Yes, We Still Cook...

a meal I didn't actually cook but thoroughly enjoyed nonetheless!

Seems I’ve been so preoccupied with Audrey starting school (and therefore eating school lunch) that I haven’t had much time to blog about the actual food the girlies are trying and (sometimes) actually eating at home.

So I’m going to go back to my roots for a bit a blog about what we're cooking around here...

(+ I volunteered in A’s school cafeteria on Friday and was so freaked out by the experience that I’m going to have to back off the whole school lunch thing for a while so I can process and plot my next steps… Let’s just say that I’m abandoning my original goal of having her buy lunch at least three days a week. She gets to buy once a week and I’m packing her lunch every other day. And that’s all I’ll say about that…for now ;-)

So onto what we’re eating or better yet, what Audrey’s eating of late. Her new favorite food is, wait for it... chicken satay*, which as you can imagine is quite thrilling. She specifically requests "those chicken curry sticks”… The kid digs the taste of curry. Yay!

On the flip side, at the stellar brunch that lovely cousin Erin and boyfriend Ben made for us yesterday (photo above), I begged her to try Ben’s homemade beignets. I mean seriously what kid doesn’t want to try a homemade sugar covered donut? Mine apparently. No dice, it just wasn’t happening.

Oh well.

Any major food adventures/wins in your world of late?


* Audrey loves the ones from our neighborhood Thai restaurant, but when I make them at home , I always use this recipe

Chicken Satay -- adapted from epicurian.com

• 2 lbs. white meat chicken, cut in 1" strips
• Bamboo satay sticks
• 2 cloves garlic
• 1 tbsp. curry powder
• 1 tsp. coriander powder
• 1 tsp. salt
• 1 tsp. butter
• 3 tbsp. light cream
• 1/2 c. coconut milk

Combine marinade ingredients and add chicken to mixture. Marinate for at least two hours.

Thread chicken pieces on one end of satay sticks. Broil or much better, barbecue and baste with marinade.

Small Bites

I was so honored to contribute to perfection that is the Autumn Small Magazine.

Take a peek at my recipe for "blueberry dessert" (original name, no ;-)

The Sad State of School Lunch -- Now We're in The Thick of It...

groovy lunchbox by Goodbyn

Yesterday my oldest started public Kindergarten, and it was a rousing success. Despite our excitement about every aspect of her new school, we're officially in the thick of the school lunch juggernaut.

Prior to this year, Audrey attended a private pre-school where hot lunch was served every day. Packing a lunch wasn't really an option, and while there were a few items on the menu I wasn't so jazzed about (I'm never happy about hot dog day), overall the menus were nutritious, and the cook made as many things as possible from scratch. But we're entering new territory here, so I had planned to pack Audrey's lunch most days to ensure she's eating the healthiest meal possible.

Then I read this over on the stellar School Lunch Talk...

"Many parents pack lunch for their children because they don’t consider chicken nuggets a healthy meal. I don’t either. But before you resolve to pack lunch for your child every day this year, think about this: one of the best ways to get better food into public school cafeterias is to put away the lunch box and become a loyal lunchroom customer...

Yes, it’s easy enough to pack a lunch for your child if you don’t approve of what’s offered at school. But every packed lunch means less revenue for school lunch programs, and less revenue means less healthy food for the students who do eat lunch in the cafeteria. What’s more, the parents who pack lunch for their children out of health concerns are precisely the parents who care about good food. Without their voices, there is nobody to speak up for school lunch change.

School cafeterias operate by giving customers what they want. Right now, we’re allowing kids to be those customers. If parents can take back that buying power, we’ll take one huge step to improving school food in America."

full story here.

So despite the fact that I'm not loving the lunch offerings at Audrey's school (think pizza, pizza sticks, corn dogs, hamburgers, etc... although they do serve nice sides -- steamed broccoli, apple slices, corn), we're going to buy lunch in the cafeteria at least three days a week, and in the meantime I'm going to try my hand at organizing something with the parents to see what we can do to improve things.

We'll see how it goes...

Detox Recap

photo via nibs

After all my whining over cheese, I thought it only fair to do a little recap of my two week detox to let you know how it actually went down.

My initial goal for going into this craziness was to "recalibrate" my diet a bit -- I've been indulging, well... a lot this summer, in fact so much so that I'd abandoned the concept of "special occasion" eating (dessert and/or wine had become the norm instead of the exception...) I thought going spartan for a couple of weeks would help me cleanse my body a bit and get me back on track before the bacchanal otherwise known as the holidays.

So for 14 days, I didn't consume any alcohol, dairy, sugar, caffeine, red meat, processed foods, flour, gluten and soy... for the most part. I did indulge in a small (4 ounces or so) cup of coffee every morning, as I didn't want to contend with a raging headache, but I was almost "perfect", staying full on brown rice, veggies and fruit, raw nuts, beans, organic chicken and pork, fish and oatmeal. I also consumed quite possibly the grossest drink on earth every morning -- 8 ounces of unsweetened cranberry juice with a big scoop of green "super food". Friends, I can't tell you how awful this was. It took every. single. ounce. of my resolve to get it down without gagging, but I suspect it contributed to the major upside of this experiment -- my super human energy.

Now honestly I'm not sure that some of my newfound energy wasn't psychological, but during the 14 days spent detoxing, I woke up about an hour earlier every morning (without an alarm clock) and didn't fall into my typical mid-afternoon slump. I also generally felt better, and yes (in case you're wondering), I also lost a couple of pounds.

So all in all, it was worth the monotony of of my meals and the absence of cheese. I think I'm going to try and do it a few times a year...maybe ;-)

Eating On The Cheap...

I'm totally addicted to W. Hoddington Carter’s Extreme Frugality series on gourmet.com. I woke up at 5:30 this morning and read every. single. one. I think that detox is giving me super human energy... Seriously.

Carter's focus isn't on organic or local food, rather his goal is to feed his family of six good food, while spending as little money as possible. Their progress has been fascinating (and funny.) It's a must read.

Happy weekend...only three more days before I reunite with cheese!

I Miss Cheese

image by michele m. waite via lovely morning

Only four more days left of this (*&#@*) detox, and I can 100%, unequivocally, without a doubt say:

I. Want. Cheese.

Otherwise, it's going great.

Salad Rolls Are Simple!

If forced to name my top five favorite foods, fresh (or salad) rolls would definitely be on the list. (These also happen to fall into the category of what I am eating, although I'm not sure the rice wrappers are 100% detox friendly.)

For years, I only ate these when we ordered or went to our favorite Thai place, but in the past couple of months, I've realized that with just a little practice, they are insanely simple to make. I don't have a formal recipe, as we kinda wing it every time, veering toward some combination of romaine lettuce, matchstick carrots + cucumber, bean sprouts, mint, cilantro, basil and sometimes shredded chicken or halved shrimp.

But I will share my tips for making foolproof, tight, restaurant style rolls:

1. Work on a completely. dry. surface. (dry it off with a clean towel between rolls, as any extra water makes the rice wrappers hard to deal with)
   
2. Use two wrappers per roll overlapping the circles about 60%
   
3. When assembling, err on the side of less filling, as they'll be much easier to roll
   
4. Make them about 10 minutes or so before serving so the rolls firm up a bit

Now my mission is to make the girlies love these as much as I do... Based on Audrey's response to last weekend's rolls, it's going to be a challenge.

What I'm *Not* Eating...

While we've definitely been eating well (fresh local veggies, homemade meals, organic meat), it's possible I've been eating perhaps... a little too well. There's been an awful lot of indulging of late, so I bit the bullet and decided to team up with my cousin Erin on a 14 day "mini detox".

We're currently on day five of not consuming any alcohol, dairy, sugar, caffeine, red meat, processed foods, flour, gluten and soy, and it hasn't been as bad as I feared. I'm not ever really hungry, as it's easy to stay full on the things we can eat like brown rice, veggies and fruit, raw nuts, organic chicken and pork, fish and oatmeal.

But I am getting a bit bored, and I'm missing cheese dreadfully...

My biggest challenge has been how to work the detox into our family eating without letting the girls know that I'm doing it. Regardless of how healthy my motivations are, I don't want to introduce either of them to anything that remotely feels like a "diet" for fear of accelerating the body image, eating disorder nightmare that they'll eventually encounter in one form or another.

So far it's been very easy to explain why I'm not having dessert, as I want the girls to know those things aren't necessarily healthy (although indulging in a quality, homemade dessert occasionally is certainly a "healthy" way to eat) but the dairy/bread questions are a little harder. I've avoided most probing by serving us all the same meal at night, and luckily many of our go-to meals (white beans with brown rice, chicken with veggies) are totally detox friendly.

Now I head into the weekend and bigger challenges -- it's always harder for me to avoid goodies on the weekend. So wish me luck and let me live vicariously through you...

What are you cooking this weekend?

The Go-To Meals and Our "System"

I'm rather addicted to Jenny's genius lobotoME notepads... love. them.

For every three or four meals Audrey turns her nose up at, we get an epic, lip smacking win.

She's every cook's dream that one, as when she does like what you've made for dinner, she tells you over and over and over...and says mmmm a lot. It's rather lovely.

When we do have one of these meal successes, I tuck it away into my go-to meal file. These make up roughly 75% of our weekly "meal plan", with the other 25% coming from "new" dishes for the girls to try. My goal is to expand their palettes a bit but not have an epic food battle every single night.

For the new things, the girls have to try one big bite. If they hate it, they don't have to eat the rest, and I try it again in a few weeks. If they hate everything else on their plate, they get one option for an alternative meal -- a bowl of cereal and a piece of fruit. That's it. Perhaps that makes me an indulgent parent, but I can't help it, I want them to eat something, and I want them to have a healthy attitude about food, to be allowed to dislike certain things. I think that's part of the evolution of our taste buds -- it just is what it is.

So do you have a "system"?? What are the go-to meals in your house?

Jamie Oliver is My Hero

image via penguin

Ok, admittedly Jamie is rather easy to love, what with his sort of mellow, punk rock approach to cooking and farming and well food in general… But it’s the school lunch thing that’s moved him (along with Pollen and Waters and Bittman) to my hero status -- You gotta idolize anyone who uses their celebrity to push forward the cause of improving school lunch.

Jamie first tackled school lunch in the UK through his show Jamie’s School Dinners to pretty great results:

“So Jamie took over school meals in Greenwich and tried to persuade the Government to improve standards. With dinner lady Nora Sands he showed that kids could be fed fresh, nutritious meals. And after a huge campaign, newspaper headlines and delivering a 300,000-signature petition, Tony Blair agreed to set new standards for school meals, and committed £280 million for proper ingredients, equipment and training.”

Now he’s headed to our neck of the woods (West Virginia specifically) to try and reform school lunch in the U.S. -- A challenge to say the least.

While I’m mildly encouraged by all the current information and activity around school lunch reform, we still have so far to go. Right now our children’s school cafeterias are essentially another fast food venue filled with HFCS laden, processed foods and their school hallways are yet another spot for soda and candy vending machines.

It's a bad scene friends.

There are all sorts of reasons school lunch has gotten so bad (school lunch talk, does a good job of summarizing here), and the root of the problem seems to be that cafeterias are incented based on the amount of food they sell, and as well all know kids love to buy junk food...

So while there’s an activist portion -- a piece of this school lunch juggernaut that requires us to take action, to be informed, to lobby and to make sure our leaders know that we want the current system to change, there’s also the piece that requires us as parents (or aunts and uncles, godparents…heck even friends) to introduce our kids to great food.

Maybe instead of taking the kiddos to McD’s for a “treat” you could make meal from scratch together… I’m a huge believer that the only way to get kids to shun such “delicacies” as frozen French fries and “French” toast sticks is to make sure they understand (and pardon my French here) what shit that kind of food is, no?

Weekend Food...

Despite a full and fun weekend (or maybe because of it) we didn't cook much of anything beyond some homemade cornbread and some comically cursed brownies (think forgetting the egg, then forgetting to turn on the oven and wondering why after 35 minutes the brownies were totally raw...)

We did have an excellent Sunday Dinner at lovely cousin Erin and boyfriend Ben's house. Not only was it incredibly tasty, but both girls LOVED it...cleaned their plates, ate every. single. bite. and then asked for more. It was a huge, huge win friends.

The Menu:

Chicken Adobo -- recipe below
Simple Parmesan risotto
Sauteed green beans with pine nuts

Chicken Adobo (adapted from Serious Eats)

serves 4

• 6 boneless chicken thighs with no skin
• 1/2 cup soy sauce
• 1/2 cup balsamic vinegar
• 10 whole peppercorns
• 1 whole head garlic
• 2 bay leaves

Separate the cloves of garlic from each other and smash them lightly with the flat side of a knife to easily remove the skins. Add them with the rest of the ingredients—the chicken should be half-submerged—to a heavy pot. Bring to a boil, then turn the heat down to a simmer. Cook, covered, for 15 minutes, then uncover and continue cooking until the chicken is tender, turning the pieces occasionally.

If desired, remove the chicken pieces and reduce the sauce to a thicker consistency, adding the chicken pieces back in near the end to reheat. Remove the bay leaves and serve.

p.s. there's a great Michael Pollen article in NYT magazine this Sunday about the rise of our obsession with cooking shows, but our decline in actual cooking...