From scratch

We are back on the meal-planning wagon. Did I get that right? As in, we are meal planning again. We had fallen off for a while, but the culinary tour of Portland recharged our foodie batteries. In the past few days alone, we've made:

Paella (Bo felt it was necessary to polish the clam shells with a dish rag. It's a Montessori thing) ...

 

 

(FYI: We don't normally banish our children to a kiddie table across the kitchen. They thought it'd be fun that night to eat by themselves. We didn't complain.)

(Also, yes, we have a thing for those Catholic saints candles you can buy at the grocery store for $2. They're all over the house right now.)

Chicken and biscuits ...

(It's official. I'm no longer allowed to cook a meal by myself. No matter where the girls are in the house, if they hear the pots clang together, they come running to help. Yes, it's great for them, blah, blah, blah, but sometimes I try very hard to not make those pots touch. Never works.)

Pumpkin pancakes ...

There was a really delicious tuna melt one night, too, but I was too busy eating it to take pictures.

This is our (extremely complicated) meal planning method:

Choose one to three cookbooks for a two-week period. Sit down with J sometime during the weekend, flip through the books, choose recipes we want to try--preferably with ingredients that won't send him to the E.R. Someone please tell me why all the good dinners contain apples, mangoes or pears?!

Scribble out a calendar on notebook paper. Go through each recipe and write down the ingredients we need to buy. Add things to the list like "more Catholic saints candles."

Grocery shop.

Make those cookbooks easily accessible for two weeks, like by setting them on the counter. Rocket science, I know.

Cook. 

Cooking dinner at home means instead of buckling the kids into and out of car seats and hoping and praying they'll leave their shoes on at the restaurant, there's more time for writing on the chalkboard wall ...

Dressing up like Glenda the Good Witch ...

 

And dancing. Good golly, these girls love to dance.

As far as the kid-friendliness of the meals, the only thing they've really balked at was the paella. And that was just Magpie. After the first bite, Bo declared that that's what she wants us to serve at her birthday party. That birthday party ... always on her mind.

The cookbooks we're using right now:

1.1080 Recipes

That's where the paella came from, not to mention the outlines for the chalkboard wall.

2. Mother's Best, by Lisa Schroeder.

Schroeder owns Mother's Bistro, where we had our last breakfast in Portland. We have several pages from that book marked, so we might need to keep that one out on the counter for more than a couple of weeks.

Here's a shot of my corn flake-crusted French toast at the restaurant (the recipe is also in the book):

3. Cooks Illustrated The Best Recipe

Mmm ... Flaky, buttery biscuits. I didn't say these were healthy recipes.  

P.S. I am crafting, but I'm working on some secret projects right now. Shhh ... I'll write them up soon.   

Comments

[twirling betty]

Yum, yum and yum. I'm coveting your Kitchen Aid. And did you draw that Butcher's cuts bull? Love it.
I try hard not to clang my pots too sometimes but then I sigh and try to remind myself that a time will come when I will wish they wanted to cook with me rather than locking themselves in their room listening to the Cure (yes, they will re-discover the Cure) and feeling generally misunderstood.

[michaela]

Oh, yeah - in our house the clanging of the pots is almost immediately followed by the dragging of the stool across the floor. I do sometimes long for those days where I'd listen to NPR and sip a glass of wine while chopping veggies blessedly ALONE. But I s'pose they'll be back soon enough, right?

[Megan]

LOL, T.B. As long as they play The Cure loud enough so I can hear it, too, that will be O.K. (Close to Me came on while I was on the treadmill today. So good).
Yes, Michaela, the dragging of the stool, too. A very familiar sound in our house. I long for a little NPR, too. We had Laurie Berkner's "Buzz Buzz" album going instead tonight. Could be worse.

[Nis]

Oh, Meegs, you *know* that you want them to play some Bel Biv DeVoe. Ha ha ha! Seriously, the meal planning has done wonders for our house in the past few years. Not only do we plan, shop, and eat more thoughtfully but we spend SO much less money. It makes life in general so much more enjoyable when we aren't (a)arguing over who "always" versus who "never" cooks, (b) spending $40 at the grocery store every other day, (c) wasting food because we have a recipe that calls for a small amount of something perishable and we haven't planned to use it later in the week in another recipe or two, and (d) saying "never mind, just make some pasta, I'm hungry!!" :) BTW, love the apron... cute!

[Tracy]

HELP! Does anyone know where I can get the bird mobile that was featured in a previous blog?

[Tracy]

By the way, its from Sept 14th of 2008!

[Megan]

Hi, Tracy. I think you mean this post, right?
http://pennycarnival.typepad.com/penny_carnival/2008/09/muckin-and-junkin.html
I loved that wooden bird mobile. The shop that I featured that day has since closed. But I'll post the picture again in an upcoming blog post and see if anyone knows where to find it. And I might have a way of tracking down the shop owner. Stay tuned.