Back in Spring, when we were bored and looking forward to Summer, the kids and I wrote down a bucket list of things to make together. We have actually been really good about doing them!
As you may have picked up from what little I mention here, Kyle travels quite a bit for work. One of the nice things about his job is that he returns with strawberries!
Often it’s more than I can handle, so we give them away to anyone who is within a 60 mile radius of us. But now that the season has slowed down (peak picking is in Spring), he brings me a much more reasonable amount to use up.
I’ve still frozen them (and made jam) aplenty.
But lately, I’ve been making strawberry cobblers. Or crisps. Or crumbles. Whatever it is called when you bake fruit in a deep dish and top it with a crunchy, buttery, oaty topping.
I usually do this with nectarines, because you know we get INSANE amounts of those every year. But they don’t ripen until late July, and so strawberries have filled the dessert void as we wait for our nectarine tree to shower us with stone fruit.
Where does the kiddo part of this come into play? We got to talking on the 4th of July and I realized (gasp) my kids had no idea what whipped cream was!!
I had to remedy that asap.
[Ignore the eye injury, he’s fine.]
We used the real deal heavy whipping cream (local and organic) and I let them add sugar and watch as the liquid turned into fluffy clouds of deliciousness.
It was a BIG hit.
As if you’d expect anything different.
So much so that we’ve made a few more since…
Which has bridged the gap quite nicely because it is now finally time for…
All. The. Nectarines.
I’m trying to pick them in stages so that we don’t have 50 ripening at the same time. I can barely keep up with all this produce though (!!!) because ever since we got back from Hawaii we have garden veggies and CSA shares coming out of our ears.
Not that I’m complaining.
The other thing I realized my kids hadn’t been exposed to was the almighty burrito.
They’ve had tacos galore. There’s no deficiency in the Mexican fare in our household. But for some reason, they’ve never laid their hands on a burrito, neither from my kitchen or any restaurant.
So, obviously, I decided to change that.
Not that it takes much encouraging, but I got them excited about it by asking them to brainstorm what they wanted and then taking them to the store right after to go get everything.
In truth, we already had everything but tortillas and ground beef, but whatever. They picked which kind of beans to make and what veggies would go in.
I made the black beans from scratch, starting them in the IP before we went to the store for the rest of the stuff. They had red onion, chili peppers, salt, cumin, and chili powder in them.
In addition to the beans, they chose cabbage, avo, ground beef, and tomatoes (only for V).
In fact, they loved them so much that we made them again a few days later!
This time with some fresh pico de gallo that I made.
Next on our cooking list…sushi, pita chips, and jello…
