I've been secretly hoping for weeks that Kate, the wonderful Modern Alternative Mama, would post her Soaked Apple Crisp recipe. Yesterday, she DID!
Today I made some apple pie filling in the crock pot. I just set up the apple crisp crust and it's soaking on the stove top.
I can't wait to see how breakfast turns out!! I'll let you know tomorrow!
One Mama's journey through daily life.
Showing posts with label cooking. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cooking. Show all posts
Friday, September 28, 2012
Saturday, September 8, 2012
Recipe Collection: Simple Salad Dressing
We are buying less "convenience" food and making more at home. One of my favorite ways to do this and explore in the kitchen is with salad dressing. We tend to be a simple balsamic vinegar and olive oil family, but my Honey Vinaigrette is a favorite as well.
Ingredients:
1 tbsp champagne vinegar
1/3 cup extra-virgin olive oil
2 tsp dijon mustard (I like mine a little thicker and tangier)
1 tsp honey (I use raw, local honey)
1/8 tsp salt
pepper to taste
1/3 cup extra-virgin olive oi
Combine vinegar, mustard,honey, salt, and pepper in bowl and whisk until blended. Slowly whisk in the oil. Adjust mustard and honey as needed for the right consistency. Place in refrigerator before serving.
That's it! This vinaigrette is great on a goat cheese and spinach salad. I crumble goat cheese over fresh spinach, sliced eggs, and bacon. You can also add grilled chicken for added protein and to make it a whole meal.
What dressings do you like?? Do you make your own??
Ingredients:
1 tbsp champagne vinegar
1/3 cup extra-virgin olive oil
2 tsp dijon mustard (I like mine a little thicker and tangier)
1 tsp honey (I use raw, local honey)
1/8 tsp salt
pepper to taste
1/3 cup extra-virgin olive oi
Combine vinegar, mustard,honey, salt, and pepper in bowl and whisk until blended. Slowly whisk in the oil. Adjust mustard and honey as needed for the right consistency. Place in refrigerator before serving.
That's it! This vinaigrette is great on a goat cheese and spinach salad. I crumble goat cheese over fresh spinach, sliced eggs, and bacon. You can also add grilled chicken for added protein and to make it a whole meal.
What dressings do you like?? Do you make your own??
Tuesday, April 3, 2012
An Eggcelent Afternoon
This afternoon while Miss Moo slept and Miss Roo played with some toys in the family room, I completed step one of their wooden Easter eggs.
Moo has always been interested in cooking- whether it is real cooking that is going on in my kitchen or something she is making in her playroom. Her felt veggies are strewn all over our downstairs and she often brings her own utensils to the dinner table. I often wonder if the poor girl was doomed to this fate because she spent months listening to The Food Network before she arrived. None the less, she has a certain love of cooking and has been know to host her own shows while busily baking away in her kitchen.
With Easter fast approaching, all our local stores have been filled (really since February) with little, plastic eggs. Moo is always quick to point them out to me. She asked a few times for some eggs and I suppose she quickly learned that I wasn't going to buy any. I'm not trying to keep her from having a dozen eggs in her kitchen, but I AM trying to cut down on the plastic junk that enters our house. Not buying these eggs to have little "treats" in their Easter baskets also forced me to think of some other solution for egging up my girls this Sunday.
A few weeks ago I ordered supplies to make Miss Roo's birthday gifts. As I searched for one last item to push me into free shipping (yes I'm one of THOSE) I noticed that there was a fruit and vegetable section. I clicked through and there they were - wooden hen's eggs! PLOP! In the cart they went. After everything arrived I pulled out the bag of 25 unfinished eggs and stared. How could I make some prettier without worrying about a huge, toxic paint mess. I turned to the pantry and saw food coloring. Hrmmm...I wonder.... off to the Googles!
Yes, you CAN make dye with food coloring.
So I did. There was no scientific method to my dying experiment. There was no measuring or determination of ratios. I simply squirted what was left of a little bottle of blue dye into one of my Pyrex bowls and then filled it to the top with water. Whisk whisk. I plopped in two wooden eggs and pushed them around. I looked at my eggs and then my fingers. I grabbed some gloves from under the sink and returned to my eggs.
The eggs began to turn blue. I let them set in the dye bath for about five minutes and then dyed two more. They looked amazing! I grabbed the bottle of yellow dye and dumped it in. Plunk! Two more eggs in. GREEN!! GREEN EGGS! Won't THEY be handy on March 2! After about 5 minutes, I dyed another round and them dumped the green. I next tried red.
Brilliant! Two round of the red dye bath and I had a dozen colored eggs sitting on my table.
I LOVE this craft for several reasons. These eggs are versatile- the girls can play with them, cook with them, count with them, sort with them, and have egg hunts with them. These eggs are durable- they are solid wood eggs so dropping them or stepping on them won't send them on a one way trip to the landfill. These eggs are visually appealing- they look like real eggs and have a similar weight to them as well. The light wood lent itself to a hue of that of a real, dyed egg. These eggs are personal - rather than running to the local X-Mart, Mama made these little guys pretty for each of her girls. And these eggs are part of my reduce/reuse plan- food coloring is being phased out for consumption in our house, so this was a non-wasteful completion of it's life here.
Tomorrow my play is to seal the eggs with my wood wax (I'll have a link to that on Saturday along with an exciting adventure for me!). I want to give the little babies 24 hours to soak in all the dye.
So there they are! Let's hope my little chef and her colleague enjoy their fresh, local eggs!
Moo has always been interested in cooking- whether it is real cooking that is going on in my kitchen or something she is making in her playroom. Her felt veggies are strewn all over our downstairs and she often brings her own utensils to the dinner table. I often wonder if the poor girl was doomed to this fate because she spent months listening to The Food Network before she arrived. None the less, she has a certain love of cooking and has been know to host her own shows while busily baking away in her kitchen.
With Easter fast approaching, all our local stores have been filled (really since February) with little, plastic eggs. Moo is always quick to point them out to me. She asked a few times for some eggs and I suppose she quickly learned that I wasn't going to buy any. I'm not trying to keep her from having a dozen eggs in her kitchen, but I AM trying to cut down on the plastic junk that enters our house. Not buying these eggs to have little "treats" in their Easter baskets also forced me to think of some other solution for egging up my girls this Sunday.
A few weeks ago I ordered supplies to make Miss Roo's birthday gifts. As I searched for one last item to push me into free shipping (yes I'm one of THOSE) I noticed that there was a fruit and vegetable section. I clicked through and there they were - wooden hen's eggs! PLOP! In the cart they went. After everything arrived I pulled out the bag of 25 unfinished eggs and stared. How could I make some prettier without worrying about a huge, toxic paint mess. I turned to the pantry and saw food coloring. Hrmmm...I wonder.... off to the Googles!
Yes, you CAN make dye with food coloring.
So I did. There was no scientific method to my dying experiment. There was no measuring or determination of ratios. I simply squirted what was left of a little bottle of blue dye into one of my Pyrex bowls and then filled it to the top with water. Whisk whisk. I plopped in two wooden eggs and pushed them around. I looked at my eggs and then my fingers. I grabbed some gloves from under the sink and returned to my eggs.
The eggs began to turn blue. I let them set in the dye bath for about five minutes and then dyed two more. They looked amazing! I grabbed the bottle of yellow dye and dumped it in. Plunk! Two more eggs in. GREEN!! GREEN EGGS! Won't THEY be handy on March 2! After about 5 minutes, I dyed another round and them dumped the green. I next tried red.
I LOVE this craft for several reasons. These eggs are versatile- the girls can play with them, cook with them, count with them, sort with them, and have egg hunts with them. These eggs are durable- they are solid wood eggs so dropping them or stepping on them won't send them on a one way trip to the landfill. These eggs are visually appealing- they look like real eggs and have a similar weight to them as well. The light wood lent itself to a hue of that of a real, dyed egg. These eggs are personal - rather than running to the local X-Mart, Mama made these little guys pretty for each of her girls. And these eggs are part of my reduce/reuse plan- food coloring is being phased out for consumption in our house, so this was a non-wasteful completion of it's life here.
Tomorrow my play is to seal the eggs with my wood wax (I'll have a link to that on Saturday along with an exciting adventure for me!). I want to give the little babies 24 hours to soak in all the dye.
So there they are! Let's hope my little chef and her colleague enjoy their fresh, local eggs!
Saturday, March 31, 2012
Cutting through the Grey
I can clearly remember being at a friends party several summers ago. His son wanted to help cut his birthday cake. My friend handed his son the seemingly HUGE knife and said "Here, son. This is the way you cut a cake with a knife." My friend then turned to some of the adults standing around and said "If he wants to use the knife it's my job to be sure he knows how to do it correctly." I must confess that I was one of THOSE friends.
I was quietly appalled. No way, I thought. I continued an internal dialog that warned of the dangers of letting a child so young even touch a knife much less use it for any task. He was much too young and that lesson was misplaced. As a parent I would have said no. As a parent I would have had the final say. As a parent I would have decided the time and place for any lesson dealing with anything "dangerous". Clearly I was qualified to make such judgments because I had NO children of my own.
Miss Moo is quite bright for not quite two and a half. I know that all parents think that their children are smart and rightly so. There are a few areas where she seems to excel and at times that clouds our memory her age. Lately she has been very interested in helping me in the kitchen during meals and particularly at dinner time. Most nights I spend more time redirecting and then fussing for failed listening on her part than I did listening TO her.
A few weeks ago I was cutting vegetables for our salad while the girls played in the family room. Moo meandered her way into the kitchen and pulled her step stool up to the cart where I was cutting vegetables. "I want to help you Mommy!" she excitedly announced. My first instinct was to send her back to play and remind her that knives aren't toys for little girls. Then suddenly I heard my friend's voice :
"Here, son. This is the way you cut a cake with a knife."
There was a lesson residing in this moment. Was it a lesson that would be taught?
Did I have the final say as the parent? Of course. Did I say no? Of course not. I smiled and began to show her how to hold a table knife and how to hold the cucumber. We practiced keeping the knife on the end far away from our fingers. We worked slowly. We worked together and then on our own. Making salad was very smooth and stress free that evening.
As parents, there is no manual that magically appears when we have our children. The is a sense of right and wrong, but I have learned more often than not there is a huge area of "grey". Each child is different. How boring would it be if all children learned in the same way at the same pace? Grey areas can cause a parent and child a great deal of frustration. However they can also be a space of great joy and learning for everyone. Our grey spaces have evolved- we now see the rainbow after the storm rather than the grey skies.
Perhaps I should call my friend and tell him thanks.
I was quietly appalled. No way, I thought. I continued an internal dialog that warned of the dangers of letting a child so young even touch a knife much less use it for any task. He was much too young and that lesson was misplaced. As a parent I would have said no. As a parent I would have had the final say. As a parent I would have decided the time and place for any lesson dealing with anything "dangerous". Clearly I was qualified to make such judgments because I had NO children of my own.
Miss Moo is quite bright for not quite two and a half. I know that all parents think that their children are smart and rightly so. There are a few areas where she seems to excel and at times that clouds our memory her age. Lately she has been very interested in helping me in the kitchen during meals and particularly at dinner time. Most nights I spend more time redirecting and then fussing for failed listening on her part than I did listening TO her.
A few weeks ago I was cutting vegetables for our salad while the girls played in the family room. Moo meandered her way into the kitchen and pulled her step stool up to the cart where I was cutting vegetables. "I want to help you Mommy!" she excitedly announced. My first instinct was to send her back to play and remind her that knives aren't toys for little girls. Then suddenly I heard my friend's voice :
"Here, son. This is the way you cut a cake with a knife."
There was a lesson residing in this moment. Was it a lesson that would be taught?
Did I have the final say as the parent? Of course. Did I say no? Of course not. I smiled and began to show her how to hold a table knife and how to hold the cucumber. We practiced keeping the knife on the end far away from our fingers. We worked slowly. We worked together and then on our own. Making salad was very smooth and stress free that evening.
As parents, there is no manual that magically appears when we have our children. The is a sense of right and wrong, but I have learned more often than not there is a huge area of "grey". Each child is different. How boring would it be if all children learned in the same way at the same pace? Grey areas can cause a parent and child a great deal of frustration. However they can also be a space of great joy and learning for everyone. Our grey spaces have evolved- we now see the rainbow after the storm rather than the grey skies.
Perhaps I should call my friend and tell him thanks.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)