Make Now, Bake Later

Someone Special, who prefers to be called "Sexy, Hot Hunk of Manhood" from now on, has a friend who writes on his blog that you should always keep slice and bake cookies in the fridge. You know, for serious cookie emergencies.

I agree completely.

The problem, though, is that I don't trust packaged cookie dough because they are, by necessity for shelf life, packed with preservatives. One of my little goals is to find whole food ways to enjoy typical convenience foods, but cookies are a bit tricky. How can you enjoy homemade cookies without having to lug out the mixer or bribe a grandma every time you want some? The proverbial light bulb went off above my head when I recalled a memory from my childhood:

When we were little, my dad coached my brothers' little league baseball team, and my mom was expected to have homemade chocolate chip cookies ready for after practice.  She would mix up tons of chocolate chip cookie dough ahead of time, freeze spoonfuls of dough on cookie sheets, then transfer said dough to a baggie and store in the freezer. She could pull a few out whenever the boys on the team were over.

Genius.

As our emergency cookie stash was running low, the girls and I whipped out our aprons and got right to work.

Everyone knows homemade cookies taste better when children stick their fingers in the dough.

Make the spoonfuls roughly the same size so that your cookies will bake evenly

I just place the cookie sheets in the freezer for an hour or so. 

Ready for the freezer, to be baked another day

So, with just a little bit of extra up-front effort, it is possible to have the convenience of slice and bake cookies with none of the additives. And to kill two birds with one stone, you can make the actual dough-mixing your math lesson for the day. Older kids can be challenged with a lesson on, say, fractions, while toddlers can develop motor skills by mixing, pouring, and stirring. Preschoolers can count out chocolate chips, kindergarteners can arrange the dough in groups of fives or twos to build the foundations of multiplication later on. And they're all learning to be helpful. It's a win-win-win-win-win situation.

That's the best kind.

How I Make Home-Made Stock

Have you ever made home-made stock, either beef, chicken, or vegetable? It's so much more flavorful than the store-bought kind, but to be honest, I used to think it would be too much trouble to make. Every celebrity chef has their own recipe for chicken stock, but I always find it so wasteful. They often want you to use the whole chicken (or two, or three!)  and then just throw it away once you have strained the liquid. This offends my sensibilities. Waste a whole chicken???? What are they thinking? Likewise with the vegetables. Veggies are relatively inexpensive (only compared to meat and dairy, though), but I still find it bothersome to have to buy vegetables just to make stock.

At last I found a kindred in The Unplugged Kitchen, by Viana La Place. She suggests saving all your kitchen scraps: onion and garlic peels, vegetable peelings, tops, and stems, cheese rinds, and even bread crusts and making soup every week. Then, one of my friends wrote on her blog about saving vegetables scraps in the freezer and making vegetable stock with them. So I decided to try it. Voila! Luscious, dark, flavorful broth, made for free, out of the stuff you usually throw away. And it's super easy to do.

All week long, I save my vegetable scraps, and I mean, everything. Tops, peelings, and root ends of carrots, turnips, eggplants, sweet peppers (though not the seeds or core), celery, okra, potatoes, sweet potatoes, stems of herbs, the tiny little garlic cloves that are too small to use, you name it, I save it. Because I'm using the scraps instead of throwing them out, I make sure to do an extra-thorough wash and rinse of everything before I use it. I put trimmings in baggies and store them in the freezer. We eat a lot of veggies in this house, so I end up with a lot of scraps. One day a week, I roast a chicken. Whatever day that falls on is the night I make stock. Before I go to bed, I ceremoniously dump the carcass and all the pan juices into my large crockpot (not sure of the actual capacity, but it's at least 6 quarts), then I dump all the frozen veggie trimmings on top, and cover everything with pure, filtered water. The only thing close to measuring I do is to make sure I don't over-fill the pot. I add the tiniest pinch of salt and two or three black peppercorns, put the lid on, turn the crockpot on low, and forget about it until the next day. Whenever I get around to it the following morning, I pour the liquid through a fine colander and into 3-cup-capacity Tupperware containers. I use a ladle to press and squeeze every last drop of goodness out of the scraps, then throw the scraps away. Then I label each container and put it in the freezer.

If you are only making vegetable stock, you could make your scraps do double duty by then throwing everything in the compost pile once you've strained your broth. If you are making a stock with meat in it, then throw the scraps away, as animal products are not supposed to go into a compost pile.

The flavor of the stock will not be consistent when made this way, as it would if you followed a recipe, but I have yet to make a batch that didn't taste good. And, I make mine almost for free with hardly any trouble, which is more than I can say for the Barefoot Contessa recipe (although I'm sure hers tastes fantastic). Oh, I do have to confess that I do not include beet scraps. The thought of red or pink stock is just not appealing to me.

And finally, I'll leave you with a link so you can read up on why broth and stock are so very good for for the body. Everyone's grandmother says that if you are sick, you need home-made chicken soup. Well, it turns out there is some actual science behind that old wive's tale. You can read about how good broth is for you here.

Random Favorites for Kids

Just wanted to share some favorites things old and new.

First, head over to Great Hall Productions to find fantastic audio recordings of children's books and fairytales. I bought a few MP3 Downloads of Jim Weiss' from iTunes. It's great for the car! We really like the "Just So Stories" by Rudyard Kipling (author of The Jungle Book).

And while you're browsing iTunes, check out the MP3 recordings of the classic Lux Radio Theatre productions. During the glory days of Hollywood, some of the most famous films and musicals were adapted for the radio and performed by the original stars. Hear the original cast perform! I bought The Wizard of Oz and Meet Me in St. Louis, both featuring the amazing Judy Garland. There are a lot of films that I recognize, but not very many are musicals. Still, great to introduce my kids to these two classics while battling boredom in the car!

If you have toddlers or pre-schoolers, head over to The Letter of the Week to find a full, free pre-school curriculum to use. Full of print outs, themes, fingerplays, poems, songs, and just plain great ideas for little ones, plus links to even more great resources.

If you're looking for more great ideas for pre-schoolers, check out YouTube page of Cullen's ABCs and KinderArt. More fantastic ideas for projects, crafts, songs, and more to keep your little ones busy!

And just because I have friends ask me a lot, some of our favorites authors of children's books are:
Paul Galdon-- retold fairytales you can trust. We especially love The Little Gingerbread Boy and The Three Billy Goats Gruff.

Robert McCloskey- Make Way for Ducklings, Blueberries for Sal, Homer Price, One Morning in Maine are just a couple of his wonderful children's books. Lovely illustrations.

Virginia Lee Burton- My absolute favorite is The Little House, but we also love Maybelle the Cable Car, Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, and Katy and the Big Snow.

Marjorie Flack- Ask Mr. Bear and The Story About Ping are two classics, among others.

Those are just a few of the classic, well-known authors of great children's literature. Enjoy!

A Child's Garden

I have two cherry "Tumbling Tom" tomatoes (one red and one yellow) that I grew from seed planted in $3.00 Lowe's all-purpose buckets on my back patio. The stems are heavy with little green fruits, and my kids and I go to look at them every day, eager for them to ripen. We have little red strawberries ripening in a strawberry pot, and several blueberry bushes with their very first crop of blueberries. They are ripening three or four at a time, and we go pick them and eat them together. I have a poor, suffering raspberry bush which is still in its original container and has yet to be planted, but it is giving me fruits despite its neglect. My oldest daughter, R, picks the ripe raspberries before anyone else has a chance. I also have yet to bring a single sugar snap pea into the house, because she eats them straight off the vine. The other day, she said to me, "It's fun to pick our food when it's ready." At that moment, nothing could have delighted my heart more. I love gardening, and have secretly been hoping that my kids would take an interest in it, too. I never mention gardening because I know if they feel forced to like it, they'll end up hating it. Instead, I just try to let them approach me about it. They'll just be playing the yard, and I'll be digging or weeding, and they come to see what I'm up to, and before I know it, they are digging the holes for my squash seedlings and wanting to see how much the plants have grown over night.

I feel that gardening is the most wonderful hobby to share with children. It is full of important lessons. Not just about where their food really comes from, but also lessons about patience, consistency, and hard work. There is no such thing as instant gratification in gardening...it's all about work up front and delayed reward. Gardening also teaches lessons about planning and working towards a goal. But gardening is more, even than that. It is a subject that directly relates to learning in all areas: young children can learn directly about the weather and how it affects the earth, they can learn basic math by counting how many seedlings you've transplanted, or the number of days until the harvest. They can learn about ecosystems, bugs and birds, predators and prey. Older children can learn about germination, photosynthesis, plant reproduction, even genetics, all by toodling around in the garden. They can practice geometry by helping to build raised beds. Gardening even provides lessons for the right lobe of the brain! I recently read about an idea of a "nature notebook"....a little pad of paper on which children can draw pictures of flowers or bugs they've seen, write descriptions, then take them home and look them up. Even though my girls can't draw very well now, I think they would enjoy that.
Many of my gardening plans have not come to fruition this year, but I'm learning all the time, so hopefully next year will be a very productive one. But big or small, I'm just glad that I can share it with my children.

And speaking of children and gardens, check out A Child's Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson (you know, that guy who wrote Treasure Island). It's a collection of wonderful poems for children, usually with beautiful illustrations. I happen to love the illustrations by Tasha Tudor, but there are so many different versions that you can find something to suit any taste.

Revive Your Greens

Here's a trick if your greens are wilting: cut an inch or two off the bottom stem and then submerge the stems in water. They'll perk right back up and stay crisp and crunchy for much longer (they're darn pretty, too).

Beautiful Soup, So Rich and Green!

Beautiful Soup, so rich and green,

Waiting in a hot tureen!

Who for such dainties would not stoop?

Soup of the evening, beautiful Soup!

Soup of the evening, beautiful Soup!

Beau-ootiful Soo-oop!

~Lewis Carroll

 Want to add a bit of extra nutrition and flavor to your soups? It's easy to do! Just make a broth from any dark, leafy green (such as kale, spinach, turnip, collard, or mustard greens, to name a few). Cover in abundant water, add a bit of salt, and boil until the broth is very dark and rich. You can also add a few more nutrients by adding one can of organic chicken broth with the water. You can eat the greens (which are delicious!) separately and reserve the liquid for a variety of uses. You can add the liquid as a stock to any soup, and one of my tricks to cook purple hull or crowder peas in the stock instead of in water. The peas get so much flavor from the broth! Or you can add it to mashed potatoes instead of milk. The broth is so good, in fact, that you can simply drink it on its own. In her book, Unplugged Kitchen, Viana la Place writes of her grandmother's "Verdura cure." Once a month, her Italian grandmother would fast, drinking only the broth some dark greens all day long. La Place claims this, along with lots of walking, is what gave her little grandmother a long, healthy life.

If you are feeling under the weather, try "the Verdura Cure." According to the Weston A. Price Foundation, broth is so good for you when you are sick because it provides a range of vitamins and minerals in a form that is easily absorbed and very useful to your weary body.