Category Archives: Feeding Kids

Black Sticky Rice Pudding with Coconut Milk

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Watch this space for more Thai food now that summer is coming.  Tropical fruit gets all the love, but vegetables like eggplants, peppers, and squash are unique products of hot temperatures as well, and with summer comes the opportunity to cook like we live someplace warmer.  Like Thailand.

My sweet tooth has always liked the idea of eating dessert first, and we’re starting our summer Thai series with it here.  I have to admit that we cook less Thai food now that Little Uncle makes it so well and so close by, but the flip side of that coin is that it was one of their desserts that reminded me to dig out this recipe for black sticky rice pudding.  (The dessert in question was kabocha squash simmered in sweet coconut milk; watch for it on the menu!)  It’s a great dessert to make for a party because it’s so simple yet visually impressive, and also because you can make it in advance and serve it cold or gently reheated.

Little Uncle’s simmered kabocha was excellent stirred into this rice pudding, but if you don’t have any handy you can just serve it plain, as I usually do, or with mango slices stirred in or on the side.  Of course you can also make this dessert with white sticky rice in place of the black, although, as you’d expect, the resulting color is a bit more pedestrian.  Try to remember to save a swirl of the thick coconut cream from the top of the can to garnish the dish. Continue reading Black Sticky Rice Pudding with Coconut Milk (click for recipe)

Vegan Chopped Salad Bar

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When I visit California, I sometimes wonder if people are really meant to live anywhere else.  We left Seattle in the driving rain and arrived in California’s summertime.  My mom’s tomato plants are taller than me, and I picked a ripe tomato.  The girls gorged themselves in the raspberry and blackberry patches.  We spent all day in in the back yard.

When it was time for lunch, it seemed only sensible to chop up a small mountain of garden and farmers market produce to make a DIY chopped salad bar.  My parents (who eat very healthfully) always have a fridge full of the best fruits and vegetables of the season.  My uncle recently started eating an exclusively plant-based diet, so we made our salad bar vegan. Today’s offerings included shredded lettuce and diced cabbage, zucchini, cucumber, carrots, and broccoli.  You could vary these in infinite combinations, of course.  We put out drained kidney beans, ground flaxseeds, nutritional yeast and walnuts for protein, and raisins for a bit of chew and sweetness.

I love this approach because it lets everyone customize a salad to their own taste.  I bet my mom took all the veggies plus flax and nutritional yeast (and maybe a splash of vinegar); I left off the carrots, went heavy on the broccoli, and topped my bowl with walnuts, raisins, and balsamic vinaigrette.

My uncle took this photo of his salad to share with you all in exchange for some tips about embarking on a vegan lifestyle.  What’s your best advice for him? Vegan Chopped Salad Bar (click for recipe)

Crispy Chocolate-Granola Haystacks

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Road tripping ain’t what it used to be, friends.

Gone are our lazy days of puttering down the coast, of long lunches with spectacular views, of starting and stopping and pitching camp where and when we like.

We’re all business now.  It’s I-5 all the way from Seattle to Northern California, aggressive packing of PB&J fixings so we don’t need long lunches, and hardly noticing the view because of the song and dance I’m doing in the back seat to entertain the girls.

That’s right, we packed the whole family into the minivan (which I like to call the “Man Van” now, both to distance myself from it and to convey to J how sexy it is for him to take the kids to swimming lessons).  And we drove all afternoon and night, and much of the next day, and lived to tell the tale.

Here are some of the things that we did in the car to entertain three children aged 1, 3, and 5: made a list of things to do, read books, sang songs, colored, napped, watched a video, ate snacks, played peek-a-boo, and let the baby pull out an entire package of floss.

Here is something we did not do in the car: eat these chocolately granola treats.  We meant to, we really did.  Hannah said they were road food and I’m inclined to agree, but once I made them we had to taste one and then, wow, another, and they were so crispy and chocolately and then it was the next day and J was asking me to please take a photo of the things already so he could keep eating them and just like that…gone, as fast as the miles roll by when you’re having a good time out there on the road.

Continue reading Crispy Chocolate-Granola Haystacks (click for recipe)

Eggs with Chiles, Chips and Cheese

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This is a five-minute breakfast or dinner that is worth knowing about.  It’s a quickie version of my favorite migas.  (I can’t believe that recipe isn’t on this site yet.  I owe you!)  I like it party because, as you can imagine, scrambled eggs with tortilla chips and cheese is alwlays an easy sell with the kids.  But mostly I like it because the adult version features roasted green chiles, a magical food.

My brother, provider of magical roasted green chiles, passed through town yesterday and brought little container of them.  If there had been more I would have made that queso fundido again, but under the circumstances we just tossed them into our breakfast.  I love how just a little bit of an excellent ingredient can elevate an ordinary dish like scrambled eggs.  I know that the world has accepted scrambled eggs with truffles or caviar as luxury food.  I submit that roasted green chiles belong in the same category. Continue reading Eggs with Chiles, Chips and Cheese (click for recipe)

Homemade Maple-Roasted Almond Butter

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A new cookbook is such a good treat.  Whether it’s on loan from the library or all mine from my great local bookstore, I always love to curl up on the couch or in bed with a new cookbook.  And I just got a good one.

I’m telling you about it because you might think that the Food in Jars cookbook, by Marisa McClellan of the delightful Food in Jars blog, is only for us fringe types who are into canning.  Not so!  First of all, this is truly small-batch stuff, with most of the recipes yielding a manageable 2 or 3 pints of jam or pickles.  No need to can those–give one to the neighbors and put the other(s) in your fridge; they’ll be gone in no time.  Second, there are also plenty of recipes that have nothing to do with canning: think of them instead as recipes for foods that you could put in jars, if the urge struck, but it would be mostly for decorative purposes.  Granolas.  Nut butters.  Pancake mixes.  Infused salts.  This recipe falls into that latter category.

I meant  to put it in a jar, I really did,  but unfortunately I halved the recipe.  Served alongside a plate of apple slices, it was gone before the jar question even came into play.  The full recipe is below, and I don’t recommend halving it. Continue reading Homemade Maple-Roasted Almond Butter (click for recipe)

Mushroom and Olive Pizza

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We haven’t made a pizza on this blog in a dog’s age.  Too hot to turn on the oven, you say?  Not in Seattle.  It’s 63 degrees outside at the moment.  Once it gets up to 70 I’ll try to work up my nerve to start making pizzas on the grill instead–any tips for me in advance?

But first, this.  A mushroom and olive pizza has a special place in my heart.  Growing up, my dad (and sometimes my mom as well, but mostly my dad on nights when my mom was elsewhere) would take us kids out to a local pizza parlor.  Red pleather, arcade games, a window where you could watch the guys toss dough and pile on toppings.  We always got a mushroom and olive pizza and a pitcher of ice-cold root beer.  It was, in the parlance of the day, so awesome.

This isn’t your ’80s pizza-parlor mushroom and olive pizza–not because that pizza wasn’t righteous, but because I am a creature of habit and make my homemade pizza with a thin crust.  And because I buy kalamata olives in bulk instead of canned black olives.  And because I usually saute my mushrooms before adding them to pizza.  But you could totally serve this pizza with an ice-cold root beer.  That would still be rad. Continue reading Mushroom and Olive Pizza (click for recipe)

Chocolate Chocolate Chip Cookies

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Chocolate is woefully under-represented on this blog compared to the role it plays in my life.  I’d say I eat chocolate almost every day, sometimes in moderation and sometimes, frankly, not.  But most of the chocolate I eat these days is in pure, unadulterated bar form.  I don’t bake with it much anymore because, in a perplexing twist of fate, I have a child who doesn’t like chocolate.  She spits out a cookie, face twisted in disgust, if she finds an errant chocolate chip in her mouth.  It’s unfathomable to me, but I work with it and mostly bake without chocolate.

So when I make something chocolate, I like to go all-out. These cookies are all-out. Are you still mulling over what nice thing to do for your dad for Fathers Day?  Skip down to the ingredients list and start baking.

The brookies (brownies+cookies=brookies) recipe on this site is one of my favorite chocolate cookie recipes. This is the other.  Those are chewy; these are a decadent, chocolatey, crumbly sable, packed with chunks of chopped bittersweet chocolate.  The recipe comes from French pastry chef Pierre Hermé, Dorie Greenspan published in her book Baking: From My Home to Yours, and I found it via The Splendid Table.  Thank goodness.

The only warning I will offer is this: the dough can be quite crumbly, and if it is too crumbly it will be difficult to slice into cookies.  I have read that using high-quality cocoa powder makes the dough easier to handle, but I used up some decidedly low-quality cocoa powder this time and the cookies came out fine.  If your dough is truly too crumbly to form into logs, stir in a spoonful of milk and the dough will come right together.  You’ll lose a tiny bit of the light, sandy texture, but the cookies will still be delicious. Continue reading Chocolate Chocolate Chip Cookies (click for recipe)

Granola Cookie Bars

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Welcome to Emmy Cooks!  You can see some of my favorite recent recipes by clicking the “My Favorite Recipes” category on the sidebar (here are June, July, and August).  If you like what you see here, you can sign up on the sidebar to receive a daily recipe by email, or follow Emmy Cooks on Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest.

There’s something about environmentally-unfriendly single-serving packaged snacks that children find irresistible.  Maybe it’s the “all mine” factor, or the satisfying crinkle of those little bags, but it’s hard to compete with a store-bought granola bar for my kids’ affection in the snack category.

These bars did the trick partly because they were fun and hands-on to make, and partly because they’re basically cookies.  Mmm, cookies.  This recipe, from Good to the Grain, was a great starting point–chewy, sweet and oaty–but I expect to do a little experimentation in the future to find a granola bar that comes closer to being a healthy kid snack.  On the other hand, these would make a great hiking snack if you actually needed a sugar boost, and I quite enjoyed them as an afternoon sweet alongside a cup of tea.  We’ll just be calling them “cookies” from now on.

Do you have a granola bar recipe you like?  Do tell.

Continue reading Granola Cookie Bars (click for recipe)

Broccoli Pesto Pasta with Olives and Feta

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Make new friends, but keep the old.  Do you know that song?  It’s a round.  One is silver and the other’s gold.

I made a lot of new friends this week.  What more is there to life, really?  I went to the BlogHer Food conference here in Seattle and a few things came to my attention.  First, I like food bloggers just as much in real life as I like them on the internet.  (There is an automatic bond among people who spend the day in serious contemplation of what to eat next, I think.)  Second, I learned some photography basics for producing better pictures than the iPhone snapshots you see here–which I will put into practice some day when I have loads more time, maybe.  And, honestly, I came home refreshed and grateful for my family after spending most of two whole daytimes away from my girls for the first time in more than a year.

I ate plenty of great food this week, but I was glad to be back in my own kitchen tonight.  I used a favorite trick of mine for squeezing more vegetables into our meal by blending broccoli into a pureed sauce for pasta and more broccoli.  I don’t know if this is technically a “pesto” but it is green and saucy, so there you go.  I didn’t use cheese in it, so this dish is vegan if you leave out the feta.

This is an easily-deconstructed meal if you care about that sort of thing: J & I had it all, the girls had plain pasta and broccoli (they declined the green “dip”–I thought I was so smart with that spin!), and the baby had pasta, broccoli, and as many olives as we’d give her.  Go figure.  The broccoli pesto would also be just right dolloped over a pizza or spread onto crostini, or even as a dip for crackers or other vegetables.

Continue reading Broccoli Pesto Pasta with Olives and Feta (click for recipe)

Easy Cheddar and Onion Egg Bake for a Crowd

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Now that I have confessed that I have a minivan, I might as well tell you about another way in which I’ve become an old fogey without even noticing: these days, I like having parties in the morning.  The kids are in good moods, the house hasn’t been wrecked yet by the the daily tornado of  family life, and you can drink mimosas.  But most of all, brunch is such an easy meal to prepare for a crowd.  All you need are big bowl of fruit, a cake (or two, in the case of J’s recent birthday) these eggs, and lots and lots of coffee.

This dish, or something like it, is one of the easiest ways I know to cook up a dozen or more eggs at once.  You can vary the filling by adding any vegetables, cheese, or meat you’d like.  I kept this one simple because I love the flavor combination of sharp cheddar and cooked-until-sweet onions…and also, I will admit, because monochromatic foods are usually a hit with the kids and we were expecting many, many kids. Continue reading Cheddar and Onion Egg Bake for a Crowd (click for recipe)