Overheard: F with Kevin and baby CJ in the living-room: "It okay, daddy, baby be happy. You can go to work now. You can go your office and sleep."
This afternoon I spent cooking. Chopping veggies endlessly, using up the bits and bobs in the fridge, the wilting clumps of CSA parsley, the bag of collected beets and beet greens, fretful-looking cabbages, and on and on. I made borscht, an obvious choice given what was lurking in our fridge, a positively giant pot, though not with a typically meaty broth, just added a frozen steak bone to the brew; fresh dill from Nina's, bought specifically for this meal. Meanwhile, I prepared a second giant pot, this one of fresh tomato sauce, using tomatoes from Nina's, garlic, onions, celery, and a couple of despondent eggplants from the bottom drawer. I was going to toss in some green pepper, but luckily tasted first; they were CSA and an odd shape, and turned out to be hot peppers. So I chopped and froze those for later, a theoretical later because cooking for kids means leaving out the spicy-hot. Kevin and I douse our food at the table with a variety of hot sauces to satisfy our tastebuds. Maybe I'll make a spicy salsa someday this winter??
The above paragraph doesn't sound like it should have taken two hours of my day ... but it did. In fact, it was probably more like three hours when all was said and done, and I'd placed supper on the table--the borscht is what we ate tonight. We also ate a small bowl of oven-roasted teeny-tiny potatoes, a whimsical mixture of varieties. These particular potatoes represented a joint family effort. I discovered a handful of forgotten potatoes this past spring, sprouting in a paper bag in our cold cellar. I'd just read somewhere that potatoes are easy to grow, so I suggested we cut them up and stick them in the ground. Kevin and A planted them out back along our fenceline, which gets a bit more sunshine than it used to. And lo and behold, the potatoes grew. A and AB dug them up yesterday. Okay, it amounted to a couple of generous handfuls, but they were beautiful and wholly ours. That was our first course for supper: our summer's crop of potatoes, roasted with salt. We're totally biased, but man, they tasted good.
Fortunately, we don't have to live off them all winter long ...
The other food, and indeed, the leftover borscht, is for meals later on this week. I'm finding the post-school-scramble to be unfavourable to cooking (it's madness, actually, to be preparing meals from scratch amidst the melee), so this week I've planned and cooked ahead. This will only get more crucial as we add in music lessons and swim lessons, both after school, along with our other commitments, both pleasurable and necessary, adult and kid.
I also boiled eggs for the kids' lunches (one egg per kid, per day), and made the kids' school lunches for tomorrow. I always make the lunches the evening before, usually while preparing supper (I'm not a morning person at the best of times; it's wise not to overload my dawn duties). This year I've been sending a container of cut-up fruit (peaches and plums and pears right now), a simple sandwich of Nina's ham and a bun/bread with either mustard or butter, a baggie of cut-up veggies (carrots, celery, green pepper--actual green pepper, that is), a container of dried fruit and seeds (apricots, raisins, cranberries, sunflower seeds), the egg, and usually a little something extra too. AB gets a cookie because she's been brushing faithfully after her meals at school; A still needs to prove himself, but I did send each of them a little container of sesame snacks for tomorrow.
Alright, this has been a stolen moment (or three) and things have gotten positively out of hand behind me ... meaning, it's time for mama to cease the ceaseless typing and read a bedtime story. We're nearing the end of Little Town on the Prairie, and Laura is already 15 years old. I'm admiring how her parents trust her as they encourage and watch her develop a social life in this brand-new frontier town. The next book (These Happy Golden Years) was always my favourite, but that was when I was a teen and I'm recalling there's some pleasantly romantic stuff, which may not fly with the seven- and five-year-old crowd. We shall see ...Labels: CSA box, kids, local food, Nina's buying club, school lunches