The Tiffin Tin

I’m not a fan of tinted food. But for some reason I can’t fathom (maybe because it’s fun?) children love colored frosting. And so, last night, we made Halloween cupcakes.

Let me say something about home-made versus store-bought. For a very long time, and even now, I prefer baked goods made with real ingredients, put together by at least one person who’s going to eat what’s being made. It’s a quality control thing. Plus, it’s important for children to know what goes into their food, and it’s fun for them to create something out of things they’ve seen in the kitchen but had no idea could be transformed into something terribly delicious.

But sometimes, perhaps more often than I’ve ever been willing to admit, it’s just perfectly fine to use a cake mix and that frosting stuff that’s on the shelf next to the cake mixes. Especially if you’re going to make the white frosting turn orange with judicious (actually, we started off judicious but then became wild) applications of food coloring. So if you’re a person who’s a little uptight about making everything from scratch, I’d say ease up every once in a while and focus on what counts in the enterprise of making orange cupcakes — it’s the chocolate chip you put in the center of all that orange. And the frosting. And the speed with which you can put all this together on an evening when you’d really just like to be lying in bed reading a mystery.

This isn’t a recipe, exactly, because it’s as easy as falling out of bed when too many children have come in to cuddle on a Saturday morning:

• 1 cake mix, chosen by a child
• 1 can of white frosting, also chosen by the child
• a few chocolate chips (or any other dot-like candy), ditto the thing about letting the child choose
• food coloring.  Red and yellow to be exact.  Who said this couldn’t be an educational outing?  Red and yellow makes orange.  That’s today’s fun fact.

Make cake mix into cupcakes, add red and yellow food coloring to the white frosting until you get the shade of orange that says “Halloween” to you, and decorate as you’d like with dotlike candies. We tried to make jack-o-lanterns on the cupcakes, but didn’t like the look we got. So we went with the elegant single chocolate chip in the center of a sea of orange frosting.

Happy Halloween!

Yogurt’s a pretty good place to hide an arachnid.  Across from the red guy is ham on herb bread, accompanied by Valencia oranges (on a stick — an arrangement that’s becoming very popular with the second grade Tiffin child.  I keep wondering if maybe he’s using those toothpicks to swordfight.)  And did you know that those Nilla Wafers you ate when you were a child now come in a mini size?  For a long time, I didn’t put cookies or sweets in the boys’ lunches.  And then I realized, a little bit goes a long way. So now I do.  I’ve just got to start adding some veg.

Yes, I cut Tiniest Tiffin’s ham into the shape of a pumpkin, and below the pumpkin two owls.  And yes, I put that black owl in the box along with his fruit on a stick. I have no excuse for this behavior except that in a few years he’s not going to think this is cool anymore and then the only person whose lunch I’ll be able to use my cookie cutters on is, well, sadly, me. (Also in this lunch: applesauce and those crackers that have peanut butter in them.)

Tiffin Twin had this lunch:

Ham and raclette roll ups (one small slice of raclette goes a  long way), cantelope, Straus vanilla yogurt with sprinkles, the kind you use to decorate a child’s birthday cake with. And the last bit of apple crisp. A cheery lunch for a middleschooler.

Happy Halloween (tomorrow — what can you do with a gummi spider?)

It’s been what — six weeks? — since school started. And in that time, we’ve (well, they’ve) managed to lose pretty much all the lovely lock & lock containers I bought earlier in the school year. Plus two canvas bags. And all our water containers. When asked for an explanation, Tiniest Tiffin said this: “I don’t MEAN to lose the containers except when I forget them. ” (It’s like living with a miniature Yogi Berra; my favorite Yogi Berra-ism I’m not as dumb as I am.)

Huge digression. Sorry. Back to lunchboxes. I went to Koreana Plaza in Oakland, hoping not to spend too much money to replace the many lost lunch containers. They’re almost out of lock & lock boxes. They didn’t seem enthusiastic about ordering more. But then — in the grocery section — I spotted the most incredible divided boxes — about 9 by 9, with four individual containers and a nice-fitting lid. Amazingly, they were only $4.89. I snapped up the only two they had and felt quite good about my replacement lunch boxes. They look a little like lunchables, except of course, they’re anti-lunchables.

As a reward for my good shopping, I bought a very cute little Korean bento box, so small you imagine it’s used only by someone on a rigorous diet or a person so teensy they hardly ever have to eat. Me? I’ve got to make room for Thanksgiving, so I’ll be eating those teensy portions for a little while. And here’s what my boys are eating:

Tiffin Twin is having: 2 Korean cookies, the name of which I cannot decipher, but I can attest that they are delicious; smoked turkey baguette, cantaloupe, and nonfat vanilla yogurt, so rich you’d swear it was made with cream.

As for Tiniest Tiffin, he had something similar:

Except he likes his fruit on a stick, with cantelopes and those slightly scary cherries you can only have once in a blue moon (make that a red moon). He also doesn’t like his meat inside bread. And that closed container? Yogurt.

So, these two lunches, plus my own lunch for a teensy person, and a thermos of hot pasta (with delicious tomato sauce) for the other Tiffin Twin and we’re a family that has enough to last us to the end of the day. Here’s everything stacked and ready to go:

Eat up!

No, honey, I don’t love Straus Family Creamery maple yogurt, apple crisp I made last night from tart organic apples, a meltingly beautiful piece of ham on crunchy, but yielding bread, and the last, most lapidary grapes of the year, the kind that seem translucent and are so sweet you want to cry… no, I don’t love your lunch more than you. It’s supposed to go like this: You’re the one who loves your lunch. I’m the one who loves you.

I know you were trying to make me laugh, because I was a little grumpy this morning, discovering that you and your brothers had managed to lose the tops to almost every lock & lock container we own. And it did make me laugh.

But I also think you need a little more attention in the morning, and you need to be the one taking the picture of your beautiful lunch and you also need to be up a little earlier so you can do a little more to help make your lunch. And then maybe when the shutter closes on your lunch, you won’t see those beautiful grapes but how much I love you, more than I’ve ever loved anything, including those beautiful grapes.

Still, when you grow up, I hope you remember that apple crisp is an incredible thing to have hot or cold, and that you’ll make it for your children, who will surely know, as you do, that a parent loves a child with more passion and commitment than they love anything else in the world. And sometimes all they can do to show you that is make you apple crisp.

Deborah Madison’s Vegetarian Cooking For Everyone provides the inspiration for this wonderful apple crisp. (Okay, more than the inspiration — she is the goddess who gives us this recipe.)

Crisp Topping

6 tablespoons butter (cut it into chunks — it should be cold. If you’re concerned about the type of fat, you can also use canola oil, or can mix canola with a nut oil.)
3/4 cup brown sugar

2/3 cup flour (I used unbleached white flour — I think whole wheat would be good here too)

1/2 cup rolled oats (you can also use chopped nuts, something I’ll try with walnuts at some point when my kids like nuts more)

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon nutmeg

1 teaspoon cinnamon

Work together all these ingredients with your fingers, using the mixer with the paddle attachment or the food processor until the butter’s crumbly. You want a “coarse, crumbly mixture.”

And then you put it on top of fruit that you’ve prepared and placed in a shallow 8 x 10 baking dish you’ve lightly buttered. Cook at 375 degrees for about 25 minutes.

For apple crisp, you’ll want to do this to the fruit to get it ready for that lovely crisp topping:

2 1/2 pounds apples, peeled, cored, sliced thin. Toss with 1 teaspoon cinammon, 1 teaspoon lemon zest, 1 tablespoon lemon juice and 2 tablespoons sugar.

This morning’s New York Times, which ungenerously does not allow you access to this story without some kind of subscription after a few days, reports this morning on the imposition of good lunching principles on English schoolchildren in the north of England. The children, according to the article anyway, “consider French fries a major food group.” According to the writer, weaning them from this sort of food “is not easy. There is no nicotine patch equivalent for chicken nuggets.”

The trouble can be seen just in that paragraph. Nobody likes to be told their food choices suck. The moral superiority of good food proponents is the single biggest impediment to the whole healthy lunch movement. That, and the top down nature of it all.

If you want people to eat well, you have to seduce them. Good food looks and smells lovely. It is not abstract. It speaks to our sense of pleasure, not our sense of duty. And good food can never be imposed. If you choose something to eat , freely, you are far more likely to want to eat it. That’s why a child who goes to a garden they help tend and picks something they’ve seen growing is far more likely to try that thing and maybe enjoy it. A child who’s told something is good for them is going to run screaming away. And their mothers are going to keep feeding them french fry sandwiches.

Which is not to say that things won’t settle down. It’s possible to learn from mistakes. The article also describes a school where new meals were introduced more slowly, with more input from parents and children. Things went better there. But until parents and children feel like what goes in the lunchbox is their choice, and their pleasure, the meals served in school cafeterias won’t be going down particularly well and the meals that come from home in a brown bag aren’t going to be much different than they ever were.

Who knew indeed. A lovely Sunday at the Temescal farmer’s market inspired more tofu-buying. That’s what’s in the upper right hand corner of the lock-n-lock: strips of tofu marinated in a wonderful asian sauce with sesame seeds mixed in. Sun dried tomato pesto next to that — from the Afghani food stall. Below that, a few wheat crackers. Next to the crackers, a very nice ham, rolled around sharp cheddar cheese. A carambar (french caramel candy, brought back from Paris by one of the Tiffin Twins who, until this year, went to a French-speaking school) and cantelope with grapes to round it out. A very international lunch, come to think of it. Asia, Afghanistan, France, California, and Wisconsin (for the cheddar).

Tiniest Tiffin likes to have a lot of things in his lunch. Trouble was, some of the pesto sloshed around in the lock-n-lock and he didn’t like that so much. I don’t like my food touching either, at least not when it’s Afghani pesto mixed up with my ham, so I can understand.

I’d rather think of it as a “progress report.” No grades here at the Tiffin Tin. But, as usual, Chef Ann inspires me to want to do well in my lunchmaking. It’s going to be a busy week next week. And so, on Sunday evening, I’m getting myself geared up to try and put some decent things in those lunchboxes. I’m aiming for “good.”

Here’s a look at today’s lunch. It started with lovely bread from the farmer’s market on Sunday. Sliced very thin. To this was added Niman Ranch salami (it’s been several weeks since we last had salami, a favorite food for several of the Tiffin children and one we have only every so often.) One child is a veg eater, so into his divided box (made by lock -n-lock, a leak-proof Korean product) went olives and cucumbers. The other two children got strawberries and wonderful concord grapes from the farmer’s market. Here they are:

The above is a lunch for fruit eating children. (Two children got this lunch. Tiffin Tiniest and one of the Tiffin Twins. ) The child who only likes vegetables (in other words, he’s not crazy about fruit), got this version):

I put in a little Straus Family Creamery maple nonfat yogurt and everyone was happy. I also made myself a little breakfast while I was at it. The same maple nonfat yogurt, the same strawberries and some Newman’s Own organic blueberry cereal.

This was great to take to work. The tin fit in my computer bag, and it has such a stable bottom that it didn’t tip over. It fit perfectly in the fridge and stayed cold. And I even liked how it looked on my desk, which is where I put it when I was done. Tomorrow, I’ve got to make a something out of nothing lunch for the boys because I can’t for the life of me figure out what new thing I’m going to fix. But that’s what the morning’s for!

The Tiffin Tin Manifesto says that you should grocery shop with your children. When they buy the food with you, they learn to make good choices. But like all manifestos, it doesn’t tell you the whole truth — it’s a utopian vision, after all. So here’s the truth: sometimes it’s just plain hard to get through a grocery store without ending up on the verge of (or in the midst of) a breakdown.

Many things conspire against a good grocery shopping trip. First, all the truly nasty food is right at your child’s eye level. And it’s tricked out to lure them into whining for it. Sanctimonious people see your children behaving just a bit badly and you just know, from the look in their eyes, that they think your children are always this way. That all children are. You give in and allow things in the basket you didn’t actually want to buy. And toward the end, you find yourself buying comfort items just for you (ice cream and liquor and potato chips) and then consuming these things, late at night, hunched over that Martha Stewart you grabbed in desperation.

So, you’re thinking to yourself, who’d ever want to shop with children? Unless they have to? Here’s one answer: a person who gets up on a lovely Sunday morning, not desperate to fill the fridge, and goes to the local DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles here in California) where the parking lot has been transformed into a farmer’s market. You bring two of your three children, if you’re me. They each get, say, $5. And a mission. One boy is charged with buying two cucumbers and some grapes. Another is looking for broccoli and apples. While they’re doing this, you get yourself a little croissant for breakfast and some flowers. And then some strawberries, and oh, look at that bread, and how about the lettuce?

I am here to tell you that our farmer’s market expedition yesterday miraculously DID fill our fridge with almost everything we need for the week.  And it was a resounding success and went beyond the purchase of a few cucumbers, broccoli, apples and grapes. And that is because there were SAMPLES! Of fruit and veg, but also of really interesting prepared food. My boys tried (a) tofu; (b) pumpkin bread; (c) Afghan bread with spinach in it that you dip into a red sauce that’s so healthy it glows. They liked everything. Including the vegan tamales.

I was shocked by this because no one has ever even hinted at tofu being an acceptable food. And bread with spinach in it would be seen as scary. Unless it’s handed to you by a guy with really blue eyes and a lot of tattoos. (I’ll admit to being the one who noticed the blue eyes. The boys were fixated on the tattoos.) They also loved the idea of salad with flowers in it. Because it was just so terribly beautiful.

One boy decided that this was the best “store” he’d ever been to. They all want to go back and try more things. I’m seeing a fall of root vegetables and delicious bread with deep green vegetables. Lovely tamales. And tons of other things, things not yet dreamed of by any of us. All in the DMV parking lot.

I like packed lunches as much as my boys — maybe more than they do. But I don’t often enough make one for myself. Proof of that? It’s October, and I’m just getting around to thinking about my own lunches. That’s about to change.

This lovely tiffin tin was waiting for me when I walked in the door Friday afternoon. It’s gleaming silver and ready to be filled. Except today’s Saturday. So I packed a lunch to take with me to Tiniest Tiffin’s soccer game.

(edamame, a little cheese, some Acme pain au levain, and two kinds of organic grapes.)

This isn’t a huge tin and it’s best for food that’s good cool or at room temperature. It seems ideal for salads of all kinds (green salads, composed salads, lentil salad, that sort of thing). It’s an easy size to transport and to put in the fridge at work, or at home . I’ve got some smaller dishes to put in it to make compartments, for those days when I want to bring a composed salad, and don’t want (gasp) different foods to touch.

And one word on moms who work at home and moms who work outside the home: one thing we all need is a decent lunch, nicely prepared, with an eye to good health. Feed yourself the same way you’d feed any of your loved ones: with care, and thought, and love. If you give your children a chocolate kiss, give yourself one too.