Approximately Seven Quick Takes: Fretful Toddler Edition

1. The toddler is sleeping like a baby these days, which is to say: badly. Trouble going down for the night, trouble staying settled. I am the Putter-to-Bedder-in-Chief in my house, the Grand Poobah-rina of Wakeful Children, which means less leisure time in the evenings. This too shall pass, I know, but here's hoping it passes quickly. I am sprinting through this post so I can just call it a night if she wakes up unhappy.


2. I served the craziest dinner tonight but it worked out pretty well. Bearing-Erin linked to this recipe recently, and when we got kale and chard both in our veggie delivery today, I decided to give it a try. I thought, "What if I used it as a crepe filling, and put some leftover pumpkin in the crepes? That way if the kids hate the filling they can still have reasonably nutritious pancakes for dinner." I've been on a pumpkin tear lately, strewing muffins in my wake.


3. Pumpkin muffins: universal thumbs-up, especially with a sprinkle of chocolate chips. I use an adaptation of the muffin formula Amy Dacyczyn lays out in the Tightwad Gazette. Highly recommend getting it down pat so you never need another muffin recipe: beat two eggs and about 3/4 cup of buttermilk or clabbered milk or thinned-out yogurt. Add 2-4 tablespoons of oil or melted butter and a bit of vanilla, along with about 2/3 c. pumpkin puree. Mix well. In my version you don't need to mix dry ingredients in a separate bowl. On top of the wet ingredients dump 2 c. flour (go right ahead and sub in some flax meal, wheat germ, almond meal, etc., or use all whole grain flour -- whatever suits). On top of the flour sprinkle 1/2 t. salt and 1/2 t. lump-free baking soda (because lumps of baking soda in the finished product are so disgusting, like the anti-chocolate chip) along with spices to suit: ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, pinch of cloves, cardamom if you're feeling wild and crazy. [EDITED! Oops! This is a hazard of sprinting through recipe-writing! Also add a quarter-cup of Sucanat or the sweetener of your choice. Hope nobody tried to make these for Saturday breakfast.] Mix swiftly, emphasizing speed over lumplessness to avoid tough muffins. A handful of chocolate chips may make your crowds of muffin-eaters ooh and aah, like fireworks if fireworks were brown and melty. And edible. Not so much with the fireworks analogy, I guess. Anyway: bake in a preheated oven for 20 minutes at 400 degrees. Use this approach to make any muffin under the sun, adding moist things like banana to the wet ingredients, and dry ingredients like nuts on top of the flour.


4. Part of the reason I have been especially flexible about the flour component of that muffin recipe is that we've been having trouble with Indian meal moths. They are very sneaky little suckers. I am double-wrapping and freezing and wielding my mighty mighty fly swatter with vigor and determination, and they keep surprising me. I hadn't seen any adults in a few days, after killing one every other day for a while, but tonight I found that they'd moved in on the sesame seeds. How do they get into glass jars, I wonder? I imagine them with teeny-tiny lepidopterous tunnel-boring machines.


5. So dinner worked out better than you might expect a dinner of pumpkin crepes with coconut kale filling to work out. Everybody whose age is measured in double digits ate it contentedly, and Stella nibbled happily from her bowl. The younger boys, though, weren't convinced about the kale and Pete hated the crepes too. He clung to my knees after dinner. "Please, Mama," he pleaded, "don't make me new things for dinner. Just make me old things. Like quesadillas."


6. What do you do when your kids hate what's for dinner? Our policy used to be that a boy could go quietly and get himself a slice of whole wheat bread with peanut butter. I'll tell you more about that another time -- wakeful toddler.


7. The end. More here.