thursday's menu

The purpose of posting my menu for the day is more of my attempt to stick to a menu plan by "writing" it down.

B: Waffles with homemade raspberry jam and orange juice
L: Leftover pizza, milk, and sliced cucumbers and baby carrots
D: Grilled Lime Chicken with Black Bean Sauce, rice, and red grapes

Daily dessert desire: Concord Grape Sorbet at The Kitchen Sink. Doesn't that look so good?!

Matilda

A couple of months ago, I saw that Marie at Make & Takes had read the book How To Eat Fried Worms with her 5 year old and then they watched the movie and ate gummy worms. Some of the comments left on her post were ideas of other worm-related activities or treats. This gave me an idea. There are quite a few children's books that have been turned into movies and knew this would be something that Daisy would really enjoy doing. We started with "How To Eat Fried Worms" and Daisy liked it a lot and surprisingly didn't eat very many gummy worms during the movie. I wonder if it's because it grossed her out. . .

The next movie/book combo we did was Matilda by Roald Dahl. We read this book together, and even though a lot of it might've gone over her head, she really enjoyed it and was blown away by the awful things that Miss Trunchbull did to little children. We borrowed the movie version with Danny Devito from the library, and decided to make the Chocolate Cake from Jessica Seinfeld's cookbook, Deceptively Delicious. Incase you haven't read the book, there's a part where a young boy, Bruce Bogtrotter, is forced to eat an entire giant chocolate cake. This recipe is much healthier than regular chocolate cake recipes. It uses pureed beets for added nutrition. It's still not perfectly healthy, but it makes me feel a little better about myself and what I'm feeding my kid, okay?

Anyway, Daisy and I enjoyed reading, watching, and eating "Bruce Bogtrotter's" chocolate cake. We're having computer/camera issues, but perhaps I'll post some photos later.

food links

Inside-out S'mores at Clumbsy Cookie

Toasted Coconut Shortbread at Culinary Concoctions by Peabody

Wonton Soup at Rasa Malaysia

Kate's Indian Grilled Chicken at Pioneer Woman Cooks

I love making the kids bento meals and I love collecting bento boxes. Here is a great American style bento blog with preschool age meal ideas. Wendolonia.

2 cool new links you will love and/or find interesting:

Cake Wrecks. "When professional cakes go horribly, hilariously wrong." That should explain it all right there.

Food Timeline-- a very interesting history of the beginnings of food from the "beginning" of time until today. You can click on many of the foods listed and it will tell you the history of that specific food. Very, very cool. At least I think so. Just check it out and you'll see what I mean. There are some cool links on this website as well.

take 5

Hershey's TAKE 5 is my favorite candybar right now. It's got everything. Pretzels, caramel, peanuts, peanut butter, and milk chocolate. YUM. Sweet and salty, nothing overpowering any of the other ingredients.

Candy Blog gave it a 5 out of 10 rating. She said it was one of her favorite candy bars at first, but she thought that they quickly stale and that they would be much better and get a much higher rating if it were made out of real chocolate once again instead of Hershey's new mockolate.

I still enjoy it, but then again I don't taste candy for a living and haven't a distinguished or refined taste for fancy cacoa, or whatever all those new chocolate products are.