Silly Popcorn!

This is obviously a warmer weather activity and not something we're doing outside now, as we have a foot of snow on the ground. But it was really fun for Eliana this summer, so I thought it would be worth mentioning!

The Set Up:

A big sheet or blanket, spread out
An air popper in the middle of the blanket, with the shield off
A little girl sitting on the sidelines, waiting expectantly

The Result:







It's way more fun than microwaving a bag of popcorn. =D

Pictures from Pizza Night!

These two little people made pizza yesterday! =D We had a blast. Ellie helped me dump in the ingredients for the dough, and then I divided the dough into 3 balls to make individual crusts for each of us. Ellie got to roll out her own.



Getting ready to roll!









Putting the pizza crust in the oven! Mmmm!



3 little pizzas, one for each of us! Ellie made hers a heart. =D She was very excited about her heart pizza.



Made with LOVE! Mwaaa!

Let the cute food continue!

We've been in full on Valentine's mode for about a month now, thanks to letting Ellie watch an episode of Caillou in which they celebrated Valentine's day. I guess I should be happy they weren't celebrating the 4th of July or we'd be in red, white, and blue for months!

So because of the recent heart obsession and Ellie's daily desire to "make heart cookies for my friends, Mommy!" we made other heart shaped food instead. Like toast and eggs!

It took longer to make, perhaps, than regular eggs and toast, but again with my firm belief in cute food. ;D And really, it isn't difficult to do and has a kind of cool effect once it is finished. Ideally, the eggs would be cooked sunny side up so you could dip your toast cut out into the yolk, but I only used white for mine and Ellie's yolk got scrambled, so it didn't really work out that way for us. So here's what you do...

1. Toast a slice of bread. Really, though, you could just butter both sides of the bread and flop it into a pan. When the first side is toasted, flip the bread over and proceed to step two...

2. Spray a metal cookie cutter with oil and cut a shape out of the center of your toast. Remove the bread cut out and let the undone side finish toasting in the pan.

3. Replace the metal cookie cutter in the shaped hole in the toast and crack your egg into the cookie cutter. This will keep the egg contained as it cooks. Because you sprayed the cutter with oil, the egg shouldn't stick to it.

4. When the egg is thoroughly cooked, remove the cookie cutter from the toast, carefully separating it from the egg. The egg should be cooked into the toast at the bottom, so the egg will stay put. If you want to, you can flip the toast and egg over at this point to brown the egg slightly in the pan. Because they're cooked together, the egg won't fall out of the bread.

5. If you want more butter, now is a good time to re-butter the bread, let it melt, and enjoy!!

Cracker Sandwiches

Today's lunch is cracker sandwiches... and Ellie is delighted by them! She wanted cheese (MY cheese, real cheddar cheese, the kind she can't have cheese) for lunch and wasn't pleased at my insistence that she eat her own soy cheese. Nor was she excited at eating cheese and crackers, if it mean that she had to eat her cheese instead of the forbidden. BUT offer her a "cracker sandwich" and she was excited. Even though it was a cracker sandwich with her soy cheese.

So we had cracker sandwiches for lunch.

Food Log: December 27

Eliana's food log for the today:

Breakfast:
3 small whole wheat pancakes (casein free) from the freezer.
Fiber One banana muffin - she licked the frosting off the top and nibbled just a little of the muffin.

Lunch:
A half grilled cheese (soy cheese) sandwich.
5 or so green olives (and she even ate the pimento!)

Dinner:
Bread with margarine and jam. She ate the whole slice.
Half a banana
A couple slices pepperoni

I don't know that I'll record Eliana's food every day, but every so often it seems like a good idea so I can gather some information on her eating habits. Right now we've got family in town and our schedule's a little wonky from the holiday vacation, but Eliana seems to eat much better when she's just drinking water or rice milk instead of drinking juice. I'm not surprised. =D

Some dairy free "cheese" recipes...

Because cheese is such a staple in our household and I don't want Ellie not to be able to eat it while we're eating it, I'm looking at cheese alternatives that I can make for her so she can have the same meals we're eating, or some of the same meals she's used to. Here are some recipes I intend to try...

Ricotta - I'm hoping this will be a good cottage cheese substitute for her...
Mac and Cheese sauce - for, um, mac and cheese, obviously...
Cheese sauce - for grilled cheese sandwiches

Dairy Free....

For about a year my mom has suggested that Ellie might be allergic to milk. She has been consistently congested for about that long (though not bad enough to cause concern or warrant doctor visits), which coincides with the timeframe we've had her on cow's milk. She is also extremely active (even for 2 year old standards - she's almost always the most active kid in a group of toddlers, whether the nursery at church or kindermusik or playgroup) and there are studies linking hyperactivity to milk consumption (specifically the protein casein, which is what cheese is made from). MOST of what Ellie consumes is in some way dairy related, from the milk she drinks (A LOT - over the past year there have been many weeks that she has consumed about 2 gallons a week) to the yogurt or cottage cheese she has for breakfast, mac and cheese or quesadillas for lunch, string cheese or sliced cheddar for snacks, feta with dinner... She loves milk and cheese. And perhaps it's this overconsumption that is making her so overly active.

So, at my mother's suggestion, we took her off milk on Tuesday. I didn't plan to start taking her off milk until Thursday, but we got halfway through the day and I'd realized I hadn't given her milk or cheese yet, so I just decided to go with it. She doesn't seem to have missed the milk. She asked for it once, but was happy with juice (well, 1/4 juice, 3/4 water) instead. I bought her some rice milk (both original and vanilla) and she doesn't seem to care for that at all, but she doesn't seem to mind not drinking milk, so it hasn't been a problem.

Cheese, however, she misses. She asked for cheese several times on Thursday, so yesterday I bought her some soy based fake cheese. Ouch! That stuff is expensive!! But she had a slice of "cheddar" and she seemed really happy about that. Didn't mind the taste difference at all. So, it's expensive, but at least it satisfies her need for cheese. We got some shredded "mozzarella" too, but she hasn't tried that yet.

So... We'll take her off milk products for a week or two and see if it makes a big difference in her behavior. I have a feeling, though, that it will. We took her off milk on Tuesday, and by yesterday (Friday) mom and I could already see a big change. She was mellower. Sitting at the table eating lunch without distraction in a busy mall food court, right next to the ride on machines in the play area. It was bizarre. Things that normally woud have been a meltdown because I told her "no" about something were not. She is still independent, stubborn, and two, but yesterday she acted like a "normal" two year old instead of a crazy one. Today Leif is seeing a difference in her, too. She is running with purpose, to a specific destination, instead of running circles just because. She walks places now, too, and is only full speed ahead when she chooses to instead of all the time. So I have a feeling we will be seeing this change from here on out as we keep her off the milk. We are supplementing her diet with calcium and she is taking vitamins, and we are trying to make sure she gets protein rich foods, to make sure that she isn't nutrient deficient now that she's not consuming mass quantities of milk.

So... it looks like we're going dairy free for Ellie. I'm not sure this is a road I really want to go down (dairy is in a lot of the foods we eat regularly!) but it looks like it's the road I'm on and if it helps Ellie, then it's the road I'll take!

My First Bento!!

Today I had the opportunity to make my first bento, so I did!! Ellie and I were going to spend some time at the splash park with friends, so I decided to pack a lunch for us to share. Perfect time to try my hand at this new technique, right? So here it is... my very first bento:

I think my container might be a little big, but I don't really know how big a bento box is supposed to be. And maybe, if I weren't calorie counting and trying to lose weight, this might be the right size box, but it seemed like it was a little deep. Anyway, it worked well, and I'll use it again for bento-ing when Ellie and I need to take lunch somewhere. I'll also let her eat the leftovers for snack this afternoon. Here's what I packed into it...

1. Strawberries. These are actually placed all the way across the box and the silicone cup is sitting on a layer of them. Then I filled in around the silicone cup with more strawberries to finish off that section. We shared the strawberries.

2. Macaroni and Cheese. This is leftover from yesterday, so I just threw it in a silicone cup for Ellie to eat. I made it a smiley face by adding hot dog eyes and a fruit leather mouth. I just cut off pieces of the hot dog and fruit leather that are also in the box.

3. Fruit Leather. I used the fruit leather as a barrier between the strawberries and the proteins. I think the proteins might have been just fine against the strawberries, but it was an easy place to put the leather and I wanted to use it for the smile anyway. =D

4. String Cheese. This is at the bottom of the box, right next to the fruit leather. It's still in its wrapper, so I wasn't worried about it getting contaminated.

5. Turkey Hot Dog. This is right on top of the cheese and under the turkey rolls. It's in once piece, except for the two slices I cut off to make the smiley face eyes. This is Ellie's protein.

6. Turkey Deli Meat Rolls. Instead of rolling each of the slices up individually, I just rolled all 5 together and figured I'd roll them separately when it came time to eat. It was laziness. =D This is my lunch protein, so I figured I'd just make do. It worked pretty well.

7. No Sugar Added Blackberry Jam. This is in the little pink Tupperware container at the top of the picture. It's my dipping sauce for the turkey rolls. Weird, but it's low calorie and good. =D

8. Carrots. We were pretty much out of vegetables that I could take along, but I found a little bag of carrots in the fridge, so they came with us at the last minute. They help form a barrier between the proteins (which are cold and lunchmeaty, so they're sort of wet) and the dry goldfish crackers.

9. Goldfish Crackers. These are sort of a filler for the box and snack food, and the carb portion of the box. I put them on the opposite side of the box from the macaroni to help balance out the colors a little. These are Ellie's snack for this afternoon, too, since she didn't really eat them with lunch.

10. Ranch Dressing. I put the ranch in another Tupperware container (the taller, old style midge containers) for dipping carrots. Ellie loves to dip her carrots, so this was *her* container.

I admit, this was more food than Ellie and I needed for lunch. I was sort of shocked by that, because if I'd packed everything into separate containers like I normally do, it would take a lunch box at least twice the size of the bento box to fit it all in. But this was extremely compact and held plenty of food. And I only had a couple lids to keep track of (the lid for my bento box fits right underneath it, so that is nice) instead of 6 or so! I opened it up and held it on my lap while we were at the park and I didn't have to worry about ziplock bags blowing away or gathering together all the containers every time I wanted to stand up. AND the bento box fit nicely into my bag (which also held a towel, change of clothes, sunscreen, nalgene bottle, sippy cup, and diapers) so I only had to carry one bag and my purse (oh, and my chair) to the park and I was set for a couple hours! Easy to do in one trip!

Something else I added to my bento box was a cloth napkin... I layed it out diagonally, folded in two opposing points, and tied the other two points around the box to create a handle. It was cute in its presentation, functional as a handle, and meant that I had a cloth napkin with me while I was eating - something I was glad to have since I forgot a fork for myself and at strawberry quarters with my fingers! I remembered a fork for Ellie (for the mac and cheese) and just tucked that inside the box on top of the carrots. Here's what the finished, packed up bento box looked like:

So there you have it. My first foray into the land of bento. I like it.

Bento Mania!

I was recently introduced to the idea of bento and immediately fell for them, mostly based on cute-factor. Really, really adorable lunches. And then I started thinking about why I would want to take the time to pack a bento. Are there any real benefits that align with my priorities (other than cuteness, ha ha!) and how I want to spend my time?

Turns out there are. See, one of the things that I hold important is stewardship. Not just of money, though I think we are to be good stewards of money as well. I think it is important to be good stewards of EVERYTHING we are given - our time, our minds, our bodies, our children, our earth... And bento fits right in with at least a couple of those, so I think it's worth a look.

As for being stewards of our bodies and our children, there is a lot to be said for the food we eat and the food we use to nourish our children. Bento encourages a colorful, balanced meal consisting of the 5 food groups. By packing your food in a bento box, you just WANT to incorporate different fruits and vegetables, because, let's face it... a bento box containing a single pbj sandwich just isn't as fun to look at as sandwiches cut into stars surrounded by blueberries and a banana moon. When it comes to adult bento, it's easier to control portion sizes and balanced nutrition when you pack it all into a single box. You can easily see what proportions you have of carbs, fruits, veggies, and protein. Bento encourages balance and moderation.

Because bento boxes are designed to be stuffed full of food (so the food doesn't slosh around and mix with other foods) it is done in a way that uses "neutral" foods (like celery and carrots) to form a barrier between other foods. You might not want your blueberries to juice up your sandwich bread, but place a few carrots as a barrier between them and you've got a problem solved! AND you've got grains, protein (sandwich filling), fruit and vegetables all right there! In a traditional lunch sack, you'd have each item (sandwich, blueberries, carrots) in its own ziplock bag, which just get thrown away. Even if you go for the reusable approach, you'd have 3 separate containers, all in a lunch bag. This way you just have everything in one container, which serves as its own lunch bag. Fewer things to wash (less water used) and fewer things to throw away!

Really it's a great idea. I can't believe I hadn't heard of it until now, but today I picked up a box to use as a bento box, and some silicone baking cups to keep wet foods off of other foods. I still have a few years before I have to send a lunch with Ellie, so maybe I'll have time to perfect the art. In the meantime, I'm excited to give it a try for our weekly picnic lunches after the hikes. It sounds so... fun! =D

Recipe Review: Deceptively Delicious Aloha Chicken Kebabs

I tried my first Deceptively Delicious recipe the other night, so I thought I'd share my thoughts on it. I made the Aloha Chicken Kebabs made with sweet potato puree. They were really good! I will make them again!

Once you have the sweet potato puree (I recommend making up the purees ahead of time for these recipes), the chicken is very easy to make. I didn't have any short wooden skewers, like the recipe calls for, so I just used the long metal ones we use for grilling. That didn't work. Because they didn't fit in the pan I was using to cook the chicken, the chicken didn't rest on the bottom of the pan and therefore didn't cook. I just pulled the chicken off the skewers and cooked them in the pan. It worked just fine. It didn't look as festive, but it worked just fine.

The chicken had a nice Polynesian flavor about it, and tasted very different from what I usually make. I really liked it! I think it would be really good served with rice or stir fry with pineapple and almonds (like a Polynesian stir fry). I definitely recommend this recipe if you have the cookbook!

One thing I don't like about this book is that it doesn't include all the nutrition information. As a calorie counter (my choice for dieting) I like to know all the specs on my food. Thanks to sparkrecipes.com, though, I can now tell you the nutrition information for this dish! You'll have to buy the cookbook for the recipe (and I recommend it!) but the nutritional details per serving (3-4 kebabs) are...

Calories: 315
Fat: 8
Carbs: 32
Fiber: 3
Protein: 30