In the kitchen {thoughts on cast iron, oranges, and smoothies}~

I love cooking with cast iron.  For one thing, it is safer than cooking with teflon coated pans.  And two, the pans are just so cute & rustic.  We are down to one teflon pan and I really want to toss it.  But anyone who has cooked on cast iron knows that it can be a chore to maintain so that the surface remains stick proof.   I have yet to toss that one pan that cooks pancakes and eggs so well. 

 

On the menu last night was potato soup and BLT sandwiches so I decided to pull out all of my cast iron pans and cook bacon in them.  Yes, there are three pans on my stove cooking bacon above!  My mom always tells me to cook something high fat in my cast iron to help season it. 

During clean up, the pans were washed again in hot water only.  (No soap.)  I always remember my mom drying her pan on a hot burner.  So I did that.  Then I rubbed them down with bacon grease again.  I even saved the bacon grease to season the pans in the future.  I’m hoping that the pans will become so well seasoned that I can go ahead and toss that teflon pan.  (Here is a great post on taking care of cast iron.  This is where I learned to rub the pans down with bacon grease again after cleaning.)

Now…on to oranges…

My kids love oranges.  I love oranges too but I’m not crazy about peeling them.  And then, sometimes the segments are hard for my younger kids to eat.  This week, I realized that if I sliced the  whole oranges into 1/2 – 3/4 inch slices and then sliced those in half that it was (a) easier for me to prepare and (b) easier for them to eat.  You probably all ready realized this but I was so excited to figure this out!  {smile}

And we can’t forget…smoothies…

We love smoothies around here.  Even my pickiest eater begs for smoothies.  He even knows that there is yogurt in it and he won’t touch yogurt with a ten foot pole!  I try to make smoothies a few times a week especially on days we have eggs.  I choose those days because my picky eater doesn’t care for eggs either.  {smile}

I don’t really measure for our smoothies but for a pitcher of smoothie that feeds 4 – 5 children I use:

• 1 – 1 and 1/2 cups of milk  (sometimes I add about 1/2 cup of kefir and reduce the milk by that much)
• 1 cup of vanilla yogurt
• 2 bananas
• 2 cups of frozen strawberries (much better with frozen)
• 2 – 3 tablespoons of sugar (can use honey, less sugar, or none at all)

Put all into the blender and blend away! 

Some of our other favorite fruit combinations are:

• strawberry and peach (use frozen fruit)
• banana and blueberry
• peach and blueberry

Do you have any favorite smoothie combinations?  I’d love to try some new smoothies!