Toasted

Tv, cable box, and a small cowboy boot that I "borrowed" from a restaurant in Mexico many years ago.

Great reading. I hope someone out there will post recipes on Egullet Recipes. Especially vegetarian empanadas. I've never had one but I think I'd love it.

Wow! Great idea. I'm roasting some onion, zuchinni, parsnip and portabello mushrooms right now, also some fresh garlic. The house smells so good! Now I know the neighbors down the street have a garden so I'm on my way to hit them up for fresh basil, ok, yup, I have a can of black beans. Tonight's dinner should be great. I'm going to add the left over saffron rice that I made triple batches of and stuck in the freezer and some ginger/orange tofo that I started marinating yesterday. I think I'll grill it and add it to the rice.

Make some polenta ahead of time and let it chill and stick it in the cooler. Slice it into "fingers" toasted on some skewers over the open fire. Serve it with a marinara sauce or just sprinkle some gorganzola over it and let it melt. This is one of my favorite camp fire treats and kids like it too!

Mark Bittman has a recipe that uses ricotta to make a paneer type cheese. I think you just drain it a little, dump it in a greased pan- smoothing it out of course, and then bake till firm. After it cools you can brown it in oil just like paneer. My cookbooks are packed away at the moment but I'm fairly sure it's in the "How to Cook Everything" cookbook.

I've lived in New England my whole life and I never heard of such a thing. What a wasted life! Such a simple recipe but so good. I'm going to a party on Sat. and I'm bringing a big plate of round tomato sandwiches with me. I might even share them with the other guests. Thanks for the recipe, you made my day.

butter Artichokes Avacados

My kids absolutely love them and so do their friends. Around here they run about $4.99 for four but I can get them at the clearance bin for about 89. cents for four because no one will pay that much for apples. My children will eat apples anyway but these are fun and different. Besides: What's wrong with kool-aid?

Beets. Nasty things. Now people are roasting them and throwing them in salads and they still taste like crap. Time to move on people. Why can't the humble parsnip have it's turn?

I would suggest a deli tray with sliced meat, cheese, and rolls. Add a couple of small containers of mustard and mayo. A pasta salad or a potato salad would go along well. Best wishes.

I just wanted to say, thanks for all the replies! I feel so desperate right now and it's nice to know that others have been in the same situation. I'd love to hear more about how other families deal with "food rebellion" BTW: thanks for putting up with my crazy self, I swear, this sleep deprivation is making me nutty!

Betts: You are a smart, very smart women and everything you wrote made perfect sense. I really needed to hear all of that. You are so right about the "face to face" aspect of dinner vrs. the food. I wrote my last post before yours and then had to laugh a little. "Guilt" was not ever an emotion my mom or grandmom ever felt- at least about food or the "little ones". If we went to bed alive and healthy it was a good day.

Help! In the past couple of months I had a baby and was on bed rest for the month before and too busy nursing for the next month. During that time Daddy made the meals and since he doesn't cook it was all microwaved crap or take out food. Now that Mommy is back on her feet there seems to be a big rebellion: no one wants to eat the healthy yummy meals that Mommy makes! I'm not saying I'm the greatest cook but I make some good stuff, I know my way around a kitchen. Here's the situation: I have four kids and I'm sick of being a short order cook and making ten different things for each meal. I want to plan one meal and have everybody eat it, at the dining room table, without people completely flipping out because " I hate black beans" "eww, asparagus looks like green worms" or, " yuck, this tomato sauce looks like the scab on my knee". OK? So, what do I do? Make them eat what I make and deal with the temper tantrums or be a short order cook? I don't know. I just had a baby and am very sleep deprived. Help me!

I'd like a bag of chips and a pickle please.

Who wants a drunken idiot coming over to their table? Not me. It might make a good story later but some of us have too many of those to count! I don't blame you for being pissed off.

Ok. I have four kids and two are babies so give me a break huh? Wed. Frozen pizza, cut up fruit, ice cream for dessert Thurs. Black beans and rice with salsa and sour cream and fresh green beens with garlic (eat up-cus it's soccer night!) Fri. Thank God! Butternut squash lasagna with roasted garlic bread and a green salad with homemade garlic crutons and what ever salad dressing the kids want to make them eat the salad. Fresh mangos for dessert (3 for $2.00 at the store!). You know, it's not the cooking that's so hard because I love to do it. It's the cleaning up. I still have dirty pans in the sink from tonights dinner and if I wasn't such an Egullet slut they would be done by now.

A nice fruit salad. The kids can pick out the fruit they like and mom doesn't have to deal with chopping and peeling it all.

I've been a vegetarian for about 20 years. First because I just hated meat. My parents made me eat it. I thought it was so gross. Growing up in ME and seeing dead deer and even bear hanging from my relatives trees, getting ready to be butchered was too much for me to take. Then I got married and lived with my husband in a small house on his parent's beef farm. Hearing the calfs cry for their mothers when they were separated was heartbreaking every year. I'm not writting this to get an emotional response- that's just the way it is. The baby cow's would cry and their mother's on the other side of the road would call back to them. For days. Some people can deal with this and some people can't. I can't. I don't judge other people for eating meat. I think it's a choice. I have children and if they decide to eat meat when they're older, well, I'll have to be ok with it. I do think though, that everyone who eats meat should visit a slaughter house or a farm and see the whole process. None of my meat eating friends will go to the farm even though I've invited them several times. I can't say I blame them.

Picked up slices at Papa Gino's after leaving the hospital (just had a baby)- Good stuff people!!! Ate 2 slices in the 15 minutes it took to get home. I love the sauce and the thin slices. I need to figure out how to make this at home.

Whenever I drive by the Papa Gino's in Waterford CT, I have to get the two cheese slices and med. drink special. I just love that stuff with a sprinkle of hot peppers, maybe some cheese, yum! The best thing, besides the taste, is the ability to fold those huge slices up and eat them in the car with out making a big mess. I can't speak about D'Angelo's because I just never order their stuff even though their in the same building as Papa Gino's.

Thirty-nine weeks pregnant here. Right now I'm craving pasta and artichokes and anything with potatoes. Earlier in the pregnancy I craved cheese grits in the worst way. Kind of weird because I had never even eaten them before I got pregnant. My adversions are mostly to smells, the fish counter at the store makes me gag, the smell of eggs-yuck, banannas. The hardest part of being this pregnant is constantly craving and even dreaming about foods that I just don't have the energy to make right now. You know, homemade ravioli with broccoli rabe, good bread, etc. Oh, well, it will all be over soon.

For me "signature dish" means something I've made so many times that I can't screw it up. Two possibilities depending on the season: Winter: Grilled polenta with wild mushrooms in a brandy cream sauce and sauteed fresh spinach on the side. Summer: Marinated grilled tofu, grilled asparagus, couscous with fresh fruit, herbs, and toasted nuts, and a fresh fruit salad with crushed mint from the garden. Lots of wine too- these "get-to-gethers" make me a little anxious.

I can certainly relate! I'm about 8 1/2 months pregnant and I also have a 15 month old, an 8 year old, and a 9 year old. I make a weekly menu for dinners which helps a lot. I make a lot of things like big batches of mashed potatoes, rice, and refried beans and freeze them in batches. I also make a ton of pancakes on the weekends and freeze those too- easy to throw in the micro for a quick breakfast. We eat a lot of soups and chili- I prep the veggies the night before and throw those and canned beans and spices into the crock pot the next morning. Another thing I do is make a triple batch of pizza dough once a week and refrigerate it. I use it for pizza, calazones, foccaccia bread ect. Along with these simple meals I use "bag" salads which I make more interesting with different cheeses, canned chick peas, diced apples, oranges, nuts, etc. My best advice is to do as much prep before hand and make big batches of things like rice, stock, dough and whatever else you like and freeze them in smaller quantities. I've finally gotten to the point where I can get a great, healthy dinner on the table in under 20 minutes. I admit to ordering in once a week, usually Thai food or Indian, food that I love but takes too long for me to make at home right now. Good luck!

What's up with the mac salad anyway? When I was in Hawaii my favorite plate lunch consisted of tofu steaks, stirfried greens, and a couple of scoops of rice and mac salad- all eaten with chopsticks of course. Now I love the mac salad but I've always wondered how it found it's place on the traditional plate lunch combo. Does anybody know?