Filed under: Thinking Out Loud
I am on a mini staycation for a couple of days this week — the boys have gone to their grandparents and I am truly soaking in every bit of silence in my house.
I did manage a batch of Sweet Potato & Black Bean Burritos, but I am otherwise not doing much cooking over this week and next, since our schedule is packed with end-of-summer parties and cramming in day trips before school starts again on September 7.
I’ll be updating Chick in the Kitchen with my farm share pickups this week and next, but otherwise I won’t be back here until September 5, when I post my back-to-school meal plan for the week. That post will include our Rosh Hashanah dinner plans, too — I’m excited to try some new recipes this year.
Make sure to follow me on Twitter for quick updates between now and then.
August 25, 2010
I have been looking around for non-insulated, roll-top reusable lunch bags — basically, a paper bag made out of some sort of washable fabric. Waterproof, ideally. But with the flood of reusable lunch products on the market, you’d think a bag like this would be easy to find. Wrong.
There are tons of insulated bags, and we already own two: one is from Thermos (similar to this one), and one is from Arctic Zone (similar to this). They both worked fine this summer as snack bags (I pack the boys’ lunch in separate lunchboxes). The problem is that these bags are bulky, and space in my kids’ backpacks is at a premium. I don’t need the insulation for their snacks, since they normally take water or juice and something nonperishable to eat. Plus, they have snack within a couple of hours of me packing their bags. Here’s what I have come up with:
Green-kit reusable lunch bag
has Velcro-sealed cotton bags with a handful of bold but simple graphics.
Kids Konserve also sells a cotton lunch sack. There are similar organic products from
Rebel Green, but the cute designs are much more “twenty-something in the city” than “elementary school boy.” A slightly more kid-friendly bag comes from
Green-kits. Each bag is $8 and includes personalization up to 15 characters — I could add the boys’ names, initials, or even a funny title like “Super G!”.
Artist's Club canvas lunch sack
Artist’s Club’s plain
cotton lunch sack looks just like a paper bag, and the kids could decorate it as they like with paint or fabric markers. It’s only $4.99. I could see this being a cute craft for a birthday party, too.
If you want to go the Etsy route, there are a bunch of bags to fall in love with, like the ones from Don’t Quilt Your Day Job. Although I think it’s beautiful and clever, I’m not sure the boys would see any difference between using one of these and an actual plastic bag from Target.
I also found an easy pattern for sewing your own snack bags with oil cloth, but I think two layers of oil cloth would be too stiff for what I want.
NYBG Roll-up lunch bag
I did find the type of bag I’m looking for in a feature on
The Daily Green, and it seems to be sold in the online store of the the
New York Botanical Garden, though the link is showing a picture of a book on Japanese stone gardens. I called the store today to clarify, but they were swamped and after keeping me on hold for a while asked for my number to call me back.
I’m definitely done looking for bags online, but I’m going to check a couple of my local stores again before I pay for shipping from one of the above vendors. Has anyone seen these non-insulated bags around? Please let me know if you do.
August 18, 2010
J. smoked beef ribs last Saturday (yes, more than a week ago), and at his request I made mashed sweet potatoes and sauteed green beans tossed with French’s Fried Onions. When he tasted the sweet potatoes he said “This is exactly what I wanted.” Ah! I was in heaven! A. has started eating beef recently, for the first time since he was about 2 years old. He liked these ribs a lot, too. The boy has good taste. (more…)
June 27, 2010
Last weekend we put in a small garden. Before we belonged to a CSA, we would grow lots of lettuce and tomatoes, plus some peppers and sugar snap peas. With the farm share, though, we get more lettuce than we can eat, so we held off on planting any this year.
We did plant several varieties of tomatoes, a black bean plant A. started growing in school, sugar snaps, and a couple of hot peppers. We filled in the rest of our squares with some flowers A. chose. I’ve never had flowers in a vegetable garden before, but we had the room and I like seeing them as I pull into our driveway.
May 23, 2010
Updated on 4/25/10: The bake sale raised more than $1,000 for Share Our Strength! And sold out of all the donated goodies.
This Saturday, April 24, Club Fit in Briarcliff is hosting a Share Our Strength Great American Bake Sale. The event is organized by my friend Alison, all the goodies are donated (by Club Fit and bakers like me), and the money raised goes to Share Our Strength, a charity aiming to end childhood hunger in America.
I made two types of muffins: Chocolate Chip Banana, and Apple Flax. They both turned out well, and look cute all wrapped up in the cello bags and ribbon we were given for packaging.
Stop by this Saturday, April 24th, from 8 am to 1 pm, and pick up a treat or two while making a contribution to a worthy cause.
April 22, 2010
Clockwise from top left: Beet, Orange, & Arugula Salad, Macaroon Cake, Poppy’s Horseradish, and Passover Triple-Chocolate Brownies.
I am not turning over my house for Passover this year. (Here’s what I did in 2008 and 2009.) I’ve been thinking about taking this year off for a while, and my decision was reinforced when we dealt with a 4-day power failure a month ago. I had to toss everything in my fridge, and while it was empty it seemed appropriate to do a deep cleaning. It felt like Passover — the cleaning part beforehand at least — had come early.
I have never been good at explaining the “why” of the choices I make for my kitchen to my boys. The why, to me, is often “because that’s how my mom did it” and that’s not a very satisfying answer to a little kid. It’s not satisfying to me when I say it out loud either, though I guess that is the very definition of tradition. I label my kitchen kosher-style, but over the past year or so I have become a lot more lenient in what that means. Without the personal conviction that I’m keeping this set of rules because of my own religious beliefs, it has been harder and harder for me to see a reason to keep shredded mozzarella off the table when I am serving meatballs. The boys don’t eat the meatballs anyway, so there’s no actual mixing of meat and cheese going on — they just want some cheese on their pasta. And I could not care less if you want butter on your baked potato while eating a steak. I still don’t combine meat and milk in the same dish when I cook, but this is more a lifelong habit than anything else.
This relaxing of my overall nod to kashrut has definitely colored my feeling about keeping Passover, and the work involved in doing so in my home. So, 2010 is a trial year. As we get closer to the start of the holiday, I am feeling a little left out of that small club of people that completely turn over their kitchens. I am, however, really looking forward to making a great dinner for my parents on Sunday. They will be in the jaws of that no man’s land of no more chometz in the house, but the holiday hasn’t started yet — what do you eat? I’m glad we’ll be able to feed them! Then on Monday I’m looking forward to cooking for the first seder with my family at my parent’s house. The Pesadich dishes, silverware, and pots I grew up using for just 8 days out of the year are touchstones that bring the holiday home for me.
Still looking for Passover recipes? Here’s a roundup I put together last year: Passover Recipes, Past and Future. I’m going to be making a version of the Beet, Orange, & Arugula Salad pictured above, using my newly-learned knife skills to supreme the orange.
March 27, 2010
At about 3:30 AM on Friday morning, February 26 we lost our electrical service during a heavy, long-lasting snow storm. And we have been without power — or heat — since then, until 4:30 PM yesterday. That’s four days of no utilities in the middle of winter. We spent Friday night in the house, sleeping around our fireplace, but then had to jump ship and go to J.’s parents. It was just too cold. I’m back now, in my warm house with every convenience around me, and a very big smile on my face. Look for a meal plan posting later today.
March 2, 2010
The other day A. was feeling a little under the weather, so I let him choose dinner and he asked for noodle soup — my homemade chicken soup, strained until clear, with thin egg noodles cooked in the broth. Luckily I had one more container in the freezer, and he (and G.) happily slurped up those noodles as if he knew they’d make him feel better.
That virus is still lingering, so he stayed home from school today in that weird in-between where you’re not quite well enough to go to school, but you certainly don’t feel sick enough to stay in bed (or even nap, dammit). He had plenty of energy to act like a loon with his brother, scarf down three full meals, and still have room for ice cream.
I started a fresh pot of chicken soup at noon today, and let it simmer all afternoon so that he could have noodle soup for dinner again (his request). And now I’m restocked. I keep these containers in the fridge overnight, skim off the fat, and then freeze them. Hopefully I won’t need another noodle soup dinner as medicine anytime soon.
February 2, 2010
On Friday, I went in to G.’s school to help cook for that night’s school-wide family dinner. I actually didn’t do much cooking, just prep work — skimming the fat off the top of four vats of chicken soup, slicing eggplant, lining enormous baking pans with foil, and so on. It’s fun being in that huge commercial kitchen — everything is stainless steel and you never seem to run out of room.
In addition to the 160 pieces of barbecue-sauced chicken you see above, there were also plenty of chicken nuggets, pigs in blankets, and this:
Yes, that’s 8 lbs. of tater tots, times two. We also made 12 eggplants-worth of chatzilim, an Israeli eggplant salad:
The school’s director uses one medium onion per large eggplant. Slice and fry the eggplants and onions until soft and golden, then drain well. Mix with tomato paste, salt, and pepper, then throw everything back on the stove to cook down for another 30 minutes or so. It is delicious! Here are the eggplant frying, along with three of the five huge ovens in this kitchen:
With all that oven space we were able to make enough rosemary-roasted potatoes for the group:
And we baked twice this amount of challah, the dough of which had been mixed and then shaped by the kids and teachers:
Just like with my morning of latke-cooking last month, it is no surprise I smelled like oil for the rest of the day. Thankfully there was another mom there who was able to chop all the onions without a problem, because I’d forgotten to bring my goggles.
January 23, 2010
Since this past September, I usually make a travel mug of coffee in the house before I leave for the morning, rather than stopping at Starbucks. (I never thought I’d get to the point where I felt stopping at Starbucks was inconvenient, but that’s how my schedule has played out recently.) I used to use a simplehuman pod coffee maker, but I could never get a strong enough cup of coffee out of it. I occasionally use our 12-cup Krups automatic drip brewer. But most often I boil water in a kettle, and then use a Melitta filter cone.
After I’d already boiled the water this morning, I realized my filter cone was in the dishwasher, and the dishwasher was in the middle of a cycle. So I jerry-rigged the set-up above, using a chinois, a bottle of olive oil to balance its handle, a filter, and my travel mug:
Not bad for something so ridiculous-looking! I was feeling pretty pleased with myself, and my mug was about half-way full before… (more…)
January 5, 2010
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I'm Dara, the Chick in the Kitchen. Living in the suburbs of Manhattan with my two boys, ages 4 and 6, and husband. Trying to feed my family something more diverse than a different shape of pasta each night. Read more 