Charmoula sauce is something I’d never heard of until our friends Ben and Liz introduced it to us. They brought over a jar filled with the golden, green-speckled marinade and I tried it tonight with talapia. Charmoula is found in Moroccan, Algerian and Tunisian cooking. It’s main ingredients are cilantro and garlic, along with coriander and chili peppers.
Watermelon, raspberries and a slice of Provolone made a wonderful after-school snack today.
I saw corn coming up in the fields today. With summer giving us a tease, I decided to splurge on some summer fruit.
On Tuesdays Molly Rose, a classmate and friend of Joe’s, comes home with us after school. Today we stopped off at our big American warehouse store, Sam’s Club so I could pick up a few things. Both Molly and Joe are terrific helpers, pushing the cart and plucking items off the shelf at my direction. When I was a kid my mother would let us pick out a package of cookies from the store. Today I told Joe and Molly Rose that they could each pick out any fruit they wanted to have as a snack when we got back home. Cookies would no doubt have cost less, but what a treat to have watermelon and raspberries in April.
Cherry-almond granola bars.
Am I crazy because I make my kid’s and husband’s lunches?
I used to make my own lunch for work and it just seemed logical to make one for my husband as well. Now I’m making a lunch for my son (his school does not have a cafeteria) to take to school, and it’s not much more effort to make for two. So throughout the school year, I go ahead and make Doug’s lunch. He would gladly make his own lunch (and I must say that he has no expectations that I do this for him), but it gives me great pleasure to know that my people have what they need to get through the day. I also should mention that my son is 15 and is capable of making his own lunch, but what he chooses to take is often inadequate. And so I fix the lunch bags. The lunches are simple, and we try to hit all the food groups: 1 sandwich of either a nut butter with homemade jam, or maybe a meat and cheese always on whole wheat bread; 1 raw vegetable; 1 fruit; 1 dessert or snack bar; 1 yogurt for Doug.
Doug enjoys a sweet with his morning coffee and is fond of cereal/snack/granola bars. Unfortunately we are sometimes reduced to buying the over-the-counter, highly processed varieties. These doughy, fruit filled or chocolate-infused briquettes are sad little candy bars in disguise. I do not eagerly purchase these. And our son, Max, is growing so fast that his caloric needs are huge, so I try and include a lot of protein-rich, calorie-packed items in his lunch sack.
So tonight I am lovingly making homemade granola bars, filled with peanut butter, oats, coconut, almonds and dried cherries. I know I’m going to receive more comments regarding the corn syrup, and just as I promised with the cookies the other night, I will try this with honey the next time. I also stir in a few chocolate chips as a teaser for a certain small person in our house.
These are not low-cal granola bars. They are high in fat and packed with sugar, to be sure. They are also loaded with real fruit and nuts, wheat germ and oats. One bar a day is plenty.
Tomorrow morning I will happily make the nut butter and homemade jam sandwich, and plop it in a well-used lunch bag along with a bag of raw carrots, a fruit, a yogurt and a lovingly prepared homemade granola bar. I’ll even send one off to school with our youngest, Joe, and take one for myself to have with my morning coffee.
Cherry-Almond Granola Bars
1. Mix together:
2. Stir in:
3. Press into a greased 9 x 12 pan. Bake at 350 degrees for 20 minutes. Score lightly while still warm; cut through when cool.
I believe that good tasting food should be visually beautiful. Food is a form of art work. I take a lot of care with my dinner preparations, following what my mother taught me that if you have a lot of different colors on your plate then you will be getting a lot of different nutrients.
I made this dish and posted it a couple of weeks ago, but I’ve not been happy with the way the meal looked that night. It was far too bland and approached a monochromatic plate which makes the food about as appetizing as cardboard. (I know it has green and red in it but there is something lacking, perhaps with the pasta itself?) So tonight I approached it with an artist’s eye, and feeling rich with a ‘fridge full of variety, I am offering this re-do.
Friends get impatient with me when I’m not able to provide exact quantities of ingredients when I’m making, for example, a stir fry, a soup, or perhaps this pasta dish. Tonight I set about to give every diner a plate full of vegetables, and all of it hidden in the pasta sauce.
These are the vegetables that I used for our family of six:
Vegetables included in this dish are: broccoli, kale, zucchini, carrots, tomatoes, onion, cauliflower and cauliflower greens.
When deciding on how much of each vegetable to use, I simply imagined how much I wanted each person at the table to have on their plate, then multiplied by six. Take a moment. Visualize your plate. Picture what colors, flavors and shapes you are looking for, and then start chopping.
As an experiment, I took of 1/6 of each vegetable and put it in a Pyrex measuring cup just to see what we were all in for:
I think we all got a great assortment of vegetables on our pasta tonight, and I feel much better about the way the dish turned out this week. There is always room for improvement!
When baking multiple loaves you can choose to make some with nuts and others with chocolate chips—something for everyone.
If you’re going to the effort of baking a quick-bread, then it’s not a lot more trouble to double or triple the recipe. There’s nothing more satisfying than having a stock pile of homemade baked goods in the freezer. I will admit that making this recipe x6 was a slight challenge in that I had to find a huge bowl, and had to scrape together 6 bread pans.
Banana Bread
1. Cream together butter and sugar, then mix in eggs.
2. Stir in the following:
3. Stir in the dry ingredients:
4. Optional: Blend in 1/2 cup coarsely chopped pecans and/or 1 cup mini chocolate chips.
5. Pour into a well greased loaf pan. Bake at 350 degrees for 55 minutes or until tests done with a toothpick.
Chunks of pecans placed on top of the batter become toasted during baking.
I’m doing what I mean to do every Sunday, and that is to plan the entire week’s menu in advance. It takes a few quiet minutes, and will save a lot of time in the upcoming week. Here’s my plan for the upcoming week:
Sunday: Tamale Pie from Laurel’s Kitchen Cookbook, broccoli, and orange slices. (Option B for my dad, who doesn’t like spicy: fish fillet, baked potato.)
Monday: Homemade macaroni- cheese-vegetable dish.
Tuesday: Tilapia marinated in neighbor Ben’s charmoula sauce, rice, frozen mixed vegies, fruit salad.
Wednesday: Tortellini with an easy tomato sauce, crusty bread, cauliflower, green salad.
Thursday: Sausage and bean dish, polenta, broccoli, green salad.
Friday: Rotisserie chicken, creamed fresh spinach, sweet potatoes, challah.
Dori taking the kids out in the Swedish double-buggy.
Picture this photo with a five year-old standing on a running board between my arms, and two large, braided loaves of challah riding on the rack beneath the little kids’ bottoms. That was the image the time this city girl decided to enter her bread in the New Mexico State Fair. (And I’m pretty sure that’s the day the buggy exceeded it’s weight limit, and one of the wheels became warped.)
We were living in the mountains just outside of Albuquerque, in a somewhat isolated area, where a trip to the big grocery store meant a 20 mile car ride. With three kids at home, ages 5, 4 and 2, I was happy to putter around the house, rather than wrangle them all into the car, and so it happened that I spent a lot of time baking bread. I challenged myself to go without using store-bought bread. Through a co-op we belonged to at the time, I ordered 50 pound bags of different kinds of flour. I baked whole wheat bread, molasses bread and a beautiful two-toned swirly bread, but our favorite was the challah I learned to bake from my Cousin Betty’s recipe.
Our mountain newspaper had a notice that the New Mexico State Fair was coming to Albuquerque. Being raised in a North Shore suburb of Chicago, I’d never so much as set foot in a state fair before, but I knew that people took bread and had it judged there. Doug was out of the country for two weeks and I was looking for something interesting to do, so I decided to enter.
I entered two separate contests: The Fleischmann’s Yeast Bread contest (with a cash prize), and the New Mexico State Fair bread contest. As I filled out the paperwork the official asked me for my empty Fleischmann’s yeast packages so she could staple them to the entry form. I’m a pretty loyal Red Star yeast user, so her request made me pause. She didn’t miss a beat, thankfully, and handed me a three-pack and a pair of scissors. “There’s a trash can under the table.” I snipped off the ends, emptied that sad yeast into the trash can, and handed her the packages to staple to my Fleischmann’s entry form.
My sister-in-law, Donna, a veteran fair goer, later informed me that picking one’s category is crucial when entering a contest. But at the time I didn’t give it a lot of thought and I chose the “holiday bread” category because challah is a Jewish sabbath bread, and the sabbath is our most important holiday — right? Unfortunately, Easter sticky buns fell into the same category. In fact, there were over 30 breads in the holiday bread competition.
The judging was fascinating. A celebrity food judge from one of the local television stations was tasting the breads for the Fleischmann’s contest. I watched with my three squirmy kids, still buckled into the buggy, while the judge took a slice from the very center of each loaf, holding some up as examples of having a good “crumb” or crust.
The kids held out long enough for my bread to be held up by the judge, who said that he was from Philadelphia and he knew what challah tasted like and that this was the best challah he’d ever had. I won a big fancy third place ribbon, and $30, which almost paid for parking and four ice creams. Later, when I talked with the judge, he told me that I should have entered in the international category. Maybe next time.
I had to drive the 20 miles back up into the mountains so that I could get Max to afternoon kindergarten, and I missed the judging of my other loaf. I called later to find out the results and learned that I had won the first place ribbon in the New Mexico bread contest. They put the bread on display in the case for the 10 remaining days of the fair and asked if I wanted it back at the end. I said no. But I did go to town to fetch my ribbons, and I framed them to display in my kitchen. With thanks to Betty Jane for her fine recipe.
My framed ribbons on the right. On the left is a “Santo,” a painted image of a saint that I got in Taos, New Mexico. On the back it says: Saint Marta. Patroness of housewives, dietitians, domestic workers, waitresses and lay sisters, invoked to protect the home.
Ingredients
For the dough:
Mix together and brush on before baking:
Sprinkle with:
Directions
The Plate is My Canvas: Recipes and Stories from My Family’s Interfaith Kitchen
and
You Can’t Have Dry Coffee: Papa’s Excuse to Have a Nosh And Nana’s Perfect Pastries
I love this soup. My first taste of potato chowder was in the basement of the Illini Union in 1975. In keeping with the diet of this part of the world, it was made with bacon and lots of heavy cream. My version is packed with great vegetables like kale and carrots, uses low-fat milk and is one of my family’s favorites.
This afternoon, in keeping with the Illini spirit, I picked up some bacon ends at the U of I meat lab. After trimming off most of the fat, I chopped up the meat and sauteed it along with the leeks. This soup is also great with bits of ham or sausage, but is also every bit is good as a vegetarian soup. Also, add some chopped red sweet pepper if you like that.
Potato Corn Chowder
Saute the onions and meat, if you’re using it, in the olive oil. When the onion is soft add all of the vegetables and the basil, and just barely cover with water. Cook for about an hour, until the vegies are soft. Take out 2 cups of the broth and vegetable mixture and quickly run through a blender, and then return to the pot. Add the milk and butter and heat very slowly until warm. Season with salt and lots of fresh pepper.
Soup night is transformed by popovers. These lovely little breads puff way up in the pan, are hollow and buttery on the inside and slightly crisp on the outside. They only take about 45 minutes start to finish, and are amazingly simple to make. Is there anything better than a hot bread product to serve with your nice pot of soup?
Popovers
Preheat the oven to 375 degrees, and when it’s hot, stick your 12-slot muffin pan in the oven to heat up for about 5 minutes.
While the pan is heating up, mix together the slightly beaten eggs with the milk, and mix in the flour and salt. Don’t worry if there are some small lumps in the batter.
Take the hot pan out of the oven and brush it with the melted butter. You’ll use up all the butter to do this. Then very quickly fill each hole with about 2/3 cup of the batter. Do this quickly so that the pan doesn’t cool down, and then put it back in the oven.
Bake for 35 mins. Serve hot!
Blackberries, strawberries and oranges served in an orange peel.
Today I saw a picture of a Waldorf salad served in a hollowed out apple and was inspired to create mini fruit arrangements for dinner. I’ve made large center piece fruit arrangements many times, but never individual ones. These were quick and simple to make, beautiful, and gave our Thursday night supper a festive feel.
The Plate is My Canvas 