Category Archives: cooking

Learning to Cook

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This evening as we sat down to a dinner (crockpot lentil soup, cornbread with honey butter, and a salad) I was reminded of my father-in-law, Stephen. Early on in our marriage Stephen asked Gavin “Did you know she could cook when you married her?” to which Gavin replied, “No, but she didn’t know either.”

We’d probably been married just over a year at that point as we were living in Sebastopol and I’d brought down some dish (probably a cheesecake, torte or sticky buns), and he was quite impressed by my culinary masterpiece.

I did not start out being able to cook, I started out being able to follow a recipe VERY WELL, which is more important than one might realize. Sure all it takes to make bread is flour, yeast and some water, but how much of it, and what you do with it is very important.

So where did I learn to cook? At the time I think my reply was “too many hours of Food Network,” but that isn’t entirely true.

To be honest, I didn’t learn to cook in just one place and most what I learned was NOT from the Food Newtwork.  Continue reading →

Zucchini Confessions

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I hate zucchini, I have always found it to be a revolting vegetable. Texturally slimy when cooked, mushy even when breaded and fried, zucchini was something I avoided – that and eggplant, but this post isn’t about that.

Up until about two months ago our home had been a zucchini-free zone, then P started to eat, and eat, and eat. So I started making my own baby food, which led to me reverse-engineering his all-time-favorite jar of mush “organic summer vegetables.”

Organic vegetables are easy to come by so I read the label: potato, carrot, green beans and zucchini.

Zucchini?! Really baby, can’t mommy get a break?

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A farewell to Sweet

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As I surfed around the internet one dreary rainy day I came across a recipe that really made my day. I thought it would be simple, fun and really neat, then I saw the ingredients and I hit delete!

The recipe in question was for star-crunch cookies, the recipe looked so revolting I opted not to bother to try it. A jar of caramel ice-cream topping? Really? Ew.

I also came across a recipe for oatmeal creme pies - another childhood favorite. Yes, at one point my mother put Little Debbie snacks in my lunch (shocking, I know!) This afternoon O wanted to help “cook goo-coos” (cookies) so helped me bake up a batch of oatmeal creme pie knock-offs.

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me turn! me help!

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Oliver has decided he likes to Help! This is not a new feature, but it has become more pronounced as the months pass, and now that O is armed with his helping tower his rate of helping has increased dramatically.

O has also acquired the concept of “me tun” – after waiting patiently and watching me do something, he decides it is his turn to undertake the task. It does not matter if the task is vacuum cleaning, unloading the dishwasher, feeding the baby, pressing the buttons on the food processor or spooning muffin batter, eventually, if it is OK for mommy to do, it is OK for O to Help!

The challenge comes with balancing what is truly helpful and what just makes a big mess. We are working on finding balance in the kitchen: chopping cucumbers for the salad is truly helpful – he can manage to do so with a dullish knife, and it does not matter if the cucumber is a uniform size. I will not however, let him chop onions. Pressing food processor buttons is fine too, he’s helping make “foof” for “Pa-tik.”

Then there are things which require no help. The other day P slept late and I felt the need to express some milk. O came into the kitchen where I was pumping, declared “me see boob!” and then attempted to assist with the positioning of the shields. Thanks for the offer, but no help needed.

I try to have several activities through out the day that O can help with. This morning started with a trip to the grocery store where O helped push the cart, bag apples, and navigate to and select the ice-cream. This afternoon, during P’s nap time, he helped bake muffins lemon blueberry muffins.

Helping “cook!” muffins is a finer line: half an extra egg here, some extra salt there, batter dripped all over the counter – my inner baking perfectionist does not appreciate the mess, but the muffins came out tasting alright, and he had a lot of fun while helping “cook cake.” The recipe was fairly forgiving -it held up to my modifications and O’s input- and while they are unlikely to win any awards, they will make for excellent snacks through out the week.

Continue reading →

Foodie Baby

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Patrick is a bit of a foodie. Oliver enjoyed starting on solid foods, but he mostly enjoyed food as a textural experience and as a medium to create a colorful mess all over everything. P also enjoys food as a textural experience and medium for colorful messes, but he packs away more in one meal than O would in a day.

  

P is quite the eater and he enjoys a variety of foods. O enjoyed single-vegetable and fruit purees. Just squash, just peaches, just peas, etc. P will eat those, but he really enjoys multiple-vegetable/fruit purees, and he loves bananas.

By “really enjoys” I mean he’ll eat through a jar or two a meal at both lunch and dinner, clearing 3-5 jars of organic baby food a day. Continue reading →

Spiced PearSauce Muffins

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I have pints and pints of home canned WTF sauce sitting in my pantry and a growing collection of dregs in the fridge. In an attempt to cut down on the collection of dregs in the fridge (and free up some of my jars), I’ve been scouring the internet looking for ways I can use it.
I came across a recipe for Spiced Apple Sauce Bread, and modified it to suit my needs: I swapped out the oil for pear sauce (you can swap apple sauce for vegetable oil using a 1:1 ratio, pear sauce is like apple sauce, right?), cut back on the sugar to 1/4 cup of light brown, used whole-wheat flour, swapped out the pecans for raisins and then made 12 very full muffins instead of a 9×5 loaf. I mostly used the recipe as a guideline for approximate ratios of wet-to-dry ingredients and even there I fudged things a bit.
I cut into a muffin once they had cooled a little bit (but were still warm) and sampled them plain, with butter, and with homemade pear butter. Flavor-wise they’re good, both on their own, and with a light spread of either butter or homemade pear butter… texture-wise, when they’re fresh and warm, they’re very moist, and a little gummy (not sure how that will change once they cool off further).
Renowned children’s author Debbie Duncan assured me that apple sauce can be used in place of butter. My own experiment has concluded that pear sauce seems to work as an apple-sauce replacement (at least when swapping it for oil), so I might experiment with using it again in another muffin recipe or two.

Homemade Apple Sauce

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This afternoon I got an e-mail from the owner of the house across the street from us, her renter (a bachelor) was OK with us picking the apples and asian pears off the trees in the front yard, she was also fine with it, as long as we didn’t bend any branches.

I wish I’d spotted the tree and asked earlier in the season (I saw it yesterday on my walk with O and e-mailed her the moment we got home) as most of the fruit was already rotting on the ground. We managed to salvage a few pieces and get a few more from the tree. They were all rather ripe, somewhat bruised and it seemed unlikely we’d eat them all before they got worse, so I decided to make apple sauce.

It was quite simple as I already had things out from my WTF-Sauce, so while P napped and O splashed water around our backyard, I peeled and cored the dozen or so apples we’d gathered.

They simmered, softened, and were pureed. The puree was boiled, ladled into jars, and the jars were processed for twenty minutes. I now have 3 pints of homemade, sugar free, locally sourced apple sauce.

I also have a better idea of how to make my next batches of WTF-Sauce.

After-Thought Chocolate Cake

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This afternoon as I was clearing out the pantry to make space for my homemade WTF-Sauce I came across a canister of Ghirardelli unsweetened chocolate, several cans of evaporated milk, and a few cans of soup that were all about to expire.

What can I do with a canister of unsweetened chocolate, evaporated milk and soup? We can have soup for lunch, but the other stuff is a bit trickier. Thankfully, there was a recipe on the side of the Ghirardelli container for chocolate cake – which required milk, so I was able to use the evaporated milk as well.

I also made chocolate buttercream frosting. Sadly, it was a bit thick, so it didn’t spread nicely. I’m a little annoyed with myself, I know how to make buttercream frosting better than that, but we’d had a long day and the chocolate cake was more of an after-thought than a planned-activity.

The back part looks a little special, but it isn’t anything that can’t be covered with some fruit or something.

look! deer!

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Last night after dinner three deer showed up in the back orchard.

This evening for dinner we had brisket pot roast with carrots, garlic herbed mashed potatoes with gravy and corn bread muffins. We had chocolate covered strawberries for dessert.

I would like to thank the wading pool, floor gym, Busytown Mysteries and a longer-than-normal nap for making dinner possible.

When Gavin saw the feast he asked if I was preparing a final meal, no, today is not the end of the world, it just felt like it, after all, today was Monday.

The roast was fall-apart tender, and Gavin made honey butter to go with the corn bread. Thankfully everything turned out very well, as we will eat a lot of leftovers this week.

Shockingly Pink, Surprisingly Tasty

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In an attempt to incorporate more fruit into our diet I’ve been picking up watermelon quarters and halves at the grocery store. I get the seedless variety because the seeds cause the toddler to freakout on an epic scale. Last week, however, they were out of both quarters and halves so I picked the smallest seedless watermelon they had.

We now have an excess of watermelon. I quartered the melon and cubed it for easier eating. We’ve had it with lunch, we’ve had it with dinner, we’ve had it as a mid-afternoon snack. We’ve been eating a lot of watermelon, and we still have 3/4 of it in the fridge.

Yesterday, I was struck with inspiration. I happened to be skimming the NYTimes homepage – I’ve cut back my daily reading to weekly skimming now that they’ve become a pay site – and found a recipe for Watermelon Mint Smoothies.

With 9 kinds of mint in the backyard and a fridge full of watermelon it seemed like the perfect recipe.

Then I got lazy, I knew if I opened the backdoor, the toddler would want to go “side” (outside) and inevitably he’d want to strip down and play in the “woa-way” (water) in his kiddie pool. I also wasn’t sure which variety of mint to pick, so I decided to leave it out entirely.

I also left out the sugar (the watermelon was sweet enough) and the melon balls for garnish (seriously, who bothers to garnish a toddler smoothie). I upped the ice to two handfuls for a nice slushy consistency.

The results were shockingly pink, and surprisingly tasty. There were a few larger ice chunks that floated to the top, and I skimmed those off before I poured any for O. The watermelon wasn’t quite as seedless as advertised so a few seeds got blended in, they provided an occasional earthy, nutty taste, which was a nice contrast to the sweet melon (I don’t know why they said to add sugar)!

The toddler enjoyed it, and demanded “moar!” It complimented his afternoon snack of taquitoes nicely, the sweet balanced the savory. This would probably go very well with our Grilled Pizza Sandwiches.

Shockingly Pink Watermelon Slushy – my variation:

  • 2+ cups cubed seedless watermelon (I tossed in about 3 handfulls)
  • 2 handfulls ice (more or less to taste)
  • Place all of the ingredients in the blender. Blend until frothy. Pour into a glass. Serve immediately.

I don’t have any photos of this shockingly pink smoothie, we finished it before I thought to find the camera. Maybe next time I’ll remember to take one.