Smells like autumn

All three kids are in school full day for the first time and I am still at home all day, but now with a little more time on my hands. With the youngest two out the door by 8:15, that's plenty of time to think about dinner.

Yesterday morning I took advantage of that time to put a pork roast in the slow cooker. But instead of the standard pulled pork recipe, I gave it a bit of a autumn flavor, subbing out the onions for two medium-small Honeycrisp apples and adding a couple of tablespoons of brown sugar. I sliced the apples nice and thin so that they would basically fall apart. We don't like as much of a vinegar taste to our pulled pork, so I put in about half the normal amount and used water for the rest.

I just love how a roast fills the kitchen with the aroma of a meal to come. It cooked even more quickly than I anticipated, so it was ready to taste when the kids came home. Elizabeth loves just about everything, so she was easily pleased. Robert was intrigued, and ended up liking his sample as well. As for Colleen, well, you can't account for taste from a 6-year-old.

Next time I plan to add another half an apple, and I'm thinking about putting the onions back in for more of a savory flavor. It worked great on toasted buns, to keep the sandwich from falling apart, although Elizabeth campaigned for egg noodles. That will have to be some other time, however.

Pizza on the grill, round two

We went back to the pizza-on-the-grill concept last night for dinner and I was pretty pleased with how they turned out. We'd planned to do this a couple weeks ago but the propane tank ran out at the wrong time, so we ended up cooking them inside, which took a lot longer and was a lot less fun.

We didn't have Neil's expertise rolling out the dough, and that's my least favorite part so Cate took care of it and I stuck with the grilling part. Cate and the kids had plain cheese pizza, nothing too fancy. (We'd eaten up all the pepperoni from a couple weeks ago.) Elizabeth had red onions on hers as well.
By the time we got to mine, we were basically out of pizza sauce, but I wasn't too broken up about it. There was plenty of other stuff to work with. Mine has pesto, red onions, artichokes, chopped basil, sun-dried tomatoes and a little bit of cheese on it. (My camera's phone doesn't do justice to anything with colors in it, I'm afraid.)

The best part was that there was leftover crust from the kids' pies for me to eat, so I only ate half of this pizza. Heading downstairs to go reheat the other half and eat lunch now!

With this blog post, we reach the 200 mark for Colemans' Couch. Once upon a time I thought we might do something more creative with post 200 but it took a little longer to get here than I anticipated with just three posts in May and five in June.

Colleen's rules of cooking, No. 1

For everything that must be stirred, there is a spoon that must be licked.

Even if that spoon was stirring cranberry relish that includes onions and horseradish. Apparently, not a problem. We'll see if she eats it on Thursday.

It's nothing like the chocolate chip cookies she "helped" make a couple weeks ago.

Let's cook, and eat shrimp!

MINNEAPOLIS -- Coleman family insiders were stunned Sunday night when Cate Coleman ate shrimp, for reportedly the first time in her life.

Coleman, 35, partook of the seafood dish as part of a Coleman family outing to Let's Cook, a store near downtown Minneapolis that offers cooking classes and events for groups. Mom volunteers there for other people's classes and brought the group of family adults down for a private class, focused on handmade pasta.

The shrimp was an hors d'oeuvre.

"Once I got past what it looked like, I tried it and it actually tasted good," she explained later in the evening.

Cate has actually cooked shrimp before, for me, as I was the only one in the family who would eat it. But she has often expressed a desire to not be able to recognize her food when it's on her plate, if you know what I mean, and a cooked shrimp is shaped a lot like the thing it used to be.

During the evening, she also tried the spinach filling for tortellini. And there were other things but I don't remember what she tasted at the table.

It was a fun evening, kneading dough, cutting it into strips and forming it into shapes, or tortellini, or ravioli ... man, getting hungry just thinking about it again. The chef had some incredible sauces to serve with the various pasta. Cate did draw the plain pasta, while other Colemans made tomato-flavored pasta and spinach pasta, but it was neat to knead the dough and roll it out, etc.

Plus, it was just nice to get out without the kids.

More photos on my Facebook page.

What Elizabeth ate

We haven't ordered out for pizza in a while -- part of an attempt to cut our food budget back as well as our calorie budget. But I found some pizza crust mixes on sale at Giant earlier this week and we cooked up a couple of homemade pizzas for dinner tonight.

When we used to order pizza, everyone would have pepperoni and I would have a sausage and onion or mushroom or something vegetable-like. But of course, I've swayed Elizabeth over to the light side and she joined me in making a veggie pizza.

Part and parcel with that is trying something new. We had a can of black olives and I convinced Elizabeth to try one. She liked it.

Of course, when put on the pizza, she was less enthralled. But she still had pizza with onions and red pepper on it. And I got her green peppers and olives to put on my slices.

But put black olives on the list of food Elizabeth likes!

What Cate's cooking

My wife seems to not be interested in blogging about herself, which leaves it to me. I mentioned in the last post that I was turning on the AC because Cate was cooking in the kitchen and that may have led you to wonder what she's cooking.

A little background -- when I met Cate, she basically had about five things she would cook on a regular basis, only one of which ever sees the light of day anymore.

In her defense, I didn't exactly come to the relationship armed with a bunch of recipes or a particular sense of urgency about changing the paradigm. We reminisced the other night -- not overly fondly -- about how we could turn a packet of frozen chicken patties, a couple slices of cheese and a little pasta sauce into two meals. Those weren't exactly fun days.

Even well into this millennium the repertoire hadn't changed a whole lot. We went through periods where we'd try out some new thoughts in the kitchen, but it wasn't until the past year or so that we both really branched out. As I was working on taking some weight off, it required that we re-evaluate everything we do in the kitchen. And thankfully, I've had her support in this process. I can't imagine being able to lose more than 50 pounds without my spouse's support.

But to the point -- it's been an interesting week. Last night Cate made jambalaya, including shrimp (I peeled them and Cate veined them). Using turkey sausage instead of pork made this a nice, low-fat meal. Earlier in the week she made chicken breasts with a cooking sauce and sauted vegetables. Today she threw together a chili that's in the crock pot. And somewhere online she read that you could make a cake from cake mix by using Diet Coke instead of the milk and egg the standard cake box calls for, saving nearly a third of the calories. The kids had a great time putting that together this morning and it's sitting on the counter awaiting dessert tonight.

I have some beef marinating in lemon juice, oregano and the like for the kids to eat tonight.

Many of these are things she won't eat. Some are things the kids won't eat. But it fosters Elizabeth's interest in new tastes and means I have plenty of leftovers to take to work for lunch.

Elizabeth's latest taste adventures include green, red and orange peppers, both raw and cooked, as well as sauteed onions. But never a hamburger. And not jambalaya.

Turning on the air conditioning

Yesterday I made an executive decision to turn on the air conditioning. The high was only 82 in our neck of the 'burbs, but Cate was cooking dinner on the stove and it just seemed like the right move so that we weren't all sweltering long into the evening.

It turned out to be the right decision. And not a difficult one.

This was not the case last year, however. Turning on the AC for the first time in 2007 involved a fair amount of finger-crossing and some tense decision-making.

As you may remember, we had operated for most of the previous nine months under the premise that we were moving. Cate and I -- mostly Cate, since I was in Connecticut, were preparing the house to put on the market and get out of Northern Virginia.

Neither of us is particularly handy. I don't think this is a surprise to anyone reading. But we had managed to get a few projects done in the interim, taking down the outdated drapes in a couple of our bedrooms and installing blinds among them.

The house also had the original 1973 thermostat, one with all the precision of a Dick Cheney hunting trip. The best we could do was hope for the temperature to be in the range of a few degrees for a short time until it needed adjusting again. So I did a little reading on the subject and determined we could manage this project ourselves.

It was relatively easy to pick out a new unit at Home Depot at the seemingly reasonable price of $80. We had the tools we needed to install it and all was set to go when, on a January afternoon, we removed the old thermostat.

The instructions were fairly comprehensive, thankfully, and referred to two possible configurations for our old, single-zone heat pump setup -- four wires or five wires. Like seemingly everything else in this house, however, it was not standard.

It had six.

Almost all of our wires were properly labeled. Almost all of the labels matched what was described in the manual. We just had an extra wire to deal with.

We spent about a half-hour agonizing over it and just decided to guess, make sure the heat worked, and let it go. Our rationale was that we weren't planning to be in the house when we needed the air conditioning anyway.

Well, of course, the NBC job went south and so did I at the end of April. And while we held off through the first heat wave of the spring, by mid-June it was clear that we needed to bite the bullet. So we threw the switch, and voila, it worked.

And the house didn't burn down or anything.

Just don't ask us to repeat it. Thanks.

Sunday dinner

I may have mentioned, or at least some of you may know, that I've tried to make Sunday dinner a bit of a big deal.

On Sundays, Cate leaves for work at noon. It's the only extended period of time where I'm at home consistently and the kids are awake. (Elizabeth, sitting next to me, nods.) So while we don't always make a huge production out of Sunday dinner, sometimes the kids and I will go shopping specifically with that night's dinner in mind, picking things out we'd like to try and that Elizabeth would like to help cook.

This photo is a no-bake chocolate cheesecake Elizabeth made last Sunday. Seriously, she basically made this entirely by herself, aside from the blending.

Tonight, it was a Chicken with Couscous recipe that we found on Taste of Home's Web site. We didn't spend nearly as much time researching tonight as we sometimes do, and had to make do with ingredients on hand, but we basically had it all. The only concession was that we didn't have any broccoli florets on hand, so we defrosted the long-dormant ice block of snap peas that was in the freezer. And believe it or not, that actually worked.

While Elizabeth was making the sauce that gets poured over the chicken, I was pounding it between sheets of wax paper with my fist. (No mallet or tenderizing hammer thingy.) I reserved some of the couscous without tomatoes for Elizabeth.

I just said to Elizabeth, "I'm so glad you like couscous." She replied: "I don't like couscous. I looooooooooooove couscous."

Robert is loving the chicken -- some nights he's not interested in eating seconds, or even finishing his firsts, but tonight he asked for more.

Good enough.

Now we just need to work on Colleen. Whenever there is bread (at home) or french fries (on the road) on the table, she refuses to eat anything else. "Breaaaaad?" she pleads.

I gave her one piece so she wouldn't starve. But that's it. She hasn't yet begun to understand the causal relationship between eating her food and getting more bread. Or she understands it but refuses to play along. So she had a piece of bread, some orange juice, lettuce, cucumbers and carrots for dinner.

The best part is, I'll have leftovers to take to work at least one day this week.

While I was putting the leftovers away, however, a strange thing happened. I made one more attempt at it, telling her, "People who eat chicken get more bread." And Colleen went to her plate, picked up the long-since cold slice of chicken, and ate it.

Finally.

So she got her second piece of bread. We'll see if she understands the next time around. And Cate, that's why you have so little bread left over.

Choppin' broccoli

It's been fun over the past year or so to have Elizabeth's help and enthusiasm in the kitchen.

I'm not sure whether it was License to Grill or Top Chef that caught her attention, or perhaps some other cooking show that she watches during the day with Cate, but Elizabeth has been willing to learn and help.

One of my favorite parts of the holiday season is preparing Christmas dinner, and it's a role I've claimed for myself. In the retail world, Cate's busiest days are in the final week before Christmas, and since that is when the Division III football season has just ended, I'm home and re-acclimating myself to the family.

So I plan, acquire and prepare dinner for both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.

This year, Christmas dinner was a leg of lamb, because I felt like doing something new. And we told the kids it was beef, because shoot, we weren't even entirely sure if we would like lamb ourselves. Elizabeth and I went grocery shopping a couple of times before the holiday, and I had her pick out a handful of Granny Smith apples and baby red potatoes. Both are her favorite, and we stumbled on a potato dish that she loves, involving quartered baby reds, red pepper and red onion roasted in the oven. And dinner was a success, even after we told Elizabeth what the main dish was.

One thing Elizabeth is great at is chopping. The other day I added chopped apples to a cookie-out-of-the-bag recipe just because it could involve her. Watching her focus on mincing the apples is pretty cool, I have to say. She also loves to marinade.

And even more cool -- as we were wandering the aisles at Wegman's the other day, she asked if we could make lamb again.

But I can wait. Gotta go find a recipe.

And, in the interim, some new ideas for chicken.