Your children loved...

... .....Black Bean Felafels... .....

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Ingredients:

2 cups black beans, drained and rinsed
500 g ground beef
1 t chili powder
1 t oregano
2 cloves garlic
1 egg
3 t lime juice

(In my recipes, 't' = teaspoon, and 'T' = tablespoon.)

Method:
Preheat oven to 425F.
Mash beans till smooth but chunky. (Don't ask me: this is what the recipe says. What it means is you'll see a greyish paste, but there will be lots of black bits in it.)
Add the rest of the ingredients and mix with your hands, then form into about 24 balls, 3 cm across.
Place on foil-lined sheet and bake 15 minutes.

Now, the full recipe calls for frying some vegetables (onions, peppers), chopping some fresh (avocado, tomato), and putting it all together in a half-pita with a cream sauce made of yoghurt and cilantro.

Which all sounds very yummy, but also sounded way beyond the coordination capacities of your average two- or three-year-old! I just gave them to the kids straight up, along with some niblet corn and cooked carrot sticks.

With ketchup for dipping, of course.

A milestone for a young man

He didn't appear in any of the last set of pictures, but he was there! Etienne lives across the street, and has agreed to help with our wading pool outings each week.

(Isn't he a handsome boy? And gentle, too.)
After our water time, it was time to get dressed again. As I wrestled children out of soggy clothes and into dry ones, I directed Milan and Owen to the teens for dry diapers. Etienne expressed consternation: turns out he had never changed a diaper!

Well then. Am I going to rescue him? Not on your life. This is a Learning Opportunity. I show him how to orient the thing, and leave him to it. Mwah-ha.

Rebekah, she of years of diaper experience, stepped alongside. "You hold their feet like this, and slip the diaper like that...

Pull this side down and draw the tab up..."

And ...

VICTORY!!!

Another diaper-experienced teen is now on the babysitting market.
(I take only a very small commission.)

Water babies

Rule #1 of Happy Outings: Make sure children are well-rested and well-fed before beginning. Here we have lunch while waiting for the pool to open.

And wait, and wait, and waaaaaaaait... (Next time, we'll wait at least another half-hour before arriving.) The kids were very patient. Happily, there was a lot to watch!

Astrid tries her hand -- or feet -- at surfing.

The pool's two watering cans were such a hit that I bought three from the dollar store on Saturday, for next week.

This is about as up close and personal with the water as Owen ever got, but I think that with no pressure and lots of exposure, he'll be crawling about on his tummy before the end of summer!

Tim Horton's

This was, apparently, Astrid's first ever Timbit. She was not particularly impressed, and did not finish it. Next time, perhaps she and I will share a muffin: I'm not particularly fond of them, either!

Here's another child who's not struck on sweet things. Eliana would far rather have a piece of fruit than a cookie. (Why, I now ask myself, do I persist in corrupting their gustatory purity with Timbits? Bad, bad, bad...)

Josh, however, does like them. "If Eliana's not eating hers, can I have it??"

And this guy. Making sure all the crumbs get off his face and into his mouth...

Him, too. Nom.

(I accidentally uploaded the pictures in the 'small' format. If you want to see larger images, just click on the picture, and it will pop up quite a bit bigger.)

Your children loved...

Lentil Rice Cakes

Ingredients:
1 cup green lentils
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 tsp dried oregano
1/4 cup onion, finely chopped
2 cups cooked brown rice (I used a mix of white and brown)
3 egg whites (I used two whole eggs)
2 tbsp whole wheat flour
1/4 tsp Cajun seasoning


Method:

Put lentils, garlic, oregano and onion into a medium sized pot. Cover with water. Bring to a boil over med-high heat, and boil for 4 minutes. Cover and simmer for half an hour. Check about every 10 minutes, stirring occasionally. If water has reduced by too much, add about half a cup more. (You want the lentils to absorb the water, but you don't want to let the water reduce so much that the lentils on the bottom scorch.)

When lentils are cooked, let cool at least 10 minutes. Drain off any excess water.

In a large bowl, mix together rice, lentil mixture, eggs, flour and seasoning. Using your hands, form into 10 patties, about 10 cm in diameter. Set aside. (I put them in the fridge for a couple of hours. I also didn't find I got ten patties. More like six.)

Preheat frying pan on med-high heat for a minute. Add enough oil to prevent sticking, and let it heat another minute. Using a spatula, place patties into the pan. Give each side a good three minutes at least before turning. The patties are a little fragile at first, but firm up nicely as they cook. If you flip them too soon, though, they might crumble apart.

That's it! When my family ate these, I made a sauce from plain yoghurt and super-hot salsa. (The original recipe included a cilantro cream sauce recipe.) Your kids ate them broken into chunks and, for everyone except Astrid, who had hers plain, dipped in ketchup. (Kind of cheating, I know. We all know little kids would happily chow down on styrofoam if you let them dip it in ketchup.)

And chow down they did! Everyone ate their first helping with gusto, and most of them asked for seconds and even thirds.

(Recipe from the July/August edition of Clean Eating magazine.)

Three babies and a box

Again with the boxes! This one started out as a spaceship, but when the flaps became a nuisance and we cut them off, it wasn't long before we decided to attach them to the sides and make them wings. Now it's an airplane!

And of course, the wings can only be improved with a little chalk graffiti...

Container baby!

First it was a box... now it's a bucket.

Isn't that just the cutest damn thing you've ever seen???

A Box and Some Babies

Astrid discovered A Box!!!

And we all know that to babies (and toddlers), there are few playthings more satisfying than
A Box!!!

I know, it looks like Eliana is holding Milan there against his will, but really, she was in there first and he decided to plonk down on her lap. I think it's more a matter of her clutching him so as not to be flattened backwards.

Throw a box on the floor and stand back. Do I know how to show these kids a good time, or what?

Happy Canada Day!