kitchenmage

Win a copy of Picture Yourself Cooking With Your Kids

Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

Don't tell anyone but I am giving away a copy of my new cookbook over on the book's site. Enter before midnight on Christmas Eve for a chance to win a signed copy.

Dish up literacy! Dine out for a good cause

Eat out on Thursday, September 18, at a Dish Up Literacy restaurant and they will donate a at least 20% of their proceeds to help provide new books and reading resources to children in need.  Dish Up Literacy, a benefit for Page Ahead Children’s Literacy Program, allows diners to put books in the hands of kids simply by going out to eat.

There are a number of great restaurants participating: Julia's, Macrina Bakery, FX McRory's, Ten Mercer and others.  If you aren't in Seattle, there are options for you, too. One of my favorite local breakfast cafes, The Place Family Restaurant is even involved. Must be my excuse to eat Northwest Eggs Benedict (made with crab cakes instead of Canadian Bacon).  Check out who's participating at Dish Up Literacy.

Neal, eat your vegetables!

The tubes of the interwebs have many strange and wonderful things in them. Facebook is both strange and wonderful, largely because people can use it to their own ends and it is always fun to see what they come up with. Case in point: Operation Make Neal Eat Vegetables, which endeavors to get Neal to, well, eat his vegetables.

What is the deal with Neal and his vegetables?

The hands of a child

I need to do a quick bit of data collection for the project that shall not be named and hope that some of the parents out there can give me a hand. I need to know the size of kid's hands at various ages/sizes. If you have a few minutes, would you please consider giving me a hand. Well, one of your kid's hands.

Here's what I need to know:

• Length from wrist to middle fingertip
• Width across palm, without thumb
• Age of child
• General size for age (short/average/tall)
• General build/weight

bonus points
I am also trying to get an idea of the volume of a fist. My preferred method for assessing this is pretty accurate and just messy enough to be fun for small people. Fill a deep bowl with water, leaving it in the sink. Have your child make a fist and stick it into the water up to the wrist. (see why it is in the sink?) Remove the fist from the water and refill the bowl with water from a measuring cup. How much water did it take?

Alternatively, with hand in a fist, measure around the widest part and from wrist to wrist (over the top). But really, that's not as much fun as the water.

Comments on kitchenMage are moderated so if you'd like to help out while not publicly divulging this data, just say so and I will note the numbers and delete the comment without it seeing the light of LCD display. If you prefer to drop me a note, it's kitchenMage(at)gmail(dot)com.

Thanks!

Apple Puffcake recipe

Lazy Sunday mornings. Light peeking in the window spills over the bed where those who resist the dawn snuggle in for just another minute or two. No agenda beyond a leisurely morning of tea, catching up on my friends on the tubes of the Internet, maybe a crossword puzzle...

Um, yeah. I remember those days.

Quick question for the vegetarians, vegans and the like...

I am in the middle of writing a cookbook and would like to include some tips for parents of children who have declared they will no longer eat food with faces. Whether it's nutrition, the meatless recipe that you cooked 3-4 times a week at first, or the delicate handling a child who seems to be rejecting your lovingly prepared meal, parents need help with this. So, two simple questions:

• If you could some advice to the parents of a newly vegetarian/vegan child, what would it be?
• What is the worst thing you can do if your child decides to eat a meatless diet? (Personal experiences from hell are welcome.)

Thanks for your contributions, everyone.

Quick tips to make you a better cook

A new cook has so many things to remember. All those terms (in French, no less); which tool to use for which task; how to take a whole, raw ingredient like a pineapple and turn it into pineapple slices; the difference between coarsely diced, finely diced and minced.

Lately, I have been recognizing how lucky I was to learn my way around a kitchen surrounded by a largish family of people offering tips along the way. I always had someone to ask leading questions ("The rice will be ready in half an hour, do you think the chicken should go in the oven?"), whisper reminders and correct bad technique. I have been saved from a large number of disasters, and the related discouragement, over the years by a well-placed bit of advice.

English muffins and crumpets: an (almost) shared recipe

Many questions have plagued humankind for eons:

• Are we alone in the universe?
• Does god exist?
• What is the meaning of life?
• What is the difference between English muffins and crumpets?

Well folks, after a day of research and experimentation, I have the answer to one of those. No, not the first three - I took the tough one: English muffins v. crumpets.

One might wonder how dull my day was to spend it hunting down the answer to such a  question, and one might be right. In my defense, however, that's not what I started out to do...

Berry Marshmallows with Chocolate recipe

The first week of January is the time of year for lofty goals and noble aspirations and the food world is no exception. Food-related resolutions seem to fall into two categories: Proscriptive and prescriptive. There are far more of the former and they mostly take the form of "I will change my diet by not eating sugar, fat, HFCS, bread, chocolate, and so on." There are, to be fair, some positive "I will eat..." resolutions out there (mine is to grow some vegetables along with the herbs in my garden) but most of them are framed in the negative. What a way to start the year, with a list of things you are going to deny yourself!

Far more fun are the prescriptive resolutions. I particularly like "I will make ____ for the first time." and the ones that start "I will learn to..." If I was forced to make New Year's resolutions - and thankfully, I am not - I would fall into this camp so I have a soft spot for them.

Plastic knife pot roast (with recipe)

Tonight I bring you the tale of the plastic knife and the pot roast, in which we will attempt to answer the question: Will the little red plastic knife be able to cut up vegetables for a pot roast or will it have to call on the reinforcement knife lurking in the background?

The bright red beauty is a Zyliss salad knife - theory being that if you cut your salad with plastic/nylon instead of metal the lettuce won't oxidize and turn icky brown. I tear lettuce for salad by hand so that purpose was of little interest to me, but I have been looking for kid-safe tools and wondered if it would work to cut veggies but not fingers. 

Setting my expectations at some reasonable level, I decided that I would try something soft to start with. Handing the knife and a tomato to someoneElse, I watched, ready to admit defeat when the knife mangled the tomato.

Except it didn't.