The Nuni just started preschool a few weeks ago. My baby is growing up! Generally she’s very happy and excited about school, because there are not one, but TWO slides and also there is a play kitchen. This new development does bring with it all sorts of new questions, such as “How many changes of clothes do I need to send each day because she will get the clothes she wore to school covered in paint?” or “Is it normal for a two year old to talk about kissing all the boys in her classroom?” or “Why does she keep telling the teachers that other kids’ jackets are hers?” The most important question of all, though, is what to provide for that time-honored ritual – the after school snack.
I pick Nuni up from school right at the start of rush hour, and our trip home can be LONG, so I have to make sure I’m carrying something that can be eaten in the car, which means that has a low choke risk (because I’m a paranoid parent) and ideally, some good fat and protein, since my skinny minnie has been running around all day (did I mention there are TWO slides?). Cheese is the obvious answer, but it’s often rejected — I wanted something that would be appealing but still pack a nutritional punch. When talking with Stephanie of Wasabimon and Karen of Fickle Feast about gluten free baking, I got the idea to use nut flours to up the protein content in a standard muffin, which also has the added bonus of turning the standard muffin into something else entirely.
Entries Tagged as 'Kid Friendly'
After School Snack — Gluten Free Pear Almond Muffins
October 22nd, 2009 · 9 Comments · Baked Goods and Desserts, Make Ahead, Recipes
Tags: breakfast·brunch·glute·Kid Friendly·sweets
Famous Simple Summer Peach Cake
September 21st, 2009 · 8 Comments · Baked Goods and Desserts, Entertaining, Make Ahead, Recipes, Summer
People who don’t live in Los Angeles say that we don’t have seasons. The sun is always shining, the grass is always green, it’s always swimming pool weather. That’s not entirely true. We have seasons. In the winter it rains and the world is green. The spring is full of marine layers and fog, studded with purple jacaranda blooms. Summer is hot and dry and brown and ridden with wildfires. In the fall it smells of dirt and the Japanese maple trees in Beverly Hills turn glorious colors and the silkfloss trees burst into glorious pink blooms. We have seasons.
They just don’t change in September.
September in Los Angeles just an extension of summer, with less vacation and more traffic. At its worst that means triple digit temperatures, smoke filled skies from wildfires, and faded, stretched out summer clothes that need another month’s wear squeezed out of them. But I like to think of this as a little blessing of Indian summer — sunny mornings warm enough to eat breakfast on the patio, evenings with a light breeze that are the perfect temperature for gin and tonics, tomatoes that continue to ripen on the vine, and summer fruits at the markets. Simple.
Tags: baking·brunch·cake·dessert·fruit·Kid Friendly·sweets·Vegetarian
Mad Manwich — Spicy Turkey Sloppy Joes
September 17th, 2009 · 9 Comments · Main Dishes, Make Ahead, Poultry, Quick, Recipes
There’s something wonderfully retro about a sloppy joe in a 1950’s Americana kind of way. You can imagine not Betty Draper (God Forbid she cook anything as plebeian as a sloppy joe) but her PTA peers
serving sloppy joes to their fresh scrubbed kids and withdrawn husbands. The entire time I was growing up (in the post-Julia Child, Alice Waters and Wolfgang Puck era of California Cuisine), I only encountered a sloppy joe between the covers of books. The books were invariably slightly out of date, with lunch ladies (also a foreign concept) serving up steamy sloppy joes in the context of a school cafeteria to girls in bobby socks and boys with pompadours. I had some idea of what a sloppy joe was, thanks to my mother’s 1955 edition of the Better Homes and Garden Junior Cookbook, which blithely incorporated cans of condensed soup, “summer drink powder” and canned fruit cocktail into its recipes, but it didn’t frankly, sound like anything I would eat. The somewhat disturbing cans of “manwich” I glimpsed at the grocery store (we certainly never bought them) only confirmed my impression that sloppy joes were a thing of the past and should stay there.
Tags: Kid Friendly·turkey·weeknight
