Category Archives: food

The Pancake Story

You know when you volunteer to bring in food for a class party and you get there, and there is a ton of food and you know the kids are just going to take a bunch, eat some, and then a lot of it is going to go to waste? And then you think, “ugh. What a waste. And who brought donuts? And can I silently judge that person and eat one of the donuts at the same time?” Then there all these moms standing around, and you know there is work to be done, but you can’t quite figure out what you are supposed to do? Or all the easy jobs are taken and you don’t want to do the hard or complicated or boring ones? NO? Is it just me?

~~Big redacted section on the reason for this particular breakfast and why I thought the idea wasn’t that great and why I volunteered to make whole wheat pancakes.~~

I volunteered to bring in pancakes for a class breakfast. And in my mind, I was one of many parents who would be bringing in pancakes or something. I didn’t write down the date of the breakfast for some reason, so I was glad and horrified when I got the email saying to be at school on a certain day at 7:45am to start cooking so all the food would be ready for 60 kids by 8:05. (Side note – there was one other mom cooking pancakes that day.) Between when I volunteered and when the day arrived, I found out I would have work to do between 8:00 and 8:30, so I asked if I needed to stay and help, which I am sure was expected, but I thought I could shirk it because there would be so so so many other volunteers, but at least I was planning ahead when I said, “I am going to make the pancakes at home, and how long exactly do I need to stay and help because Mondays are crazy at work…?” I didn’t hear back.

Now, I would never complain about Dave, especially on my blog, so this next section is really about me, and how awesome I have become after 14.5 short years of marriage.

I tried to pawn the pancake helping duties off on Dave. There was a miscommunication.

Monday morning, we had this conversation:

Me: Here are 80 pancakes. I don’t know how long you’ll have to stay and help out.

Dave: I don’t have time to stay and help out. I have to work.

Me: But when we talked about it, I said, “I have to work Monday morning. I can’t help out with the breakfast.” And you said, “Why don’t you let me handle everything?”

Dave: Yeah. That’s what I said. And then I said I was sure I could drop off the pancakes. And then you said. “Well if all I had to do was drop them off, I could handle that.”

Me: Yeah. That’s what I said.

And scene.

Well actually, then we argued about whether or not he should take a half full bottle of syrup “just in case.”

Then Dave left to drop off 80 pancakes and 2 kids.

I sat at home working. And thinking. I thought about how I was extremely worried about how 4 teachers could possibly manage to feed 60 kids pancakes. What if there were no other parents to help? WHO WOULD WIPE DOWN THE TABLES AFTERWARDS? Of course, maybe the tables wouldn’t be sticky if there was no syrup? I started to imagine myself getting really mad at Dave, and then I thought, who cares? A younger MegaMegan could have been angry for weeks about this. But really. Not worth it. I have officially grown as a person. When Dave got home, I found out which moms were there and I txted them my thanks for covering for me. Those moms know what to do at class parties. I probably should buy them each a glass of wine.

So now that I am so mature that I can recover from a miscommunication/argument in less than an hour, the next step is to not be a freak show in the first place. But that would make for pretty boring blog posts.

Missing: One Paddle Attachment

At some point over the holidays, (Christmas – it was a while ago) I read a lot of recipes for foods that contained fresh cranberries. So I bought a bag of cranberries while they were still prominently on display at the grocery store. Then for the next two weeks, on and off, I flipped through my many stacks of magazines looking for the elusive recipes, and I never found them. So I turned to my trusty friend google, and found this recipe for cranberry coffee cake. But yeah, it has to cook for 75 minutes and cool for half an hour. I could never quite figure out when it would be made and eaten. Would I prep it the night before, and then get up really early to bake it so we could eat it for breakfast? Would there ever be a lazy Sunday where I could lounge and bake and have a late brunch? These are the thoughts that assailed and reproached me for over two months every time I opened the crisper to get a vegetable. I pretty much had to stop eating fresh vegetables for a while or else suffer the guilt of the uncooked cranberry coffee cake. Are you starting to wonder how long cranberries last in the refrigerator? Well, I can tell you this: at least 10 weeks. The recipe calls for 2 cups of cranberries, and the bag holds 3 cups, so I just picked out the two cups of non-shriveled one and composted the rest, good or not.

Jack slept in until the late hour of 7:30 this morning, so I got up with him and decided today was the day! And I made him help me, which means he had coffee cake batter as his second breakfast (oatmeal was first) and he’ll be having coffee cake for lunch. Take that childhood obesity epidemic!

Despite Jack’s help, the cooking process was fraught with problems. Well, just one major problem. I couldn’t find the paddle attachment for my kitchen aid mixer and I had to use the handheld mixer like some animal. It was a total nightmare. And by that I mean, I got sort of bored standing there holding the mixer all that time. I blame all the pies I have been baking that do not require the use of my kitchen aid. The last time I needed the paddle attachment must have been when I made my dad’s traditional spice cake with chocolate icing, so who knows where it could be now? (Seriously Mom – did you put the paddle attachment somewhere weird when you were cleaning the kitchen?)

Since the cake had to cook for so long, and lazy, lounging Sundays aren’t really my thing I guess, I managed to do the grocery shopping while the cake was in the oven. I gave Dave instructions, but I also set the timer on my phone, and made it home with plenty of time to spare.

The verdict: The cake is pretty good. It might have been slightly over cooked. A little too buttery for my taste. The cranberries are nicely tart. But I know have a guilt free crisper, and that’s all that really matters.

Resolutions

New Years Resolution Status:
10 pies – 5 down ( 2 plums, 1 cherry blueberry, 1 straight cherry, and a chocolate pie) 4 to go
10 science experiments – 4 down, 6 to go (no change from last month)
10 blog posts per month – I have a 6 post deficit for February, so now I am 8 posts behind.
10 crafts – 0 crafts this month, 10 to go.

Last month I did a little something different, where I wore a pedometer every day and I tried to get 10,000 steps a day.

As you can maybe see from my blurry picture, I managed 290,443 for the month, so I did make it to my goal! Two things I learned about myself: I barely move on Sundays, and I get a lot more exercise when I work from the office than from home. Also, I do not like to fail at my goals so I definitely started to skimp on strength training in order to get all my steps in. I need a new workout goal for March because, “Oh no! I have to be lounging in a hot tub in a bathing suit for spring break” has so far gotten me nowhere. Possibly because the thought just occurred to me a few seconds ago.

Substitute Pie

I made a “classic diner style chocolate pie” from the Baked cookbook for Valentine’s Day. It’s definitely filling a void in my life where cake used to be and which pie has been half-assedly attempting to fill. Fruit pie that is. Chocolate pie is a whole different thing. Chocolate pie is good for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And it is chocolatey.

I am calling it substitute pie, because it was 12 degrees on the day I made it, and I refused to go to the store for the many ingredients I didn’t have. So instead of Ovaltine I used cocoa powder, instead of milk and dark chocolate, I used semi-sweet, instead of whole milk, I used a combo of heavy whipping cream and 2%, and vanilla paste instead of a vanilla bean.

It is supposed to be frozen for 4 hours before you eat it, but the question is, then what? I made it two days in advance, and on Valentine’s Day I re-read the recipe. How soon before we want to eat it do I take it out of the freezer? The answer is unknown, but it’s definitely longer than “immediately before dessert.” I took the pie out and start to hack away at it for a couple minutes before we decided we needed 20 minutes to do dishes and let the pie warm up. I told the kids we’d just have to wait a day for pie and they were devastated. Twenty minutes later, it wasn’t any easier, but we suffered through some cold and delicious pie.

I cut the first round of pieces too big, and the look on Luke’s face slowly became frightening. He was really trying to finish, because it was really good, and I am sure he didn’t want to let down Team Pie, but he sort of looked like he was going to either cry or throw up. I had to tell him there was no shame in not finishing your pie.

Pink Pancakes

Happy Valentine’s Day!

This morning, I was walking Lucy, and I was fondly remembering the days when my mom would make holiday themed/colored pancakes, so I immediately rushed home to whip up a batch of pink pancakes. (I actually used beet juice to color the pancakes to avoid the artificial coloring. Just kidding, I used food coloring.)

Note to self: Food-coloring-pancakes look much better with white flour. The whole wheat flour just made this turn out really weird. I started off making smiley faced pancakes, and while those were cooking, I got out the cookie cutters because I was making Luke’s lunch and I wanted to cut his sandwich into the shape of a heart. (I know, I am the best.) And then I found the heart shaped pancake cutters! I forgot about those! So in the mean time, I slightly over cooked the smiley face pancakes. I gave the kids the first batch off the stove and they were deemed, “sunburned on one side and really tan on the other side.) There was a lot of laughing. Then I moved on to heart shaped pancakes which turned out slightly better. They were delicious! My goal in every motherly thing I do is to create a memory that my children will look back on fondly, and the sunburned faces might do the trick.

The recipe is from this book, which I love.

Meta metamegan: I disabled comments for a while because all of a sudden I was getting a million spam comments. They are back on now, on new posts only.

National Pie Day

PHOTO CREDIT: Dave.

Did you know that today was (in)ternational pie day? Seems like it would be on March 14th, but that’s because I am a nerd. Regardless, today was a good day for Team Pie. Luke asked if I was going to join team pie, and I said, “Sure, why not? It’s Pie Day.” Then Jack started sobbing, so I had to renew my allegiance to Team Cake. Either way, I have 10 pies to bake this year, so today was a good day to start.

I was secretly hoping that Luke was going to hear that it was Pie Day at school, then come home to surprise me with the news, only to find a pie cooling on the counter. But I guess it’s also Chinese New Year? Oh well. Oh, and the pie was still in the oven, and I was heading out for a girl’s night out, so I had to tell him how to do the milk and sugar glaze and then I headed out.

Long story short – I made a rustic plum pie, because I had some local plums that our neighbor had shared with us this summer, and there was such a bumper crop that I froze a bunch. But that’s a story for another post. I made two changes to the recipe: I used only 1 T of lemon juice because I was afraid it would be too tart, and I used half brown sugar instead of all white because I ran out of sugar, if you can believe that. AND I didn’t measure the plums.

It’s very delicious.

Ho Ho Ho

Luke was reading his book before bedtime the other day and he needed help with a vocabulary word: Ding Dong. I had him use in it a sentence for me first, before I came up with this excellent definition, “it’s like a ho-ho or a twinkie, but instead of being chocolate of vanilla it’s pink or something and covered in coconut.” I just spent upwards of two minutes researching hostess products only to find that what I described to Luke was actually a Sno Ball. Regardless, his response took me by surprise. He said, “What’s a twinkie? What’s a ho ho?”

Come on! I know we are Boulder hippies, but we aren’t that bad! What’s a ho ho? Are you kidding me? I told him that when I was a kid I had the generic version for lunch every single day of my life. We we were a Swiss Cake Roll family. And when I did finally see or maybe even taste a honest to go ho ho later in life I thought Swiss Cake Rolls were actually better.

My mom kept the Swiss Cake Rolls in the freezer. Why? I don’t know. But when she opened a 2-pack and put one in your lunch, you either got the one that had half the chocolate from the other roll stuck to it, or you got the one that had half the chocolate missing. Hence the childhood phrase, “I CALL CHOCOLATE.”

Twinkies, on the other hand, never crossed the threshold of our house. I always wished we could get twinkies just once, but it never happened. By the time I started babysitting and had my own spending money, I was twelve and had already started dieting, (and by “dieting”, I mean, “lying about my weight”) so even though I still wanted to try a twinkie, I knew it wouldn’t be that enjoyable in the long run.

I shared all these snack cake related memories with the boys and Jack’s response was, “I want one of those Santas!”

Oh honey, “It’s Ho-ho.”

Cookie Status

Baked:

Chocolate Chip

Chewy Chocolate Gingerbread

Chocolate Peanut Butter Suprise

Dough Made and Rolled Out:

Sugar Cookie

Other Sugar Cookie for Star Wars Cookie Cutters

To Be Made:

Spritz

Other

But here is the situation: The sugar cookie dough is too dry. I wondered, WWLD? What Would Laura Do? Well, she would probably tell me to JFGI. So I googled, but I can’t believe there was nothing for “my sugar cookie dough dried out in the fridge. What should I do?” And honestly, it was too dry before it even went in the fridge. Not sure exactly what happened there. But no hits on google, and no time to wait till tomorrow to find out WWLD. So I just sort of smeared some melty butter over the dry areas and got the kids ready for bed. When I came back to the dough it was a little easier to roll out. It’s in the freezer now, so I’ll have to report back later as to how they turned out.

I have a totally different problem with the star wars cookie dough, but I fear there may be many more problems to come with that, so I might as well save that debacle for it’s own post.

However, the 3 recipes of cookies that have been baked already are really really good. Some are frozen, so don’t worry readers. You may get to try one or two yourself.

Then and Now: Cookie Baking

Jack and I kicked off the Cookie Baking Extravaganza yesterday. We made tollhouse chocoloate chip cookies, just to get things rolling. Then we made the dough for sugar cookies, and we made chewy chocolate gingerbread cookies. Then we tried to take a nap, but for some reason… couldn’t seem to settle down.

This pose reminded me of my first year baking with Jack, in 2008.

Aww. And I can’t have a Then and Now, without a Luke picture too, circa 2005, when he was 2, going on 3.

The plan is to make at least one dough, or one cookie recipe per night this week.

Cookie Season

I asked Jack to mark some cookie recipes for me so I can plan my annual cookie baking extravaganza. He marked some and now he is taking a break. Looks like I am going to be busy.

MetaMegan

kids, bikes, books, food