Tea time!

I decided to have a cup of tea instead of a cup of coffee with breakfast this morning. My son was appalled: "Tea this early in the day! Tea isn't for the morning, it's for teatime in the afternoon!" He knows I have an alarm that goes off inside my head sometime midafternoon to remind me to have a cup of tea. We'll be out somewhere and I'll suddenly feel the urge for a cup of tea and know without looking at my watch that it must be sometime between 3 and 4.  The kids and DH know that if I suddenly say "Ding, ding, ding" it means that alarm in my head has just gone off! It hadn't occurred to me though, until this morning, that the kids have never seen me (or anyone) drink tea at any other time of day!

DH bought me a mug like this for Christmas this year

Ice cream flavors

I've blogged in the past about an unusual icecream flavor available locally. Here's the board listing the flavors available at an icecream parlor in downtown Bar Harbor. Do you see any unusual ones?

I wonder if the Queen likes . . .

. . .  Marmite?

(From The DieLine blog.)

Apparently Marmite is selling a limited edition Jubilee version exclusively at Sainsbury's.

Toast!

Toast seems to be more popular in the UK than here in the US. I remember Saturday lunches when I was growing up, or any lunches when I was at uni., would often be something on toast. Baked beans on toast. Poached egg on toast. Sardines on toast. Cheese on toast. This song about toast even did quite well in the charts!



My DH turns his nose up at 'something on toast' as a meal, as do the children. It was a nice quick, and cheap lunch and I still enjoy it from time to time - though usually when I'm on my own!

Still, I was never so cheap as to make a toast sandwich - something Mrs Beeton apparently included in her famous cookbook! I'm not quite sure why the Royal Society of Chemistry decided to revive the toast sandwich and tout it as the UK's cheapest meal.  A slice of toast between two slices of bread - never mind if it's cheap, it hardly sounds nutritious, does it? If I'm going to have an unhealthy meal of carbs with my carbs, a chip butty or a crisp sarnie (or maybe even a conny onny sarnie) would be much more to my taste!


(Sheffield United anthem - "You fill up my senses like . . . a greasy chip butty")

What time is lunch?

I'm trying to remember what time lunch (dinner) was served when I was in school. I'm pretty sure it was 12 noon. My secondary school had 4 different dining rooms, so there were no separate sittings - everyone had the same lunch period/dinner time, though sometimes it did feel as though we spent much of it queuing! I'm pretty sure we had at least an hour for lunch too, maybe a little longer. Some kids went home to eat, and others to the local chippy. When I was in 6th form we persuaded one of the PE teachers to give up some of his lunch break one day a week to open the swimming pool for us. We must have had at least 20 minutes in the pool to make it worthwhile.

School lunch hours over here are much shorter - certainly nowhere near an hour. Both my kids complain that they don't have enough time to eat all their lunch, though I know part of that is because they spend too much time talking! Still, I was shocked to look at DD's schedule today and realize that her lunch hour is only 24 minutes long. Not only that, but she has 'first lunch' - which starts at 10:48 a.m. Not even time for elevenses and she's having lunch?!

They put WHAT in the chocolate chip cookies?

A couple of years ago, I wrote about the local asparagus ice cream.This week I had another interesting culinary experience. Chocolate chip cookies laced with . . . no, nothing illegal, but definitely strange. Take a look at the photo below and see if you can figure out what it is. I'm still trying to think why anyone ever thought this was a good idea. They weren't bad, but I don't think I'd order them again. Looking online, I was surprised to find quite a few recipes for chocolate chip cookies that include this extra ingredient.

A reason to live in the USA?

Forget wanting to live in the USA being about freedom and the pursuit of happiness - apparently it's all about the doughnuts!

I only found the blog BritishSpeak today - looks like it'll be one I go back to!

Chocolate delivery system

I wrote this post back in February and apparently I forgot to hit 'Post'!

I recently recommended that Kelly, in her search for the best cookies ever, try this recipe for chocolate cookies with chunks of Maya Gold chocolate in them. I hadn't actually tried the recipe myself, but it looked yummy. Kelly took the bait, made the cookies and wrote a wonderfully detailed post about the making of the cookies. She concluded that, good as they are, the Rolo cookie recipe we got from In the Left Lane is still better.

So I decided I should do my own comparison. I'd made the Rolo cookies for DS to take to school for his birthday and had THREE adults want the recipe, so you know they are good. DH had given me some Green & Black's Maya Gold for Valentine's Day but on looking more closely at the recipe I realized that one 3.5 ounce bar wasn't going to go very far when the recipe called for a POUND of chocolate! That's $12.50 worth of Maya Gold, when it's on sale. $15 when it's not. I was thinking these had better be some freakingly awesome cookies!



I decided I had to try them anyway. Kelly had warned that the dough got hard to mix at the end, and boy was she right! Getting the last of the flour incorporated took a lot of effort - and then I still had to mix in the chocolate chunks. I'd decided to go with four bars of the Maya gold and it turned out to be plenty. I wasn't sure that I had the right kind of chili powder so I only added 1/8 of a teaspoon.



For all the effort, they were worth it! The kids love them. I love them too, but can actually eat just one at a time. (I really didn't believe Kelly when she said one at a time was enough!) The kids were eating them for a treat this morning when we were out and someone walking by commented on how good the cookies smelled! And although the recipe said "makes 24 cookies", I made up the whole batch and got not 24 but 44 perfectly sized cookies. Again, I should have listened when Kelly said she put half the dough in the freezer, or perhaps the sheer quantity of ingredients should have clued me in!

Our conclusion - yes, they were great, but for 'everyday' cookies we liked the Rolo cookies better!

Another sign of spring

I've never actually eaten fiddleheads - fern sprouts. The season for them is very short - only three weeks or so. They do have them in the supermarket, but I've been told they're much better fresh. Fiddleheads aren't just any old ferns though and, just like with mushrooms, if you don't know what you're doing and pick the wrong kind you can make yourself sick. (Oh, and in case you're wondering - I don't think putting them on pizza is a common way to eat fiddleheads!)

Expectations

When I was in primary (elementary) school I had school dinner (lunch) every day. My mum counted on us having a good meal, to the point where our evening meal at home until I was at secondary school (6th grade) was a sandwich and a bag of crisps. I think we probably did have pretty good lunches, though I remember not liking the liver very much. I actually liked the flavour and the texture, but I didn't like the 'rubber bands' you had to cut out of it. I remember getting told off by the dinner ladies for 'playing' with our food when we stirred the dollop of jam into the semolina to make the semolina pink. I liked semolina, but we never had it at home. We sometimes had pink custard too, which I'd forgotten about completely until another blogger mentioned it recently.

School lunches definitely weren't so good once we got to secondary school. I remember being served battered and deep-fried spam fritters and loving them. I actually added more salt! One day I was at the very end of the line and they had literally run out of food. My lunch that day was white rice and chips. That was the day I discovered that plain white rice could be made more interesting with the addition of malt vinegar. By the time I was in the 6th form I was too lazy to walk to the other side of the school to get my lunch so I stopped having school lunches. In fact I think I stopped eating much of anything for lunch because I was too lazy to make a lunch to bring to school with me. I survived on coffee and Lipton's Cup-a-Soup because we had a water heater in the 6th form common room and everyone had their own jar of instant coffee and CoffeeMate. I had coffee when I arrived at school, one at mid-morning break, one at lunch after my Cup-a-Soup, and another if I had a study hall in the afternoon. A cup of tea when I got home from school, and a coffee after dinner, and it's a miracle I ever slept!

After I moved on to university, they changed to a cafeteria system at school so that instead of paying a set price for a (supposedly) balanced meal, kids could choose what they wanted. I have no doubt chips outsold everything else.

I was pleased when I heard of celebrity chef Jamie Oliver's campaign to improve school meals in the UK, though I don't know how successful it was. Certainly, there were stories in the press of parents circumventing his plan for no junk food by delivering fish'n'chips to their poor children who couldn't stomach the thought of a healthy meal.

Jamie has now made a new series for American TV about food – how families eat, what kids get at school and why, like the UK, the diet of processed food and snacks is causing so many health and obesity problems. I choose to send my kids to school with a lunch from home, as I have not been impressed with the lunch menus. The series was filmed in Huntington, West Virginia and from what I've seen, the school lunches there seem very similar to school lunches here, several states away. I've watched the first two hours of the series and I have to say some of it seems to be a setup. One of the 'lunch ladies' (who seems confused by that title) seems convinced that nothing he does will succeed. Given that the entire series has probably been filmed already, I am guessing that she eventually will see the light and become one of his greatest supporters.

The first meal Jamie served was in competition with the 'regular' school meal, and of course most of the kids chose the meal they were familiar with. The next meal, all the kids were served Jamie's menu. The administrators complained that Jamie had not provided nutritional analyses of the meals, and had not provided two starches 'as required'. Why was he not told in advance his meals had to meet certain nutritional requirements? Well, it does make for more dramatic television . . .

He was 'allowed' to serve a third meal, which initially was no more successful than the first two. Part of the problem was that in order to eat his food, the kids needed a knife and fork. Why is that a problem you ask? American public schools (at least none that I've been in) do not provide knives for their students to use. Well, I can see their point - they use plastic cutlery, and a plastic knife is usually pretty useless. I did lunch duty in one school for two years, and there was one meal (some kind of meat patty served with gravy) that the kids really needed a knife for. Most kids would pick the patty up with the fork and then nibble around the patty, never taking it off the fork. Practical, but hardly good table manners. There were two of us on lunch duty and every time this meal was served, we would go into the kitchen and ask for real knives, and then would go around the room asking the kids if they wanted us to cut their lunch up for them.

Eventually, we managed to persuade the woman running the kitchen that for that one meal in the menu cycle the kids could be trusted with plastic knives. Yes, I said trusted. Her reasoning for not providing knives was the kids couldn't be trusted. Excuse me? Like they couldn't poke each other's eyes out equally effectively (if not more so) with a plastic fork? Actually, I think she was following policy set by higher ups, as she's really a very reasonable lady. Once the kids were given the plastic knives, I realized we had another problem. Most of the kids (and I kid you not) DID NOT KNOW HOW TO USE THEM! Now instead of going round the room cutting the kids' meals up for them, I had to go around the room teaching them how to use their knife and fork effectively.

Therefore, I was well aware before Jamie's new show that American kids as old as 10 years old may not actually know how to use a knife and fork. In the UK, on the other hand, I remember my mother saying that when she taught the reception class the parents were told that when their child started school at age 4 or 5 they needed to be able to use a knife and fork by themselves because the staff did not have time to help them. So I also understand why Jamie expected the kids in the US to be able to use a knife and fork, and his reaction when he found they couldn't. What completely threw me for a loop was the oppositional lunch lady's reaction when he said that in the UK kids as young as 4 and 5 are expected to be able to (and can) use a knife and fork. She said, in all seriousness, "Can you document that?" She honestly did not expect kids to be able to use a knife and fork!

Jamie asked if some of the kids could be made to stay at the lunch tables for a little longer and he started going around showing the kids how to use a knife and fork. The principal then started doing the same thing. Lo and behold, once the kids were EXPECTED to eat, and TAUGHT how to use a knife and fork so that they could eat the food, many more of them ate up and did in fact enjoy the food.

If we don’t expect our kids to be able to use a knife and fork, then they will never learn. If we don’t set expectations for our kids, they will have nothing to rise to. And quite frankly, I don’t think learning to use a knife and fork is a very high expectation, even for a kindergartner! Or is the US-UK cultural divide greater than I thought?



(Oh, and go read Expat Mum's post on this topic if you haven't already!)

Where is Mr Kipling when I need him?

Mince pies are not easy to find here in the US, and when you do find them they are often quite expensive. Most Christmases I just go without, although occasionally I do find some imports and decide to indulge in a box. This year, inspired by Karen, I decided to try making some.

I'm not sure when the last time was that I made mince pies, if ever. I think I need to practice. The store-bought mincemeat was acceptable, but the pastry left something to be desired. They did look quite nice though:


Maybe if I master making mince pies, another year I'll try making a real Christmas cake.

Birthday party food

A while ago Parent Hacks website posted a 'wonderful' idea one of their readers had come up with: serving jello (jelly) in individual serving sized paper cups. Hmm - we were doing that years ago in the UK for birthday parties. I've never seen jelly (jello) served at a birthday party in the US. Over here, the food at kids' birthday parties is usually pizza followed by cake served with ice cream.

When I was a kid in the UK, we had sandwiches (cut into little triangles), jelly in little paper cups with whipped cream on top , and 'fairy cakes':
(Picture from citybumpkin's blog.)

I remember chocolate blancmange rabbits on lime jelly grass too. I don't think they sell blancmage in the US, not that I've ever looked for it. (No Angel Delight either, which I remember we often had for dessert - I loved the butterscotch flavour!) Here's a picture of a blancmange rabbit, though the red jelly looks weird to me - it really should have been green!


(Photo from howarew's photostream at Flickr.)

The actual birthday cake might or might not have been eaten at the party, but guests were usually sent home with a slice wrapped up in a paper serviette. Americans I've mentioned this too all think that is really weird!

What do you remember about the food served at children's birthday parties when you were growing up? Has kids' birthday party food in the UK changed?

Shoot your own turkey

It must be nearly Thanksgiving! Apparently the turkey shooting is more organized than I thought - I had visions of people just wandering out into the woods to look for turkeys.

Blackcurrants

One of my favourite summer fruits is blackcurrants. Unfortunately, it is very difficult to find them here in the US. Blueberries, on the other hand, which I never had when I was growing up in England, are very popular over here. Blueberries look very similar to blackcurrants, but taste very different. For years blueberries have disappointed me. I would see a blueberry pie being served and it looked so much like blackcurrant I would have to have a slice. Then I would realize it was indeed blueish in colour and not purple. I'd take a bite and be disappointed by the lack of flavour. Blueberries always seem very bland compared to blackcurrants.

It wasn't until recently that I discovered the reason for blackcurrants' rarity in the US is that many states banned blackcurrant growing in the early 1900's in order to prevent the spread of white pine blister rust, Cronartium ribicola, a disease affecting white pine trees, a mainstay back then of the timber industry. Today the use of white pine as lumber is rare and disease-resistant plants are available, but the antiquated ban on producing blackcurrants remained in effect pretty much nationwide until recently. Some states are now allowing blackcurrant plants to be reintroduced. In New York State it was primarily the result of the efforts of one 'gentleman farmer' who now runs a company that sells blackcurrant 'nectar', blackcurrants. I can now buy blackcurrant 'nectar' at our local supermarket! (I can buy Ribena too - but it is insanely expensive as it is imported. Blackcurrant jam too, imported from Poland, and worth the price even though DS has decided it makes very good PB&J sandwiches now that he's finally understood that the lumps in the jam are the fruit!) I could order frozen blackcurrants online at $5/lb, for a minimum of 3 lbs (plus shipping & handling of course!)

They even sell currant bushes via mailorder. The law in my state still says however:

"No person shall deliver within the Commonwealth from outside the Commonwealth any blackcurrant (Ribes nigrum) plant, root, scion, seed or cutting."

So no blackcurrant bushes in our backyard for the foreseeable future! Still, over the years I have gotten to like blueberries for what they are and appreciate that, unlike blackcurrants, you can eat them raw. In fact, I've decided that's mostly my favorite way of eating them, though I don't object if they're cooked into pancakes or muffins. Tonight's dessert was definitely one for blueberries though, not blackcurrants, as it did need raw fruit. However, I modified the original 'Real Simple' recipe slightly and the 0% fat Greek yogurt (instead of cream cheese and cream - thanks for the inspiration Mum!) along with the lemon zest (called for in the original) gave it some of the tartness I miss from blackcurrants.

Weirder than asparagus

This morning I read about the death of Mollie Sugden, the actress who played Mrs. Slocombe in the BBC sitcom Are you Being Served? Shortly afterwards, an online acquaintance coincidentally mentioned a relatively new ice cream shop in San Francisco called "Humphrey Slocombe." The name is a reference to that same TV show. They have the usual wide range of ice cream flavours, but some rather odd ones too: foie gras, salt and pepper, and peanut butter curry for example. I wasn't too sure what the flavour of Secret Breakfast was likely to be, but it turns out it's bourbon and cornflakes!

The local ice cream

Well, one of my commenters got the ice cream flavour right, but I'm afraid I'll have to disqualify her and not give her the non-existent prize because she cheated. I'm sure she's actually been there (right Molly?), and has probably eaten some of this ice cream. It is indeed unusual - so it's not honey or maple flavoured, although those are both local products. It is not listed on the flavours board as locals simply know that it's available in season.

Unfortunately, I don't have any in-focus photos of the ice cream. This is not deliberate. I was trying, but perhaps I was focusing too much on eating the ice cream instead of taking photos of it. I'll blame it on the fact that I didn't have my glasses with me. I have sadly reached that age where my arms are not long enough and I need glasses to focus on anything closer to me than the length of my arms. I had thought that maybe the camera with its so-called AUTO-FOCUS (they lie!) might be smart enough to do just that and focus, but apparently I'm still supposed to do something to get it to focus. I need a camera that will read my intentions and focus on the thing I am thinking of. Then my photos would be much better. In the meantime, I'll just have to remember my glasses and learn how to work the camera!

Back to the ice-cream! Here are said blurry pictures. They look a little greener than the photo in the last post, but I think this is closer to the true color.




The flavour is, as Molly said, asparagus. Sounds disgusting doesn't it? Well, it's actually asparagus and almond and it's pretty heavy on the almond - although as you can tell from the photos the asparagus is definitely in there! If you think of asparagus in a cream sauce it becomes a little less strange I think. It is perfectly edible, although I think I would go for chocolate brownie or cookie dough another time. Remember a lot of American ice cream places will give you a taster spoonful of a flavour or two before you buy, so if you see an unusual flavour you don't have to commit yourself and find you hate it.

Zooming in on the photo from the previous post, you can actually see both the almonds and the asparagus in the ice cream. (See, sometimes I CAN make the camera work!)


I bet they have asparagus ice cream at the British Asparagus Festival. If you can't find anywhere locally that sells asparagus ice cream and you'd like to try it, you could always try making it yourself. There's another recipe here. I'm not sure I would serve it with smoked salmon though as this English restaurant suggests! Nor would I be up for asparagus beer!

Ice cream

Many years ago when my parents came to visit me for the first time in the United States we spent some time travelling around New England. I remember being in Rockport, Massachusetts, one afternoon and deciding we needed some ice cream. My father was delighted at the selection of flavors, and happy that they let him try a couple before he bought. I suggested that he buy a small ice cream. He indignantly insisted that he wanted a large. I suggested a small would be sufficient. He got the large and it very nearly defeated him. I think he only finished it out of sheer stubbornness!

Like many other things, ice cream servings do tend to be larger over here than in the UK. This afternoon a friend described the 'small' ice cream served at our most local ice cream stand as ' the size of a child's head.' We had run into her at a slightly further afield ice cream stand, where her kids were getting a treat after a long and sweaty hike. Ours were just getting a treat. Next time we should do a hike first!

This afternoon's destination is a local dairy farm. They sell a variety of ice cream flavours, all but one (the peanut butter one) made on the farm from the milk from their own Jersey and Holstein cows. You can tell how local the product is as soon as you step out of the car - one of the other products they sell (to enrich the soil in your garden) has a much stronger smell than any ice cream could! The kids like going here for ice cream because they like visiting the cows. You can't feed them or pet them, but there's just something irresistible about these very large animals.

Here's a pic of my (small - I asked for ONE scoop but I think the girl couldn't count that high!) ice cream:
I chose to have a particularly local icecream. Not only does the milk come from the cows on the farm, but one of the other main ingredients does too. It is a seasonal flavour, not offered all year round, so it is not listed on the flavours board.

Can you figure out what flavour my ice cream was? (I removed the name of the farm from the flavours board photo, so you can't just Google it!) It's one of those things that doesn't sound like a good idea necessarily, but is actually quite good. No prizes for the winning guess I'm afraid.

Cooking by heart

How many recipes do you know by heart? The UKTV Food channel recently surveyed 3,000 British people about their cooking habits and discovered that on average they knew 6 recipes by heart. (A recipe being a dish that includes 4 or more ingredients.)

The top ten dishes British people feel most comfortable cooking (and the percentage of people who can cook them without a recipe) are apparently:

Spaghetti bolognese (65%)

Roast dinner (54%)

Chilli con carne (42%)

Lasagne (41%)

Cottage or shepherd's pie (38%)

Meat or fish stir fry (38%)

Beef casserole (34%)

Macaroni cheese (32%)

Toad in the hole (30%)

Meat, fish or vegetable curry (26%)

Source: UKTV Food survey

I could manage 7 of those without a recipe, 8 if I'm allowed to use a jar of Patak's or Trader Joe's curry sauce! (Interestingly, Patak's has recipes on their websites - but only five TOTAL on their US site as opposed to the dozens and dozens of recipes on their UK site!)

This household beats the average because those surveyed admitted they made an average of just four home-cooked meals per week, and they own just five cook books. Hmm - I probably have five cookbooks that I use on a regular basis, but there are at least thirty cookbooks in my living room alone. If home-cooked means eating at home, and not eating take-away or frozen/prepared meals, we eat home-cooked meals ALL the time! Very occasionally (once every couple of months) we have pizza. Equally rarely, a box of Trader Joe's samosas will sometimes serve as dinner - though less often since they annoyingly stopped selling the India Relish that went so well with them!

I'm trying to think of actual recipes I know though. A lot of the meals I cook don't really seem to qualify as needing recipes! Baked boneless, skinless chicken breast with some kind of spice mix like Montreal Chicken, served with rice (cooked in chicken stock with onions and garlic), and microwaved peas. Ground (minced) turkey with garlic, onion, mushrooms, zucchini (courgettes) and pasta sauce from a jar, served over pasta. Does it count if the pasta sauce comes out of a jar? Can you tell my main goal is simply to get people fed? Sometimes I do chop a lot of veggies and do a chicken stir fry. That takes more effort, but it still doesn't really need a recipe! Hmm ... chicken casserole! That one counts, I'm sure! Bite-sized pieces of boneless, skinless, chicken, with onions, garlic, mushrooms, canned corn, tomato paste, cubed potatoes, a couple of bay leaves, thyme and chicken stock. Throw it all in a casserole dish and bung it in the oven till done! Quantities? Times? No. Can't give you those. Fill the casserole dish. Check it occasionally while it's cooking till it seems done. This one is perfectly edible (indeed, better) when reheated the next day, so a little over-cooking won't harm it.

DH is the one who knows most of the recipes in this house though. Occasionally, very occasionally, he deigns to write them down so that I can attempt them. Tonight's super yummy turkey burger recipe is one that he knows by heart, but I could never replicate it unless he wrote it down. (And he hasn't.) It involved ground (minced) turkey (of course!) and garam (chickpea) flour, egg substitute, Worcestershire sauce, garlic powder and a bunch of other spices. There were no measuring tools involved as far as I could see, yet the recipe turns out well every time. Here's one of my favorites he did share with me (but I certainly don't have it memorized yet!)

BLACK BEAN AND CORN SALAD

1 can black beans (rinsed & drained)
1 can corn (drained)
1 vidalia onion
1/2 each red, orange and yellow pepper
1/2 cucumber (English)
4 medium tomatoes (remove seeds)
1 can sliced black olives

3-4 tbsp chopped fresh parsley
abt 3 tbsp chopped fresh cilantro
4 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
4 tbsp red wine vinegar
1 tbsp lime juice
1 crushed and minced clove of garlic
1 tsp sugar
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp ground cumin
1/4 tsp ground black pepper
1 pinch dried oregano

Put vegetables in bowl.

Mix liquids, herbs & spices in a jar. Shake hard for a minute. Pour over vegetables and stir to coat all.

Best if it sits overnight.

Enjoy! And if you do, please let me know in the comments, and leave one of your favorite recipes there too!

Dinnertime

Both children are usually pretty good eaters. They like a lot of things I'm told many other children their age won't eat. But for some reason DS has decided in the last 6 weeks or so that nothing we cook is good enough for him any more. He will request something for dinner and then refuse to eat it when it's served. Unless it's cheerios, goldfish crackers or a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, there's no guarantee he'll eat it. Some yogurts are acceptable, and anything mom and dad would classify as junk food, though we rarely, if ever, serve it. Tonight's dinner conversation was typical:

On seeing dinner being prepared by DH:

That's yucky!
How do you know? You've never tasted it!
I just hate it!
But you like everything that's in it!
Well, I'm not going to eat it!
Then you're going to be very hungry because that's all that's on offer tonight!

When it was actually put in front of him:

You know I don't like that!
(We ignore him.)
The sauce is touching the broccoli!
(We ignore him.)
I'm not hungry! I'm full!
But I bet you have room for chocolate ice cream don't you?!
Yes!
Well, the ice cream is only for people who've eaten at least half their dinner!

The faces he pulled were quite entertaining, but he wouldn't let me take a photo of him:


Nor, apparently, was it acceptable to take pictures of his 'disgusting' dinner:

(The empty cup was going to have milk or water poured into it after he'd eaten some of his dinner. We've learned not to fill it at the beginning of the meal as otherwise he just fills up on liquid!)

My dinner, on the other hand, was very nice:



Just kidding! The teatowel and cocktail napkins were joke gifts from DH this holiday season! I had the same pasta with homemade tomato sauce with olives, pork, and broccoli that the kids had and I'm looking forward to the leftovers for lunch at work tomorrow (even without an accompanying glass of red wine!)

DS never did eat any of his dinner, but that's OK - guess what he's having for dinner tomorrow?! :-)

Follow-up: He did indeed get offered the same meal a second time - and guess what? This time it was deemed yummy and he ate it all up!

From the fringe of the bell curve

Maddy asks:

"Consider sharing a recipe that your family, a family member or you, enjoy that doesn’t seem to be appreciated by many other bodies on the planet."

I'm not sure that this really counts as a recipe, but something my mum served when we were growing up and I loved, was grated cheese and ketchup sandwiches. I remember her serving them at a birthday party of mine and some of my friends thought they were weird. I seem to remember most people eating them though. Well, some people anyway ... though, come to think of it, maybe that was me and my sister! I tried feeding them to my own kids last weekend as we had somehow ended up with a lot of cheese in the house. (We rarely buy it as too many of us in this household have high cholesterol.) I was very disappointed to find that when offered this rare treat, the children decided they hated it. I thought that as Americans they would eat anything that was accompanied by ketchup.

There's no recipe - just grate as much cheese as you need and then add ketchup until the cheese sticks together in one big glob. A shortcut would be to simply cut slices of cheese (REAL cheese with a nice sharp flavour - none of those horrid plastic squares that masquerade as cheese!) and put them in between two slices of bread and add ketchup. The gloppiness of the grated cheese with ketchup is definitely preferable as far as I'm concerned though - it's a texture thing! Another variation - using HP Sauce (steak sauce) instead of ketchup - was always reserved for grownups as my mother thought we'd find the HP Sauce too spicy.