Every night we go through the suggestions in the suggestion box, which are a combination of things campers legitimately want, and things staff think will be funny to have everyone hear. The other night I got a legitimate one from a camper that said “more soup,” which was sweet. Then after the chicken-potato-spinach disaster of a meal on pizza eve (I’m making that a thing, pizza eve = the lunch before you have pizza for dinner) we got one that said “less picky campers” signed “mashed potatoes.”
It’s hard not to take it personally when people reject the food that I work really hard to produce, but I know that if you don’t like potatoes, for example, you’re not going to care how much effort went into making them. So in response to the trends of picky-ness, we’ve started betting on how many of the campers will eat certain things. This morning I made blueberry muffins, and we bet on how many of them would pick out the blueberries. Most people said one or two — nope! SEVEN of them picked them out. 7/30?
The muffins looked delicious enough to me. I used the Enchanted Broccoli Forrest recipe again. I like the part where you melt the honey and butter together.
The night before last I was in the kitchen at night making lots of things with peanut butter in them. Don’t believe me?
Cleaning out jars of peanut butter to recycle is a little bit annoying, I do have to say. I love recycling though. The first thing I made was peanut sauce for noodles (which only 1/2 of the campers even tried). I took the leftover sauce and leftover noodles and put them together with some sauteed mushrooms. Yum.
Campers are dumb, because that is delicious. The other thing I used peanut butter for was peanut butter banana chocolate butterscotch cookies. Previous to adding the chocolate chips and the butterscotch, these were vegan, because they have like zero ingredients.
Plus the bananas and maybe a little sugar (half the peanut butter was skippy, plus bananas are pretty sweet), this is the entire dough. Here, I’ll give you the recipe:
Peanut Butter Banana Cookies (adapted from Joy the Baker’s flourless peanut butter cookies):
ingredients:
1 cup peanut butter (use natural, it will taste more like peanut butter)
1 tsp baking soda
1 banana
brown sugar to taste — I used maybe a tablespoon, but there was a lot of sugar in the peanut butter already.
optional: chocolate chips and butterscotch chips, less than a bag of each
1) Mash the banana
2) Stir the baking soda in the peanut butter
3) Add the banana to the peanut butter mix, then add about a tablespoon of brown sugar, depending on the kind of peanut butter you are using. At the most, you’ll want a quarter or half a cup.
4) If using, add the chocolate/butterscotch chips.
5) Bake at 375 for about 10-15 minutes. It took mine longer because my oven is doing this dumb thing where it refuses to turn on right away, so it’s never quite up to temperature. Grrr.
They looked delicious in the end.
Who would have ever thought there were basically no ingredients?
For lunch we made quesadillas. Last night was taco night, and I accidentally gave away too many of the tortillas (because I was afraid of running out of taco shells, which did not happen at all — perhaps due to the availability of tortillas), so I did some complicated math and figured out that each person could have 2/3 of a tortilla to start, and then everything would work out just fine — and it did. When we make the “right amount” of quesadillas, there are always tons leftover, so this was better, especially with picky eaters and kids with tiny bodies who simply don’t eat very much. I tried making some tortillas, but that was not really working out for me at all because a) I couldn’t get them to be thin enough, no matter how much I rolled them, and b) it was taking forever. I made 6 and called it quits.
But look! These look like real quesadillas! We also made a delicious bean salad — just beans, grilled corn, cilantro, onion, green pepper, white vinegar, olive oil, salt, and pepper.
Grilling corn was really really fun.
For dinner we’re making the Enchanted Broccoli Forrest, awwwwwww.
All Around The Larder 