple in the car, but needed more than an apple to keep me upright until lunch. This stuffed apple was one of my grab and go breakfasts back then, or I'd wrap it up and eat it for lunch on the days when I didn't have time to pack something balanced. The peanut-butter provided a kick of protein and good fats. The dried fruit provided a bit of sweetness and chew. And the apple provided crunch, fiber, juiciness and clean hands. It's a simple and versatile meal. Just slice the apple in half and use a pairing knife, grapefruit spoon or melon-baller to carve out the seeds, stem and flower, then fill with peanut-butter and dried cranberries as above. Or use raisins, chopped dried apricots, currants, dried blueberries, dried cherries. Swap out the peanut-butte...

What do you think of when you think of oatmeal? It is sweet powdery packets mixed with boiling water, or microwaved with milk? Is it flakes cooked to thin paste on the stovetop? (Was that leading the witness?) Is it nutty, chewy wholesome steel-cut oats, finished with butter and a bit of honey, or some dried fruit? (That was definitely leading the witness.) If oatmeal makes you think of peaches and cream packets or those flakes, I humbly suggest you try the other kind. It's possible you're intimidated by it. It takes too long. It's more expensive than the flakes. You don't own a spurtle . Now, I am not an oatmeal expert. I was born in Texas, not Scotland or Ireland, and the portions of my family that were from those lovely oat-filled places moved to the mid-West of the United States and assimilated long before I was born. But I do know that not only are steel-cut oats better for you than the packets (which are really no better nutritionally than cold c...

I had to assemble enough food to hold a toddler through lunch.  It had to keep at room temperature and all fit inside one container since I am the queen of losing container parts. The wrap on the top is whole wheat with avocado inside, and the foil packet on the bottom is a peanut butter and jelly wrap which I kept isolated because I didn't know what the allergy situation was at the sitter's house today. The container is a Ziploc from Target.  I like these a lot. I present it here as part of " What's For Lunch" Wednesday. "  It's pretty typical of what goes into a packed lunch for the small folks around here, though if I were going to show you a truly typical lunch there would be mini-ravioli and mixed veggies in there.  Maybe next week.  If you have to feed small kids, or if you have to feed yourself lunch on a regular basis I recommend checking out the adorable lunches over there.  Some of them are super-simple and much, much cuter than mine.

Last week I attended a board meeting for a proposed public charter school in my neighborhood. It was quite an education, as was the chatter on the mailing list in the days that followed. The discussions had me thinking about the purpose of public education, and the importance of adding a good school to the system, even if the neighborhood school is already good. I have a lot to say on the subject, but I don't have my thoughts on schools in particular all sorted out.  So here's a piece from my personal archives (an old blog now locked away) that touches on many of the same issues. originally published 14 September 2006 Last Friday, All Things Considered offered up this commentary by Bill Harley on the budget of his small town, and how voters choose to spend their money. He focuses on the library. His thesis is that if libraries didn't already exist, we wouldn't be able to get them started now. No one would agree to pay more taxes so they could share books. Book p...

Chocolate Pie Not that unproductive is always a bad thing, mind you. I was out of town for the weekend, and without phone, internet or television. I didn't even have a chance to work in a kitchen. (I would have been baking communion bread, but there was a communication breakdown and I didn't know my services were needed. We used leftover dinner rolls instead.) I was going to bring my laptop and work on a buff and polish of an old essay from my personal archives to share with you, but I brought my sewing machine with me instead. I am more fluent with words than with thread, and my time might have been better spent at the keyboard, but I had a project that needed to be finished. (It's not finished. I keep running into problems. I'm tempted to blame the machine, but it's probably me.) So instead of something new and thought provoking I offer this, my most viewed picture on Flickr. If you Google "chocolate pie recipe" and look at images it...

On Saturday we made our annual pilgrimage to the nearest set of mountains to buy apples and pumpkins from people who have real orchards and real pumpkin patches and then have a picnic and walk in the woods. It was a gorgeous day and the woods were just right. The trail we always walk is quite short, chosen years ago by my father because it had the virtues of parking spaces, picnic tables, proper toilets and some history which could be learned, along with some ecology, via the self-guided tour sheet that is found in a little box at the trailhead. Frankly, I'm not sure how a single walk in the woods could better describe my father's requirements for a family trip. The guided tour has not changed since I was a little girl. And when the tour is relaying the history of the family who lived in those woods there isn't much in need of change. But the ecology of that little piece of woodlands has changed quite a bit in the quarter century that I've known them. The wo...

When the weather starts to turn in Autumn, I like things that are warm, and warming. I love making soup. Normally, when I say I'm making soup I mean a specific vegetable soup that requires a full afternoon of puttering around the house and occasionally tending the soup. There isn't always time for that. So I make other soups. This one has the virtue of being simple and fairly quick, assuming you have average knife skills and you know vaguely where things are in your kitchen. (I just barely meet those qualifications.) And what says Fall better than pumpkin? It's also smooth and creamy and comforting. The smooth does require blending. I use an immersion blender, which you really should put on your wish list if you don't have one, but you can use whatever soup blending technology you have available. A note on spice mixes: People Who Are Very Into Food will tell you that pre-made spice mixes are evil and you should toast and grind your own spices. And they...

There's been a lot of press about bullies lately, and the children and young adults who suffer from bullying. Sometimes we don't call the perpetrators bullies. We call them bigots, especially when the people being bullied are homosexual. Those young men weren't being bullied just because they were gay, they were being bullied because they were reduced to a single word. In the case of suicides that have been getting press recently, the word was “gay” (or maybe one of the other less attractive words for the same thing.) But the word can be different. It can be “geek” or “skinny” or “ugly” or “stupid.” When we reduce a person to a single word we dehumanize them. “Ugly” isn't a person, and “Gay” isn't a person and so it's okay to treat them as less than human. (As an aside, sometimes that word is “girl” in which a person is reduced to a word describing her gender and is therefore not interesting as anything other than the sum of her body parts as use...

The point of frying slices of green tomatoes in a cornmeal crust is to make use of a foodstuff that would otherwise go to waste. At the end of the growing season, whenever that is for you, the green tomatoes that remain on your tomato plant aren't going to get ripe. You can surrender to it, and let the tomato rot in your compost, but then you wouldn't get to eat fried green tomatoes, and that would be a shame. Green tomatoes are astringent little things, almost as crisp as an apple and that really makes them perfect for frying. The heat softens them, and the astringency cuts through the fat flavor of the crust. Plus, they're simple. The only trick is to pick the tomatoes when they're truly green. If they've started to ripen and soften they'll loose some of their punch. Not that they won't taste good when dipped in cornmeal and fried, just that they won't be fried green tomatoes. Most frying recipes recommend that you remove your food from...

Everyone deserves homemade birthday cake. It ought to be right there with life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness. (Although maybe they assumed that birthday cake was covered by the happiness bit.) This means that you (Yes, you! Okay, maybe me.) might need to get over a few things, like your doubt about your cake decorating ability. A homemade birthday cake does not need to look like it came from Charm City Cakes . If you made it with a good recipe and good ingredients and love for the recipient, it will be good, and maybe no one will fall to their knees and beg you to make their birthday cake, swearing that money is no object. But something better might happen. Someone might know that you put time and love into the cake, and they might feel loved. How cool would that be? It's also possible that someone might declare your cake one of the few that is worth the calories, which given the caloric content of cake is really quite a statement. The birthday boy wanted ...

This is a quickie with no pictures, but two (2!) complete recipes. I'm going to go ahead and assume that you know what vanilla ice cream looks like. And now you're thinking about ice cream, aren't you? Maybe it's a cone from the shop in town, or something on a stick from the truck, or soft serve from the college cafeteria? Is there chocolate sauce? A cherry on top? Can you feel that dribble on your chin? Need a napkin? I love ice cream. It is my favorite dessert. If I had to I would give up cake and pie and crumbles and all that in order to keep ice cream in my life. (Note: perfectly ripe fruit is not dessert. It is fruit, and it is a wonderful, wonderful thing. I'm not offering to give up perfect blackberries here. I will even put them on my ice cream.) My brilliant, gorgeous sisters-in-law gave me an ice cream maker for my last birthday. That this is like giving a spoon and a lighter to a drug-addict is neither here nor there. Now I have...

One of the obligatory foodie magazine articles (they're a on three year cycle) decries the horror of pasta salad and proceeds to spend 3 pages deconstructing the pasta salad so that they can rebuild it into a stronger, better, faster bionic pasta salad that will amaze your friends and change your mind about pasta salad forever, provided, of course, that you follow their recipe exactly. Quick, dash to the store for feta and endive! Some times you plan your potluck contribution carefully and you have time to buy smoked truffle oil and champagne vinegar. Sometimes you forget about the potluck until that afternoon and you have to wing it. The key to winging it is having a pantry with things in it that you bought because you never know when you might have to wing it. For this salad it was a can of white beans, a can of black beans and a box of pretty colored pasta shells. I am forever buying dried pasta that has an interesting shape or color. It's a habit I recommend....