Cooking with Grace

Summer is here (for some kids) and that probably means a lot of playing outside or in the pool in the hot weather. A popsicle can be a nice treat and making homemade popsicles can also be really fun. Here are a few ideas–just pour the mixtures into popsicle molds or into dixie cups/regular plastic cups with those wooden craft sticks. If they aren’t coming out easily, run the plastic cup under some warm water and twist it to remove it.

1. Creamy Fruit Pops- In a blender, blend 2 cups of fresh fruit (strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, mango, cantaloupe, or others) with a little bit of fruit juice or milk (1/4 cup). Stir in vanilla ice cream one scoop at a time until the mixture is the consistency of a thin smoothie. Pour into containers and freeze.

2. Chocolate Banana Popsicles- In the blender, combine 2 bananas with 1/2 cup of milk, 1/4 cup of plain yogurt, and a few large squeezes of chocolate syrup. Stir in chocolate chips if you want, then pour into containers and freeze.

3. Lemonade or Limeade Popsicles- Make lemonade with fresh lemon juice or lime juice according to your favorite recipe, adjusting it so that the lemonade is a bit stronger than usual. Pour into containers and freeze. You can also add a drop of red food coloring for pink lemonade popsicles.

You can also dilute your favorite ice cream with milk (or your favorite sherbet with fruit juice) and freeze in containers. Encourage kids to get creative with inventing their own recipes and mixing different fruits and flavors. Good luck and have a great summer!

Making breakfast in bed for a mom on Mother’s Day is a very nice present. However,  most kids don’t even know where to start or what kinds of foods to make. My mom likes scones, so I’ve posted her favorite recipe here. It’s not as dry as scones are normally because it’s made with buttermilk, which keeps the scones moist and delicious. I add chocolate chips and dried cherries, but you can use all chocolate, all cherries, or other dried fruits if you want. Serving scones with hot tea, coffee, orange juice, or whatever drink your mom prefers can be a breakfast all by itself! Or you can make toast in the toaster and serve it with butter and fruit preserves on the side. If you know how to cook eggs, you can make an omlet or scrambled eggs and serve them along with the rest of the breakfast. Here’s the scone recipe:

Ingredients:

2 cups flour

¼ cup sugar

1 ¼ teaspoon baking powder

¼ teaspoon baking soda

¼ teaspoon salt

1 stick cold butter, cut into pieces

½ cup each chocolate chips and dried cherries

1 teaspoon vanilla

2/3 cup buttermilk

1 egg

1 tablespoon milk

Directions:

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. In a large bowl, whisk together flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Cut the butter into small pieces and blend together with flour mixture using two knives. It should look like crumbs. Stir in the chocolate chips and the cherries. Whisk together buttermilk and vanilla and stir into the flour mixture. Gently knead dough 4 or 5 times on a lightly floured surface. Pat dough into a circle and cut into 8 pizza-shaped slices. Make an egg wash of one tablespoon milk and one egg, beaten together, and brush it on top of the scones. Sprinkle tops with sugar and bake for 15 to 20 minutes.

Here are three candy recipes that I love. They are all really fun for kids to make and the last one is very easy for even little kids to make (it only has two ingredients):

1) Butter crunch– this candy is almost exactly like toffee except it is softer and chewier due to the low temperature at which the butter-sugar mixture is cooked. I found the recipe in a 1942 Woman’s Home Companion cookbook. To make butter crunch, melt 1 cup butter over low heat and add 1 cup sugar. Stir until the sugar dissolves. Add 1/8 cup of water and 1 Tablespoon of corn syrup. Cook over low heat until it reaches 290 degrees F on a candy thermometer. Stir slowly to prevent burning. Remove from heat and stir in 2/3 cup of almonds. Pour into a buttered pan and let cool. Melt 4 ounces of chocolate or chocolate chips and spread the melted chocolate over the top. Sprinkle it with 1/3 cup almonds that have been chopped finely. If you want, you can spread chocolate and almonds on the other side, too.

2) Peppermint Patties–this recipe is from the same cookbook: Combine 1 cup of water, 2 cups of sugar, and 2 Tablespoons of corn syrup in a saucepan. Stir gently over low heat until the sugar is dissolved. Bring to a boil, then cover and boil for 3 minutes. Remove the cover and keep boiling (without stirring) until the temperature reaches 240 degrees F on a candy thermometer. Tip: If crystals form on the side of the saucepan as the mixture boils. The cookbook recommends using a damp cloth wrapped around the tines of a fork. Pour the syrup onto a marble slab or saucepan that has been sprinkled with cold water. If you have marble countertops, you can do this right on the counter. Do not scrape the pan. Let the syrup cool to 110 degrees F on a candy thermometer. Once it has cooled, use a broad spatula or a knife/spoon to “work it smoothly, toward the center of the slab.” As it cools, it will begin to look like icing and then harden into fondant. Knead the mixture to soften it and then place the fondant into the top of a double boiler. Heat over medium heat (DO NOT BOIL) and stir in a teaspoon of peppermint extract. Drip the melted fondant onto wax paper with a spoon and make circular patty shapes. When they harden, dip them into melted chocolate and let them cool.

3) Peanut Butter Cups–Peanut butter cups are really easy to make. Just melt chocolate or chocolate chips and pour the melted chocolate into a cupcake liner in a cupcake tin (just enough to cover the bottom). Then place a few teaspoons of peanut butter on top of the chocolate and cover with more melted chocolate. Kids may also enjoy decorating the tops with M&Ms, sprinkles, or other candies. Refrigerate until the chocolate has hardened.

Mexican wedding cookies are small, crumbly cookies covered in powdered sugar. We made them at cooking camp over the summer a few years ago and they were very fun for the kids to roll in sugar. They were also fun to eat

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees. Grind 1/2 cup almonds and 1/2 cup pecans in a food processor until they are almost like a powder. Add 2 sticks of cold butter (cut into pieces) into the food processor and pulse for a few seconds. Add ¼ cup powdered sugar, 2 1/2 teaspoons of vanilla, and 1/2 teaspoon of almond extract into the processor. Pulse for a few seconds and then add a cup of flour. Pulse a few more seconds, then add another cup of flour. Make small cookie dough balls out of the mixture and put them on a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper. Bake for 15 to 20 minutes, or until the bottoms start to turn brown. Once the cookies cool a little, roll them in powdered sugar and cool again. Roll in powdered sugar again. Eat.

I made a potato salad a few days ago from a recipe in a book that my mom and I found a few years ago on vacation in Missouri. This is one of the best potato salads I’ve ever had!  Here’s the recipe:

Ingredients

4 slices bacon, chopped

2 Tablespoons chopped onion

1/4 cup vinegar

2 Tablespoons water

3 Tablespoons sugar

1 teaspoon salt

1/8 teaspoon pepper

3 cups cubed potatoes (cooked)

1 Tablespoon parsley, chopped finely

Directions:

Fry the bacon and onion together until the bacon is cooked. In a small bowl, stir together the vinegar, water, sugar, salt, and pepper. Stir the vinegar mixture into the bacon pan and cook for one minute.  Add the cooked potatoes and the parsley.

Today, my mom told me about a cupcake frosting that she had which tasted just like marshmallows. It is called seven-minute icing, made by beating egg whites and sugar over a double boiler with a hand mixer for seven minutes. I tried it today and it turned out beautifully! Apparently, the recipe is an old southern tradition which TV chefs such as Paula Deen and Alton Brown have prepared on their shows. It makes a really fluffy, delicious, and pretty icing for cupcakes. It also looks very nice with sprinkles on it. Here is Paula Deen’s recipe, although there are many other ones on the internet: http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/paula-deen/7-minute-frosting-recipe/index.html

*Tip: Don’t let the double boiler pan touch the water, or the icing will turn grainy. Good luck!

Foods that are “in season” can be a lot better tasting and a lot cheaper than foods that are out of season. This is because foods that are grown locally and at the peak of production are shipped over a shorter distance, making them more fresh and less expensive. Here is a map of the United States which shows the produce that is in season for each month: http://www.epicurious.com/articlesguides/seasonalcooking/farmtotable/seasonalingredientmap

The produce that is in season right now is very easy to use in foods that kids will enjoy. Lettuce and spinach can be used in salads paired with dressings that kids like (Ranch, for example) and fun toppings like cheddar cheese, crumbled bacon, or another vegetable that kids like. Salad bars can be a lot of fun if kids are given interesting toppings! Strawberries are also in season this month. You can use them in fruit salads or eat them as an after-school snack with a sweet dip (store-bought or homemade: vanilla yogurt with honey and fruit preserves stirred in). Or for a dessert that kids will have fun making, you can melt chocolate chips and dip strawberries into them, then cool them on wax paper. Adding nonpareil sprinkles or drizzling melted white chocolate over the top can be a lot of fun too. Here is my recipe using strawberries for a tropical fruit salad from the summer class I taught last year:

Ingredients:

3 oranges

1 can cubed pineapple

1 large can mandarin oranges

1 box fresh strawberries

A few drops of lemon juice

Maraschino cherries

Sweetened flaked coconut

Directions:

Cut each of the oranges in half horizontally. Scoop out the insides and put them in a blender or food processor. In a large bowl, combine the pineapple cubes and mandarin oranges. Slice the strawberries and stir them in. Pulse the orange insides in the blender and strain them into a bowl. Mix the juice with the lemon juice, and Pour it over the fruit salad in the bowl. Serve the fruit salad into the orange halves and garnish them with cherries and coconut.

Saint Patrick’s Day is a great time to try some new Irish foods! Little kids will love to dye foods green and older ones will have fun tasting foods that they may never have had before. I shared my mom’s Irish soda bread recipe last year (we make it together every year and it’s a lot of fun). Just click on the link on the right side of this article to get to the March 2009 archive. Another fun recipe to try is Colcannon. It is similar to what is known as “bubble and squeak” in England, a dish made from mashed potatoes and cabbage–you can also use kale in place of the cabbage if you like. Here’s an easy recipe:

Boil one pound of potatotes until they are soft, then mash them and season them with butter, milk, and salt as you normally would. In a seperate pot, boil the cabbage until it is no longer crunchy (you don’t want it to be too soggy though). Drain the cabbage and reserve it in a seperate bowl. Cook 2 or 3 slices of bacon in a large saucepan along with 1/4 to 1/2 of a small onion (chopped) and add the reserved cabbage.  Stir in the mashed potatoes and serve. Many old recipes also recommend using a pinch of mace to season the dish. Some people like to make a small indenation in each serving and fill it with melted butter.

If you have shamrock-shaped cookie cutters, they can be used as molds with this next recipe for Rice Krispy treats:

In a large saucepan, melt 1/4 cup of butter over low heat. Add one 10 oz. package of marshmallows and stir until they have completely melted. Add 3-4 drops of green food coloring and remove from heat. Stir in 6 cups of Rice Krispies cereal. You can press the Rice Krispies into a baking pan lined with wax paper and then cut them into squares, or you can wait for them to cool down a little and the mold them by pressing them into a cookie cutter and then letting them rest on a sheet of wax paper. This recipe is super-easy for little kids to help with, too!

Irish stews are also very popular on Saint Patrick’s Day. Irish people mainly raised sheep and grew root vegetables before migrating to America during the potato famine of the late 1840s and early 1850s. A common meal for people who did work like this was a stew made from lamb, potato, onion, and parsley. Since the recipe arrived in America, people have begun to using other types of meat and adding beer to the stews. Another traditional Irish recipe which has been “Americanized” is corned beef. Although many people think of this dish as Irish, the closest thing to it that is actually from Ireland is bacon and cabbage (cooked pork and cabbage simmered with herbs and garlic and served as kind of a stew). The use of corned beef began in New York City’s Lower East Side as a cheap alternative to pork–suggested to Irish immigrants by their Jewish neighbors. I hope that everyone enjoys these recipes and has a great Saint Patrick’s Day!

Hello Everybody! Valentine’s Day will be here very soon! It’s always so fun for kids to exchange Valentines, especially if they are home-made or if they involve candy/sweets. Here are some ideas for the very best possible combination- homemade AND sweet!!

* Use my almond toffee recipe to make delicious chocolate-covered toffee (you can make it in a baking dish then break it into peices, or you can rub the inside of a plastic or metal cookie cutter with a bit of butter and use it as a heart-shaped mold): In a saucepan, heat 2 sticks of butter (cut up) with 1 1/2 cups of sugar, a Tablespoon of lite corn syrup, and 2 Tablespoons of water until the butter is melted. Then leave the heat on medium-low and let it cook without stirring until it is golden and the temperature is 300° F. Stir 1/2 cup of chopped almonds into the mixture carefully, and then pour a little into each buttered cookie cutter (you can also use shapes other than hearts) or into a buttered baking dish. Once they have cooled, remove them from the molds if you used molds, and spread melted chocolate chips on each side, sprinkling with crushed almonds if you want and waiting for each side to harden before flipping them over.

* Cover pretzel rods or smaller pretzel twists in melted chocolate. You can use milk chocolate or white chocolate, and drizzle the opposite color chocolate over the pretzel (which looks fancy and is very impressive!) Or you can use valentines sprinkles before the chocolate hardens. If you cover the whole pretzel twist in chocolate, it looks like a little heart- perfect for Valentine’s Day!

* Make traditional Valentine’s “love knot” cookies, which are shaped like the symbol for infinity- a sideways 8- because love goes on forever and are golden-colored (never tarnishes) because of the infinity-shaped gold pins worn on Valentine’s Day in the Middle Ages. The recipe is from a cookbook called “A Continual Feast” which includes recipes for holidays and saints’ days from all around the world http://www.amazon.com/Continual-Feast-Celebrate-Throughout-Christian/dp/0898703840. Preheat the oven to 375 °F. Beat 1 cup butter until soft, then add 1 cup sugar and blend until fluffy. Beat in 2 eggs, 1 egg yolk, 1/4 cup sour cream, a few drops of yellow food coloring (for the “gold”) and 1 teaspooon vanilla extract. Sift (or whisk) 2 1/2 cups of flour and then add it to the dough. Chill the dough for about 1/2 hour and remove it a little at a time (this will make it easier to handle). Roll it out in between hands into a rope- I prefer to make skinny ropes because they expand it the oven. Bake them for about 15 minutes. If you would like, you can add golden sprinkles on the tops, I made some with red sprinkles and they also turned out nicely. You can add a teaspoon of grated lemon rind to the dough if you like (it was in the original recipe) but I prefer it plain.

* Instead of- or in addition to- making regular sugar cookies to decorate for friends at Valentine’s Day, try this recipe for butterscotch cutout cookies from Virginia Pasley’s cookie book: Preheat the oven to 350° F. In a bowl, whisk together 1/2 cup brown sugar and 1/2 cup white sugar. Cream 1/2 cup of butter with the sugars slowly, creaming well. Add 2 eggs, one by one. In a seperate bowl, whisk together 3 cups of flour with 1/2 teaspoon salt and 1/2 teaspoon baking soda. Add this to the original dough alternately with a teaspoon of vanilla which has been mixed with a Tablespoon of water. Chill for an hour, then roll out and cut with cookie cutters. Bake for 15 minutes. These cookies have a flavor which is definitely kid-friendly but different from sugar cookies, although the two look very similar. They can be decorated with sprinkles or icing.

Icing Recipes

Making your own icing can be so much fun! For more delicate cookies or cakes, let kids stir water (from a dropper if you want to be careful) into powdered sugar until it is as thick or thin as you want. This makes a great pourable icing  to drizzle over little tea cakes, etc.

For an icing that can be piped out of a ziplock bag (fill the baggie with icing and then snip off a corner with scissors) use this recipe from Wilton http://www.wilton.com/recipe/Buttercream-Icing and use food dye to make any color you want.

So, after the cutouts I made a few more types of cookies but then our oven broke and I couldn’t finish the last 2 recipes  I still haven’t finished the all of the cookies I had planned on making, but I have been cooking a lot aside from that. I made some delicious chocolate truffles (in peppermint and orange flavors) to give as Christmas gifts and cooked Christmas Dinner with my mom. I also made a chocolate-caramel-almond cake for a New Year’s party, in addition to many other random recipes. Anyway, many people have made resolutions for New Years to eat healthier, so I thought that I might post some recipes using fresh fruits and vegetables that kids will love to help with and love to eat. Here are some ideas for what to do with fresh ingredients:

* Make veggie chips by slicing turnips, parsnips, carrots, beets, rutabagas, or other root vegetables very thinly (use a mandoline if you have one) then spread them on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper. Drizzle them with olive oil and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Bake at 350 until crispy. Since these are a different kind of chip based off of a baked version of potato chips, you could always use potatoes if you aren’t feeling too adventurous. They are a great way to introduce unfamiliar vegetables to kids and they aren’t deep fried! Yay!

* From the 1951 Fannie Farmer Cookbook, “Two Pear Salads for Children,” Kids can make a Bunny by placing half of a peeled pear (cut side down) onto a bed of shredded lettuce, then decorating it with cloves for eyes, a marshmallow for a tail, a bit of pink candy for a nose, and almond slivers as ears. A “sunbonnet” is also easy to make. use a large leaf of lettuce and put a pear half inside it (cut side down), with the larger end at the top and use cloves as eyes, a bit of candy for a mouth, and pimento for a ribbon at the bottom. I think it might even be fun to cut a bow out of strawberry slices. These salads can be made using canned pears if you want to.

* Fruit ices and sorbets are delicious and kids usually love anything that is similar to ice cream. Over Christmas break, I made a recipe for pineapple carpaccio and sorbetto from an Italian cookbook. It involved slicing thin pineapple rings, topping them with powdered sugar and then a scoop of pineapple sorbet each, and then garnishing them with fresh mint leaves. To make pineapple sorbet, puree fresh pineapple in a blender or food processor, then measure 2 cups. Bring 1 cup of granulated sugar and 2 cups of water to a boil and add to the pureed pineapple. Freeze the mixture for a few hours and then serve. To make berry sherbet from the Fannie Farmer cookbook, sprinkle 2 quarts of berries with 2 cups of sugar and let stand for 2 hours. Then put them through a sieve and add 2 cups of water. Freeze, stirring with a fork every hour or so. Scoop and serve when completely frozen.

* Help kids make a salad from their favorite vegetables. Honey mustard dressing is easy to make from plain yogurt mixed with a little mayonnaise and stirred together with as much honey and yellow mustard as you like. Or search google for some other fun dressing recipes. Fruit salads are also fun to make; at cooking camp this year, we made a tropical fruit salad and served it in a half of an orange (hollowed out) then sprinkled coconut on top and added a maraschino cherry.

*Fondues are fun if you have a fondue pot. You can use the recipe for cheddar cheese fondue that I posted a few months ago and dip cauliflower, broccoli, celery, carrots, bell peppers, and other veggies into it.