Scottish Cow

Molly and the Earth

The happiness and excitement that Molly exudes when she’s running through the grass to get to the garden is something else.  Trying as carefully as her little hands can manage to cut some lettuce leaves with the purposefully dull pre-school scissors.  Filling the basket, flipping the still-growing yellow and red stemmed chard leaves back and forth, it’s obvious she’s wondering when we get to pick some more.  They are crowding each other out, and we need to make some space where we carelessly planted the seeds too close together, weeks ago, together.  The pride in painting her own little terra cotta pots with pictures of tomatoes and peppers and then getting a seedling into each one, with only a few casualties.  The tears shed over her worm collections, the first of which had its population devastated in what’s come to be known as “The Flood” – the night their screened-in “house” was left outside, presumably for some fresh air, only to encounter a downpour.  There was no ark.

 

It’s gotten to the point where we can dispatch her out to the herb garden with a request for a few cilantro sprigs or some mint, and she’ll usually return with what was requested, usually without dirty roots hanging on, but not always.

She redistributes toads around the yard to the gardens, thinking they’ll be more comfortable there, like a force of nature.  She’s the fifth wind.

It makes me smile when she asks a question that I don’t know the answer to.  “How many cabbages will be on that plant?  Where do the eggplants come out of?”  There’s something to be said for a 31 year-old learning the same things at the same time as his almost 5 year-old.

She’s obviously going to be a better gardener than me some day.  More than that, the building, the digging, the dirt under your fingernails, seeds breaking from the soil – I feel like we’re starting a family tradition – and a wonderful one at that.

She’s learning to work, to have a bit of self reliance in a world that seems to encourage otherwise at times.  She’s learning how good and simple food can be and how annoying it is gritting on dirt between your teeth when you try to eat something straight from the ground.  She’s getting slightly less afraid of things that creep and crawl.  Her pride is a sign, I think, of her feelings for her surroundings.  She may not know it, and certainly has trouble expressing it sometimes, but she cares.  Not just about her family, and her toys, and getting a nice plate of cheese & crackers to snack on in the afternoon.  She cares about this little skewed rectangle of ours, 96 feet wide, and 300 feet from the curb to the weedy fence all the way at the back that we alone are responsible for. 

Good for her. 

So, what to do with all the vegetables…A few ideas, you know, aside from just eating them straight:

1) Better salad dressing – try something different.  One of our favorites is a miso based dressing that was born to be customized.  The dressing gets its body from oil and miso (usually just white) – add some sweet, some sour and herbs and you’re all set.  You really need a blender to get it emulsified and a food processor is probably too big, unless you’re doing a huge batch.

In a blender – a couple spoons of miso, some chopped up chives, scallions or a little minced onion, a spoon of honey or sugar, a little bit of vinegar/lemon juice, a handful of fresh herbs (nothing too strong, hold the rosemary), and give it a blend.  If it’s really thick, add a little water.  While the blender is running, slowly pour in some oil.  I like grapeseed or canola for this (something plain).  The dressing will thicken up as you go.  Stop, taste, fix.  You can add more water if you want it thinner.

It would be great on steamed/grilled veggies as well as the basic green salad.

The picture isn’t fantastic, but then again, it’s just a bowl of dressing.

2) Wrap it – I’ve said it before, wraps are great for kids.  They are excellent for using up leftovers, and hiding ingredients that might be cause for strife (kale, I’m looking in your direction.)  If you don’t have any ingredients to hide, you can set up a big pile of stuff like this, and everyone can build their own (the fruit wasn’t going in.) 

3) Eggs:

Again nothing new, but a little different.  We had some left over spaghetti with pesto.  It ended up getting cooked into a frittata with zucchini, shredded chard leaves and a whole bunch of herbs.  Hard to go wrong with that.

…

 

Our Fruity Girl

Fruit is a perfect thing for kids to mess around with in the kitchen.

• Tastes good
• Good for you
• Doesn't require much messing around with

Molly always wants to help out in the kitchen, but she's especially taken with chopping stuff.  We've recently upgraded her from crappy plastic-handled kid knife to our butter/dinner knives.  Sharp enough to actually get through some things without turning it to mush, but not sharp enough to detach appendages.  Funny, she gets concerned everytime she sees me holding a knife after witnessing the almost-removal of a fingertip while slicing scallions.

She's also been concerned with making fruit salad recently.

And why would we want to discourage that?  We wouldn't, of course.  It's getting easier now that the weather is on our side.  When you're in the supermarket in the middle of February and they have butternut squash and strawberries, and your little girl is begging for them (yes, she actually begs for those things - that's right before she starts begging for ice cream and cookies), it's very, very hard to say, "No, honey, that squash was grown 5,000 miles away in a different hemisphere.  Let's wait until September."

So, we don't say that.  We buy the squash.  Back to the fruit, and the helping out in the kitchen.  I left Molly a note with a "secret mission" when I left for work on Friday.

There were instructions not to open the note until noon.  Apparently, around 9:30 she tried, "...but daddy's not here." 

After finally getting to open it, she was concerned there wouldn't be enough time to make it.  Molly chopped up all the fruit she could find.  Once it's peeled (Tina helping here) you can pretty much go through any kind of fruit with a butter knife. 

Yes, there's some peaches in there from a can, but you've got to learn how to use a can opener too, right?

It was delicious.  Thank you Molly.

Black Bean Tacos

If we have leftovers in our house, which we often do, there are two destinations that seem the most common - stir-fried or wrapped up in a tortilla.

Today it's tacos.  The aim here wasn't to be authentic, it was to be quick and delicious.  On the authenticity scale, our tortilla-wrapped creations probably fall somewhere between sacrilegious (mmm...sacrilicious) and pretty close to something that might be recognizable as Mexican food.

Anyway, kid-wise, these can't be beat - tacos are one of those things that hit the kid trifecta -

1) They can be customized and self-assembled

2) You get to eat with your hands

3) They're really messy

These were great because they consisted entirely of things we always have, and really, everyone should - Tortillas (wheat, corn, big, small, whatever, they last forever in the fridge), a can of black beans, lettuce and tomatoes.  In the summer you should always have lettuce and tomatoes around, or else you'll be unable to make a BLT, and the thought of that makes me angry.  These were fantastic local greenhouse tomatoes, but the grape tomatoes you can get year-round are definitely good enough.

Can of beans - great for all sorts of stuff besides chili.  We eat a ton of beans.  I like cooking dried beans from scratch as much as the next bean nazi, but really, this whole thing was ready in 20 minutes.  So lay off, dried bean nazis.

Use whatever kind of tortillas you have (these were small corn ones) and add any other kinds of toppings you have (guac, sour cream, cheese, onions, salsa, etc).  I will point out that there is no meat, no cheese and no sour cream in the one pictured above, and it was (still) delicious.

This was so easy, I feel ashamed to even call it a recipe, but here goes...

Black Bean Tacos

1 can black beans, rinsed, drained
1 clove garlic, minced
(optional) any kind of fresh herb (i used marjoram, because we had it)
Corn Tortillas
Diced tomatoes
Shredded lettuce
Oil
Salt/pepper
+ any other toppings you want (i used some scallions)

Heat some oil in a pan over medium heat and add the beans, the garlic, the herb and some salt/pepper.  Cook until they get hot, stir occasionally and mash up to the desired consistency with a fork or the side of a rubber spatula.  Set aside, or keep on low heat.

For the tortillas, heat a little oil in a big pan or griddle on high and cook tortillas, flipping to get each side a little crispy.

Assemble and eat. 

Beer, Wine and the Kids

So the piece in Wednesday's Times food section (Michael Ruhlman already blogged about it), about introducing your kids to wine - when I read that the first thing that came to mind was the offhand comment a couple of posts ago about Molly having a sip of beer.

I instantly thought that it probably sounded incredibly cavalier and irresponsible, and want to explain a bit. If you read the piece from the Times, a lot of the same thinking applies. As far back as I can remember in my childhood, beer or wine was usually part of dinner. I was never explicitly told, "this is part of the meal and not to be abused," but that was understood. Sometimes I got a little sip and that was it. It was for Mom and Dad, and I don't recall liking it a whole lot anyway. Do you remember when you learned that snow was cold? Probably not - you grew up with that understanding because it was all around you. At least if you grew up in the Northeast.

By the time I was in high school, I could have a small glass of wine with dinner if I wanted. It was part of the meal and it was also a culinary learning experience. It was also starting to taste good, and I appreciated that as well. Along with the food on the plates, it was part of our dinner together as a family.

Just to be clear - Molly is 4 and a half. She's not having alcohol with dinner. Every now and then she gets a sip (for beer she'd rather dip her finger in the foam anyway). She understands that it's something for adults. My hope is by the time she's older, and when we're comfortable letting her have a small glass of wine at dinner (way older), she'll already have some appreciation of what alcohol should be - something to compliment and enjoy with your meal, something to share with family - and what it shouldn't.

Seven Months Old, Hungry for More

Abigail is 7 months old and we really can't wait to be able to give her real food. Not to say her applesauce, pearsauce, carrotsauce, squashsauce, bananasauce and spinachsauce aren't real, but you need to see it: If you're holding her and attempt to eat something, say a forkful of pasta or a spoon of ice cream, Abby's mouth opens up and she launches her entire body in the direction of the food. She's a shark propelling herself at some helpless prey. And if it's possible for a 7 month old to look offended, man, she looks it when that bite lands in your mouth and not hers.

She gets little bits of whole bananas and sweet potatoes and pasta and bread when we're eating them, and absolutely loves it. Imagine getting to taste everything for the first time! It would be great to have those memories of what you were thinking the first time you bit into a slice of watermelon or a crispy piece of roast chicken skin.

We were very lucky with Molly...once she started eating off our plates, we let her try just about everything and she kept asking for more. For the most part she still does. I think when she rejects certain things now, it's more out of her four (she'd say four and a half) year old sense of purpose and not really an aversion to what's on the table. She's also become something of an unintentional wise-ass as she screams "LOOKS GROSS!" when you first put her plate down and then proceeds to polish it off. She requests things like "goats cheese" and "the peach beer" (uh...she might have accidentally had a sip of a Belgian lambic at some point). We can only hope Abby is the same, so the two of them can sit at the table together, belching, laughing and fighting for the last scoop of hummus.

On the other side of the world our adorable almost-year-old niece Anya is learning to eat in a totally different environment. We haven't met her yet, as she was spirited off to Beijing with her parents, but apparently she won't eat her vegetables unless they are stir fried with soy sauce.

She's going to be an awesome dinner companion in a couple years.

Overall, some common sense prevails - if you keep feeding kids PB&J, plain chicken breasts and American cheese (does that stuff ever grow mold?) because you think that's all that they'll like...guess what happens? Don't get me wrong, we're not claiming to be experts on nutrition for picky toddlers, but I've seen both sides and the effects are pretty obvious. If you're enjoying your food, they are going to enjoy your food also.