The Tiffin Tin

There are few things more comforting than soft boiled eggs (in a proper egg cup — this one is from W’s mother, and there’s a space under the cup for your other egg), and toast soldiers.  And if there are flowers, well, all to the good. 

This is the beginning of the green smoothie.  It starts off a lovely yellow color and then it becomes green, right after you add the green stuff.  Here it is kale.

I know.  A little troubling.  In fact, however, they are really quite good.  I’ve been drinking these since the new year, and they are doing me some good — more energy, mostly.  The other claims I’ve seen, the ones about how your gray hair will revert to its original color, and your sex life will become, well, you know, really great, and  your mental state will show great improvement?  Nope.  I hasten to add that none of that stuff has been bothering me anyway.   

I drink one of these every day, and I put it in a stainless steel water bottle thing that I really, really like because it keeps things pretty cold and there’s no weird smell from this thing.  Ever.  

Should you wish to inject more energy into your day, the Green Smoothie basically consists of:

2 bananas

a cup or so of frozen fruit

three handfuls of greens (mostly, I use kale and spinach, favoring spinach because it is already washed from those bags you get at Trader Joe’s, and besides, it’s organic). 

the juice of one lemon

enough water to fill up the blender

I like to think that the whole thing is mine to drink, but one or two of the tiffin children generally  have some too.

 I know it’s February, but happy new year anyway!

Here’s the thing — this lunch, which is something I have all the time — comes with stuff I always forget to tell them to leave off, so I have to scrape it off to the side.  I don’t want to eat tons o’ sour cream and guac at noon. 

This salad — which is called the Ensalada Mexicana, comes from Ananda Fuara, the nicest vegetarian restaurant in San Francisco.  Really lovely women in saris, who remember your name, serve you some of the best stuff you can get in the Civic Center at lunch time.

Oh, and I have to work late tonight.  I might even post my dinner. 

Nope. I ate it too fast. And I’ll add, while I’m at it, that this salad doesn’t look as good as it tastes. But when you get to the black beans, brown rice, and corn tortilla on the bottom, you have arrived in a kind of work lunch heaven that’s hard to describe.

It’s been a long break around here, as we’ve adjusted to the fact that the children who used to love cute little lunches now insist on having a lunch that’s been thrown in a plastic safeway bag because it is so not cool to have a bento box.

So you know what? A blog must morph under circumstances like this. And morph we will here at the TiffinTin. Into grown up lunches, as often as I can, even if it’s only a photo and a snarky comment. Occasionally, the truth will be told about what goes into the preteen lunches. (Ouch.)

So, thanks for checking in while I was gone (and what was up with the 600 page views back in February? Man, people want tins, that much is quite clear. Well, good. Tins I have. Tons of tins.. And now they’re all mine, mine, mine.

See you tomorrow for the first grownup tin lunch.

xo, Lily

Dear Tiffin Tinners,

This site is on summer break. I’ll be back in September, with middle school lunches, and third grade lunches, and grown up people lunches, and maybe some new thoughts about how we go about feeding ourselves away from home.

have a lovely summer,

BL

I’ll be taking a short break — until Valentine’s Day — to finish up some medical treatments. See you in a few weeks!

xo, BL

It’s inevitable that we greet the new year with the desire to do new things, be new people. For a very long time I did this in the spirit of recrimination, speaking to myself about my goals in ways I’d never speak to others — you’ve been so awful about food, now you’d better shape up. That kind of thing. And then for a while, I just stopped resolving to do new things at the beginning of the year altogether. This avoided the awful feeling of beginning a new project as penance for being a bad person, which is good. But it also made it difficult to take advantage of the momentum that is everywhere these January days.

And so I’ve embarked on a new course:  I want to create a healthy beginning to the year, a beginning that’s full of beauty and interest and inspiration, and a beginning that relies on small things, like a cake plate full of naval oranges.   I’ve sketched out a series of pieces on small things that can mean a lot and I’ll be writing about those for the next few weeks. I’ll have a few lunches in there too, of course.

The first in this series can be found at the Daily Tiffin.

(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.

My Dear Reader,

The Tiffin Tin will be on vacation until August 30, which is the first day of school around here. We’re on a brief break now, waiting for fall, the time for packed lunches:and when that time comes around, this site will feature all the lovely things we pack and bring with us for the journey, generally the journey my three children make to school, but my own as well.

Enjoy the rest of your summer. See you August 30.

The Tiffin Tin

Just as the worst time to open an umbrella store is during a drought, the worst time to begin a blog devoted to packed lunches (most of which are meant to accompany children to school) is during summer vacation. What was I thinking?

For a while, I’ve been getting by showing you pictures of my favorite containers. But that’s not what I promised. I promised to show you packed food so delicious that other children would literally offer your child their ipod AND their cell if your child would let them eat a tiny bit of your child’s lunch. Food so remarkable and jewel-like that your co-workers will try to steal it the instant your back is turned.

Alas, it is not lunch-packing season.

What to do? I’m not entirely sure. I’ve noticed some interest in lunch box notes — so perhaps I’ll post some downloadable ones. Maybe I’ll post picnics we have around here. I’m going to take a few days to think about it. If you end up at this site, tell me why you came and what you might like to find here, unless you’re the person who found me by typing in “tiffin sex tonight.” You want somebody else.