Category Archives: kids

Carrot Goodness Muffins

baking, breakfast, kids 1 Comment

This is another one of my sneak-good-food-into-The-Kiddo recipes. It turns out, however, that my friend The Healthy Eater loves them too! They’re great for a quick, out-the-door breakfast on the go that doesn’t involve waiting in a fast food line, and keep you filled up till lunch. Yay for that! Adapted from here.

You will need:

  • 1 cup whole wheat flour
  • ½ cup wheat germ
  • ½ bran
  • ¾ cups white sugar
  • 1 tablespoon ground cinnamon
  • 2 teaspoons baking powder
  • ½ teaspoon baking soda
  • ½ teaspoon salt
  • 1 pound grated carrots
  • 1 egg
  • ½ cup apple butter
  • ¼ cup vegetable oil
  • 1 tablespoon vanilla extract

Optional:

  • 1 apple, peeled and chopped
  • 1 cup raisins
  1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees F. Line 24 muffin cups with paper liners, or use non-stick spray
  2. Whisk together eggs, apple butter, oil and vanilla in a small bowl
  3. In a larger bowl stir together flour, wheat germ, bran, sugar, cinnamon, baking powder, baking soda and salt
  4. Stir in carrots (and apples and raisins if used), then stir in apple butter mixture until just moistened
  5. Scoop muffin batter into muffin cups — about 3/4 full
  6. Bake at 375 degrees F for 15 to 20 minutes, or until the tops are just turning golden and spring back when lightly pressed

These freeze wonderfully! I make a huge batch of them every couple weeks and freeze them in giant ziploc bags, then take out a couple every night — by morning they’re ready to eat!

Crack-a-roni: pioneer macaroni and cheese

kids, lunch, supper 16 Comments

Crack-a-roni. This is how The Yankee refers to this dish. My sister, too. And her husband. The Kiddo? He refers to it as he does to any foods that are not yogurt, bread, or Cheerios: “No tank you, mama.” Sigh.

Anyway! The dish! This is from my 1950 Betty Crocker Picture Cookbook. Best $20 I’ve ever spent. I stray very little from this, so here goes:

You will need:

  • 6 Tbsp. butter
  • 6 Tbsp. flour
  • ½ tsp salt
  • ¼ tsp pepper
  • ¼ tsp paprika
  • Dash of nutmeg
  • 2 cups milk
  • 8 oz. uncooked macaroni
  • 1/2 pound Velveeta* or 2 cups cheese(s) of your choice

*Even with my general aversion to foods whose ingredients I cannot pronounce, I use Velveeta here. It just totally works in this dish.

Now, just like for the chicken pot pie, we’ll make a white sauce:

  1. Melt the butter over low heat in a heavy saucepan
  2. Quickly whisk in flour, nutmeg, paprika, salt, and pepper, whisking until mixture is smooth & bubbly
  3. Remove from heat; whisk in milk — for a minute it may look like it’s turning into a giant lump, but keep whisking and pouring the milk
  4. Bring to a slow boil and boil for one minute, whisking constantly
  5. Reduce heat to low and cook until thickened — at least ten minutes for best flavor

Easy assembly:

  1. Preheat oven to 350F
  2. While the white sauce is cooking, boil pasta for two minutes less than the shortest time on the box; e.g. if your pasta says to cook for 10-12 minutes, then cook for eight minutes
  3. In a greased baking dish, layer half the pasta, half the white sauce and half the cheese; repeat so you have two layers of each component
  4. Bake at 350 degrees for about 40 minutes or until bubbly. At this point it’s super yummy to stop and stir it together. You can then either serve as-is for super creamy mac and cheese, or put it back in to brown up a bit. Serve hot from baking dish
  5. Join a gym

How does your garden grow?

kids, tools 9 Comments

Wanna know how much The Yankee rocks? A LOT.

He built this:

And, because that line in Rocky Top about the dirt being too rocky by far is all true, we filled the raised bed with this:

Saturday morning we headed out to Home Depot with The Kiddo. We checked out all our options, lumber-wise: we didn’t want pressure treated lumber because we didn’t want the chemicals from it to make its way into our garden. Then cedar was suggested as an option: the Home Depot guy said, “Oh you could use cedar! It would do great. I mean, you’d have to build a new one every season, though.”

After a few seconds of blinking and telepathic communication, we did not pass go, but went directly to the Trex. This was more our style! More sturdy than anything else in the store, and safe to use around food.

“Oh yeah,” says Home Depot guy, “You could eat off it.”

Uh, okay.

All told, it cost $93 for the supplies to build this garden (not including the fill dirt), which is eight feet by four feet. Expensive? Sure, a little. But we have to do it only once. And we used screws to assemble it, so we could theoretically take it apart and reassemble it every year. But smart money is on me leaving it there. 😉

So far The Kiddo and I have planted four tomato plants (because, really, what’s the point of a garden without the prospect of tomato sandwiches?), two pepper plants, some cilantro, some basil and some strawberries. I’d love to add onions and carrots and green beans.  This nifty online planner shows how many of what you can plant in a square foot (thus my semi-obsessive square foot markers… made from The Kiddo’s yarn), then gives instructions for each plant you picked. How great is that?

So tell me! Do you garden? Do you have any advice, this being my first raised-bed garden? Any thoughts on how to keep away bunnies and other unwanted guests at the salad bar? Lay ’em on me!

Whey biscuits

baking, breakfast, kids 5 Comments

After all that yogurt straining, I ended up with quite a bit of whey. Time to make biscuits!

I used:

  • 2 cups King Arthur AP flour
  • 1 tsp salt
  • 1 Tbsp baking powder
  • 1/4 cup powdered milk (for extra protein and creaminess)
  • 1/2 tsp instant yeast
  • 2 Tbsp shortening
  • 2 Tbsp cold butter
  • 1 cup whey

I do these in the food processor — they’re ridiculously fast that way. Toss in the flour, salt, baking powder, powdered milk and yeast and pulse a couple times. Cut in the shortening and butter and pulse about 8 times. Pour in the whey and let it sit a minute to soak in, then pulse till mostly blended — maybe 5-8 times?

Now pat out the dough on a floured surface and cut with a floured cutter. My cast iron was otherwise occupied, so I baked these on parchment paper on a cookie sheet:

Bake at 400 degrees F for about ten minutes. See them poofing up?

Get ’em while they’re hot!

The finished product:

The Kiddo loves these with Sunbutter on them for lunch; I love ’em with butter and honey. Fluffy tasty goodness!

Toddler yogurt/yogurt cheese: in the thick of it

baking, breakfast, kids 5 Comments

As discussed, The Kiddo loves him some yogurt. The problem is that it’s so creamy and fabulous the he sometimes has issues keeping it on the spoon all by himself; all by yourself is very important when you’re two.

Enter the cheesecloth! By straining out some of the whey from the yogurt you make it thicker, therefore easier for a little one to manage with a spoon.

I lined my gravy pitcher with cheesecloth, then spooned the yogurt onto the cheesecloth, which is over the strainer. I folded the cheesecloth over the yogurt to keep it covered, and put it in the fridge overnight.

If you want to hurry the process along (hungry toddler?), you can add a little weight to the equation:

For this setup I lined a mesh strainer with cheesecloth and set it over a bowl. I spooned in the yogurt and folded the cheesecloth over it, then put a clean soup mug on top of that. In the soup mug went an unopened can (of Arthur O’s, but I’m pretty sure they don’t have any specific magical yogurt powers). The weight of the can compresses the yogurt and speeds up the whole straining/thickening process.

The longer you let the yogurt sit in either set-up, the more whey will drain out, and the thicker the yogurt will be. Regardless, you’ll end up with this:

Yummy thick yogurt on the left, whey on the right.  If you let this strain a long time (24 hours or so) you end up with yogurt cheese! You can use this for all kinds of things as a replacement for mayo or sour cream in nearly any recipe.

Whey is chock-full of protein and minerals, so it doesn’t need to go to waste. I use it instead of water for making bread, pancakes, etc., and gently stir it back into a bowl of yogurt if I want to thin it out a bit for me. Heck, you can even make whey biscuits! Whey keeps in the fridge for six months, so there’s no rush; it also freezes just fine. I freeze it by the 1/4 cup in a muffin pan, then pop the whey-sicles into a freezer bag after they’re set up for easy measuring in the future.