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...