Healthy Shephard's Pie

Why am I posting a recipe on a family blog? A few reasons. The first one is, I get a LOT of requests for this recipe. This is my go-to recipe for a potluck, or a meal when someone is sick or just had a baby, and I also make it about twice a month, so I frequently end up serving it to guests or playdate friends. I think almost every time I make it, someone asks me for the recipe, which I take to mean it tastes pretty good. I'm also posting it because as far as I know, I made it up, and it tickles me that the most popular recipe in this house (by vote of our kids) is one that I make - although it should be fairly noted that daddy the professional chef kicks my butt at everything else, from pancakes to frittata. And the third one is, I have found a rare recipe that is both FULL of vegetables and truly kid friendly - there are some kids who are so picky that they won't eat this, but I've served it to many a child on a playdate and it goes over well most of the time. If you, like me, are always searching for vegetable-full recipes your children will eat, try this one. As an added bonus it's gluten, soy, egg and dairy free and can be made vegetarian, which is quite adaptable in this age of many food allergies and intolerances. Finally, a friend of mine with lots more blog readers than I have said I should post something on the blog people might conceivably be googling to find, which will direct them to my blog and introduce the possibility they will keep reading it. (to that end: healthy dinners, healthy kid dinners. dinners with lots of vegetables. etc. find me, google!) So here you go, this is my own version of shephard's pie. Make it, enjoy it, and snicker at your kids eating cauliflower with gusto.

Ingredients: (this recipe makes enough to feed my family of 4 hearty shephard's pie eaters for 2 nights)

5 lg yukon gold potatoes
1 head cauliflower
1 medium onion
1 yellow bell pepper
2-3 grated carrots or about 1 c. chopped baby carrots
frozen peas
1.5 tbs olive oil
1 lb ground beef, turkey, or 1 large can each (the double size ones) kidney beans and chickpeas (if you want to make it vegetarian)
olive oil, chicken stock, margarine, coconut milk or whatever you usually like to mash potatoes with (if dairy is fine for you, use milk and butter)
ketchup
soy sauce
worstershire sauce
spicy brown mustard

Directions:

In a large pot of salted water, place the potatoes and cauliflower, all chopped up into small pieces. Put the heat on high and bring up to a boil.

after you do that, dice the onion, bell pepper and carrots and saute in the olive oil about 5-7 minutes.

Then add your meat (or beans). Cook through.

when the meat is cooked, turn off the heat, leaving the pan on the stove. add approximately 2/3 c ketchup, 1/3 cup mustard, and a generous amount each of worstershire and soy sauces to the vegetable and meat mixture. unfortunately I forgot to measure how much I usually use. Anyway, just taste it and see it tastes good. those four things mixed together are hard to get wrong, really.

Then put it all into the bottom of your biggest pyrex because this recipe makes a lot. sprinkle a half bag of peas over it.

Finally, drain and mash your potatoes/cauliflower. I usually use either chicken stock, olive oil and salt OR unsweetened coconut milk (the beverage, not the stuff in a can) and smart balance, but you can use whatever you like. don't forget some salt. it just depends what I have on hand. Mashed anything tastes pretty good no matter how you do it.

Finally, spread the mashed on top of the meat and peas, put in the oven for 30 minutes or so at about 350, and voila. dinner for two nights. plus lunch for the kids sometimes too. I don't know precisely how many servings of vegetables are in each serving, but I'm willing to guess at least 5. onions, carrots, bell pepper, peas, cauliflower and potato in every bite, so you can choose not to count the onion or the potato as vegetables and still end up with 5 veggies per serving. And it truly is kid friendly - I think it's the ketchup.

Finished product from the side:

Clean plate club:

Enjoy!

Deep thoughts.

Owen: Mommy, what's a disability?
Me: Well....it's like when a part of your body doesn't work, or when you can't do something that you used to be able to do.
Owen: what does that mean?
Me: Well, for instance, some people are blind. they can't see anything. that's a disability.
Owen: Miss Marcie said a disability is like when you only have one leg.
Me: Um, ok. yes. that's also a disability.
Owen: So... she said if you only have one leg, you would get a fake leg.
Me: Um, right.
Owen: So, I was wondering, if you only have one leg, how would you get to the fake leg store?
Me: Well....someone would drive you?
Owen: Right. Well, how would they get to the car, then?
Me: They would...I think someone would carry you.
Owen: But what if it was a GROWNUP that needed to get to the fake leg store. How would THEY get to the car?
Me: They would get pushed in a wheelchair - I really don't think you need to worry about this.
Owen: ok. thanks mom. I'm a robot, anyways.

Happy Birrrrrrthday, Owen!

Owen turned 4 March 15th, but judging by the number of times it was celebrated this year he's approximately 8. I know everyone wants to get a slice of the birthday action, so you can't begrudge both sets of grandparents wanting to have a birthday party, and of course on his actual birthday they made a little to-do in his preschool class. So this was party number 4, capping off a month of birthday revelry. I was a little worried about hosting up to 12 preschoolers here in this little house, but I shouldn't have worried. We had a turnout of 8, which turned out to be just the right size, and a good time was had by all.

One thing I love about 4 year olds in general and my four year old specifically is their love of costumes. Owen wanted a pirate party, and luckily we have a pirate costume:

I found bandanas, eye patches, and pirate tattoos for ridiculously cheap at oriental trading company (ps: environment, exploited chinese laborers - lets just get this out of the way now. I apologize.) and as the kids came in we got them get dressed as pirates.

I started the party by reading "How I turned into a pirate". I saw this at another party and thought it was a great strategy. that was a superhero party and when we got there the birthday boy's mom read a superhero book, which got all the kids in the superhero theme. It went really well.

Next, I had the kids decorate brown paper bags with pirate stamps, stickers, and markers (to later use as goody bags when we broke the pinata). I spent a lot of time rounding up pirate art supplies, including stamps and stickers, and expected this activity would last at least 20 minutes. Definitely not. It was well recieved but the kids spent five minutes each on their bags and announced they were done and went back to swashbuckling with balloon swords. Oh, well. Either way it was fun, though I suspect if it were girls this activity would have lasted longer.

Next I had planned a beanbag toss and a pinata. The beanbag toss was fun although none of the kids paid any attention to the line we had taped on the floor to stand behind and throw the beanbags. They all stood about 6 inches from it and then expected to be praised for getting all three beanbags in. We did the pinata next, which was awesome. One kid ended up going bananas on it and it broke in a very satisfying explosion of more pirate tattoos, chocolate dubloons, ring pops and plastic dinosours (again, oriental trading company is a party planner's friend).

Next came cake. The cake! Andy had made this totally awesome pirate cake last night, which took him forever and was truly a work of art, with multiple poop decks and some serious cake architecture, but sadly: the weight of the two sides of the cake boat were too much for the frosting and the whole thing came apart spectacularly at about 9:15 pm. We had to completely redo the cake (and by we, I mean, Andy had to completely redo the cake and I drank wine, kept up a running commentary on how great the first cake was, and did a 10pm run to CVS for more frosting). The second cake still came out great:

I had planned for all this to take the 2 hours of the party. ha! all of the above took 1 hour and that's a stretch with me dragging my feet before cake trying to figure out what else to do. Lesson learned: NEVER overestimate the attention spans of 4 year olds. After cake came about an hour of wild running around, swashbuckling, and just general 4 year old hillarity - (also a couple meltdowns and one potty accident, but really, far less than might be expected in a free-for-all of 9 kids) and overall everyone had a great time.

After everyone went home, Owen said it had been the best time ever, which Andy and I took to mean the party was a success. And we gratefully wash our hands of any more birthday celebrations for a year.

ARRRRRRGH!

When in Rome....

This is a fully grown silver laced wyandotte:

We now own 6 of 'em. Only they haven't hatched yet. We hope they're all ladies, (the hatchery gives us a 90% guarantee) but if one or more of them isn't, andy will have to practice his butchering skills because we're not keeping any full grown roosters in our backyard.

The hatchery will ship our day-old chicks on April 23, and we should recieve them 1-2 days after that. And the chicken-keeping portion of the lakeville experience will begin.

if you're nice to us, we'll give you fresh eggs. The ones we have leftover from bribing our neighbors with, of course!

For those of you interested in how the chicken experiment goes, I've read 2 books on chickenkeeping front to back and I'm ready to go. I plan to use the blog to chronicle the experience in a fair amount of detail because I know several people who are very interested in how it goes. So April 23 is d-(ish) day...stay tuned!

Big Boys and Little Boys

Almost 4 years ago, we brought 2 month old Owen to visit 1 year old Jack, the son of our good friends Erin and Chris:

This weekend, Erin drove out to visit with a nearly 5 year old Jack, and newly 1 year old Theo, to visit with Owen and Eli:

For some reason these photos made me realize how fast time really is flying! When did our babies get so big?!

One Room at a Time

I'm working on making the house feel more homey, and wanted to start with the kids' room. Decorating is definitely at or near the bottom of our life priority list, and we can live in a house with an ugly bathroom floor for a long time. But I feel like the boys room should look nice. For those readers who never saw our Boston house, I have to say, the boys' room was the highlight. Andy's mom did an amazing custom paint job to match the wendy belissimo bumblebee nursery set that I just fell in love with when I was pregnant with Owen. To this day, the thought of the new owners of the house painting over my nursery makes my heart ache and I prefer to delude myself by thinking that the 50-something lesbian couple that bought it were just so charmed by the nursery that they kept it just the way it was. Don't burst my bubble, friends, ok?

I'm not nearly as talented when it comes to painting and decorating, and sadly, the kids are really pushing too old for a baby nursery theme (although, had we stayed in our old house I probably would have kept them in the bumblebee room until they were 10 and 8. In retrospect, it's probably for the best that we left....) My lovely friend Jenna bought me an adorable package of transportation decals, so I broke out a level and a yardstick and made a line of them chugging around the walls of their room:

I used the royal blue curtains from our old dining room, and found a royal blue rug at home depot for $30, and I think that just those three things together (decals, rug, curtains) made the room look much more cozy. My mom had picked up a matching pair of multicolored striped blankets at Marshalls and gave them to me in the event I ever decided to change from pastels to primary colors, which came in handy:

Andy's mom had made wall decorations spelling the boys' names out of wood and painted them in a light green gingham-esque check to match the original nursery, and she's offered to repaint them in a royal blue and bright red, which I will take her up on. I think that once I put up those, the room will have a nice, finished look, good for the kids for a long while (I don't think Owen will be too cool for trucks until he's at least 8, do you?) but not too overdone. I'd love to paint the room, because I hate the bright white, but as you can see in the first picture the walls in all the bedrooms are textured, which the man at home depot advised me looks weird painted any color but white. So I think we might need to live with the white. Anyway, I feel good enough about this room to move one. One room down, 7 to go.

Diaper Free 2012*

Are we not supposed to talk about poop in the internet? I'm not sure what the rules are with respect to future mortification of children. I'm going to use my self-imposed rule that matters related to bodily functions under the age of 4 are fair game on the internet, after that it behooves a parent to be more circumspect. But with that said: we're potty trained, folks! Don't give me any credit. Elias followed his brother's lead in deciding one day that he was ready to use the potty, and then he ran with it. Also like his brother, it was like a light switch. One day, not trained. next day, trained. He decided on Sunday he was ready for undies full time, and he's only had 2 accidents to date. One of these was a pretty impressive pooptastrophe tonight, but that one was mostly my fault for not realizing that he wasn't done going and taking him off the seat too early. He's even been dry during his nap at school all 5 days this week. I am surprised, but thrilled. I realize that I have been very, very blessed in the toileting department. Owen was done with diapers (also 100% his own doing) at right around 2, I think the June after he turned 2 in March, and Eli obviously turned 2 last week. I think it's coincidental that they both followed the same pattern, and I'm certainly not going to pontificate on whatever spectacular parenting technique I used to accomplish training without fuss. Because if there's one thing I've learned, it's that much of parenting is luck, or the absence of it. Just like I didn't do anything wrong and have a 4 year old that has slept through the night only a handful of times, I didn't do anything right to get my toddlers in undies. I am very grateful, though. I know potty training can be a huge and stressful ordeal and have many friends who struggle with it mightily, even with their 3 and 4 year olds. I also have many friends who found labor and delivery a breeze and had sunny, cheerful babies who slept through the night starting at 4 weeks. Parenting karma gets spread around unevenly, what can you do? tonight, however, I'm celebrating the end of diapers (and assuming we have no more kids, this is really the END OF DIAPERS.) that's kind of...crazy. and liberating! And a little sad. But mostly awesome. It's kind of like carrying around a 50 lb sandbag for 4 years. You get used to carrying it around. After awhile, you barely even notice you're carrying it. until you drop it, and you realize how awesome life was before you started dragging the damn thing around! diaper free....wheeeeee!



* A few people who read this blog will get that allusion, know what's funny about it, and hopefully find the juxtaposition of why it's funny to the actual subject at hand (potty training young children) amusing and not depressingly....adult.