Wrap up a full lunch
Dec 31, 2011 Uncategorized
Greek salads are great, but sometimes they aren’t practical to take on the road. Take the salad, wrap it up and head out to run your end-of-the-year errands.
It’s a simple, healthy lunch that you can eat on the go. Better tasting than any drive-thru, this is a good-for-you lunch that you will not regret later.
This is either a great way to finish up the last of a salad or you can make the salad from scratch.
Greens, peppers, olives and feta cheese…how can you go wrong with that combination? Add a flavorful wrap and you’ve got a winning combination!
I like to put the cold salad in a warm wrap, but you could bake the whole thing together, making it all meld together.
Greek Salad Wrap
| 3 tomatoes, cut into wedges 1/4 red onion, sliced |
| 1/2 cucumber, sliced into thick half-moons |
| 1/2 green pepper, julienned |
| 4 ounces of feta cheese, cut into small cubes |
| 16 kalamata olives 2 spinach and herb tortilla, warmed
|
Tags: Cheese, Cold Salad, Cubes, Cucumber, Drive Thru, Greek Salad, Greek Salads, Green Pepper, Greens, Kalamata Olives, Lunch, Moons, Nbsp, Red Onion, scratch, Spinach, Tomatoes, Tortilla, Winning Combination
Sunrise Layer Cake
Jul 26, 2011 General
My son Mozely turned 1-years-old today.
One year ago, we were watching Lie to Me at home and I heard a pop (!).
I had just been telling everyone at work that the baby wasn’t coming out for at least a couple more weeks, based on the previous experience.
Boy, was I a naïve 2nd time mom.
Four hours and a 28 mile drive later I was frantically waiting for the doctor to show up so I could push, because there was absolutely NOTHING more important in the world than pushing, and those freaking #@$&% people just refused to let me do that. Until the doctor came.
I would have delivered to any creature with opposable thumbs at that moment.
20 minutes after that doctor finally showed up, I screamed and pushed and
this is what I got.
I guess it was a good trade. Before that moment I wasn’t totally sure.
We did one of those “Can you come eat some cake in 5 minutes?” thingamajigs. I couldn’t really call it a party, because it wasn’t organized. 
Maybe even as organized as this cake, as it was in the early stages.
In Hawaii we’re lucky enough to call some people our family, even if we’re not actually related, and Mozely’s uncles and aunties and their kids came. I felt guilty about not being organized and decided to buy some pizza at the last minute. And my neighbor found an unused bag of party stuff. 
Ok, so maybe I can call it a party after all. Maybe parties are just wherever you can be with everyone else.
It was Ethan’s birthday too. I’ve known Ethan since he was, like, two, or maybe just two feet tall, and definitely since he told us funny things about his ears.
I didn’t buy Mozely any presents. Instead I spent most of the day making his cake.
Layers: Strawberry (with beet for coloring), orange, mango, guava, coconut. Lilikoi curd and coconut Italian buttercream between each layer.
I’m calling it a sunrise cake. I don’t think I pulled off the coloring perfectly, but for from scratch and trying not to use food coloring—I think it was a good effort. The vegan orange layer completely started squishing and falling apart so I will put that layer up higher next time. For a moment I thought I had a catastrophe for a cake, but some firming up in the fridge helped its looks. A little bit.
The Lilikoi curd was just amazing. I also loved the coconut frosting. I’m still looking for a great mango cake recipe. For some reason, that’s the one that doesn’t cook up so well. However, in the sunrise layer cake, the flavors melded and just tasted light and fruity with a tang of the curd. It worked.
Recipes (click on the links)
I halved each of the recipes to make just one 9” circular cake pan.
Strawberry Cake (I added 1/4 Cup of beet puree to intensify the color.)
mango cake: yellow box cake with mango juice instead of water.
Coconut Cake and Coconut Frosting
I cut each layer in half horizontally and some I threw away because of the unevenness of the cakes, and really, I had enough layers that there was some to spare. Luckily. Lilikoi curd and frosting are in between each. The cake wasn’t as beautiful as my drawing. But I did have a vision.
I spent all day on this cake. There’s something BIG inside of me that wants to feed people. If you’re reading this, you probably know the feeling. Food has a lot of power.
This week I wanted to let you know there are ways YOU can get involved with Share Our Strength, the organization that works to help keep kids fed, even during the summer. I teach at a school where almost half of our students receive some kind of financial assistance for lunch and breakfast. During the summer, many kids don’t have a place to eat a good lunch every day!
Share Our Strength brings in multiple ways to get involved. There are event fundraisers, bake sales, blogger campaigns, and more. Click Here to see how you can contribute. This summer there is a dollar of dollar match for your donation.
Yahoo! is partnering with Foodbuzz to contribute $20,000 to Share Our Strength on behalf of the reading and blogging community. Help support this donation by:
1. Making Yahoo! your homepage now.
2. Sharing the campaign with your Facebook friends and Twitter followers.
Tags: 'amp, Aunties, Beet, Cake Layers, Coconut, Curd, Ears, Food Coloring, Funny Things, Italian Buttercream, Layer Cake, Neighbor, Opposable Thumbs, Orange Mango, Party Stuff, scratch, Strawberry, Time Mom, Two Feet, Uncles
No one ever says, “It’s easy as biscuits.”
May 6, 2011 General
Next week will be the last week we cook in the kitchen for culinary class.
Next week will be the last week I have to haul my Kitchen Aid, 4 bags of groceries, a 50lb bag of flour, and my regular humongous bag of work to school, then the perishables up three flights of stairs to the fridge, and then everything back down and over to the kitchen.
Next week will be the last week that I’ll be yelling to kids to turn off their burners when no pots are even on the stove top or to hold knives down when they walk around. After that I won’t have to remind students to look at the recipe instead of just randomly assigning measurements or mixing steps. I won’t have to demonstrate cooking techniques and explanations which immediately become mocked by students as some kind of sexual innuendo (see butter recipe, below). I won’t be cleaning the kitchen for an hour after the students “cleaned up”.
Next week will be the last week that I’ll try to convince whining kids to taste kale salad, that macaroni and cheese from scratch is better than Kraft, and little teeny bits of garlic are not going to kill you when they’ve been simmered for almost an hour in a Moroccan tagine.
Next week will be the last week that these kids will have to convince me that they’ve learned something this year.
I can’t wait until next week so I can miss all of this.
We made biscuits, homemade butter, and jam. I gave out two different recipes to six groups and came out with six completely different products. Biscuits are most importantly about texture. If you’re like us about every third batch will turn out like crackery hockey pucks instead of fluffy flaky puffs. Here are the two Biscuit Commandments:
Thou Shalt Not Knead the Dough Too Much.
Thou Shalt Roll the Dough 1” Thick.
If you follow these two important details, you will do well. After observing my students’ work, I’d have to add a few more pieces of advice:
wet dough is better (and never add more flour than is called for)
do not grease the cookie sheet
pay close attention to teaspoon vs. tablespoon markings
the butter and milk should be cold, cold, cold and work quickly, quickly, quickly
biscuit cutters, if you remember to bring them to class, would be good. cut down, don’t twist.
The recipes we used:
Cream Biscuits by Deb at Smitten Kitchen
Homemade Blackberry Jam by Savory Sweet Life
Homemade Butter
- 1 Cup cream
- 1/2 tsp salt
- In a lidded jar, shake the cream and salt about one revolution per second. You’ll have butter pretty soon. If you are doing this in a high school class, use the two handed back and forth method with the jar held horizontally instead of the “shake weight” method. Trust me.
Tags: Biscuit, Biscuits, Different Products, Explanations, Flour, Fridge, garlic, Groceries, Homemade Butter, Kale, Kitchen Aid, Knives, Macaroni And Cheese, Moroccan Tagine, Perishables, Pots, scratch, Sexual Innuendo, Stairs, Stove Top
