Snickerdoodle Muffins

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posted by Caroline

If you settle Eli for a nap, he’ll want to read a book first.

So you’ll bring out one of his best-loved books.

When you’re finished reading the book, he’ll want another.

And another.

When you say they’re all gone, he’ll ask you for a sip of water before sleeping.

So you refill his water bottle and he has a long drink.

Having a long drink makes him realize he needs to pee, so you walk him to the bathroom.

When he’s in the bathroom, he’ll see his bathtub Titanic, which will remind him of the lake he dug in the sandbox at preschool this morning.

So you talk all about preschool, where his friend made sand-cinnamon muffins. “Speaking of muffins,” he says, “I want to make muffins!”

So you offer to make some, but only after he naps.

So he settles into bed thinking about muffins, and wakes up ninety minutes later saying “Muffins! Let’s make some!”

So you get out the ingredients, and your muffin tins, and less than an hour later you eat muffins topped with your friend’s homemade strawberry jam. Yum.

Snickerdoodle Muffins

Adapted from the Joy of Cooking

Preheat oven to 400; line a standard 12-cup muffin tin with paper cups (this is an excellent job for a preschool helper)

Whisk together in a large bowl (the larger the bowl, the less chance your helper will scatter flour on your floor):
2 c all-purpose flour
1 T baking powder
½ t salt
1 t cinnamon
6 T flax seed meal

Whisk together in another large bowl (again, the larger the bowl the better for your  young helper):
2 large eggs
1 c milk
2/3 c brown sugar
6 T melted butter or vegetable oil
1 t vanilla

Add to the flour mixture and stir together lightly, just until the dry ingredients are moistened. Perhaps take the spoon out of your helper’s hand now so that the batter doesn’t get overmixed. Divide the batter among the muffin cups. Bake until a toothpick inserted in the middle of one or two muffins comes out clean, 12-15 minutes.

Take the muffins out of the pan and place them on a wire rack to cool. While they’re cooling a bit, put 1 T of butter in a heatproof dish, and let it melt in your cooling oven. By the time the butter’s melted, the muffins will be cool enough for your helper to brush with melted butter, and sprinkle with sugar and cinnamon. Eat with jam, or not.

Berries, II

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posted by Lisa

Caroline’s gorgeous post about berries highlighted one fundamental way that our families are different.  We write about the very many ways that our family food cultures overlap in our introduction and some of the ways that we don’t.  We thought a lot about cooking and meat and picky eaters.  But we didn’t think about berries.

Every Sunday, when I go to market, I wish (oh, how I wish) that I had some of Caroline’s restraint. But, here, we’re sort of profligate with the berries.

It doesn’t matter the kind: blackberries, red raspberries golden raspberries, ollalieberries, strawberries.  Whatever Ella Bella Farm or Swanton Berry Farm has in season, we buy.

At the height of berry season we go home with six baskets. At $3 a basket you can do the math.  Every spring, I brace myself for the summer market bill as the season ramps up.  It gets very, very expensive. I get anxious. But we get by. Berries have not yet bankrupt us, and they’ve given us a lot of pleasure.

Ella and Finn eat them at a fierce rate.  This began when they were in strollers, and we would buy an extra basket for them to munch on while we shopped. But the problem was always that they didn’t just pick at one or two berries–they ate the whole basket. This was an expensive snack.  But we indulged. As explanation, I can offer the fact that I descend from a long line of Irish Catholics on my mother’s side. My father was a Presbyterian with Roman Catholic sensibilities, who converted in the early 1980s.

So a berry basket gets ported to the table daily and generally devoured. Sometimes, they don’t even make it to the sink for the prerequisite rinse (I know, I know).  In fact, Kory and I? We steal the berries  when we can.  There are very, very rarely leftovers, but when there are, I make ice cream. Last week, I had a very rare 2 pints of blackberries and some basil leftover, and with 1/3 cup of sugar, 2 cups cream, 1 cup milk I made blackberry basil soft serve ice cream.  I think it was the best ice cream I ever made.

But I draw the line with blueberries, which was Caroline’s post was so compelling for me. I just can’t bring myself to buy them, ever.  At $4 for 1/2 pint, they are just too expensive. Even for me.

But my husband’s Grandmother lives in Oregon, and she picks all her own berries, pounds and pounds and pounds of them.  All varieties, every summer, which she freezes and jams and shares with friends. Enough to feed herself all year, and to give pound to us and several of her children.  For the last two years she’s developed a system where she picks, packs, and mails fresh Oregon blueberries to us, so a box of midnight blue goodness, probably five or six pounds arrives on our doorstep ready to freeze.

These are so coveted, I can usually bring myself to ration them. But Ella and Finn had two bowls each that first day. Maybe 3. I made a small pie. We had blueberry pancakes three weeks straight. They ate them frozen, right out of the bag.   We got them In late July. It’s late September. The berries are gone. Kerplink, Kerplank, Kerplunk…

Berries

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posted by Caroline

At home, I am a miser with berries. I haven’t quite gotten over the sticker shock when I pick up a basket of organic berries. But I fork over the money, thinking of the farmers who will use the income to pay their employees a decent wage, feed their children, buy health insurance.

Still, I can’t help but want to dole out the fruit in small doses, save it for special occasions, offer an inexpensive apple instead. Much as I adore summer fruit, much as I hate to see the glorious variety of strawberries, blueberries, raspberries,  ollallaberries, nectarines, apricots, peaches, plums, pluots, aprium, and plumcots give way to four straight months of apples and pears, much as I regret all the torn-out magazine recipes that I didn’t get a chance to try, the frugal New Englander in me is honestly a tiny little bit relieved when the summer bounty is past and we’re back to apples and pears. Pears and apples.

Which is why every summer I make a point of bringing the boys to visit my parents’ home in the Connecticut woods, where they can eat all the berries they like. This year we arrived in late August, between the two raspberry crops, but there were a couple quarts in the freezer which the boys ate, thawed, on their breakfast cereal. Ben picked both blueberries, paraphrasing Blueberries for Sal (“Kerplink! Kerplank! Kerplunk!”) as he did, and blackberries, toughing out the sharp thorns longer than I would have expected, and then proudly showed off his harvest to everyone in the house.




Both boys ate little peaches, some no more than two or three bites, the speckled skin hiding a perfect sweet-tart balance.




And my dad peeled and cut up about forty of them for me to bake into a peach and blackberry crisp:




The boys gathered windfall apples and admired the last small green pears of the season. They tried gooseberries (not a hit), and if we’d stayed one more day, I would have thawed some of July’s strawberries and rhubarb for a pie.

Of course, the price of these fruits is harder to figure. First there is time. My dad planted the orchard before there was a house on this property; I was a kid when I helped him line up the trees, unable to share his vision of an orchard through the tangled brush, but happy enough to play along. The berries have been planted more recently, but some only this year matured enough to produce a decent harvest. And then there is care. The blueberries (transplants from a patch near my late grandfather’s house) need to be netted from the birds, the trees pruned and fenced to protect them from deer, the more delicate plants mulched for winter. And then there is the harvesting, and the processing — freezing some whole, some hulled, others peeled and pitted.

There is no way to pay for all this bounty, except to say thank you, and eat, and say thank you again.

And so when the boys crowded into the kitchen asking for a snack, I’d say, “How about some berries?” and fill their bowls.



The Blog as Teaching Tool, Part I

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posted by Lisa

As we sat one night to dinner, not long after I started this blog, at home in California, the usual insanity erupted.

My normally saint-like children, who of course can do no ill at the table (please see all earlier, idyllic, vacation-posts where gastronomic peace and harmony reigned supreme, and manners were observed with dignity but oh, dear reader, do stay tuned!)…had turned positively feral.

You can not imagine.

Or perhaps, if you have one child in the range of 6 and one in the range of nearly 4 you can.

Perhaps, if you have a boy and a girl, or 2 boys or 2 girls, one or both of whom are active, one or both of whom like to talk; one or both of whom do not especially like to sit still; one or both of whom like to sing and yell and play act; one or both of whom need friends or guardians or simply toys at the table; one or both of whom do not mind a mess, well then maybe you can imagine my particular purgatory on this night.

We do not have childrens’ meals at our home.  We do not have separate food for them, nor a separate table, nor a separate set of dishes.  Ella and Finn eat what we eat.  At dinner, though on weeknights they eat earlier, together, I sit down with them so it’s still a family affair.  I set the table with placemats, cloth napkins (unless there are no clean ones), a full set of flatware, a full size dinner plate, an appropriately sized glass. In other words, it’s not a slap-dash affair. I plate their food carefully.  It’s fresh. I cook daily. It’s not foie gras, but it’s not frozen pizza either.

So, on this particular night, the mayhem included: falling out of chairs, spilled water, spaghetti eaten by the handful by my 6-year old, rocking on knees, green beans dunked in water, hands dipped in water, wet and olive-oily slick hands wiped on clean shirts, dirty faces wiped on shirts, spaghetti and green beans on the floor, warning, warning, warning, after warning.  Bread crumbs on the table. Bread crumbs on shirts. Bread crusts in the water. The table was a mess. Shouting, yellling, laughing, singing. It was joyful all right. My children were a gleeful mess. Oh, sure, they loved the meal.  I did not love how they were eating it.

Finally I looked up and said very sternly, “Ella and Finn, if you do not pick up your forks and start eating properly, the way I know you know how, I will write about your bad manners on the blog.”

And they grew wided eyed and horrified. “No, no, NO!” they laughed and scrambled to sit right down on their bottoms. But they actually picked up their napkins, wiped their faces, retrieved their forks and used them properly for the rest of the meal.

And in the true spirit of discipline I have kept my promise.

And now, some months later, Finn is learning to use a knife, but that is a story for another day.

The List, or To Market, To Market, Part I

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posted by Lisa

I do my shopping on a weekly basis and it’s something of a ritual for me.

It’s something that I learned from my mother, who did it mostly because she didn’t like to spend a lot of time in the grocery store.   She made a long list, hauled us kids in the station wagon, and made her way through the Shop Rite, aisle by aisle, piling her cart high with foodstuffs. What I do is not that much different.  Because I shop weekly, I have to be organized, so I keep pretty good lists about what I need or want, and because it’s a long-established habit, I can write these lists pretty quickly, unless I’m throwing a dinner party or it’s a holiday.  Like my mother, I buy a lot food. Sometimes, I can hardly believe how much food I buy.

I buy almost all of our food at 2 places: Trader Joes and the local farmers market.  About once a month I’ll buy a large stash of organic, free range meat at Whole Foods, or from Prather Ranch in San Francisco–by far my preference–and freeze it, and every few months I’ll treat us  to cheese and mortadella and grissini and many other excellent imported things from Woodside Deli.  But I try very hard to keep my shopping life simple.

All of our family food culture–and all of my marketing revolves around my local farmer’s market, which runs year round. It’s small, family friendly, and I’ve been shopping with many of the farmers for longer than I’ve known my husband.  I know that I could get a CSA box, that it would save me time and–very probably–a lot of money, but I’ve really come to love the farmers and the relationships I have with them. More important, Ella and Finn now have relationships with many of the farmers and opinions about their food and where it comes from, so that’s become an increasingly important part of our family food life.   So, while my list of how and what we eat really does start with the farmers, they are far too big a topic to deal with in one post.  Instead, over the coming weeks I’ll focus on one purveyor at a time in a series of posts: “To Market:  Where It Begins” so as not to overwhelm you.

I don’t plan my menus, but I rely on what is in the farmer’s market to determine our meals.  We eat small amounts of meat, and I let our produce and the season dictate each meal.  So keep on hand a range of dried goods and staples that will allow me to cook pretty much whatever I want in any given week with the fresh produce from the market.

For now, here is the list of  things that anchor our family food life, and as I prepare to write this I confess feeling a bit uneasy, a bit naked, as in, what will they think of me !? as in:  what will they think of my pantry ?! as in will they think i am a food snob?! too pedestrian?! unfit to be writing in the blogosphere?! will Sarah Palin’s assistant yell at me, too?

But in the spirit of full disclosure, in the Sexton/Plath/Lowell way of doing things, even though I’m probably more comfortable with the Moore Model, here is what I might have on any given week on my Trader Joe’s shopping list:

1 case Crystal Geyser Bubbly Water

cannellini beans

organic black beans

marinated bean salad

1-2 gallons 1 % milk

OJ w/calcium

brown bread, white bread, nan, italian bread, organic tortillas

organic bananas

Niman ranch hot dogs

organic tofu

Trader Joes masala or curry simmer sauce

baby bell cheese &/or organic string cheese

dubliner cheddar cheese, or gouda goat cheese, or cheese curds

fresh mozzarella

cottage cheese

cream cheese

Fage yogurt

prosciutto &/or pinot grigio salami

guacamole

mild salsa

organic white corn chips

salsa

potato chips

rice crackers

pb &/or cheddar cheese sandwich crackers &/or

multi-grain entertaining crackers

maryland crabcakes

frozen organic crabcakes

frozen terayaki chicken (my one very recent capitulation to organic meat–more on this choice on the “suriviving first grade” post)

frozen pot stickers

frozen organic jasmin rice

frozen pizza dough

organic jasmin rice

organic pasta: 1-2 lbs, spaghetti/penne, whatever they have that I’m in the mood for

Polenta

pizza sauce

Grade B maple syrup

Flour

Organic brown &/or white sugra

sun dried tomatoes

dried mushroooms

canned tomatoes

“eggplant” hummus

1-2 cans tuna in olive oil

1-2 bottles canola oil for frying, depending on the week

single origin chocolate bar

a tub of cookies

ketchup, dijon, mayo, capers, butter, sesame oil, soy sauce

beer. six pack

wine, 2 bottles red, 1 bottle white

whole organic chicken–I don’t like to buy these here, but sometimes I do.

Other staples I can’t get at Trader Joes, but which we keep in the house:  Papadam, too many different kinds of salt to list right now, several olive oils (standard, an excellent extra virgin, and infused), nori, Rice Krispies, wasabi peas, Jeremiah’s Pick Organic French Roast Coffee, Ciao Bella Gelato, Carnaroli or Arborio rice, Polenta or Semolina flour …Some of these I get at our lovely local, family owned Key Market.  Which I would shop at all the time if it didn’t cost me 3x as much as Trader Joe’s…

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