The Tiffin Tin

Lucky me (and I do mean that). I’m going to Gualala with one of the Tiffin Twins. It’s his sixth grade class field trip. As far as I know, we are not scheduled to get there in a rusty old pickup, but this picture evokes journeys for me, so there you have it.

The Gualala River is beautiful, and it is threatened by all kinds of modern forces. That’s why they’re going. To find out more about that and what can be done about it.

I’ll be away until October 7. I have a beautiful new camera, by the way, and on my return will be posting lots of food pictures.

Eat delicious lunches while I’m gone, okay?

And, lest you think I haven’t left you with anything of note to do while I’m gone, go and check out Ed Emberley’s October activities. They look like fun.

Or sign up for handy tips about how to live your life well, in small ways, at ideal bite.

(from left to right:  whole wheat toast with homemade raspberry jam, butter; whole wheat toast plain with an obscene amount of butter; whole wheat toast with an embarrassing amount of honey:  I had no idea how much until after I posted the picture, and by then it was too late.) 

I’m having a difficult time — I’ll just admit it — figuring out how to get whole wheat bread to work in our house. Most whole wheat breads are, at least in my sons’ eyes, way too heavy, have too many seeds and look all wrong. But, like the juice reduction program I recently managed to institute, it’s important to all of us to enjoy and eat whole grains. My boys eat a lot of sandwiches. I’d rather they didn’t always eat them on white bread or baguette.

I’ve been keeping my eyes open for breads and bread recipes that don’t rely on too many seedy things, and yet aren’t white bread, dressed up as whole wheat with a teensy amount of wheat germ, sugar and raisins. Although Berkeley is home to many wonderful bakeries, so far I haven’t found one that makes a nice whole wheat bread — one the Tiffin Boys will eat, anyway.

This afternoon, I made two loves of bread from the encyclopedia of vegetarian cooking, Deborah Madison’s Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone. This book is huge, has a bunch of award stickers on the cover, and yet the whole wheat bread recipe is elegantly simple.

It’s also a recipe you can make wrong, and it will still turn out. How do I know that? Because I failed to follow the very clear directions. I didn’t add the flour to the sponge, but instead added it when I got around to the second step, the one where you add the rest of the flour to the dough and knead it. Despite this error, which occurred because I was nervous and excited (yeast does this to me), the bread was fine. Tiniest Tiffin ate a lot of it. Could be that any warm wheat product, slathered with enough sweet will taste okay. Still, he did give me a high five after he finished it. And then he ate mine.

Here’s what you do (not, by the way, what I did — omitting the flour in step one! Don’t you do that.)

First you make a sponge, which is basically just a mixture of the following

• 2 1/4 cups warm water
• 1 scant tablespoon (one envelope) active dry yeast
• 1/4 cup unsulfured molasses
• 2/3 cup nonfat dry milk or dried buttermik
• 1/2 cup gluten flour
• 2 cups whole wheat flour

You stir all that together, until it’s smooth and then you cover the bowl with a damp cloth and put it someplace warm for an hour (after an hour it should be twice its size and foamy on top).

Then, you stir the sponge down. Next, add 1/3 cup vegetable oil, 2 1/2 teaspoons of salt and 3 1/2 cups of whole wheat flour about 1/2 a cup at a time. You’ll know you’ve got enough flour when you produce what Madison calls “a shaggy, heavy dough.”

Knead this shaggy heavy dough for about 3 to 5 minutes. Add more flour if the dough will take it, a few tablespoons at a time. (I’ll admit here, that I added a LOT of flour, but that’s because I hadn’t added it in the beginning. The dough took it, let us be clear.)

Put the dough in an oiled bowl, roll it around, then cover it and set it in a warm place to rise (it will double in bulk). About 1 1/2 hours shoudl do it.

Deflate the dough, form it into loaves and place them seam side down in two greased 4 1/2 by 8 1/2 bread pans.

Cover again, and set aside until the dough rises to the edge of the pans. This should take about 45 minutes. During the last fifteen minutes, preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Bake until browned — 45 to 50 minutes. You’re supposed to let it cool completely before you slice it. We did not do that. It was okay. Given all the other directions I failed to follow, this seemed like the least of my problems.

I’ll make this again, and follow the directions. If I do, I’m pretty sure it will be really great, rather than simply decent.  I’ll report back if and when that turns out to be the case.

Making lunch for several people at once can be a little like that famous scene from I Love Lucy: the one where Lucy and Ethel get a job making candy, and then Lucy gets distracted, and suddenly everything speeds up and there’s candy everywhere and Lucy and Ethel are in big, big trouble. In our version, we all wake up fifteen minutes later than we should, the lunchboxes are still in the hall, full of the slightly disreputable leavings from the day before, and there’s no bread anywhere to be found, and the parents become undignified and frantic and the children end up eating dry cereal for breakfast. That sort of thing.

After more mornings of this than I care to admit (the adults in our family have been making school lunches since 1998), I’ ve only recently come to some techniques for keeping the line moving, and the lunch-preparer sane. I offer them to you hoping you will not have to spend eight years learning the hard way as I did. These tips are helpful no matter how many children you have. Something for Everyone: that’s the Tiffin way.

• Advance preparation is absolutely key. Before you go to bed, each lunchbox should be cleaned out, and — this is a key point — filled with the containers you’re going to use the next day, if you are the sort who uses containers. (I am.) The water bottle should not be under the couch. It should be in the lunchbox. This task is an ideal one for children to perform when they get home from school or after care. It is a terrific way to teach them to think ahead, and prepare ahead.
• Try to get up before your children. Or, if you are hoping to have some help with the lunches (and you should) appoint one child to be your early morning helper. They will enjoy being up alone with you. I know getting up early is incredibly difficult sometimes, especially when you have little ones who like to sleep in your bed and hate to let you go, but it’s an important habit to adopt. You don’t have to be June Cleaver, dressed to the nines for breakfast, but it’s good to have YOUR things ready before the madness that is breakfast begins. That means you should be showered, in clean enough clothes, and your own tea or coffee should be piping hot in a nice cup just for you. Perhaps your helper would like a cup of hot chocolate. There is no reason why the making of lunches cannot be a small morning indulgence. One in which you have the house to yourself or share it with one special child.
• Lay everything out before you start. Think about what you’re making and get all of it out of the refrigerator and cupboard. The rhythm of the assembly line works best when you don’t have to interrupt yourself to go rooting around the fridge for cheddar cheese.
• Have a sink of warm, soapy water at the ready. When you finish using a utensil, put it in the sink. Even if you don’t have time to do dishes, it’s much nicer to come home to things that are soaking, than things spread everywhere.
• Do one item at a time. Prepare all the protein items and put them in the boxes (sandwich, soup, etc.). Then the fruit and/or veg items. Put in the calcium or yogurt, or whatever other thing you give your children. You should be sure that the lunch is balanced. (I’ll be writing about that tomorrow.) Add cold packs to each lunch, if needed. A napkin. And a utensil.
• Put things you’re done with away, as you finish using them. It’s less confusing to have fewer open containers of mayo and mustard on the counter when you’re working. Plus, as you put things away, you have a sense that you’re nearing completion.
• When you’re finished with the food, tuck in one small thing (if you have time) that your child doesn’t expect. A chocolate kiss. A note. A small toy. A joke. A riddle. A trading card.

I hope this makes the morning less of a madhouse. This entire process takes a while to refine. Some things I’ve suggested will strike you as madness. Mix and match. You are the parent and you get to decide how things are going to be!

My youngest son (he who is sometimes referred to as Tiniest Tiffin) goes to a school that has very low test scores and the highest number of children eligible for free lunch in our district.   It also has great teachers, a fine principal, a nice physical plant and a very sweet librarian.  I’m glad he’s there (and not just because of the awesome lunches they serve in the cafeteria.)  The low test scores may be attributable to the fact that, for many of the children, English is not their native language.  Can you imagine trying to take a test in German after a year of high school German?

But they all speak garden.  Our school’s greatest treasure (besides the fact that there’s a grassy field where you can play soccer) is Farmer Ben.  He’s a young guy, just had a baby, and went to the school when he was a kid.  He wears overalls, and has pink cheeks.  He’s a little bit strict, but he likes kids, you can just tell.  He knows all their names and plays a mean game of kickball.  He’s going to be a wonderful father.  He took a four month leave of absence to be with his daughter.  And he left another good guy, Farmer Jasper, in charge while he’s out, a guy who can hold his own on the soccer and kickball fields. 

The sunflowers are huge, there’s a lot of zucchini and the corn’s high.  It’s harvest time at school.  The children may not always know how to answer the questions on standardized tests.  But they are, for at least the hour they’re in the garden, in a place where they’re connected to the earth, each other, and this place.  I’m grateful for that today. 

Why is it that one child likes his lunch hot, and another needs a cold pack with everything? It’s one of the mysteries of human diversity. Suffice it to say that one of the Tiffin Twins is a hot food guy. So I send him to work outfitted like a man who’s working construction on a chilly day. With rib-sticking hot food in a thermos we both like. (16 ounces, good for a middle schooler, with very cool little grippy things on the lid so it’s easy to open). And a bottle of water.

This lunch is stir fry: pork, brown rice, green beans. Protein, whole grains and veggies. Water. The perfect lunch for a hot food guy.  He thought so too.

You’ll notice there’s no picture today. I’m not slacking off, I’ve just temporarily lost my camera. The one that has the pictures of the great joke that went into one of the Tiffin Twins’ lunches. (Check lunchbox notes. The joke’s there under the September 19 entry.) And pictures of this morning’s fruit on a stick.

I thought this idea was a little ridiculous, but I’m here to tell you that when you’re seven years old and you get three cocktail toothpicks with cantelope balls, watermelon balls and red grapes threaded on them, you are a happy man. So do try fruit on a stick. It’s sort of fun and not difficult. You need: three kinds of fruit, a melon baller and some toothpicks. The long-ish kind with the frilly ends are fun. A normal toothpick will also do. Stick the fruit on the toothpick and pack it all in a tupperware or other flat box. If you’re feeling like being a bit wild, put some marshmallows on too.

Other matters? Well, just one actually. Juice. Two of my boys are huge juice drinkers. And although juice does give you some vitamin C and possibly calcium (when it’s calcium- enriched anyway), it also costs a lot of calories for those benefits, benefits you could better get from a piece of fruit and some yogurt or milk (if you drink milk, that is). And so, knowing we’ve gotten into the habit of thinking of juice as the beverage you drink when you’re thirsty, I’ve been trying to get the boys to see it as a once a day, or once in a while drink. I don’t want them to think juice is evil. I just don’t want them to think it’s water.

Here’s how I went about changing this habit. First, over the summer, I started filling glass containers with water and putting them in the refrigerator. Four, to be exact. I chose glass because things seem to get colder in glass. And because it looks nicer. And because it doesn’t pick up weird smells after a while. Four containers might seem like a lot of water, but it’s not when it’s all you drink.

Throughout the summer, when the boys were hot and asked for juice, I’d say something vague like, “There’s no juice in there, but I think there’s ice cold water.” It was important not to make a big deal out of this. In this case, I think I might have pointed out only once or twice that water’s a great thing to drink and that juice is more a once a day kind of thing. And they would pour themselves a glass of water and really not say much more.

Gradually, juice has disappeared. Now, on the table at dinner, we have ice water, milk and wine. And they don’t seem to notice. For a while, one of the boys would ask for his glass of juice a day, but then he stopped after a few weeks, and a few times of me saying vaguely, I don’t think we’ve got any in the fridge.

Here are three things that make me think juice is no longer the drink of choice around here (1) I found a container of juice in the fridge and realized it had been in there for over a week. No one was drinking it. (2) Yesterday at dinner, there were orange slices on the table. One of the boys said, “can I have some orange juice,” and then corrected himself, “I mean orange slices.” It wasn’t for our benefit, or even conscious. He likes orange slices better than orange juice. (3) Another boy said, when I asked him if there’s juice available in the cafeteria at lunch if he’s thirsty (in fact, there is — they’re generous about that), “Oh, just pack me some water. Or if you forget, I use the water fountain.)

How about that? It’s a small thing, but it’s actually a big deal, to change one habit. I come away from this experience believe you can indeed help someone change a habit, if you do it one at a time, without judgment, and casually if you can, with a neutral explanation about why you’re doing it. You offer a pleasant alternative to the habit and then you persist.

What are we tackling next? Having dessert every night after dinner.

Purple grapes, vanilla yogurt with strawberries, bread sticks and turkey. Water.

Okay. First thing I want to say is — this is not the most attractive lunch I’ve ever put together. It’s delicious, but do you really want your lunch to have a trading card in it called “Rampant Growth”? One of the Tiffin Twins chose this to give to Tiniest Tiffin. They were both quite pleased with this transaction. I kept thinking about how unappetizing it was, although it’s certainly a good description of what children do.  They grow.  Rampantly.

There’s a lesson here: children don’t have the same antenna about some things as we. Boys like trading cards. They like opening their lunch boxes and seeing them. It makes them happy. Their friends offer to give them junk food in exchange. (Tiniest Tiffin, remarkably, did not trade his card for doritos. He thought his brother might be mad if he did that. Whatever his motives, I’m glad he kept the card.)

And also this lunch makes me think about how it’s not good to have too much white food in your lunch. I put some strawberries into the vanilla yogurt. But the turkey and bread sticks were, well, white. No way around that. The grapes are purple, so it wasn’t an unmitigated white-out. Tomorrow, it’s time to put that turkey in a baguette, where it more properly belongs.

Here’s a simple Sunday link, with thanks again to the Tiffin Tin’s research editor (my sister Sue), who found this great site for melamine lunchbox tiffin tins.

Today I conducted — entirely by accident — a side by side comparison of the lunch Tiniest Tiffin brought from home and the lunch he could have had at the cafeteria at school under the Berkeley School Lunch Initiative. Tiniest Tiffin brought one of those end of the week lunches: the end of the week’s salami tucked into the rest of the Semifreddi baguette we bought yesterday. He had the last of the Straus Family Creamery nonfat vanilla yogurt and an organic valencia orange. And he had a capri sun sport drink, which is lower in sugar and calories than other drinks, but still not water. I’m getting there.

I dropped by the cafeteria, curious to see how things are going there. When I came in, his class was stuffed around one of those picnic style lunch tables. I wonder why they don’t spread out: the tables around them weren’t full. The adult supervision consisted of a loose band of grown-ups who seemed to be happy letting the children fend for themselves, which they seemed to be doing very nicely.

Tiniest Tiffin seemed to like what he was eating, particularly since it included a weird green finger puppet that my husband said looked like the Mold that Ate the School Lunch. (You can see it peering over the yogurt above.) I was advised not to include it in the lunch, but I did anyway. We know what mold looks like around here, and it does not yet seem to feature eyes and a mouth.

I was sort of smug about that lunch, but that ended when I got a look at what everyone else had from the Lunch Initiative. It looked and smelled so… well… plausible. Like food you’d buy for your own lunch, except in a portion size that’s actually reasonable. It’s shocking really how much food they give you when you eat lunch out. I bought one, dear reader. It was $4 and included a drink (milk, but organic milk). Plus, you get to go to the salad bar and it’s a nicer salad bar than the one in the building where I work. I was so happy with this lunch that I forgot to take a picture until I was well into the meal and had messed up the perfection of its exterior. Here it is:

This is not a lovely picture. The food is not beautifully presented. It’s hard to know how they could do a lot better though. It was hot, fresh and not slopped around. You’ll notice the salad (those little tomatoes were really, really good), in addition to the broccoli and cauliflower. Here’s something of note: the veggies were not overcooked, tasted only of themselves and the sauce from the black beans just made them even better. The chicken enchilada was really good. It was not terribly cheesy and I have the feeling that its caloric impact was pretty low, not something you can say about the chicken enchilada you might buy at work. The black beans were remarkable, with a lot of flavor.

I cannot say enough about the portion size. There was not too much. And the salad bar is really great, with all kinds of vegetable offerings. And it’s easy to use.

I opened my package and began eating. I looked up and noticed that several children who’d been reluctant to try it had opened theirs too. They seemed to like it.  I’d give today’s school lunch initiative an A.

As for Tiniest Tiffin’s home lunch: well, that capri sun sport drink took a few points off. But the green mold man brought them back up. It gets an A too.

This weekend, I’m in pursuit of some kind of whole grain thing that tastes good. Tune in tomorrow for an update.

Lunch for the Tiffin Twin with the big lunchbox. (It was pizza day for the other Tiffin Twin.) Much like yesterday, except the bread’s from Semifreddi and the fruit is the most melon-y cantelope I’ve ever tasted. It’s from the Berkeley Bowl, which is a great place to buy produce, particularly if you are the determined sort and willing to cruise around for a parking spot. The sandwich features the very last of the Niman Ranch salami. Next week’s protein is going to be much leaner: turkey I think. And then more great Straus Family Creamery vanilla nonfat yogurt and the last of the organic blueberries.

This Tiffin Twin also wrote today’s lunchbox note. It went to Tiniest Tiffin, who does not always like his brothers or treat them well, but who knows that when the chips are down, his brothers will be there for him.

Here’s what one of the Tiffin Twins requested today: Sandwich (Niman salami on Acme sourdough), organic purple grapes, organic blueberries, Straus Family Creamery Vanilla non fat yogurt (as good as full fat, and a lovely flavor, like the maple) with a few blueberries on top.  So, we’ve got protein (not so lean, but not too bad), grains (have to check and see if Acme sourdough is at all fiber-rich), lots of fruit and good ones (grapes and blueberries), and dairy (yogurt,yum).  For breakfast, he had half an egg and a piece of Acme sourdough toasted with raspberry jam I made a while back.  (protein, and a bit of sugar and butter, plus the grain).  And half a glass of milk (totally new for him.  doesn’t like milk.  Tried it because Tiniest Tiffin does like milk).

I forgot:  for lunch, he’s drinking water.  The juice has been almost forgotten in our house!  Yay.

He loves fruit, not so crazy about vegetables. (Carrots are pretty much it for him, so I’ll put them out for a snack on the return home.)

Still thinking about whole grains. I’m considering making something from the Renegade Lunch Lady’s new book.

Grilled chicken (brined first in 1/2 cup kosher salt for each 2 pounds of chicken), chocolate chip cookie, grapes, yogurt with raspberries. (I just realized I forgot — again — to put in a spoon. Poor thing.)

This is a fine lunch. It contains not a single whole grain, however. (I read yesterday that there should be something like 4-5 servings of whole grains a day.)  Today, I think I’ll make something nice with whole wheat flour, something like banana bread or cinammon bread. I’ll report back tomorrow.

And a note on the Berkeley School Lunch Initiative: This morning we looked at the menu, because we were running late and wanted not to make lunch for Tiniest Tiffin. Hmm. Baked teriyaki fish. I don’t know about you, but that didn’t sound appetizing. I think it might be delicious. Still, something more needs to be done here: how you describe something matters.

Tiniest Tiffin did, however, have breakfast at school. I noticed they’ve begun to include nice little paper trays with each breakfast. This is a fine, fine improvement. One class, a class with enterprising parents (kindergarten of course) had already set the food up before the children arrived. The table looked like a table you’d want to sit at. The muffins were nice. They had fruit in them. They were whole grain and delicious. (Every child who needed to eat breakfast ate one.) The orange juice was frozen still, and the children made slushies out of them. The juice carton was smaller than the milk carton, which is exactly as it should be.

The teacher saved the yogurts and fruit for a snack later in the morning. Smart woman. While not every child needs to eat breakfast at school (some eat at home), they could all use a snack at around 10:30 or 11:00 and very few of them bring a snack along.

Actually, it’s one of the Tiffin Twins who really likes a good thermos. He’s the hot food child. And although he insists on taking his lunch in a brown paper bag (in this case, a nice one with a handle from Peet’s Coffee, our favorite local coffee roaster), he puts a very fine thermos inside. Today, all the pictures of his lunch made it look so terribly unappealing, that I’m contenting myself with the outsides of things.
Like his lunch bag.

And his new thermos. It’s a 16 ounce thermos and it worked beautifully today. Inside went some nice rice and pinto beans made over the weekend. And when he opened it at lunch? The food was still wonderfully hot.

Cantelope, banana whole wheat mini-muffin, Niman Ranch salami, egg (and salt), Straus Family Creamery maple yogurt with raspberries, trail mix (peanuts, raisins, a few m&ms), cheddar cheese.

This lunch looks like a lot. It’s for a hungry, growing 11 year old boy. Turns out, it was enough food for him, and because I forgot to put a spoon in, he didn’t eat the yogurt.

I’ve been reading a lot of about school lunches. Next week’s tiffin tin will discuss a little bit about what I’ve been reading.

Middle school lunch for the Tiffin Twins has been a little tricky this week because we only have one lunchbox, the one they used all last year to carry their lunch in. It’s huge, and they had an elaborate system for deciding who’d carry it to school and who’d carry it out to lunch and who’d carry it home. Now, they’re going to different middle schools and so, for the first time in their lives, they won’t be eating lunch in the same room. One of the Tiffin Twins kept the massive lunchbox. The other one asked for a paper bag.

What I’ve pictured above went into the very big Tiffin Twin lunchbox, the one that’s now used by a single twin. Note: that is way, way too much salami. I knew it as I was cutting it up, but I didn’t take it out. He’d asked for that much and I was curious: would he actually eat it? (the answer? Yes. Tomorrow, not so much of that kind of thing.) On the menu: Niman Ranch salami (made without nitrates or other yucky stuff), Acme sourdough baguette, cheddar cheese, Straus Family Creamery nonfat maple yogurt, amazing green grapes that taste like nothing I’ve ever had before, more grape-y than anything, a few blueberries, a hard boiled egg (for snack) and salt in a container too large for salt, but the best i could do.

Closed, the containers look like this:

And the note? Tiniest Tiffin hasn’t been getting along with one of his older brothers all that well. I asked him to think of one nice thing his brother has done for him and write it down. His first response was, I like my brother because he taught me all the bad words. I asked him to try again. This is what he came up with. (Yesterday, his brother actually got up and made him a bagel for a snack, after one request on my part and he did it with good humor.)

I think you can get the idea. Tiniest Tiffin got a little mixed up trying to write I like you because…. but he added that dollar of his own volition. It was his way of making it count.