2012 begins.

As usual, Em and I fell asleep before the new year; we don't even TRY anymore to stay up.  I got a wall calendar sometime last month that's kindof a do-it-yourself, start whenever you want thing designed with kids in mind, so I started it and have been jotting down little references on the days.  For instance, today is not JUST New Years Day, but also Dad's Birthday (Astrid's dad).  The calendar came with lots of stickers for holidays and family/school related things, so I'll use those as well as write in "made cake-mix cookies" the recipe for which should really get some attention because I thought the cookies ruled.  Em loves cookies and I learned about using cake mixes because I had tons of coupons for cake mixes and we couldn't eat all those cakes before the cake mixes expired.  Also, we rarely have any all-purpose flour on hand as we grind our own whole wheat flour for most baking purposes.


So, I've started Astrid's introduction to the concept of time with the calendar, a short video song "Days of the Week" and the globe spinning one revolution each day, etc.  She'll take from it what she can at this age.  I'm also introducing her to the Dolch sight-reading words before we get into phonics.  Right now, we're working on the pre-primer list and will include some nouns before moving to the next list.   She won't be two years old until Feb 7, but she's a quick study and already toilet-trained.  While my three kids were reading at 3 years, they toilet-trained more in the third year than the second, so that time-consuming learning hurdle is behind her with expectations of some set-backs due to the new baby. 


Some might consider it a bad idea to have any kind of "structured" education at this age, but the human mind is never again as receptive as it is during the first 6 years, so I like to toss out as much material as possible with the thought that "what sticks sticks".   A (to me) interesting question was introduced at Amber Strocel's blog on whether boredom should be addressed in young children.  You'll definitely want to check out her site if only to listen to the beautiful music used to background the slide show of their 2011.  I pretty much dedicate myself to Astrid in the hours during the week when she's here and I introduce lots of learning activities hoping that she'll have an interest in one of them.  If she shows no interest, I move on to the next activity and/or take clues from her.  If she brings me a book, we read.  If she brings me the play-dough, we make stuff.  If she wants to go outside and the weather is decent, we go outside.  If the weather sucks, she learns about weather.  She seems content to do whatever.

Here she is starting on breakfast (the first event of our days together). 

Here she is washing the dishes we dirtied making the cake-mix cookies.  At one point I thought she might have lost interest and tried to take her down from the stool, but she said, "No!  I help wash dishes."  Probably never again in her life will she enjoy washing dishes as much as she does now.

Here she is just relaxing in her favorite dress-up hat while eating one of those cookies.

Cooking With Small Children.

Astrid LOVES to cook (unlike her mother).  She'll pretend to cook if I don't have a cooking exercise planned for her.  She won't be 2 years old until Feb 7, 2012, so I'm still leary of her impetuousness when it comes to the stovetop.  I read today (on the internet) that anyone with a brain would realize that small children shouldn't be allowed to use the stovetop.  I'm more of the opinion that small children should be taught how to use a stovetop safely, so (for now) she's still watching me flip the pancake while she wears the oven mitts, but I expect her to be safely flipping the pancake under my supervision within say a year if I still have the pleasure of watching her three times/week after her family moves. 


No. 1's inlaws want to buy them a house in their neighborhood before the new baby is born.  This would mean a nice house in a nice neighborhood with a good public school.  It would also mean a longer drive to bring Astrid here. 


So far, we've made cookies, pudding, and pancakes (from mixes).  We've also made play dough (from koolaid) and we'll make jello this week.  We haven't yet made anything from scratch and we haven't yet made anything that requires electricity to mix.   She came early yesterday so No. 1 could make a prenatal appointment, so I figured she wouldn't be so hungry that she couldn't help make her own pancake. 

What are your thoughts on cooking with young children?  If you have children, how old were they before you allowed them to use the stovetop?



Baking With Young Children, AKA It's Okay To Eat the Dough.

Yesterday, Astrid and I made cookies from one of those packaged cookie mixes. We'll get around to "from scratch" eventually, but I wanted her first experience to be fast and easy. She's had the Paula Deen Child's Baking Kit for a while now and loves to "play" stir, mix, etc. She's 17 months old now.

No. 1 doesn't garden or bake, so Astrid's experiences in these things come on my watch, which is still M-W-F from (roughly) 11-2. Her swimming experience is mostly while she's here, too, simply because our housing development has a pool, but No. 1 joins us for that. She's quite good at swimming now with the exception of remembering to keep her mouth shut, as she loves to laugh at the fun of it all.

I got all the baking stuff laid out before she came, set out an egg and a stick of butter to warm up, and pulled over to the island the two stools that typically stand at the counter between the kitchen and living room. I removed their "hats" to provide more friction.

We had fun. She was very interested in the process, using her Paula Deen utensils to beat the egg and mix the butter, egg and batter. Of course everything got tasted individually first and she finished up the mixing with her hands (which I do myself on occasion).

She's one of those bakers who likes to eat the dough as much as the cookies. I was a little worried about that (as well as the raw egg), but it turns out that both are myths unless the egg is "bad", which we'd probably notice.











Since it's WAY too hot to bake, I used the convection oven's bake feature and small pans. I was afraid to let Astrid near the hot pans, so laid out the cookies on cooling racks where she could test each for proper temperature by giving them a lick.

Thanksgiving Cooking.

I'm FINALLY (TODAY) getting lists made and reviewing recipes I want to use Thursday. We're having dinner at our house this year and I suppose the guest list is about 17.

For Astrid's sake, I ordered a turkey and prime rib from Whole Food that haven't been given any antibiotics or hormones in their lives. I'm hoping to use the leftovers to freeze some turkey and beef for her.

There are SO many considerations. *I* prefer one thing, the kids prefer another, Astrid can't have TOO MANY variations on a theme yet, and that's part of the reason why I always make enough food for 200 people. Each dish may only feed 6 or 8, but I make enough of them to feed more than I'll have.

I have to stop myself (MAYBE) from making a brussel sprout dish that just looked SO appealing and I know my kids love brussel sprouts. We're already having a huge salad, carrots, green beans, broccoli loaf, and a creamed corn dish and sweet potato dish provided by Dave's mom, so I don't NEED another veggie dish, but (then again) I remember one Thanksgiving where Em's brother said, "but I don't like any of those".

Em gets mad at me every time: "You make too much; we'll have leftovers through the next year!" Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Not too interested in posting of late.

My vermiposting experiment absolutely SUCKED. Turns out that the worms need to be covered from sun and/or rain and we don't have any outside coverage. So, they stayed in the house (along with their fruit-fly groupies) until cooler weather came and I could move them out to the garage (which only stays reasonably cool during the winter). By summer of next year, I need to figure out a way to keep them outside covered from the sun and rain. I need a vermiposter HUT.

STILL trying to control the fruit flies in the house! I have traps EVERYWHERE.

Em got the raised garden bed I ordered put together except for digging holes to place the "feet" in the ground.

Thanksgiving is at my house this year, so I'm trying to get that plan done (to the exclusion of others). Today, I ordered an organic turkey and roast. I make babyfood for Astrid and it's all organic; I don't think new people should be eating things containing hormones or antibiotics. So, whatever the guests invited don't eat will be cut up and frozen for Astrid.

Sorry to say that my son won't be coming for Thanksgiving this year. It'll be just Em's family and my two daughters with their families. I really don't know what happened to my son, but he's been unwilling to have his picture posted online for many years now, and has recently just grown apart from his entire family. I love him and wish him well, but it's pretty hard to take the dismissal. A cousin of mine has a brother with whom he hasn't communicated in over 30 years; he doesn't even know if he's alive or not. I hope my son's not moving in that direction because *I* still want to see him even if no one else does, but my grandfather used to hide in the basement when company came, so it's not like there aren't genetic precedents.
Hope you all have a happy Thanksgiving if I don't get back here to post before then.

Making Your Own Baby Food.

When my kids were little, I thought formula was poison and was even concerned about commercial baby food. The same scares you hear about now were happening then:

Commercial Baby Food Scares.

When Astrid turned six months old, I started making baby food for her. The rice cereal was more work than it was worth. All I had to do on my end was turn the rice into more of a flour consistency, but No. 1 then had to boil while whisking the flour and it turned out pretty gummy anyway. Commercial baby cereals are dehydrated, so no boiling is necessary. You can buy whole grain, organic baby cereal. Astrid is currently on a mix of Wheat, Spelt, and Barley with no ill effects. Just squirt breast milk in with a Tablespoon of cereal in a little bowl and stir.

Banana and avocado couldn't be frozen, but were simply mashed or mashed with a little distilled water added. The first vegetable I made for freezing was sweet potatoes from my garden last year mixed with sugarless apple sauce. My sweet potatoes never grew to be very sweet. Her second dish was organic baby carrots mixed with sugarless apple sauce. Then, pears and plums from the grocery store. Then, a bag of frozen peas. This week, I got small sweet potatoes, huge peaches, and zucchini from the local Farmer's Market.

Boiling sweet potatoes from Farmer's Market after peeling and slicing:



Puree.



Once food is pureed, put in ice-cube tray. One cube = 1 tablespoon (or a little more if you want). I used trays with lids so could only make the cubes as high as the lid would hit.

If cooking more than one food at a time, you may want to label them. Peaches look a lot like sweet potatoes once pureed. Correct spelling is not important.



I let them freeze a day or two and then empty them into freezer containers to give to No. 1. [I used freezer bags] Make sure you get as much air out of the container as possible or they'll get freezer burn. At mealtimes, she can simply nuke a cube (or a cube of each she has in mind for the meal). Heat another way if you're opposed to microwaving.

If you make baby food, how do YOU do it?

Another way to cut back on meat without going vegetarian.

My Husband's love for hamburger helper.

We went grocery shopping yesterday for the first time in over a month. It had been much longer than that since we'd had any hamburger or tuna or chicken helper on hand and Em loves to make it when it's his turn to cook.

Yesterday, our local Kroger finally had a sale that corresponded with coupons on HH that also corresponded with a sale on Angus chuck.

Thing is, since we've not had hamburger helper, I've been mixing bulgur in with ground meat dishes to both try and get us to eat less meat and add healthier foods to our diet, and Em has LOVED the substitutes ... so I'm hoping he loves the substitutes here.

I bought 6 pounds of ground chuck, to which I'll add 1 lb (dried) brown lentils (cooked and smashed) plus one cup of dry bulgur (cooked and mixed with the lentils). I'm hoping to end up with 10-12 (roughly 1-lb) piles of meat & stuff.

I think he chose 10 HH and 2 tuna helpers, but my lower back went out this week and I really didn't pay too close attention, anxiously awaiting the end of the grocery experience so I could sit down. Point is: I think 10 would be enough.

Lots more work involved over just separating and wrapping the meat for freezing, I learned. First, the lentils needed to be cooked and an attempt made at mashing them.


Then, the bulgur needed to be cooked and added to the lentils.


Separating and wrapping the meat is always a chore in itself and one that is never measured on the meniscus. As Rachael Ray is fond of saying, "I eyeball it." Here's the 1st half of meat mixed with 1st half of non-meat mix (eyeballed).


Close-up, you can see that the mix definitely doesn't resemble 100% meat.


After I finished wrapping the 2nd half of that, I went on to wrap 4 boneless primes that Em and I will share.


I know some folks eat less/no meat all the time, but this is the first year I've been actively engaged in cutting back on our consumption of animal products. Will we give up meat altogether eventually? I kinda doubt it. We've spent over 60 years eating animals, starting before they were given hormones and antibiotics. Will I feed Astrid the kind of meat we've bought for years? No way!

Still have 40oz of bacon to cut and package. I freeze 4 pieces of bacon separately. That can wait until tomorrow, however. As I said in the beginning, I've had problems with my back this past week and today's the first day of fluidity, so I want to spend some time hooping.

More dietary experiments; this time we cut back on food AND try to eat the evening meal earlier.

Em and I both have been having some stomach problems lately which we felt were associated with eating too late and having too heavy a meal.

So, he threw down the gauntlet this week. Starting yesterday, we'll try to eat lighter and earlier in the evening so we can sleep with no problems.

A few days earlier, I'd made up some Cajun Trinity. Froze two quart bags of that, which will work out well for these dietary experiments.

Last night (first night) we had :



Cauliflower, asparagus tips, mushrooms and tomatoes tossed in at the end ... served with 4 frozen Armour meatballs that got nuked for 3 minutes.



Doesn't look like much, but that's the point.

Tonight, we're going to have something similar with different vegetables using quinoa as our protein source. Gonna also add some of that trinity I froze earlier in the week.



Good week to start reading Omnivore's Dillemma. I'd previously been concerned that Em might hate me if I took away his meat. Now, he seems to be saying, "I want to eat lighter meals; I'm looking for an alternative."

I'm thinking we'll try this "cutting back" approach to it all and see how that works before making a rash decision on dietary changes.

Freezing Kale.

Yesterday we visited No. 1 and Astrid, so picked up some produce at Fiesta, which is near her house. Fiesta produce is always fresher looking than other groceries and most foods aren't in packages, so I can bring home just what I need with no packaging to discard. The girl who bagged our groceries was obviously sick, so I put everything I bought in a sink full of water with a little bleach, rinsed it off and let it sit on the counter to dry. Also still on the counter was that bowl of kale I'd picked before the snowstorm that never came, so today I'm committed to doing something with all this food.

This morning I tackled the kale. I'd read yesterday instructions on freezing it at Not Martha. It looked straightforward enough, so I got out all the things I'd need and went to it.

Some people cut and some people rip, and I cut some and ripped some. I didn't save the stems for anything, although some people eat them. Some people eat broccoli stems, too, but we're not hungry enough for that yet, either. They feed the dirt in my gardens just like asparagus stems.

First step after cutting is the blanch. Some people don't blanch, but I'm new at this, so I did.





Following Not Martha's instructions, I took each batch of kale from the salad spinner to the towel.



Once all the kale is processed and on the towel, the towel gets rolled tight and squeezed to remove as much moisture as possible. My largest bowl was the perfect amount to fit on the towel after processing.




The kale is then transferred to a baking sheet (covered with parchment so there's no sticking) and put into a freezer for 30 minutes.



We got 3 quart freezer bags of kale from this batch. Each bag will be more than enough for the two of us at one meal. Takes the guesswork out of it for me, as the kale is already cooked down from the blanch.

Copycat White Castle Cheeseburgers, among other things.

No. 1 and Dave came for supper Sunday night with Astrid. I cooked up a pork loin I'd had in the freezer since 2007 - [Em and I defrosted, reinventoried and reorganized both the garage freezer and refrigerator freezer last Saturday.] I used THIS RECIPE with changes based on reviews and we really enjoyed the meal. Em and I had leftovers yesterday. Here's "Poppy" with Astrid from that evening. No. 1 had an absessed tooth and looked like she had a tennis ball in one side of her mouth, so we didn't take photos of her or Dave; details below.

Spent a fair amount of time cooking yesterday. Made a stovetop pea-soup for starters. No. 1 had a molar that my dentist had "fixed" which absessed so badly that she had to have the tooth pulled yesterday. I can't save her tooth from the dentist I recommended (who I'm not going to use again, either), but I could make her some soup to eat while that side of her mouth heals.



We'll drop it by today or tomorrow. It's currently snowing, so I'm not sure we'll venture out today, but anticipation of snow encouraged me to cut a big bunch of kale yesterday.



I didn't cut all of it, but more than I could fit into the largest bowl I have.

Maybe it was because No. 1 and Dave ate some White Castle Cheeseburgers for lunch that Em had bought when they stopped by earlier in the day Sunday, but when Super-bowl bites came to my attention, I wanted to give it a try, so took out a pound of lean angus chuck to defrost in the morning. Having read that King's Hawaiian Savory Butter rolls worked really well for buns on the "sliders", we bought a package of 12 on our morning shopping trip.

We only needed 1/2 lb of chuck for 12 sliders, so I found a recipe for a spicy meatloaf that would accommodate the second half of ground beef plus the 1/2 lb sausage leftover from last week's pizza.

The meatloaf was really easy to make. Usually, I throw all kinds of veggies into it, but I had other things on my mind, so made it as stated, wherever it was. We haven't tasted it yet; that's for tonight's supper. We had some leftovers from that pork meal for supper last night.

Most interesting of the meals made, IMO, was the White Castle Cheeseburger copycats.

I used the method of one reviewer and first laid out the 1/2 lb beef chuck mixed with 1/4 pkg of Lipton onion soup mix, a handful of shredded cheese [I think I used a Mexican blend, but I don't think it makes a difference] into a 6x8" rectangle.



This rectangle was cut into 2" pieces with a pizza cutter and placed into a 9x13 glass baking dish which went into a 350 degree oven for 17 minutes.



While they were baking, I sliced open the Hawaiian rolls, took three slices of Kroger American cheese and cut them into 4 parts each. Cut myself slicing the rolls, and used the pizza cutter to cut the cheese. My aim wasn't very good in either task.



Once the patties had cooked, I took a paper towel [gasp!] and wiped out excess oil from the glass pan [not much from lean Angus chuck] and put the completed buns into the same pan, covering it with tin-foil before putting back into the oven for another 13 minutes.



Last step was to let them cool for a few minutes, wrap two into a paper towel for nuking after freezing (just like the real version) and putting into a freezer bag. 12 fit nicely into one gallon bag. We had to taste one first, so this batch only has 10. "Close enough!", we both said. Next step will be to duplicate the taste of King's Hawaiian Savory Butter Rolls.

Dealing with food waste; when life throws you carrots, make carrot-raisin salad and carrot-cake.

This month has been designated by the Crunchy Chicken the month of the Food Waste Reduction Challenge. Notice the badge on the sidebar?

I always have the best intentions of incorporating more fresh fruits and vegetables into our diet, buy them on sale, and then ... mostly what happens is that Em cooks supper several days in a row and I forget all about the food I'd bought that's been sitting in the refrigerator for ... well, for example, No. 2 flew down to attend No. 1's wedding shower in April of 2009 (last Spring) and I bought some spinach/artichoke dip for her to eat while here. She's a vegetarian and I wanted to be sure to have something besides peanut butter/jelly sandwiches in case she got hungry ... except she preferred peanut butter/jelly sandwiches to that dip and we just got around to eating it this week. No kidding.

I found a ball of homemade pizza dough on the freezer door and a container of that hot pork sausage that Em likes on his pizza. I didn't have any bell peppers or onions, though, and I like my pizza to have SOME vegetables. We had a 2-lb bag of carrots that I think I was gonna use for the baby shower last month, but Dave's mom made so many food dishes that whatever carrot dish I was gonna make got changed into something else that filled the few gaps left ... so I asked Em if he'd like carrots on his pizza. His face contorted into what I took to be a "NO!", so I thought, "Well, that dip has spinach and artichokes in it at least" and spread it onto the pizza dough. Worst thing that could happen was food poisoning, right?



Em had made spaghetti (with no veggies) the night before, and there was some sauce with ground beef left, so I put that on next.



Rest was pretty standard fresh ingredients and the pizza was quite good although it stuck to the pan a bit (which had more to do with not enough oil on the pan than old ingredients).


We both woke up the next morning feeling fine, so NO food poisoning! Makes me wonder if that dip was actually a food or more like a twinkie.

So, Diane was blogging about making a carrot cake and I thought, "I wonder if they use any carrots?" and it turned out they did and Em likes carrot cake (oh happy day), so I looked around for some recipes that didn't involve 12 cups of sugar, and found some capable of being tweaked to lesser amounts without losing the taste or using artificial sweeteners. I had a plan for the carrots.

The next day, Em said, "So, you want to get rid of those carrots?" Thinking he'd found a new public dumpster, I said, "I want to USE the carrots." He said that his very favorite salad is carrot-raisin if I could find a recipe for that on the web. With Google as my friend, I was able to make


and



from



and Em liked BOTH very much.

Tomorrow I see what I can do with apples and cantaloupe on their last legs.

Obesity makes US unhealthiest country in world.

We need to teach our children to eat healthier, but how can we if we don't know how to eat ourselves?

Pie from sweet potatoes frozen in paper lunch bags.

You might remember my experiments with freezing squash in brown paper lunch bags. Yesterday, Em found a bag in the kitchen freezer that said, "Sweet Potatoes for Pie - 10/09/09" and took it out to defrost. He was ready for his sweet potato pie.

Neither of us feel well yet after he caught the cold/cough in Northern Nevada at the end of last month and shared it with me, but he went to the store and bought two frozen pie shells and was determined to make this pie. That was yesterday. He asked me to find him a recipe for it and I had that ready this morning right out in the open for him to read along with a stick of butter and the bag of sweet potatoes that we'd put in the frig overnight, but he fell asleep instead. So, I asked if he'd like ME to make the pie for him and he said, "I'd LOVE for you to make the pie; I only seem to have enough steam to walk to the couch and lie down."

My plan was to begin a tradition of Frugal Friday meals starting with some tuna/quinoa patties mentioned at What's Cooking?, so I went outside and scrounged up an onion or two and some cilantro for that one. After I made the pie, though, *I* only had enough steam to walk to the couch, so we're having frozen pizza tonight and Frugal Friday will be tomorrow night. That explanation was to explain why the ingredient photo for the pie includes onions and cilantro.

The equivalent of two sweet potatoes were put in 3 layers of brown paper bag. After defrosting, I was able to save all 3 bags; they weren't wet at all! Of course, I had to scoop them out of Em's hands before he threw them away.




The batter still had some lumps because I hadn't fully cooked through the sweet potatoes as indicated in the recipe I sorta used (with changes based on reviews). They were simply the sweet potatoes "processed" and then defrosted.



We both helped lick the bowl from the batter and we're gonna LOVE it.

Fallen leaves make good soil ... and sweet potatoes grow after the tops look dead.

Tepid day here in North Texas. I think the high was close to 70 degrees.

We took the opportunity to rake the leaves in the front and redistribute them to the gardens out back. During this redistribution effort, I found out that our sweet potato beds had a bunch more sweet potatoes to process.

Em helped gather leaves.



I helped put them into the garden beds.



But, then, I started feeling around under the sweet potato beds and there were several more to process.

We got not three (as shown), but FIVE in the end.



Next nice day here we'll plant more stuff, but today was really good.