feeding the troops
as you might imagine, the grocery bills around here aren't pretty. this is a household where we go through 4-8 boxes of cereal per week. even the resident 30-pounder can polish off a can of spaghettios by himself, and making macaroni and cheese is now a 2-4 box event.
one of the boys' favorite junk food treats are those stupid little single-serving bags of chocolate chip mini-muffins. a three dollar box of those things will feed the kids for about ... two minutes. the best part is that each box has FIVE bags of muffins in it, and the competition for that last bag has gotten pretty creative. last night's incident culminated with SpazMonkey and DramaQueen deciding that the first person to finish his bag o' muffins would win the last bag. Spazmonkey, seeing that DramaQueen was eating more efficiently (mostly because DramaQueen is able to stop talking from time to time) jammed his last two mini-muffins in his mouth and ran - wide-eyed with fear that his plan wouldn't work out and trailing frothy muffin-drool - for the last bag. He was so busy looking over his shoulder, though, that he tripped and dropped the bag. MonkeyBeef, quiet opportunist that he is, grabbed the bag and, pausing only to push SpazMonkey back to the ground, ran off with it to his favorite hidey-hole behind the sofa, squealing and cackling.
this is even funnier when you know that MonkeyBeef doesn't even like the goddamned things. he's licked them, sniffed them, and smashed them like playdoh, but he's never actually eaten a single one.
so lately, the boys' response to "because that costs too much," is "can we make it ourselves?" 90% of the time, the answer is no (examples include real lightsabers, nano-microscopes, bionic suits, genetically modified organisms, and credit cards.) but sometimes (board games, food) the answer is yes.
so, mini muffin tins, mini chocolate chips, and a super-white egg-yolk-less cupcake recipe from my grandma's treasure trove of cookbooks, and we duplicated the things almost perfectly.
one thing about letting your kids cook from the time they're two (or younger, in MonkeyBeef's case... that little bastard can get up in some cookie dough and double fist it til half the batch is gone before you ever baked it) is that, by age five, they're perfectly comfortable suggesting new recipes. and a lot of them are actually good! then there's SpazMonkey. the kid who dips his apples in ketchup and scoops up his lucky charms with doritos. he wanted to make "hot and spicy cheezit muffins." i told him next time i made cornbread, we'd go ahead and do that, but he would be staying the fuck off my cupcake recipe with that shit.
mini-muffins also score high on the instant-gratification scale. they're done in under ten minutes, and you can see them puff up, solidify, and brown... hence the boys throwing the horns.
baked 48 of the little things, which lasted them several days. fuck you, hostess!
one of the boys' favorite junk food treats are those stupid little single-serving bags of chocolate chip mini-muffins. a three dollar box of those things will feed the kids for about ... two minutes. the best part is that each box has FIVE bags of muffins in it, and the competition for that last bag has gotten pretty creative. last night's incident culminated with SpazMonkey and DramaQueen deciding that the first person to finish his bag o' muffins would win the last bag. Spazmonkey, seeing that DramaQueen was eating more efficiently (mostly because DramaQueen is able to stop talking from time to time) jammed his last two mini-muffins in his mouth and ran - wide-eyed with fear that his plan wouldn't work out and trailing frothy muffin-drool - for the last bag. He was so busy looking over his shoulder, though, that he tripped and dropped the bag. MonkeyBeef, quiet opportunist that he is, grabbed the bag and, pausing only to push SpazMonkey back to the ground, ran off with it to his favorite hidey-hole behind the sofa, squealing and cackling.
this is even funnier when you know that MonkeyBeef doesn't even like the goddamned things. he's licked them, sniffed them, and smashed them like playdoh, but he's never actually eaten a single one.
so lately, the boys' response to "because that costs too much," is "can we make it ourselves?" 90% of the time, the answer is no (examples include real lightsabers, nano-microscopes, bionic suits, genetically modified organisms, and credit cards.) but sometimes (board games, food) the answer is yes.
so, mini muffin tins, mini chocolate chips, and a super-white egg-yolk-less cupcake recipe from my grandma's treasure trove of cookbooks, and we duplicated the things almost perfectly.
one thing about letting your kids cook from the time they're two (or younger, in MonkeyBeef's case... that little bastard can get up in some cookie dough and double fist it til half the batch is gone before you ever baked it) is that, by age five, they're perfectly comfortable suggesting new recipes. and a lot of them are actually good! then there's SpazMonkey. the kid who dips his apples in ketchup and scoops up his lucky charms with doritos. he wanted to make "hot and spicy cheezit muffins." i told him next time i made cornbread, we'd go ahead and do that, but he would be staying the fuck off my cupcake recipe with that shit.
mini-muffins also score high on the instant-gratification scale. they're done in under ten minutes, and you can see them puff up, solidify, and brown... hence the boys throwing the horns.
baked 48 of the little things, which lasted them several days. fuck you, hostess!
posted by welfareloser at 9:26 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Links to this post:
Create a Link
<< Home