Word To The Ys

I love to cook.

I love (almost) everything about it.  I love finding new recipes.  I love experimenting and improvising.  I love hearing Joe’s mumbles of approval as he devours my latest concoction.  The kids?  Well, if they approve it’s just icing on the cake, but I never count on it.

I spend a lot of time in my beautiful kitchen.  The table is often my makeshift office; it is where I help Max with his homework; it is the site of afterschool snacks and meals and quality family time.  The kitchen is also the site of stacks of dishes and an unspeakably dirty stovetop, but that’s another story.

In part 1, I talked about why I changed my cooking habits, and some of what I cook.  I thought I’d follow up a bit on some of my sneakier tricks; for instance, how I make things healthier for the whole family.  How I trick my pickiest eater into consuming more vegetables than he’d like to.  How I get around using processed foods, and how I find the time to make so much from scratch.

First of all, I don’t have a lot of gadgets in my kitchen, but my biggest can’t-live-without-it appliance?  My breadmaker.  I suppose my crockpot wins the #2 position.  But I bought this breadmaker off craigslist for $20 two years ago, and recently replaced it with another (exact same model!) $20 craigslist breadmaker and it has saved me.  I make all the bread we consume in this house, including buns.  Now, is the recipe I use the healthiest possible bread recipe on earth?  No.  But my kids love it and we also love it and it works for us.  Here’s the recipe, if you must know:

• 10-11 oz. milk, warmed to about 100 degrees
• 1.5 teaspoons salt
• 1 tbsp. softened butter
• 4 c. bread flour
• 2 tbsp. sugar (or experiement w/other sweeteners)
• 2 tsp. yeast

This is the order in which I put my ingredients into my bread machine, which I then put on the “dough” setting about 90% of the time.  In 1.5 hours I have my bread dough, and it is perfect.  I almost always shape the dough (by hand) into round buns, place on baking sheets, cover with tea towels, and let rise in a warm spot for another hour before baking them at 350 degrees for 15 minutes.  When all is said and done, I have 18 lovely buns, which we use for kids’ sandwiches, toast, hamburgers, or whatever.  I sometimes make hot dog buns out of this dough simply by shaping them differently before rising/baking.  They always look super-duper ridiculous but taste a million times better than store buns.  The hands-on prep time is extremely limited; you could do this in the evening hours easily, or on the weekend.  I’ve frozen them before, too, if I knew we wouldn’t use them up pretty quickly or in preparation for my absence or something.  We do usually go through 18 in 2 days, though.  What can I say…Max eats a lot of PB&J, since that’s his alternative when he doesn’t like a dish I’ve prepared (after he tries it first, of course.)

When you make things from scratch, you can add a lot of secretly healthy stuff that your not-so-secretly skeptical kids won’t really notice.  I love to stick spinach in things.  Max will complain a lot but the other guys like it.  Adding fruit or veggie purees is another technique.  I have made our Saturday morning breakfast tradition healthier (and, no lie…tastier!) by making my pancakes with oatmeal. (If you click on that link, it’ll take you to an external website with my Oatmeal Pancake recipe.)  Homemade  yogurt with fruit and either juice concentrate or honey for sweetener, plus ice and a blender?  Smoothie heaven.

Another homemade trick of mine is salad dressing.  Did you know that you can make delicious ones that contain no oil whatsoever?  I have one recipe in particular that I’ve developed through trial & error, and that everyone in the whole house enjoys.

• 2 tbsp. vinegar (I use white balsamic from Trader Joe’s)
• juice of 1/2 a lime (lemon works, too!)
• 1/4 tsp. paprika
• 1/4 tsp. celery salt
• sugar (or honey) to taste (I usually use 1-2 tsp. or so, for the kids) 

Microwave for 30 seconds to a minute (depending on your machine) and stir to dissolve ingredients.  Allow to cool slightly (or completely) and drizzle on your salad.  I put this with greens, diced apples, and diced orange/clementines and my kids go wild for it.  They literally eat it before anything else on their plate.  Anyway, the point is that you can make something in 2 minutes that tastes better and is much healthier than the bottles you pick up in your condiment aisle.  Plus…vitamin C!

We shop quite a bit at Trader Joe’s, because we can’t afford Whole Foods or Mississippi Market and TJs has a lot of minimally-processed choices.  Many gluten-free items for those who need it.  Most (if not all) items are lacking in corn syrup, which despite the ad campaign to convince me I’m being a paranoid dumbass I do my best to avoid…mostly because I can control the sugar in things I make myself, whereas it’s more difficult to be sure I’m moderate in my corn syrup intake with the prepared foods.

A lot of people think I’m crazy when they find out I make everything (almost) from scratch.  Cakes?  From scratch.  Brownies?  Haven’t used a box in years, and I’m known for making a mean brownie.  But this is what I always tell them, whether or not they believe me: it doesn’t take much more time.  It tastes better, and is better for you.  I’m sure some people think, because I stay at home, I am more able to do this than others who work outside the home.  But have you tried cooking with 3 kids underfoot?  It’s not easy.  It’s worth it, though, to know that I’m not filling all our diets with the trappings of convenience food: partially hydrogenated oils, MSG and other sodium, and high fructose corn syrup.  This stuff is proliferant in prepared food items.  I’d rather make cookies at home with butter and less sugar and absence of artificial food dyes anyday.  So you don’t have a lot of time?  Again, cooking en masse over your weekend is a good strategy.  Crockpot cooking might be a big help (this website is the best, people.  THE BEST.)  Or just giving yourself a pep-talk and recognizing that cooking from scratch doesn’t have to be hard or time-consuming.

You can do it!  The more you practice, the better and quicker you’ll become at it, too.  It couldn’t be more true when I say that if *I* can do it, anyone can!

Posted in Cooking | 7 Comments »

I have had a request.  And since the requestee not only put up with my snoring and other personality quirks for my entire freshman year of college but ALSO sent me an awesome care package this week like a totally thoughtful friend, I’m to obliged to honor this request.

Shawna wants to know about what I feed my family.  The short answer?  Everything.  At least in the case of Oliver.

But seriously, it might be interesting to some to hear a bit about how my cooking looks since the Great Attitude Revolution of 2008 (or thereabouts.)  Every week, Joe and I (sometimes I on my own) plot out our dinner menu for a week or so.  We’re not really sticklers for when we do this, or how many days exactly we plan, but it’s usually 7-10 days worth of meals.  We put these on our family Google calendar, because we’re huge nerds.  Then we make a shopping list and go buy exactly what’s on the list.  This is probably one of the biggest changes in our food culture in the last year or two, because we used to just go to the store and wander aimlessly looking for food that sounded good and then we’d put a bunch of crap in our cart.

What changed all this?  Well, about the time I started to actually care about cooking, we were finding that Max was having bizarre allergic reactions to food.  We didn’t know what exactly was causing the reactions, because nothing of note had come up in his allergy screening the previous year.  We somehow, after a hearty helping of Valentine’s candy and subsequent helping of head-to-toe hives, zeroed in on the possibility of artificial food colorings as the culprit.  I did a little web research and found that Red 40 and Yellow 5 are both suspicious characters in the world of food allergies, though there are no tests currently to test for possible reactions.  We thought we’d just eliminate them from his (and, for the most part, our) diet and see if it helped.  And guess what?

No more hives.

Now, if only it were just that easy!  If you ever want to have an interesting shopping trip, go to the store and try to buy things without either (or both) of these colorants.  They’re in EVERYTHING.  And not to get all crazy on you, but…they’re made from COAL TAR and PETROLEUM.  Eww.  Some people take umbrage with Carmine, a natural red colorant, because it’s made from bug shells but I insist that I’d rather eat pulverized bug husks any day over something that’s a derivative of COAL TAR.  (Ew. Again.)  Anyway, I digress.  If your go on this grocery store mission, you will see how difficult this is, and why I started making so many things from scratch in my own kitchen so I would know exactly what ingredients were in our food.  And we come full-circle to my crazy yogurt-making.

That was a really long intro.  Let’s get down to business: specifically, Shawna wants to know some of the go-to healthy (healthier?  than Happy Meals?) dinners I conjure up ’round these parts.  Here are some perennial favorites:

• Hamburgers.  Made with lean ground beef and on my homemade buns, I guarantee they’re better than anything you’d get out and about.  Max has requested we have these weekly, on Mondays, to ease the pain of the week’s dawn.  We usually do.
• Pasta.  Some nights I go super easy and toss some sundried tomatoes and Romano or Parmesean (the good stuff, people) on there for good measure.  The kids don’t love this (especially the picky one, heh-hehmm MAX.)  But they do love buttered noodles, and so it’s usually a win-win.  I also love to make a pasta dish with mushrooms, spinach, and whole wheat pasta that would be almost good for you if it weren’t for the white sauce.  But at least I make it, so it’s better than the jar of alfredo, anyway.
• Chicken.  I make quite a lot of chicken dishes in my house, and now I’m about to share an actual recipe (finally! thinks Shawna.)  One of our favorite chicken dishes is named…aptly…Salsa Chicken.  Take a pound or so of boneless, skinless chicken breasts (3-4 of them) and put them in the bottom of your crock pot.  Now add a small bag of frozen corn (um, 16 oz. or so?) and one can of black beans, drained and rinsed to the crock pot.  Finally, dump in a large jar of your favorite salsa.  Put the lid on your crockpot and turn it on low for the day (6-8 hours.)  When you come back to it, the chicken should shred easily with two forks.  Shred it up (large or small; it’s your preference) and serve it over lime cilantro rice for a real treat.  How do you make that, you ask?  Recipe NUMBER 2!  If you’ve got a rice cooker, I don’t need to tell you to use it because you’re already planning to. Because they’re awesome.  In any case, with whatever tools you have, make 4-5 cups of rice.  Squeeze the juice of a lime into it when it’s cooked, and stir well to distribute.  If you like cilantro, add some, chopped roughly, to the mix.  It’s like you’re at Chipotle, minus about a half million calories.  If it tickles your fancy, you can slap all this in a tortilla.  Add more salsa.  It’s foolproof.   And you’ll have lots of leftovers for lunches throughout the week.

This is quite enough for now from the novice cook, but as you might have guessed from the title I plan on writing a part 2 with some more specific recipes and tricks.  And hopefully I’ll spare you my (full) diatribe on high fructose corn syrup.  No, really…please come back.  I’ll bring cookies.

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