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baby food and a little giveaway.
The entries for this giveaway are now closed. Thank you for participating. I will announce the winner soon!
My kids often ask me if I am going to ever have another baby. I tell them it would be a little difficult right now, considering I am not married. They usually don’t press the issue, or ask too many questions on the subject—thank goodness!
I am in a phase right now, though, where most of my friends are either pregnant again, or have young babies. Some of them have been asking for good baby food recipes, so today I picked some peaches from the tree in my yard and made some baby food out of them.
Recently, the people at Oxo Good Grips asked me if I wanted to review some of their products. I had had my eye on their food mill for ages, and I asked them if they would send me one, and an extra for one of my readers. They did, and I have been using mine for some time now, for everything from homemade popsicles, to desserts soup, to mashed potatoes. I can’t tell you how much I love it. It’s a fantastic product.
My favorite feature is that it has three separate disks, so you can change them out according to how finely you want your food processed.
For this giveaway, I will be sending one lucky reader the amazing food mill and a copy of the book Organically Raised by Annie Daulter. If you would like to enter, please write a comments in the comments section, and confess if you have ever sampled your baby’s baby food, and if so, what your favorite flavor is. Mine is the pear puree. I will accept entries until Thursday night at midnight! So good luck!
And while we’re on the subject of all things baby, I want you all to check out my friend’s etsy site. She makes these incredible handmade bags and little tooth fairy pillows. So if you’re looking for something cute to give a little person in your life, be sure to order something from her. Everything Emily makes is so perfect, right down to the minute details. She is an artist.
Homemade baby food is so easy to make—it really is. All you need is fresh (ideally organic) fruit or vegetables, a stove, and a blender.
something quick and light.
Instead of apologizing for not posting in ages, I am going to just pretend like I’ve been here all along.
I took the picture of this salad with a this new light I bought
Before I forget, I am really excited about teaching a cooking class at Thanksgiving Point this spring. If any of you will be in Utah in the middle of May, then be sure to sign up for it. I am teaching a series of classes right now called “Entertain Your Family: Fun and Easy Ways to Impress the Ones You Love Most.” On May 20th, I will teach a class on how to throw a panini party for your own family, with recipes and ideas on how to make it really fun. It’s for people who have old kids, young kids, or no kids, so if you can make it, please come!
Also, if you live in Utah, and would like to have me teach a class somewhere, please let me know in the comments section.
panzanella caprese
The other day, my friend Shannon and I were sitting at her table in her lovely home eating a panzanella salad made mostly of things from her garden. Her tomatoes were perfect, in all different colors and varieties, and I started to wish the whole salad were just the croutons and tomatoes and basil.
She said she liked the croutons the best too, and I thought it would be good to make my next panzanella with mostly those ingredients, like a caprese salad. All I did was take away the peppers and cucumbers, and added in some fresh mozzarella. It’s the best two salads all in one. I hope you enjoy it, too.
how to caramelize onions
Oh, how I love these!
The two keys to really good caramelized onions seem to be time and low temperature. High temperatures will cause the onions to cook too quickly and burn on the edges. If you don’t have much time, though, as is usually the case with me, you can raise the temperature to about medium. Just be sure to keep an eye on them, and stir them frequently.
I made these specifically for the sandwiches Brooke and I ate at our picnic, but they would be delightful in a warm pasta salad, mashed potatoes, or an omelette.
greek yogurt with honey and figs
My daughter, of course, wouldn’t touch this dish, even though it looks like a sunflower. My sons, however, did like it, especially the yogurt in the middle.
Some of these ingredients may be a little hard to find if you aren’t in a nicer grocery store. I found the figs and the Greek yogurt at Whole Foods, one of my favorite places on the planet. If you can’t find a Greek yogurt, substitute it for a vanilla whole milk yogurt, and drain it the same way as the directions. If you can’t find figs, you could also use pears, or strawberries, or anything else you would like.
Also, if you don’t have a cheese cloth, that’s okay. just use a couple layers of white paper towels. I used cheese cloth because the lines look pretty on the yogurt.
talamee
Connie, our wonderful guest mom, is back with us again and shares her recipe of talamee, a traditional Syrian flat bread. She and her husband came to our house a couple weeks ago to show me how to make it. This recipe makes a ton, so be ready to freeze what you don’t use the first day.
With our leftovers, we sliced the bread through the middle like a big ciabatta loaf and covered with sauce and cheese to make pizza. Then this morning, I mixed up some eggs, milk, cinnamon, and sugar. I crumbled the talamee into rough 1 inch pieced and dredged it in the eggs and milk mixture. I grilled it all together in a nonstick pan and made a cross between bread pudding and French toast. Yum.
talamee and family traditions, by Connie
My father was raised mostly by his Lebanese grandmother. She had already done her fair share of raising children, having 17 of her own, but when her daughter had to go to work in another state, she took in her two young grandsons.
kung fu panda soup
We’ve been watching a lot of Kung Fu Panda lately. The movie stirred up strong craving for noodles in my nine-year-old. This is what I came up with. He insisted on eating the soup with chopsticks.
I now present to you: Kung Fu Panda Soup.
mornings in maine
It’s June 3rd, and I have the heat on.
These rainy, misty days are my favorite days of summer. They remind me of my childhood in New England with windy walks on beaches and pinewood fires in the center of drizzly campgrounds. They were the days that gave us hope amidst the countless unbearably muggy days in between.
The chilly summer memories I hold most dear are the vacations we spent in Maine. One early morning, while staying near friends, we ventured out to Blueberry Hill to pick blueberries. On the way home, we found a red raspberry bush with the most delicious berries. I still compare all raspberries to those I had on that vacation, and only rarely do I ever find one that rivals them in taste.
For many years, I thought that Robert McCloskey had based his book Blueberries for Sal
In the afternoons, we would run around with our friends’ Golden Retriever. Her name was Sunshine, and till this day, if ever I hear the John Denver song “Sunshine on My Shoulder,” I think of those vacations in Maine and get a catch in my throat. (Yeah, I know, whatever. I’m a sap.)
This Cream of Wheat with blueberries and maple syrup brought back my memories of Maine.
If you have never tried cream of wheat cooked in milk, then I would strongly suggest it. It is like eating pudding for breakfast. If you would like a vegan version of this recipe, that tastes like a creamy version of mangoes with sticky rice, substitute the milk for a cup of light coconut milk. Follow the same cooking instructions, and garnish with turbinado sugar and mango.
lentil soup you’ll absolutely love. trust me.
I know for some of you the weather is getting a bit too warm for a soup like this, but I wanted to sneak it in before the summer. It is one of my favorite soups. It has tons of fiber, tons of vegetables, and tons of flavor. I make it, freeze it, and then anytime I want to feel good about what I eat, I pull a bowl of it out my freezer and heat it up for lunch.
Though I changed this recipe so much that it is definitely my own now, my inspiration came from a book my friend Shannon gave me. It’s by America’s Test Kitchen and is called The New Best Recipe
Oh, and I just want to briefly mention that the toast in the picture there is from the same baguette I froze a couple weeks ago. All I did was pop the frozen pieces in the toaster.
black bean tortilla soup
The kids are on their second week of spring break (aaahhh!!), and they were watching so much TV that the cable box and DVD player froze up (I only TRY to be a good mom—never said I was one). So now they’re keeping themselves entertained by making up songs about Spongebob Squarepants and Star Wars.
Here’s a chicken tortilla soup I adapted to be vegetarian. It uses chipotles in adobo, which you can buy in a can in the Mexican food aisle. Any leftover chipotles can be frozen in an airtight container for up to a year.
