Posts tagged as:

cooking with kids

My favorite pastry brush

April 23, 2009

 
This is a picture of my favorite pastry brush from cooking school, which I bought not at the over-priced store conveniently attached to the school but at Home Depot.  (Where I get most of my cooking gear.) It’s a 2-inch brush that we used for glazing tarts, basting roasts or birds, brushing egg wash over [...]

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Peter Schaner’s Easter eggs

April 11, 2009

Decorating eggs for Easter is a long tradition (pagan origins, Christian symbol of rebirth), which in my house historically involves buying those flimsy egg-dying kits from the grocery store with their haphazard array of paper bits and dye tablets that usually don’t work out right.  We’ve experimented with wax crayons, food coloring, different vinegars, vegetable [...]

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Muffin recipe testing

March 25, 2009

Muffins are very, very cool things.  Sure, they don’t have the current caché (i.e. hype) of cupcakes, but you can eat them for breakfast without falling into a sugar coma.  Muffins are also how I got to know Kimberly Boyce, as I wrote a story about her whole grain muffin experiments now that she’s home [...]

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Wilted dandelion green salad

March 25, 2009

My kids think it’s hysterical that people eat dandelion greens.  They don’t really like them, as they find the greens a bit bitter.  But the girls just love it when grown-ups eat them.  You’re eating weeds, points out one or the other.  Yes.  But one person’s weed is another person’s dinner.  And they’re quite pretty, [...]

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Blueberry corncakes

March 25, 2009

Finally, blueberries.  I went to college in Maine, so I was a bit suspect of blueberries after I moved to California.  But then I discovered Santa Barbara berries one spring at the Santa Monica farmers market.   They don’t have the same exact flavor, but they’re equally good.  Corncakes are sturdier than pancakes made with just [...]

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Apple galette

March 23, 2009

I grew up at a boarding school with a working apple farm, so we ate a lot of apples. Picked them off trees, pressed cider as a class project, grabbed them from wooden crates that looked rather like these on our way to and from classes.  After I wrote a story about Southern California U-pick [...]

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Edible gardens

March 22, 2009

How to get kids to eat healthy foods?  Open the doors.  Instead of bribing kids or hiding vegetables in their chocolate pudding or blueberries in their hamburgers, get them into a garden.  For starters, bribing is an ethically questionably activity.  (Chores, sure; homework, maybe; food, no.) Then there’s the problematic fact that my kids can [...]

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Strawberry aguas frescas

March 21, 2009

Another amazing thing to do with fresh ripe Camarosas or Chandlers or Gaviotas is to make a batch of aguas frescas with them.  I didn’t know what these were (aguas frescas, not strawberries) before I moved to Southern California, but I quickly learned to order them–fresh fruit aguas frescas, horchata, jamaica and tamarindo–at restaurants and [...]

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