CSA Share 16 and Kid Food

Lots of good stuff this week- first time for carrots and sweet potatoes, a purple pepper, broccoli, more apples . . .

Here's some of the stuff that I made from last week's share:

Tomato, basil and mozzarella w/ olive oil, salt & pepper

Haven't made one of these in a while- used the lettuce and added gorgonzola cheese, dried cranberries and walnuts, with balsamic vinegar and flax oil.

Omelette with sweet orange peppers and green onions

Green beans w/garlic & bacon tossed in with some chicken, spinach & fontina sausages from TJ's.

This is Gillian McKeith's Shepherdess Pie.  I took a picture before covering the rest with mashed sweet potatoes so you could see all the yumminess inside.  This is one of my favorite fall dishes of all time! We served it for a dinner with Nellie's friends, along with greens dressed in a homemade vinaigrette.  For dessert, Nellie made baked apples with vanilla ice cream, caramel sauce and chopped pecans.  It was a truly scrumptious evening.

In a desperate attempt to get the kids to branch out and eat some different things, I let them pick recipes from Ed's Better Homes and Gardens Junior Cook Book.  The recipes in there are not exactly what I'd call healthy, but Eddie really loves that book, and at least it got them to try some new things.  

This is called Farmhouse Breakfast pizza.  It's pizza dough with scrambled eggs, hash browns, cheese, bacon and ham on top.  Andrew's side only has cheese, bacon & ham, which he picked off and ate sans crust.  Maybe he's on a low-carb diet.

Another dish Ed picked out was stuffed baked potatoes.  We used many of the same ingredients from the breakfast pizza for these.   I have to say, this was one of my favorites.  Mighty delicious and meaty and salty.  

Ed also chose Caramely  Apple Breakfast Muffins, which he proclaimed to be the best muffins in the whole wide world.  Not gluten free, so I couldn't verify his claims.

Andrew chose Monster cookies for one of his recipes.  This involves baking chunks of candy in cookie dough.   Most of Andrew's recipes involved chocolate of some kind.  Don't know where he gets that gene from. ;)

Ed experimented with some hard candies in his and found out that they don't really work too well in Monster Cookies.

 The recipe experiment was a good one, since it got the kids thinking ahead and planning meals.  They had to provide me with the shopping list for their recipes, and Andrew found out the hard way that yes, you really do need to include every item on the list, even if you don't understand what it is, or the recipe won't work.  I made them do most of the recipe prep and cleanup themselves, too.

Eddie's Lightsaber Creation

Eddie made a lightsaber by taping a test tube to a little flashlight with a piece of green tissue paper over the light.  It's pretty cool.

Oh, Edward!

Daddy had a really great idea to get Ed to be enthusiastic about his Cub Scout walk in the woods this evening:

                                                                  Mosquito Netting!

Don't you want to snuggle the monkey?

Take heed, parents.  If you think it might be a good idea to take away your kids' toys so that they would learn to appreciate them and keep them clean and not scattered all over the floor, think again.  A few weeks ago, after yelling at the boys for the millionth time to clean up their room, and coming upstairs to find them fighting and not a single thing picked up, I lost my cool and ordered them out of the room.  I then proceeded to bring laundry baskets into their room and load up all their toys, books, papers and other miscellaneous junk, and take it all into my room.  I sorted through and pitched anything broken, and made a donate pile for the few items that still resembled their original state, but are no longer favorites.  I let them choose one toy each and told them that if they took care of that toy for a whole week, they could earn another one back.  It took two weeks for them to get the message, and now they have 2 toys each.  They are already planning what they'd like to earn back next.

Apparently, I forgot a few items.  I left the basketball hoops that hang over their closet doors, and there were some items in backpacks that I didn't find, including the stuffed monkey you see in the picture below. So, after what seemed like a particularly long school day, I sent them up to their room to play, away from me.  I was doing my usual round of websites, when I heard an intruder approaching.  I called out, "Didn't I tell you to play upstairs?"  Eddie answered, "But don't you want to snuggle the monkey?"  I turned around to this: