Isn't this WILD?

So, I decided to make a foray into backyard foraging. We're growing quite a crop of dandelions in our yard, and I knew TK was going to mow 'em all down last night. So, the boys and I headed out to pick dandelion leaves.

I researched a little online and saw the young, small leaves are generally less bitter, so that's what we picked. We got about half a colander full before we all lost interest.



I popped 'em in some salted boiling water for about 8 minutes while frying some bacon. Then I drained the dandelion greens and transferred them to the pan with the bacon grease, along with some minced garlic. Snipped in a few chives from the garden, sauteed it all for a few minutes, then topped it with crumbled bacon.

My overall assessment: kind of bitter, but certainly edible. And kind of fun that it's just a weed growing in the yard!




I do have to say, though, that I'm more excited for the wild blackberries we have growing in a brambly mess in the backyard. Foraging those blackberries are worth braving the thorns!

Anything worth foraging in your backyard?

And now it's all paying off!

So, as you regular blog readers have probably noticed, I like to let my kids "help" me cook. Sometimes it seems crazy...everything takes twice as long and is quadruple as messy. Nothing ends up turning out exactly as intended, and the days of perfect presentation are long in the past. And sometimes, when the stars align, we have catastrophic misadventures that result in the ruination of well-loved and much missed appliances.

But then, something happens that makes all that extra work worthwhile.

Last night the boys wanted to husk corn for me*. I knew it would take them forever, and it would be a mess. It was raining, so I couldn't take them outside, so I knew out entire kitchen would be covered in corn silk, requiring a far longer cleanup than if I just husked the corn myself. But, it's been many months since they got to husk corn, and hey, I've somehow convinced them the chore of husking corn is actually great fun. So I let them go at it.

After a few minutes, I heard from B-man, "Mommy! There's a big WORM on this corn!"

Yep, he came across the dreaded corn worm. The very reason why I will *never* switch to organic corn. I peeked at it enough to verify that yes, it was an absolutely disgusting worm, then calmly asked him to throw the ear of corn away.

So, 3 years of having kitchen helpers? 3 years of fights about who gets to shake the spices in first? 3 years of over- or under-salting every dish? 3 years of cleanups that take twice as long as the actual cooking? The destruction of my blender? Every minute of it worth it when I didn't have to be the one who found the corn worm!


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*As an aside, at our local (giant) farmstand, they had fresh corn trucked in from Florida. Usually, it's so not worth buying anything but local corn as it's always a disappointment. But N-man LOVES corn (in fact, he ended up eating three ears last night!), so when I saw it, or more precisely, when HE saw it, we bought some. It ended up being really good! I mean, no local fresh summer corn, but way better than the frozen stuff we've been eating all winter.

Kitchen Adventures

Remember when I used to post lots of recipes here? Remember when I used to write about cooking with kids (mwah ha ha!)? Yeah, between the winter sicknesses and my pregnancy food aversions, that has fallen by the wayside. But I rallied the other day and decided to try something new with my kids. I had come across a new (to me) cooking blog the other day, and saw a recipe for pop-up baked pancakes. Sounded good and easy to me! So the boys and I got to work.

And they started fighting.

Quite honestly, they'd been fighting all day and it was wearing me out. We measured out the flour, each putting in half the amount, but when we got to the milk, all hell broke loose. B-man demanded to add the FULL amount of milk, but N-man wanted to add some, too. Adding half amounts just wasn't going to cut it as a compromise. But tough noogies, that's what we did. B-man was having a full-out tantrum, and I was just ignoring him, going to the fridge to get some eggs. But in the midst of their fighting, they knocked the blender. Which fell off the counter. And smashed into a zillion shards of glass.

So I stuck them on the counter so they'd be away from the glass, ran and got some shoes for myself so I wouldn't cut my feet up, and began the long and arduous task of cleaning up broken blender pieces. It took about half an hour, and by the time I'd gotten all the glass up, the milk and flour had dried into glue. That absolutely would not wash off the floor. Another fifteen minutes with a scrub brush finally loosened the "glue" enough to clean it up.

So after 10 minutes of cooking (and fighting) and 45 minutes of cleaning, we had soybean butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch. Want the recipe??

I might not be quite ready to get back into the kitchen just yet. What do you think?

What's your fortune say?

I made fortune cookies with the boys today. It's been something I've been meaning to do, since we can't eat at Chinese restaurants because of B-man's nut allergies. I never get to eat fortune cookies anymore!

Anyway, I used this recipe (scroll down past the wonton soup recipe), subbing orange and vanilla extracts for lemon and almond. I don't know how it turned out as we won't eat any until after dinner. It only made 9 cookies, and I think I made them too thick since they're kind of doughy in the middles instead of crunchy all the way through. It was pretty easy, though.

But I'm not really writing this to tell you about the cookies. What I want to tell you about are the fortunes. I decided to let the boys write the fortunes. I set up a table in word, then they told me what kind of clip art to add, and what to write. Here are some of the examples:

N-man:

• Next to a picture of a dog, "No touching locks".
• Next to a picture of a horn, "I had a good day".
• Next to a picture of a soccer ball, "Happy Birthday."

I love how random N-man is. It's no one's birthday. We have no rule about locks, neither pro nor con touching them. While I'm glad he's having a good day, why did he want a picture of a horn next to it? We didn't play with any horns today. He's a lovely mystery!

B-man:

• Next to a picture of a beehive, "Don't eat bugs."
• Next to a picture of a dog, "Don't eat doggies."
• Next to a picture of a tuba, "Don't drink milk out of a tuba."

I love the really good advice B-man choose to share. He always wrote a "fortune" that was related to the picture he chose. He's much more linear in his thought-process than N-man.

We wrote tons more fortunes. Far more than could fill our nine cookies. I should have doubled up! Or maybe I'll try this recipe again, using less batter for each cookie and spreading it far more thinly to try to get the traditionally thin crunchy cookies.

This was truly a case, though, where it doesn't really matter how the cookies turn out. It was lots of fun making them, and that's good enough for me. Though I hope when we try them after dinner they are yummy!

I wish my life was as good as an ABBA song

A girlfriend invited me last night to go see Mamma Mia. So we headed out, on a Tuesday night, to see a 7:30 show. It was sold out! What's up with that? Quickly, we got into our cars and drove to another nearby theater to see the 8:00 show. Whew, there were tickets left. But there were also THREE bus loads of teenage Italian tourists. That's pretty weird, isn't it?

I thought I was being so wild, going to see a movie on a weeknight. I guess people do it all the time. Who knew?

I enjoyed the movie, although it made me wish I was watching three other things:

Pride and Prejudice, the BBC version, of course. It is a truth universally acknowledged that all women of a certain age (um, my age) are in need of Colin Firth*. He was very good and very funny in Mamma Mia.

Muriel's Wedding: I'm sorry, but this movie still holds the title for "best movie to use ABBA for the soundtrack". Mamma Mia came close, but couldn't quite dislodge it.

Veronica Mars, the first season, of course. I believe Amanda Seyfried will always be Veronica's dead best friend, Lilly, to me, no matter how great she is in other things. And she was pretty good in Mamma Mia. But again, it was no Veronica Mars.

So all in all, a very fun night. And now I have a lot of DVDs to pull out and watch!

Random unrelated thought: I got some awesome purple beans at the farmers' market the other day. They look like green beans, they taste like green beans, but they're purple! The boys were pretty excited about them, and both took a bite of the raw bean as we were getting it ready to cook.

So I steamed them, took off the cover, and GASP! They were GREEN! I mean, it's kind of neat that the beans turn from purple to green, but I'm pretty sure my boys thought I just switched out the fun purple beans with regular green beans so they wanted nothing to do with them.

Don't you think the purple beans should come with a warning: "These beans turn green when cooked."

But anyone with older kids and a glass topped pot might want to plan a "watch the purple beans turn green" experiment that if you're lucky, will end with all the beans being eaten!

*Did I go a bit too far in mixing my Jane Austen references? I hope not! I also am being too lazy to pull out my copy of Emma, so I hope I came reasonably close to "quoting" it.

Three year olds + art museum = not a good time

For Father's Day this year, my husband said he wanted to go to an art museum. There's a (formerly...I'll get to that) good one in New England: the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem. It has (used to have...I'll get to that) a large fun kid's room where kids can play, plus the rest of the museum is a pretty respectable art museum.

So TK thought it would be a fun mix. We'd all have some time to see at least some of the art museum, which would be fun for us grown-ups, and then we could go to the kids area and that would be fun for the boys. It's a long drive for us to get to the museum, but we hadn't been to an art museum in ages and thought this would be the best bet for us. So we made the long trek.

We bought our tickets, went in, and stopped right inside to explain to the boys about how art museums are just for looking, not for touching, but after we looked around for a little bit, we could go into a room just for them where they could touch anything they wanted.

This would have worked great, except...the kids area was CLOSED. CLOSED, I tell you! So we're in an art museum. With almost three-year-old twins. Without a stroller. And no fun area for them. Wouldn't you think when we bought tickets with two little kids that they may have mentioned that the kids area was closed for the next few weeks? Jerk ticket guy! I'm sure we could have complained and gotten our ticket price refunded and left, but as already mentioned, we'd driven quite a while to get there, and really wanted to see an art museum. So we decided to give it a go.

Yeah, not the best idea. B-man nearly touched a painting. It set off an alarm. N-man got one foot up onto a display before I grabbed him and he got yelled at by a museum guard (who didn't fool me at all. I know WE were the ones being yelled at). We were trailed all through the museum by guards.

I think we'll wait a few more years before trying to make sure our boys are properly cultured. For now, I think skee ball at Chuck E Cheese may be the extent of culture our boys get. The carny culture really isn't one we should dismiss!

Random unrelated thought, I can't resist another recipe edition:




Here I thought I was being so smart, making the dreaded bok choy on a night when I was going out for dinner. Of course I tried it, and wouldn't you know, it was incredible! Damn, that was unexpected. I was completely, though pleasantly, surprised. The only problem now is that I'm a little depressed that we got our expected CSA distribution list for the week and there's no bok choy on it. Ah well, maybe spring turnips will be my next true food love...stay tuned!

Oh, the recipe. Here it is. I didn't really make any changes, so just follow the link if you're interested. And for those of you "cooking with kids", the sauce part of this recipe is easy and fun to do with kids. Lots of measuring and dumping into a cup and stirring. Washing bok choy is pretty easy, too...just give the kids a big bowl of cold water and let them swirl the leaves around in it. It may take a couple changes of water. Plus, then there's the salad spinner, and all-time favorite with my kids! So it's a pretty good "cooking with kids" recipe. However, it would have taken a minor miracle to actually get my kids to actually eat this. Maybe you'll have more luck!

Laura Ingalls Better Watch Out!

Have you ever wanted to make butter? Well, here's your chance. It's surprisingly easy and while not exactly quick, is far quicker than I originally feared. My almost three year old twins aren't overly impressed with making butter, but adults find it incredibly interesting. We made it twice while my parents were visiting, and they've been making it with all their friends now! So I suspect this one will be a big hit with the adults even more than the kids. Without further ado, here's the recipe:

Ingredients:

Heavy Cream
Salt (optional)
Minced Garlic (optional)
Fresh Rosemary (optional)
Fresh Parsley (optional)
Fresh Chives (optional)
Or, whatever mix ins you'd like...or no mix ins at all.

Directions:

Find a small wide-mouthed container with a tight fitting top. We used an old Avent bottle with a non-nipple top. I've heard the glass stage 3 baby food jars would be a good size as well if you still have some sitting around.

Fill the container about half full of heavy cream.

Shake. Then shake some more. Then keep shaking. It takes a while. We just kept passing the bottle around and giving it a shake. At first, TK's comment was "the cream is going to spoil before it turns into butter!" Nothing happens for a little while. Then, it starts to turn into whipped cream. Then, after it's been whipped cream for a while and you keep shaking, it suddenly "breaks". The butter solidifies and the excess liquid (buttermilk) all comes out. It takes about 10 minutes or so total.

Pour off the buttermilk, and now you have butter! You can eat it straight, or mix in whatever you'd like. We tend to do lots of herbs from the garden, but you could also mix in some cinnamon and sugar and use it to make cinnamon toast, or just a little salt to make it slightly salted. I put the minced herbs in a little bowl, and then let the kids sprinkle them into the butter and stir it all up.

As you stir in the mix-ins, more excess liquid will come out...just pour it out.

Eat the butter! You can store it for a day or two in the fridge. We never make enough that this is really an issue, though.

Chocolate covered pretzels

I wrote an article for my Mother of Twins newsletter about cooking with kids (that phrasing still sounds all wrong to me!), so I've decided to use my blog to be a little more organized about cooking projects that have gone well with the boys. Or failed miserably. That would be fun, too. I figure it'll help me to keep all my "recipes" in one place, and maybe it'll help a few of you, too.

So here's a recipe we made a few weeks ago for chocolate covered pretzels. I use the term "recipe" loosely. I've found with three year old twins, recipes that need precise measurements are a set up for failure!

Ingredients:

Pretzels (any kind you want, just make sure they're big enough for your kids to hold part of it and dip the other part)
Chocolate chips (let's say 2/3 cup)
Sprinkles (I don't know, I just kept dumping more into their bowls as they ran out)

Directions:

Cover a cookie sheet with waxed paper. Set aside. Fill a small bowl for each child with pretzels, and another small bowl for each child with sprinkles. Set aside. Don't even think about making them share bowls, because that's just setting yourself up for fights :)

Put the chocolate chips in a microwave safe bowl. Microwave 20 seconds at a time, stirring well after each 20 seconds, until they are melted. The chocolate will be hot, but if you take it out JUST as the chocolate has melted, it shouldn't burn your kids. At least it didn't burn mine, but as always, test it yourself before giving it to your kids.

Set the bowl of melted chocolate where each child can easily reach it. Give them their bowls of pretzels and sprinkles. Show them how to dip half of each pretzel in chocolate, then dip it in sprinkles. Set them on the waxed paper to cool and harden. Or eat them right away. Whichever.

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This recipe worked really well for us, and as you may imagine, was a big hit with the kids. Of course. Pretzels, chocolate, and sprinkles. Those are things I've never had trouble getting my picky boys to eat. On the messiness scale (from 1 to 10, with 10 being a complete disaster), I'd give it an 8. Chocolate got all over them (especially their faces), and sprinkles ended up all over the place. It was a pretty quick clean up, though, as the chocolate wiped off things easily and the sprinkles could just be vacuumed up.

It was a very quick recipe: quick set up, quick to make, quick to eat.

Overall rating: 7 out of 10. Unhealthy, messy, but quick, delicious, and so much fun for the boys. I'll be honest: we'll definitely make this one again, despite the fact that it's not exactly health food!


Food allergy note: nut-safe chocolate chips can be a challenge as all the major brands carry a potential nut-contamination warning. I've found two brands, though, that are safe for nut allergies: the BJ's store brand (Berkley and Jensen, I think), and the Roche Bros. store brand. Neither have a nut allergy warning on the bag, and I've given both to my son who has peanut and tree nut allergies.

Ideas of recipes my kids can help me make?

I'm writing an article for a twins newsletter, and I'm going to write about cooking with kids**. Anyone have a favorite recipe their kids like to help with? It can be as easy as mixing together a fruit salad to something more complex where they can only help with certain steps.

My kids are almost three, and we're dealing with peanut/tree nut allergies. Those are my only constraints.

Random unrelated thought: N-man climbed out of his crib yesterday at nap time. I heard him over the monitor, with his little feet pitter-pattering around the room. Then I heard B-man ask him, "Can you get me out, too?" Sorry, bucko, you're stuck!

**PS~~Got a better way to phrase it than "cooking with kids"? It sounds like my kids are going to be the main ingredient! A little too To Serve Man-esque for me!

Tortillas! Tortillas!

So, if you've been reading you probably know that I like to cook. And since my kids don't eat, I figure cooking with them can't make things any worse...it can only make them more interested in food as it's impossible to become any less interested. Oh shoot, I'm off track again, thinking about the fact that my children subside on air and kisses. Anyway.

I decided today I'd make some homemade tortillas with the boys. There was a recipe in a recent Highlights High Five magazine (great magazine, by the way, for toddlers), so I thought I'd give it a try. We had a lot of fun, it wasn't too messy and didn't take too long, and the quesadillas we made were surprisingly good. I'm not going to lie to you...these tortillas weren't any better than store bought. Maybe not even quite as good as my favorite tortillas from Trader Joes. But we all ate them and enjoyed it! Here's what they looked like...not too bad, huh?


Here's the recipe, adapted slightly from the recipe in High Five:

Ingredients:

1 1/2 cups flour
1/4 teaspoon salt (original recipe calls for 1/2 teaspoon, but I found the tortillas to be salty so I'll cut back in the future)
1/2 cup hot water (not boiling, just hot tap water)
1 1/2 Tablespoons vegetable oil

Directions:

Mix together flour and salt, then add hot water and vegetable oil. Stir until combined and mixture forms a ball (I had to use my hands, and let the boys knead it a bit, too).

Divide into 6 balls of dough.

Flatten slightly with your hand, then roll until flat and thin (my 2 3/4 year old boys could roll it out a bit, but then I had to finish rolling them thin). The dough should be fairly dry...mine didn't need any extra flour to keep it from sticking.

Coat a nonstick skillet with a small amount of vegetable oil and heat over medium heat. Add a tortilla and cook for 1-2 minutes, until the underside is slightly browned in places. Flip, and if you're making quesadillas, top with some cheese or other toppings and let melt with the other side cooks for approx. 1-2 mintues. Fold in half and enjoy. Or you could skip the cheese, just cook the other side, then use these to make tacos, burritos, whatever.

Random Unrelated Thought: Why does Massachusetts have such a stick up its butt about billboards off the highway? What, do they have to preserve ALL that view? Puh-lease! Connecticut is so much more fun to drive through. I mean, I feel like a trip isn't complete unless I see at least 10 billboards for some skanky porn related establishments. And you can count on Connecticut to deliver in the first twenty miles. I heart the Connecticut DOT, or whoever it is who lets them put up so many awesome billboards.