road food

Muffins For the Road (Vegan Banana Wheat Germ)

By in Uncategorized Tags: , , , , ,

dsc_0075by Caroline

I have lost count of the number of field trips Ben’s first grade class has taken this spring, and we’re not done yet, and I seem to be driving them all. I’m not complaining; I’m not a committee mom — you won’t find me organizing this fund-raising gala or that anniversary celebration– I like to do the things that involve the kids most directly. I volunteer in the lunch room (more on that in a later post), I help out with messy art projects, and I drive field trips. And when I do, I bring muffins, because it seems no matter how short the drive might be (a recent trip to the symphony clocked in at about 7 minutes) it seems that as soon as the car doors are closed and the buckles are buckled, somebody’s hungry. A good muffin can satisfy hunger pangs and raise morale on a longer drive. Plus, although I have no particular guilt about offering my kids sweeter baked treats (I’m not as organized about it as Lisa, but I, too, let them eat cake), I haven’t found anyone yet who objects to a muffin. These are what I brought along on our farm field trip the other day, and they gave the car a nice banana scent, too.

1 c plain soy milk
1 t apple cider vinegar
2 very ripe bananas
1/3 c canola oil (I scanted the vegetable oil slightly and added a splash of walnut oil)
1/3 c sugar
1 t vanilla extract
1 1/4 c flour (I used a mix of all-purpose and whole wheat flours)
3/4 c wheat germ
1 T cinnamon
2 t baking powder
1/2 t salt

Preheat the oven to 375 and line a 12-cup muffin tin with muffin papers, or lightly grease the cups.

Combine the soy milk and vinegar and set aside for a minute or two to curdle.

Meanwhile, mash the bananas in a large mixing bowl, then add the soy milk mixture along with the oil, sugar, and vanilla. Mix well.

In a separate bowl, combine the flour, wheat germ, cinnamon, baking powder and salt. Add this to the banana mixture and mix until just combined. Spoon batter into the muffin cups and bake for 22 minutes. Let the muffins cool in the pan for a couple minutes, then transfer to a rack to cool completely. My first batch didn’t last that long…

Berries, II

By in Uncategorized Tags: , ,

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…

Unfamiliar Waters

By in Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , , , ,

After a week in Paris, we headed south for a week unlike any we’d ever experienced (or likely will again). To celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary, my parents gathered our family on a barge that toured rivers and canals in the south of France. We were the only passengers, cared for by a crew of five including –most importantly, for this blog’s purposes–a chef named Charlie.

Charlie had his work cut out for him. Among the 13 of us are five vegetarians (two of whom sometimes, depending on the circumstances, eat fish), one vegan, two on low-salt diets, one who tries to avoid chocolate (quel dommage!). We had been in touch about our dietary preferences ahead of time, but in Charlie’s broken English and my faltering French, we spent an hour the first afternoon going over the details, a conversation that resulted in this list:

Later it was simplified to this:

Only Ben and Eli never learned how to eat Charlie’s cooking, and he never quite learned how plain they really wanted their food. By the end of the week, when even unsauced pasta didn’t appeal, I realized it wasn’t his food that they were objecting to; they just wanted home cooking. Failing that, we rationed our one precious jar of peanut butter, spreading it ever-more-thinly on each day’s crusty baguette. The rest of us learned to eat like royalty, trying unfamiliar flavors and combinations, indulging in rich sauces and a week’s supply of wine and cheese served at every meal; the boys stuck with the most prosaic meal of all: pb&j.

Yes, We have no banana blooms…

By in Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , ,

posted by Lisa

…a story in pictures about desire lost and found.

Week 2 at the Koloa Sunshine Market, we came for the regular things: greens, radishes, mountain spinach, tomatoes, fiddlehead ferns, mountain apples, and a back breaking assortment of mangoes, papayas, pineapples, passion fruit, apple bananas.  Everything was rough and beautiful as always, and Ella and Finn knew their way around the small market this time, so they were excited to help pick out our haul and scavenge from table to table.  There was a lot of begging, and a lot of giving in on my part. They understand what a farmers market is from our life back home, so this was an adventure they could understand.  And if a part of their excitement about being on Kauai involved purchasing and eating lots of local (and new to them) produce, who was I to deny them?

We had to buy an extra pint of tomatoes and several more bananas to replace the ones that they ate while walking around, but we got all of the things we needed quickly (before they sold out), plus two beautiful sprays of orchids that lasted all week.

But, what I most wanted was a banana bloom to chop and stir fry, or chop and toss in our greens. I had wanted this all week, and I searched everywhere, and while there were several wild ones hanging from the trees, and more strewn on the ground outside the market, there were none to be bought.

Still, the trip was not without adventure for any of us.

We found this:

A soursop fruit, which was creamy and sweet and a little tart.  I liked it, but my family wouldn’t touch it. It stayed at the market.

Ella had great fun with our camera, snapping off two dozen pictures of the farmers and their goods. My favorite is this study in yellow and green:

And we enjoyed more coconut, especially when the man with the machete hacked ours open so we could eat the meat after the water was gone.

The machete was much larger than it looks, and shells did fly.

Then, we struck gold.

Across the path, Finn & my husband spied the sugar cane:

They bought and contemplated the sugar cane:

And Finn quickly appropriated said sugar cane. Because really, what is better in life than sugar in the form of a bat?

Mission: Eiffel Tower

By in Uncategorized Tags: , ,

posted by Caroline
The first time we’d tried to visit the Eiffel Tower, we traveled via the batobus, which offers a scenic ride down the Seine.

Too scenic, as it turned out.

We arrived at 7pm and faced lines that snaked from the entrance back and forth all the way across the plaza. We were without sufficient food or line distractions to survive the wait, so we risked – and faced – the boys’ loud and bitter disappointment by turning back and regrouping.

The next day was stormy and windy and Eli didn’t nap. We debated: on the one hand, the weather might be keeping the crowds down; maybe a tired boy would be a docile and patient line stander…. But probably not, on both counts. We stayed home and cooked dinner.

Finally, we planned our ascent of the Eiffel Tower like mountaineers plan for Everest. In this case, Tony and I were the Tibetan sherpas, and the boys were Sandy Hill Pittman, who show up and have every desire met, needing only to put their bodies where they’re told and not use up too much oxygen. I was grateful they didn’t want cappuccino (although come to think of it, at the base of the Eiffel Tower, that would have been easy to provide).

We’d been advised that the lines are shorter in the late afternoon, so we waited until after Eli’s nap, hoping that the boys would be well-rested, the lines a little easier, and that we’d get up to the top and out before it was way too late for dinner (or even bed). We brought Eli’s view master and discs, Ben’s journal, 2 cameras (since Ben’s a big photographer now), and windbreakers in case it was cold at the top. More importantly, I spent Eli’s naptime packing up food:

carrot sticks, water bottles, baby bell cheeses, 2 peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, 2 nutella sandwiches (never underestimate the motivating power of chocolate), 2 Z bars, and a ziploc bag of almonds and raisins. We set off at 4, arriving at the base at 5pm. Tony grabbed a bench with the boys while I staked out our place on line.

We didn’t make it out without any tears (from Eli, when I started walking down a flight of stairs holding his hand rather than letting him hold the banister):

But, we made it up, we made it down, and we made it back home, our backpacks empty, four and a half hours later.

cross-posted over at Food for Thought.

«‹ 2 3 4 5