In the kitchen

Star Wars Blue and Gold Dinner.

Okay, we’re trekking back to February here. If you couldn’t tell from the minimal amount of posting I’ve done over the past few months, it’s been busy in these parts.

One of the things I got roped into tackling almost single-handedly was the food for our Cub Scout pack’s Blue and Gold Dinner. Our cub master decided on a Star Wars theme, which we were totally down with.

I should add that I had to feed up to 80 people on a $120 budget. Including much of the paper products. Not even possible. But I was close, which, in my estimation is almost the equivalent of feeding the five thousand.

Thank heaven for Pinterest. I tweaked a couple of the ideas to suit my purposes and this is what we ended up with:

In retrospect, I thought it might have been funny to include a picture of “frozen” Han Solo. Woulda shoulda coulda.
A few of them got kinda toasted. But they were finger-lickin’ good. Here’s the recipe.
I delegated this one out and am SOOO glad I did. She said these were a nightmare to assemble. But aren’t they cute?
I came up with Luke Skywater on my own-aren’t I clever? It’s probably on the internet somewhere but I’ll take credit for it until someone comes after me.


Not pictured: a giant vegetable tray with veggies arranged to look like Yoda. Great in theory but underwhelming on the delivery. It looked like Yoda for about two seconds…long before I thought to take pictures of the food.

The food got rave reviews (let’s consider for a moment, though, that the “reviewers” were mostly mothers of relatively large families who were simply grateful they didn’t have to cook dinner that night. So I’m taking their compliments with a grain of salt, to say the least.)

Either way, no one went home hungry, so I’ll call it a win.

The best things in life are homemade.

This morning at breakfast Anna commented to me, “These pancakes are GOOD!”

“That’s because I made them from scratch,” I replied.  (Right down to grinding my own wheat into flour).

I prepare breakfast for my children four out of the five school days each week.  Pancakes make a weekly appearance.  Mainly because the simplicity of adding water to Costco’s Kodiak Cake mix means I can sleep until 5:45 and still whip them up before Anna is out the door.

Pancake mixes are lifesavers, for sure.  As far as I’m concerned, any breakfast that appears on the table at 6:00 a.m. is a freaking labor of love.  But to suggest that a mix and pancakes from scratch are one and the same is simply untrue.

Think about it.  When attending an event where dessert is potluck, which ones disappear the fastest?  Including the crumbs.

No one’s calling up the local grocery store bakery to get their chocolate chip cookie recipe.  But you can bet they want mine.

I’m a creature of convenience as much as the next person.  Despite my cache of tried-and-true recipes for whole wheat bread, granola bars and banana muffins, I (more often than not) raid the snack aisle for goldfish crackers and wheat thins.

I might even have snagged a giant bag of Costco rolls a time or two.  My kids don’t mind a bit.

In my heart, though, I know that I’m giving my best when I’ve slaved over a stove or oven to present a fresh, unprocessed version of the same.

It’s not just because homemade(or homegrown, for that matter) tastes better.  Or even that it lacks the lengthy easy-to-mispronounce ingredient list on the side of store-bought packages.  Although, that’s part of it.

Somehow it satisfies me to know that my vanilla ice cream recipe contains only four ingredients compared to the 19 listed on our favorite store brand.  I even brag to my kids that my recipe is “healthy”, though arguably anything containing heavy whipping cream is most certainly anything BUT.

Still, homemade goodness is more than just goodness.  It’s love.

It’s the message it sends.  Messages like, “I was willing to get up a few minutes earlier to make you pancakes from scratch.”  Or, “I know how much you love my homemade granola bars so here’s a few dozen to tide you over for, oh, two days”.  Or, “I appreciate how hard you work to put food on the table for our family so I’m willing to sacrifice my time to make that food delicious.”

Food just might be a love language, I’m convinced.  Its power cannot be underestimated.  While you won’t find me swearing off prepared foods entirely, you can bet I’ll keep sending love notes in the form of edibles for years to come.

 

Millions of peaches.

August and September not only bring the first month of school but hundreds of backyard peaches.  We found out this year that our homeowner’s association no longer allows planting behind our property line because it’s not “firewise”.  Apparently, they did not see the gangly weeds that came right up to our property line prior to our planting of said peach trees.  Needless to say, this year’s harvest will likely be our last.  So we made the most of it.

Jack was my little helper for the first round.

A couple of weeks later, I avoided burnout by enlisting the rest of the crew.  We canned over fifty jars of peaches (after giving away dozens and dozens of them to friends and neighbors) and still had a few left over for four jars of jam.  Yum.

Camp cooking hack.

We’re vacationing on the cheap this summer.  Yes, that means we’re camping.  Tent camping, no less.  Camping can get expensive really fast if you don’t prepare your own food.  And, it can get exhausting really fast if most of the prep work hasn’t been done before the trip.

Which means, for the last week I’ve been making breakfasts and dinners galore that can be easily cooked or reheated on a camping stove (or in the fire) so we can enjoy yummy food in minutes with minimal mess.  I started with French toast sticks.

The way to a man’s heart.

Dads have come a long way in recent years.  Studies suggest that they help more around the home and with the children than ever before.  Despite this, our appreciation/respect for what they do may or may not have improved accordingly.

This Father’s Day we set out to make certain Tim had no doubt how much we love a appreciate everything he does for our family.  How better to do that than through food, glorious food?

For starters, the kids scoured Pinterest for just the right candy bar poster.  

We kicked off the morning with a nutritious breakfast of (yep! They’re homemade!) Boston Cream Donuts.

I could have stopped there but since dinner has to get on the table, why not make it a special request from our special guy?  Louisiana Chicken Pasta it was.  Seriously delish.  (Though, as a side note, I would recommend pounding the chicken breasts super thin so you don’t have to deep-fry them to the point of looking burnt…the chicken tasted divine but didn’t make for an amazing display). 

All that(and a Sunday afternoon nap) made for one happy daddy.  That night Tim thanked me for my hard work and thoughtfulness and remarked that he needed to up his game on making me feel awesome on Mother’s Day.  Cha-Ching!

How to love leftovers.

I grossly overestimated the amount of gravy my kids would put on their chicken fried steak the other night.  I could have thrown it out.  Tim could have chugged it single-handedly.  But thanks to the waste not, want not side of me, I opted to incorporate it into another meal this week:biscuits and gravy.  Yum.

When my husband and I got married, he brought with him a strong aversion to leftovers.  I quickly cured him of that.

Here are my favorite ways to use up leftovers:

  1.  If there’s enough for another meal, throw it in a labeled Ziploc freezer bag, lay it flat in the freezer until solid, then line it up filing-cabinet style in your freezer.  Like so.As a side note, my very favorite meals to freeze include:  Indian food (meat and sauce), Chili, Chicken (Our family doesn’t eat an entire chicken from Costco so I shred up the rest, pop it in a freezer bag and save it to make something else another day), meaty spaghetti sauce, and pulled pork (or chicken, or beef).  It is delightful to thumb through my freezer filing cabinet on a busy day, pop the leftovers in a crockpot and only have to worry about whipping up a vegetable or grain to accompany it.
  2. Stow it in a clear container in the fridge and enjoy it for lunch another day.  Store them at eye level so they don’t disappear into the dark abyss.  If your leftovers start to pile up, designate one night of the week “leftover night” and have each of the kids pick out his/her favorite to reheat for a hodge podge dinner.  Everyone gets what they want.  It’s almost like eating at a restaurant.  Almost.
  3. Plan a meal around it.  Put the right side of your brain to work and come up with another way to use up what’s left behind.  For instance, when we have taco salad for dinner, I invariably end up with extra lettuce and cheese.  So the next morning I sprinkle all of that cheese on scrambled eggs for the kids’ breakfast and throw some grilled chicken strips(frozen leftovers, naturally) on the lettuce for a lunch salad. Or I might use the cheese to make quesadillas and the lettuce to pull together a Caesar salad to go with pasta that night.  The possibilities are endless but you’ve got to get creative.  Or just google recipes that use up leftover ingredients.

 

One of these days I’ll get around to posting some of my faves.  Until then, get your own creative juices flowing so you don’t have to guilt your kids into eating more than they want by telling them about the starving kids in Africa.  Because, while guilt trips might be effective, they aren’t necessarily the best course of action for weight management, or for saving your wallet, or for showing gratitude for the abundance we enjoy.  Or for learning compassion for the starving kids in Africa, for that matter.   So yeah.  Leftovers for the win.

 

Oven-roasted Tomato Bruschetta

The weather has officially turned COLD.  I plucked the last of our green tomatoes from the vine a few weeks ago, plopped them in a brown-paper-lined box and waited until they turned bright red to use them up in the deliciousness that is oven-roasted tomato bruschetta.