Category: Chow Time

Do you like my wings? Aren’t they Bee-utiful? Today is World Bee Day, the day that we celebrate Bees and other pollinators from around the world.

Pollinators move pollen within a flower or carry pollen from flower to flower. Their work is called pollination. Three-quarters, or 75% of the world’s crops depend on the work of pollinators to produce a healthy harvest. Can you think of pollinators other than bees? If you said bats, birds or butterflies, you are right!

The world is home to more than 20,000 species of bees. There are mason bees, leaf-cutter bees, sweat bees and carpenter bees just to name a few. Bees are pollinators. Bees wiggle and waggle and dance on flowering trees and plants. As they dance, they transfer pollen from one flower to the next.

Most bees don’t make honey. They make something called bee bread or pollen loaf, but that is another story! And maybe another recipe. It is the honey bee who gathers nectar from flowers to make honey. Honey is the only food made by insects that is loved by humans around the world. So, if you love honey, thank a honey bee!

Some crops like almonds, apples, blueberries, cherries, pears, pumpkins and strawberries depend on honey bees for pollination. Without help from the honey bees, these crops would bear little or no fruit!

Has anyone ever called you a Busy Bee? Take that as a compliment. Worker bees are fast! Their wings can beat 250 times per second allowing them to fly as far as 15 miles in an hour. Honey bees must visit five million flowers to make just one pint of honey.

How can you help the bees? Bee supportive!

• Buy honey from local suppliers. When you support local beekeepers, you support the bees who live in your neighborhood. Bee a good neighbor!
• Plant a bee garden. Bees like colorful flowers to dance on as they sip nectar.
• Make a bee bath! When you leave a bowl of water outside, it’s like giving the bees their own little drinking fountain. Make sure you provide clean water every day.

Today, you can make this bee-utiful StrawBee-ry Salad! https://carltoncooks.com/world-bee-day-recipes/

You may have noticed the green onions and lettuce in the picture above. Did you know that you can regrow green onions and romaine lettuce by placing their ends in fresh water?

And I know how much you like ranch dressing. I like it, too. But as I always say, it is good to try new things. Today I have a new thing I think you will love. Honey Bee Salad Dressing! Made with real honey that was made by real bees. Just like ranch, you can use it on everything and you just can’t bee-t it! Try Honey Bee Salad Dressing at home. Email me and tell me what you like to eat it with. I like mine on fruit, salads, and as a dip for my potato chips!

This Easter, stay safe and stay home to stop Coronavirus-19!

And remember to send me your ideas for this week’s puzzle pantry game. Together, we’ll invent dinner, one ingredient at a time.

Greetings Good Health Heroes,

Let’s invent dinner using what you have! Today we’ll look at a mystery tool and use the Puzzle Pantry Game https://carltoncooks.com/pantry-puzzle-game-makes-delicious-dishes-at-home/to create a meal.

First, today’s mystery tool is:

The mystery tool is a grater. Today, let’s invent dinner together and use the grater to shred some cheese!

TL from Colorado wrote to say that he wanted to play the Pantry Puzzle Game https://carltoncooks.com/pantry-puzzle-game-makes-delicious-dishes-at-home/with us. He has 2 eggs, 2 mushrooms, some dry spaghetti, half a bag of frozen peas, a piece of bacon and a tiny piece of Parmesan cheese. He wants to know if there anything he can make with those ingredients. I say, let’s invent dinner!

Pasta Carbonara https://carltoncooks.com/carlton’s-carbonara/ is a dish you can sometimes order at Italian restaurants. If you speak Italian, the word carbonaro means charcoal burner. Carbonai is the word for coalmen, or the men who make charcoal by hand. Some people think that pasta carbonara might have been created for the carbonai because the pasta has little flecks of black pepper that look like the ashes created by burning charcoal. Today, there are still carbonai in Italy who make charcoal in this traditional way.

With the ingredients that he has, I think TL can invent dinner and make something I like to call, Carlton’s Carbonara https://carltoncooks.com/carlton’s-carbonara/ for dinner, and crunchy cookies called Carlton Kisses https://carltoncooks.com/use-leftover-egg-whites-to-make-crunchy-carlton-kisses/ for dessert.

So let’s wash our hands, go to https://carltoncooks.com/carlton’s-carbonara/ and invent a delicious dinner! Remember to send me ingredient ideas for the Pantry Puzzle Game https://carltoncooks.com/pantry-puzzle-game-makes-delicious-dishes-at-home/

Tell me your ingredient ideas and we’ll invent dinner using what you have!

Love,

Carlton

Greetings Good Health Heroes,

The last time I wrote, I promised you a mystery. I’ve also been thinking about a game we can play so that while we are home we can practice our cooking skills and have lots of fun. I want to make delicious dishes with home ingredients.

So let’s play my Pantry Puzzle Game.

First, I will give you a mystery to solve. I’ll post a photo of an important kitchen tool, and you tell me what that kitchen tool is. And then, we’ll use that mysterious cooking tool as we cook together.

Next, we will create recipes from the foods we find in our home.

Can I tell you a secret? Sometimes, even when I don’t have to stay home, I like to play the Pantry Puzzle Game. I look at the ingredients that I have in my house and use them to create a recipe. Right now it is better to say home and use what we have rather than go to the grocery store every time we think of something new to cook.

This is today’s mystery tool.

The mystery photo is of a sanitizing wet wipe. We use them to wipe and sanitize our counters before cooking. Remember. Never flush wipes down the toilet. They will clog and block our sewer pipes, and that would make me sad.

If you’d like to play the Pantry Puzzle Game just email me with ingredient ideas to use in our next recipe. If you send me three or more ingredients that you have in your home, I’ll tell you what you can make with them.

Today’s Pantry Puzzle Game recipe comes from a friend who lives in Chicago, Illinois. He wanted muffins. He had a cake mix, but he had no eggs, oil, or milk. But he did have a can of pumpkin. It turns out that you can mix one can of pumpkin with one box of cake mix and NOTHING ELSE to make delicious cakes or muffins! Click here https://carltoncooks.com/make-two-ingedient-pantry-puzzle-muffins/to learn how to make Pantry Puzzle Muffins.

So let’s be Good Health Heroes. Email your ingredient ideas to me. Wash your hands, and let’s cook!

Love,

Carlton

Hello to my Good Health Heroes!

What’s up? How are you feeling? Tell me a story.

Coronavirus-19 will not stop our stories! We can write while we are at home. Some of you may have brought your journals home, and if you did then it is fine to write your stories in them. Some of you may have notebooks from home that you can use. And some of you may not be able to find a notebook at all, and that is it fine, too. Long ago, before anyone had even invented notebooks, do you know what people did?

They told their stories. People gathered around campfires, under the stars, at dinner tables, or under blanket forts on their living room floor, and they told their stories to each other. I like to tell my stories to Henry and Ella, or to my friend Rock Lobster. So each day that I post a picture, I want you to think about what I’ve posted and tell a story about it. You can write your story in a notebook, or you can tell your story to the grownups or other family members in the house, or you can find your own special friend like Rock Lobster and tell your stories to them.

Your stories are yours. Your pictures are yours. Your art is yours. And in all of those things you can talk about anything you would like to talk about. Coronavirus-19 has made us change the way we live our lives for now. It is ok to be scared about that and it is ok to be mad. But we don’t have to let Coronavirus-19 stop our stories or take away our fun! We can dance around our living rooms and be happy. It is is ok to play, and write stories and make art. We are going to live our lives at home, wash our hands a lot, and make this virus go away as fast as we can.

If you want to, you can email your stories to me. I will email you back. Or you can save the stories inside your mind to share with me later. We’ll see each other again soon.

Don’t forget. Every time you wash your hands with soap and water https://carltoncooks.com/good-cooks-use-soap-and-water-for-clean-hands/ while you count to 20, or as you sing a very long song, you are making Coronavirus-19 go away. YOU are helping the world. YOU are a Good Health Hero!

Stay Healthy, and remember, I think you are Paw-some!

Love,

Carlton

PS- Check back soon. I’ll have a mystery for you to solve, and a game for you to play.

Hello My Friends,

I know that it came as a surprise to have school cancelled just before Spring Break. 

And I know that many of you don’t like changes when they come as a surprise. I don’t like surprise changes either. I like to plan for my changes. I think many grown-ups don’t like surprise changes. And if some of them seem upset right now, it is because they are just like us and were stressed by the surprise change in their plans.

This is what we know:

We need to stay home to stop Coronavirus-19! Coronavirus-19 is a germ like many other germs. Coronavirus-19 loves to hide in the same places that other germs hide, like on our hands. Coronovirus-19 is a bit stronger than other germs and really likes to make older people like Grandfathers and Grandmothers, our Abuelas y Abuelos, sick. Some of us could have the germ on our hands and never even know it because the germ might never make us sick. But even though we might not get sick, we don’t want to pass the germs to others, especially the older people in our life.  We want to stop the spread of germs and make Coronavirus-19 go away fast!

So this is what we do.

First, just imagine if every single one of us at our school got sick at the same time on the same day. Imagine that we all felt sick enough that we needed to go to the nurse. The line to the nurse’s office would wrap around the school and there would not be enough space for all of us to fit in the room. And our nurse would not have enough time to see all of us.

But if we all stayed home, we would keep our germs to ourselves until they disappeared. And if some of us did get sick, we could go to the nurse as we needed to, and there would be plenty of room in the office. Soon the germ would disappear because we kept it away from so many people.

And that is why school was cancelled and we are staying home. Our job is to stay at home, wash our hands often, and keep Coronavirus-19 from spreading until we make this germ go away! Together, we will be Good Health Heroes!

Fortunately, for us, we are Good Cooks! So we already know how to wash our hands. Click here https://carltoncooks.com/good-cooks-use-soap-and-water-for-clean-hands/ if you want to remember the last time we talked about washing hands.

So, stay home to stop Coronavirus-19! And if you want to email me, remember, I will always write back.  I will be looking for activities that we can do together as we stay in our own homes, so come back often!

Stay Healthy, and remember, I think you are Paw-some!

Love,

Carlton

On New Year’s Eve, people talk about making resolutions. Making a resolution is just a fancier way of saying that you are making a plan. On New Year’s Eve people make resolutions or plans for the coming year.

What do you want to do in 2020? I think 2020 is going to be a fun date to write at the top of all of my papers! 2020 is also a great year to wear as a pair of glasses just like the glasses I am wearing in this picture. Most of all, I think 2020 will be a great year for us to cook together. This year, I resolve and plan to share many more recipes and activities with all of you. Email me and let me know what kinds of food you would like to make together.

Happy New Year!

Or as my friend, Rusty the Retriever says, “Yappy New Year!”