Growing Versions

Some are more fun to eat than others...

The other morning, on a particularly lazy one, I did not quite get around to formally feeding my son breakfast.  He would not have gone hungry, for a while now, he has helped himself to cereal, everything is within easy reach, there is fruit in the bowl. He's 8.  However, on this particular morning, he was having none of this self-serve breakfast.  No way. He kept repeating how hungry he was.  I kept telling him to serve himself. Finally, he put his head into his hands and wailed, "I'm just so hungry." I reluctantly gave up on the book I was reading and ventured over to him. I held him in my arms and whispered into his ear.  "I could make you an egg, or kale chips or a sandwich. What would you like me to make you?  We could roast that squash we got?" And just like that he calmed down, he wiped his eyes and apologized for "going all crazy".  "I am just hungry ", he explained.  That is when I realized, food alone does not a...

Right from his era of breastfeeding on demand, my son has continually made it clear that he feels every morsel that passes his lips needs to involve me.  Long ago, my daughter began to independently retrieve an apple from the fruit bowl or prepare her own cereal.  My son likes food eating to be a collaborative affair. And by collaborative, I mean prepared and presented by me. As a little one, even when the piece of fruit was within reach, he would holler to be fed. I think it's because he likes to be social when he eats and feels that when I send him alone into the kitchen to get a snack, he is being banished. Lately though, since he's started grade 2, his teacher has been maximizing the use of the school's kitchen garden and he has started to take it upon himself to prepare snacks for himself and us. Last night, he presented a snack to his father of Lunenburg pudding ( a local delicacy, like sausage) sprinkled with cheese, pumpkin seeds and lemon juice.  Surprisingl...

Last summer, I made peace with feeding my kids.  I decided that we will eat  as if it were summer all year round.   Why do vegetables have to be cooked? Why do meals have to be complicated?  They don't, in the summer. We all feast on camp suppers and bbq buffets and picnics. I decided to picnic through the snow storms and right through till June.  Picnicing to save our lives. Cucumber and dip and hummus and toast with avocado and berries and cereal for supper (occasionally).  Food is food no matter the time of day or year, let's just eat it and move on!  I've got another picnic to pack.

Should we pre-pour the lemonade the night before? Should we switch business plans?                                                                        Re-branding.                                                              Workforce engagement.                                                          

Making lunches in the summer is my therapy to help me recover from making school lunches. May I carry the spirit of food trucks, watermelon wedges, charred hot dogs crystalized by roasted marshmallow, and peas right from the pod into school lunch making mode.

Right now, in this season, everything we eat is either turgid with water or slipping down under the leaves and rotting into the ground. The moisture fills in every vein of kale and rounds out each blood-fillled beet with water logged vitamins, . We must put what comes off  the stems right into our mouths or can it or freeze it, or share it  if we hope to capitalize on all this pent up moisture and energy because water evaporates baby and every other creature is living more fully right now positioning themselves to take advantage of our waste. Eat those peas and carrots now while they crunch. Crunchiness comes at a greater cost later on.

At the urging of my son, who had been introduced to them at school, I bought a pomegranate. I had never eaten one, although I had had some of the juice before. The pomegranate set up is intimidating. All those seeds made me feel like I was failing before I even started. Then I came across a short video that promises to crack the pomegranate code in less than 10 seconds   It dispelled the mystery shrouding these little blood red pearls of juiciness. The guy who presents this trick is really into pomegranates, he's very convincing that trying them is something not to be missed. Now that the code has been cracked, now that I know that these seeds embedded in tiny purses of juice quench thirst like no other seed I have tasted so far, I cannot stop thinking about them. I am having pomegranate shaded dreams.

I have developed this insatiable hankering for Banh Mi sandwich. Banh Mi means baguette in Vietnamese.  The crunch of the pickles and the pleasing tang of the cilantro that gets me every time. I discovered a vegan variety a few weeks ago at the  recently opened Wild Leek  and now I have been high tailing it there every chance I get.  It is almost a problem. My Banh Mi budget is almost exceeding my regular, everything else budget. The other evening, I went to another place called  Indochine .  They too specialize in Banh Mi sandwiches.  As I staggered towards the restaurant door with my friend in the pouring rain, I almost tripped over myself getting to the counter. The saliva was forming and I could almost taste the crunch and savour the sour ting of it on my lips.  As I raced to order yet another Banh Mi sandwich, my friend exclaimed that it was a soup kind of night. Silently, I curled around my Banh Mi sandwich thoughts with a pro...

When I was about 8, my mom read The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe out loud to me.  I can still picture a stand alone wardrobe positioned to the right of the entrance of a stark whitewashed room across from a single window, through which the children travelled into a magical world.   Beyond that, the only other thing I remember is the emphasis put on Turkish delight.  It was a really big deal in that book. I was drooling listening to it being described and by the end of it, I couldn't stop thinking about it.  It seemed like a delectable treasure drenched in sugar that would be well beyond my expectations. One day, my mom went to the city and came back with some Turkish delight.  It did not meet my expectations. The disappointment was staggering. What?  Sure it is drenched in sugar, but as far as I was concerned, there was a reason for that, it wouldn't be particularly edible without it. "Edmund    was already feeling uncomfort...

It is way to cliche to complain about being busy.  I am busy because I am privileged to have a job (which I like) and two healthy active kids (who I like).  However, these past couple of years have been strenuous.  I concede that I have taken certain (i.e. hundreds of) shortcuts to make things easier. Most of these shortcuts I am at peace with, (no vacuuming,wearing unmatched socks on a regular basis, not insisting on nightly baths and no homemade bread ...well, um, that never happened anyway).  There are hundreds of these shortened steps, I am sure, that I have gradually succumbed to accepting.  However, one of the shortcuts I am not so happy about has been cutting out baking and cutting down on cooking from scratch.  Cooking from scratch still happens but lots of shortcuts have been thrown into the mix which have also short changed  my joy doing it. In the process of saving time (initially to keep the impatient pleas from kids to a dull roar), I...

There is a lightness, an airy quality to the food we ingest these days.  The summer foods remind me to eat close to the vine. Before the pickling and freezing and canning and baking into things, we eat the food that replenishes the memory of what food we ought to be eating.  Those perfect vitamins and water and minerals growing in our midst refresh our memory of summer's light that we can draw on later.

There are so many recipes within reach. Despite all this choice, I'm having a tough time boiling down what I actually need to eat.  I labour over heat but produce little that actually fills me up. I submerge my doubts with foods that my body does not understand. I  relinquish my hunger for a deeper one.  What is  it that will nourish me, without taking advantage of me? What do you eat to feel peaceful and fed?

  Non-cooks think it's silly to invest two hours' work in two minutes' enjoyment; but if cooking is evanescent*, so is the ballet.   Julia Child  When we are short on the real ingredients, or are recovering from a sugar-laden holiday, play dough  substitutes fabulously for the sugar and butter and flour (we still use real sprinkles though). The play dough versions provide a greater variety of treats that we haven't yet figured out how to make in real-life.    * I had to look up evanescent.   It means:    vanishing; fading away; fleeting or  tending   to   become   imperceptible;   scarcely   perceptible.

I had a brain wave the other day that I am still patting myself on the back for coming up with because they don't happen very often.  My son was reluctant to come to the table and eat supper.  I told him "let's have "Christmas Dinner"".  "Christmas dinner" is code for dinner by candlelight.  Even though we were having macaroni and cheese, he happily ran to the table.  Can we have "Christmas Dinner" every night I wonder? Source: awelltraveledwoman.tumblr.com via Erin on Pinterest In the meantime, my daughter had been pre-heating the easy bake oven for over an hour in anticipation of heating (er...baking) her cookies that she had whipped up for dessert. Despite the lead up time, the cookies came out 45 minutes later as warm dough. I think we are doing it wrong. My son, loves candlelight. This morning, as he lay ailing from a stomach bug he urged me to make some changes. "Let's make this room beautiful. Do you ...

It could be the on demand breastfeeding when he was younger (my husband's theory, not shared by me), it could be our lack of an overly strict routine at home (more likely), it could be just a quirk of this stage of his development/physiology or it could be  semantics, but my son wakes up in the morning not wanting breakfast.  He just wants snacks. Me "How about some breakfast?" Him "No thanks, I'll just have a snack." Me "What would you like for your snack?" Him "Mini-Wheats with milk, blueberries and juice." Me "Okay, breakfast snack coming up." But you know, snacks are way more fun than meals don't you think? Let's have a meal  sounds like so much work (tell me about it!).  Snack supper is my kids' favourite type of meal.  For now, as long as the "snack" is healthy (ahem...usually), then I'll leave what we call them for another day. How about you?  What are your favourite "sn...