FYI on call for recipes, and a deal

I know some pretty inventive cooks read this. I know this because chances are I know you personally. Check this out: Gooseberry Patch has put a call out for recipes of two kinds. 1) Cookies and 2) Mom's Best Recipes. Check out more on the Gooseberry Patch blog. I've already submitted one. It takes only minutes. And for those of you I know personally, if you'd like some suggestions as to which ones to submit, Elli and I are available for consultation. We may have to sample the product prior to judgment, however. BONUS: If your recipe is selected, Elli and I would like to invite you over to our kitchen (considering you are in driving distance) to help you make the dish, and we will blog together about our adventure. Talk to you again soon....

Sing the ABC Muffins

Daddy once said that life before Elli was like having black-and-white TV; we had no idea the beautiful view of the world we were missing. What an apt description. Case in point, before Elli, the refrigerator was bare and boring. And now.... (watch this video)

Just hours before filming this video, Elli said her ABCs unprompted, without the music all by herself. She's 2 and she knows her ABCs. Maybe she'll test out of elementary school altogether. In honor of Elli's milestone achievement this week, I sought a recipe that somehow related to the alphabet. Once again, Taste of Home delivered.

ABC Muffins (no, I did not make up that title)

3 eggs

3/4 cup vegetable oil

1/2 cup applesauce

1/4 cup honey

1 package (18-1/4 oz) yellow cake mix

1 1/2 cups wheat bran

2 teaspoons ground cinnamon

In a mixing bowl, beat eggs, oil, applesauce and honey. Combine the dry cake mix, bran and cinnamon; add to egg mixture. Mix just until blended. Fill greased or paper-lined muffin cups two-thirds full. Bake at 350 degrees for 20-25 minutes or until the muffins test done.

Those of you who have read a few of these blog stories before know that I have an adversion to ingredients that are outside my grocery store comfort zone. But Elli was inspiration enough to send me on the adventure to find wheat bran. The whole story would take up a whole post, so here's the nutshell version: searched four aisles (to no avail), called both Grandmas for advice (to no avail), searched for store manager (to no avail), used iPhone to Google "where find wheat bran," found product description and picture online that led me to the jackpot in the "health market" section. Had the package not cost only $2, I would have given up at one Grandma call. All for you, Elli.

I set up sweet girl with a bowl of applesauce in front of her on the counter while I started cracking the eggs in the bowl. She helped me count them as I cracked them open. ABCs and 123s. She will graduate high school by age 10. She then helped me count out three 1/4 cupfuls of oil and pour in the applesauce from the jar. Her favorite part was next: squeezing the bear-shaped jar of honey as we measured out 1/4 cup of the sweet nectur. She tried her best to help me squeeze, but the bear was just too bulky for her little hands. The stream coming out of the bear's head was just the right size, though. She watched the stream of honey pouring out, carefully calculating her move.

Her aim was good, but her thrust was a little too hard, and honey ended up streaking down the page of my cookbook. This is why coated, wipeable pages are so important! Next step was blending it all together with the hand mixer.

"It's going to be a little loud," I warned her. I have to give her fair warning on things that are loud. Much like Mommy, she does not care for loud noises.

Elli marveled at the sight of the ingredients folding into one another. "Oooo, look at dat!" she said. The first time she has ever said that, by the way. Who knows where she picked that up. I looked in the bowl. It looked like liquid sunshine, whose brillance was accentuated even more by the stark white mixing bowl.

"Yeah, that looks pretty," I said. We turned to the dry ingredients. I had bought Pillsbury yellow cake mix for this recipe because not only do I love Pillsbury cake mixes (Funfetti, anyone?) but they were also on sale. Score. I tore open the bag of mix and breathed in the familiar pudding-in-the-mix smell.

"Ahhhh!" I sighed. And so began the game of Smell That. "Smell that, Elli," I said, holding the bag of cake mix close to her.

She leaned over and sniffed. "Mmmm, dat smell dood."

"You bet it does! And we are going to put this cake mix into this smaller bowl." She helped me dump the cake mix. "Now, Elli, smell that." I held the open bag of wheat bran under her nose. She sniffed. Dead silence. "I know, right?" I said. "Not as nice smelling as the cake mix." We measured out the wheat bran and added it to the little bowl. The cinnamon was a nice return to good smells, and Elli insisted on tasting the cinnamon. I sprinkled a little in her bowl of applesauce she had yet to finish.

That made her finish it. Meanwhile, I began mixing the dry and liquid ingredients together. The thick, shapeless, flex-less batter that formed did not instill in me much hope of a moist muffin, but there was only one way to truly found out what this recipe could do. Elli took on the task of lining the muffin pan with paper cups.

Then she ran point on determining which cups to fill and in which sequence. FYI: this batter does not pour so much as drop and plop. If you read the recipe closely it just says "fill" the muffin cups 2/3s full, but it doesn't say how to go about doing this. For me, spoon, scraper, elbow grease.

While the muffins baked, Elli cleaned...without using her tongue this time, thank you very much. She used a wet cloth like Mommy to wipe off the counters. About an hour later, Elli and Daddy shared the first taste of an ABC muffin. Elli's verdict: "That's deedishess!"

What other opinion could you need? She's a preteen college grad, after all.

Things Elli Could Do:

Count eggs and cupfuls

Help pour in ingredients

Expertly detect good smells from not-so-great smells

Drop in paper cup liners

Determine which muffin cups to fill and when

Overall ABC Muffins Ratings (5 being the best):

Elli-friendly cooking: 4

Elli-friendly eating: 5

Simple: 5

Fast: 5

Frugal: 5 (even factoring in cost of energy searching for wheat bran)

'Something Beautiful' in a Sausage Puff

The structure of childhood is built on phases. And right now Elli is going through some surprising phases in her entertainment tastes. As far as music, she is obstinently loyal to the Newsboys. To the point that the mere suggestion of listening to some other artist (like, say, I don't know, Chris Tomlin), can stir up a tempest no ship captain wants to see coming. Last Saturday afternoon, when I asked Elli if she wanted to listen to some music while we cooked, she said, "No Chris. Newsboys!" Sorry, Chris, buddy. You still have my heart, but for this toddler, Newsboys is where it's at. So, we turned on the greatest hits CD and settled in to make a new recipe, from my beloved Taste of Home cookbook. I was attracted to it because not only does it have only four ingredients and I thought Elli would love to play in the dough, but it also calls for sausage. For those of you keeping score, I'm down to five pounds of sausage from The Gift of a Third of a Pig last fall. I'm seriously considering donating the rest. Sausage Cheese Puffs 1 pound sausage 3 cups baking mix 4 cups cheddar cheese 3/4 cup water In skillet, cook and crumble sausage until no longer pink; drain. In a bowl, combine baking mix and cheese; stir in sausage. Add water and toss with a fork until moistened. Shape into 1 1/2 inch balls. Place 2 inches apart on ungreased baking sheets. Bake at 400 degrees for 12-15 minutes or until puffed and golden brown. Cool on wire racks. This recipe makes four dozen puffs. Four dozen. That's about three dozen too many for our family. You can freeze them, but we opted to take in about half to church with us the next morning, treating the nursery workers to a special surprise treat. I put on the sausage to cook while Elli help me prep the other ingredients. "First we need to measure out three cups of baking mix," I told her. We set the Pyrex measuring cup and large mixing bowl in front of us on the counter, and I picked up the box of baking mix and poured out the first cup. "That's one," I announced. "Can you pour that into the bowl?" She grabbed the cup's handle and attempted to lift it. It got about a quarter of an inch off the counter. "Ess too heavy," she said. "OK, I'll help you lift it up."

We poured it together into the bowl, and I measured out the next cup. "How many cups is that, Elli?" She paused, searching her memory. "Two!" "That's right, two. Let's pour it in the bowl." I measured out the last cup and asked, "How many is this?" "Ess two!" "It's three." "Es tee!" "Nicely done. Let's pour." Elli looked at the pile of mix in the bowl. Suddenly, she smiled. She pointed at the pile and exclaimed, "Cheese!" "No, honey, it's baking mix. It's like flour." She looked at the pile again. "Ess cheese!" Her finger approached the pile, and she looked sideways up at me in that 'look what I'm doing aren't you gonna stop me?' way. "I'm telling you, sweetheart, it's not cheese. You can try it, but I'm not sure you're going to like it." As a child, I used to eat that orange powder cheese like crazy, sucked it right out of the golden cannister like a Pixie Stick. I did not, however, eat baking mix in that way. Or at all, come to think of it. Elli ate the baking mix as if it were powder cheese. "Elli, you're ridiculous. If you want cheese, I have cheese. Take a look at this." I held up the two, two-cup bags of shredded Cheddar cheese. "We need to put this in the bowl too. Want to?" She licked the baking mix off her fingers and nodded. Confident she could go solo on the cheese, I opened the bag and handed them to her with the instructions to put the cheese in the bowl. She did awesome.

And I was able to give a little TLC to the cooking sausage. To my surprise, Elli did not try to swallow the cheese shreds whole, per her usual. She did, though, try to reach into the baking mix box to get more of the white stuff. "Seriously, Elli, I'm telling you it's not cheese." She just looked at me and continued to lick her fingers. "Oh boy," I muttered. I took that as a sign that she was too preoccupied to stir. So, I stirred, and Elli ate. By this time the sausage was cooked and cooled enough to add. I moved the bowl away from Elli, added the sausage, and stirred some more. "Want to help me add the water?" Elli nodded. And so the dough began to form. Ever try to stir a pound of sausage, two pounds of shredded cheese and three cups of baking mix? It was like trying to move wet sand with a spork. "Forget this," I said. "Let's use our hands." Elli watched as I rolled the dough over and over itself to blend all the ingredients together into a soft, gooey dough. "Time to make some balls." I showed her how to break off some dough and form it into some sort of semblence of a ball. "It's just like Play-Doh," I told her. Apparently, though, that trick only works once. She only picked apart the gob of dough I gave her. She just wasn't interested. She was interested, however, in the baking mix. "Cheese!" she said, scooping up the dusting on the counter.

I knew I had to distract her from the "cheese." The thing that worked was turning up the Newsboys. While I rolled out some puff balls, Elli shook her groove thing, which turns out to be a lot lower on Elli than you might think. (You'll probably need to crank up your volume to hear the music in the background of this video -- the stereo was in the other room. If you want to listen to the song that was playing, it was "Something Beautiful" by "No Chris.") Yes, she was licking the bowl. There was baking mix on the side. Though I had thought for sure this would be a recipe Elli would be enthralled with, it wasn't really. Oh well. They can't all be Jif Shakes. But we did get some tremendous laughs out of it, not to mention a week's worth of breakfast. Things Elli Could Do: Help measure and pour baking mix Dump in cheese Form dough (had she not been preoccupied with the baking mix) Eat things normal kids would not Overall Sausage Puffs Ratings (5 being the best): Elli-friendly cooking: 3 Elli-friendly eating: 4 Simple: 5 Fast: 4 Frugal: 5

Question of the Week: What is your favorite breakfast recipe?

Prepositions of the Ravioli Lasagna

After starting this blog, the influx of recipes coming my way has been tremendous. I'm very grateful to all of those who have forwarded recipes and offered tips. I read every one! Recently I was given a recipe that I knew Elli and I should try as soon as I read it. Shout out to Beth. She forwarded a recipe from the magazine All You (I had never heard of it until she told me about it). The magazine includes, among many other things, quick family-friendly recipes such as the one Beth alerted me to:

Weeknight Ravioli Lasagna

1 1/4 cup marinara sauce

1 20 oz package refrigerated cheese ravioli

1 10 oz box frozen chopped spinach, thawed and squeezed dry

8 oz shredded mozzarella cheese

1/4 cup grated Parmesan cheese

Lightly grease an 8x8 backing dish. Spoon 1/4 cup marinara over bottom of dish. Cover with half of ravioli. Spread half of remaining sauce over ravioli. Sprinkle with spinach and then half of mozzarella. Repeat with remaining ravioli, marinara and mozzarella. Sprinkle top with Parmesan. Cover with foil and back at 375 degrees for 30 minutes. Remove foil and back until bubbling, about 10 minutes longer. Let cool for about 5 minutes before serving.

Reading the recipe I saw a great opportunity to work with Elli on spatial relationships: on top, below, beside, etc. It's like a lesson on prepositions hidden in a recipe. Glorious. She'll be diagraming sentences by preschool. I could also introduce her to one food I have come to love as an adult. Yes, that lovely, underappreciated spinach. She's normally a veggie lover. How could this not turn out well? Turns out, the recipe put us in contact with the spinach right off the bat.

"Whas dat?" she asked, pointing at the unwrapped box of thawed spinach in the sink.

"That, precious girl, is a box of spinach. The spinach is very wet. We need to squeeze out the water, like this." I picked up the box and squeezed down. Green-tinted water streamed out. Elli's eyes lit up as if I were squeezing the bath water out of her rubber duck (which makes her giggle every time). We're off to a good start.

"It's doocey!" she squeeled.

"It's very juicy," I agreed.

She wanted some of that action. "Eddi do it!"

I helped her hold the box. "Here we go....squuueeeeze!" The water rushed out, streaming down her arms. She laughed.

"Skeeze!"

We squeezed again and again, the water coming in smaller and smaller streams until finally we got most of the water out.

"Open," she instructed me.

"What do you say?"

"Peas."

I opened the box and she looked at the contents quizzically. "That is the spinach," I told her. "Can you say spinach?"

"Pin-etch."

"Want to try some?" She picked up a little pinch of spinach and put it in her mouth. Sign #1 your child will never again consider placing spinach in her mouth: She suddenly grows very silent when it hits her tongue. 

She spit it out and said, "No pin-etch."

Despite the obvious, I held out hope, thinking that maybe if the spinach is covered in sauce and ravioli, she won't even notice she's eating it.

We moved over to the counter to begin the layering process. I had Elli hold the 1/4 cup measuring cup while I spooned out the right amount of sauce from the jar. "Now can you pour it in the pan?" I asked, pointing at the measuring cup and then at the baking dish.

She did it perfectly, and as I was spreading the sauce out in the bottom of the pan, Elli looked over at the opened package of ravioli and asked, "Whas dat?"

"That is ravioli."

"Radeedoughdee."

"Ravioli. I need you to help me put the ravioli in the pan. Let me show you how." I put the first piece in the corner of the pan. Then I grabbed another and told her,"I'll put this piece next to this piece. See that? Can you put another piece next to this one?" I pointed to the spot I meant. She reached into the package, picked up a ravioli, examined it, then put it down in the pan where my finger was pointing.

"Can you put another one next to it?" She repeated her process exactly, up until the point of placement, choosing a spot on the opposite side of the pan. "Nice. Keep going. Let's put some more ravioli in the pan." She grabbed the ravioli one by one and placed them carefully into the pan, in no particular order, which is to say in "toddler order."

When she had placed what I estimated was about half, I told her it was time to put the spinach on top of the ravioli. I showed her how to grab a little bit of spinach and put it on top of the layer of ravioli.

"Just like that. Okay, now your turn." She grabbed a fistful of spinach and plopped the hunk down on the ravioli. I could practically hear the hunk smack the ravioli when it fell. "That's big. Can you tear it up to make it small?"

She looked at the hefty wad of spinach slowly denting the top of the ravioli and replied flatly, "No." She instead picked up another hunk and put it next to the first one, and then another one.

Those three hunks equalled half of the spinach. I pulled the box out of her reach and showed her how to tear the spinach into small pieces. She watched me, unresponsive to my prompts for help. Sign #2 your child won't consider putting spinach in her mouth: She does whatever she can to avoid being in contact with it for too long. With the spinach in smaller quantities, I grabbed the bag of cheese.

"What's this, Elli?"

"Cheese!" she exclaimed, as if saying, "Ah, my old friend. How delightful to see you again."

"Where does it go?" I asked.

"On top," she replied. Oh, she's good. Getting her to touch cheese, not a problem. With the first layers complete, I picked up the jar of sauce and together we poured what I estimated was half all over the layers, then we started again with arranging the ravioli.

I was wrong on my estimate of half of the ravioli. It was just a wee bit crowded on that layer, but it all works just the same.

"What is this?" I asked Elli, showing her the half-empty box of green stuff.

"Pinetch!"

"Where does it go?"

"On top!" she said, patting the ravioli. This time I broke up the spinach for her before she grabbed handfuls; worked so much better...when she actually picked up the spinach, that is. I realized at this point that perhaps an 8x8 pan is not big enough because the layers easily surpassed the top of the dish. I smooshed the layers down a little, which helped some. After we had completed the last layer of cheese and sprinkled on the Parmesan, I put a few toothpicks throughout the pan to keep the foil off the top layers. When I had put the pan in the oven, I turned to Elli and said, "All done. Now all was have to do is clean up." I set up about wiping off the counters, and Elli did her part by cleaning off the measuring cup.

The Ravioli Lasagna was a hit, even though my pan was a bit too small and Elli did break my heart by refusing to eat the spinach. In a last-ditch effort, I tried to convince her that spinach was grass, hoping the novelty was enough to get it in her tummy. No avail. She further crushed my spirit by picking off each strand of spinach from the pieces of ravioli before eating the ravioli. Sensing my love for the spinach, she would kindly hand it to me as she picked it off.

Maybe next time I'll use half the amount of spinach or use spinach and cheese ravioli instead of the plain cheese. I'll probably also prep the lasagna ahead of time if Elli is assisting instead of trying to make it all in one night to make it truly "weeknight" friendly in our house. 

Things Elli Could Do:
What couldn't she do?

Overall Weeknight Ravioli Lasagna Ratings (5 being the best):
Elli-friendly cooking: 5
Elli-friendly eating: sigh, 4 if you remove the spinach
Simple: 5
Fast: 4
Frugal: 4

Question of the Week: What food do you wish your child (or you, for that matter) liked?