In a Doll’s House

In my rebellion against the toy mega-corporations and retina-searing pink plastics, I’ve had to resolve my own personal biases with my girls’ love of fashion dolls, and their desire for doll houses.

I can understand the desire. As a little girl, I wanted nothing more than a tiny house, all of my own. My friend two houses down had a doll house, three stories and about nine rooms, with real shingles on the roof, and a whole collection of miniature furniture and accessories. I could not fathom how she could stand to spend more than a few minutes separated from this magnificent little house!

My father and mother seemed to “get it.” They knew I wanted a little house, all of my own. The same Christmas my cousins and I tried to prompt the holiday with our wee-hours coffee excursion, my parents, grandparents, and aunts all decided to fulfill that desire, and managed to keep it entirely a secret.

Dad had been out of work for a few months (as is fairly typical of winters in lumber), and had spent the time finishing out the attic space in our little house with two bedrooms, so we could finally have the five children divided up into two spaces, rather than sharing one front bedroom crammed with bunk beds. Three things he had to work with were building material scraps, ingenuity, and time.

He built what was either a small fashion doll’s house (two rooms and a roof “deck”), or a large bookcase, with flat panel construction so it could be transported to and from my grandparent’s house under all the luggage in the back of our blue and white Volkswagon van. Trimmed bits of carpet became the luxurious wall-to-wall carpets in the little house. Real “wood” paneling salvaged from the remodel of the room that would house the new stairs in the big house became wall coverings for the little house.

He packed extra bits of scrap lumber and odds and ends; when we arrived at Grandma & Grandpa’s house, the two men disappeared into Grandpa’s woodshop to make additional furniture in fashion doll scale.

While the menfolk were busy making the house and furniture, my mother, grandmother, and aunt created everything else with fabric, needles, yarn, and love… quilts and rugs and pillows, and an entire wardrobe for my Barbie. Parts of the bounty were arranged in the assembled house; other parts, like the clothing, were wrapped in tissue and laid in small boxes, to give me lots of fun things to open in the morning.

Under cover of darkness, when all the children had been banished to bed with dire threats of coal and switches if we didn’t just Go To Sleep, For Goodness’ Sake, the adults brought in the house, assembled it, decorated it, and headed to bed themselves.

I glimpsed the assembled house as we snuck through the darkened living room to the kitchen to make that coffee, and immediately, a small war set up in my little heart. On the one hand, I was so excited… for my cousin, to whom I was sure the house would be given. She had the coolest Barbie stuff, including a Malibu Barbie with a yellow bathing suit. Since she was rather fond of me, I was sure I’d be allowed to play with her and the house. On the other hand, I was devastated… it was exactly the sort of thing I wanted to take home with me forever.

I tried very hard to not look, but even back in bed, I could see the wonderful little house by the twinkling lights of the Christmas tree, and I knew in my heart I needed to muster up more happy for my cousin, and less selfish for me.

Then, O! the joy of the next morning, when I began to unwrap small boxes filled with doll things, and mentioned to my cousin that it would be fun to play with her and her new house after breakfast… and my cousin looked at me with a puzzled smile and said, “But, that’s YOUR house… it says so on the tag!”

Fast forward about 17 years. We were in a similar position to my parents… out of work for several months, very little cash for presents, but a workshop full of salvaged wood, some ingenuity, and time. Our Eldest had been improvising doll’s houses in every nook and cranny, so we knew a real house would be well received. The planning commenced.

At Thanksgiving, my Tall, Dark, and Slightly Neanderthal husband smuggled the flat wood out to my brother’s house. While my sister-in-law and I prepped dinner, they went to my brother’s garage, and stood before the Big Saw needed to cut the wood into house parts. My poor husband was stressed… all the cuts had to be right the first time, because there was no money to supply a do-over.

On the way up, I had jokingly told him he ought to ask my brother about saying a prayer before they cut, that I remembered my Dad praying before all the parts of our upstairs remodel, because mathematically, things like the stairs couldn’t fit… but with a prayer first, they did.

So, my husband jokingly shared my thoughts with my brother, who got very serious and said, “Good idea. We can’t afford to screw this up.” So, they said a manly prayer, knowing that God would understand the desires of two amateur carpenters eager to delight one small girl, and dove in.

It worked. The pieces went together correctly on the first try.

Fast forward through another month. We spent weekends and evenings working on the house in secret; our Eldest was banned from the garage and pantry (which was next to the garage), and told there were Christmas surprises there, and that peeking would spoil things entirely. Being a good girl, she didn’t even try.

We covered each level’s floor with self-stick vinyl kitchen tiles, trimmed to fit. Scrapbook papers were decoupaged onto the walls. We had a tiny jar of free mis-tint paint recolored to get just the right shade for the exterior. Wide tongue depressors were cut into 2″ long pieces, and applied individually, by hand, for shingles. My husband built a bed to fit an 11″ fashion doll; I dressed it with a padded mattress and bedskirt, and pillows in cases. He built two fireplaces with mantels, and one old-fashioned black “iron” range in the kitchen. The lowest level was fitted with doors, and became a storage cabinet. We let other family members on both sides know what our project was, and they added things like additional furniture, clothes, and accessories, all wrapped separately for under the tree.

Oh, and since my husband is quite Tall, with an inherited propensity for building on a Tall Man’s Scale, the constructed house is just over seven feet tall at the peak of the roof. Ken dolls can stand in the rooms, and look to scale.

Christmas Eve, my brother stopped by after work, to see the finished house and visit for a minute. We stood in the garage together, gazing at it.

“Do you remember the house Dad and Grandad built for you that Christmas?” he asked.

“Oh, yes,” I replied.

“You’d have had kittens if it was something like this.”

“Oh, yes.”

“She’s going to love it.”

And, she did. And does.

That night, while tucking the kids into bed, I told our Eldest that we needed to install a Christmas surprise in the room just above their bedroom, so if she heard any thumping or banging, it was just us fixing the surprise, and she should keep herself and her brother downstairs, in bed. Tickled to be in on the secret, she agreed. The Boy, who had helped glue down several courses of shingles, was also tickled, since he knew about the double-secret trick.

We got the enormous house through the kitchen and up to the guest room with about 1/2 inch to spare, and bolted it to the studs for security. After arranging the house fittings nicely, we retreated, leaving a large bow on the door to the room.

The next morning, Eldest got more and more excited as she unwrapped packages of doll things. She asked if she could clear the books out of part of the living room bookcase and set up a house there, and could barely contain herself when the answer was, “I suppose so…”

When all was unwrapped, she looked around and whispered to her daddy, “What about the big surprise for my brother?”

“Oh, that’s right! How about you run up there and make sure it’s all ready, then we’ll let him see?”

Off she went, with the rest of us close on her heels. She saw the house level by level, each floor adding another, louder, “OH!”, until she finally burst into tears and launched herself at her dad for a hug. “It’s really mine, isn’t it? Not my brother’s! It was a surprise for me?”

Knowing how very hard it would be to leave her new house, I was happy to bend the rules just a bit, and let her eat her meals in the guest room all day.

Five years later, the doll house is still her favorite play thing.

You just can’t get those kinds of memories from a box full of pink plastic, some assembly required.

The Progressive Album

We live at some distance from our extended family on both sides. My home valley is between 8 hours (as my speed-demon brother drives) and 10 hours (as more sensible, non-speeding, stop-to-pee me drives) away. My Tall, Dark, and Slightly Neanderthal husband’s family is a good week’s drive away, down on the Gulf Coast. Neither of the Grandmas gets to see our kids as much as they would like, and the Greatmas have it even worse.

(According to my nearly-5-year-old, the nomenclature works like this:

• Mom and Dad
• Grand Ma and Grand Dad
• Great Ma and Great Dad

She came up with it her own self, and she’s not one to brook an argument on the topic. It helps her keep a lot of old people straight, and genealogy is rough when you’re not even eye-level with the kitchen countertop.)

We work hard to keep family relationships strong across the miles. Phone calls are frequent, and we spend a lot of time telling our kids family stories from our lives, and those of the Grand and Great parents. You’ll hear that nearly-5 girl talk fondly about her Grandpa C, though he died six years before she was born. She also gets a little irate that she can’t go visit her namesake Great-Greatma Fern (who died in 1992, at the age of 101 1/2. My spicy child came along nearly 13 years later, for goodness sake, but linear time is a little iffy when you’re small.) She feels connected, because she knows them through stories.

When a friend of mine sucked me into the vast conspiracy and cult that is “Scrapbooking,” one of the first projects I saw a use for was a progressive album for each of the Grandmas. My mom already had an album going, so it was a simple thing to do up simplified pages as I did my own album work, and send over sets to pop into her book. My husband customized a nice binder for his mom, and we send down new layouts already in page protectors, to help her keep up to date on our lives, and how the kids are growing and changing.

I’m not good at contributing to these progressive albums on a regular basis, but I keep it in mind when buying paper; I tend to buy double what I need for my own layout, so I can split the other set of papers into simplified versions for my mother and mother-in-law.

More recently (mid-November), I’ve started another progressive album, this time for my grandmother, who is confined to bed for a bit, recovering from an injury. “Sitting Still” is a foreign concept to her, let alone laying still! To help her pass the time, I put together a smaller, 8×8″ album with pictures from our family’s year, including our visit to her house this summer. I tried to include the stories behind the pictures with short captions on each layout.

I know she’s far more concerned with just being able to see the children’s faces and activities, rather than being impressed by the newest “product”, so the layouts are very, very light on embellishments. I stuck with one color of stamping ink (sepia) and one writing pen color (black), accenting stamped images with colored pencils here and there. Most pages have no patterned paper at all; I cut up a grand total of two 12×12″ patterned paper sheets to finish 30 pages! No stickers, no brads, no ribbons, no stitching, no vellum, no rub-ons, no glitter, no embossing.

The streamlined embellishment still took time, but in about 8 hours, I’d scrapped pictures from February through last week, and I’ll be able to finish the last four layouts (in addition to the current 15) and have the whole album in the mail in the next 24 hours. By the weekend, she and my grandfather will have a new set of stories to read together, and a new set of smiles to light up the room.

I rebel against any generation gap.

In Which We Create Junior Foodies

I am very firm in the belief that the only reason American children eat hot dogs, boxed mac & cheese, meat-that-was-formerly-known-as-chicken nuggets, canned spaghetti rings, white balloon bread, and other bland, over-processed atrocities, is that we adults don’t give them better.

After all, children in Thailand snorf down bowls of pho as soon as they’re old enough to avoid choking on the noodles. Japanese kids eat sushi. European kids enjoy smelly cheese and interesting bread. Swedish kids like lingonberry jam. Scottish kids eat… well, to quote a favorite 80s movie, I also firmly believe all Scottish food is based on a dare, so we probably shouldn’t dwell overmuch on what Scottish kids might eat if given the chance. Particularly if they’re Scottish boys. That’s how we ended up with haggis, I’m pretty sure.

As a child myself (lo, these many years ago), I went through a few food phases that must have seemed odd to on-lookers.

There was the Clam Chowder Era, in which I only ate chowder at restaurants. (This actually became a bonding point with my father-in-law, eventually. I’m convinced he was willing to drive from the Gulf Coast to the upper Oregon Coast to eat the extraordinary clam chowder at Mo’s in Cannon Beach. That he could visit us at the same time was a pleasant coincidence. The man was serious about his chowder.)

There was also the Chinese Fried Shrimp Epoch, in which ordering for me was extremely simple: chow mein, pork fried rice, and tempura shrimps, alternating dunks into horseradish-spiked sauce and good old Western tartar sauce. (Never on the same shrimp, though, as that would be gross.)

(There was also a thankfully short-lived stretch when I insisted on dressing my salads with ketchup. My mother, with great fortitude, resisted sicking up at my choice, but she also refused to let me wander down that culinary path, and grounded me from ketchup until I moved back to more normal dressing options.)

I met my husband at a restaurant. He struck up a conversation over a comment on my entree choice, and things sort of snowballed from there. One date and fourteen years of marriage later, we still enjoy talking about food, and making and eating all manner of tasty things (thus, the Food Nifties here on the blog!) We can (and have) spent entire afternoons at the computers or in a book store, reading recipes aloud to one another.

So, when we added children to the mix, we decided to ignore the Child Menu Atrocities, and feed them from the normal menus and regular plates as much as possible, hoping to side-step the agonies of having to base our dining choices around an immature, stunted palate that had never been allowed to go beyond dino-shaped “chicken” patties dunked in ketchup.

For the most part, it has worked beyond our most joyous dreams. Tell my kids we’re having “hot dogs”, and they’ll be prepared to slather interesting mustard on a bratwurst or kielbasa. Lasagna or ravioli involve a lot of spinach and ricotta, and possibly some spicy Italian sausage. They’ll take minestrone over “veggies and letters” canned soup any day. My Eldest has her own herb plot to keep us stocked up on fresh tasties for the kitchen. We watch cooking programs as a family. And, we can go to any restaurant we choose, from any cuisine, and be confident out kids will find something they like to eat.

(The Eldest, at five, impressed a waitress in a Gulf Coast seafood restaurant, when she very seriously asked “If Chef has any of that flat fish, with both eyes on one side of their head?” The waitress correctly interpreted “Flounder?” and Eldest continued, “Yes, please. May I have that broiled, with some lemon and butter and a tasty herb? And do you have steamed rice? And I’d also like some steamed vegetables, with carrots in them. Could you ask Chef to not put in the squash? But if he needs to, that’s okay, too. I can push them to the side. Oh, and may I please have some plain water with lemon?” She enjoyed her meal tremendously, and Chef came out to meet the little girl who took her food so seriously.)

There are one or two serious downsides to creating junior foodies.

It gets really expensive buying things when you have a spicy little girl of 4.5 who thinks that garlic chevre is something to be inhaled a spoonful at a time. I don’t like having to share my marinated artichoke hearts. And you have to be careful when you turn a kid loose in the produce & bulk foods section and say, “Choose some treats for Christmas stockings!” because they’ll always come back with the interesting (expensive) stuff. I have kids who will quiz a food vendor on the origin of their haggis, because they’re kind of picky about imported brand names, and don’t like the “cheapo” ones. We’re trying to invest the Eldest with a sense of tact regarding her outspoken protest of boxed baking mixes. And explaining to your delicate mother-in-law that yes, that child really does want a lingua (beef tongue) taco, can be… fun.

Don’t think we eat Brie-encrusted handmade pasta for lunch. They do eat some of the normal Kid Menu stuff. I’m just really grateful that they’re learning to have a flexible palate, and that I’ve never once had to open a can of Chef Boyardee, with its insipid, watery odor and gluey, smooshy “pasta.”

Creating junior foodies: one very small way to rebel against limited dining choices for the Thirty Bearing/Raising Children Years of my life. I can’t take another “ketchup as salad dressing” episode in this short mortality. My mom was a saint.

Food Nifty: 3-Cheese Florentine Ravioli

This recipe developed out of my family’s love for spinach-filled lasagna, and  my decision to come up with a more portable, portionable version of the flavors. I still make lasagna now and then, but these little ravioli are so easy and fast! I form a whole mess of them, and flash-freeze in a single layer (no ravioli touching another), then bag them for future cooking (just drop, frozen, in boiling water until they float again, about 3 minutes)

Ravioli need a fresh egg noodle as a wrapper. To make this a nearly-instant gratification dish, I use packaged won-ton or pot sticker wrappers from the refrigerated section of the produce department. It’s an Asian egg noodle, rather than Italian, but my tastebuds don’t really care. They’re a bit rebellious, too. I can get these noodle wrappers in a package of 60 for under $2; the recipe quantities will fill up to 120 ravioli, depending how fat you like each one.

In a mixing bowl, combine:

1 small container ricotta cheese (I use full-fat, but lower-fat works fine.) I prefer ricotta to cottage cheese, as the latter is too wet for the recipe to work well. I think the small ricotta size is about 8 ounces; it’s under $2 at our WinCo store.

1/3 cup fine grated Parmesan or other salty smelly hard Italian cheese

1/3 cup fine grated Mozarella cheese

A few grinds of black pepper

Paste garlic, to taste. (I’ve also used garlic powder. Never use garlic salt.) You’ll be able to taste and adjust the mixture.

8 to 10 ounces ch0pped, frozen spinach. Thaw and squeeze well to remove most of the moisture. You can also give this a bit more of a chop if you like; small pieces work best.

Blend the ingredients well, adding more garlic and pepper to taste. There is no raw egg in the mix, so you’re not likely to contract any horrible diseases. Just don’t drool in the bowl. It will be smelling pretty good at this point.

Working in batches of 8 to 12 wrappers, brush the edges of each with a bit of water. Place a 1/2 teaspoon or so of filling in the center, and fold the wrapper over, pressing to seal the edges. You may adjust the filling amount to your own preference.

Lay the completed ravioli on a lightly floured baking sheet, not touching others, and either cover with a towel until you’re ready to boil them, or flash-freeze them and bag for later cooking.

To cook, drop them 5 or 6 at a time into boiling water (don’t crowd them.) When they pop to the top and are hot through, they’re done and ready to skim off and serve. They’re great with either a tomato-based sauce, or a white cream sauce. The spinach flavor is quite mild, and combined with the dairy, you’re getting a walloping load of calcium and iron.

Homemade ravioli. You’ll never look at Chef Boyardee again.

Church Quandary

I recently discovered I’ve been fomenting rebellion in the Junior Sunday School.

Our family has a “no snacks at church” policy. I could say it’s due to a deeply held personal belief in training maturity, self-denial, and preparation for worship, but really, it’s that I don’t like to haul a rolling suitcase to amuse my kids at church. I’m just not that nice.

Instead, I rebel against the notion that kids need to be amused during church. I don’t bring toys, or little books, or coloring crayons. My kids are expected to make do with the same distractions I allow myself during particularly dull sermons: notebook paper, mechanical pencil, the ever-exciting concordance in my scriptures, the maps at the back, and the hymnal. Once they hit five, they’re in charge of remembering and hauling their own paper and pencil, too.

I realize that not everyone has this same habit. I try really hard to not be annoyed at the parents who pack what amounts to a picnic lunch for their kids, then spread it out in a pew for a mid-service snack. And I really have a problem with Sunday School teachers who hand out sugary treats every Sunday. Yes, let’s hype them up with a sugar rush just before a 70-minute worship service! Good plan!

Treat-dispersal had calmed down over the summer, but then my Spicy Child’s new teachers started things back up, and Spicy was coming out of class each week with suckers, or chocolates, or other little sugar treats, and then getting really put out when I wouldn’t let her eat them in church. Tired of the combat, I finally told her I didn’t want her to have any more treats at church, the end.

Cue several weeks of no treat battles, in which I assumed we had reached a bliss point.

Not so.

Two weeks ago, dear little Spicy Child was in the car with me, and said, very seriously, “Mom, it’s a problem.”

“What’s a problem, baby?”

“You say I should be a good girl in class. And you say I can’t eat treats in church. But my teacher gives me treats when I’m a good girl, and only the bad kids don’t get treats. But you want me to be a good girl, and then they give me treats. It’s not fair. I don’t want to be a bad girl.”

Immediate cringe.

(Not so big a cringe as when the Sunday School ladies stop me in the hall with a crooning, “Oh, Your Child had some… interesting… things to share in class today!” Then, it’s an immediate cringe followed by “Were you discussing Things Families Do, or Inappropriate Language?” because my children are being raised by the son of a drill sergeant, and while his vocabulary is a pale remnant of a once-vast litany of profanities and vulgarisms, it’s still pretty rich by church-going standards.

Add in the ways children interpret things (said Spicy Child considers anything she doesn’t particularly want to listen to as “F Words”), and my Tall, Dark, & Slightly Neanderthal husband’s kilt wearing habits combined with a desire to actually parent and correct his daughter gets shared in the Sunday School lesson on “Things Families Do as “My daddy doesn’t like to wear pants, and he says F Words at me.” Oh, I love Sunday School.)

So my daughter and I had a clarifying moment: she is allowed to be a good girl, and the teachers can give her a treat. But, she needs to put it in my bag and save it for eating after lunch at home. Crisis narrowly averted.

Food Nifty: Hot Spinach-Artichoke Dip

Here’s another instance of rebelling in very small ways: learn to make all your favorite restaurant foods for pennies at home, and foil the Dining Industrial Complex!

Then, make your kids do the dishes.

It’s almost exactly like eating out, but you can give “tips” like “Finish up and get to bed, or you get double the math worksheets tomorrow!” No way can you do that at the chain steakhouse.

Speaking of the chain steakhouse, have you noticed that every single one of them has pretty much the same appetizer menu? I can’t bring myself to spend $8 for a little half-cup appetizer portion of artichoke dip, even if it’s brought by a really cute waiter.

The home-crafted version tastes the same, but you can make a massive batch (I’m talking, two 9″ pie plates full!) for the same $8. It freezes just fine, too. I like to make one batch and portion it out to mini-loaf pans, then freeze and wrap them for storage. You can either thaw one in the fridge for a day, then heat through, or pop the frozen brick out of the pan and nuke/stir/nuke/stir for a far more instant gratification of your dip desires.

If you’re the only person in your family with an addiction to this dip, or if you’re single, etc, you can also portion it out into a cupcake pan, freeze for about 2 hours, then dip the bottom of the pan into hot water and pop them all out. Wrap each tightly in plastic wrap, then bag them in a gallon-size freezer bag. You’ll have single-serving size dips that are perfect anytime.

Just paddle together the ingredients until smooth, pop into a pan, and either bake at 350* until golden brown and hot through, or freeze and do it later.

10 ounces chopped frozen spinach, thawed and well-squoze (technical cooking-type term. Really, just thaw and squeeze it out really well. You want spinach as an accent, not as a boggy nasty splodge on your plate.)

8 ounces cream cheese (or it’s lower-fat, tangy cousin, neufchatel)

1/2 cup sour cream (I suppose you could go lower-fat with this, too, but that’s where it ends.)

1/2 cup grated Monterey Jack cheese

1/3 cup grated Parmesan cheese (I use the cheap stuff in the bulk section at WinCo, actually, not fresh. Again, rebellion. Small, small rebellion.)

2 tablespoons chopped green onion

1 large can artichoke hearts, drained and chopped. You could use plain, or marinated (yum!)

Serve with bits of baguette, or bagel slices, or wheat crackers, or whatever you want to dunk. It’s all your iron and dairy fat in one spot (for about a month!), and really, really tasty.

Frozen Assets

There never seem to be enough hours in a busy Mom’s life, right? (Or, I’d argue, a busy non-Mom’s life!)

One aspect of homekeeping that can take up inordinate hours is cooking (and the derivative arts of baking; grilling is in another category of “Arts” entirely, and I leave it to the Tall, Dark, and Slightly Neanderthal Fellow I married 14 years ago. He’s only singed his eyebrows off the once.)

Personally, I get a kick out of cooking. I like providing my household with nice things to eat. I like the cost benefits of cooking (and baking) at home. I like the control it gives me over ingredients, as much for what I can leave out, as what I put in. I like messing with recipes to get the flavors we like best.

(I also like showing off at potlucks and parties, but that’s because I’m a terribly vain person who likes to brush off compliments with a casual “Oh, it was nothing, really.” I hope no one ever really believes that. It was something, actually. I’ve just read far too many cooking and homemaking manuals from the 1940s and 1950s, and like to pretend I’m bits of Donna Reed, Betty Crocker, and June Cleaver, all mixed up together with a little touch of Tank Girl and perhaps some Seven Brides Julie Newmar, as well as Julie Andrews and (young) Angela Lansbury just for savor.)

So, I admit it, I like to cook. From scratch.

But, I don’t like to do it every single day. If I have to think about food that often, I can’t actually enjoy eating it.

Through the marvels of modern technology, I can have my cake and eat it too… by making things ahead and freezing them. Now, you can find all sorts of books in the library with recipes that make up and freeze well, so I won’t list out a huge bunch of instructions. If you take a walk through the grocer’s freezer section, you’ll get a lot of ideas of things that can be frozen successfully. If Big Food can do it, probably so can you.

• I try to portion recipes out into either family meal packets, or individual servings, and then package them for the freezer, so we have a lot of flexibility in what we pull out to eat. Freezing foods also works wonderfully for very small households, or households of one, where regular recipes that serve 4 to 6 mean a week’s sentence of the same meal, over and over and over.

• Be sure to label and date your packages, and include notes on any special handling directions you’ll need later.

• “Flash freeze” foods, naked on a baking sheet for 15-30 minutes, or until firm. Then you can bag them (or wrap and bag in the case of baked goods) without risking a huge Food Mass Lump frozen all together.

• If you don’t want to own 92 various casserole dishes and pans, just line your dish with foil, add the food, and freeze until the food block is solid. Then you can pop it out of the dish and wrap it well for freezer storage. To use, simply pop it back into the same size dish, and bake.

• Or, use disposable foil pans bought in bulk from a warehouse store or restaurant supply. Disposable pans are a bonus if you might be dropping off an emergency dinner to a friend or loved one.

• Save room by freezing liquids and sauces in plastic zip-top bags; lay them flat on a baking sheet to freeze solid, and then they’ll stack flat, or upright in small baskets, for better use of freezer space and increased organization.

So, here are some things we’ve enjoyed prepped and frozen, and how we do it!

Meatballs

Mix and form your favorite meatball recipe, setting them fairly close together on a baking sheet. Bake at 350*, until cooked through and decently browned. Drain, cool, and bag for the freezer! Pull out only how many you need. They’ll either nuke for a few moments to re-heat, or you can heat them through in sauce.

One year for Christmas, we gave my nephew a gallon-size freezer bag full of baked and frozen meatballs, sharing optional. He was delighted.

Ravioli

I’ll share my 3-Cheese Florentine Ravioli in another post. Form and flash-freeze, then bag. These will cook from frozen in about 3 minutes.

Stuffed Pasta

I use the ravioli filling to stuff shells, manicotti, or make lasagna. It’s just as much work and mess to make one pan as to make three or four, so I get it over with, and have a season’s worth of the dish in the freezer!

Cookies

Oh, my family loves cookies.

(They like cookies with raisins, which I think are just gross (disappointed legless flies…), so I actually make cookies with raisins, because then I’m not tempted in the slightest to eat any.)

I don’t mind making cookies, but it’s rare I want to stand there and cycle through ninety pans of cookies. Instead, I mix up the cookie batter, then arrange the cookie dough balls on a baking sheet and flash freeze (place them close, as they sure won’t be expanding in the freezer!) When they’re firm, they get bagged and labeled. To bake, let them stand on a cookie sheet while the oven heats, and add about 1 minute to the overall baking time.

That same year we gave one nephew meatballs, we gave his brother bags of frozen cookie dough balls. (Obviously, frozen gifts only work if you’re not shipping them, or traveling a long distance to give them!)

Being freed from an obligation to bake the cookies the same day you mix them means you can make five or six batches in one day, freeze and label them, and have cookie baking prepped for a month, pulling out a half-dozen or dozen to bake fresh as needed.

Pot Pies (Meat)

We do these as pasties (turnover style) or in muffin tins, and freeze them before baking. Use your favorite pastry crust, and pre-cook any veggies, meats, or gravies for the inside. Let the filling come to room temperature before you fill and freeze the crusts. Flash freeze, and wrap individually, then bag for storage. (If you’re having trouble getting a frozen pie out of a muffin tin, try dipping the underside in hot water very briefly.)

Pies (Dessert)

Same process as for meat pies, actually. Fruit pies freeze the best. Avoid those with custard fillings, obviously.

Bread Puddings

We bake, flash-freeze, wrap, and bag both sweet and savory bread puddings. My husband’s favorite breakfast treat is a sausage-Swiss cheese bread pudding, briefly re-heated in the microwave. Muffin-tin portions are just right; one for smaller appetites, and two for hearty eaters. (Lemon curd for sweet bread puddings does not freeze well, though; home canning is the way to go with that one!)

Muffins (Sweet or Savory)

Bake, remove from the tin, flash-freeze, wrap, and bag by type. These pack in a lunch perfectly; they’ll defrost in time for lunch. If you prefer them hot, unwrap and nuke briefly. Both breakfast-style muffins and dinner-style (with things like caramelized onion and cheese mixed in) will freeze and reheat well.

Holiday Sides

I prepare dressing and a desperately addictive regional potato dish called “Funeral Potatoes” well ahead of holidays, and freeze them until they’re wanted. Having a small stash of tasty frozen side dishes makes it really easy to supply an emergency meal for yourself or others. My goal is always to spend as little time as possible in the kitchen on festive occasions.

Hot Dip

My  Hot Spinach-Artichoke Dip makes a pretty good-sized batch… far too much to eat in an evening unless you take it to a potluck. I portion it out for singles (cupcake tins) or couples (mini-loaf tins), wrap, and freeze (or, freeze & wrap in the case of single servings). Ten minutes of actual effort, and I have multiple appetizer portions ready to go.

Breads

I don’t like to freeze entire bread loaves, but I’ve successfully made, formed, and frozen individual bread portions, and stored them for up to two months. Butter crescents, cloverleaf rolls and other shaped yeasted doughs just need to thaw on the baking sheet and reach nearly-room-temperature before baking. Take that, Poppin’ Fresh.

We also freeze and wrap griddled and cooled made-from-scratch English Muffins, but I don’t know how long they’ll keep. We’ve never managed to get past about two days, as we keep pulling them out to enjoy.

Home frozen foods: just one small way to rebel against fast food, restaurants, and the Boxed Food Conglomerates world-wide!

Food Nifty: Baked Potato Soup

I like soup.

The winter after I left college, I was living in another college town, in a house full of girls I grew up with. Some of us were working, others at school. One of my hobbies was visiting a restaurant downtown for lunch, having their soup-and-foccaccia lunch special, then going home to suss out the ingredients and replicate the soups.

That’s how I ended up with Baked Potato Soup. It has a different taste from boiled potato soups or chowders (a bonus, in my mind), makes up pretty quickly, and can be done very flexibly to meet a wide range of personal tastes and dietary needs. I’ve done it in vegetarian styles, in carnivorian styles, even in low-fat (which is not my normal mode of operation… give me small quantities of high-quality real fats, and I’m much happier.)

The recipe is one of those annoyingly inexact things, but give it a go one of these winter evenings, or for breakfast! It’s very filling, and a great comfort. We like to serve it with fresh cornbread, or buttermilk biscuits, or fresh from the griddle homemade English muffins.

Count on one medium baking potato for each person you’re feeding, plus one or two “for the pot.” Bakers work better than waxy potatoes for this. Give them a good scrub, and either pierce and wrap in foil to be baked in an oven, or pierce and microwave them until soft.

Smash each potato with the heel of your hand to open them and cool them a bit faster.

Use a spoon or your fingers to skim off some of the potato peel. I do leave some intact, but you don’t want too much in the soup, or it can spoil the texture.

Puree the potatoes with a combination of broth and water, into a thick soup, then heat it through on the stove.

This is where it gets flexible: you can use all water, or water and chicken broth, or water and vegetable broth, or water and bouillon cubes (Mexican chicken bouillon doesn’t taste like celery, remember!).You can make a very thick soup, or a thinner one, as you prefer.

Add a bit of salt and pepper (not much), if you like them.

Then, set the soup out with a variety of toppings, and let everyone suit themselves! You might set out some crisp chopped bacon, or ham; grated cheeses; steamed veggies; chopped green onion; roasted garlic; caramelized onion; spicy black beans with cumin and cilantro; sour cream, Greek yoghurt… really, the sky is the limit! Anything you might enjoy on a baked potato, you can toss onto the top of your soup bowl, in whatever proportion you wish.

(One warning: if you take this to a Church Lady luncheon, you may have to reassure the Ladies that there are no rules to the soup, and they can top it with as much or as little of anything as they prefer. Some Church Ladies are really, really worried about “doing it the wrong way.” Be a good Not Molly example, and load yourself up willy-nilly.)

Keep the initial portion size pretty small, though. One ladle of soup is far more filling than you might imagine, it being essentially liquid baked potato. My husband refers to it as “Liquid Lead.”

It will keep leftover in the fridge for several days, but doesn’t freeze particularly well, unless you’re willing to run it through the blender after thawing (the texture changes some if you don’t re-blend it.)

Food Nifty: Balsamic-Soy Glazed Chicken Wings

This is one of the more addictive recipes in my arsenal. I found the base recipe a few years ago in a gourmet cooking magazine, and decided to give it a go. Who knew “gourmet” could be this easy, and this… well, nifty?

First, start with 20 chickens.

(Just kidding. Buy wings at the store. I’m not that pioneer about things.)

Preheat the oven to 500*.

Seriously.

These roast at Five Hundred Degrees. Trust me. I didn’t believe it at first, either, but life is a lot better when you exercise a little bit of faith and just go with it.

(Also, please give me credit. I didn’t write “just wing it” right there, and it nearly killed me to not use the pun. Besides, you’re not winging it. You’re trusting me. So really, set that oven to 500*.)

Toss 4 pounds wing pieces with 2 tablespoons olive oil and 1/2 teaspoons each salt and black pepper.

Arrange the wing pieces on two large, rimmed baking sheets. Roast in that 500* oven for about 35 minutes, until the wings are really golden and crisp.

When the wings have been in for about 20 minutes, start reducing the glaze. Stir in a small saucepan, letting it boil and reduce to about 1/3 cup:

3/4 cup balsamic vinegar (and the cheap stuff works just fine for this!)

1/4 cup soy sauce

2 teaspoons sugar, or 1 teaspoon honey

1/4 teaspoon minced garlic (or a dash of garlic powder. Dang, my working class roots are showing.)

1/4 teaspoon ground ginger (fresh is best; omit if you don’t like ginger. I won’t gripe. I rebel against recipes all the time.)

Let these boil down, as I mentioned. Be sure to avoid putting your face over the saucepot. This is boiling vinegar. It stings a bit if you snork it up your sinuses.

When it has reduced to a gooey, coats-the-spoon consistency, take it off the heat and stir in about a tablespoon of butter.

By now, the wings are roasted and glorious. Let the pans stand about 3-5 minutes before you try to loosen the wings at all. (I admit it… I move just one wing piece immediately, so I can amuse myself for the remaining four minutes and 45 seconds by picking the tasty bits off the pan where it stuck hopelessly.)

Move the wings to a mixing bowl, and drizzle the glaze over them. Toss around a bit to coat, and let them stand a few more minutes before tossing again. The crisp chicken skin soaks up the tangy glaze, and takes on a gorgeous mahogany color.

Return the wings to the turned-off oven to keep warm and re-crisp a tad before serving.

Be sure to serve them alongside some damp towels or cloth napkins that you don’t mind being stained forever. They’re messy, unless you’re not to particular about licking fingers in public. Paper napkins are less useful, as the paper bits stick, and who wants to lick sticky, papery fingers in public?

If (and that’s a big longshot if) there are any leftovers, they nuke well for breakfast the next morning.

What… other people don’t eat balsamic chicken wings nuked for breakfast?

Pity.

Neanderthal-Carnivore Bible Interpretation

We started a history unit this morning, doing a comparison and contrast between the scriptural account of Creation, and the historic and scientific accounts of Creation. Pretty cool thus far, and the reading-aloud practice from the Bible is always a nifty thing.

We got to the sixth day, wherein God gives all the herbs, grains, fruits, and veggies “to be meat” for man. All agreed that “Dad isn’t going to like this.”

My Tall, Dark, and Slightly Neanderthal husband is a confirmed carnivore. If I set before him a plate of meat with meat-influenced side dishes, and meat jello for dessert, he’d be a really happy guy. Salad is what you eat before the steak. Carrots? Celery? Nice friends with the cayenne buffalo wings.

Meat. It’s What’s For Dinner (He Hopes.)

So, at his lunch break, we gleefully informed him that God intended Man to be vegetarian!

He sat in shock for about three seconds.

“No,” says he, “you’re interpreting incorrectly. Right there, it says ‘given herbs for meat’. Now, you’re wrong thinking that’s the main course. It very clearly says herbs for meat. As in, rosemary for the beef, garlic for the pork. Herbs to put on the meat. That’s what the scripture says.”

I can hear the chorus of men around the world, in a solemn

Amen.