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!
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.
Gift Giving, Revisited
We have written about inexpensive gift-giving before, but this seems like the right time of year to revisit the subject.
This is a great time of year to bake cookies, breads or other treats for gifts. The oven will help to heat your house and you won’t have to run the heater as much! Wrap up a nice loaf of bread or plate of cookies for your workplace, or your spouse’s. Give treats to your neighbors and friends. Wrap a paper plate with saran wrap, tie a festive bow around it and, voila!, you have a lovely homemade, inexpensive gift.
Break out those craft scissors and some tape to create homemade cards or other crafts. Use old magazines or calendars to do collages. Four greeting cards can be made from just 3 or 4 pieces of 8 1/2 by 11 paper. Visit websites or a local craft store for ideas.
Buy an inexpensive photo frame and paint it or embellish it in some way. Glue on beads or shells. This could be a lovely gift for a grandparent, especially if your kids helped with the frame.
Cross-stitch or embroider on fabric to make a bread cloth, table cloth or napkins. Knitted and crocheted gifts are treasured keepsakes in our home. Keep checking garage sales and rummage sales for unused cross-stitching sets.
Offer to babysit or pet-sit as a Christmas gift. Give another Mom a day to do her Christmas shopping by herself. You know I’d love a gift of time like that!
Your kids can help with most of these projects. This is a great time to teach them about creative giving. Maybe they will even have some gift ideas of their own.
Garden Ideas, Part 2
Another summer garden crop that we have had much success with is tomatoes. I usually spend all spring thinking about fresh tomatoes. And I usually end up planting too many tomato plants. (We also get fresh tomatoes all summer from our local CSA farm.) We get the tomato seedlings free at the local university open house in the spring, so we don’t even pay for the seeds/seedlings! And I forget, every year, just how big the vines can get! They usually end up overshadowing whatever I have planted close to them.
Cherry tomatoes are a huge hit with The Boy. I will often find him out in the garden, eating juicy, red cherry tomatoes right off the vine. Of course, by the end of the summer, I am giving away bags of them to everyone in the neighborhood.
The regular tomatoes, though, I am a little more frugal with. What we don’t eat fresh (on pizza, sandwiches and just plain!), I like to freeze. I freeze tomatoes whole, without cooking them. I don’t know if this is the ‘right’ way to do it, but it works for me. I cut off the tops, put several in a freezer ziploc bag and ’suck’ as much air out as I can before sealing it. I label the bag and pop it in the freezer. Freezer tomatoes are great to use in sauces and such later on. Take a bag out of the freezer and allow it to thaw a bit in the refrigerator. Empty the tomatoes into a microwave-safe bowl and finish thawing. The skins slip off quite easily and the tomatoes can go right into the pot or the pan.
Another way to save your excess tomatoes is to make spaghetti sauce and freeze that. If you live in an area that will support the growth of tomatoes all summer, try growing some yourself and save some $$ on fresh tomatoes all summer and sauces throughout the winter!
Garden Ideas, Part 1
We are lucky enough to live in a very moderate climate and can have a garden growing all year round. Here are some of our success stories. They might be crops for you to try if you too live in a moderate climate. I have found the internet to be the best resource for figuring out what to plant and when.
We have a variety of herbs growing, especially during the summer months. Parsley, chives, rosemary, thyme, and basil are wonderful to have on hand and fresh. I hate to buy an entire bunch of fresh herbs at the store when a recipe only calls for one teaspoon or some very small amount. This feels very wasteful to me and I haven’t had success with freezing or drying the leftovers yet. I love to just grab my scissors and step outside to clip what I need right off the plant! Herbs can easily be grown in pots and planters too, if space or temperature is an issue for you.
We have had huge success with basil and rosemary especially. The Man has to hack back the rosemary every fall and we still get a huge bush by the next summer. Basil thrives in our region during the summer months. We love to use it fresh in salads, on pizzas and in sandwiches. But my favorite thing about basil is pesto. Pesto is so easy to make and freezes really well. Throw some fresh basil in a food processor with some olive oil, pine nuts and garlic. Process until smooth. Use it fresh with pasta or in eggs or as a sandwich spread. Or freeze it to use throughout the winter months. I freeze it in ice cube trays, then pop it out and store it in a freezer ziploc bag. At the end of the basil growing season, I make a huge batch and freeze it to use throughout the cooler months.
Ideas for Halloween Candy
Parenthacks has another good post about using up leftover Halloween candy. My personal favorite is chopping it up and mixing it into ice cream. yum yum!
Rice Krispie Treats, Fun for Everyone
It was cool and rainy this weekend, the kind of days that call out for cookies. I decided to make Rice Krispie Treats. The Boy helped and I realized that making these tasty treats has great potential to be a fun, fairly inexpensive activity.
I haven’t tried the generic brand of Rice Krispies (Crisp Rice?), but I assume it wouldn’t be that much different than the Kellogg’s brand. And I always just buy the cheapest brand of marshmallow, especially if I am making the treats within a few days. Other than that, all you need is butter or margarine and perhaps some food coloring or other little ‘extras.’
Melting the butter and marshmallows needs to be closely supervised. We don’t want burned fingers or hands. Make sure you use a large pot so that it is easy to stir in the cereal after everything is melted. Once you have stirred in the cereal, it is easy for a young child to help press the treats into the greased pan or shape them.
I’m sure the ideas are endless, but you could add some food coloring to the marshmallow/butter concoction as it is melting. Add red and shape the treats into hearts for Valentine’s Day. Add green and shape into shamrocks for St. Patty’s Day. Add orange and make ‘carrots’ for Easter. I could go on. Shaping the treats is fun. Just remember to butter/grease your hands really well. Or use greased saran wrap to shape the treats. Add M&Ms or other candies before they cool to decorate. My favorite has been the carrot-shaped treats with green sour worm ‘tops.’
The Boy is not a fan of chocolate. (He doesn’t get it from me!) So these are a fun treat for him to help make and eat. If you wrap each square or shape in saran, they do last a few days, but of course, I think they are best when eaten right out of the pan!
Spatulatta
I recently came across a fun website, Spatulatta: Cooking 4 Kids Online. The site has short videos of kids cooking in the kitchen. It is definitely something to use when The Boy gets a little older. For now, it is a good reminder that early exposure to kitchen activities can be a great thing for kids. The Boy gets to do little things already, like, cracking eggs, stirring, cutting out and frosting cookies and ‘washing’ dishes. That last one is actually more like playing with soapy water and utensils in the sink.
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