A Perfect Kid Meal: Snow Crab Legs & Raw Vegetables with Red Pepper Garlic Mayonnaise

Jul 9, 2009 by

  

I’m all about mayonnaise now.  I pretend that all mayonnaise, even the cheap store brand, is mayonnaise in its ideal form, like I once made from freshly laid raw eggs from our backyard, free-range, happy hens (who are no more), with a little lemon juice, Dijon mustard, good olive oil.  There’s nothing you can say against a little mayonnaise, at least in its ideal form. Good egg, good oil—it’s health food.

Stock veggies dip I made this mayonnaise-based dip the other day and served it with raw carrots, cucumbers, jicama (a crisp, fresh Mexican root vegetable), turnip and radishes, along with some ready-to-eat snow crab legs I found on sale for $5 a pound. I had never served crab legs…

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Which nuts are the best?

Jul 4, 2009 by

Stock nuts

It’s as easy to eat well and feed your children well as it is to eat poorly. Well, OK, not really, but sometimes, in some ways. OK, mostly it’s not exactly easier, but occasionally just having a little accurate information is all it takes to make a better choice over a worse choice.  I’m all for building in as many ways as possible to do this thing better without increasing my effort.  I figure the more good choices I can make, the less my bad ones will matter.

A reader asked me some time back which nuts were the best to feed children.  I really had no clue and hadn’t thought about the question.

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Food Forethought: How to Make a Grocery List

Apr 7, 2009 by

Grocery basket woman

I once asked my French mother-in-law, Lucienne, how she managed to cook for the crowds when large numbers of her five children’s families descend on the old farmhouse for days or even weeks at a time. Her answer applies equally to managing daily dinners for one’s own little family: “Il suffit de prévoir”: it just takes some planning ahead.

Traditionally, French women, unlike my mother-in-law, are said to make almost-daily trips, on foot, a little basket on her arm, to the corner grocery store, or better yet, to an outdoor farmer’s market where local growers are displaying their just-picked produce, sparkling with dew. This ideal woman is supposed to know how to choose what’s freshest and most appealing,…

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Conventional Wisdom Versus the Truth about Why Kids Won’t Eat Their Vegetables

Mar 26, 2009 by

Veggie man “Getting a child to enjoy healthy food is next to impossible, but there is no harm trying,” says a website that talks of “making” kids eat healthy foods by piling food in humorous structures on the plate.

“Most kids will turn up their nose at the sight of anything green,” another web source matter-of-factly warns parents that might not be aware of this “truth.”

Kids are fussy. They‘re hard to please, conventional wisdom tells us. Feeding them is Difficult. It’s A Problem. Kids are born wanting to eat what’s bad for them,…

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Why A Child’s Place is In the Kitchen: Relating To and Through Food

Mar 23, 2009 by

This post was featured in the Charlotte Mason blog carnival on June 9, 2009

Mom and kids cooking

The question is not,—how much does the youth know? When he has finished his education—but how much does he care? And about how many orders of things does he care? In fact, how large is the room in which he finds his feet set? And therefore, how full is the life he has before him?  — Charlotte Mason

Psalm 31:8 Thou hast set my feet in a large room.

My French mother-in-law, Lucienne, once told me early in my marriage that she thought that cooking well helped one keep one’s husband. …

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