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.

Eaty gourmet

I'm sure we all remember the great stuff we used to make ... or make our parents make, as a kid. Peanut butter and banana sandwich, grilled cheese with a pickle in it, some potato chips on top of our bologna sandwich.

That last part was important. It was the only way I could choke down the bologna sandwich on wonder bread that went with me to school for lunch on occasion. (Sorry, mom.)

Well, Colleen has been experimenting for herself lately, and using most of the same materials I'm sure we all used. Except that the other day, she took it one step further.

This is Colleen's banana dog. It's a banana with peanut butter and grape jelly on a hot dog bun. She pretty much ate all of it. In fact, I'd say it might not be that bad.

Try it, you'll like it!

Our oldest daughter is adventuresome in some areas, hesitant in others. And that's OK. She's done some things in the past couple years that I wouldn't have anticipated, trying new foods, for example, and she's enjoyed them more often than not, of course.

This week we nearly had a throwdown over Elizabeth's participation in chess club at school. Robert has been enthusiastic throughout (I mean, come on, it's a club!), but Elizabeth wanted no part of it. And with Cate out of town this weekend, I was jumping into an already-existing conversation without much of the background. But I had my orders: on my to-do list was writing a check for their enrollment, and the prescribed amount covered two.

So that was it. She was going. Even though she got all dramatic and scratched her own name out on the enrollment form.

This was Tuesday night. Wednesday morning I sent the form in -- with Robert, not with Elizabeth -- and asked Mom to check Robert's bag right before they went to the bus stop to make sure Elizabeth hadn't sabotaged it. Wednesday and Thursday night I heard nothing about it. And today she sneaked into the room behind me after I dropped off Robert. So I gave her her space and didn't embarrass her.

My theory? She found out exactly how many kids actually take part in chess club (there were about 40 today) and who some of them were and she realized that it indeed was going to be pretty cool.

After I said good-bye to Robert, I hung around upstairs and watched. She had a great time.

To nobody's surprise.

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!

Hot tongue, summer in the suburbs

Around 2 p.m., Elizabeth asked me what we were doing for dinner. All I knew was it would be chicken, since I pulled some out of the freezer last night for that purpose. She said she would look for a recipe online and I turned her loose on it.

Every couple of minutes, she asked me if we had certain ingredients in the house. We're running low/out of certain things and we're not going to replace them before we move. We don't need more Worcestershire sauce, for example, since we wouldn't finish another bottle ... well, it took us three years to finish the last one.

She started calling out ingredients and it turned out we had them all, so we decided to make a Grilled Barbecued Chicken recipe from Taste of Home. I don't think Elizabeth knows how spicy this is, however.

• 1 tablespoon chili powder
• 1/2 teaspoon hot pepper sauce
  
• 1 large onion, chopped

Those are actually the only really spicy components, unless black pepper is on your spicy list. But the marinade comes out very spicy. We'll see how they react. Probably need to grill up a hot dog or two just in case.

The one consumable we did replace was the propane tank for the grill. No way we were getting through six weeks without grilling.

What Colleen ate

We spent most of the day waiting for Lowe's to deliver the new fridge and washing machine. Waiting and waiting. And since we kept the fridge rather empty, we were light on dinner.

They arrived at 5:15 and were out by 5:45.

We went to Wegmans to replenish the milk supply with the intent of coming back home and cooking, but the kids were rapidly losing patience. So instead of bringing food home, we decided to cut the trip short and just eat there. Wegmans has a good amount of take out options, as well as an extensive salad bar and hot bar, so we got half a rotisserie chicken with roasted rosemary potatoes (Elizabeth's choice) and steamed vegetables.

I put Elizabeth in charge of getting fresh fruit from the salad bar with explicit instructions to come to a consensus with Robert on choices. And I got a couple things from the hot bar, nothing too heavy. Colleen started getting fussy as I was completing my dish (some rice noodles, a couple of mini egg rolls and some breaded fish) but I was chalking that up to the hour (after 6 on a long day).

She got even more fussy as we checked out. Wegmans has some seating upstairs that I had thought we would use but they didn't allow shopping carts up there, so we ate outside.

I set the food on the table and started cutting up the chicken, and Colleen is getting rather insistent about my food. I keep telling her that I'll eat my food when I'm done serving everyone else.

Finally -- and you parents know how it is -- I actually get to eat for myself. So I lift a piece of fish out of the container and Colleen points, and says, "Dad, eat your food!"

And it hits me. She doesn't want me to eat it. She wants to eat it herself. It looks just like a breaded chicken tender.

So what the heck, I give her a piece. She snaps it up.

I give her another. And another. I got one bite. She ate the rest.

So Colleen ate fish.

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.