I said I’d post about the Whoopie Pies that my husband made for a dinner party the other day, so here they are! Basically, we were invited to someone’s house for dinner the day before and asked to bring dessert for six people. I suggested making another pumpkin pie, as that takes five minutes of prep, or picking up a dessert at a bakery on the way. Tim had recently bought an America’s Test Kitchen magazine: Best-Ever Recipes, and we noticed a Whoopie Pie recipe that night. It was decided, we must make Whoopie Pies for the dinner party.
The only problem was that the magazine’s recipe called for a marshmallow filling (Ew!) instead of mascarpone, which is what made us fall in love with Whoopie Pies in the first place. So Tim called the Marcyk Fine Foods in Denver, where we originally became addicted to these treats, and they actually gave him their recipe! He then typed it up and printed it out – what a cutie – so now it is a permanent part of our recipe collection. I don’t think it would be right to post their recipe online, but I know you can Google and find Whoopie Pie recipes in abundance. Just keep in mind that a mascarpone filling is much more sophisticated and delicious than marshmallow (it’s what makes desserts like Tiramisu so good.)
In true form, Tim waited until the next day to make them and we were baking them up until the minute we left for dinner. The filling was too soft to pile high enough between the cakes; next time we’ll start earlier and chill the filling first. Also, our cakes came out tougher and drier on the outside than Marcyk’s, so we’ll have to work on that. All in all, it was a success!
Man, my hubby rocks! (Now I just have to get him to make the appetizer for the Christmas party this Friday. I was enlisted with a bunch of “wives” to bring one, but I have no idea what to make.)
Poached Eggs, Potato Cakes, and Spinach
Yesterday my husband spoiled me again with the above breakfast: Poached eggs on potato cakes with spinach. He took the leftover mashed potatoes from our second day of Thanksgiving and mixed them with the last of our summer chives and fried them into cakes. He topped it with a pseudo-Hollandaise sauce made with mayo, lemon and hot sauce.
Here is another picture with his pajama pants to prove that we are indeed at home and not at a restaurant:
Poached Eggs, Potato Cakes, Spinach, and Tim's Plaid Pjs.
We lazed around most of the day, but I did manage to build my Pack n Play bassinet that I got at my baby shower last week.
Did I mention how fortunate I am? Three of my new friends here in this tiny Colorado town threw me a baby shower with at least twenty people (about fifteen people more than I would have had if I had had my shower in Denver where I lived for three years), many of whom I had not met yet. What a wonderful way to be welcomed into a new town.
While I was building the Pack n Play, my husband was industriously calling our favorite deli back in Denver and obtaining their recipe for Whoopie Pies, which I’ll post about tomorrow.
Check me out! So hard to believe that I have another month to go and that it will get even bigger!
My 34 weeks pregnant belly.
Last night we decided to experiment with using brown rice in a risotto instead of Arborio. We should have read Mark Bittman’s hint that you should par-boil the brown rice first before subbing it in a paella or risotto. It took FOREVER! But it was worth it. I did all the prep and putting it together – yay! Back in the kitchen again!
Brown Rice Risotto with Mushrooms and Greens
- 1 cup brown rice
- one package baby bella mushrooms
- one small onion
- mixed greens: kale, cabbage, chard….
- grated fresh Parm
- low sodium organic veggie broth – 1.5-2 boxes
I sauteed onions and baby bella mushrooms in olive oil and cooked some delicious mixed greens from the last farmer’s market of the year separately – to add at the end. We then added the brown rice to the veggies, and sauteed until translucent, before beginning to add the low sodium veggie broth. I stirred and added broth for as long as I could stand it. I was trying to cook dinner for my tired hubby who has worked nearly 19 days without a day off, but being seven months pregnant, I had to get off my feet after 45 minutes or so and then he took over till the end. When the rice was ready, we added the greens and grated Parm. It was delicious. I loved the chard the best.
Then for breakfast this morning, Tim made a Spanish Tortilla with farmer’s market potatoes, onion, mushrooms, and a very mild poblano pepper. We served it with the last tomatoes of the year marinated in EVOO, salt and pepper. The juice and oil from the tomatoes was a perfect sauce. He plans to eat it the rest of the week on the way to work.
I’ve been reading a lot lately – and neglecting my blog. I’ve just finished The Mother Dance: How Children Change Your Life, as well as So Sexy, So Soon: The New Sexualized Childhood and What Parents Can Do to Protect Their Kids. Motherhood is a new topic of interest to me, as I am now seven months pregnant! And sexualization of women in the media is a topic that has been bothering me for a long time, but I haven’t found book that addressed my exact concerns until recently. I’ll come back to the motherhood theme in future posts, because I’ve got a lot of ground to cover on the sexualization subject.
Previous books I’ve read, such as Promiscuities and Dilemmas of Desire, were on female teen sexuality and double standards, often focusing on the dangers girls face in a culture that expects boys to “be boys” and girls to “say no.” A cultural pattern that assumes it’s normal for boys to have sex on their minds 24/7, and that girls themselves do not have desires, but must bear the sole responsibility for keeping sex from happening too soon. Read: girls have the sole responsibility for defending their all important virginity from being defiled. For, as we all know, a slutty girl is a bad thing, but there is no such thing as a slutty boy. Not to mention the new cultural phenomena of of girls performing fellatio on boys at “rainbow parties,” etc, which you’ve probably heard about on Oprah. In this new cultural pattern, girls are emulating the raunch culture of Girls Gone Wild and “performing” sex acts at parties. Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture was about this raunch culture and the exaltation of sexiness above all other qualities and the emulation sex professionals as a source of “girl power.”
These books were informative, and gave me some insight into why Girls Gone Wild commercials made me so sick to my stomach, but they didn’t offer any solutions and they were missing an important piece that I just couldn’t put my finger on.
It turns out that the missing piece is media and advertising, and the realization that they don’t just affect teens and college women, but also girls and boys starting as young as preschool!
At this point, I’m going to advise you take a deep breath before going on, because it’s a big, and disturbing topic. The book begins with many scary stories about girls as young as four years old crying because they are not skinny and sexy and feel they must go on a diet, the majority of elementary school boys encountering pornography on the Internet, and several elementary school kids in Boston being suspended for playing “the rape game” on the school bus. It talks about gender polarization in advertising that has resulted from corporate research proving that you can hook little girls into being consumers at a young age by teaching them to be sexy at all costs, while selling violence to boys. There is a phenomenon called age compression in which girls are not only getting their periods earlier, but quitting play with dolls at much younger ages, and having fits of pre-adolescent rebellion in Kindergarten!
And the worst part – which I had unconsciously realized every time I turned on the radio and was appalled by the explicit sexual lyrics on rap songs, or even pop songs, in the middle of the afternoon! - is that the media which surrounds us doesn’t just affect its “intended” audience of teens and adults, but children are exposed to more of it than we can even begin to control on a daily basis.
See?! I told you it was disturbing, and many of you would probably rather not think about it for the rest of your lives. But, while it’s terrifying and overwhelming it’s extremely important to face it, because there are things that we can to to combat it.
The book does an excellent job of giving strategies for building closer bonds with your children at whatever age they are, in which you can foster a policy of open communication with them about these media images and how they feel affected by them. It gives advice for raising media-literate children, who by questioning the media, will not be such slaves to it. And finally, it gives a multitude of resources for coalitions that you can get involved in to make changes in media portrayals of girls and to the advertising directed at children in general.
Phew!!!! I’ve said quite a mouthful, and it’s only the tip of the iceberg. I expect my blog is going to be high-jacked by this subject for quite some time. I’ll try to break it up with pics of the delicious dinners my husband has been making!
Meanwhile, here are just a few of the websites you can explore to get involved in fighting the effects of corporate advertising on children:
Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood
Center for a New American Dream
Teachers Resisting Unhealthy Children’s Entertainment
Action Coalition for Media Education (ACME)
Alliance for a Media Literate America (AMLA)
Center for Media Literacy
Center on Media and Child Health
Common Sense Media
Media Education Foundation
Mind on the Media
