Food for Kids: Inspiring a Love of Cooking

I am so grateful for the fond memories I have of watching and helping my mom cook when I was little, and I want to give my son those same experiences.  But Little E seems a bit too young for that right now.  Until he stops grabbing at everything and starts to have a longer attention span, I want to give him something else to do.  Enter imaginative play!

I am thinking of getting E some play fruits and veggies to go in a play kitchen.  There is such a wide variety in play kitchens!  Some look just like an adult kitchen and would take up a whole wall.  I am leaning toward getting the KidKraft Vintage Kitchen.  A friend of mine has it in blue, and it is sturdy, easy on the eyes, and not too big.

Do you have a favorite product or brand to recommend?  What were your favorite food-play activities?  (Mine was "running" my own restaurant with a friend.  Our signature dish?  Rainbow salad: red tomatoes, orange carrots, yellow peppers, green lettuce...and blue salad dressing.  Not blue cheese, just ranch with blue food coloring!)

Recipe: Mexican Pulled Chicken

What to do with chicken leftovers?  After grilling, we often have a lot of extra chicken, and while I like it hot off the grill, I tend to scorn the leftovers.  Until now, chicken salad was our go-to solution for leftover chicken, but I was looking for something new, and a bit healthier.  A little searching around yielded a recipe for Mexican Pulled Chicken.  The original recipe calls for uncooked chicken to be simmered with onions, cumin, chili powder, soup stock, and salsa, then removed, pulled, and added back to the pot.  It is just as easy to introduce the chicken at the post-pulling step, which has the additional benefit of making the total cooking time shorter.  The salsa you choose will greatly affect the flavor of the dish, so pick a good one!  I used a corn and bean salsa, and ate Mexican Pulled Chicken wraps all week for a quick lunch or dinner.  This recipe is Kosher, but for some delicious treyf, sprinkle on some cheese.

Garden update: One out of four pepper plants (the orangsicle variety) has four little peppers growing, two out of seven tomato plants (cherry and lemon boy) have tiny tomatoes, and one out of six eggplants has a small whitish purple fruit growing.  The cilantro (aka coriander) I planted in early april is blossoming, and hopefully I will be able to harvest the seeds soon!

Cilantro in bloom

Pretty little flowers, do your thing!

You’re a Waldorf salad!*

I love a good, hearty salad, especially as it heats up outside.  The problem is all the time it takes to prepare the fixins and all the space it takes to store the inevitable unused portions.  So it is a treat to go out to a good salad bar, where I can mix and match to my heart’s content.  Right now, my favorite place for doing this is Ruby Tuesday’s.  There’s nothing like a spinach, egg, tomato, chickpea, black olive, sun-dried tomato, crumbled feta, and dried cranberry salad with a balsamic vinaigrette or blue cheese dressing.  What's your favorite salad combination, and where’s you’re favorite place to get it?

Speaking of delicious fixins, I am more than ready for fresh garden tomatoes!  We have seven plants this year, all with little yellow flowers, so I am hopeful to get a good turn out this year.

*Do you recognize this line?  It’s from You’re the Top, by Cole Porter, from Anything Goes (here's a fun explanation of some of the references in the song).  I heard it on the way to the restaurant, and I ended up having some Waldorf Salad during dinner.  How appropriate!

Hello, everybody, so glad to see you!

Welcome!  I love food.  Does that make me a "foodie"?  In any case, this passion seems to run in my family.  My grandmother left behind dozens of recipe cards, carefully typed out with a typewriter.  My mother added dozens of new recipes she found through the years.  While I was growing up, I watched my sister experiment with bread baking, and now she is trying out cheese making and other culinary experiments.  Being the younger sister, I grew up enjoying what everyone else made, but somewhere along the way I discovered that I loved more than simply eating.  I loved trying new ingredients, new recipes, and new techniques.  I loved trying out dishes that other people made, true, but also produce that other people grew.  Recently my love of taking photographs spread to delighting in photographing food being made.  My husband's interest in the science of nutrition was contagious.  And since I became a mother, planning food for our small family has become a hobby of culinary exploration, creativity, and thriftiness.

As you might surmise, I spend large portions of my free time thinking about and engaged with food.  And I decided that instead of keeping these food experiences to myself, it would be more fun to share them.  This blog is my forum for that sharing.  Check out the Sneak Peeks page to find out the upcoming posts I am planning.

Hungrily,

Trish