Cooking with the Helms

Have I ever explained to you all what cooking at our house is like? I have a classic example for you. We wanted to head to the splash park. I wanted something healthy and lite for lunch to take with us. I had been planning to make this Hummus with Green Goo sometime. So, I decided, this was the time!

Splash Park was hopping!

I started breakfast, oatmeal, and cooking the chickpeas. I found out that we had a ton of coffee left from the day before, so we made iced coffee for breakfast. I served the girls and Ralph their oatmeal. I discovered that I had forgotten to put tahini and parsley on Ralph's grocery list last week. I didn't even know what tahini was. I learned early on in the life the art of substitution in cooking. I learned this from my mother as I was constantly asking to make things that we never had the ingredients for. Mom would just say, "Use xyz instead," and I would. Most of the time it turned out great. I decided to Google tahini and found that it was toasted sesame seeds pureed with sesame oil. I whipped up a quick batch of that. Now on to the parsley problem. I could used dried. Then I remembered we had this lettuce from our CSA that sort of resembled parsley so I used that. I made the green goo (that is just so fun to say!). Sat down to eat my oatmeal now that Ralph and the girls were done.

Fun in the sun!

Did I mention that I was working around several days of dishes? The sun has been shining here and we have been so busy chasing it that we have completely neglected the house! After I finished my breakfast, I finished up the hummus. I threw everything into a cooler bag. Ralph threw some Naan from Costco onto the grill while I rounded up the girls. We wrapped up the Naan, added a bowl of strawberries and every body's water bottles into the bag. We walked away from the dishes and went to play in the water.

Enjoying yummy Naan and Hummus with Green Goo

That, my friends, is cooking at our house. Multiple substitutions and Googling necessary. Dirty dishes. Breakfast gone cold from multitasking. However, the hummus was excellent! The "Green Goo," awesome! It totally made the hummus. I don't even like hummus. I thought maybe if I made it that it would help. It seems it did!

LOVE this face!

Now, if any of you have a hankering to clean a crusty, scary house or tackle a yard that will soon hide my children from view, come on over! I promise good eats will appear out of the mayhem and mess. We will then close the door on the dishes, eat out on our gorgeous deck and laugh and visit until long after the sun goes down (which is pretty late in this neck of the woods).