Little House Party

Looly's 6th birthday is coming up later this week. I'll spare you the where has the time gone gush since truth be told, it hasn't been all hugs and rainbows. Sure she's decent kid now but I still haven't forgiven her for four months of colic. Or the Northwest Airlines diaper incident of 2006. She knows what I'm talking about.

Despite our rocky start, I've grown rather fond of the little moppet in recent years. And she has had some kick ass birthday parties, including last year's Little House on the Prairie Pioneer Camp Out.

Tin cup party favors, bonnets, and covered wagon models for all!

Fresh squeezed lemonade. Ma would have remembered to take the tags off the bottoms of the cups

I wore that pink dress as a flower girl in a wedding in the early 1980's and my grandmother sewed the red and gold number for my sister in the 1970's. That's right, baby. Vintage. Nana picked up the bonnets at an Amish market.

Sullen prairie girl. You'd think we made her live in a dugout.

Making beeswax candles

Setting up for the water pail relay. Girls v. Boys

Camping safety debriefing with Pa

Tent-pitching chaos

The frosting is tinted with a raspberry juice. No artificial dyes in LHOTP!

Looly Ingalls Wilder

This year she's doing it up with a baking-themed art party. Try not to fall off the edge of your seat in anticipation. Happy almost 6th birthday, Looly. Thanks for learning to use the outhouse.

Happy Food Allergy Awareness Week

And of course, a very Happy Mother's Day too!

In what was to be a most apropos kickoff of Food Allergy Awareness Week, the kiddos (with a little help from Mufasa) prepared me a lovely Mother's Day breakfast.

Yup, that's a sun dried tomato and feta omelet with fresh pico de gallo, berry fruit cup, hot coffee, and they did not overlook my propensity for carbs with a croissant and toast.

Roo chopping feta

Looly slicing kumquats for the fruit salad

Bean cracking eggs for my omelet

Roo's turn for egg-cracking

And then...

The photos don't do the hives justice since when he first started reacting I was much too busy overreacting to snap photos. The single drop of Benadryl we got him to drink did little to remedy the situation since it, along with a cup of freshly chewed fruit salad, ended up all over his shirt. Once I was fairly certain we wouldn't be celebrating Mother's Day in the emergency room, I managed to document the event for the allergist.

In retrospect we should have known better but this was his first time reacting to touching egg. He didn't actually ingest any at all.

Still, despite a few itchy spots, it turned out to be a tremendous Mother's Day. My kids, and their Dad, rock.

So like I said, Happy Mother's Day! And Happy Food Allergy Awareness Week! In our house you can't have one without the other.

Looly's Extra-Fancy Vietnamese Cinnamon Apples

After much anticipation, Looly finally got to put her Extra-Fancy Vietnamese Cinnamon to the test. Did I mention this is no ordinary cinnamon. It's extra-fancy. What separates extra-fancy cinnamon from regular cinnamon, you ask? A mini-tuxedo and top hat perhaps? Sadly no. But Penzeys claims their Vietnamese Cinnamon is the strongest, richest, and sweetest cinnamon around, so hold onto your top hats, people. Looly is understandably impressed.

Personally I've been craving rot your teeth, chisel out of the pan cinnamon rolls with cream cheese icing, but always the picture of moderation, Looly chose simple warm cinnamon apples instead. She is like her mother in other ways.

Hacking Peeling some apples

Grating the nutmeg

Go time!

Looly's Extra-Fancy Vietnamese Cinnamon Apples

6 Granny Smith (or other tart) apples, peeled, cored, and sliced into wedges
1/2 cup brown sugar
2 tsp. Penzeys Extra-Fancy Vietnamese Cinnamon
1 Tbsp. lemon juice
1/8 tsp. nutmeg
1/8 tsp. salt
2 Tbsp. butter

1. Combine apple slices, brown sugar, cinnamon, lemon juice, nutmeg and salt in a large bowl. Toss to coat.

2. Melt butter in a large pan over medium heat. Add apple mixture and cook until soft, about 10-12 minutes.

3. To make them extra-fancy, top with a dollop of whipped cream, sprig of mint and a bit of lemon zest. Dig in!

Pretty fancy, eh?

Nopales Salad (AKA Cactus Leaf Salad)

 

The fascination with cacti began with our trip to Albuquerque in March. Looly, Bean, and Roo had never seen a cactus in person and found it highly unlikely that such menacing plant life actually existed outside of cartoons. This is somewhat ironic since from my vast research (Wikipedia) I know that prickly pear cacti are a prominent feature at Illinois Beach State Park just north of Chicago. Apparently we don't get out much.

They were already impressed. Then I told them we could eat the beasts.

The first challenge was buying prickly pear leaves, or nopales. Note I didn't say we had trouble finding cactus. Buying the dang things, however, proved a bit of an issue, being that no one, including the manager of our local Dominick's grocery store seemed to have the faintest idea how cactus pads might have made it inside their store, let alone what to call them, or how one might go about ringing them up at a cash register. Many tense moments passed before I agreed to a haggled price of 88 cents per pound. Is this a fair price for nopales? I've no idea.

Slicing off thorny spines with the Santoku occupied the next half hour. I didn't even impale myself. Much. Then I gave each child a small sample of raw cactus to try which they promptly spewed back at me with tortured grimaces and vile curses. Turns out chopped raw cactus is a little slimy. Just saying.

That was the moment I realized I didn't know what I was going to with all this cactus. Back to the Internet. Someone mentioned that boiled nopales taste a little like green beans so I decided to trust them and put together a salad.

Note: I started with 8 cactus leaves. You probably don't need that many. As it was my first time I'm pretty sure I shaved off way more leaf than I needed to in order to avoid eating spines later. There are a few YouTube videos of people cleaning cactus leaves much more efficiently that I did. So as I was saying...

Nopales (AKA Cactus Leaf) Salad

5-8 prickly pear cactus leaves (nopales), spines and edges removed, sliced into small strips or pieces
1 medium onion (half to boil in water with nopales, other half chopped for the salad)
1 Tbsp. salt
1 large tomato, seeded and chopped
1 red, orange, or yellow bell pepper, chopped
1 medium ripe avocado
3 Tbsp. cilantro, finely chopped
2 Tbsp. fresh oregano, chopped
1 serrano pepper, seeded and minced
1 clove garlic, minced
1 lemon, zest and juice
1 cup queso fresco, crumbled
2 Tbsp. olive oil
salt and pepper to taste

1. Bring a large pot of water to a boil. Add half an onion, 1 Tbsp. salt, and the nopales. Boil about 12 minutes. Be careful it doesn't boil over.
2. Remove nopales from stove, drain, rinse in cold water. Discard onion.
3. Combine cold nopales, chopped onion, tomato, bell pepper, avocado, cilantro, oregano, serrano pepper, garlic, lemon zest, and queso fresco in large bowl and toss together.
4. In separate bowl, whisk lemon juice, olive oil, salt and pepper. Pour over salad and toss to coat.

Gotta admit, even I'm a little impressed with me. Isn't it lovely? And it tasted awesome. Next time, tortilla chips on the side.

Traversing the Restaurant Scene with Food Allergies

I want my kids to see the world before they're too cool to hold my hand. I want them to run their fingers along the weather-pocked stone of the Mayan temples I keep telling them about. I want them to know the sharp sting of black sand on the soles of their feet and the cool melt of ahi on their tongues. They should be sticking their noses into steaming pots of dal in India and sampling nshima in Zambia where their father was born. Our passports are up to date. I even bought a new bathing suit but sadly we won't be boarding an Airbus any time soon. Damn you, food allergies. I want to go on vacation!

OK, so we're not quite ready to tackle international travel yet, but as I mentioned in a previous post, we're inching toward mobility. Over the course of the past four years of dealing with Roo's allergies (now down to eggs, peanuts, tree nuts, beef, and peach) we're starting to get the hang of this eating on the road gig.

First things first. When we go to a restaurant we always have Roo's epi-pens and Benadryl. Always.

We call ahead whenever possible to get a rundown of how the restaurant handles allergies, what food items are safe, and what type of oil they use to fry stuff. We do not call to ask these questions at 7:00 pm on a Saturday night.

Once we get our menus, we ask all of the allergy questions again and compare answers. Often they are not the same as those received on the phone.

We keep an emergency snack bag in the car with a few small items in case we can't find something safe and need to buy ourselves some time. This bag contains fruit snacks, pretzels, and Dum Dum lollipops at a minimum. Bananas and turkey roll-ups do not keep well in the car. 

When someone, say a busy waitress, takes time to find out once and for all if there is egg in the fusilli pasta and returns with the label torn from a box, we do not let this act go unrequited. We are chronic over tippers. This is not a bad thing.

And we're learning to relax.

Eating out with food allergies is a risk but so is everything else worth doing. Every time Roo works his way across the monkey bars I worry that the kid before him had peanut butter on his fingers. Every time Looly goes on a play date I worry that there's an unsecured firearm in the house. Every time Bean opens our back gate on a stormy day I worry a gust of wind is going to smack the iron handle into her teeth. But somehow the monkey bars get crossed, the play date gets played, and the gate gets secured once more.

I guess that's what we do. I can't protect them from everything. For Roo, eating buttered noodles and broccoli from a kids menu is just one of those things.

Goldilocks finds her Apron

When you're 5 (or 35), a large part of kitchen success centers on wearing a cute apron.

All aprons are not created equal.  Some droop low and gape at the chest leaving flour and chicken stock to trickle down your shirt. Some hike up high on the clavicles, never resting comfortably against a necklace or collar.  Others are made of flimsy fabric that provides little protection to cashmere against an assault of stewed tomatoes. Too long, not long enough, too plain, too ruffly, too stiff, and someone please tell me, what is the purpose of a half-apron in the kitchen?

Then there are the ties. Listen up, apron makers of the world, apron strings must be sewn to tie comfortably behind the back of the wearer without a clothesline's worth of excess. Alternatively, the strings may be precisely long enough to wrap around the waist once and knot at the belly button. A rough average between these two lengths is unacceptable. 

Good news, Goldilocks. We have found our perfect porridge!

Cute, right? These aprons are from Forshee Designs on Etsy.com and they are awesome.

Bright, modern, custom fabrics, sizes that make sense for growing kids (none of this fits ages 2-12 nonsense), adjustable velcro neck straps, and perfect tie-length set these lovelies apart in our drawer full of cast-offs. Check them out in action. 

Bean's Vanilla Night

Bean loves Horizon Vanilla Milk boxes so imagine her delight when she found out we could make vanilla milk at home using the Mexican Single-Strength Vanilla Extract she picked out at Penzey's earlier this month.

Bean's Vanilla Milk

2 Cups milk
2 Tbsp. granulated sugar
2 tsp. vanilla extract (not imitation)
sprinkle of ground cinnamon (optional)

Warm the milk over low heat in a saucepan. Add sugar and stir until dissolved. Stir in vanilla. Pour into pretty cups and top with a smidgen of cinnamon if you like.

To up the fancy factor, we served the milk warm in the same tiny green teacups I used to drink from at my Grammy Arta's house when I was Bean's age.

Why yes, that is a pink monkey nightgown on Roo.

Since warm vanilla milk is best sipped alongside a tasty treat, we made heart-shaped shortbread cookies dipped in dark chocolate.  We used this simple Shortbread Cookie recipe from JoyofBaking.com and Bean was thrilled that we got to put her vanilla to work again. The cookies were crumbly, buttery, and delicious.

Looly and Roo measuring flour

Their perfectly measured 260 grams

Bean and her own vanilla

Ready for the oven

Why not dip a few pretzels too?

yum!

Still to come, Looly's Vietnamese Extra Fancy Cinnamon.