It has become a Sunday tradition for Annika to choose a recipe from her kids' cookbook to make. After that, we make ice cream. Today, Annika chose angel hair pasta with herbs, garlic, and shrimp. Okay, she actually chose mac and cheese, but I made her choose something else and THEN she chose angel hair pasta.
Annika then "chose" cherry ice cream. See, cherry is the flavor I wanted to make, so I gave her the following "choices": spiced ice cream, coffee ice cream, mint ice cream, and cherry ice cream. Cherry it was! (As long as kids have the illusion of choice, they're good - she didn't even question why chocolate wasn't on the list.)
Finally, I had Annika chose a vegetable to make as a side dish. She chose broccoli . . . again. It is the child's favorite veggie. She even told me the other day that her farts smell like "yummy broccoli"! Wow. Annika specified that she wanted the broccoli with lemon and garlic, like we'd had last week. Okay, I can't argue with that.
I typically like the Williams-Sonoma kids' cookbook that I bought for Annika. The pictures are great and the recipes are grown-up friendly too. But you have to use common sense. For instance, the lasagna she made two weeks ago called for an entire pound of mozzarella and almost two pounds of ricotta. Um, no. We halved that and it was perfectly fine. That brings me to the pasta. It called for eight cloves of garlic. Eight! I should have remembered the lasagna, but I figured hey, it's garlic, garlic is good. Why not? Annika and I dutifully mixed 8 oz. of quinoa pasta (cooked in salted water) with the sauce. We easily made the sauce out of eight cloves of garlic sauteed in 2 teaspoons of olive oil. Then we added a pound of peeled shrimp (Annika peeled them), a quarter cup of chopped parsley, and the zest of one lemon. (On a side note, can somebody please create an easy zest? Like a jar of zest? Or "easy zest" lemons?) Then we tossed the sauce with the pasta. I say "we," but it was really me. It was at this point Annika decided she was done cooking. I fought every instinct to push her to continue. After all, I want her to enjoy cooking, not dread it. I did manage to cajole her into stirring the pasta and sauce together after she dumped in a quarter cup of Parmesan cheese.
While Annika was off not stirring the pasta, I made the broccoli. Yet another Peter Berley recipe. First., I blanched one head of broccoli (cut into bite-sized florets) in very salty water. Then I sauteed 2 cloves of garlic in hot olive oil for 30 seconds and added the broccoli and sauteed it all for 3 minutes. Serve it with a lemon wedge for squeezing.
If you are keeping score at home, that is a ten garlic clove meal. Don't get me wrong, it tasted good, but my breath is likely still a weapon of mass destruction. The garlic absolutely eclipsed the rest of the pasta. Next time I'll probably use four. The broccoli was perfect, tangy and garlicky. On its own, the broccoli would have been great. With the pasta, it was adding insult to injury. That, of course, didn't stop me from bringing both leftovers for lunch today. Sorry, coworkers.
The ice cream was a delicious treat. Really, can you ever screw up ice cream so badly that it isn't? But this was particularly good. It tasted more like cherries than cream, which is awesome if you love cherries and I do! Here's the recipe: http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Cherry-Ice-Cream/Detail.aspx An ice cream maker is a great investment. It is pretty cheap and - as long as you remember to freeze the canister in advance - it is nearly instant gratification. You just mix a handful of ingredients and pour them into the canister and wait for about 15 minutes. And then you have delicious, homemade ice cream (in our case, organic) as a reward!
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