I went on a bit of a buying frenzy last year with my cookbooks when the kids started school. I was excited to make home-made dinners and I guess I thought HAVING a ton of books would make me cook more but then it made me realize that I needed more cooking tools: more pans, more mixing utensils, more little slicers and cutters and other fun tools. So after I bought all those things and signed up for a bunch of cooking classes, I kind of lost steam towards the end of the year. So the other day I grabbed a never-used cookbook off my shelf, the Moosewood Kitchen Simple Supper cookbook that a friend told me was awesome and I chose a few recipes to make for dinner.
The coolest thing is that many recipes in this book give great suggestions for other recipes in the book that might complement them for a whole meal. So, I made pineapple fried rice, baked tofu and sesame broccoli.
Actually I didn’t really make all that.
The guys totally helped me out. And because all these things were vegetarian items I didn’t have to worry about the kids and germy raw meat so I could let them do a lot of it independently. So this cookbook is great for cooking with kids because most of the items are vegetarian or fish.
I’ve decided that I need to cook at least three recipes from each of the cookbooks I bought last year before I can buy anymore this year and this sounds like a good idea right now, but I am not always good with willpower. Does anyone out there actually think I’ll be able to stick to this goal? Regardless, it was fun to cook with my guys and being in the kitchen with them is one of my favorite things in the world and I hope we do more cooking together this year, for sure.
Terumi Pong is a Seattle-based family travel writer and mom of twin teenage boys. She loves coffee and pastries, shopping local and looking for greener ways to live. She is also known as Scout’s mom (Scout is a 5ish pound little black yorkie-poo)