Showing posts with label Hungarian. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hungarian. Show all posts
Friday, July 22, 2016
What's for supper, when you can't read the package? (Friday)
We bought a package of Knorr Fix Hungarian Goulash mix at the Euro grocery. Unfortunately, the package directions are in Polish.
Not to worry. A video is worth a thousand labels.
Tuesday, May 07, 2013
What's for supper? Inauthentic Chicken Paprikash, but we liked it (recipe included)
Canadian Living's recipe for Chicken Paprikash, adapted to what we had (see below)
Reheated basmati rice
Sweet potatoes
Butterscotch dumplings, because we had a container full of homemade sauce that needed to be used up
Boy, people nitpick a lot. The Hungarian-born readers (see the comments below the original recipe) certainly didn't care for this version of Paprikas/Paprikash. I'm sure they wouldn't like what I did to it, either. But you know what? Mr. Fixit, whose Schwabian grandma fed him many Hungarian-influenced dishes including Paprikas, thought it was fine. So don't call Lisa and complain. (Besides, she can't cook anything except hots-cakes.)
Here's the recipe plus my comments/changes.
Chicken Paprikash to Enjoy (Not to Fight Over)
Ingredients:
2 tbsp (30 mL) olive oil
1 lb (454 g) boneless skinless chicken thighs, quartered -- I used a pound of chicken breasts instead, partly thawed and cut in small chunks
1 onion, thinly sliced; 3 cloves garlic, minced; 2-1/2cups (625 mL) sliced trimmed cremini mushrooms -- I used frozen mixed vegetables that contained diced onion, mushrooms, red peppers, and green beans, plus half a teaspoon of garlic powder
2 tbsp (30 mL) sweet paprika -- I used only 1 tbsp. of "regular" supermarket paprika, plus 1/2 tsp. smoked paprika
3 tbsp (45 mL) all-purpose flour
2 tbsp (30 mL) tomato paste
2 cups (500 mL) sodium-reduced chicken broth
1 tsp (5 mL) lemon juice
1/2 tsp (2 mL) salt -- or less
1 pinch pepper
1 pkg (375 g) broad egg noodles -- we had leftover rice so didn't cook noodles
1/2 cup (125 mL) 5% sour cream -- we passed this at the table
2tbsp (30 mL) chopped fresh parsley -- left this out
Preparation
In large nonstick skillet, heat 1 tbsp of the oil over medium-high heat; brown chicken, 4 to 5 minutes. With slotted spoon, remove chicken to plate. Drain fat from pan. (I didn't drain anything, because I was using white meat.)
Heat remaining oil in skillet over medium heat; cook onion, garlic, mushrooms and paprika, stirring often, until onion is softened, 1 to 2 minutes.
Add flour and tomato paste; cook, stirring, for 1 minute. Gradually stir in broth and bring to boil; reduce heat and simmer until thickened, about 1 minute. Return chicken to pan; add lemon juice, salt and pepper.
[Meanwhile, in saucepan of boiling salted water, cook noodles according to package directions.]
Drain noodles and serve topped with chicken mixture. Garnish with sour cream and parsley.
Source : Canadian Living Magazine: February 2012
Wednesday, April 04, 2012
What's for supper?
Tonight's dinner menu after our afternoon out:
Hungarian smoked sausage (that was spicy!), cooked in the slow cooker with sauerkraut and acorn squash
Reheated kasha
Lettuce, sliced cucumbers, leftover bean salad, cottage cheese, applesauce
Fancy dessert glasses with a big spoonful of blackberry crisp, a little spoonful of vanilla yogurt, and a few extra thawed blackberries on top
Hungarian smoked sausage (that was spicy!), cooked in the slow cooker with sauerkraut and acorn squash
Reheated kasha
Lettuce, sliced cucumbers, leftover bean salad, cottage cheese, applesauce
Fancy dessert glasses with a big spoonful of blackberry crisp, a little spoonful of vanilla yogurt, and a few extra thawed blackberries on top
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
A Month with Charlotte Mason, #19: Beyond Us
I said yesterday that I was going to go in a certain direction with this...but I changed my mind.
It's true that Miss Mason warned even school principals not to take up her methods too "lightly," and if it was a danger for them, surely it is for us as well...a lot of what online CMers have worked at over the past decade or so has been meant to balance the proliferation of "Charlotte Mason Lite." It's also true that if you want to know what all this is/was about, you cannot do better than to read Charlotte Mason's books. Forty years of experience packed into a few paperbacks..."the best thoughts of the best minds" and all that.
However... there are two points, two big ones anyway, that get missed in this. One is that Charlotte Mason headed the Parents National Educational Union, which was a nation-wide group. In other words, it wasn't just CM and her best and closest friends; this was a large iron-sharpening-iron community. You can call her the inspiration, the head, even the heart behind this educational movement...but she didn't do it alone. She edited the Parent's Review, but she didn't write it alone. She headed the House of Education training college, but she didn't teach it alone. She wouldn't have called her philosophy and methods "Charlotte Mason Education." I'm not even sure what she did call it. In the books she refers to "this method," "PNEU methods" and so on, but "it" doesn't even seem to have a more official name...and perhaps that's the reason we've fallen back on referring to it as "Charlotte Mason" or CM, just like "Montessori schools." But perhaps if we started saying that we homeschool using PNEU methods, it would get even worse...people would do Google searches and come up with travel guides. Or we'd get people asking about how you homeschool using that pneu-monia method. Without trying to discredit Charlotte Mason, I wonder if someday we'll come up with a name for her method that nails it without requiring an entire workshop's worth of explanation.
The second issue is this, and it's why I pasted that quote at the top: there is a need for the wisdom-made-practical that we have benefited from ourselves, even if it's not labelled CM or packaged the way we expect. Charlotte Mason appreciated excellent educators, even if they'd never heard of her methods (or they had lived before her time). She particularly mentioned a teacher in a mining community who taught his students what they really wanted and needed to know, helped them find answers to the things they wondered about, and (I think) showed them that they were intelligent enough to learn those things. It reminds me of Marva Collins teaching inner-city kids stuff that was way off the expected-results charts. It reminds me of some of the books on the website Learner's Library, like Richard B. Gregg's Preparation for Science, published in 1928, endorsed by Mahatma Gandhi, and meant to give rural students in India a strong start in science...which also reminds me of George Washington Carver and his college students scrounging stuff to make their own lab equipment. It reminds me of some of the points in For the Children's Sake, that CM's methods can be used in the most unlikely settings.
And those unlikely settings...perhaps...are where we should be setting our hearts, using our creativity. The unlikely children, even the ones with the "play in the toilet" parents. Especially those ones. Many of us have cultivated our creative frugal homeschooling...and yet it's not even our children, necessarily, who need that creativity the most. I live on a somewhat limited budget, but I could go out and buy a math game if I needed to; I just prefer to make my own, or to use what we already have, or to scrounge a used one. For some parents, using any available materials would be necessity, not choice...but even more important, for some of those same parents, the materials may be there but the motivation and the knowledge to use them are not. Simplest example: many homeschoolers know how to use a deck of cards to teach math skills...you count the spots, you learn the numerals, you play simple games...and don't most people have cards around the house, or pencil and paper, or Cheerios? Using Cheerios, or beans or raisins or pennies, you could exactly duplicate the very detailed early math lessons that Charlotte Mason gives in Home Education. We have this information...we have used it, we've expanded on it, we've created games, we've taught our children... but to a lot of people, a deck of cards is just a deck of cards.
So where to from here? Literally, where to?
Who to?
I greatly admire our online friend the Deputy Headmistress, and I've often drawn on her CM ideas myself. She's been one of the driving forces behind Ambleside Online for years. What has impressed me lately, though, is how she's...reinvented isn't the right word, but I'm searching for a better one...retooled how she does CM/AO, to work well under special circumstances, for two children of a different cultural, different economic/family background. She and her family are giving them the atmosphere and the discipline (sorry about the tulips), the ideas and the living books. What Blynken does for school when he's there doesn't have to look exactly like AO Year 1 (well, he's only in kindergarten anyway). It couldn't, because he isn't there all the time.
But this is the whole point...that this thing is based, according to Charlotte Mason, on a few principles and truths about the way our minds work, about who we are, about what we need. It's not a Victorian/Edwardian/George the Fifthian, English, one-old-woman-in-black movement. It has roots going back to Comenius and Plutarch and classical education as a whole (see some of Krakovianka's posts for discussion on that). It resonated with twentieth-century Christians working at L'Abri. It can reach forward into a time when it's most needed...a time that's already here when we're forgetting so much of even our own past century's history, when people don't want to read anything longer than Twitter, when we don't know how to survive without our plug-ins, or how to cook food that comes without a package and directions. Mr. Fixit has a young German-raised co-worker who didn't recognize the term "Austro-Hungary" (where Mr. Fixit's grandparents were born), and who knows almost nothing about the Third Reich. As another example, when the Apprentice started public high school she was somewhat surprised to find that she knew more about women's history issues (such as the right of a woman to be recognized as co-owner of a family farm) than some of her friends did. And we are hardly militant feminists here.
I don't think the answer, somehow, is going to be in hosting scare-you-off CM workshops, even basic ones. The world is full of Blynkens, and toilet kids, and teenagers who could still find a bigger room to step into if they had some encouragement. Not all of us can handle weekend (or two-week) unofficial foster kids. But some of us can find...need to find...other ways to reach out beyond our own few lucky homeschooled children. The world may not need (or think it needs) more "CM," but it does need more magnanimity, more imagination, more story, more humanness, more connection points, more wonder. If that's what we're able to give our own children, that's good. But if we can find a way to pass it on even further...wouldn't that be amazing?
Something to think about, anyway.
"I think of a young woman I met at the corner store once who was toting a little one; I asked her if she knew about the mom-and-tot play programs and drop-ins that our community centre offered. She just looked at me without much interest and said, "He'd rather play in the toilet." Maybe she was joking? I've never been sure."--2005 post here about povertyIf there's anything I feel apologetic about in Charlotte Mason, it's that...in a way...homeschoolers have appropriated her ideas, made them our own, and turned Charlotte Mason into...well, Charlotte Mason. Something that takes us an hour to explain (including the necessary biographical details) and causes people to wonder (as one lady asked plaintively at a support group meeting), "um...are there any OTHER ways to homeschool?"
It's true that Miss Mason warned even school principals not to take up her methods too "lightly," and if it was a danger for them, surely it is for us as well...a lot of what online CMers have worked at over the past decade or so has been meant to balance the proliferation of "Charlotte Mason Lite." It's also true that if you want to know what all this is/was about, you cannot do better than to read Charlotte Mason's books. Forty years of experience packed into a few paperbacks..."the best thoughts of the best minds" and all that.
However... there are two points, two big ones anyway, that get missed in this. One is that Charlotte Mason headed the Parents National Educational Union, which was a nation-wide group. In other words, it wasn't just CM and her best and closest friends; this was a large iron-sharpening-iron community. You can call her the inspiration, the head, even the heart behind this educational movement...but she didn't do it alone. She edited the Parent's Review, but she didn't write it alone. She headed the House of Education training college, but she didn't teach it alone. She wouldn't have called her philosophy and methods "Charlotte Mason Education." I'm not even sure what she did call it. In the books she refers to "this method," "PNEU methods" and so on, but "it" doesn't even seem to have a more official name...and perhaps that's the reason we've fallen back on referring to it as "Charlotte Mason" or CM, just like "Montessori schools." But perhaps if we started saying that we homeschool using PNEU methods, it would get even worse...people would do Google searches and come up with travel guides. Or we'd get people asking about how you homeschool using that pneu-monia method. Without trying to discredit Charlotte Mason, I wonder if someday we'll come up with a name for her method that nails it without requiring an entire workshop's worth of explanation.
The second issue is this, and it's why I pasted that quote at the top: there is a need for the wisdom-made-practical that we have benefited from ourselves, even if it's not labelled CM or packaged the way we expect. Charlotte Mason appreciated excellent educators, even if they'd never heard of her methods (or they had lived before her time). She particularly mentioned a teacher in a mining community who taught his students what they really wanted and needed to know, helped them find answers to the things they wondered about, and (I think) showed them that they were intelligent enough to learn those things. It reminds me of Marva Collins teaching inner-city kids stuff that was way off the expected-results charts. It reminds me of some of the books on the website Learner's Library, like Richard B. Gregg's Preparation for Science, published in 1928, endorsed by Mahatma Gandhi, and meant to give rural students in India a strong start in science...which also reminds me of George Washington Carver and his college students scrounging stuff to make their own lab equipment. It reminds me of some of the points in For the Children's Sake, that CM's methods can be used in the most unlikely settings.
And those unlikely settings...perhaps...are where we should be setting our hearts, using our creativity. The unlikely children, even the ones with the "play in the toilet" parents. Especially those ones. Many of us have cultivated our creative frugal homeschooling...and yet it's not even our children, necessarily, who need that creativity the most. I live on a somewhat limited budget, but I could go out and buy a math game if I needed to; I just prefer to make my own, or to use what we already have, or to scrounge a used one. For some parents, using any available materials would be necessity, not choice...but even more important, for some of those same parents, the materials may be there but the motivation and the knowledge to use them are not. Simplest example: many homeschoolers know how to use a deck of cards to teach math skills...you count the spots, you learn the numerals, you play simple games...and don't most people have cards around the house, or pencil and paper, or Cheerios? Using Cheerios, or beans or raisins or pennies, you could exactly duplicate the very detailed early math lessons that Charlotte Mason gives in Home Education. We have this information...we have used it, we've expanded on it, we've created games, we've taught our children... but to a lot of people, a deck of cards is just a deck of cards.
So where to from here? Literally, where to?
Who to?
I greatly admire our online friend the Deputy Headmistress, and I've often drawn on her CM ideas myself. She's been one of the driving forces behind Ambleside Online for years. What has impressed me lately, though, is how she's...reinvented isn't the right word, but I'm searching for a better one...retooled how she does CM/AO, to work well under special circumstances, for two children of a different cultural, different economic/family background. She and her family are giving them the atmosphere and the discipline (sorry about the tulips), the ideas and the living books. What Blynken does for school when he's there doesn't have to look exactly like AO Year 1 (well, he's only in kindergarten anyway). It couldn't, because he isn't there all the time.
But this is the whole point...that this thing is based, according to Charlotte Mason, on a few principles and truths about the way our minds work, about who we are, about what we need. It's not a Victorian/Edwardian/George the Fifthian, English, one-old-woman-in-black movement. It has roots going back to Comenius and Plutarch and classical education as a whole (see some of Krakovianka's posts for discussion on that). It resonated with twentieth-century Christians working at L'Abri. It can reach forward into a time when it's most needed...a time that's already here when we're forgetting so much of even our own past century's history, when people don't want to read anything longer than Twitter, when we don't know how to survive without our plug-ins, or how to cook food that comes without a package and directions. Mr. Fixit has a young German-raised co-worker who didn't recognize the term "Austro-Hungary" (where Mr. Fixit's grandparents were born), and who knows almost nothing about the Third Reich. As another example, when the Apprentice started public high school she was somewhat surprised to find that she knew more about women's history issues (such as the right of a woman to be recognized as co-owner of a family farm) than some of her friends did. And we are hardly militant feminists here.
I don't think the answer, somehow, is going to be in hosting scare-you-off CM workshops, even basic ones. The world is full of Blynkens, and toilet kids, and teenagers who could still find a bigger room to step into if they had some encouragement. Not all of us can handle weekend (or two-week) unofficial foster kids. But some of us can find...need to find...other ways to reach out beyond our own few lucky homeschooled children. The world may not need (or think it needs) more "CM," but it does need more magnanimity, more imagination, more story, more humanness, more connection points, more wonder. If that's what we're able to give our own children, that's good. But if we can find a way to pass it on even further...wouldn't that be amazing?
Something to think about, anyway.
Sunday, December 31, 2006
Treehouse Recipe Index for 2006
[Reposted and updated]
Here's a roundup of the recipes we posted this year on Dewey's Treehouse. I didn't include the ones that were only given as a link. And I should note that most of these aren't original: they came from Food that Really Schmecks, Whole Foods for the Whole Family, The Harrowsmith Cookbook, Vegetarian Times, Canadian Living, and friends who like to cook.
[Update note: one might THINK, especially after viewing the November and December recipes, that we eat nothing in the Treehouse but chocolate. Mama Squirrel thinks that would be nice, but it isn't true. As our New Year's Resolution, we promise to provide a few slightly more healthful recipes in 2007.]
January
Kitchener Special
Kasha-Vegetable Pilaf
Sugar-free Banana Prune Bread
February
Subversive Tuna Recipe (Tuna Wrap-Up)
Raisin Sesame Cookies
March
Cocoa-Ricotta Cream
Beef and Green Bean Stir Fry
Dulcie's Macaroni Meal in a Skillet
April
Good Friday Kiffle (or Kolacky or Kolache)--one of our most-Googled recipes
May
Coffeemamma's Sour Cream Rhubarb Muffins
July
No-Bake Brownies
August
Hungarian Stew
Swiss-Cashew Salad, Our Version
Serendipity and the DHM's Chicken Recipe
September
Tofu Chocolate Pie
October
Cranberry-Apricot Loaf
Pumpkin Gingerbread Snacking Cake
Edna Staebler's Glorious Golden Pumpkin Pie
November
Small Chocolate Cake
Rather Retro Recipe (Lemon Dessert)
Jam Bars
Chocolate Fingers
December
Christmas Day Lunch (Jiggle Bells and Star of the East Salad Plate)
Chocolate-Apricot Confections
Chocolate-Hazelnut Slices or Crescents
Our 2005 Recipe Index
Here's a roundup of the recipes we posted this year on Dewey's Treehouse. I didn't include the ones that were only given as a link. And I should note that most of these aren't original: they came from Food that Really Schmecks, Whole Foods for the Whole Family, The Harrowsmith Cookbook, Vegetarian Times, Canadian Living, and friends who like to cook.
[Update note: one might THINK, especially after viewing the November and December recipes, that we eat nothing in the Treehouse but chocolate. Mama Squirrel thinks that would be nice, but it isn't true. As our New Year's Resolution, we promise to provide a few slightly more healthful recipes in 2007.]
January
Kitchener Special
Kasha-Vegetable Pilaf
Sugar-free Banana Prune Bread
February
Subversive Tuna Recipe (Tuna Wrap-Up)
Raisin Sesame Cookies
March
Cocoa-Ricotta Cream
Beef and Green Bean Stir Fry
Dulcie's Macaroni Meal in a Skillet
April
Good Friday Kiffle (or Kolacky or Kolache)--one of our most-Googled recipes
May
Coffeemamma's Sour Cream Rhubarb Muffins
July
No-Bake Brownies
August
Hungarian Stew
Swiss-Cashew Salad, Our Version
Serendipity and the DHM's Chicken Recipe
September
Tofu Chocolate Pie
October
Cranberry-Apricot Loaf
Pumpkin Gingerbread Snacking Cake
Edna Staebler's Glorious Golden Pumpkin Pie
November
Small Chocolate Cake
Rather Retro Recipe (Lemon Dessert)
Jam Bars
Chocolate Fingers
December
Christmas Day Lunch (Jiggle Bells and Star of the East Salad Plate)
Chocolate-Apricot Confections
Chocolate-Hazelnut Slices or Crescents
Our 2005 Recipe Index
Wednesday, August 16, 2006
Hungarian Stew
Well, that sounds better than Hungarian Leftover Roast Casserole.
The Deputy Headmistress was looking for recipes for leftover roast beef, and this is what I usually do with ours. It's one of those no-real-amounts recipes, which makes it hard to write out. But these are the basics:
You need 1 good chunk of leftover roast, chopped into small (fork-sized) pieces; 1 small onion, sliced; at least 1 clove garlic, chopped; sliced carrots; salt, pepper, 1 tsp. paprika, and a can of tomato soup. Bake this in a covered casserole for an hour, or put it in the crock pot for the afternoon. When it's heated through and the carrots are cooked, you can add a can of green beans, if you want to stretch it a bit, and a large spoonful of sour cream; you might put it back into the oven for a few minutes to warm up the beans. We usually eat this with noodles or perogies (the little potato-stuffed ones from the supermarket).
Mushrooms might be a good addition, too. If the sauce is too runny, you can thicken it with flour or cornstarch (mix the cornstarch with the sour cream before adding).
The Deputy Headmistress was looking for recipes for leftover roast beef, and this is what I usually do with ours. It's one of those no-real-amounts recipes, which makes it hard to write out. But these are the basics:
You need 1 good chunk of leftover roast, chopped into small (fork-sized) pieces; 1 small onion, sliced; at least 1 clove garlic, chopped; sliced carrots; salt, pepper, 1 tsp. paprika, and a can of tomato soup. Bake this in a covered casserole for an hour, or put it in the crock pot for the afternoon. When it's heated through and the carrots are cooked, you can add a can of green beans, if you want to stretch it a bit, and a large spoonful of sour cream; you might put it back into the oven for a few minutes to warm up the beans. We usually eat this with noodles or perogies (the little potato-stuffed ones from the supermarket).
Mushrooms might be a good addition, too. If the sauce is too runny, you can thicken it with flour or cornstarch (mix the cornstarch with the sour cream before adding).
Tuesday, February 21, 2006
All around the kitchen
Re-posted in 2011, with updates
Our friend the DHM at The Common Room started a Meme for Monday. In other words, a quiz game to play and pass on, in this case about our kitchens and cooking habits.
1. How many meals does most of your family eat at home each week? How many are in your family?
Two adults, one teenager, two younger children. We eat most meals at home, maybe eat out once a month. Mr. Fixit sometimes stays at work over lunch and goes out for a burger.
2. How many cookbooks do you own?
I thought I had quite a few, but definitely not as many as the DHM's guess of 300. Maybe 40? I have some doubles for the girls (for when they're out on their own someday).
3. How often do you refer to a cookbook each week?
Including my binder of printouts and clippings? Probably several times a week.
4. Do you collect recipes from other sources?
The Internet is one of my favourite sources as well, particularly recipes from friends' blogs. I also think the recipes from Canadian Living turn out pretty well. As Mama Lion said in her responses, the Internet has definitely changed my cookbook-buying habits and also my clipping-and-saving habits. Reading the Hillbilly Housewife's site alone has been the equivalent of a new cookbook.
5. How do you store recipes?
The ones I like go into a binder. Clippings I'm just thinking about go in an accordion file.
6. Do you follow recipes pretty closely, or use them primarily to give you ideas?
Depends on what it is. I've read so many recipes for things like lentil soup that by now I just notice "oh, they put in oregano and carrots, maybe I'll try that." But some recipes work so well just the way they're written that I don't want to change them. I like recipes that give you variations and suggestions for substitutions, because I don't always have whatever-it-is on hand.
7. Is there a particular ethnic style or flavor that predominates in your cooking?
How about this: Post-vegetarian/tightwad/comfort food with a few shots of Mennonite and Schwabian. (Mr. Fixit's family cooked in an Eastern European style that combined German, Hungarian and Croatian cooking influences.)
8. What's your favourite kitchen task related to meal planning and preparation?
Taking something out of the oven that smells good. And maybe puttering around before supper time, getting everything on the table.
9. What's your least favourite part?
Peeling things.
10. Do you plan menus before you shop?
I usually have several meals in mind but I don't always know when we're going to have them.
11. What are your favourite kitchen tools or appliances?
Crockpot, toaster oven, timer. And Mr. Fixit's power grinder that sharpens knives, but that's in the garage.
12. If you could buy one new thing for your kitchen, money no object and space not an issue, what would you most like to have?
A gas stove and new curtains.
13. Since money and space probably are objects, what are you most likely to buy next?
A blender, if I can find one at a yard sale. (I want to make milkshakes.)
14. Do you have a separate freezer for storage?
Yes, we just got one.
15. Grocery shop alone or with others?
We all go together on Saturdays, and then Mr. Fixit goes to the butcher's when he's at that end of town.
16. How many meatless main dish meals do you fix in a week?
It depends on the week. Usually a couple of nights a week, and then I guess you could count "meatless leftovers" the next day!
17. If you have a decorating theme in your kitchen, what is it? Favourite kitchen colours? (And yes, I spell Canadian; doing it the other way is like walking backwards for me.)
A theme? "Homeschool Contemporary." Blue and yellow flowered wallpaper. I have a few vintage china things out that I like, roosters and funny-face jam jars.
18. What's the first thing you ever learned to cook, and how old were you?
My mother let me put bacon on the Kraft Pizza Mix when I was about three...
19. How did you learn to cook?
Brownie Cooking Badge when I was nine?
"1. Prepare a breakfast, set the table and serve the breakfast. It should include: juice, cooked cereal, boiled or poached egg, toast and milk. Tea or coffee for adults.
2. Prepare and pack the following in a lunch box:
a) A sandwich made with meat, poultry, fish, cheese, egg or peanut butter filling. [I guess tofu spread wasn't an option?]
b) A raw vegetable, washed and prepared, such as carrots, turnip or celery sticks.
c) A raw fruit or cooked or canned fruit in a leak-proof container.
d) Simple cookies you have made.
e) A hot drink in an insulated container.
OR
Prepare and serve, at a table or on a tray, a lunch or supper to include:
a) Hot soup, either homemade or canned.
b) A sandwich made with meat, fish, poultry, cheese, egg or vegetable filling; with a raw vegetable served on the side.
c) Canned fruit.
d) Milk, tea or coffee for adults."
I also learned from making a lot of dinners during high school (my mom often got home from work right at supper time) and from working for a chef in a camp kitchen one summer. I did NOT learn from the one year of grade 7 home ec I took.
[Oh, I forgot to say that I took a Community Nutrition Worker course ten years ago. But that wasn't about learning to cook--it was more about budgeting and shopping, and getting people to try things like lentils.]
20. Who else would you like to participate?
Has to be somebody else with a blog, right? OK, I tag Marsha at the Abarbablog.
Our friend the DHM at The Common Room started a Meme for Monday. In other words, a quiz game to play and pass on, in this case about our kitchens and cooking habits.
1. How many meals does most of your family eat at home each week? How many are in your family?
Two adults, one teenager, two younger children. We eat most meals at home, maybe eat out once a month. Mr. Fixit sometimes stays at work over lunch and goes out for a burger.
2. How many cookbooks do you own?
I thought I had quite a few, but definitely not as many as the DHM's guess of 300. Maybe 40? I have some doubles for the girls (for when they're out on their own someday).
3. How often do you refer to a cookbook each week?
Including my binder of printouts and clippings? Probably several times a week.
4. Do you collect recipes from other sources?
The Internet is one of my favourite sources as well, particularly recipes from friends' blogs. I also think the recipes from Canadian Living turn out pretty well. As Mama Lion said in her responses, the Internet has definitely changed my cookbook-buying habits and also my clipping-and-saving habits. Reading the Hillbilly Housewife's site alone has been the equivalent of a new cookbook.
5. How do you store recipes?
The ones I like go into a binder. Clippings I'm just thinking about go in an accordion file.
6. Do you follow recipes pretty closely, or use them primarily to give you ideas?
Depends on what it is. I've read so many recipes for things like lentil soup that by now I just notice "oh, they put in oregano and carrots, maybe I'll try that." But some recipes work so well just the way they're written that I don't want to change them. I like recipes that give you variations and suggestions for substitutions, because I don't always have whatever-it-is on hand.
7. Is there a particular ethnic style or flavor that predominates in your cooking?
How about this: Post-vegetarian/tightwad/comfort food with a few shots of Mennonite and Schwabian. (Mr. Fixit's family cooked in an Eastern European style that combined German, Hungarian and Croatian cooking influences.)
8. What's your favourite kitchen task related to meal planning and preparation?
Taking something out of the oven that smells good. And maybe puttering around before supper time, getting everything on the table.
9. What's your least favourite part?
Peeling things.
10. Do you plan menus before you shop?
I usually have several meals in mind but I don't always know when we're going to have them.
11. What are your favourite kitchen tools or appliances?
Crockpot, toaster oven, timer. And Mr. Fixit's power grinder that sharpens knives, but that's in the garage.
12. If you could buy one new thing for your kitchen, money no object and space not an issue, what would you most like to have?
A gas stove and new curtains.
13. Since money and space probably are objects, what are you most likely to buy next?
A blender, if I can find one at a yard sale. (I want to make milkshakes.)
14. Do you have a separate freezer for storage?
Yes, we just got one.
15. Grocery shop alone or with others?
We all go together on Saturdays, and then Mr. Fixit goes to the butcher's when he's at that end of town.
16. How many meatless main dish meals do you fix in a week?
It depends on the week. Usually a couple of nights a week, and then I guess you could count "meatless leftovers" the next day!
17. If you have a decorating theme in your kitchen, what is it? Favourite kitchen colours? (And yes, I spell Canadian; doing it the other way is like walking backwards for me.)
A theme? "Homeschool Contemporary." Blue and yellow flowered wallpaper. I have a few vintage china things out that I like, roosters and funny-face jam jars.
18. What's the first thing you ever learned to cook, and how old were you?
My mother let me put bacon on the Kraft Pizza Mix when I was about three...
19. How did you learn to cook?
Brownie Cooking Badge when I was nine?
"1. Prepare a breakfast, set the table and serve the breakfast. It should include: juice, cooked cereal, boiled or poached egg, toast and milk. Tea or coffee for adults.
2. Prepare and pack the following in a lunch box:
a) A sandwich made with meat, poultry, fish, cheese, egg or peanut butter filling. [I guess tofu spread wasn't an option?]
b) A raw vegetable, washed and prepared, such as carrots, turnip or celery sticks.
c) A raw fruit or cooked or canned fruit in a leak-proof container.
d) Simple cookies you have made.
e) A hot drink in an insulated container.
OR
Prepare and serve, at a table or on a tray, a lunch or supper to include:
a) Hot soup, either homemade or canned.
b) A sandwich made with meat, fish, poultry, cheese, egg or vegetable filling; with a raw vegetable served on the side.
c) Canned fruit.
d) Milk, tea or coffee for adults."
I also learned from making a lot of dinners during high school (my mom often got home from work right at supper time) and from working for a chef in a camp kitchen one summer. I did NOT learn from the one year of grade 7 home ec I took.
[Oh, I forgot to say that I took a Community Nutrition Worker course ten years ago. But that wasn't about learning to cook--it was more about budgeting and shopping, and getting people to try things like lentils.]
20. Who else would you like to participate?
Has to be somebody else with a blog, right? OK, I tag Marsha at the Abarbablog.
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