Farm-to-Fork Dinner

Last weekend, to close out my birthday celebration, I got to check off an experience from my bucket list. Yippee!! Ever since I learned it was a thing, I’ve wanted to have a lovely, gourmet, communal outdoor farm-to-fork meal. I pictured a long rustic, yet polished wooden table set for a full dinner for anywhere between 30 and 100 people. This vision was very likely inspired by some piece of marketing by some winery or other that we toured before kids.

Despite the winery influence to my daydream, all the pairing dinners that we heard of by us were inside, usually in a barrel room, and lacked the rustic charm I’d envisioned. Them, a couple months ago I heard of a dinner that seemed to fit the dream perfectly. Our current CSA* (they deliver to our door!) was hosting a farm-to-for dinner at a local farm with proceeds benefiting the San Diego Food Bank, a cause I truly believe in and want to support in a more hands-on way in the future. So, we eagerly purchased our tickets, arranged for my parents to watch the kiddos and ventured to the farm.

Grilled Cheese Bar Birthday Party

Birthday celebrations are fun, but can sometimes bring challenges. In my family for birthdays we tend to get together for dinner – either out to eat at the birthday person’s place of choice or dining in with a favorite meal – give gifts and eat cake. It’s a great formula for birthday success! This year, I felt home bound by our adorable kiddos. Dining out is just not much fun these days, so I didn’t want to get everyone out just to be forced to wrangle kids in an unfamiliar-to-them environment and be stressed through all of dinner. But, what to eat?! After much deliberation and restaurant take-out research, I landed on a favorite childhood meal, but with a twist.

Enter the grilled cheese bar. My mom makes a mean grilled cheese, so I wanted to take advantage of her mad skills, plus see how we could adventure to make new, maybe more adult grilled cheese combinations. I Googled this grand idea, and sure enough, it’s a thing! Bloggers and celebrities have shared the idea, so I took what I thought would work best for our family and pitched the idea to my family. Thankfully, they were game. And, we had quite the spread!

Grilled Cheese Bar Spread

Returning to the Kitchen

When a new baby arrives, all eyes are on that adorable babe. And, for new parents, all their attention and energy go to that little wonder. It’s amazing and utterly exhausting. At least this is how it was for Husby and me with both Lil’ O and Lil’ Chica.

We’ve just recently crossed the line with Lil’ Chica (now a whopping five months!) that we can reintroduce our own hobbies. The precursor to this has been the return of regular sleep. Hallelujah! I’d still like more, but I can mostly count on a six hour stretch at night; and, compared to those early days and nights of two hours max at a time, six hours is simply glorious. Now that Lil’ Chica is mostly on a schedule, I also know what windows of time are available to me to get anything done.

The laundry, tidying and cleaning is unending, but Husby and I have gotten to a balance that we can start to think beyond basic home and kiddo care. For him it’s the return of his MBA classes this week. For me, it’s mostly the idea and goal of cooking more. I’ve been happily reading a Christmas influx of cookbooks and dreaming up how I can more regularly return to the kitchen. Cooking dinner falls exactly when I’m nursing Lil’ Chica, so I’ve been out of commission and we’ve all been relying on multi-talented Husby to get dinner on the table each night. I’ve cooked up some breakfasts and other things, but dinner has been eluding me. No more!

Beyond Post-Prego Diet Food – Exploring CSA Produce

Some women are super cute pregnant. I don’t believe I was one of those women. I got huge! I gained 55 pounds and I can’t blame it all on Lil’ O, who was born at the large, but perfectly respectable weight of 8 pounds, 12 ounces. I’ve been dieting. I’ve been exercising. I’m super close to achieving my pre-prego weight, but not my pre-prego body. I’m coming to terms that all those cute clothes in my closet may not fit again, but I’m still eating right and working toward that magic number on the scale.

When I focus on healthy eating, there’s an interesting trend in our house. While dieting, I cook more. And, when I cook more, we eat more adventurously. Yet, despite my large arsenal of cookbooks and cooking magazines, I’ve been intrigued by the movement for more community-supported agriculture, or CSAs. Here’s how it works: For a regular fee, we get a weekly box of fresh, in-season produce from local growers. Simple, right? Wooed by the allure of trying new things, especially veggies, as I work to stick to my healthful eating resolution, we made the leap and joined.

A box of new produce each week can be a bit intimidating and time consuming – after all, we want to be sure we eat up all those delish veggies before they go bad and before we get another box. For now, we’re doing a three-week trial run leading up to Thanksgiving to see if we can keep up the veggie-loving pace.

Now, I’m honestly not sure if this is the best use of my time, but exploring new veggie options does have worthwhile merits, at least in theory: we’ll eat more veggies by exploring new flavors; by knowing more veggies, we’ll be able to introduce Lil’ O to more tastes; and, if I do this correctly, we’ll be eating more healthfully (and maybe I’ll finally lose that last little bit of weight). And, if it does turn out to be too much work or too time consuming, we’ve chosen our initial intro to be a week-by-week subscription, meaning we’re not locked in to a six-month or annual subscription and stuck paying for produce we potentially can’t finish each week. Hopefully, we can stay on this healthy eating band wagon, but we’ll see. And, if we don’t, I resolve not to feel guilty about it. We’ll still be eating our veggies; the dinner side dish repertoire may just be a bit more mundane. Not the end of the world.

If you’d like to follow along by checking out the recipes I’m finding to use up all this crazy, fresh and potentially obscure produce, check out my dedicated Pinterest board where I’m currently housing my recipe finds and noting any successes.



Ants on a Log!
Thanks to some celery in a recent produce box, I introduced Husby to this childhood classic.
Truly, somehow he'd never eaten these before! Glad I could fix that!

Foodie Friday: Paella Night

Our dear friends recently cooked up paella and a full Spanish-themed menu. We dined on amazing made-from-scratch paella, olives, smoked nuts, salad, cheese and bread. Delish! Ms. E’s husband is the chef behind this paella. He cooks it up for a lucky group of hungry folk about every six months and Husby and I are lucky enough to be among those invited. There was a slight glitch with this batch, though: it was SO stinkin’ hot outside! It reached up to 108 degrees in our inland-San Diego suburb. Guh! Since they live nearby, don't have AC and we were already using our AC for Lil' O (and let's admit it, ourselves), we offered and they gladly accepted to move the party to our place. Whew!

So, we had a somewhat impromptu dinner party at our place. Five couples, plus three baby boys and a 1-year-old little lady with plenty of Spanish food for all. It sounds like a lot, especially given the impromptu nature of the party changing venues, but we learned a fun secret. Hosting a dinner party is way easier when somebody else does all the cooking! Go figure! Cohosting took a load off for both couples, and since we both have little guys (Ms. E and her husband are the parents of Lil’ O’s best bud, Lil’ Sir), it was a welcome relief to get a break and still host a fun night in. Watch out! We may be co-hosting dinner parties all the time in the future!

Foodie Friday: Figs!

Welcome to my first Foodie Friday post! I’m passionate about food and eating fully, though ideally healthfully. I make no promises as I'm learning that balancing life with Lil' O and Husby can take many turns, but it is my goal to post a foodie note weekly and share some of my foodie outings and kitchen feats.

We start with the sweet, sweet fruit that’s taking over my backyard: figs! A lot of my experimenting in the kitchen lately has been trying to use up these sweet jewels, but I must admit our tree is producing far, far more than I’m able to cook, dry and jam. Little did we know when we bought our house how much work a full-grown fruit tree requires. At peak season, which is August through October, we could easily harvest pounds and pounds of figs twice each week. So, if you know of any fig recipes worth trying or want to come over and pick some fresh figs, please let me know! The comment section is open. ;)

Since not everyone will rush over to help with the harvest, though, try finding some fresh figs at your local farmer’s market. They are super good in a variety of recipes and are elegantly simple and refreshing with a little bit of cheese to cut their sweetness. Recommended cheeses include smoked gouda, blue cheese or goat cheese. But, for those who’d like to cook up some fig-infused goodness, here are two recent successes from the batch of fig experiments I’ve been trying lately: honey fig scones and sun-dried figs.

Honey Fig Scones

I love scones. Hands down, it’s my favorite thing to make. This is largely because it seems you simply can’t buy a good scone just anywhere. So, it seemed natural to find a scone recipe using figs. This one is a winner. It got the coveted gold star in our household, meaning it’s pretty amazing. My first batch tasted great, but came out a bit flat (see pix). My second time around, I wanted to make them a bit healthier, so used whole wheat flour and they came out perfectly! I swear switching the flour is the only thing I did differently, but it sure seems like another adjustment was made based on the results. I’ll have to try them a third time to be sure I can replicate these awesome fluffy whole wheat results.

Sun-Dried Figs

The internet is an amazing thing! I came to the realization, after looking at so many fig recipes, that with all these fresh figs now, if I needed dried figs later in the year I’d be upset I didn’t take the time to dry my own figs. Only problem is that I’m a city girl and have no idea how to dry fruit. Luckily, there’s this crazy thing called the internet and you can type in questions and find instructions! Yay! So, that’s what I did. I searched and found instructions, then followed them (mostly). My amendments: I used cheesecloth instead of tulle and put my figs in the sun for about four days to really be sure they were good and dry. Next time, I think I’ll try putting a food tent over them as well, since bugs still tried getting to the figs through the cheesecloth. Overall, it worked really well! I just had to remember to put out the figs in the morning before I got Lil’ O up and began our morning routine. (FYI, mornings aren’t my thing, so remembering something outside of the routine was a bit of a challenge.) Thankfully, I prevailed and we have a small batch of dried figs! Weeee!