we’ve been attacked

by the flu.

proving that you can eat healthy and still get sick. (this is very difficult for me to admit.)
so far, cole and i have survived. actually we have all survived…we have advil, fresh oranges to squeeze, lots of garlic…loads to be thankful for. i guess i should say cole and i have managed to escape the flu, the fever, the yuckies…even if one of us is a little worse for the wear from getting up at all hours to attend to little crying ones. that cole is a trooper, i tell you.

but even though we are feeling under the weather, we are celebrating in our hearts tonight…with kenya. while there is still much to be restored, it is a great mercy to me to be able to rejoice with my children over this answer to our constant, hopeful prayers. God be praised.

today we have reached an important staging post, but the journey is far from over.

let the spirit of healing begin today.

let it begin now.

kofi annan

amen. and amen.

our best guess

it’s been several years since i discovered how much i love annie’s naturals goddess dressing. i’m pretty sure my mother-in-law introduced me to it one year in taos. my friend, natalie and i did everything we could to get this premium dressing for cheaper. we took turns driving to wild oats to buy it on sale. we ordered a case. finally trader joe’s started making a knock off and i would bring it home by the box full when i went to chicago. then natalie decided she would try to make it. i took her recipe. actually i wrote it down as she made it one day…natalie doesn’t really measure as she makes it. then i played with my guesses as far as the measurements. and here it is…our best guess at this dressing that both our families gobble up on everything from carrots to spinach to hard boiled eggs.

goddess dressing

1 cup sunflower oil

¼ cup tahini

1 tablespoon toasted sesame seeds

2-3 cloves garlic

1 tablespoon chives*

1 tablespoon parsley*

1/3 cup apple cider vinegar

1/3 cup soy sauce

½ teaspoon kosher salt

juice of 1 lemon

place all ingredients in a food processor and pulse until smooth.

 

*natalie uses the dried herbs because the dressing keeps longer, but we go through it so fast that i like to use fresh when i can. you put more in when you use fresh.

 

 

swedish pancakes

i realized that you don’t have the recipe for swedish pancakes. we got this recipe from some precious friends from our chicago days, and they are melt in your mouth good. our kids eat these so fast they burn their tongues. there has been much debate in our family over the adjusting of this recipe. we have cut the butter a little bit and i believe we use half whole wheat flour. i think you could cut the butter a little more, but taido feels i have adulterated this recipe enough as it is. they are supposed to be served with lingonberries, which are a little difficult to locate down south. you can buy them at ikea, strangely enough. and here in the greater little rock area, you can get them at fresh market.

swedish pancakes

4 eggs

1 cup organic milk

1/2 cup flour

2-4 tablespoons melted butter, plus more for the pan

4 tablespoons sugar

cook 1/4 cup batter in a greased skillet for until slightly browned (3 min or so) and flip to brown the other side for just a minute.

spread lingonberries in the middle of the pancake and then flop the two sides over the berries, like a burrito.

if you’re feeling especially indulgent, you can top it off with fresh whipped cream.

my favorite salad

I cannot tell you how much I love this salad.

I could eat it every day.

It’s simple. it’s yummy. and I almost always have all the ingredients on hand.

Enjoy.

photo by Whitney Loibner

always makes me happy salad

(serves 4, so i half it for tai and me for lunch)

mixed greens (about a bag full)

dried cranberries (~1/2 cup)

toasted, slivered or sliced almonds (~1/2 cup)

2 large, crisp usually fuji apples, diced

1/2 cup freshly grated parmasan cheese, even better if sliced off the wedge with a cheese slicer OR 1/2 cup diced feta cheese

dressing:

1/2 cup olive oil

1/4 cup trader joe’s orange muscat champagne vinegar OR regular champagne (or white wine if you must) vinegar with a tablespoon of orange juice

2 tablespoons honey

1/2 teaspoon coarse kosher salt

i use a little hand blender to mix my dressing. it emulsifies it really well. this may be too much dressing depending on how much lettuce you use, but you can always refrigerate the rest and use it later.

a week at our table, part two

A hallmark of the Western diet is food that is fast, cheap, and easy. Americans spend less than 10 percent of their income on food; they also spend less than a half hour a day preparing meals and little more than an hour enjoying them. for most people for most of history, gathering and preparing food has been an occupation at the very heart of daily life. Traditionally people have allocated a far greater proportion of their income to food–as they still do in several of the countries where people eat better than we do and as a consequence are healthier than we are. Here, then, is one way in which we would do well to go a little native: backward, or perhaps it is forward, to a time and place where the gathering and preparing and enjoying of food were closer to the center of a well-lived life.

In Defense of Food p.145-6

Let’s just say that if the standard for how you’re doing on eating all depends on the percentage of your income and time you are spending on food, then we are doing just fine over here at the chino house.  In fact, I was thrilled to find this quote to help justify my food budget, which honestly is closer to 20% than 10%. Michael Pollan makes a wonderful case for spending more money on less food. better food. real food.

He also talks about how you have to invest more time into eating well. You can’t spend the same amount of time on a microwavable piece of plastic and a fulfilling meal. Again. This is ime justified for me. I spend some time almost every weekend flipping through recipe books and magazines as I plan the upcoming weeks’ dinners.

I have a tool that I call a meal planner (very creative, I know). I made it myself (actually I made many of them one year for Christmas and gave them away as gifts and I think that maybe two of those people are actually using them…) You can make one too. It is just a half binder filled with half sheets of paper with a template for writing down what you are having for dinner. There are also pages for every month for planning bigger meal events, like parties. And there are pages for grocery and farmers’ market lists.

The most valuable part of my little planner is that the template has 5 years on it so if you use your meal planner faithfully, soon you will have meal lists from the years before with entire menus, based on exactly what is in season. I decided to make this after I had used the same calendar to write three years worth of meals. I just kept using it even though the days of the week were wrong, because I didn’t want to throw away knowing what we had for dinner last year. If you don’t want to make your own templates, email me and I will happily send you mine.

All of this seems like it takes a lot of time. but actually it saves time. I don’t go to the grocery store over and over again, and I don’t have to figure out what is for dinner at 5pm. Both of those tasks are exhausting to me. Having a plan saves me being in that situation. Of course, I invariably forget something I need from the grocery store, but I just steal it out of my mother’s unbelievably well-stocked pantry or freezer. (you know where to go if there is a national food shortage.) Or I send my husband to the store for that one little carton of half and half.

Here is one week from the meal planner…dinners to feed your body and your soul.

monday:

homemade lasagna (i use the recipe right off the package of the whole wheat lasagna noodles. buy the kind that you don’t have to precook. add whatever you like. i put in everything…layering in cooked italian sausage or ground beef or roasted eggplant if we are going meatless, ricotta cheese, mozzarella, broccoli, zucchini, yellow squash, roasted garlic, onions, whatever i feel like…or happen to have)

bread (fresh from a local bakery) or fresh artisan sourdough from sam’s

since the veggies are in the lasagna, i don’t feel like i have to serve anything else with this. if i’m having company, i might also make a caesar salad.

tuesday:

chop chop salad:

2 cans garbonzo beans (chickpeas)

1 head chopped romaine lettuce

1 lb chopped tomatoes

1 oz chopped basil

8 oz grated mozzarella cheese

4 oz cubed provolone cheese

1/2 lb blanched green vegetable (both asparagus and sugar snap peas work great)

1/2 lb cubed cooked chicken breast

1/2 lb cubed salami

1/2 bottle Newman’s Own Family Recipe Italian dressing

this is a meal salad. which means i don’t serve anything else with it. except maybe the bread leftover from monday. since little ones often don’t care for big mixed salads, i put a little of each ingredient (even the chickpeas) on their plates as i’m chopping for the salad bowl. usually i only use one of the meats. “plating” everyone’s food before dinner tends to help with controlling portion sizes.

wednesday:

fresh tilapia fillets, sprinkled with your favorite seasoning (penzey’s fox point) and grilled 3 minutes on each side.

cherry tomatoes

1 lb. sugar snap peas, steamed and sprinkled with salt, sesame oil and sesame seeds

corn on the cob, dropped in boiling water for exactly 3 minutes, then drained

brown rice (buy organic short grain brown rice in bulk from wild oats and you will never turn back)

i buy exactly one ear of corn per person and one fillet of fish per person. i could eat two but do i really need to?

thursday:

quesadillas: made with whole wheat or corn tortillas, organic refried black beans (with sauted garlic and onions mixed in), tillamook sharp cheddar cheese and spinach. serve with homemade salsa of your choice and homemade guacamole. we cook them in cast iron skillets on the stove lightly greased with canola or safflower oil.

the kids, because they are kids, prefer just cheese, but they have to eat one with beans before they can have plain cheese ones. they prefer to have their spinach raw, on the side instead of in their quesadillas, so i indulge them. mary polly eats hers with annie’s goddess dressing.

friday:

soup and bread

Picky eaters might prefer one that is pureed.

you can buy bread at a local bakery to go with your soup or you can make baguettes from french women don’t get fat. she has a very easy recipe. or for a super healthy, super easy, no rise option (for those who are afraid of yeast), make this yummy bread:

quick whole wheat bread

1 cup wheat bran

½ cup wheat germ

2 ½ cups whole wheat flour

1 teaspoons salt

1 ½ teaspoons baking soda

2 cups buttermilk

½ cup blackstrap molasses

mix dry ingredients.

stir wet ingredients into dry ones.

spoon into greased loaf pan.

bake 1 hour @350.

turn out and cool on wire rack.

saturday:

grilled salmon (grill twice as much as you need for sunday or broil in the oven if you don’t like to grill in the winter)

roasted sweet potato fries (sweet potatoes peeled, cut into wedges, tossed in olive oil, kosher salt and chipotle pepper flakes, then roasted 18 minutes on each side on a jelly roll pan lined with parchment paper in a 425 degree oven)

roasted potato fries (follow same instructions as above except skip the chipotle pepper flakes)

roasted asparagus (same instructions again, only roast for only 10 minutes, more if you are using very thick asparagus)

this is one of our absolute FAVORITE meals! it is simple, healthy and always delicious, but if you just can’t eat fish twice a week, make arroz con pollo from the smitten kitchen. i made it twice last fall and the kids ate it up. i made some plain rice on the side and used drumsticks in the dish so i could fish them out and serve them to the kids alongside their plain rice. and of course i substituted brown rice. always brown rice, friends, except in sushi.

sunday:

of course, by now you could be eating leftovers, but we often eat our leftovers up at lunch so just in case you really need seven whole days of meals, here’s one more. and easy for sunday!

whole wheat pasta tossed with pesto (from your freezer or from the refrigerated section at sam’s or for those of you who live by one, trader joe’s) and any of the following: grilled salmon (from yesterday), cherry tomatoes, kalamata olives, steamed asparagus (or any green vegetable), roasted red peppers, sun-dried tomatoes, sauted red onions, roasted garlic cloves, spinach, feta, goat cheese, or fresh parmesan.

again, this is a meal. you don’t have to have anything else, but you can always dress it up for guests with bread and salad. also, you can fix those fussy children’s plates as you chop if they don’t like all of their foods mixed together. oooh, and since it was so easy you can use your cooking time making lemon pound cake. or some other yummy treat. because we do like our treats at the chino house, even if we are a tad snobby about them.

so there you have it. except for that we would probably eat leftovers at least one of these nights (lasagna and soup both tend to be leftover meals), this really is what you could expect if you ate at our house for a week. these are the regulars. about once a week taido or i will make something that is more time consuming and complicated. something from a new magazine or website or one of the barefoot contessa’s cookbooks. taido’s specialty is risotto. it is to die for. he usually makes it on valentine’s day, but he was otherwise occupied this year… but this list is meant to show you that eating healthy food, at home, every night, is not impossible. if you bought all your groceries ahead of time, it would be easier to cook the food on this list than it would be to figure out what’s for dinner at 5pm every day, even easier than going and getting something from somewhere. i believe this is true even if you are working outside the home during the day. i have a neighbor who works very long hours (and has four children) and she still cooks for her family (her husband helps too) because she plans her meals and makes her lists and then the whole family goes to both the grocery store and sam’s every weekend.

i have said this before, but it bears repeating, even though i have somewhat strong opinions about food, i really do believe that you are a beautiful, amazing creation of the one and only almighty God…no matter what you eat. it just makes me so happy to put good things into those little creations. so comment/email with your questions and we can all journey together towards helping our families eat well. at the table.

whole wheat buttermilk pancakes

Whole Wheat Buttermilk Pancakes

2 cups whole wheat flour

2 teaspoons baking powder

1 teaspoon baking soda

½ teaspoon kosher salt

3 tablespoons sugar

2 eggs

3 cups buttermilk

4 tablespoons melted butter

chopped nuts (optional)

Scoop 1/4 cup batter into skillet or onto griddle.  Cook for 2-3 minutes.  Flip.  Cook one more minute.  Serve.

Makes about 20 pancakes.

You can add anything you like to this batter…blueberries, chocolate chips, cut up strawberries.

a week at our table, breakfast and lunch edition

a diet based on quantity rather than quality has ushered a new creature onto the world stage: the human being who manages to be both overfed and undernourished, two characteristics seldom found in the same body in the long natural history of our species.

…doctors report seeing overweight children suffering from old-time deficiency diseases such as rickets, long thought to have been consigned to history’s dustheap in the developed world. But when children subsist on fast food rather than fresh fruits and vegetables and drink more soda than milk, the old deficiency diseases return–now even in the obese.

in defense of food

and with that happy thought, here is a menu plan (per request) for one week of eating that is based on quality rather than quantity. our breakfast and lunch plans rarely vary, so i will do them first. hopefully tomorrow i will tackle dinner.

breakfast at the chino house.

monday: cereal (cheerios or better, some organic form of cheerios like trader joe’s o’s or golean with organic milk, organic soy milk or organic plain yogurt and honey) or eggs (your choice, you fix it…)

tuesday: taido’s rise and shine waffles

wednesday: cereal or eggs, same as monday

thursday: taido’s whole wheat buttermilk pancakes

friday: muffins (bran or blueberry) or scones (i usually make enough batter today for sunday morning since it is rush rush rush. i use ina garten’s scone recipes, but i substitute at least half whole wheat flour and cut the butter in half)

saturday: crepes or swedish pancakes (taido again)

sunday: muffins or scones

about once a month, one of us will make an old school high protein (and cholesterol) breakfast: bacon, eggs and homemade buttermilk biscuits cooked in a cast iron skillet greased with bacon fat. i usually feel guilty for serving this up, but after reading michael pollan’s book, there is genuinely not much wrong with this breakfast , especially when you compare it with a pop-tart and cocoa puffs. this breakfast is still real food. we just don’t eat it every day.

chino lunch.

cole: leftovers or eggs (which he makes), plain spinach leaves and a treat

ben: 1 whole organic crunchy peanut butter and organic raspberry jelly sandwich on whole wheat bread

6 baby carrots or a tupperware of spinach leaves

1/3 apple, cut up or a bunch of grapes

1 small dish cheddar bunnies

1 juice box (this is the only time my kids get juice, so it is a special treat)

a treat (one homemade cookie or one item from the treat bowl, which is jar where the kids dump all halloween, christmas, valentine, easter and birthday candy when they bring it home.)

mary polly:

1 small tupperware almonds

6 baby carrots or a tupperware of spinach leaves

1/3 apple, cut up or a bunch of grapes

1 small dish cheddar bunnies

1 juice box

a treat

simon: yogurt or applesauce, fruit, cheerios, leftovers with cole…

taido and alison: leftovers or one of about three salads. this one, my favorite salad (which i promise to post soon) or just a spinach salad with hard boiled eggs, whatever crunchy vegetables i have (celery, cucumber, carrots, turnips, red onion, bell peppers…) and annie’s goddess dressing (for which i also have a recipe).

because wasting food is pretty much paramount to murder in my book, mary polly and ben finish their lunches after school, before they dump all the dishes in the sink and put their lunch boxes away (in a perfect world). i use tupperware instead of ziplock bags so they can’t throw away food at school and because of the whole plastic in the ocean bit. (back to the toxins) also, after the initial tupperware investment, it saves money to not buy ziplock bags. simon always manages to get a decent share of ben’s leftover lunch in the afternoons. it is quickly becoming one of his favorite traditions. he is on ben like white on rice the minute the lunch box comes out of the backpack.

rise and shine

a food system organized around quantity rather than quality has a destructive feedback loop built into it, such that the more low-quality food one eats, the more one wants to eat, in a futile–but highly profitable–quest for the absent nutrient

from in defense of food, p.124

quality rather than quantity. it’s an idea that i think applies to all of life but most certainly in the area of food. i am working on a promised list of meals that will last you a week and feed your body well, but for now i am just going to tell you what we had for breakfast. taido makes breakfast at least three times a week at our house, and this one is a regular. we have burned up two waffle irons since we got married and are now on our third. our kids have loved them since they were toddlers in rainy seattle. move over eggo. here are the best (and best for you waffles) we can think to serve up around here. make a whole bunch on the weekend and freeze them if you don’t like to make breakfast during the week.

rise and shine waffles

serves: 6 chinos

1½ cup whole wheat flour

2 teaspoons baking powder

½ teaspoon salt

2 cups organic milk or organic soy milk

2 eggs

¼ cup butter (melted)

3 tablespoons honey

1 cup rolled oats, not instant

1 cup chopped nuts (if you don’t like nuts you can leave them out and add ½ cup more of oats.)

most waffle irons take about 1/2 cup batter per waffle. serve warm with real maple syrup, not corn syrup.

 

whoever welcomes one of these

i was doing my bsf lesson this morning and i wanted to write all about this one question that is on there, but then i remembered that i was a volunteer in the children’s department last week and i had wanted to write about that. so let’s just pretend it is last wednesday afternoon. before i left bsf and went on to the rest of my day.

and forgot what it was like to be a toddler.

something i haven’t told you about bsf is that once a semester you are encouraged to volunteer in the children’s department. i find that generally bsf-ers don’t care for this requirement, and tend to sort of grumble about it without any regard for the fact that you, sitting right there in their discussion group, actually have a child in the program. so if you are psycho-guilty like me, you feel bad that this person, who doesn’t want to be around your child (or any other children), has to be a volunteer and you wish you could help them out of it. right now i don’t happen to have children in the program, so i don’t feel bad when people complain. simon is too young, so he has to go to grandjule’s house during bsf, along with the homeschooler.

usually, it’s not necessarily that bsf-ers don’t like children. it’s just that it takes so much to get to bsf every week with your lesson done and it seems like a waste to have to miss the entire day of bible study to play with toddlers, who, by the way, already have two bsf children’s leaders in their rooms with them.

but i am here to tell you that it is not a waste.

this is one of those annoying bsf rules that i can actually defend. now i know that because, as i have said before, i would often rather be with children than adults, that maybe being a volunteer in the children’s department comes a little easier for me than some. that being said, i still think it is a valuable use of anyone’s time. and anyone can do it. it’s not like in the other places in your life where you might be asked to work with children where you have to prepare activities or even lead lessons. when you volunteer at bsf, you just show up. with your little childlike heart. you go in. you sit right down on the floor (which is easy for you if you’ve been going to yoga…and after you’ve read my blog for this long, how can you possibly be not going to yoga?) and you say something like what are we doing here? oh goody! blocks. i bet i can stack ten of these up. can you? and for the next two hours you don’t have to do anything but be a well behaved child. when the leaders say it is time for songs, you pull the chairs over and sing songs. when they say it’s time for the bathroom, we all line up and go to the bathroom. when it is time for the story we do little finger plays with our hands and then put them in our laps and be real real quiet and listen to the story, which is always some portion of what we are actually studying in the adult class at bsf. this is especially fascinating during the year that bsf studies the minor prophets.

you move with the class through all of these little 10 minute increments into which the bsf masterminds (they’ve spent years working all of this out i tell you.) have segmented the bsf children’s program experience. and i truly believe that it works beautifully because children, especially small children, really crave order. and orderly it is. if a child gets out of line, he or she might as well have committed a felony. the director is called in to handle the job. she gently sits with the little demon that won’t sit still for the 10 minute story time, patting his back and encouraging him. telling him the answers when questions are asked so he can exercise his turn to talk. notice that this is not my job as a volunteer. nope. i’m still just sitting there. maybe sometimes someone sits on my lap. i don’t get to answer any questions.

towards the end is my most favorite part. something that revolutionized how i spent my early mornings with my toddlers when i had them in bsf. it is quiet time. (i know you’re shocked that it’s my favorite.) it’s not nap time. it’s quiet time. it is when the leaders turn off the lights and you lie down on the ground with your head on a paper towel (your pillow) and close your eyes and talk to God. in my view, quiet time is just another word for shavasana. and so i lie down in corpse pose (with my head on a paper towel, you know, to protect it) and enjoy the quiet 10 minutes. praying. thanking God for these women who love these children every week. they pray for these children every day. they prepare for these children’s classes with as much or more rigor than we prepare for the adult class, and they still do the adult lessons too. in the midst of a week that was swirling around me in a way that felt uncontrollable, i was completely still on the floor in a room full of toddlers. 2 year olds, fidgeting and sucking their thumbs. talking to jesus. and here’s the best. when it is your turn to get up from quiet time, the bsf teacher comes around with a little puppet that taps you on the cheek and she says, God loves you, alison. oh yeah…i got it too. just like the others. and i was glad to hear it. i always am.

He called a little child and had him stand among them.

And he said: “I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.

Matthew 18:2-4

happy valentine’s day or at least you don’t have the plague

we had a valentine’s banquet at our church tonight, and high school students served and babysat to raise money for ski camp. it was so great…especially the babysitting. i sent my kids with taido and went to yoga. then i arrived late.

it was kind of late when i was bringing the kids home and tai had to stay and help, so i told the big kids to scoot into their pajamas and they could watch an episode of little house on the prairie while i got simon down. they were all complaining that they hadn’t really eaten because they had little caesar’s for dinner at church, which they hate because they are food snobs like me. God love ‘em. so i’m thinking…i will pop some popcorn and cut up fruit when i get simon in bed and they can wind down their happy crazy sugar high day watching little house on the prairie. which is a tradition we have started since mary polly got the entire first two seasons for christmas. she was turned on to the little house by the carr gals, and i have to say that it is an obsession i can get behind. i cry at almost every episode. in fact, i would like to move to the little house. the whole show connects with something deep inside me. taido thinks i am secretly in love with charles ingalls. or that i wish he was charles ingalls. really i wish i was caroline ingalls. i love her.

anyway, i tell you all that to tell you that tonight’s episode was all about the plague coming to walnut grove through a pack of rats inside some bad corn meal. it was unusually depressing and gross, and maybe not the relaxing, popcorn and fruit eating activity i had envisioned. it was so sad that it was almost comical.

so after the boys cheered when the barn of cornmeal and rats got all burned up, we ended our valentine’s day with explanations of why we don’t have to worry about all kinds of diseases anymore because of vaccinations. so if your valentine’s day was a little crummy, as it just can be…with all that expectation and all, well…at least you don’t have typhoid.