Lunch Lady Blues

The good news is, my kid loves school lunch. She told me tonight she wants to tell the lunch ladies that this is the best food she's ever had. I told her to go right ahead, they'd be so happy to hear it.

The bad news is, this is hard not to take personally. What about my Mark Bittman pasta tonight? And the crusty bread and olive oil accompaniment? Nada.

Having eaten lunch where my kid goes to school, I have to admit it is pretty good, fresh stuff. Not the canned green beans of my childhood. In truth, I am mostly just delighted that she eats a good lunch and I DON'T HAVE TO MAKE IT.

Go lunch ladies!

Week 98—Back to School, for the 1st time

Mon – Homemade pizza, salad

Tues –  Chicken stir-fry

Weds – Beef skewers w/cherry toms and mushrooms

Thurs – Pasta, beans, and greens

Fri – Burgers/dogs

Alts – Alfredo; falafels

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I've been admittedly lax on the whole meal-planning-grocery-shopping ritual this latter part of summer. It's been a nice break, reminding me of the order that is brought to my life when I do menu plan. No scrapping for meals, no looks of "what's this?" when I set, uh, something on the table.

Tomorrow, 9/12, represents the first time in my 6 years of parenthood that I will officially ship a kid off to school for all-day every day education. Which means one huge thing to me: I have to have 3 kids who are in varying states of neediness (diapers to tricky zippers) out the door by 8AM every day.

Some parents shed tears at the prospect of sending their little ones off to kindergarten. I think my overriding concern is for one of a dictated schedule for the first time in years. What does parenthood look like from here? Should be an exciting week. Happy cooking.

Flaming Green

I'm packing for a camping trip (sorry, Matt, be there in a sec) but simply had to pause when I came across this book of matches.

Are you kidding me? Did you, oh Diamond Matches-Makers just completely negate the Tremendous Environmental Good that you bestowed on we, the purchasers of your Responsibly Sourced wooden matches by using a multi-color printing process which is without question vastly more environmentally harmful than using irresponsible forests for the wood splinters that comprise your match sticks?

Rich! This makes me want to use TWO matches each time I light up my dubiously gathered wood pile to burn my Responsibly Sourced Jet-Puff marshmallows.

Seriously people. Stick with the 2-color print job and spare me the litany on how green my choice of matchsticks is.

Habitat Wrap-a-thon

My husband and I spent last Thursday evening assembling wraps for a Habitat for Humanity crew working in a tornado-damaged area of NE Minneapolis.

Thanks, Becky, for the suggestion to make wraps! So, the photo of them on my car seat (yum) doesn't make them look too appealing, but they looked decent in person. They were pretty fun to put together and it was easy to make a big variety for all tastes. We had chips, cookies, and salsas as well.

By the 40th wrap, I even had a pretty slick deli-style wax paper roll-up going.

The event inspired a lot of wrap-oriented lunches in our house lately, using up left-over ingredients.

Cakes, as decorated by the kids

This year, the kids were very excited to decorate their own cakes. The theme for both was basically "stick toy on top of cake" so it was a pretty clean proposition.

My daughter wanted a horse cake, so we frosted it with a lush green pasture, then she put a fence, tree, couple of ponies, hay bale and water trough on top. I'm describing it so thoroughly because I didn't get a picture of it other than in video form.


My son wanted a spider cake. I was pretty excited to make a round cake and give it big hairy spider legs, but he spotted some Spiderman cupcake toppers that he thought were the coolest things ever. So instead, I frosted a web onto the cake and he popped the little Spidermen all over the cake.

Pretty simple cake year compared to the Barbie cake last year, and alligator cake from a couple years ago!