Free Chris Kimball magazine, Tech+Food Waste, & more
1. Get a free issue of Christopher Kimball's new magazine.
Christopher Kimball left ATK/CI last year and he's started a new magazine. It's brand spankin' new, and you can get a free first issue, no strings attached.
I obviously haven't tried the magazine yet, but hey, it's free, and I figure it's worth a shot.
(Hat tip to reader Deb, who emailed me about it!)
2. Tech and Food Waste
Reader WilliamB sent me this article about how technology is being used in a variety of ways to help reduce food waste, from production, to restaurants, to homes.
(Want help for yourself? Here are my top ten tips to help you stop wasting food.)
3. Freezing greens is awesome.
Speaking of food waste...I bought a huge bag of spinach from Costco, and despite my best efforts, I knew we weren't going to get through the whole bag before it went bad.
So, after I used about half of it, I picked out a few bad leaves, and put the rest in the freezer.
Frozen and thawed spinach is no good for eating, in my opinion, but in smoothies, it is a-ok.
4. Kindness matters
I talk about kindness a lot with my kids as a matter of course, but it seems like the topic has really come up a lot in the last week, especially because of Joshua and Lisey both having jobs now.
They've run into co-workers who aren't kind, customers who aren't kind, bosses who aren't kind, and they're needing to be kind in the face of that.
I'm reminded that being high up on the ladder, or knowing a lot or having many skills is somewhat useless if you can't be kind.
I want my kids to learn and become skilled, of course, but more importantly, I want them to be kind, to care about other people's feelings, to have compassion for others, and to be able to put themselves in other people's shoes.
4. Attention, email subscribers!
I forgot to remind you of this yesterday....but if you want to enter the Ecobags giveaway, you need to leave a comment on the actual post. I can't keep track of emailed entries, unfortunately.
So, click here and you'll end up at the giveaway post where you can leave a comment to enter.
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And that's all the miscellany for this edition! I'll be back tomorrow with a menu post.
My husband and I are of course in love with our 5 granddaughters, aged 1 through 10, and we marvel at how bright and cute they are. We always finish our frequent talks about them with one of us saying that the most important thing--above intelligence and outward beauty--is that they be kind, which their parents are indeed teaching them and showing them.
Their first jobs! Always quite an experience. Our niece, who was raised by southerners who relocated to the north, got her first job at an ice cream shop as a teen. She was raised to say Ma'am and Sir, which she always did but, poor child, one middle-aged female customer chewed her out for calling her Ma'am, saying it was disrespectful and trying to make her look old, leaving our niece in tears. She remained polite, though, and explained she meant no disrespect (It didn't help. The woman was still furious.). Don't worry, she's 33 now, has a master's degree and a good job, and is still just as polite as she always was. No scars were left from that encounter.
I'm not a smoothie person but I do like spinach that has been frozen then cooked later. So I freeze my leftover spinach too, only I blanch it a bit first. I'll eat it steamed with a little garlic and salt, but since my husband doesn't like it much that way, I also mix thawed spinach into pasta sauce, cheese fillings, spanakopita, egg dishes, etc. There's more than smoothies out there!
Oh dear! The poor girl.
That's a classic example of a situation being all about the customer's issues and not about your niece. The customer must have had some serious underlying age issues, or she wouldn't have reacted the way she did.
I'm in the south teaching grade 2. I admit I'm getting to be an older lady, but being called ma'am didn't make me an older lady. It's expected that a 7 year old call their teacher ma'am whether she is 22 or 42! It's called being polite, showing good manners and being nice.
A waitress who was younger than me called me "sweetheart" all through our meal, and it was just the oddest experience! (But I wasn't furious, just confused.)
I'm really interested to see how ATK fares without Chris Kimball. Some of their live events on Facebook have been great and I'm liking the rapport between Julia and Bridgette more than Chris being one big know-it-all pretending to be a simple farm boy.
We've had to freeze greens as we're feeding a lot of it to our daughter in the form of purees. Personally I think greens aren't all that edible to begin with but she seems to like them.
One big challenge of being in an environment where people aren't kind is that it can be difficult to be the nice one. The pigs in the pen don't want to see you on the fence and will want to drag you down in it. Instead, it's better to try to elevate the situation with others perhaps trying to follow your example.
Yes, yes to your last paragraph. Joshua's in a situation like that right now, and it's tough.
Good practice for him, though. Public Radio has been airing a serious about how reacting in unexpected ways - breaking the cycle of expected responses - can change the entire interaction. Sounds like this might be a good time to share it with your kids.
There's also a fine example from Facebook, where what started as a mean confrontation, ended up differently. (The title says trolling but I don't think that's accurate.) [many ineffective attempts at links later] Let's see if this link will work:
https://www.facebook.com/hashtag/itgoesdowninthedm?source=feed_text&story_id=10206886782745201
Yep, that's what I told him. A soft answer often turns away wrath, in my experience. And at the least, it doesn't add fuel to the fire.
Also...remind you kids that the lack of kindness by other people isn't a reflection on them. You don't want them "sucking it up" and being kind. You want them to realize that rudeness by other people has absolutely NOTHING to do with them--then, it's easier to be kind (without your kids getting their own stomachs in knots).
Yep, I was just talking with them last night about that. Most of the time, people's unkindness has more to do with them than with the person they're being unkind to.
In one of my first jobs, my boss was extremely nasty--and it turned out she was stealing from the company.
Thanks for the heads up on the free magazine!
I've been wanting to freeze our excess greens, since there tend to be quite a few of them in the Picky household unfortunately! Using them for smoothies is a great idea; I wonder if it would work for juicing as well?
Ahhh, and it's great that the kiddos are already learning lessons in the adult world. My first job was as a secretary manning the phones. I cried every day after work for a week because of how mean people were. Kindness matters!!
Thanks for bringing up kindness. I need reminders of its importance often!
I actually sometimes just buy the frozen leaf spinach for smoothies because I can't get through it fast enough. Why did I never think of freezing the leftovers when I buy it for salads....!?
Congrats to your kiddos on their first jobs!
My youngest just got hired into a management job thinking it would be really easy. Boy was he in for a surprise. He commented about how mean all his department employees were to him, I must have told him 1000 times...ALWAYS treat them the way you would want to be treated. Always be respectful. Anyway he is looking for another job but I think the experience benefited him.
It makes me sad how horrible people can be in this world. I also think the press could use to cover more feel good stories instead of the horrible ones.
I wonder if his predecessor was less than kind. Sad to say, it can take many years to change the culture of a workplace from not nice to really neat.
On the topic of kindness, there is a book called " Do Nice. Be Kind. Spread Happy." It is over 90 pages of "missions" for people of all ages to spread happiness and kindness. I have been doing one "mission" per week with my 3 year old and it has been an amazing experience! The book is published by Usborne and can be found at http://www.thebooktreehouse.com!
Here's the synopsis: This cool and quirky title is full of ways to spread a bit of happy, and release your inner ninja of niceness with some guerrilla acts of goodness. From sending hugs through the mail to being “pushy” at the park, there’s a helper hint for every hero.
We belong to a CSA and in the spring get tons of greens. Of course my family is not fond of greens in any way but I freeze them and use them to make my broths. They add great flavor as well as vitamins. I remind my granddaughter that she is only responsible for how she acts not others.Be kind because it is the right thing to do
I want to thank you for turning me on to the Cook's Illustrated, Cook's Country and ATK. I am an old chick and I have learned so much about cooking from these sources. Frugal note - I bought the CI cookbook and several years worth of magazines at the thrift store. Score!
If I know I have too much spinach, kale or bok choy, I make up smoothies and freeze the smoothies. Hmmm, I'm thinking I could blend up whatever I have and freeze it and add it to smoothies later like ice cubes.
FYI: Lisey IS kind! Love her!
Yup, I do that too! I've made some pretty disgusting-looking green ice cubes to throw into smoothies.
I'm super proud that Lisey and Joshua are both being kind to customers, whether or not the customers are kind to them. Yay!
In one way it's good to have those experiences now, while the kids live at home and have you to help them process the bad things - though still not fun! Looking back, I can see how my high school job as a waitress helped me differentiate how I treated people versus how they responded - sometimes there's just no correlation, and it's not about you. This helped me with my first adult job with a difficult boss. I actually think this lesson may be easier to encode while you're younger - at least for me; I think I would have gotten much more wrapped up about it as a young adult where I was very anxious to please at my first job, but I had those earlier experiences to remind me that people aren't always kind or reasonable, and that's OK (you live through it). Jobs in high school are useful !
Yep, I think it's nice to have a part-time job while you live at home...that way the bad experiences aren't at a 40 hours a week level, and you still have your parents there to encourage you and talk to you.
And it's great to learn these lessons when you're not depending on your job for rent. It's a less pressure-filled environment!
Frozen spinach is great for chicken enchiladas and veggie lasagne.
What kind of jobs are they doing that they're encountering poor behavior they haven't already (presumably) encountered for years through sports and activities ( I know you homeschool)?
Well, they haven't been in customer service before, so, that's new. A customer came in the other day and told Joshua he sucked at his job, even though Joshua was being polite and attentive. And then after Joshua politely explained that he was new and was learning every day, the customer tried to humiliate Joshua by asking him fish questions that Joshua wouldn't know the answers to.
We're lucky that no organized activities we've been in have given him quite such rude treatment as some customers do. 😉
This might be an unpopular opinion, but Christopher Kimball rubs me the wrong way and I'm more interested in CI and ATK without him! I wish him well in his new endeavors though!
I did always think his column in the beginning of the CI magazines was boring. I skipped over it every time. 😉