We are expecting a blizzard here in Central New Jersey and with two feet of snow predicted, school will be out for the next few days. Baking is one way to pass the time with school-aged kids. Try making this recipe for peanut butter and chocolate chip cookies. With only four ingredients, it couldn’t be easier. You don’t even need an electric mixer.

Peanut butter and chocolate chip cookies. Recipe makes about 2 dozen cookies

Ingredients:

1 egg
1 cup chunky peanut butter
¾ cup sugar
½ cup chocolate chips
Optional: ½ cup chopped peanuts

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
2. Mix ingredients in order listed, adding the optional peanuts, if desired.
3. Drop dough by rounded spoonful onto unto an
greased cookie sheet.
4. Press more chocolate chips into dough if desired.
5. Bake for about 8 minutes or until underside of cookie is brown.
6. Cool on baking rack for about 10 minutes.

Not only will baking keep the kids occupied on snow days, they’ll love being able to eat what they bake as well.

This recipe was also posted on my food column on Examiner.com. You can find it here.

Our forbearers canned the fruits of their harvest out of necessity. Lacking the modern transportation that today has all but obliterated the word, “seasonal,” they “put up” jars upon jars of the bounty of their gardens, groves, and orchards, ever-conscious that their food security for the winter existed in the results of their efforts  lining their cupboards.

Canning is making a comeback. Despite the convenience of fast food drive-through's, take-out convenience stores, frozen entrees, and prepared meal-starters, many people are turning to their own resources to take charge of the food they consume. They are waging their own war against food that is over-processed, under-cooked, and laden with ingredients that only an organic chemist can spell or pronounce.

Cathy Barrow, a food blogger and landscaper based in Washington D.C., has been canning since she was a child and now spends most weekends in the kitchen, preserving  the bounty of farmer's markets and local harvests. Her book, Mrs. Wheelbarrow’s Practical Pantry: Recipes and Techniques for Year-Round Preserving, is a treasure trove of ideas and methods for capturing the essence of freshness and flavor when it is at its peak and enjoying it months later.

It isn't only increasing the quality of the food she eats that prompted Barrow to embark on this life-changing (and life-sustaining) way of cooking and eating. She, along with her husband, Dennis, are also concerned with the plethora of cans, bottles, Styrofoam trays, and other packaging that often accompanies food purchased at traditional take-out restaurants and grocery stores. Every jar of food that is preserved at home eliminates the extraneous packaging accumulating in our landfills.

Like Barrows, I too grew up canning, although my repertoire was not as varied as hers. In fact, my canning experience was basically limited to one type of produce: tomatoes. As the children of Italian immigrants, each year my parents “made” the requisite garden that produced bushels and bushels of tomatoes. Some of my most vivid end-of-summer memories consist of working side-by-side with my mother in a steamy kitchen, cutting, cooking, and then pureeing the tomatoes prior to ladling them into sterilized Mason jars. (No food processor for us – we pureed the “old fashioned way,” by hand with a Foley mill.) I recall the satisfaction of seeing 50 or so quart-sized jars lined up on a table in our basement, waiting to be transferred to the “wine cellar,” a small room in the back of the basement that we used as a pantry. And most of all, I remember enjoying the flavor of a fresh, off-the-vine tomato in the middle of winter when we sat down to Sunday afternoon and Thursday night dinners – the two times each week we ate “macaroni.”

One of the advantages of Barrows’s book is that anyone , no matter what their experience with canning and preserving, will learn something about what was once a necessity for survival. At over 400 pages, Mrs. Wheelbarrow’s Practical Pantry is chock-full of step-by-step directions for preserving stocks, soups, beans, and other vegetables. The author walks the reader through meat preservation using brine and salt and air-curing. There’s also a chapter on making fresh cheeses. Beautiful photographs by Christopher Hirsheimer and Melissa Hamilton compliment the easy-to-read text and instructions, and provide a step-by-step pictorial for many of the techniques

Whether you grow your own vegetables or buy them locally at the farmers’ market, canning provides an opportunity to eat healthier, save money, and help the environment. Pick up Mrs. Wheelbarrow’s Practical Pantry: Recipes and Techniques for Year-Round Preserving and give it a try.

This content has also appeared on my Examiner.com site.

Welcome to Sundays in the Kitchen. How did I come up with this name for my blog?  As a child of Italian heritage, for me, Sundays were all about food.  For breakfast we had buns and sweet rolls – a wonderful departure from the cereal and toast that was our usual weekday breakfast fare. Then, after breakfast, my mother would set the “gravy” (aka “red sauce”) to simmering as the family got ready for late morning mass. Sometimes a chicken or a roast was left roasting in the oven while we were at church. When we returned, we sat down as a family to a big Sunday dinner at an hour of the day when most non-Italian families were having lunch.

But that’s not all. After we finished eating at our house, we usually went to our grandparents’ house. The grownups caught up with all that had happened since they saw each other the previous week while the cousins ran around outside until it was time to eat again. Around six o’clock, my grandmother put out cold cuts and bread. Those who were really hungry could fill up with a sandwich. (Our Sunday meals were reversed. We had dinner at lunch time and lunch food for dinner). Those who could go for just “a little something” had cake and Stella Doro Italian cookies with a cup of coffee.

Fast-forward forty years. My parents are the grandparents now, and while I don’t make it to their house every week, I try to visit them on Sundays as often as I can. Before I visit, I spend a few hours in my own kitchen, usually baking, and I bring whatever I’ve concocted with me. Then, just like in the old days, we put the coffee pot on around 6 p.m. and have a cup of coffee and whatever it is I’ve baked for the week.

Like most people, I seem to be traveling in several different directions at once. I’m a college professor, a freelance writer and a reading and writing tutor.  There’s hardly ever a minute to spare. But if I plan carefully, I usually can carve out an hour or two on Sunday afternoon to spend in the kitchen. This time in the kitchen is a different type of down time. As I chop, mix, and stir, I think about how I can best help my students. As I crack eggs, sauté vegetables, and modify recipes to my standards, I test sentences in my head for whatever writing project I happen to be working on at the time. My Sundays in the kitchen make me more creative in the other areas of my life. And the other areas – teaching and writing, especially writing about food, help me realize my creativity in the kitchen.

I hope you will follow my posts as I blog about my Sundays in the Kitchen experiences. I’ll write about food in general and its many relationships – to health, to family, to holidays, and much more. I’ll share recipes and post photos. I’ll write about restaurant experiences. And I hope that what I write will inspire you to spend your Sundays (or any day!) in the kitchen.