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Healthy Teacher Starts Now

I don’t relish having to wake up at 5:30 a.m. again, after a long summer of sleeping ’till (gasp!) 6:30, but a new semester brings its own small pleasures. Meeting new students, seeing cherished colleagues again, embarking on new projects on campus…and…a little more structure to my eating habits.

Our classes in the LINCC program are long: three to five hours five days a week for 15 weeks (plus all the prep and meetings that happen outside the classroom hours), so there’s a 20-minute break for snack and then once class is over I eat lunch. We have a fridge and a microwave and so it’s convenient for BYOFood and for avoiding between meal noshing.

For some reason my smartphone images sometimes end up sideways….but you get the…picture

In anticipation of back-to-school I got some bento boxes and have already prepared my lunch for tomorrow (the grandparents have taken Leandro to a powwow today so I could collect myself!) and I am sharing day one’s meals with you!

Happy Back-To-School everyone. If I am not too frantic, I will share my little guy’s first day of Second Grade (!) lunch bento….

Tags: school lunches

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Categories Food, lunch

Tales from the Lunchroom: The Story Continues

12 Jan

So a couple of days ago I posted a note I had sent in to my son’s first grade teacher.

Guess how this turned out?

The story goes that he started complaining that his friends wouldn’t sit with him in the lunchroom because they said his food smelled bad. Regular readers know the lengths I go to to make sure he has good home-cooked food every day, which is mostly rice and beans, pasta with vegetables, quesadillas (yes, with beans sometimes). I would very much like to be able to send him in with lunch money, but what I have seen from the cafeteria menus looked pretty, well, not-what-we-eat-dear (mind you, the new January menu looks like someone has made some changes: baked chicken fingers, homemade macaroni and cheese…so I am giving it another look this month since I need a break!).

So I sent in the note, a bit skeptical of the story and thinking that perhaps this was actually a play for lunch money and tater tots for lunch. Then at dismissal the teacher asked to speak to me. Continue reading →

Tags: cafeteria, food issues, kids, school lunches

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Categories Food

¡Comida Hispana! Recipes to unleash your inner Latino

Mango Mojitos With Ancho Chili Salt

It was another summer Friday in the neighborhood and that called for another festive cocktail. Riding high on the success of last session’s passionfruit mojitos, I decided to make mango mojitos. The drink itself followed much the same construction, but the mango was decidedly sweeter than the passionfruit, so I decided that it needed a […]
Passionfruit Mojitos by the Pitcher or Glass

Summer evenings in the neighborhood can be wonderful. Occasionally on a Friday some of us neighbors bring out folding chairs and sit together in one front yard for a bit of happy hour while the kids go mental on someone else’s lawn. It’s pretty much BYO, but we do mix up a pitcher of experimental […]
KID IN THE KITCHEN: Tembleque (Tropical Coconut Pudding)

We spent the better part of last summer in Puerto Rico, and among the tasty things that my little guy fell in love with was tembleque, a jiggly (temblar means to tremble) dessert that falls somewhere between pudding and flan. I promised him we’d make it back in New York, and this weekend, for a […]
Sangría Tropical (and rainforest paradise pictures)

When the heat gets tropical, so should the drinks. On a recent trip to the mountains of Puerto Rico, I was inspired by a wonderfully cooling and exotic sangría I had up around and about El Yumque (Caribbean National Forest, the only tropical rainforest in the U.S. Forest Service system) at Noelia’s, recommended to us […]
Salmorejo de jueyes (Land Crab Stew)

There are a number of land crab species skittering about Caribbean coastlines. Some are edible and the one we eat most here in Puerto Rico (although I am told they mostly are imported from Venezuela these days) is Cardisoma guanhumi which we call juey and — if you are English-speaking — you might call the […]