I love cooking with my kids. It is one of my favorite activities.

But I really, really love combining cooking with our favorite books.

During the next few months, I am looking to share some of our favorite books and corresponding recipes here. These are simple ideas for helping favorite books come to life, and sharing healthy food with kids. I’d love it if you shared some of your favorite books and the recipes that go with as well!

This first book is a long-time favorite around here. We love Maurice Sendak, and for years we have read Chicken Soup with Rice, a book about the months and how chicken soup is always appropriate.

From the book: “I’ve told you once, I’ve told you twice, All seasons of the year are nice, For eating chicken soup with rice.”

We read this book when we make our favorite chicken stock. As we read, the kids chop onions, celery, carrots and parsley. Rice boils on the stove.

When we finish the book, the vegetables go into the pot with a little oil to soften. We add the stock, one cracked clove of garlic, salt, pepper, and the cooked rice, bring it all to a boil and then lower the heat, cooking until everything is tender and the flavors have combined.

Although “all seasons of the year are nice, for eating chicken soup with rice,” we especially like it this time of year.

Do you have a favorite recipe for sharing with kids?

So I have a few people in my life who occasionally tease me about my organic ways.

They are just joking, of course, and I don’t really take it seriously.

But recently, someone made a joke about me making my own butter.

I hadn’t ever tried it, but you know how these things work — it wasn’t long until I found an opportunity. (Coincidentally we made it in a pre-school co-op class I am co-teaching. It. Was. AWESOME.)

So now, it’s sort of a new obsession around here. Not only is homemade butter very easy (you don’t have to buy a churn, I don’t care what the Internet says), the kids love making it, and we are finding all kinds of different versions and uses for the stuff.

This past weekend we made garlic-herb butter for homemade garlic bread.

We also love to make cinnamon-butter to go with homemade bread. I know. I am getting a little Little House on the Prairie with all this. But I promise, try it once, and if you don’t find yourself making batches and batches of butter, you are a stronger pioneer than I am.

Homemade Butter

This is more of a process than a recipe. Homemade butter only contains only two ingredients: heavy cream and a bit of salt. We favor Organic Valley’s heavy cream if you can find it. The salt really makes a difference, but we literally add just a pinch.

We make butter by putting about a half-cup of cream into a small jar. We add just a few grains of sea salt.

Then the fun begins. We shake, rattle and roll that little jar until the magic happens. Shaking is great, but when little arms get tired, it sure is fun to roll it back and forth across the floor.

In just a few minutes, the cream starts to thicken, and eventually achieves a whipped consistency. This is perfect for bread and a great way to covert margarine-lovers who think that the spreadability of that stuff negates the uckiness of the ingredients.

If you shake a little more, the butter will thicken and the solids will seperate from the whey or butter-milk. (Buttermilk is great stuff and has lots of uses!)

We keep our butter in the fridge for a few days. We usually make pretty small batches, and make it often.

Variations:

• To make cinnamon-butter, add a just a shake of ground cinnamon to the cream before shaking.
• To make garlic-herb butter, mix in minced garlic and finely chopped herbs when the butter reaches the whipped stage and stir carefully.
• To make honey butter, add about a tablespoon of honey to the cream and shake like crazy.
• To make citrus-butter, add minced orange or lemon zest to the cream before shaking.

Go ahead and give butter-making a try. And if anyone teases you about your efforts, offer them a bite. They will pretty quickly declare a take-back.

This Monday morning we are …

• Saying good-bye to the last little bits of fall, and feeling grateful for the long weekend spent together
• Planning for the big holidays to come: St. Nicholas Day, Santa Lucia Day, the Winter Solstice and Christmas
• Writing in our journals (more Thursday!)
• Starting holiday gifts (more Friday!)

What are you up to this fine Monday morning?

An assortment of recipes, books, blog posts, or other things that inspired me this week.

Favorite natural toy company Bella Luna is offering free shipping and free modeling beeswax

Using media to solve the childhood obesity epidemic

One Small Change: Natural Hair Washing Tutorial

The Family Part of Family Dinner

Coconut Cardamom Sweet Potatoes

What is inspiring you this week? Please tell us about it in the comments below!

The kids and I are big fans of green smoothies. We all them frog guts, and we are in a special club called the “Frog Guts Club.”

You can join. It is open enrollment right now.

I know green smoothies seem a little scary. If you haven’t tried one yet, you probably don’t buy it when people talk about how “they don’t taste like death,” and “they really don’t make you gag at all. Promise.”

But it’s true. Close your eyes. Take a sip. It will be OK. 

This is a recipe for my new favorite green smoothie. I am drinking one this morning, as part of my squirt whipped cream and too much cranberry bread detox plan!

I promise this smoothie is delicious. If you are nervous, just add a little bit of kale the first time.

Tropical Green Smoothie

One banana

3/4 cup crushed pineapple

1/2 cup coconut milk (or more, depending on the consistency you need to get it going)

A few handfuls of kale or other greens

Throw everything in a blender and take it for a spin!

Yum!
No really … Yum!

A small list of some of our family’s Thanksgiving thankfuls …

• our pets — a dog, a cat, a rat and 4 fish
• yummy food
• pens
• grandparents
• hummus
• paper airplanes
• good friends
• time together — this 4-day weekend is really exciting for us!
• the new Muppet movie
• extended family near and far
• a new baby on the way (not ours, but still very special to us!)
• the opportunity to write every day
• little friends who come to visit
• falling leaves
• bike riding
• warm blankets
• Monopoly
• painting

What are you thankful for today?

We had a lot of fun this week making Thanksgiving placemats with some little friends.

These are a simple little project, but they are so fun for the kids to individualize, and they are great keepsakes for parents.

To make each placemat, we used two 12-inch by 6-inch pieces of neutral cotton fabric. The kids used fabric paint and paint brushes to decorate one side of their mats. (It’s fun to add hand prints or other designs.)

When the painting wass dry, I placed the two right sides of the fabirc together and sewed almost all the way around, leaving a small hole for turning. Next I turned the mat right-side-out, folded the edges of the hole under, and top stiched all the way around (I used a zig-zag stitch, but any stitch will do!)

Finally, I added each child’s name and the year in fabric paint. Some years I embroider their names, but this year, I had four to do, so fabric paint was a good substitute!

Voila! Thanksgiving placemats — perfect for meals and snacks all year-round, and for activities like making bread!

How are you getting ready for Thanksgiving in your family?

It’s Cranberry Bread Day! It’s Cranberry Bread Day!!

You saw it on your calendar, right? Heard about it on the radio?

Uh-oh. Starting to think that Cranberry Bread Day may be an Anderson Family tradition only …

 But it is so fun, and has become so much a part of what makes us look forward to Thanksgiving that I hope you will join us in celebrating!

Our cranberry bread tradition began many years ago, before Ellery was even born, when Owen and I read the book Cranberry Thanksgiving. It is such a sweet story about a grandmother guarding her famous cranberry bread recipe, but the deeper message is that you really can’t judge people based on how they appear, or even if they smell like lavender.

(This book always reminds of my grandparents who often sought out a person who was alone for Thanksgiving and asked them to be part of our family celebration. In college, they often told me to bring friends home who could not travel all the way back to their own hometowns to celebrate. My grandfather always said that we were so lucky to have so much, and to have each other, and it was our duty to share that. So reading this book gives me a chance to tell my kids that story too!)

In the back of the book is a recipe for Grandmother’s Famous Cranberry Bread, and that first year, we tried it. We got lots of recipe requests at Thanksgiving, and the following year, made it again with a few changes.

We keep experimenting based on allergy restrictions and what we think tastes good (fewer raisins, then no raisins, then adding pecans, for instance).

And what we have come up with is our family’s own recipe based on the book, but also a fun family tradition that really is one of my very favorite parts of the year.

Our Cranberry Bread

(based on the recipe from Cranberry Thanksgiving by Wende and Harry Devlin, and pictured here in their muffin form)

2 cups white spelt flour (unbleached flour is fine too!)

1 cup evaporated cane juice crystals or sugar

1 1/2 tsp baking powder

1 tsp salt

1/2 tsp baking soda

1/4 cup light olive oil

1 egg, beaten

1 tsp grated orange peel

3/4 orange juice

2 1/2 cups cranberries

1/2 cup chopped pecans (optional)

Mix dry ingredients (including cane juice crystals or sugar) in a large bowl and set aside. Mix wet ingredients in small bowl. Add wet to dry and mix until just combined. Fold in cranberries and pecans, if using. Spoon into greased loaf pan, cake pan or muffin tin. Cook at 350 degrees for 22 minutes for muffins, 35-40 minutes in a cake pan and 55 minutes to an hour in a bread pan. The bread/muffins is done when a knife inserted in the middle comes out clean.

Note: In the spring we substitute rhubarb for the cranberries! Rhubarb and orange is so yummy together too!

Happy Cranberry Bread Day today!

Do you have a special Thanksgiving tradition? Please tell us in the comments below!

This Monday morning we are …

• Preparing for Thanksgiving. Check out this fantastic free download from Life As Mom.
• Stuffing some pumpkins for centerpieces
• Making cranberry bread — an annual tradition. (Recipe tomorrow)
• Making thankful trees!

What are you up to this fine Monday morning?