Good morning!

I never mean to be away long when I decide to take a break from here. A week at most is what I promise myself. And then it turns into seven. As you might have guessed, I've been busy. My all consuming second job as a meth dealer,, Big Name Fan of the Wheel of Time series kicked into high gear with the release of the latest book in the series. It's a good book. If you are a fan of the series, you should read it. Anyways, I've still been eating and cooking and reading about food, if perhaps not quite with the dedication my other hobby is getting these days.

Yesterday was Thanksgiving, which my parents hosted. It was a very traditional affair and I ate three desserts. My sister, Allison, is an incredible baker. No one can resist her treats.

My contribution was a sweet potato casserole. My family was never big on sweet potatoes growing up, until we realized they didn't HAVE to be boiled to death, then slathered with marshmallow. I think I'm the only one that eats them with regularity, but they are not foreign objects on the dinner table for my parents and siblings.

This casserole recipe is adapted from one given to me by a student. In my Food Appreciation class this month, we've been focusing on Thanksgiving foods. So we've made pie from scratch, this casserole, pumpkin cookies, etc. When I let the students know we'd be making sweet potato casserole, he brought this recipe and I liked it better than my usual one. So we made it, I liked it and now it's mine.

The adaptions are mainly just to lighten it up a bit. The original called for a crazy amount of butter, eggs and sugar, which I have reduced greatly. Sweet potatoes are naturally delicious and really don't require much gussying up to be presentable.


Sweet Potato Casserole

3 cups mashed, cooked sweet potato (I roast mine in the oven, I think it tastes better)
1 egg
1/3 cup unsalted butter, softened
1/2 orange juice
1 cup chopped pecans
1/4 cup dark brown sugar

Combine sweet potatoes, egg, butter and orange juice in a casserole dish. Top with pecans and and brown sugar. Bake at 350 for thirty minutes and serve warm.

The magic ingredient in this, as far as I'm concerned is the orange juice. Citrus and sweet potatoes go surprisingly well with each other. The acidity brings out the natural sweetness of the potato. I'll probably make this again in a few days when we need another Thanksgiving fix.

Tricking Kids Into Eating Vegetables

This semester, I am teaching a "Food Appreciation Class". This will either be the best thing I've ever done professionally, or it will be cited in the newspaper report about why I shot up that shopping mall.

Teaching kids to cook can be immensely rewarding and insanely frustrating all at the same time. And I'm not teaching just any kids, I'm teaching a gaggle of middle school kids with mild to moderate special needs. Lots of impulsivity issues and poor decision making skills, even for young adolescents. So the highs are much higher and the lows are much lower.

Take today for example, I'm currently teaching a unit on how to pack a sack lunch that doesn't make me want to gag when I look at it. The lunches they bring range from Hot Pockets, to Spaghetti Os to entire frozen pizzas. One of my students downs a 20 ounce bottle of Mountain Dew each morning while he munches a fast food breakfast in the car on his way to school. My #1 goal this semester is to help them shake off these poor eating habits the parents have allowed them to develop.

Our recipes were two simple sandwiches that they can make themselves at home with minimal assistance. In fact, I want them to be able to do it themselves. No fancy ingredients or weird looking tools. We did Alton Brown's Roasted Veggie Cream Cheese Spread, which is delicious, and we did a simple tuna salad sandwich mixed with roasted red peppers and baby spinach. That turned out amazingly good.

The comments from the kids as we made these amused me greatly. "I don't like tuna fish!" "Are red peppers spicy?" "Will the zucchini make it slimy?"

Afterwards, all the comments became "You gave me a copy of the recipe right?" "You must have bought some fancy tuna, because this was GOOD!" "I'm going to ask my mom if I can start eating dairy again, that smells great."

I hope they bring some of these to school with them in the coming weeks. If nothing else they ate a vegetable today.

Tuna Salad with Veggies

2 cans tuna
3/4 c mayo
1/2 c roasted red peppers (You can find these in little glass jars at the grocery store if you don't want to roast your own)
1 c baby spinach, chopped or torn into bite sized pieces
Toasted whole wheat bread or crackers


Combine all ingredients, then spread on the toasted bread. Eat.