Tuesday, December 4, 2012

Little House and Lemon Rice for Lunch

BigSis is reading HarryPotter now and it is hard to get her off that and make her read anything else. So Harry Potter is going to be the major player book wise in her reading list for the next months.

But since I love buying and borrowing books and our library always has an ongoing book sale where used books are sold really cheap, I picked up two classics for a quarter and two dollars recently. 

One of them is "Little House on the Prairie", the second book in the Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder. I hadn't read the Little House series as a child and am thoroughly enjoying it now. BS has read some other books in this series but not this one. She read and finished it in between Harry Potter. It is a charming book very well written and gives a picture of a different America years ago. The details the author adds about her father building the house and the front door which has a latch from logs is intriguing as is the part about the wild animals in the prairie. I wasn't aware that this was part autobiography and to know that Laura Ingalls really lived a life like that now makes it more interesting.
When I asked BS what she thought was hard about Laura and Mary's life, she said lack of Television and wild animals. And when I said what she though was fun about their life, she said "No homework"!
On Amazon


The other book I got is "The Swiss Family Robinson" by Johann Wyss. I had loved this book as a child and I really want BS and later LS to read it. On Amazon

The Food

 
Uma, a reader of my other blog had wanted me to post what I send for school Lunch everyday. Now BS is a fourth grader and I don't send a home lunch every day. Her school has a good cafeteria and serves decent hot food so at least a day or two in a week, I ask BS to eat there. Since her tastes are more Indian than American she prefers the home food. Else I would have asked her to at the school cafe every day !!

LS who is 4 goes to school only 3 days a week, of which one day is Pizza day. The other two days I give her a staple boring lunch because at school she doesn't want variety. Her lunch is either a grilled cheese sandwich, scrambled eggs and a bread or boiled pasta with ketchup.

BS however likes variety in her home lunches and so I try to rotate things a bit. I thought it might be a good idea to post the lunches that I pack for her, at least the better ones.



Today's(this was actually last Friday's) lunch was Lemon Rice, Brownie and a Clementine.

The Lemon Rice was a simplified version of the more exotic Lemon Rice. I could have added some vegetables but then didn't.

1. Cook Rice like you would normally cook rice.

2. Now heat oil in a fry pan.

3.Temper the oil with few cumin and mustard seeds and some curry leaves.

4. Follow with the rice, say 1 cup of cooked rice. Sprinkle little turmeric powder and salt and then mix with rice. Fry the rice for a minute

5. Next add lime juice. I added almost half of a Meyer lemon for 1 cup of Rice and mixed it with the rice. Also sprinkled a little sugar. Taste and adjust and you are done