Tu Bishvat Waldorf style

Greetings!
Hope y'all are having a relaxing weekend.
We had a very nice Tu Bishvat experience (not to mention Ariel's birthday celebration) at Ariel's kindergarten. Miss Pat, Ariel's teacher, aka "Haganenet" wrote an email to all the parents' asking them to bring a plant, and they did! all of them! All the little ducklings went after Miss Pat and Yariv, holding a a plant, and Yariv dug and dug and then the plants were planted in an orderly manner.

I just love my husband!
It turned out that many of the kids were experts at planting, whether by knowledge from their parents or from Miss Pat, and many gave planting advice to Yariv (did you know that when you take a plant from the plastic pot, you have to loosen the roots a little bit, to allow them to attach better to the ground later? i didn't.
It was cold and windy but i am happy to say the mission was completed with success and the kids were real pros! And of course, the story would not be complete without one or two critters. All the digging made way for the discovery of a number of worms, and waldorf being a waldorf, the tradition is to put your treasures in little buckets and show all the other kids. Ewwwww!!!!!!!



Don't know how familiar you are with the waldorf K environment, but it is immensely serene and they have a nature table, depicting the major characteristics of each season. this is their winter scene. Miss Pat is a genious!

Ariel was very happy with both the planting and being a birthday girl. I guess that that was the best we could do given the circumstances (being abroad away fro family, friends, etc). 

Re'em always enjoys a good palntin' and diggin'! A la prochaine mes amis!

Sunday lunch

While everybody else here will be busy watching the superbowl, we will have a very quiet, threesome (well, technically foursome, but Re'em will not be enjoying it yet) lunch.
I already showed you the boiling chickpeas, well, now you can see the end result.

Yariv cooked the chickpeas with baking soda for about an hour, let them rest in the pot, and then removed their thin shells. After that, it's just magic. You combine the chickpeas with tahini, garlic, lemon  juice, cumin powder and some of the chickpea cooking water. The amounts are individual, meaning that one person would prefer a lot of lemon juice, while another will prefer a little, and the same goes for the rest of the ingredients.

The kale salad looks terrific, and i thought that indeed the best kale would be the Lacinato kale as the recipe from the suggested, so i went to whole foods and got a bunch.

I also cooked Kamut berries, for the first time i might add. I cooked them as i would rice, only with one extra cup of water, because they are some sort of ancient wheat and it looked like needed extra TLC. Added 1 tbsp of soy sauce and salt.
Here are some pics from lunch:

                                                                      The Kale salad

                                                               The kamut berries

                                                                        Ariel's salad

                                                       and the glorious hummus

I feel lately that i want to try more vegan recipes, and try exchanging milk and eggs with vegan ingredients, such as homemade almond milk, flaxseeds and others. It actually feels great - to eat without eating animal products. I feel more healthy and more clean somehow, like my footprint on animal suffering has decreased.

Blog update/new direction

Wow, this Austin experience is starting to feel like toooo much. Father dying, our pets giving in to old age, Africa's death, what more could a pessimist like me ask for? Well, at least my second baby was born October 26th, so not all bad, right?
So, my resolution from all these deaths, especially in the face of my eldest saying to us: "you did a bad bad thing! you should have let Africa (our cat) die on his own time!", is to start afresh - turning this blog around and writing about food, the food i cook, the food my lover bakes, and probably other people's food.
So, today, there a few things planned for our meals.
Kale Cesar salad like here: http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Tuscan-Kale-Caesar-Slaw-366450

Hummus that is already cooking

and bread. Photos will follow.