Cooking with Kid(s)

I enjoyed having my nieces in town for Thanksgiving. I think the best part
(other than the Raggedy costume)
was the quality time I spent with Adele in the kitchen on Friday! (Making food that was homemade, but full of refined flour and white sugar - and food coloring! - not exactly Slow Food or Local Food or Real Food.)

I posted earlier about trying to figure out what to serve for breakfast to my niece that does not include eggs, oatmeal, or peanuts. My sister decided on pull-aparts - and actually got up early in the morning to make the dough, so it had plenty of time to rise.

Okay, so breakfast still wasn't ready until 10:30, and I didn't get any pictures of the process, but Adele did a great job helping me put little balls of dough rolled in butter and cinnamon sugar in my Bundt pan.

She's two, so I was afraid she'd pile all the dough on one side of the pan. Actually, she did a great job of putting the balls around the pan. When she had filled one layer of dough about halfway around the pan, she looked at her handiwork and exclaimed (I am not making this up), "oh look, it's a perfect rainbow." She was right. The balls of (brownish) dough in a semi-circle were indeed a perfect rainbow shape. She continued on with her work, and eventually the dough made a perfect circle. After the first layer, I think she got a little bit bored, and she started just throwing the dough anywhere. But it only took a little bit of rearranging before the finished product was set on top of the oven to rise again. The rolls were pretty good, although they could have had more of the butter/sugar mixture!

Later in the day I asked Adele if she wanted to make cookies with me. She and her mom do cooking "projects" at home sometimes, and she really seems to like them. Plus, Portage is a nice town but it isn't the most exciting place for two-year-olds. (We don't even have an art desk.) I got out my grandpa's Crisp Cookie recipe that my aunt gave me a few years ago, when I knew I wouldn't make it all the way to WI (from Kentucky) for Christmas, but didn't want to miss out on Grandpa's cookies. (Or the decorating that goes with it.)

Michael and I had (a little too much?) fun decorating the crisp cookies last year!
Adele helped me pick out good cookie cutters (she named the shapes as I held them up - if she didn't know what the shape was supposed to be, we didn't use that one)
hmm . . . what could this be?

She was very interested in sprinkling flour on the dough mat
and she even helped roll out the dough.
The cookies turned out pretty well by my standards - none of them were burned or undercooked, and only a few were smashed/broken.
With three pans and lots of helpers (and photographers) the job went quickly, even if it was very hot in the kitchen! Adele took a nap while the cookies cooled.

Adele sampled the cookies after her nap.
Oliver and Loki tried to convince Adele to share with them (but she didn't)
Finally, we were ready to decorate! (Aunt Dee Dee made a little mistake about what time the parade was supposed to be on Friday night - I had it in my head all day that the parade was at 5:00 but our internet was down, so I had no way of verifying this (without going downtown to look at the signs). Around 4:45 as we were piling on winter gear to go to the parade, I checked the internet again and it was working - which was a good thing because the parade was not until 6:00.) So we used the extra time to decorate the cookies.

Adele was a very good sport about wearing a kitchen towel as her "apron."
Mommy showed her how to do one, and then Adele decorated like a pro.
Okay, so she got a little bit messy . . . that's what the newspaper was for!
What's wrong with this cookie, MeMaw?He has an owie knee, just like BaPa!
I sent the decorated cookies home with them.
I wonder how long they lasted.

Fall Wanderings

Michael and I enjoyed getting outside last weekend when his mom and step-dad were in town. We went to a state park and took the dogs (their cocker spaniel Loki, our Oliver) on a long (by Oliver's standards) walk around the lake.

We forgot to bring the camera.

Michael suggested we go back there today, because he was ready to get away from it all again, but I didn't want to be repetitive. So we went to the UW Arboretum instead, sans dog. (No dogs allowed, which meant I couldn't be disappointed by the fact that my dog is usually uninterested in walking more than a block and a half from our house.) The arboretum was a good choice because we were already in Madison - I picked up 10 more pounds of apples at the Farmers' Market, along with some garlic, sweet potatoes, and half a gallon of honey!

I brought the camera today. Here is a little bit of what we saw.
I don't know why this picture is funky. Something happened when I rotated it on the computer. I did not think it would still look like this when I posted it in my blog, but apparently it was not just a glitch in the software, it is actually a change on the picture file itself. I know I could have cropped the picture, but that would have been work!

Oh yeah, a recipe

Sorry folks, it's been a crazy week. And I know there are hundreds of avid blog readers out there, incessantly hitting the "refresh" button at the top of your screen, waiting, salivatingly, for my tomato puree recipe to pop up as a new blog. (Hey, a girl can dream . . . )

Drumroll please . . .

Tomato Puree, My Way (with pictures - Yes, I am recycling pictures. No, I did not have time to make another batch of tomato sauce this week):

1. Boil water in a largish pot (not a stock pot, but something you'd use to make a decent sized batch of spaghetti noodles).

2. Blanch tomatoes, four or five at a time, until their skins crack.

3. Remove the cracked tomatos and set them on a plate or your favorite snowman platter.
4. If a tomato hangs out in the water for a long time and does not crack (like my tiny tomatoes, and the romas I used from our CSA share - not pictured above) go ahead and pull it out.

5. Peel the skins off and core the tomatoes. This should be easy. It goes faster if one person blanches tomatoes while another skins them. Be careful - they might be hot. (Some people dip the tomatoes in ice water first. My mom never did that step, so neither did I. It is faster and the tomatoes don't get waterlogged, but you do have to watch your fingers. Especially if you're planning keep them in good shape so you can dunk them into a pan of scalding water in a few hours.) (By the way, after a rough night where it literally felt like both hands were on fire, I woke up in the morning and my hands were fine. I went to work and helped small children make hide paintings My feet, on the other hand . . .)

6. Cut the skinned tomatoes into chunks and put them into a really big bowl, cutting off any bad parts first. (When I did this part alone, in the morning, with the first 15 lbs of tomatoes, I seeded the tomatoes and squeezed the juice out, according to a recipe I found online. I discovered with my chinois set that this was an entirely unnecessary step, and wasted time and good tomato pulp - especially from the romas.)

7. Grab a handful of tomato chunks, stick them in the bottom of the chinois set (wikipedia spells it chinoise, listing chinois as an alternate spelling, but I'm going with what was on my otherwise-utterly-unhelpful packaging), and move the wooden cone (kind of like a mortar and pestle, but with a sieve instead of a solid bowl on the bottom) around in a circular motion. I used the chinois set over a large glass cake pan the second time around, because it held more, and I didn't want to scratch my stainless steel pot. Not that I wanted to scratch the cake pan . . . surely someone out there has a better suggestion.) I thought this would be difficult. Since the chinois set came with literally no instructions (not even washing instructions) I was not sure what would happen when I put the tomatoes in. The holes looked larger than tomato seeds - I thought the seeds would fall right through. I tried a tiny amount of tomatoes (which didn't really have that many seeds anyway because I seeded the first batch) and put them in, mashing them around with the wooden cone. I didn't know what to expect, but was delighted to see a little puddle of what really looked like tomato paste under the contraption. I'd been prepared to take the chinois set back to the store (you can see the plastic bags that the pieces had been wrapped in in the background) if it didn't give me the results I wanted. I'd read one recipe that called for making puree in a blender, so I had a back-up plan. But I gave the chinois set a try, and was very pleasantly surprised. The chinois set worked, and I didn't have to use any electricity to get the puree. Very cool. (Getting off the grid is going to become my next big obsession, after I've fully conquered home canning and locovorism. Just so you know. But I digress.)

8. Continue this until your pasty puddle of tomato below the chinois set is overflowing, and pour it into one of several containers you have sitting out for this purpose. (Assuming you're going for the full 10 quarts.)
9. Load up the chinois set for another round of smashing.
10. Use your tomato puree to make tomato sauce.

11. Have some of your family over for dinner to sample the tomato sauce, to thank your dad for his help, and to show off a little. Make homemade garlic croutons from homemade bread to serve with your sister's homemade raspberry vinaigrette. Use your dad's garden flowers as a centerpiece. Take a walk by the river. Actually feel chilly for the first time all summer. Forget to take a picture. Oh wait, skip that last one!
Thanks dad! I'm glad I get to grow stuff and cook stuff with you. Next time we'll have to remember to eat off of our own pottery! (And take pictures of the meal.)