The gift of good food

I'm in the Green Phone Booth today, sharing the tasty delights we fed a sister before she deployed.  Bon appetit!

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Because the Green Phone Booth is no longer available, here's the post:

In which Truffula gains renewed appreciation for the power of good things to eat...

As of yesterday, my sister's boots are on the ground.  She had the past weekend off, and was able to travel home.  Her one wish: "to have some 'real food'."

Our mother and I ratcheted our kitchens into gear.  Soup was cooked.  Beans were soaked.  New ferments were prepared, and finished ones were pulled from their special places in the refrigerator.  Fruit and eggs were procured.  The dehydrator was filled and fired up.

Cafeteria fare and MREs have their purposes, but all thoughts of those were cast aside for

• pureed vegetable soup
• pats of butter (shh... they might even have been enjoyed straight up)
• aged, raw milk cheese
• sunny, golden yellow breakfast eggs
• squash chips, dipped into navy bean hummus made with Italian extra-virgin olive oil
• water kefir, from grains she'd carefully dried and sent to get me started kefiring way back when
• creamy milk kefir from direct-from-the-farm milk
• hearty, dark, whole-grain sourdough bread
• Dad's special goulash recipe, featuring grass-fed beef
• beautiful smoothies, containing raspberries, cherries, peaches, and generous pours of coconut oil
• kimchi, savored like a vintage wine

What do two wacky enterprising sisters do when left to their own between divine meals and snacks?  They devise a fermented cod liver oil taste-off!  We gathered jars of Green Pasture's new emulsified flavors, got out a supply of forks (they're better than spoons for stirring, in this case), revved up our taste buds, and happily sampled away.  The results: she loved the peppermint, I favored the licorice, and we were in firm agreement that the ginger one didn't need to be purchased again.

As she left, space in her bag was at a premium, but Mom found a way to slip in some sandwiches and apples for the road.  In the emails and text updates which followed, we read how sparingly those sandwiches were rationed out, with each bite savored to the max.  The organic apples received highest praise in comparison with the standard-fare Red Delicious.

LCDR G., we'll keep those ferments going for you, and our kitchens stocked!  (In the interim, I'm taking suggestions from gentle readers for how to mail dehydrated veggies in something other than a glass canning jar, and still have them remain in good condition.)

Easy, healthy Valentine's Day snack for kids (and grownups, too)

Today was our day to supply snacks for S's class.   But, what to send along?  Muffins came to mind as "single-serve" goodies for a group of elementary-school-aged children.  Still, wasn't there anything else?  I scoured my resources, found nothing I wanted to make, and then... contemplated the ingredients we had on hand in the first place...

Since it was a week before Valentine's Day, I thought it might be nice to incorporate a heart-shape theme somehow...  And then...

Inspiration!

I retrieved my heart-shaped cookie cutter, got my ingredients ready, and then set to work with my cutting board to mass-produce heart-shaped "sandwiches" of sorts.

Ingredients:
flour tortillas (up the health factor with whole-wheat tortillas)
ham
cheese
patience

I put one heart of ham, and one heart of cheese between two tortilla hearts.  The results: a whole lotta love on each plate - LOL!

I sent along three plates full of these sandwiches.  S reported that there were merely 4 hearts left at the end, and that these were snatched up when their availability was announced.

All in all, a success!

Cooking lessons start with "Devil Sauce"

When I asked S when he'd like to accomplish in Grade 3, he included cooking as one of his items.  Unprompted!  Conveniently, that was one of my agenda items for him as well. :-)

Last week, our CSA had an abundance of peppers.  Hot peppers.  We were encouraged to take them by the fist-full, and the newsletter handily included a recipe for Jalapeno Hot Sauce.  This recipe calls for 20 (!) fresh jalapenos.

Papa Gardener is a hot sauce fan, and saw his name written all over that recipe.  He and the boys put it on their to-do list, and off they went, using the experience as Cooking Lesson Session #1.

Rubber gloves were pulled out for the slicing and dicing.  A while later, I received a phone call with the progress report: they should have turned on the over-the-stove fan... the fumes from the cooking sauce were gassing out the chefs!

By the time I got home, the air was clearer, and sauce jar, specially labeled by S, had claimed prime real estate in the refrigerator:

 

Lasst uns froh und munter sein - our visit from St. Nicholas

Lasst uns froh und munter sein,
und uns recht von Herzen freun!
Lustig, lustig, traleralera!
Bald ist Nikolaus Abend da,
bald ist Nikolaus Abend da!

St. Nicholas came to visit us again this year!

We've spent the past few nights singing verses from "Lasst uns froh und munter sein."

Today, S and T decorated paper plates in anticipation of tonight's visit.

St. Nicholas' helper industriously set to work after bedtime, making a sweet yeast dough for the bread-men which are traditional St. Nicholas Day fare in our family. (I add extra sugar to the recipe, and a dash of lemon or orange extract -- depending on what I have on hand -- for festive flavor!).

As has been our custom in previous years, St. Nicholas brought bread-men for some of our neighbors as well. Together with S and T, we will deliver these to the families, along with our good wishes, tomorrow.

When you cook, you need a drying rack for the greens

I'm rereading Mitten Strings for God right now. Inspired by the segments that were my "light bus commute reading" today, I invited T. to help me prepare dinner. He demanded his toque, and off we went. We made a beet soup, and cooked up some collard greens and chard, all ingredients of goodness from our CSA.

While I was working on the soup, T. was at the kitchen table, working with the greens. He was happily singing to himself. Then, I heard some lyrics about a drying rack. The next thing I knew, he started making trips to the oven door handle, explaining that the greens needed to dry on the "drying rack" before he could cut them into smaller pieces. So, onto the "rack" they went!