I haven’t turned into some wacky salad-lover (because salad-amor can only be bad), but my culinary greens are slowly becoming much more interesting. To me. Ahem, shortly after I got married, I discovered that all lettuce doesn’t have to be pale and sickly-looking and that Romaine is actually much more edible. Fast forward a few pregnancies and tomatoes started looking pretty good as well.

A couple of months ago I got a new cookbook The Splendid Table’s How to Eat Supper: Recipes, Stories, and Opinions from Public Radio’s Award-Winning Food Show. One of the recipes called for escarole. Escawha? Apparently it was some sort of spicy green that was too swanky for Safeway to carry. Ditto the curly endive in another recipe.

Finally yesterday I got around to going to the Market of Choice down the hill from my house, where they carry all sorts of fancy thises and thatses and slap the “organic” label everywhere you look so they can charge gazillions of dollars for it. There, right next to the $49.99/lb. mushrooms (not even kidding), were my fancy escarole and endive and the more pedestrian romaine. They weren’t even terribly expensive.

I did get suckered into paying $4.99 for a small package that contained about twenty blooms from edible flowers. Some smarty pants decided not to put the names of the flowers on the package (otherwise, who would buy them when they can go raid their friends’ or neighbors’ gardens??), so I had to purchase a pack to take home and try to ID the contents. Of course, this becomes more difficult once the contents are in your stomach.

I had read somewhere or other (I think in that same book, which is full of all sorts of useful side information) that if you wash and spin dry your lettuce when you first buy it and then store it with a couple paper towels in a Ziplock bag that you’ve sucked all the air out of, it will keep in the fridge for up to ten days. Not wanting my new spiffy non-iceberg lettuce to get all gross, I spun it up in my
awesome new Oxo Good Grips Salad Spinner

that’s actually kind of fun to mess with. It’s very zoomy and spinny. You know, “awesome” and “salad spinner” are probably words/phrases that should never be uttered together.

I tasted some of the endive and escarole on the way home, and they both seemed more bitter than would be strictly desirous in a salad, so I stuck a whole bunch of romaine in the bowl and then a little bit of each of the others. Feeling all
epicurean, I then added maple bacon pieces (the real stuff, not disgusting fake bacon bits), tomato, hard boiled egg slices, and toasted pine nuts as well as a bunch of the flowers. A bit of fresh viniagrette for the table and voila! a lovely salad to go with George’s fabulous steak, my crusty bread, Bourbon and Brown Sugar beans (thank you, Bush company), and watermelon. And no, we did not devour all this ourselves. My parents came over and happily helped.

And the salad….. was a hit! Some of the flowers were a bit bitter, but the pansies were quite sweet and yummy. I’m starting to think about maybe making a potted garden next year and I’m going to have to look into some edible flowers for it. The endive and escarole added just a bit of a peppery flavor to the salad without overpowering it and making it gross. The entire bowl got eaten. I was shocked!

So that is my salad story (and I’m stickin’ to it!). Which officially makes me quite possibly the most boring person on earth. To make up for the fact that I’ve just essentially done an entire post on lettuce, I am leaving you with a picture that my FIL took on Saturday at our church’s picnic. This is Faith practicing her supermodel pose, complete with the cadre of admiring onlooking boys behind her. Hehe.

Rachel

Ben & Jerry’s Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Ice Cream

1 1/2 cups chocolate chip cookie dough
2 large eggs
3/4 cup sugar
2 cups heavy cream, or whipping cream
1 cup milk
2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Chop cookie dough into bite-sized pieces. Place in a bowl, cover and freeze. Whisk the eggs in a mixing bowl until light and fluffy, 1 to 2 minutes. Whisk in the sugar, a little at a time, then continue whisking until completely blended, about 1 minute more. Pour in the cream and milk, and whisk to blend. Add the vanilla and whisk to blend again.

Transfer the mixture to an ice cream maker and freeze following the manufacturer’s directions. When the ice cream is quite stiff (about 1 minute before it is done), add the chopped cookie dough. Be sure to wait until the last possible minute or the dough will get sticky and unmanageable. Continue freezing until done.

Makes 1 quart.

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A few weeks ago I posted that Henry was a super crabby baby. Well, I think we’ve finally figured out the magic trick to get him to cool his jets. It’s a two part trick, which makes me feel better about it taking me eight weeks to figure out what it was.

First, I cut dairy (except yogurt), chocolate, and coffee out of my diet. That helped a little bit. Then I started making sure I burped the living daylights out of him after every meal. This entails serious whomping on his back for ten minutes to such a degree that when we’re in public people start looking at me like “what is that lady doing to that poor baby??” When I sit him on my lap and he has bubbles in his tummy, he stiffens up so much that I can barely get him to bend at the waist. When he’s all done burping, he’ll sit on my lap all relaxed and happy. That’s the test.

This pretty much clears up whole charming evenings of crying (like evenings at the theater but with more drama) and we’ve discovered that he actually smiles and is quite adorable when he does so. The big downside to all this is that I have to cut half of my favorite food out of my diet, and some days one must eat ice cream, especially if one has just foolishly made it themselves. George helpfully spent all day Monday reminding me that my five minutes of bliss produced twenty-four hours of misery. Thanks, Honey!

Unfortunately, now Henry is trying to come down with another cold so that’s making him slightly crabby. No one here has a cold and I don’t know of anyone at church or anywhere that has one either so I don’t even know where he got this (the last one was from his older sister coughing on his face). Argh! Hopefully it will be gone by the time Family Camp comes around in two weeks.

In potty training news (because I know you all like hearing about poopies and peepees), Faith is doing great with numero uno and disastrous with numero dos. It’s been what, three weeks now? She has yet to get ye old pooper in the appropriate receptacle. This is not a good way to please your mother, father, or older siblings whose bedroom floor you poop on (this was yesterday). Last night George woke me up around 5 am to tell me that Faith had exploded and he needed some help with cleanup crew. Thirty minutes, a bath, and a fresh change of sheets later, we made it back to bed. This qualifies in the mother and father not pleased category.

I hope this gets sorted out soon. This is the fifth child I’ve potty trained and none of the other ones had this problem. We’ve had other problems, such as Georgie not wanting to get off the potty if his poopies wouldn’t come out and one of the older girls (I think it was Trinity) being too scared to flush the toilet afterward. Both of those were sorted out by hitting on a story that helped analogize the problem to something that they were already familiar with. I started one last night with Faith that will hopefully make sense to her. If it does, I’ll publish it in the next post (again, I’m sure you’re dying to know…).

In the meantime, if any of you other Moms out there have encountered this problem and come upon some brilliant solution (or pedestrian solution or any solution), please post it. I’d like to have this sorted out before camp as well if at all possible. I hate potty training!

Oh, for you RCCers who are going to Family Camp and are looking for cheap croc knock offs for your children to destroy (those are the foam plastic clogs that you see everywhere you look), I priced them out all over and have the results posted on my new shopping/sales blog here (there’s always some good reason to start a new web project, right?). If anyone else is interested in coupons/codes, feel free to take a look. Only a couple of posts are there right now because I just put it up last week, but if you stick your email address in the form on the right hand sidebar, you’ll get email updates for new sales.

Rachel

While I was looking for frozen yogurt recipes (which I can eat because dairy has live cultures that will make the dairy so it doesn’t bug Henry), I came across this amusing site on how to make ice cream with children instead of an ice cream maker. This looks like something my kids would love to do on a hot day. Plus, it has a whole explanation of the thermodynamics of ice cream making so it could qualify as a science project (did you hear that, Dad???). Here’s the link: Homemade Ice Cream Maker. Let me know if you try this out (and naturally I’ll do the same if/when we try it). Looks like the site has all kinds of other neat science toys and things you can do with your kids too.

Rachel

Rachel

Cherry Pie 

Makes one 9” pie (serves 8 )

1/8 to 1/4 t. salt

1 c. sugar

1/3 c. flour *

3 cans (14.5 oz. each) red tart pie cherries (not cherry pie filling), drained, reserve juice

½ c. juice from cherries (you might not use all this)

¼ t. red food coloring (optional)

¼ t. almond extract (optional)

1/4 t. lemon juice

1 T. butter or margarine

Pastry for two-crust 9 inch pie (I cheat and use Pillsbury)

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Combine salt, sugar, flour; mix well. Add sugar mixture to drained cherries; mix well. Stir in some cherry juice if the cherries and sugar look dry (you don’t want it to be too soupy, just mostly cherries with some juice), food coloring, almond extract, and lemon juice. Roll out half of pastry and line a 9 inch piepan. Pour cherry filling into pastry lined pan. Dot top of filling with butter. Adjust top crust, seal and crimp edges; cut slits in top crust to allow steam to escape.

Bake 50-60 minutes or until crust browns and filling begins to bubble (cover edges with tin foil for first 30 minutes to prevent over browning). Cool pie several hours to allow filling to thicken before slicing.

*Two tablespoons quick cooking tapioca may be substituted for flour. Combine sugar, tapioca, cherries, juice, food coloring and almond extract. Mix well and let stand 20 minutes before pouring mixture into pastry lined pie pan. Continue as above.

The TFC one I think I got all done. Even better, I got the automation done so I don’t really have to do much with it for a couple months when the autoresponder messages run out. Then I’ll have to add some new ones, but my friend Jenni is putting them together so I don’t have to actually do the hard work on it. Hehe.

This morning I woke up wanting fruit for breakfast, which is odd because I’ve been eating things like bacon, eggs, and toast; sausage biscuit with egg; and chicken fried steak with biscuits for breakfast every day for weeks. See a pattern there? So I made a Tanya-style bianco, which is basically a bunch of different kinds of fruit chopped up and thrown all together in a bowl with maybe some whipped cream or granola on top. Usually quite delicious!

Today I ate mine and then got ambitious and went upstairs to go beat the garbage out of Anika’s bedroom. When I have morning sickness and the radioactive house starts bothering me, usually that means I’m feeling better. I don’t care what it looks like when I’m sick. So anyway, I went upstairs to clean and about halfway through realized that I was pooped and not feeling so hot.

Of course, leaving a child’s bedroom half clean is not a good idea because they will smell it within five seconds and immediate redistribute whatever you’ve cleaned away into a more or less uniform layer of junk reaching the far corners of the carpet. So I held myself together and finished the room. Then I went and threw up my breakfast. Hurray! After that I took a shower, made second breakfast (I’m practicing to be a hobbit) of bacon, eggs, and toast (which did not get bounced), and called my Mother for some sympathy. It worked well.

And now, just because I’m in a food mood (probably because all my favorite things currently are making me sick due to morning sickness), here is one of my very favorite recipes. The flavor from the chicken and sausage all seeps into the rice and yuuuuuummmmy. This makes a great meal for groups and family gatherings. When we went camping this summer, I made a double batch and fed 18 people (who all wanted the recipe). With the meat and a starch, it’s basically Portuguese comfort food, perfect for fall and winter.

PORTUGESE CHICKEN AND RICE WITH CHOURICO

¼ c. Olive oil
3 lbs. chicken seasoned with salt and pepper to taste (seasoning salt works nicely)
1 lb. Portuguese chorico or Polish kielbasa cut into 1 inch pieces
1 large yellow onion sliced
1 red bell pepper, cut into thin strips
1 yellow bell pepper, cut into thin strips
3 cloves minced garlic
2 c. California long grain rice
1 T. paprika
2 t. kosher salt (substitute with a bit less regular salt)
1 t. black pepper
½ c. white wine
1 16 oz. can whole plum tomatoes with juice (can use whole regular tomatoes, just slice them up a bit)
3 c. chicken stock (preferably home made, but the canned liquid kind will work)
6 bay leaves
¼ c. Italian (flat-leaf) parsley, chopped (regular parsley seems to work fine too)

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

2. Heat olive oil in a large Dutch oven or heavy-bottomed, oven-proof pot over medium high heat and brown seasoned chicken pieces on all sides, about 6-8 minutes. Set chicken aside. Add sausage, onion, peppers, and garlic to pot and cook for 5 minutes. Add uncooked rice and stir, making sure to incorporate rice with sausage and veggies, and cook for 2-3 minutes. Return chicken to pot, stir in paprika, salt, pepper, and wine, and reduce for 2-3 more minutes.

3. Add tomatoes, chicken stock and bay leaves and bring mixture to a gentle simmer. Cover with a lid or foil and place in oven for 30 minutes. To serve, garnish with chopped parsley. Serves 6.

This makes enough rice for much more than six, so if you throw in a few extra chicken pieces you’ll have at least enough for eight.

Rachel