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One woman's adventures in cooking for her Dutch-American family.









Showing posts with label kids. Show all posts
Showing posts with label kids. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 4, 2012

Banana Snowman

It's been a crazy few months, between my intense three month headache, selling our house, packing up all our worldly possessions and moving into a small, furnished apartment until our new house (and kitchen!) is done.

Hopefully, in the downtime, I can catch up a bit with my cooking here. I've been using Pinterest for a lot of my meal plans lately. But with most of my cooking gear packed away, meals have been simple.

In honor of our first big snow, I made my son a snowmen snack:

Tuesday, September 6, 2011

Jello Fishbowl

This weekend we attended a friend's open house party. Our friend bought a mid-century ranch, and did a fabulous job updating it. As I was trying to figure out what I could do for a practical housewarming gift, I found this cute jello fish bowl recipe on Pinterest:


I found a cute glass jar with cover at Target, and since you can never have too many glass jars, I decided to make the jello fishbowl in the jar for housewarming centerpiece.

Montana Anchor Mini Glass Jar with Lid from Target
One word of warning about this recipe. It's not something you can throw together. Between the need for flat soda and the fact that the gelatin needs to set, you'll need at least two days to assemble this.

Ingredients

  • 1 two-liter bottle lemon-lime soda, flat (I left the cap loose over night)
  • 4 1/4-ounce packages unflavored gelatin (or 1 box blue jello, if you can find it)
  • 2 drops blue food coloring (if you don't use blue jello)
  • 2 ounces gummy fish
Instructions:

1. Unscrew cap of soda and leave it overnight so that it becomes flat. Unless, of course, you have some flat soda laying around, in which case, you are good to go!


2.  Place 1 cup soda in a large bowl. Sprinkle gelatin evenly over soda, and let stand to soften, about 5 minutes. I thought it made a crazy face, what do you think?

3. Place 2 cups soda in a small saucepan over medium heat. Heat until just before a boil.

4. Add the softened gelatin, stirring to dissolve the gelatin completely over the heat, about 2 minutes. Remove from heat.

5. Pour the liquid into the fish bowl. Add the remaining soda and food coloring, and stir to combine. Martha suggests adding the food coloring and soda to the sauce pan, but I put it in the glass bowl first so I could see the coloring.

I used 3 drops of blue food coloring.
6. Using a damp paper towel, carefully remove any bubbles that have formed on the surface. If you give it a minute, most of the bubbles will disappear on their own, then use the paper towel to get the last stragglers.

7. Transfer to the refrigerator to chill overnight.

8. When ready to serve, use a sharp knife to make vertical slits in the gelatin; insert the fish in a random pattern to make it look as though they are swimming in the bowl. Keep refrigerated until serving. Serve within 6 hours.

Eet smakelijk!

Friday, January 14, 2011

Fun Lunches with D

Okay, these are not particularly gourmet meals, but there are super fun. One day a few weeks, while we were walking around my hubby's hometown, we hung out in a bookstore. I love bookstores in general, and now that my Dutch has improved, I'm able to (mostly) follow the instructions in Dutch cookbooks.

One of my favorite souvenirs from our trip to Holland was this Dutch cookbook for kids.

Roughly translated, the title is "Garnish with Kids" and it's full of step-by-step photos of fun meals for kids that look like animals and vehicles and things.

I haven't found anything similar in English...yet.

D and I have had lots of fun with lunch this week. I've had to improvise quite a bit and my options are rather limited until we go shopping tomorrow, but it's been a really cool way to spend our long car-less days at home. (We'll be getting a new car on Monday). One of D's favorite things is to "help" me cook. At least once a day, he'll pull a chair over to the kitchen counter and say, "Cook, Mommy?" Sometimes he'll go over to the pantry and start handing me seasonings. I love that he loves food, and this cookbook is an especially good way for him to appreciate the process of putting a meal together. For now, his job is to watch, help gather the ingredients, and most important, sample often!

A few of our recent creations:

Airplane

Fish

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