Bread, Wine, Salt

While I'd like to say that the boys will eat anything you put in front of them, they won't, and none of us like mushrooms very much.  Apples, Fuji preferably, one boy prefers them sliced, the other whole. Red seedless grapes, only red, only seedless Pears Cheese pizza (boys), veggie pizza (grown ups) but not mushrooms, as noted above, and not green peppers, because cooked green peppers are gross and they make everything around them taste like cooked green peppers Anything in the black beans/ rice/ cheese genre  Fixings for grilled cheese (damn you, public school breakfasts, for introducing my child to American processed cheese food product) or peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. One child now eats pickle and lettuce sandwiches. Blueberries, but really only the frozen ones, preferably wild, because while my children are American cheese eaters, they do know that the smaller, wild blueberries are delicious, while large cutlivated blueberries are flavorless blobs ...

Muffins can be tricky business. They're great things to make fresh for breakfast, because they're small and bake quickly. On the other hand, they go from deliciously moist to dreadfully over-baked in the time it takes you to finish typing a status update.  Add in all the usual pitfalls of quick-breads and you really need a good recipe and good technique to make good muffins. It started with Christine's pumpkin bread recipe , which I stole shamelessly, because in cookery it's not stealing, it's sharing. It's a fine pumpkin bread recipe, not a thing wrong with it. But I have never been one to leave well enough alone. Perhaps because I don't want to feel like I'm making someone else's recipe, because I want to prove I'm a special baking snowflake who can fiddle with baking recipes. So I fiddled. And the first time it was all wrong. The bread was overly dense and a bit sad looking at the top. Multiple slightly sad, if still edible, attempts f...

In October of 1997 I was on a ferry from Calais, France to Dover, England.  From Dover my friend and I had a long train ride to the North of Scotland.  After a month of hostels and backpacks and European men with questionable intentions, my friend and I were still friends, but we did not have eight hours of conversation left in us. I needed a book. I picked two books from the duty-free gift shop on the Ferry, and read them both on the train. One was The Yellow Admiral by Patrick O'Brian, number 18 in a popular series featuring the brave, dashing sailor Jack Aubrey and his friend the naturalist and intelligence agent, Stephen Maturin. The eighteenth book is not the best place to jump into a story, but O'Brian and his publisher knew that, and the new reader is helped along with crucial bits of backstory, so I didn't have trouble following it. I've forgotten the other book I bought that day, but in the nearly 16 years since I first read The Yellow Admiral I've be...

In June we had house guests. Since the last time we'd seen them they converted to the paleo diet. (Short version: no grains, no dairy, no legumes, lots of meats, veggies, nuts, and fruits, limited raw honey, dark chocolate.) We had to feed them, while also feeding my older son who won't eat meat unless it's bacon. Almost as soon as they were gone I had vegetarian friends come over for a play date, and I had to feed them lunch. And then the next day my mostly vegetarian friend and her utterly carnivorous husband and son came for a visit and I had to feed them, too.  I say "had to feed them" as if it were a trauma, which is wasn't. I like feeding people. I say "had to" because they were in my home over mealtimes so I was required by the laws of hospitality to offer them sustenance. Basic hospitality also required that I provide food that was acceptable to them. Hospitality doesn't say anything about judging their dietary choices. Why they ea...

On Monday morning I got a call from a client, warning that my services would be needed soon. The threat of labor makes me pretty efficient. I filled and ran the dishwasher, cleaned the sink, took the boys grocery shopping, got the groceries put away, fed the boys lunch, emptied the dishwasher, made snack and dinner for the boys, filled the dogs' water, cleaned the dog' ears, and put the flowers in the vase. I spent the rest of Monday at the birth, watching a skilled nurse-midwife facilitate the VBAC my client wanted despite circumstances that might have sent some providers running for the operating room. It was a great birth, the baby was perfect and I'm glad I was there to witness it. But it meant that I didn't get to bed until 2:00 in the morning. When I say that I am a morning person, I do not mean 2:00 in the morning. A mere five hours later the sun was up and my children were up and my husband was getting ready to leave for work. I had a follow-up scheduled for...

My Husband is the very best of husbands and I wouldn't trade him for anything. He unloads the dishwasher, after all, a task I find tedious, and he never takes it personally when I completely rearrange things he has put in the dishwasher.  I don't like to complain, so we'll say that a feature of his unloading of the dishwasher is that things sometimes go to unexpected places.  So this morning as I was searching for my little blue boxes to pack the boys' lunches I could find the lids but not the bottoms.  I looked in the drainboard, the container drawer, and the other drawer where things seem to go, but they were not in any of those places.  The lunch I wanted to pack didn't fit neatly in the Ziploc lunch containers and I was in a rush, so I shuffled things into containers for sharing and headed out the door. Ravioli and veggies (green bowls for them, glass bowl for me), blood oranges,  blueberry muffins .

Everything was eaten eventually, even though there was no dip for the cucumbers. The blue boxes are  Sassy boxes  that I bought in the kids aisle at Target. They're also on Amazon and you can probably get them at most places that sell kid stuff. They're really the perfect size for the preschool/early elementary set. They come with a variety of internal containers, most of which have been scattered, and which I never found hugely useful anyway. The main downside is that none of the compartments is water tight, so these aren't great for messy things.

We've been having unseasonably warm weather here. Yesterday and today were in the 60s, so the playgroup decided to obey the weather rather than the calendar and meet outside.  My boys were very excited about this both because it was a beautiful day and because being outside meant plenty of playground equipment for everyone, instead of a limited number of toys which are inevitably the cause of much angst. Yesterday my younger son rejected his lunch in favor of begging for bites of my salmon burger and broccoli, so today I made salmon for everyone.  The boys ate all of their lunch, albeit in two shifts because it's hard to focus on food when there's playing to be done. Everything but the pears came from the freezer.  The boys like their peas cold so I just poured them into the containers straight from the bag. I heated my veggies in the microwave (in a glass dish because I have a no plastic in the microwave policy.) The salmon burgers were cooked in a skillet and then...

I kind of hate pizza delivery. It's never fast enough, it's never very good, and if you're ordering for a crowd it's always about compromise. Have you ever had pizza with someone who wanted exactly what you wanted? I also prefer baking with whole grains most of the time. Some pizza places will offer a whole grain crust, but they're not serious about it, so it's terrible: more biscuit or cracker than yeasted dough and too sweet. Blech. This dough makes it easy for me to make pizza at home because it takes just a few minutes to mix up and then it sits in the refrigerator waiting for me. The only downside is that you can't start when the craving hits and have pizza half an hour later. The obvious solution is to eat pizza once a week, and make a new batch of dough while you're cleaning up. I'm not from New York or Chicago and I do not claim to be a pizza expert. There are plenty of pizza experts out there who will teach you how t...

Lunch in the Park , a novel about love and family, is available for sale in multiple electronic formats at Smashwords , for the Kindle at Amazon.com and for the Nook at BN.com Wherever you buy it, it is DRM-free . The delicious recipes that Kate and Jeff cook up are right here on my blog. I hope you'll read Lunch in the Park , you'll love it, and you'll feel the overwhelming urge to write a review on one or more of the sites above. And of course I'd love to hear from you here on the blog, too.   Sometimes I'm here talking about food.  Sometimes I'm chasing my kids around.  Sometimes I'm serving women in labor . If I'm not doing any of those things I might be checking in on the lives of the fictional people who live in my head. Before you run away, no, I'm not hearing voices.  I've just always have a story or two that I'm writing in my  head.  If I have a few minutes I try to get the story out of my head and onto paper.  Sometimes ...

A trip to the grocery store not withstanding I didn't have dip on hand, so this is a mix of buttermilk, sour cream, and a salt-free spice blend.  It's a small step up from making french onion dip from soup mix. There are roasted pumpkin seeds in the bag. All this fiber and vitamin filled goodness is brought to you by the big bowl of Halloween candy in the closet.

It was my day to co-op at my sons' school, and I had a client meeting 25 minutes away in the afternoon. School ends at 11:30 and the meeting was at 1:00. Normally that would have been plenty of time to get the kids home, fed and safely deposited in the loving embrace of the playroom where they could occupy themselves and enjoy the benevolent neglect of their father who was working from home in the next room. But of course nothing is ever simple and I was the only co-oping parent instead of being one of two, and my older son's class let out a bit late due to some flower planting and a trapped possum. I got home much later than I had expected. I did at least have a plan. We had good cheddar and tortillas in the refrigerator, and in the fruit drawer of the pantry there were a couple of good baking apples. My goal was to make these as quickly as possible. I used an apple corer-slicer, but a knife would do just as well, grated my own cheese and had both boy...

My mother packed my father's lunch every day. He had a domed, construction worker style lunch box which always had a thermos full of coffee or soup, a sandwich, a piece of fruit and a cold pack, maybe a cookie if we had some.  Minus the cold pack, it was probably much the same as the lunches he took to school as a boy. I don't make fancy bentos. I learned long ago, and re-learn continously, that fancy and I are not friends. I'm okay with that.  Not making the fanciest lunches doesn't stop me from making lunches that nourish my family. My bentos won't become internet sensations, and possibly don't even really qualify as bentos, what with all the boring, but if 30 years from now my boys think a packed lunch includes a serving or two of vegetables (and maybe a cookie if they have one) then I'll be pleased. slightly more colorful than last week Check out the other lunches this week.

lunch for 1 adult and 2 preschoolers This is how I get my kids to eat vegetables.* Snack at preschool tends to be fruit and some kind of simple carb.  I'm not thrilled by this, but as that's the only thing about that school that doesn't thrill me I try not to whine too much. Snack yesterday was white rice, soy sauce and pineapple, today was canteloupe and cheese quesadilla.  I try to make lunch focus on veggies since I know the starchy carbs will reappear at afternoon snack (today I made lemon millet muffins) and possibly again at dinner.   This box provides 1 hard cooked egg per person, lots of veggies and some ranch dressing for dip.  My older son, who rarely eats all the way through a hard cooked egg dipped his egg in the dressing and ate it all, along with a good number of veggies.  Dip is a good way to lure unsure eaters to their vegetables.  If you choose or make a dip with quality ingredients the bit of fat it adds will not only make the v...

After several weeks of blowing off playgroup (It's hot outside in the summer!) and then showing up with a grocery bag full of whatever seemed lunch like at the local grocery store, I finally got a lunch packed. One apple, one cucumber, and a handful of carrot chips with some ranch dressing for dip was enough for me and the boys. We each had a yogurt and water.  Those of you wondering where the starch is, it was at breakfast, morning snack and dinner. Don't forget to check out the other lunches at What's for Lunch

There are a lot of changes coming for me, and while I'm not making New Year's resolutions per se, it seems appropriate that these changes come at a traditional time of starting over. And while some of these changes revolve around my health, I'm not going to go too crazy. You'll find no promises to give up carbs or fat or whatever it is all the cool people are giving up these days. I will be trying to be more aware of what I'm eating, and not eating things which aren't good. What's that you say? “Of course you shouldn't eat things that aren't good. Who does that?” Me. I do that. I eat things when I'm not really hungry and I sometimes eat things that aren't really tasty even though there's no reason. If I'm going to stuff myself full of something, I want it to be something lovely, eaten in a way that acknowledges that food is not just fuel. So unresolution number one is to make more waffles. These are good waffles. Th...

Can someone better at photography than I am please explain why my sour cream is glowing? I promise it wasn't really glowing. Black bean and cheddar quesadillas on whole wheat tortillas, served with salsa and sour cream. Beans were cooked as described here . Everything else was store-bought. This was more than enough for the four-year-old, the 18-month-old and the spare toddler. The container is Ziploc brand. I don't pack many lunches these days. Older is only in school half-days and I'm at home during the day. Wednesdays are my only consistent lunch-packing days, as that's the lunchtime playgroup day. The lunches at playgroup vary widely, from nutritionally balanced to "Here, eat some raisins and goldfish." Honestly if I weren't posting lunches here I'd probably serve ravioli every week, and it's possible that the fruit wouldn't always be part of the plan. It's not that I don't serve my kids a variety of foods, it's...

The lovely and talented Justine left a suggestion on my post about cooking steel cut oats , so I had to try it. I always do what Justine tells me, because in addition to being lovely and talented she's very smart. Toasted oats, people! You must toast your oats! MUST! Why? Because it makes them taste all toasty and nutty and yum and you will love it. Also, because if you follow my instructions you can wake up to a pot of oats which requires only enough heat to warm through and then it's done. No fuss, no muss. The night before you want oatmeal for breakfast, measure out your water and put it on to boil. I use a ratio of 1 part oats to 3 parts water. I use an electric kettle and I really think everyone with electricity should own one, but a kettle on the stove will do as well. Put a large pot over low heat. Toss in a pat of butter (or don't if you'd rather not. This will work either way.) to melt. Measure and add your oats. Add a pinch of salt. Stir...

Okay, so there's no recipe here. It's just boiling and slicing so we can get to the playground. The mini-ravioli are from Trader Joe's and are very popular around here. As you can see, the toddler couldn't even wait for me to take a picture before he snatched a sample. They cook in 15 minutes. I just put the frozen peas in the colander and drain the cooked ravioli over them. This warms the peas and helps cool off the ravioli so it's ready to eat or cover for transport. Sides today were a clementine and half an apple. The container is a Ziploc I found at Target. Check out the other bentos at What's for Lunch Wednesday.