Heart-shaped food

The girls and I made heart-shaped sugar cookies for Valentine's Day.

We decorated them with royal icing (I used this meringue powder and this recipe) and sprinkles.  I colored the icing with juice from frozen berries - I just nuked them until they burst and then strained out the juice and used it in the recipe instead of water.  I also added some lemon juice to mask the flavor of the meringue powder, which I think is pretty gross.  The meringue powder, it turns out, contains some artificial crap, so I think I will go back to egg whites for royal icing.

Z didn't seem to mind the taste.

My original plan was to surprise Jeremy with the cookies at work.

However, Zoia apparently has the chicken pox, and as our housekeeper cannot remember whether she ever had it (?!), she is staying away for the next week.  So we are homebound and can't in good conscience give anyone our pox cookies anyway.

More for us, I guess.

I also made some heart-shaped garlic knots to go with our dinner last night (recipe to follow).  They were pretty quick to make - I decided I wanted to make them 90 minutes before dinner and even with the yeast rising time, they were ready in time.

Brushed with garlic oil and drizzled with parsley and kosher salt.  If I had had parmesan cheese on hand I would have used that too.

Heart-shaped herb-garlic rolls (makes 15 small rolls).

Ingredients:
1 T active dry yeast
3/4 c warm water
1 T sugar
1.75 c flour
1 T salt
2 T olive oil
2 tsp dried basil
1 Tbs garlic powder
2 tsp dried oregano
2 tsp dried thyme

3 Tbs olive oil
1 large garlic clove
1 tsp salt (if you are using kosher, double the amount)
2 Tbs minced parsley
grated parmesan cheese (optional)

Stir yeast and sugar into the water, allow to sit five minutes, or until bubbly.  If it doesn't get bubbly within about 10 minutes, your yeast is bad; start over with new yeast.  Stir in salt, flour, olive oil and spices, and knead, adding additional flour if necessary, until the dough is smooth and elastic (I use my KitchenAid with dough hook for this).  Allow to rise for 30 minutes.  While the dough is rising, preheat your oven to 400 and grease a cookie sheet or prepare it with parchment paper.

After dough has risen a bit (it does not have to double), take golf-ball sized globs of dough and roll them into snakes between your hands.  Connect the snake at the top and push into a heart shape.  I found that pinching the dough at the bottom point of the heart, and the inner point, helped it keep its shape.  When they are all rolled, allow to rest for 10 minutes or so, then put in the oven for 18-20 minutes.  While they are baking, make the garlic oil: mash the garlic with the salt until it is paste-like, then mix into the olive oil and allow to sit.  Chop your parsley and grate your cheese.

When the rolls are done, brush them immediately with the garlic oil and sprinkle with parsley and cheese.  If you are not eating immediately, put the rolls in a bowl or basket lined with paper towels and cover with a kitchen towel.  Mine stayed piping hot for 30 minutes this way, and were still warm an hour later.

Where to Next?

That's the question, right?

Here's the answer.

Yep, we're going home this summer.  Jeremy got a very good job at the State Department and we anticipate we will be in Washington for two or three years.

And I am scared.  We've only been out of the U.S. for four years - but all of a sudden it feels like a lot longer.  When we moved to Moscow, my first child was just eight months old.  I have spent almost my entire parenting life overseas and suddenly, that seems significant.

I should be clear.  I am very happy that we are going to be able to spend time with family, that our girls and boy will get to know their relatives, get to play with their cousins.  But my priorities have shifted during the last four years, and moving home brings with it challenges I wouldn't have thought about five years ago.

I think the things I am most apprehensive about are:

1) The relentless availability of stuff, and

2) GMOs and the general quality of our food.

On the first point, we have too much stuff.  OK, so pretty much every American I know has too much stuff.  But just how much, too much, stuff we have, is made clear to us in stark relief every day.  Every day when I drive past the scrap-metal shacks near our house, I remember how much un-needed stuff is in my garage.  Every time I slip a coin to the gypsy children begging on our route to school and look at their ragged scarves and dirty fingers, I think about all the toys that lie, un-played with, in our playroom.  I send bags of stuff out of the house every few weeks, to shelters, to my housekeeper and to her neighbors.  But it feels like we are still suffocated with stuff.

I know that, theoretically, this should be under my control.  That I will just have to keep our trips to stores brief and infrequent.  Here, we never go shopping for recreational purposes, and I have even cut down significantly on online ordering lately.  It feels great, honestly.  While in the States, though, I have definitely found myself going to Target just because I was bored.  Maybe I won't have time to be bored.  One can hope.

On the second point, I am not naive enough to think that we are not eating genetically modified stuff in Georgia.  After all, they do import produce (even sweet potatoes from the U.S., for which I am very thankful).  But I do think hormones, antibiotics and GMOs are fewer in our food supply here.  I already told Jeremy we'd be spending a lot more on food when we go back to the States, as I will try to buy hormone-free and organic as much as possible.  Our checking account is already quaking in fear.

So anyway, yeah.  Back to DC in summer 2014.  Ready or not.

Dye for your cake, the natural way

I'm over at Hardship Homemaking today with a tutorial on making naturally dyed marshmallow fondant.  Hardship Homemaking is an expat-run blog with tips and tricks on how to move a family around the world and make do when you can't find the things you need at your post.  There's a wealth of information over there, so check it out!

Garden update

You guys.  I checked the garden yesterday.

Stuff is growing.

Stuff that I planted.

Like sugar snap peas!

And spinach!

And broccoli on top of the spinach because I forgot that I had already put spinach there! And they will probably both die but I don't care because I'm justsofreakingexcited that something grew!

Cabbage juice cupcakes

Today I made a small batch of white cupcake batter to experiment with natural food coloring.  I was particularly interested to try making blue and pink cupcakes with the "dye" I made from purple cabbage.  When I boiled the cabbage, the water turned blue.  But when I added a glug of vinegar, it instantly turned fuschia.  I was a little worried at what the cabbage water would do to the flavor of the cupcakes, especially because I had to mix quite a lot of the blue water into the dye to get the color.

So here is what they looked like out of the oven.  Don't mind the stab wound in the (yes, blue!) cupcake; I couldn't find a toothpick:

The two on top were dyed with the fuschia cabbage water.  The one next to the blue one was dyed with pomegranate juice, which just turned it an unappealing shade of taupe.

Then I cut into them:

Well, would you look at that!  And they didn't taste cabbagey at all.  Who knew?

(The ones on the bottom are carrot, lemon and lime cupcakes.  I don't know why I thought they would take on any color.  Clearly they did not.)

Palm Sunday and some eggs

Though most of you probably celebrated Easter yesterday, we've got another week to go.  So we spent the weekend dyeing Easter eggs and marking Palm Sunday.  We cut out all artificial colors and flavors from our diet not long ago, and thus, we decided to make our own natural dyes for the eggs this year. We dyed brown eggs, white eggs, and a carton's worth of quail eggs that I picked up on impulse at the supermarket last weekend.  For our natural dyes, we tried: red cabbage, beets, red onion skins, red wine, turmeric, and simmered spinach.

Natasha and Zoia helped fill the pots with the natural dye stuffs.

Zoia didn't quite understand what was going on; she thought we were making soup.

Natasha enjoyed a rare opportunity to stand at the stove.  Just looking at this photograph makes me nervous.

Zoia also wanted to dip eggs in the dye.  Here she is dipping a brown egg into a bowl of hot beet juice. 

Here's Natasha, dipping some raw white eggs into a pot of onion-skin-dyed water.  We tried two methods - immersing already cooked eggs into hot dye, and boiling raw eggs along with the dye stuff.  I had red that the boiling method worked better, but I messed up my experiment by only boiling brown eggs ahead of time, so the only eggs that boiled along with the dyestuff were the white ones.  Kind of hard to compare.

Here's a cool trick.  So, when you boil red cabbage, it turns the water a lovely Smurfy blue (the jar on the left).  But if you add a glug of vinegar, the cabbage juice instantly turns bright fuschia (the jar on the right).  I didn't try to dye any eggs in the fuschia (another experimental fail; I didn't plan ahead at all!), but the blue dye actually took quite nicely.

After we'd immersed all our eggs, we had dinner and Z entertained us with tricks.

Then we checked on our eggs.   I only put quail eggs in my red wine.  The wine did dye the outside of the eggshell a deep brown, but it also actually ate away at the outer, brown speckly part completely.

This is what a red-wine-dyed quail egg looks like when you remove the brown peel.  That is still shell there - just the inner layer of the shell.

And here is the finished product.  The quail eggs took the dye the best.  The brown ones on the edges were dyed in the onion skins.  The yellow ones in the middle were dyed in turmeric.  The blues were all cabbage juice, although I think a couple of them were in the beet juice first (which did nothing).  The funky white-and-black ones are red wine.  

These are all onion skin and cabbage.  The chicken eggs that hung out in the beet juice and the turrmeric water, and the spinach juice, didn't take on much color at all, so I overdyed them all in the red onion mixture.  I think next year we will have far more red onion peels, and we'll leave the eggs in that mixture and in the cabbage juice longer.

Palm Sunday morning.  Again - it is still quite cold here - 30ish on Sunday.  I was just an irresponsible mom and let them hang out outside to get these pictures of them in their green dresses.

Doing it myself

I think about blogging most days - I was doing so well - but lately I have no time for anything.  Part of this is because my oldest seems to be on her way to dropping her only nap.  Lately we get 20-40 minutes out of her per day.  I'm trying to transition her to quiet reading time in her room, but so far, she will only do it if I am sitting in plain sight in the hallway, reading myself.

The other reason I have no time is that I am cooking a lot more than I used to.  We've been on the Feingold diet for about three weeks now, and I can cautiously say that it seems to be helping N's eczema.  It seems, however, to have doubled the time I spend in the kitchen.  We can't eat anything with artificial colors or flavors, or most preservatives.

Example: We don't eat storebought bread anymore.  I don't have a bread machine.  And the recipes I use - a soaked grain bread recipe that is linked in pdf form on the bottom left of this page - and this sourdough bread recipe are pretty time consuming.  You do the math.

But there's more.  Jeremy and I spent several hours this weekend making graham crackers from scratch since Natasha's beloved Honeymaids have artificial vanilla flavor in them (seriously, just charge us the extra buck and use the real stuff!).  And when I made "Oreo" truffles for Christmas (using the Trader Joe's knock off which doesn't have as much garbage in it), I had to find an alternative to chock-full-of-crap candy melts for the coating.  Having used regular chocolate chips before, I knew that untempered chocolate doesn't set up as nicely as the melts do.  And I wanted the coating to be crisp.  And I am a glutton for punishment.  So I decided to temper the chocolate first.  It wasn't hard, but added 40 minutes or so to the process.

Below, some of my homemade sauerkraut (really tasty) and a slice of my homemade sandwich bread.  Below that, a really bad picture of a few of the truffles scattered around Jeremy's beloved fudge mint cookies.

When I get some time maybe I will figure out how to take good photos at night without natural light. 

Sauerkraut and sour dough

I have begun writing this post several times over the last few days, but I keep starting over because it just gets too long and unwieldy.  I've been thinking a lot lately about making some changes to our family's diet.  I'm not talking about low-carbing to lose weight or anything like that (though I would like to know how it is that I've been following the Couch-to-5K program for the last six weeks and just ran nearly 2 miles straight yesterday and have yet to drop an ounce).  No, what I'm looking for is a healthier way to eat, that will improve all of our immune systems and help Natasha overcome her eczema.  We've been fighting with it for two years now, and I know there has to be a better way.

I've done a lot of reading, and to be honest, it's completely overwhelming.  We have decided to try the Feingold diet, which, while generally recommended for ADHD, is also supposed to be effective against eczema.  It's a two-pronged approach.  The first part involves cutting out all artificial colors, flavors, sweeteners, and most preservatives. 

I thought that part would be easy - I cook mostly from scratch - or so I used to tell myself - and try to avoid junk.  But a quick sweep through our cabinets found quite a bit more yellow No. 5 and artificial flavor than I would have predicted was in there.  Goodbye, Honeymaid graham crackers.  Goodbye, cookie sprinkles.  Goodbye, candy melts.

Part 2 involves eliminating salicylates, which is are naturally occurring food chemicals, from the diet.  Apparently, many of N's favorite foods - apples, grapes, berries, raisins, cucumbers, and more - are chock-full of salicylates.  We have already noticed that she has allergies/intolerances to foods like tomatoes and oranges, and now I know that they are also high-salicylate.  I am a little skeptical of a diet plan that just eliminates certain fruits and vegetables, but I am just sick of seeing my toddler scratch herself to bloody pieces.  It's worth a try, anyway.

As I am shifting my family over to this diet, I have realized that I do rely on freezer items for meals once or twice per week.  Many of these items are not compatible with our new diet.  Like vareniki - which are little Ukrainian raviolis stuffed with potato or cabbage.  So this weekend, I spent hours making over 100 vareniki.  This batch is potato-pumpkin-thyme.

And in my reading, I have come across ideas from other diets that make sense to me.  Mostly that everything we are used to buying prepackaged from the grocery store - like bread and cheese and yogurt and sauerkraut - is much better for you if you make it yourself.  So yesterday I started a jar of sauerkraut.  It needs to ferment in there for awhile, so I am not sure when we will actually eat it.  But here it is, in its infancy:

I've also got a bag of sourdough starter that someone gave me last week.  Sourdough - real sourdough - is supposedly a lot better for you than quick-rise yeast bread, because the bacteria in the starter breaks down the hard-to-digest stuff before you even put it in your mouth.  I think I'm getting that explanation right, but I've a lot of reading yet to do on the subject.  Anyway, this starter was given to me along with a recipe for Amish Friendship Bread.  The recipe calls for a box of instant pudding, which would have turned me off even before I started doing all this reading.  So I'm going to try to use the starter to make a real bread that doesn't have artificial flavors and carnuba wax, whatever that is, in it.

Stay tuned.