Sneaky

Have you ever heard of the "Sneaky Chef?" Her name is Missy Chase Lapine and she is the author of several "Sneaky Chef"  cookbooks.  I have checked out her cookbook several times from the library and every time has been at a different eating stage for our girls.  The first time was "Oh this has some good ideas but L. is doing okay with eating right now so I'm not sure we need to resort to this," and the most recent time was "Okay L. doesn't want to eat anything but crackers and cheese and plain noodles with parmessan cheese, maybe we can find something in here."  Her basic strategy is purees.  She has various purees in different colors based on the ingredients which she then sneaks into different dishes that kids already eat and love.  For example she has a "white puree" that I think has cauliflower and maybe white beans (I can't remember exactly) and you can then add that to mac and cheese.  Her big thing is that the puree can't alter the dish in a noticeable way, or else the picky kid of course will not eat it.

My difficulty with this method is that one of my food goals for our family is that our kids recognize vegetables as they are (not pureed and hidden), and that they eat a variety of them knowingly. But maybe this could be a good way for us to ease in to it? That being said she does have a bunch of great ideas that we have tried.  One of them is a flour blend.  It is one part wheat germ, one part wheat flour, and one part unbleached all-purpose flour. I fill a gallon size zip lock bag with the flour mix and keep it in the freezer. She says that it should work fine in most things that call for flour, but I haven't been to daring and mostly use it in things that are pretty flexible with the type of flour you use, like muffins or banana bread. She has a bunch of recipes and ideas on her website: http://www.thesneakychef.com/  Check it out and see what you think.

Taste of Fall and Comfort Food

These are two recipes that I LOVE!  They are a bit less on the healthy side and more on the really yummy side.  Both are great on cold days. Enjoy!

Apple Cider Syrup 

1 cup sugar
1/4 tsp. cinnamon
3 Tbsp. flour
1/4 tsp. nutmeg

Mix in a medium sauce pan then add:

2 cups apple cider (or apple juice if you don't have cider)
2 Tbsp. lemon juice

Cook on medium high heat until it boils, stir constantly.  Boil 1 minute, remove from heat and add 4 Tbsp. butter. Stir until butter is melted. Absolutely delicious on pancakes, waffles, or ice cream :)


This next recipe is pure comfort food.  A neighbor brought this over after R. was born and it totally hit the spot.  We made it last week and it had the same result. :)  The recipe came from this website: http://thepioneerwoman.com/cooking/2009/11/quick-recipe-leftover-turkey-pot-pie/

We used chicken instead of turkey, but you may have some leftover turkey next week that you want to use. We also did pie crust on the top and bottom.

Leftover Turkey Pot Pie

1 pie crust (1/2 of Perfect Pie Crust recipe)

1/2 stick butter 
1/2 cup finely diced onion 
1/2 cup finely diced carrot 
1/2 cup finely diced celery 
2 cups leftover turkey, light and dark, diced or shredded (or both!) 
1/4 cup flour 
2 cups low-sodium chicken or turkey broth 
splash of white wine (optional) 
1 cup heavy cream 
Frozen peas (optional) 
Fresh thyme, chopped 
salt and pepper to taste

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

Melt butter in a skillet or dutch oven. Add onion, carrots, and celery, and cook until translucent (a couple of minutes.)
Add turkey and stir. Sprinkle flour over mixture and stir. Cook over medium heat for a couple of minutes, stirring constantly.
Pour in chicken or turkey broth, stirring constantly. Splash in wine (you can leave this out if you’d like.) Pour in cream. (May add frozen peas at this point if you’d like.)
Bring to a slow boil and allow mixture to cook and thicken for a few minutes. Add salt and pepper to taste (do not underseason), and fresh or dried thyme to taste. Do one final taste at the end and add what it needs.
Pour mixture into a casserole dish or deep pie pan.
Roll out crust so that it’s about 1 inch larger than the pan you’re using.
Place the crust on top of the pot pie mixture, and press crust into the sides of the dish. Cut vents in the top of the crust.
Bake for 30 minutes or until very golden and bubbly.
Allow to cool for a little bit before serving.

The Amazing Smoothie

Smoothies are quickly becoming my best friend.  I have always been a big fan of smoothies and am only now  learning of all the great things, other than fruit, that you can throw into them and the girls love them! I don't think they have ever turned me down when I have offered them a smoothie. We started throwing spinach into smoothies a while ago, the first time I didn't I wasn't thinking and threw it into an orange julius. The resulting flavor was fine but the color was a nasty pukish gray and no one wanted to touch it.  So a good rule of thumb is if you are throwing green stuff in your smoothie and you don't want you smoothie to be green or pukish gray, throw in fruit that is dark colored like red or purple (mixed berries like blueberries, strawberries, raspberries, and blackberries work really well and you can buy them in big bags at Sam's, Costco, or Winco).  Flax meal is another super easy thing to throw in, avocados make smoothies nice and creamy (but remember the green rule) and we discovered something else surprising...broccoli.  My friend told me that she knew someone that put frozen broccoli in their smoothies, my thought: gross. When I think broccoli I think of a bit more overpowering flavor and not really one that you want to chug down in the morning.  I decided to give it a try though and just put in a little bit and SURPRISE... you couldn't taste it.  The next time we tried a bit more and... the same result.  We've even tried broccoli and spinach and it was still good.  I don't know if fresh broccoli would have the same result as frozen, we haven't tried it, I most definitely would not try cooked broccoli.
   We had a complete dinner fail the other night.  Ryan was going to be gone till late and as often happens when Ryan is not going to be home for dinner I didn't feel like spending a lot of time making something that I was pretty sure the girls wouldn't eat.  So we ate cereal and I justified it with a smoothie that had broccoli and spinach in it.  Yay for smoothies!

Farmer's Market

So we tried out our local farmers market a couple weeks ago and it was awesome!  I've been meaning to check it out for months but we always had something else going on.  There were lots of produce vendors and even vendors selling meat, eggs, and bread.  The prices were even pretty comparable to the grocery store and some times cheaper, which I was a little surprised at.  Another cool thing is that they operate all year round, yay for California!  I think I may go every Saturday.

Goals for Food

I think an important step of changing the way we eat for the better is to document my specific goals for our family.  So here goes:

1. Get all of us to eat healthier:  In talking with Ryan we all have specific eating needs, I just need to figure out the best way to meet all of them.
3. Eat more of a variety of vegetables.  I did a little spread sheet once of all the recipes we typically make and then divided the ingredients into categories like: pasta or rice, produce, dairy, canned goods, etc.  I discovered that basically the only vegetables we eat on a regular basis are: potatoes, green beans, carrots, celery, onions, lettuce, spinach, and occasionally other more "exotic" things like asparagus.
4. Stay in my grocery budget. Basically I am not very good at this.  We have some wiggle room in our budget that we can increase it a little bit if necessary but I need to decide, given our other food goals, what the best amount is for our family and then stick with it.
5. Grow a fair amount of produce we eat in our own garden. Ryan and I both grew up in families with large gardens and mothers that canned what they grew.  I am so grateful for this skill that our families past down to us and have big plans of turning our small weed patch into something much more productive and useful.
6. Waste less food.  I feel like whenever we get a lot of fresh produce inevitably a bunch of it ends up going bad and getting thrown away because I don't use it fast enough, I can't figure out what to make with it, or I just forget about it.  This may also be a menu organizing problem.  If I organize our menu in such a way that when I buy, for instance, something like spinach I include meals with spinach several times so that I use it all up before it goes bad.
7. Improve my cooking skills, learn what ingredients go well together, get better at making meals out of what we have.  Whenever I have something I don't know what to do with I always just jump on to allrecipes.com and see what I can find. Not that doing that is a bad thing, but I would love to have a better knowledge of fruits, vegetables, and especially fresh herbs so that I knew what goes well together and the best way to prepare it without always having to dig up a recipe.  I rarely ever buy fresh herbs and have never grown them because I just don't know what I would do with a large quantity of them.
8. Food storage. We have essentially no food storage and very little in terms of emergency preparedness.  I really want to get organized and have 72 hour kits, a week or so of water for everyone, and at least a three month supply of food that we are rotating through.  I have always thought of food storage as canning jars and mostly #10 cans full of wheat and rice, things that you store in case of natural disaster.  But really it is more for everyday emergencies like running out of grocery money (always happens), or a pay check or reimbursement is delayed, unexpected expenses, being temporarily out of work, city water line gets clogged or backed up (this actually happened once in Provo and we couldn't use the water for a good part of the day).  We even got a letter from our water company recommending we have at least a 3 day supply of water for everyone in our family.

So this gives me lots to work towards but there is no time to start like the present.

What's for Lunch?

I ask myself this question everyday as it nears noon and my answer?.... usually I have no idea.  Lunch is my worst meal of the day as far as what to make.  A lot of the time I can think of things for me and Ryan to eat but those things are necessarily things that the girls will eat, like a salad. Everyone is beyond sick of peanut butter sandwiches, in fact the last time I made them for lunch L. through an all out crying fit. It is not uncommon for her to refuse to eat something but it usually doesn't turn into a crying and screaming extravaganza.  I even made an organized lunch chart/menu that I could follow to try and generate some ideas other than sandwiches.  It went something like this each day we would have something different: soup, pasta, salad, sandwiches, and then we could have leftovers a couple times during the week.  I think the idea itself is good but I am struggling with kid friendly ideas for each of those categories.
    We did have a fair amount of success with one idea about a month ago: Tea Party.  The credit for the idea goes to Fancy Nancy.  We fixed up some herbal tea in the morning (our favorite is the Celestial Fruit Sampler) and I added a little sugar so the girls will actually drink it, then we refrigerated it till lunch.  Then we make a bunch of finger foods like: banana or some other kind of bread, cut up veggies, sandwich roll ups - a slice of bread rolled flat with a rolling pin, then spread filling like peanut butter, honey, or jam, then roll it up and cut it in half (or more pieces, think cinnamon rolls) and put a tooth pick in each piece.  The girls loved this, I even let them use their play dishes so they each had a tea cup and little plate. We also invited friends over for the tea party once and that was fun.
   Other than that though I am in need of lunch ideas. Anybody have any favorites?

Brief Adventure with a CSA

One of the new things we tried recently was a CSA. In case you don't know, CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture. Our CSA website defined it as "a partnership between a farm and a community of subscribers which provides a direct link between the production and consumption of food. Members make a commitment to support the farm throughout the season. Members purchase a share of the harvest which is delivered to them weekly at a local drop location." Basically you pay up front for a local farm to grow food for you, then you pick up a box of produce every week at a specified location, or some of them will deliver to your door for an additional fee. You don't get to choose what is in the box, the give you what ever is ripe and in season. There are many advantages, some being: you know where the food came from, it is fresh (often picked that morning), you support local agriculture, and you get a good variety of in-season produce. If the farm has a good year then you benefit by getting more produce, however if it is a bad year then you may end up with less than you would normally get. CSAs may also offer different sizes of produce boxes so you can choose one based on how many are in your family or how often you cook. They also usually give you recipes that you can make based on what is in your box.

My main motivation, silly as it may sound, was that it forced me to buy a variety of vegetables that I may not have bought other wise and I then had to find something to do with them. The particular CSA we chose divided the year up in quarters and you paid per quarter. If you wanted to sign up later in quarter they would pro-rate the cost. I signed up at the end of the quarter, so we paid for four weeks worth of produce. Some CSAs also have "add-ons" or extra things you can pay for and get weekly with your produce like flowers, bread, fruit, honey, meat, etc. Ours offered bread from a local bakery so I signed up for four weeks of bread too.

In case you are interested, this is what we got in our produce box each week:

Week 1: Yellow squash, zucchini, potatoes, cucumbers, string beans, corn, basil, tomatoes, and garlic

Week 2: Beets, yellow squash, zucchini, potatoes, lemon cucumbers, string beans, cantaloupe, and cinnamon basil

Week 3: Yellow squash, red onions, lemon cucumbers, string beans, tomatoes, corn, and peaches

Week 4: String beans, cherry tomatoes, figs, eggplant, red bell peppers, basil, and potatoes

It was a real challenge for me to find stuff to do with our produce (tells you something about my cooking) and to do it before it went bad, and sadly we didn't end up throwing some stuff away because I didn't do something with it in time. I think my biggest problem was poor planning on my part. I typically plan my weekly menu to go from Sunday to Saturday and I do my shopping on Saturday. Our pick up day was on Tuesdays so this threw off my weekly menu and shopping, it was my bad for not adjusting. However, I will say that in those four weeks we ate more vegetables than we have our entire marriage (4 years) and we felt better too. We also tried several things that we had never tried like figs and eggplant. One of our favorite things to make was CSA pizza. On Friday or Saturday nights we would make a pizza out of things we had from our CSA. They were always pretty tasty.

Our last week of the CSA Ryan and I talked about the things we liked about a CSA and if we wanted to continue. We both really liked having a CSA and we felt healthier. However, we decided not sign up for the next quarter though mostly because we went way over on our grocery budget and while with better planning we might be able to fix that, there are some other things I would like to try, like farmers markets and maybe some grow boxes in our little yard. This week was our first week without it and I missed getting our "surprise box" on Tuesdays, it was something I looked forward to. We may very well go back to a CSA though, but I think I would switch to a different one. Our pick up site was about 20 minutes away on a side of town that we typically don't have a need to go, which was sometimes a pain and took a lot of gas. There were also some I found with more variety that I liked. All in all it was a really good experience and I would definitely recommend them to others.