Keanna's Creamy Pesto Pasta

A few weeks ago, Keanna made creamy pesto with bow tie pasta. At the time, I didn't take pictures to blog it so I had her make it again specifically for that purpose. The first time she made it, she used homemade pesto. Nothing can compare to the taste of fresh, homemade pesto. But in the interest of time, I had her use store-bought pesto this time. Costco currently has it on sale for a really good price.

Over 1 pound for under $5. And it's freezable!!

Keanna's Creamy Pesto Pasta
1½ lb. pasta
1½ c. cream
1 c. pesto
¼ c. grated Parmesan cheese
Salt & pepper to taste
Pine nuts (optional garnish)
Fresh basil leaves (optional garnish)

Simple ingredients: cream, pesto, Parmesan cheese, salt, & pepper

Cook pasta according to package directions. After putting the noodles into the boiling water, begin preparing the creamy pesto--the goal is to have the noodles perfectly cooked at the same time the sauce is finished. In a saucier or large sauce pan, heat cream at medium-high just until it begins to boil.

Turn heat as low as it will go. Whisk in pesto, Parmesan cheese, and salt and pepper.

Transfer hot pasta to a large bowl. Spoon creamy pesto over pasta and gently toss to coat. Sauce will thicken and soak into noodles as it sits and cools, so leave the pasta a little saucy. If desired, garnish with pine nuts and basil leaves. Serve immediately.

Almost any shape will do. Keanna just prefers bow ties.

This time we served it with bacon Brussels sprouts and Dutch crust rolls.

One batch as written above feeds my family of six one dinner and leaves leftovers for a few lunches.

Kids' Summer Cooking 2018, Week 2

This was a busy week with swim lessons for all four kids, doctor and dentist appointments for all six of us (some of us had multiple), pet sitting a bird, a gymnastics competition for April, a concert in San Francisco and youth group for Keanna, some bowling time for all the kids, an A's game for all of us and my parents, and a family outing to the opening of a community dog park.

Even with all the busyness and activity, we still required each kid to prepare one dinner. This week's menu was really fun and delicious:

• Keanna: BBQ chopped salad (think StoneFire Grill, all my Santa Clarita friends!)
• She used this chicken recipe and was impressed with how good and easy it was.
• Lukas: chimichangas with homemade refried beans
• Koda: waffles
• We used the recipe from The Joy of Cooking, but you can find Kimiko's waffle recipe here.
• April: grilled cheeseburgers and homemade French fries

The challenging one this week was April's menu. She specifically requested to make homemade French fries and not start with frozen ones in a bag. I knew that I would have to do the actual frying for safety reasons and that is a task that needs full attention, so I recruited Bapa (my dad) to help April grill her burgers in the backyard. Of course, the grill was also too hot for her to actually handle the meat on it, so we gave her as many jobs as we could so it was still her meal. For the French fries, she cut most of the potatoes.

April cut.

I fried.

They were soooo delicious!

For the burgers, my dad taught her how to evenly season the meat, how to avoid cross contamination when working with raw meat, and how to form patties.

Watch...

...do.

Notice April's hanging out in the trampoline while Bapa does
the hot work of cleaning the grill.

When the meat was just about done, he let her put the cheese slices on the patties.

 

Hopefully in the near future, I'll have time to blog the process of making chimichangas. They are so easy and so good!

This coming week, the kids have double duty. Not only do they have to make one dinner, but they each have to make something to take to a 4th of July celebration. I'm looking forward to seeing what they all pick!

April's Summer Fruit Salad

My kids are frugivores (animals that eat fruit). We have to ration the fruit so they don't eat themselves into some serious tummy troubles. Our staple fruits are apples (Fuji and Granny Smith), bananas, and oranges. I buy those all year because they are almost always reasonably priced. But now that it's summer, other fruits have gone down in price! This week I bought peaches, nectarines, cherries, blueberries, and strawberries. The kids are loving the variety.

About two weeks ago, April wanted to "make something with fruit." So I gathered what fruit we had at the time, and we threw together a fruit salad. It was an instant hit, and she has since made it two more times. The great thing about April's fruit salad is that you can use any fruit you want or that you happen to have on hand. Besides the fresh fruit I mentioned above, she has also used canned mandarin oranges and frozen peaches.

One thing to note is that you will want to adjust the amount of brown sugar depending on your personal preference and the sweetness of the fruit you use. You can also substitute other types of sweeteners if you prefer not to use brown sugar.

As the salad sits in the fridge, the juices will start to come out of the fruit so be sure to eat it within a few hours or up to one day of mixing it.

Regardless of how you make it, this fruit salad is sure to be a great addition to any summer meal.

April's Fruit Salad
5 c. bite-sized fruit pieces
1 c. Greek yogurt
2-3 Tbsp. brown sugar (or more or less depending on preference and sweetness of fruit)

Put all ingredients in a large bowl. Gently and thoroughly mix until brown sugar is dissolved into yogurt and all fruit is evenly coated.

Knife skills are valuable for children to learn.

Beautiful colors! This batch contains pitted and halved cherries,
blueberries, strawberries, Granny Smith apples, and Fuji apples.

April loves it when she has properly packed the brown sugar
and it retains its shape.

Stir gently so the fruit doesn't get smashed.

Enjoy the fruit salad of your labor!

Kids' Summer Cooking 2018, Week 1

Summer vacation!! Woohoo!! After a whirlwind of a finish to the school year, a graduation celebration, and a couple road trips, we are settled into our summer routine. More about all that later. But that means the kids are cooking dinner! Each kid is cooking one dinner each week.

Week 1
Keanna: creamy pesto with bow tie pasta and Greek salad (Kimiko's salad recipe here)
Lukas: pancakes (see Kimiko's recipe here)
Koda: pizza with homemade dough (focaccia as the crust!)
April: baked potatoes, chili, and broccoli

Meanwhile, as the kids are enjoying swimming lessons, summer reading time, play dates, and more time outside, I am preparing for next school year. For the fist time, I will be teaching a video production elective. Consequently, I'm having to produce some example videos to show my students what my expectations for them are. Using pictures I had readily available on my phone, I threw this video together while experimenting with Adobe Spark. Enjoy!

Taming the Kids' Dishes

I actually enjoy doing dishes. Most of the time. The warm water. The clean kitchen afterward. It's rewarding to me. But that doesn't mean I want to be doing dishes all the time.  During the school year, I have very little time at home with my family. As much as I like clean dishes, I was saddened by the fact that I had to say "No" to other things to get them done. Yes, ideally, my kids should be doing all the dishes by now. But due to our season in life and our daily schedule, that's just something we can't do right now.

A few months ago I finally got fed up with the amount of time I was spending on dishes, and I took a drastic step--I donated all the plastic kid dishes.* Seriously. We had about a dozen Pampered Chef plastic plates and various Ikea kid dishes. That was one of the problems. We had too many dishes. With so many dishes in the cupboard, the kids felt like they could get a dish out any time they wanted. We had trained them to rinse their dishes and put them in the dishwasher (or the sink if the dishwasher was full/clean/running). But I still spent so much time unloading the dishwasher, hand drying the plastic stuff that didn't dry in the dishwasher, reloading the dishwasher, and hand washing all the dishes that didn't fit in the dishwasher. With our crazy schedule, there were always dishes in the sink.

"I donated all the plastic kid dishes."

With my cupboards empty, I replaced the old kid dishes with nine new kid dishes. Each of the younger ones has exactly one plate, one bowl, and one cup. These are the only dishes they are allowed to use. After each use, they hand wash, dry, and put their dishes away. Each kid has a different color so there is no arguing about who left their dishes out or who forgot to clean theirs. Keanna is old enough to use the real, grown-up dishes so I didn't buy her a set.

"Each of the younger ones has exactly one plate, one bowl, and one cup... After each use, they hand wash, dry, and put their dishes away."

Kid dishes go in the lower cupboard for

easy access by little people.

I bought these at Target for $0.79 each. They have a lot of color, size, and style options. All of them seem to stack very easily and neatly.

There was some whining and complaining the first couple of weeks, but now they know what is expected and they do it with happy hearts. An added bonus is that they kids now think twice before using any dishes. It is very rewarding to see my kids learn the skills they will need as an adult and take ownership over a small part of dish duty. And it's nice to be able to spend time the extra time doing things with my children.

*I actually did keep a few of the old plastic dishes for when the nieces and nephews and neighbor kids are here,but they are out of sight, out of reach of my children. I am considering getting rid of those and getting a few more sets of these Target ones in a different color.

Clark Summer Cooking Adventures, Part 2: April's Waffles and the Perils of Cooking

By far, the most popular things to make for dinner among the Littles are pancakes and waffles. They would eat pancakes and waffles for three meals a day if I let them. During the summer when they are doing the cooking, the rule is that only one of them gets to make breakfast for dinner each week. And we rotate who gets to do it. April got the first round of waffles this summer.

As I write this, I'm realizing that my favorite waffle recipe isn't yet on Near to Nothing! I'll have to post that soon. It's a yeast-risen waffle recipe which is great because you put it together the night before (for breakfast) or the morning of (for dinner) and let it rise in the refrigerator until you are ready for it. Kimiko's go-to waffle recipe can be found here.

In the shuffle of April's waffle day, we did not get the yeast recipe mixed together in time, so we went with the regular waffle recipe out of The Joy of Cooking. 

As I've said before, I try to let my kids do as much of the cooking as they can do on their own. April is now six years old and can do quite a bit on her own. For the waffles, she measured the dry ingredients (as I challenged her to double fractions), cracked the eggs, poured the wet ingredients that I had already measured out, mixed the batter, and poured the batter into the waffle iron. I took the done waffles out of the iron and transferred them to the oven to stay warm.

Batter should be lumpy. 

I LOVE my double waffle maker!

Sadly, this cooking adventure took a bad turn, and I don't have any pictures of the rest of the process or the finished product. The kids love canned fruit, but I hardly ever buy it. Since April was cooking breakfast, I splurged and bought canned peaches and mandarin oranges. April successfully opened and poured three cans of mandarin oranges into the serving bowl. But the peaches got her. :( As she was preparing to pour the peaches into the bowl, she sliced her thumb on the open can lid. It was a pretty clean cut, such that it took her a few seconds to realize what happened and it didn't start to bleed right away. But once it started bleeding, it bled and bled. After washing her up, wiping her tears, and applying a band-aid, I finished making dinner by myself while she rested on the couch.

Even though April's waffle night didn't end as planned, we still had a delicious breakfast dinner and she had a great time working in the kitchen up until her injury. Despite the painful experience, she's looking forward to her next turn to cook dinner. And because of her painful experience, I know she'll be extra careful with cans from now on.

Clark Summer Cooking Adventures, Part 1: Koda's Mac 'n Cheese

This is the best fact I could get out of him, silly boy.

It's summer! And that means my (Sumiko's) kids will be doing the cooking! Each kid is in charge of cooking and cleaning up dinner one night each week. Of course, they have Mom's help and guidance, but I let them do as much of it as they can.

Making the roux.

First week's meals are as follows:
Koda: stove-top mac 'n cheese
Keanna: penne rigate with creamy pesto and Japanese cucumber salad
April: waffles
Lukas: chimichangas and bean dip (he's my burrito boy!)

We started last night with Koda's mac 'n cheese. You can find the recipe on my baked mac 'n cheese post. The kid-preferred stove-top variation is mentioned toward the bottom.

One thing that I love about cooking is that it is a great teaching opportunity. As we cooked, we talked about the science behind what we were doing. Why do we add flour to the cheese sauce? To thicken it. How does flour thicken things? The individual flour granules act like little sponges--they soak up the liquid and swell up. Why do we stir the flour into the butter rather than just mix it directly into the milk? To separate the flour granules before they swell so we don't end up with lumpy cheese sauce. I love it! I get one-on-one time with one child, dinner gets made, they learn a life skill, and they learn the concepts behind cooking so they can apply them to other dishes.

Another great benefit of having the kids cook for everyone else is that it teaches them to serve and be grateful. Koda was so happy to make macaroni and cheese for his family. And they were so appreciative. Every other kid complimented him on his dish without prompting. My heart swelled as I sat at the dinner table and heard the kids showing love to each other. Having the kids cook means more time prepping dinner and more mess, but it is a small price to pay for the character rewards gleaned.

Proud of his accomplishment!