Childhood Food

So lately, I've been trying to come up with more ideas for Nora's meals (and ours) and since she's a second meat eater, this means that I'm now buying and cooking more meat than I have ever before. This has encouraged me to return to some of the meals of my childhood. Things I haven't eaten in years. One standard in my house growing up was a mayo based tuna pasta salad which I'm sort of making a varient of for tonight. Basically, macaroni, tuna, onion, carrots, peas and a nayonaise dressing (although when I was growing up it was macaroni, tuna, onion, dill pickles & olives w/ a mayo dressing) - see Isa's Brooklyn Macaroni Salad for inspiration. I also dragged out this old standby from the Betty Crocker for kids cookbook - pear bunnies - although I think the original had involved cottage cheese, you can't really tell in the picture but the tail is a marshmallow.

Note the tator tots - a sure sign of childhood. I still love them!

Tonight, I'm also making a jello w/ pineapple. Although, if my mom or one of her aunts were making this it would also involve shredded carrots, celery (yuck), mandarin oranges, and possibly nuts.

So what comes to mind when you think of childhood food? Any favorites? Anything you wouldn't touch again with a 10 foot pole? Send me your memories!

Obamania

While I still haven't decided who I'm voting for on Tuesday, Nora appears to have Obamania. Here she is rocking out during his victory speech in South Carolina. Yes, that's Dad on the castanets.

Photo update

Here's those photo's I promised of samosa making and one of Nora actually eating spicey food!



This is one of my favorite photos of Nora, it's from Christmas day. She's holding a felt banana that I wish I could claim to have made. It actually peels.
And finally, here's Nora coloring with markers and as you can see, she's been watching too much Miami Ink with us. I cannot tell you how happy I am that markers are now washable.

And The Winner Is....

Jason!  Congratulations to my sweetie on winning the Hendrix Alumni Play Writing Contest.  For those of you who've known him for awhile, you have no doubt heard some of the plot involving a frozen yogurt shop in a mall in the late 80's early 90's.  I'm looking forward to seeing the reading next fall at Hendrix! I guess he can now add Award Winning Playwright to his resume and get a statement ready for when the society page gives us a call - which might actually happen if the grandmothers get wind of this. 

More Testing

Last night I tested yet another Isa recipe and I also tested something else, with potentially more serious outcomes. With all of Nora's food allergies, we've been delaying all nuts, but while at the doctor's this summer, she mentioned that coconut was not like other nuts and that we should consider giving it a try with Nora. I hadn't really felt like doing it until last night. Testing food on Nora is always a bit of a worry. The results can be fabulous (like the other day she decided out of the blue that she would eat salad - salad!!!) or they can be much more risky - vomiting, hives, or worse, using the scary epi jr. pen. Thankfully, we haven't had to do that yet. You'd think I'd have given much more consideration to trying a potentially dangerous food on her, besides, hmm, I've got some coconut milk, I wonder if it would taste good in this - maybe I'll give it to Nora. So we did. And she liked it and there have been no reactions so yea! coconut is okay now! This is a plus since many vegan recipes use coconut milk - especially desserts and also because coconut is a favorite of mine and several other family members (Laura!).

The Isa recipe I made was the potato and edamame samosas. I ended up using green peas instead of the edamame. These were delicious and very kid friendly. They made a bunch of cute little pies with plenty for dinner, leftovers and the freezer. It was also a bit more ambitious than I initially planned for a weeknight menu, but I am so happy with the results and it wasn't as bad as I thought to work with the dough. However, they made much more filling than I needed. So I tossed some frozen cauliflower in a pot, heated it up with the potato water, a small can of coconut milk and a couple of tablespoons of tiki masala paste. I pureed it all together and then folded in the extra filling (which was really yummy on it's own) and it made a really nice soup/very wet curry. Together with the samosas, curried chickpeas and tomatoes (I think I got this recipe from Natascha) and rice and it all turned out so well. And surprise of surprises, Nora ate much of it - well actually the tomato chickpea curry was not as well received and occasionally she would stop and make this terrible face and grab her soy milk so perhaps it wasn't all good. I'll post pictures of the samosas later.

Menu Planning

One of my informal New Year's Resolutions involves doing better menu planning to avoid the all to common refrigerator rot that occurs when I buy things that I think look great, but have no real plan for using. This has been helped by a wonderful template that I found on one of the craftblogs I drool over- maybe one day I'll finally take up crochet.



Anywho, this menu planning is also helping Jason come up with ideas for Nora's lunch - or will if he actually uses it. I've used it to create a mix and match list of Nora mains, sides, desserts and snacks of things that we usually have around the house -and I hope this will make a substantial dent in our overstuffed pantry as well (a problem similar to refrigerator rot, but not as terminal).

It is also assisting in two other goals - test kitchening my way though Vegan w/ a Vengeance, and Veginomicon and taking my lunch to work more often. This weekend, I made a modified version of one of her red beans and rice recipes (I didn't have any seitan, a vegan staple I've yet to experiment with) and the hot glazed tempeh, which has turned out to be quite addictive. The added benefit - it requires 1/4 cup of hot sauce! Yes! I've cleared out a less used condiment from the fridge, but don't rejoice too fast- Jason has unfortunately already replaced with not one but two varieties of Tabasco -he is of the people of the sauce. Luckily I liked it so much, that I plan to make to make this many more times. I also made a pea soup (not an Isa recipe) and the gingerbread cupcakes from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World. I am trying very hard not to eat these all away from Nora, so I'll be making them again. Let's hope I can stick to the menu planner for at least 5 meals this week.

SSTTTTUUUKKKKKK!

Many things are stuck at our house. Playdough lids, bear clothes, blocks inside airplanes, feet in footed pajamas, babies on top of potties next to sinks, hands inside elephant trunks. What's stuck in your house?

Test Kitchen Continues

I didn't get as much holiday cooking done as I had hoped this year. I didn't get any Christmas cookies made nor did I get to the Chex mix. I did make the chocolate cupcakes for Nora's birthday from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World and I was most pleased with the result. But I never got around to making any of the scones in Vegan w/ a Vengance. But since I was home today with Nora (she had her two year check up today and I took the day off to be with her - she's fine but got a shot). I decided it was time to make the orange glazed scones. They worked out very tastily. I suggest for anyone attempting these, to take seriously her recommendation to use a cookie sheet and not try to squeeze them into a smaller cake pan or 9x9 brownie pan because they are big to begin with and expand some more. Despite the close quarters of the pan they still turned out well and I'm having a hard time not eating the rest of them. So another yes for Isa.


I've also been experimenting with uploading pictures to Picasa, so I'm hoping that I get it to work and there will be a slide show uploaded of several pictures from the past month, including Nora's kitchen, the now departed purple horse, some shots from Nora's b-day, Christmas, and New Years. Unfortunately, we nave no pictures of Tree and PD's visit. I'm hoping Todd will share some of his excellent shots.

Happy New Year, Everyone!

I feel like I should be doing some sort of countdown list of the good and bad of 2007, or posting my resolutions for this next year, but really I haven't had the blogging spirit for awhile. This December, I was awash in Christmas spirit for the first time in years, and it resulted in actually doing not one but two advent calendars with Nora which was really fun and I'm happy we did it, although it did result in a let down for her when they were all over. I also minimally decorated (owl tree, stockings, a few bowls of holiday decorative things, and wreath on door) which is more than I've done for several years as well - although not all of my family appreciated my efforts. But then we all got sick and crabby and Christmas sort of faded away as did New Years. Jason did make a resolution, and that was to use up all these bottles of lotion we have laying around the house this year, but that was sort of the extent of it. I know Tree and PD have a very extensive goal setting session over the new year, so maybe they will post an instruction manual for the rest of us.

Now I'm back at work and after two absolutely freezing days (it was 52 degrees INSIDE my office), I'm sort of thinking about what needs to be done this year, which for work is quite substantial, and so I'm somehow not so much thinking about my world outside of work.

I guess I have thought about goals Nora-wise. So, in order to make me a better parent and keep me on task, here they are: 1. night weening in the next month or as soon as everyone is no longer sick (this is really more about me and my need for sleep than better parenting), 2. cooking more healthfully for her (and us) 3. keeping a better schedule, especially sleep schedule since the past two weeks of her night waking has been killing us 4. (which is related to 3) much less TV. We used to be better about this, but during the month of illnesses that was December, Nora (and I) spent way too much time in front of the TV and it is disturbing to me both how much she asks for it and how much she knows about the characters on that magical screen. I'm also disturbed that I actually looked at new TV's for us since I was shopping for a new DVD player (ours is dying) and that I even ordered my vouchers for the converter boxes for the changeover in 2009, despite the fact that I've got a lot of other things to do which should be priorities. I need to get back to watching only what I really want to watch and not just whatever is on and limiting Nora to watching TV only when I really need to get something else done and not on just to keep her from whining about it or just because I don't feel like playing with her right then or because I want to play on-line. I guess my rant on TV is getting a little off topic here, so I'll try to move on. 5. Play with Nora more and especially, get outside more. This is a fun one, so there is no excuse for me dodging it!

That's it for my '08 goals. What does '08 hold for you?