Inspired by many of the Asian themed recipes I’ve been drooling over on Passion4Eating and in my quest for an appropriately sized compartmentalized lunch box for big boo, I stopped in a Japanese market in my old hood. I bought some spring roll papers (which I haven’t used yet) but I also got a ginormous bag of Haiga Brown Rice. The bag claims it is Japan’s most popular variety, a short grain brown sticky rice. I love this stuff! I can’t get enough of it in fried rice, cabbage and pork stir fry, French salad, rice with sautéed onions (saute an onion in a bit of oil until caramelized, then add cooked rice). Tonight I made a double batch of rice and served it with a pot-o-red beans. What’s on the menu tomorrow night? French Salad, mmm.
The rice prep is a little more involved than I’m used to for brown rice, but it’s worth the extra steps. For any of you classically trained chefs, I’m curious to know what the pre-soaking and post-lid-covered-steaming contributes to the final product. It does result in much shorter cook time than I’m used to (about 20 mins) with long grain brown rice (almost an hour). But total time elapse from beginning to end is the same. I guess what I don’t save in time, I do save in electricity??
If you like brown rice, but have never tried a short grain brown rice, give it a shot. It is love at first bite for me.
Pork and cabbage stir fry is a dish I concocted when I was new to organic meat, and organic co-op produce shares. I had bought a pound of organic ground pork (ground pork had never been on my dinner table before this meal), and purple cabbage and one rogue zucchini was in my share, along with a bunch of spring onions. This is the dish that simultaneously hooked me on the challenge of the creating tasty meals using random veggies found in co-op shares and eating onions. Not to mention it’s got the whole “purple food” thing going for it. Needless to say, I-heart-this-meal. Hubby loves it too. The boys are not as eager, and much prefer to eat purple cabbage raw. I hope eventually they come to love the Asian flavors and become ginger fans. For now they munch the cabbage before I cook it, and pick out the rice and meat in the cooked dish.
Kid Appeal Tip If there is an ethnic food you're crazy about but kiddos aren't, don't take it off the menu. It often takes kids a dozen or more exposures before they'll try/like a new food. So if you like it, keep it on the table. This goes for Asian, spicy, Mexican, Mediterranean, etc. Keep presenting it, keep eating it with relish and eventually some or all the kiddos will take to it.
Pork and Cabbage Stir Fry
Sauce (I’m guestimating here, I just add the ingredients to a bowl, the total combined ingredients were about 1/3 cup. My apologies, I'm terrible at using recipes)
1/4 cup soy sauce
1 TBS rice wine vinegar
1 TBS cornstarch
1 TBS toasted sesame seed oil
1 tsp sugar
2 cloves of minced garlic
Whisk all ingredients to combine, set aside. Give it another whisk just before adding to the pan.
Stir Fry
1 pound ground pork (organic valley sells it in a roll in some grocery freezer sections)
1 large diced onion
1 large (three fingers or more??) of thinly sliced ginger
Half a head of shredded red/purple cabbage
1 TBS of sesame seed oil
Salt and pepper to taste
Sauté the onion in a wok or large heavy bottomed pan until translucent. Add the pork and cook through, drain off the fat and return the meat/onion to pan, salt and pepper to taste (remember there is a soy sauce based sauce so don’t go heavy on the salt in this step). Add the ginger and sauté until fragrant and soft. Add the cabbage and cook a couple minutes, more than "wilted", but not too soft. Add the sauce and coat cabbage meat mixture. Sauce will thicken quickly so work it in fast. Serve over brown rice.
LifeAsMom's ultimate recipe swap is cooking for a crowd today. One of the meals I serve when family comes a callin' is this one skillet meal that focuses around sausage. I usually buy some kind of "healthier" sausage made with venison, turkey or chicken and no one complains. I'm not suggesting the sausage is ever healthy, but you can find leaner and lower sodium options if you choose poultry based sausages over pork or beef.
This meal doesn't require much prep other than dicing the potatoes, onion and slicing the sausage. However when you use one pan, and cook everything in stages it will take about an hour. And you'll need a pretty large pan (dutch oven?) if you plan on doubling this. This recipe fills up my 13" skillet.
My family loves this meal! Who doesn't love the potato, onion, sausage combo? The green beans add a colorful crunch to this hearty meal. We call it soul food night in our house. I love this with venison when we have it.
One Pot Sausage, Potatoes & Green Beans Makes 6-8 Servings
One 12 to14 ounce package chicken or turkey link sausage (I usually use Aidell’s Sun-dried tomato), cut into 1/2-inch-thick slices
1 tablespoon oil (I use grapeseed oil for saute)
1 medium yellow or white onion, sliced or diced
2 cloves garlic, diced, crushed or minced
1 ½ pounds potatoes, cut into 3/4-inch dice
One 16-ounce bag frozen whole, French style green beans, partially thawed (I use organic, fresh would work too.)
1/4 to 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt to taste
Freshly ground black pepper to taste
Place sausage in a large skillet or Dutch oven and cook until both sides are brown (the time may vary depending on whether the meat was precooked or not). Remove meat from pan and set aside. Pour off any fat. Heat oil in pan and cook onion and garlic on medium-low heat until translucent, about 5 minutes. Add potatoes to pan and cook over medium heat until they are tender and almost done (test with a fork; you don’t want them as tender as boiled potatoes for mashing). You may need more oil if you’re using a non-stick pan. Stir occasionally to prevent potatoes from getting too dark. When potatoes are nearly fork tender, add green beans on top, cover with a lid, and cook for 5 minutes. Stir and cook 5 more minutes or until potatoes and green beans are fork tender. The steam will cook the green beans. Return the sausage slices to the pan and stir them into potato mixture. Cook for a few more minutes or until potatoes are fork tender. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Note: I keep this recipe pretty bland since I’m feeding preschoolers, but if you’d like a little more heat, use some red pepper flakes, your choice of spice mixture, or choose a spicy sausage.
The only downside to this meal is that it takes an hour for it to come together if you actually use just one pan. You can speed up the process several ways, but you'll use more dishes. One is by heating the sausage in another pan in water, slicing it and adding it back to the potatoes/green beans. When the MealMakeOver Mom's tried this in their test kitchen they expedited the cooking process by nuking the diced potatoes a bit before cooking in the skillet. Another option would be to defrost/heat the green beans in another pan or in the microwave before adding to the skillet.
Kid Appeal Tip Do your kids refuse mixed up dishes, even with they accept the ingredients separate. This is a common food aversion for some kids. This is a temporary problem, you can teach your kids to eat stuff mixed up. Don't make it a permanent problem by serving the dish deconstructed to your kids. If it helps them eat up, serve it as you cooked it and let them move stuff around on their own plate. Big boo would deconstruct meals like this and stir fry, making piles of potato, green beans and sausage then eating them separate. He probably did this for a year before learning to eat it as I served it. I would gush about how I liked to have a bite of salty sausage with the potato and green bean to give them more flavor. Eventually he wanted to try it mama's way. With toddlers who aren't as capable with the fork to sort on their plate, prompt them by saying "Can you find a green bean in the mix?" or " I stabbed a potato with my fork, what can you stab?"
Some of the other crowd pleasing large recipes I have posted are:
[Ed Note: Hello to PBS visitors! Welcome. If you're new to Food with Kid Appeal, visit the recipe index for over 100 free real food recipes, and the introduction tab to learn more about growing a good eater. If you like what you see, stick around. "Like" FwKA on Facebook, or sign up for email updates.]
Green Peas, Yay or Nay?
Were green peas on your "no thanks" list as a kid? They were for me. For some reason I tolerated both fresh and canned green beans, but canned peas were just right out. Those mushy dark green balls on my plate were gross. I don't recall them being served very often, I guess they weren't anyone's favorite.
Instant Toddler Food
Frozen green peas only became a staple in our house when big boo was a beginning eater. I often served them to him when I needed a meal on the go. Toss diced chicken and some frozen peas into a little dish, grab a piece of fruit and voila, toddler dinner. The peas would be defrosted by the time we got where we were going. Then he got old enough to open the freezer and was always so interested in the bags of frozen veggies. At some point he sampled a frozen pea and loved them. That was one of his favorite snacks-he still asks for them sometimes.
Fun Family Food
Green peas only got in the family menu plan once I started making fried rice with carrots and peas. I've come to really enjoy the peas in fried rice along with sweet carrots and onions. And since they are one of the few frozen veggies that taste decent, and I can readily find organic, I decided to get them in the menu more often.
Say goodbye to mushy peas
The secret to frozen green peas is to add them frozen to the dish a couple minutes before the dish is complete. Essentially you're just defrosting them and bringing them up to temperature. They add such a nice bright green color to a dish, and a bit of crunchy sweetness. I think where green peas go terribly wrong is when they start getting cooked. I love how convenient they are, a perfect summer side veggie. Open bag, dump in pan, remove from heat. Adding them defrosted to a cold salad is a good use of green peas as well.
For those of you who have been following this blog for a while, you already know onions are a new addition to my diet. After a year of eating onions, my onion consumption has turned onion infatuation. Onions are now a part of almost every meal I make, and instead of a little onion I'm using a whole onion every time I dice one up. How's that for a recovering-picky-eater testimonial? Onions initially were reserved for meat and soup dishes, but now they get diced, sliced and julienned and added to veggies.
Green Peas with Sauteed Onion ingredients
One julienned onion
1 tsp healthy fat/oil
16 oz bag of frozen peas.
directions
Julienne one onion. Let onion rest 15 minutes before cooking to allow it's health promoting properties to come out. Saute onions in the oil until translucent and caramelized. Salt onions after they've browned (adding salt early draws moisture out this is a sweat, you don't want that). Add one bag of peas and cook for a few minutes just until hot, stirring a few times. Remove from heat immediately.
I made these on grandpa night, and they went over well with all the grownups and kids. These will be on the table again soon.
Kid Appeal Tip Do your kids pick onions out of everything? Don't worry, just keep serving them. You can add them in big pieces so kids can pick them out, that way they don't turn their nose up at everything you add onions to. Or you can dice them up really small so they can't even find them to know they're in there. I like doing both so that the kids get used to seeing them. I know eventually they'll stop picking them out. They are about 50/50 now. Sometimes they eat them, even in large pieces other times they eat around them. Onions, among many other health benefits have anti-viral properties. I always tell the boys that onions help suck the sick bugs out of their body so they don't get as sick as often. When they pick them out I ask if I can have their serving, then gleefully gobble up all the sick bug sucking onions for my healthy body.
LifeAsMom's Ultimate Recipe Swap theme this week is summer dessert. I grew up eating this no bake dessert in the summer during family gatherings with all the cousins. I've modified the recipe to make it even more wholesome, reducing the sugar amounts, adding ground flax seed to the graham cracker crust, and out of personal preference replacing the sliced bananas with cherries. The original version was called Banana Split Cake.
Instead of buying cherry pie filling which has food coloring in it, and is quite sweet, I use cherries packed in water (or their own juice) and make my own cherry sauce. I also make whip cream from scratch instead of buying frozen whipped topping (I don't know what that stuff is, but there is no DAIRY in it! Skeptical? Read the ingredient list next time you're in the store....ick). I only add a table spoon or two of sugar to the cream before whipping, and it tastes delish. I make my own graham cracker crust by dumping graham crackers in the food processor and adding 1/4 cup of ground flax seed to the crumbs before adding the butter.
This 5 layer dessert is loaded with two kinds of fruit, cherry and pineapple, and you get a little protein in the cream cheese, whipped cream and flax seed, plus a little whole grain in the graham cracker (did you know they were one of the early heath foods?). All this adds up to a nice wholesome treat that no one will know is good for them. I served it this week at a family dinner and it got gobbled up. I planned on taking a picture of a piece so you could see the layers, but I got caught up in enjoying it with the family I forgot to get the camera back out at serving time....
All the home-made steps do make this dessert a labor of love, but considering how large a dessert it is, and it's fruity, refreshing, crumbly wholesomeness the extra effort is worth it. The boys both loved helping me with spreading/mixing the layers, and licking the bowls!
This recipe makes a large 9 x 13 dish and is perfect for large gatherings. I halved it and put it in an 8 x 8, which was plenty for my party of 5 adults and 2 kidlets.
Cherry Split Cake
Crust 1 14.4 oz box graham crackers 1 stick melted butter 1/4 cup ground flax seed meal. You could put other ground nuts/seeds in the crust if you like a nutty taste.
Pulse graham crackers in food processor. Add ground flax seed to crumbs and combine. Press in the bottom of 9 X13 glass pan and put in fridge to set while you get other layers ready.
Meanwhile drain 1 20 oz can crushed pineapple (in juice not syrup). Cream cheese filling 2 8 oz pk of cream cheese (I used Organic Valley's neufchatel cheese) 1.5 cups powdered sugar (original recipe calls for a box of powdered sugar...) 1 tsp vanilla.
Mix all ingredients with a blender. Smooth cream cheese mixture over graham cracker crust. Cherry Filling 2 cans of tart pie cherries (in water or juice), including juice. 1 cup sugar 4 tTBS of cornstarch
Combine all ingredients in a saucepan over medium heat, mix just until sauce is thickened. The cherries sauce will look anemic compared to regular pie filling because it lacks food coloring. Tastes the same! Let filling cool before spreading it over the cream cheese filling. A short cut here would be to use canned pie filling, or 4-5 sliced bananas instead of cherries. Spread drained pineapple over cherry filling. Spread whipped cream over pineapple filling. Optional: top with chopped nuts Chill for a couple hours before serving.
Share your childhood dessert memories with me!
I wonder what that dessert would taste like with a chocolate custard instead of the cream cheese filling (minus the pineapple).
We had a snack supper tonight. It was a hot afternoon waiting for the camp bus to arrive with big boo, the excited but weary Kinder Camper. Big boo was even hotter than me, there is no air conditioning on the bus. We are pushing 100 degrees with 764% humidity here! Plus we had an after camp errand to run putting us home late. I was too hot to "cook." Ants on a Log, which I served with egg toast and a fruit salad of apple and mango was on the menu. Over all a pretty wholesome meal with protein from nut butter and eggs, grains from bread, and a couple fruit/veggie servings between the fruit salad, celery and raisins. Ok fine, it was more like 4 fruit/veggie servings for me. I ate hours ago and I'm still stuffed. We won't talk about how many peanut butter servings I ate.
Sometimes the celery, peanut butter, raisin combo really hits the spot and we all indulge in a few too many of these sweet, crunchy, sticky, chewy bugs. Since I got over my veggie discrimination (you know the kind where you don’t count carrots, celery, peppers and onions as vegetables, and the only things that really counts as a vegetable are the ones in the “super green” category), I have come to love a crisp head of celery. I still don’t really care to eat it plain, and hubby will complain I’m encouraging the boys to be fussy when I peel off some of the extra strings between bites, but with peanut butter and raisins I can knock back a few stalks. And so can big boo.
Once when comparing the nutrients in broccoli and celery for my nutrition class, I discovered that celery was in fact a vegetable worthy of wholesome vegetable status. Additionally, Dave Grotto, author of 101 Foods That Could Save Your Life includes celery in his list of foods everyone should be eating for better health. According to Dave, celery is a good source of Vitamin A and also contains vitamins C, B1, B2, calcium, iron, magnesium, phosphorus and potassium. He suggests using the leaves as a substitution for parsley. I started saving my leaf tops and adding them to the stock pot when making chicken or veggie broth (leave veggie scraps in for only 45 minutes, fish them out early when making meat stock, or add them toward the end). The best part about celery is phalides which may help lower cholesterol and coumarins which may help in cancer prevention.
These make a great healthful snack for a party, play-date, or picnic. We brought along our ants on a log supplies for our recent road trip and ate them as our veggie along with hot dogs one night.
Kid Appeal Tip Do your kids eat raw veggies? If not, they should. They are the ultimate healthy convenience snack. Grocery stores even sell individually packaged carrots, celery, etc. for adding to lunch boxes. If you've offered raw veggies and they don't eat them readily, keep trying. Make a point to serve a veggie tray at parties, send raw veggies in school lunches, offer them as snacks etc. on a regular basis. Yes. Offer them regularly even if they routinely refuse to eat them. If you can't stand the idea of waste because they don't eat the carrots you send at lunch, just send one carrot. Request they eat just one. Sometimes once you get them over that "I don't like that" mentalitly by assuring them they just need to eat a little, not a lot. Often they will discover they actually like the thing they thought they didn't like and start eating a larger portion. There is a plethora of colorful raw veggie choices. Next time you take your kidlet to the grocery store, have every family member pick out any raw veggie they want, then do a taste test. Purple cabbage, red, yellow, orange peppers, green beans, asparagus, cauliflower, broccoli, jicama, roasted beets (I could go on...) will offer some variety over the usual suspects. For veggies traditionally thought of as cooked, drop them in boiling water for 1 minute, then shock them in ice water until chilled. Drain and serve with your favorite dip.
Ants on a Log
Celery Peanut butter Raisins
Wash celery stalks and cut into thirds or fourths. Smear peanut butter on cut stalks. Put the raisin “ants” on the celery “log” with the peanut butter “glue.” Better yet, let your kids add the ants. If you know the ants go marching one by one ditty, all the better.
What do you serve for snack supper when you opt out of a hot kitchen in the summer?
Cabin camping is just right for our family of slightly prissy mom and adventuresome young boys.We are all finally toilet trained and sleeping through the night in a bed, and that makes tent camping a possibility soon, much to my dismay (the tent part).Maybe next year I’ll consent to that. Hubby will be taking the boys on an overnight tent camping trip in the late summer, but I’m reserving my tent sleep for the cooler Texas fall.
I don’t know about you, but I can hike all day, get blisters and mysterious insect bites as long as I get a shower and bed at the end of it. Oh and some food item that contains whole grains or nutrients.But put me in a tent, and I’m ready to leave the woods after one day of sweaty buggy hiking and one night of fitful rocky ground sleep.
LifeAsMom’s Ultimate Recipe Swap theme this week is camping food.I love how FishMama includes a salad in their dinner plans.She puts greens in a zip lock bag, adds salad dressing, gives it a shake and voila, fresh veggies on the road.With all the bagged salads and pre cut veggies in the market these days, there is no reason to exclude veggies from your next camping excursion.
Last week on one of our hikes I took a trail mix made of Cheerios, raisins and unsalted almonds.Trail mix is easy to assemble from things you probably already have in your pantry.Just put items in a zip lock back, bring Dixie cups along, and hand every kiddo a cup full of trail mix when you take breaks from long walks.
Trail mix is the ultimate hiking snack.Being outside all day uses up energy stores quickly, especially when you’re a busy toddler or adventuresome grade-schooler.Dried fruit is high in natural sugar to replace energy quickly, nuts are a great healthy protein to help build muscles and keep the mind alert so a child can navigate tricky obstacles and absorb all kinds of outdoor facts like the geology of surrounding rocks or how to build a safe fire in a fire ring, and the cereal is full of whole grains that give the body an energy supply that will outlast the energy burst from the dried fruit.It also provides fiber to help the colon move the meat and cheese that will be prevalent on all those sandwiches and hot dogs.Additionally there’s the bonus of not feeling too guilty should your youngest spill two cupfuls on the trail.If you can’t pick up all the bits, there isn’t much that is too far off a forest animal’s diet that can get their health into trouble.
Little boo munches trail mix in a dixie cup on the Natural Bridge hike in Petit Jean State Park.
½ cup dried fruit (raisins, papaya, mango, cherries)*
1 cup unsalted nuts or seeds (almonds, walnuts, peanuts, pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, etc.)
Double or triple as necessary.
*watch out for dried fruit with sugar added.I like to use lightly sweetened cereal/fruit and an unsalted nut here because sugar and salt are so pervasive in most other camping foods like chips, pretzels, hot dogs, cookies, drinks etc.Dried cranberries have a lot of added sugar, so unless you splurge for the ones that are sweetened with apple juice, choose a different fruit like mango for a change of pace over raisins.
Little boo munches on an apple near the falls at the cedar falls hike in Petit Jean State Park.
Healthy camping food suggestions
Choose whole wheat bread for hot bog/hamburger/sandwich bread
Buy pre-cut bagged veggies like baby carrots, sugar snap peas, snow peas, celery to serve along side sandwiches and chips at lunch.
Buy bagged pre-washed salad to add dressing to for salads or as the lettuce for sandwiches.The spring mix varieties will last longer since the leaves aren’t cut.
Single serving sized yogurt drinks offer calcium, protein and probiotics to keep the gut functioning properly.k,
If you do bring a baked item, choose something like oatmeal raisin cookies or pumpkin/banana bread and use white wheat flour in the recipe.
Bring along apples, bananas, tangerines or grapes.They are affordable, hold up without refrigeration and pack well in backpack for a trail side snack.
Eggs are a great protein source, try including them in breakfast, or hard boil some before the trip to keep in the cooler.
Potatoes are high in fiber, and a good source of carbohydrates to help replenish all those calories little ones burn up running around all day.Simply wash, fork prick roll in foil and add to fire pit 1-2 hours before a meal.If you don’t have that much time before a meal, put them on one night too fully cook while the s'mores are being made, remove them to the cooler and add them back to the fire on night two, they should have time to warm back up.
Prepare a salad before. This carrot and cabbage slaw keeps for a few days.If you don’t have time for a home-made dressing, buy one ready made, or add some honey to any Italian/ vinaigrette bottled dressing.
Make “healthier” snacks like pita chips, hummus, veggie chips, cheddar bunnies, fruit leather, popcorn, etc.
This post is getting far too long!I have other recipes to share, but I’ll have to do that later.One is for campfire breakfast (a potatoes, onion, bacon, egg scramble) another is pit pockets (a breakfast sandwich named by a friend with egg, sausage, cheese and kept warm for late risers wrapped in foil in the fire pit embers from the previous night’s fire).A third is for campfire biscuits.These are in no way healthy, but super fun and an alternative to s’mores.Stay tuned, and have fun in the outdoors with your kids.
Have I inspired you to join FishMama's ultimate recipe swap? If so, leave me a comment. I'd like to know who's having fun doing it with me! If not, what are you waiting for? Leave her a comment and let her know I sent you.
Inspired by many of the Asian themed recipes I’ve been drooling over on Passion4Eating and in my quest for an appropriately sized compartmentalized lunch box for big boo, I stopped in a Japanese market in my old hood. I bought some spring roll papers (which I haven’t used yet) but I also got a ginormous bag of Haiga Brown Rice. The bag claims it is 
