The United States of Snacking

my snack of choice...if, that is, I were a snacker...

I'm not so much a "snacker"... Sure I'll nosh on a handful of nuts, a few olives, maybe a sliver of cheese if I'm having a late dinner or (being totally honest here) if they're readily available, but I don't actively seek out snacks. I'm pretty much a three square meals gal...bare bones. I know, I know, snacks are healthy, they keep your metabolism going, ensure you don't get too hungry and eat like a deranged lumberjack during meal-time.

But I'm still not that into them.

My girlies on the other hand (you knew this was coming) are obsessed with "snacks." In fact, I'm not sure they really even eat meals at all. I think their caloric intake pretty much consists of a steady stream of snacks. All day long.

I am not happy about this.

Now in all fairness, some of this is out of my control. Audrey's school's kindergarten lunch time is (wait for it) 10:30...in the morning(!), and I think this somehow throws off her meal-time clock all day long. She doesn't like breakfast (I know...it's awful, I've tried everything), so her first meal is at 10:30. Then come the snacks. There's the 1:00 snack, the 3:30 snack, the 5:00 snack, dinner (which is pretty much a big snack) and then a small before bed snack.

Snack overload.

We roll pretty healthy, so snacks are usually fruit...my kiddos go through bananas, strawberries and blueberries like it's their job + some protein. We do lots of yogurt too. But still the snack thing is rather disconcerting. There has to be a better way.

To further stress me out, I just read this NYTimes article about the never-ending snack time.

So what do you think? How do you handle snacks? To snack or not to snack?

Oh Salad

There's a passage in Alice Waters and Chez Panisse where Alice muses (and I'm paraphrasing here) that given her own immense love of salad, it would be unfathomable to her that her young daughter Fanny wouldn't just come out of the womb craving it.

Lucky for Alice, this is essentially the case, and she's able to make wee Greek salads to tuck into young Fanny's lunchbox, which she happily gobbles right up.

Let's just say that's not so much what's going down at my house.

If my kiddos liked certain foods solely based on the fact that I liked them, there would be no need for this blog. They'd be happily lapping up any number of delicacies that they currently (vehemently) refuse, like, yes, salad.

I love salad in ways that a mere blog post can't adequately describe. Like Jora, I could eat it every day. In fact, if I had a pick only one thing to eat if stranded on a desert island, it would most certainly be salad...+ it's a perfect meal for when you're stuck in a post-holidays cooking rut (thank you for all your great suggestions/support for crawling out by the way, I just picked up a slow cooker cookbook, and I'm using that until inspiration strikes again...)

But the girlies, well the girlies won't touch salad.

I realize it's largely a component thing, as they like tomatoes and carrots and celery and any number of other things you'd put on a salad, but they just don't like them all tossed together with dressing (oh God no, not dressing...) oh and and stinky cheese. I think salad is infinitely better with some stinky cheese perched on top.

So for this one, (and truth be told, many others I'm sure) I'll just have to live vicariously through Alice, but I'm hoping the girlies will come around to my beloved salad... One day.

The blood oranges are gorgeous right now, so I built a salad around a couple I picked up at Whole Foods this weekend. Super simple and v. yummy.

Blood Orange Feta Salad

• One small head of butter lettuce washed and torn into small pieces
• 1/4 cup Feta cheese
• One blood orange thinly sliced
• 1/4 cup salted macadamia nuts, lightly crushed
• (this weekend I used sesame garlic SASS dressing, which is pretty much the only bottled dressing I'll buy, but my favorite dressing is below)

Dressing

• 1 cup walnut oil
• ½ cup chardonnay vinegar
• 1 tsp. sugar (or more, to taste)
• 1 shallot finely minced
• Salt and pepper to taste

A Wee Bit of A Rut...

Aran's gorgeous photo + recipe via design * sponge

So (in an attempt to go easy on myself) I'm going to chalk my forthcoming statement up to a sort of holiday food hangover...ok?

I'm not in the mood to cook. At all.

Not inspired, not dreaming up recipes, not thinking about what to make this weekend. Just plain not into it.

And yes, I really think it's partially due to all the heavy food we cooked in December. We were in the kitchen a lot the past couple of months...hosting Thanksgiving, dinner parties, Christmas Eve dinner, a Christmas day feast. Maybe I'm just burned out...oh and my jeans are awfully tight, so there's that too.

So we're not "cooking" a lot, rather we're preparing food. Simple pasta, lots of salad, big pots of easy white beans, hummus with crackers and celery, scrambled egg sandwiches, nothing worth blogging about, but it does the trick.

I'm trying to pull out friends, I am...I even spent Sunday afternoon pouring through kid's cookbooks with Audrey trying to drum up some inspiration.

So anyone else feeling this? Any tips for getting out of a January food funk?

Oh the Progress

It all started with a loaf of pumpkin bread.

Albeit it was incredibly good pumpkin bread, and it was delivered in the most magical, Normal Rockwell-esque way (by two kind neighbors, in a basket, on Christmas morning), so there was all sorts of good stuff happening with that bread before we even sliced it open. But really, other than cornbread, I’ve never seen my daughter devour something with such unabashed gusto as she did this bread. And she’d never tasted pumpkin bread before. + (and this is the big part) there was no cajoling, no begging, no “I promise you’ll like this, just try it for God’s sake…”

She just popped a bite into her mouth, and then another, and another…until half the loaf was gone.

That was the start.

A few days later during our New Year’s week trip to New Orleans, she also ate (for the first time with very little cajoling) and loved the following items, in no particular order:

• Jambalaya
• Dirty rice
• Cabbage (in full disclosure, she didn’t love the cabbage, but she tried it without gagging, so that’s something…)
• Black eyed peas

But wait, there’s more. That photo above, that corn, roasted red pepper and edamame succotash. Yep, she tried that too.

Honestly I’m not sure what’s happening here friends. I fear aliens have abducted my kiddo and replaced her with a pint sized epicurean.

So...any new foodie milestones on your front?

Edamame and Corn Succotash

• 1 bag frozen organic sweet corn
• 1 bag frozen organic edamame
• 1 small shallot
• 2 tbs butter
• 1 marinated roasted red pepper
• salt and pepper to taste

Completely thaw the corn and edamame. Sautee the shallot in butter. Add corn and edamame and sautee until cooked through. Dice red pepper and add to the pan, cooking for a few more minutes. Salt and pepper to taste. Especially good with pork chops!