My Favorite Cookbook
About a year ago we started subscribing to a local farm. As CSA members, we receive a box of veggies and fruit every week. This has been great for our diets. We’ve begun to get a feel for what is in season and how good things taste when they are not shipped from another continent!
At first, though, I was at a loss as to how to cook all these vegetables. (The fruit is easy. The Boy eats fruit with almost every meal.) I shopped around and finally settled on From Asparagus to Zucchini; A Guide To Cooking Farm-Fresh Seasonal Produce. This cookbook is amazing! It is organized by vegetable, with at least 4 recipes for each. Most of the recipes require other ingredients that are also currently in season. In addition to the recipes (we have yet to find one we really don’t like), each section has a brief history of that vegetable and cooking and storage tips.
Really, who knew there were so many delicious ways to prepare beets or how delicious a carrot almond cake could be? Pasta Pie with Fresh Greens anyone? How about Garlic Parsley Pesto or Penne alla Zucca (Roman Pasta with Pumpkin Sauce)?
f you are thinking of trying to cook more with seasonal produce or if you have a plethora of squash and need some ideas of how to use it, this is the book for you. If you want to introduce more vegetables (and not just the mainstream veggies you find at the supermarket) into your diet, this is the book for you. If you like to shop at Farmers’ Markets, but just don’t know how to fix that kohlrabi, this is the book for you. Happy Cooking and Happy Eating!
Waste Not, Want Not. Fruits and Veggies That is.
One big part of living on less is to make sure you use up everything you have. Everything that you buy and don’t use is wasting money. Keeping fruits and veggies in an edible state is always a hard one. Which fruits can go together and which ones make other ones spoil faster? Apple and banana? Grapes and carrots?
Luckily, there is a webpage that can help, imagine that? Here you can learn about how to keep fruits and vegetables fresh and prevent spoilage. It lists a bunch of common fruits and vegetables and where you can store them and for how long. For example, celery can go in the fridge but garlic should always be stored on the counter. A great resource for keeping your food fresh and not having to throw it in the compost pile.
Cereal Shapes
Dry cold cereal is a great tool for teaching kids about shapes. Fill a baggie with several types of cereal and let your toddler sort them out by shape.
Circles: Cheerios
Squares: Chex, Quaker Oat Squares
There are more shapes in some sugary cereals (Lucky Charms comes to mind). If you don’t want to buy an entire box, consider buying the little one-serving packs and letting your kids glue the shapes onto paper. Or just eating a small serving for a special treat.
And of course, there are other foods that come in basic shapes. Some crackers are triangle or rectangle shaped. When you start looking around your kitchen, you may find little teaching opportunities everywhere!
Little Dinosaurs
We’ve been checking out a different How Do Dinosaurs… book from the library for the past few weeks. The Boy really enjoys the rhythm and rhymes and has taken to reciting some parts. These are short picture books that teach a simple lesson. The dinosaurs learn their colors, count to ten, say good night, eat their food and go to school to name a few.
Younger kids might enjoy the counting and colors books and older kids will like to see the dinosaurs go to school and play with their friends. The silly, rhyming text is accompanied by great illustrations of dinosaurs with human parents. These are fantastic books for older kids who are into dinosaurs too.
Keep Track of Your Little One’s Books
We currently have anywhere from 500 to ∞ children’s books littering the house. There is the full 5′ bookshelf in the kid’s room, the 7′ one in the living room, the books on the coffee table and the ones that are stashed in the couch for leisure reading between building train tracks and knocking down Lego towers.
We have ratty books, brand new books, books that make sounds, books that have lights and require batteries, puzzle books that come apart, cloth books, velcro books, old classics, new soon-to-be classics and possibly even lost library books. But how to keep track of them all and be able to share that list with relatives and friends so you don’t end up with 6 copies of Pat the Bunny?
Enter the website, LibraryThing.com. You can create a free account and start entering all the books you have by title, author or ISBN. When you are done you get a fairly simple looking URL that you can send around to family and friends. This lists all the books and you can even see how many people also have a certain book on their list. Over 2000 for The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein!
You can even make other lists for yourself, but since you can fit about 20 children’s books in the space that Andrew Carnegie’s biography would fit, it is especially helpful for managing the ever growing kid’s bookshelf.
Old Return Address Labels
Although it may be tedious work to cut the picture off old return address labels, they can be put to good use as stickers for your child. Some relatives recently moved and gave The Boy all of their old return address labels to play with. We cut the name and address portion off and now have a good-sized bag of fun stickers for him.
Toddlerobics
We’ve recently discovered the Toddlerobics books and they have fast become favorites. One of our recent posts talked about ‘do-it-yourself’ toddler classes. If a gymnastics/activity class is not in the budget for you, check out these books for some toddlerobics at home. The Boy loves to do the activities in the book as I read them. Zita Newcome’s rhymes and illustrations appeal to children and adults alike. You can use these books to do a 20-30 minute gymnastics class at home!
Free and Amazing Photo Organizer
So you have kids and a digital camera. That probably means you have anywhere from 1-10000 pictures and videos of them. Most digital cameras come with software to help you organize and edit your photos, but most leave a lot to be desired. One of the best programs out here also happens to be free! It is called Picasa.
This program is amazing. It can watch your picture folders, adding new ones anytime you plug in your camera. It creates thumbnails of all your videos and pictures for easy organizing and editing. You can do a lot of basic editing, cropping, red eye reduction and a bunch more.
One of the best features is you can choose what format to print pictures in. You can have wallets, 5×7, 4×6, all the common formats. You can print out the best pictures and give to family members as gifts!
You can also have it resize images before you email them so you don’t clog your family’s email accounts with glorious pictures of your kids.
Once I discovered this, I threw out the horrible Canon software and have never looked back. And that was about 6000 pictures ago!
Thank You Notes
It is easy to have your kids be involved in the thank you note process, no matter what the age.
For the very young: Write thank yous for the gifts your young children have received on note paper made from their own drawings. Let kids fingerpaint or color on blank notecards or on regular paper that can be cut down or folded to fit in an envelope.
For toddlers and pre-schoolers: Let your child ‘write’ the thank you themselves. Then ‘translate’ the scribbles into readable English. If the kids are starting to write their own names, let them sign the thank you note.
For primary ages: Kids can draw a picture of the gift (wearing the sweater from Grandma or playing with the toy from Uncle Matt) and you can write the thank you words they dictate to you. By this age, though, many children should be able to start writing sentences. A simple Thank You Frame (see below) is appropriate for this age.
For older elementary kids and above: By the time your child is in fourth grade an above, they should be capable of writing thank you notes themselves. One strategy for getting kids to get thank you notes done is to not let them use the gift until the thank you has been written. Another idea is to set aside one morning or afternoon for thank you writing. Put all the supplies that kids will need (pens, pencils, paper, envelopes, stamps, addresses, gift lists) on the dining table. Sit down as a family and have everyone complete their holiday thank you notes. You can do yours at the same time and be a good model for your kids!
All Ages: Take a digital picture of your child with or without the gift and attach it to an email to the giver. Or print the picture on regular paper and use that as your stationary.
Creamed Eggs on Toast
Here is one of our favorite (fairly cheap) recipes, used for breakfast, lunch or dinner.
1. Hard-boil several eggs.
2. In a medium sauce pan, melt several Tablespoons of butter.
3. Add several Tablespoons of flour and stir to make a paste.
4. Add about a cup of milk and stir.
5. Stir in the hard-boiled eggs (chopped) and any extras (minced onion, garlic salt, salt, pepper).
6. Serve over toast and enjoy!
This recipe is great because it can be varied in so many ways. Throw in some left over chopped ham or ground turkey (in addition to or without the eggs). Stir in some chopped, cooked veggies. We generally have eggs and bread on hand, so this is a tasty, last minute, easy meal to prepare. If your eggs are already hard-boiled, the preparation takes ten minutes or less.
-
Categories
-
Archives
-
Links