Dark Days Dinner Challenge Week 7

This week we are trying the honey baked lentils and roasted delicata squash that have been making the rounds in the challenge. I had all the ingredients on hand (even local ginger! but I had to use fresh) The challenge here, which I haven't gotten to yet, is whether or not my kids will eat the food prepared for them. They are funny about beans and funnier about winter squash. So I have leftovers (yet another batch of potato, leek and sorrel soup) to pull out in the case of a miss. But since I am a fan of all things lentil and squash-ish at least I will be happy with dinner. (except this one squash and black bean burrito recipe I made one time. Oh what a disaster) Of course, it is SOP around here that if Mommy likes it, no one else does. Why is that? And, BTW, on a related note, how is it even possible to dislike tortilla espagnol?

This weekend is a local smorgasbord though of food and craft. We need to head to Ojai on Sunday for farmer's market and toy store action (and a little tea shop thrown in for the heck of it. And it is not one of those frou frou afternoon tea kinds of places, but rather an old-fashioned place where you go in for breakfast and get beans and toast and potatoes and tomatoes and a pot of strong tea. Or a regular fry-up if you are so inclined. I love that place.) Then back home to head out to the Holiday Craft fair where I hope my favorite potter is going to have a booth. I have a few things I want to pick up.

And then next week: Hanukkah! Tons to do and latkes to eat. And although Food on the Food's Daikon potato latkes look scrumptious, I will never get DH to go for them. This is the man who is horrified by the thought of a blueberry bagel! I wonder if I can buy potatoes by the bushel and if it would be cheaper? I have a whole giant drawer in my kitchen devoted to them and they really don't go to waste around here. I wish I had the room to plant potatoes here. But my little 20' x 3' garden is already chock full and has no room for potatoes. Now if only my artichoke would bear. It is huge, but so far, nothing this fall. Ah well.

ETA: Surprised again. I hardly got any of the squash because the kids wanted it all! No lentils though. Yay leftovers.

Dark Days Dinner Week 6

No photos tonight, although if the light is good tomorrow when the leftovers come out, I will try to take some. This is not a particularly photogenic meal. Maybe I should have taken photos of the ingredients instead.

Tonight's dinner was Potato Sorrel soup. It is a variation on the old standby Potato Leek soup, but leeks are nowhere to be found at the market lately and I have plenty of storage potatoes and onions bought from there. So I picked up a bunch of sorrel last week and added it to the soup this evening. Is it strange to have an almost 7yo and 2 1/2yo cheering the addition of leafy greens? Not that I'm complaining. Actually I like the soup better with the greens as well. They give a brightness that really is missing without them.

Dark Days Dinner Week 5

Usually I do this later in the week - specifically the day after I go to the farmer's market - but this week I had things to use up, so Monday was the day. It doesn't photograph well, and I had to get in a photo before my 2 hungry children scarfed down all the hard-boiled eggs. This is the only one of 6 that lasted long enough for a photo op. Also on the menu is locally made pugliese bread spread with the last of our goat cheese in oil and a trio of roasted root vegetables (potatoes, turnips and parsnips) with local olive oil and rosemary from the garden.

The children, picky fellows that they were tonight, wouldn't touch the parsnips and turnips with a 1o foot pole so I had to pick through theirs and remove the offending pieces so that they would eat the vegetables at all. I remember the good old days when Z would eat roasted turnips straight and beg for more. And B. Well B will eat whatever Z does and won't eat whatever Z won't. 2 year olds are like that I suppose. Although he'll tell you he's 6.

Dark Days Dinner Week 4

This week our dark days dinner was chicken pot pie. Made with leftover chicken from the market and leftover, frozen veggie broth from last week, and of course the requisite fresh veggies - carrots, celery, potatoes, turnips, onions - and one major cheat - frozen puff pastry. It was from the freezer and had been there awhile, if that helps! LOL But so far as I know, there are no flour producers in our general regional area, so any flour product is a cheat. Plus, I've made homemade puff pastry and it is a major PITA to do. The photo is actually from the leftovers that I am heating up for lunch for B and myself for lunch. Usually there aren't leftovers when I make this, but DH worked until 11:30 last night and so he didn't want it when he got home. More for the rest of us!

This recipe is one I have adapted from several recipes and my own trial and error over the years and have jotted down notes onto a recipe pad. Very few of my recipes are actually mine. Mostly they are the bits that I have pulled from this or that cookbook, of which I seem to have fewer of than ever. I used to love to buy and collect cookbooks and all other manner of books, but here in my frugal age of motherhood, I hardly ever buy anything for me anymore. Just one of those things I guess. So as a result, I have a smallish collection of cookbooks that are almost falling apart from use.

I read an editorial a few months ago talking about family dinner and how regardless of whether it is homemade or made using the myriad of prepackaged frozen foods available, dinner takes about the same amount of time to prepare. It was based on a study published in the British Food Journal and performed right here in SoCal by UCLA's Center on Everyday Lives of Families (no really) called "Dinner preparation in the modern United States". (no really)

Basically it found that 70 percent of the dinners analyzed were made at home, meaning of course no restaurant food. But nearly every one of those "homemade" meals did include commercially prepared food (i.e. Hamburger Helper , frozen stir fry mix, jarred sauces, etc) Only 22% used none or very little of those types of foods. Only 3 times were recipes from cookbooks used and none - none! - used hand written recipe cards or recipes clipped out of newspapers. Best part? The dinners averaged a "statistically insignificant difference" in the amount of time it took to prepare, from start to finish - an average of 52 minutes.

The editorial goes on to say how strange this is when food based television shows are so highly rated and cookbooks are such best-sellers.

And I think that this isn't how I was raised or how I live my life. Sure we have convenience foods in our house, but they are expensive and for occasional use, unless you count our scheduled Tuesday battered halibut from TJ's. If they ever stop carrying it, my kids will have their week completely thrown off. They mark time by it, LOL! I remember as a teenager having a friend come over to dinner and remarking about how amazing it was that my mom made mashed potatoes from real potatoes. Funny thing is, I never had the boxed kind until I was an adult and had some at a friend's house. It never seemed like that much of a time savings to me to not just use actual potatoes.

Off to serve lunch!

Harry Potter and the Painted Cave

A post in two acts.

Act I Halloween

Z wanted to be Harry Potter for Halloween. Since he is a big fan after having read Sorcerer's Stone recently (about 5 times!) I figured he would want to have robes he could really use for pretend play, so here we have Hogwarts robes fully lined (and reversible so he could theoretically pretend they are Quidditch robes as well) There aren't any actual branded Harry Potter robe patterns, so it is necessary to take another pattern and alter it so you can have something similar. I used Simplicity Pattern 3597, because Simplicity patterns were on sale for 99 cents. I'm sure there is another pattern company's pattern that is equally able to be altered. This one was pretty simple to adjust. I change the sleeve shape, and, instead of doing the facing I fully lined it. All in all it wasn't too difficult, but I totally zoned on the sleeves and they are a bit wonky, but not bad.

Here he is.



Act II

The Painted Cave



This cave is up in Santa Barbara and it a relic of the Chumash Indians who lived in this area (they still have a reservation nearby) This cave retains paintings created in the late 1600s using shells, red ochre and charcoal. On the left there is a painting that is believed to depict a solar eclipse that occurred on November 24, 1677. I really can't believe you can walk right up to it, peer in through the bars blocking total access and see this. All these pictures are taken with a flash, because otherwise you would be able to see nothing.



Here are the guys, goofing off in some of the nearby niches.




And here is B, looking for all the world like the cover of a Hardy Boys, the Toddler Years book.

Week 3 Dark Days dinner

Our dinner this week, well the local one anyway, is courtesy of living here in Sunny SoCal at the ocean. It is Fisherman's Stew, made with kid-caught (from the ocean) rockcod. DH and Z went out on an all day fishing expedition on the ocean and caught quite a bit of sand dab and rockcod. Here they are with the rockcod from tonight's meal.



In addition to the fish, the stew contains homemade veggie stock (from farmer's market veggies) and fish stock (from the aforementioned fish) and of course veggies (even tomatoes still!) also from the farmer's market and some locally made pugliese bread. Served in a locally made pottery bowl. That has to count for something. Actually, that is one of my favorite things - handmade (and locally made) pottery. I loooove my beautiful bowls. When Z was in Waldorf kindy a couple of years ago, the teacher had handmade pottery bowls and cups for use each day at snack and I loved them. They had such a beautiful weight and a special feel to them. So much more then a machine made bowl has ever appealed to me. I never knew where to pick some up, but on the 4th of July, I ran into a couple of potters at a local fair and I snapped up this bowl, an omelet bowl and a berry bowl (with drainage holes). Since then I also have picked up another bowl, but I am always on the lookout. It is a slow process since the items aren't cheap, although they aren't expensive either. They are fairly priced, but in a one-at-a-time kind of way. One of my favorite local potters is http://www.ginagart.com/ My berry bowl is one she made.



On the downside of the challenge, I put up some oven dried tomatoes in olive oil a couple of months ago and went to use some this week (using things put by and all) and they had gone bad. One jar had some tomato sticking out of the oil and had starting to grow fuzz, so I tossed it, and the next was just slimy and wrong textured and I wasn't comfortable after the batch before being bad, so I tossed that too. Thus ends all of my put by oven dried tomatoes. Bummer.