A very young ManifestMom.

Have you ever heard of the “Armed Forces Recipe Service?”

I have. It’s kind of a nightmare, to be completely honest. Every kitchen of each of the five services has a huge collection of color-coordinated standardized recipes that are scaled to 100 portions to make them easy to multiply for large crews. Most of these recipes are completely terrible. Seasonings seem to be discouraged in military cooking, and they have probably never been updated. Most recipes calling for milk involve reconstituting non-fat dry. Some recipes are comical: There’s a recipe card for peanut butter and jelly. . . . Did you join the service as a cook and not know how to make PB&J? Really? Some of these recipes are actually good, but there are but a few. My favorite was rice pudding. Mmm.

I had tried and rejected tapioca at a young age and so I’d never eaten rice pudding. I just assumed that I wouldn’t like it. Working for a crew that had diverse tastes, though, cooking things that *I* liked wasn’t always an option. I was a Food Service Specialist in the United States Coast Guard and my job was to feed between 100 and 240 people each day. I remember very vividly bending over a 50-gallon steam kettle that was half the size of me, stirring crazily with a huge whisk to keep the eggs from scrambling in my hot rice, milk (not NFD) and sugar mixture. I’m sure anyone who walked by would have laughed hysterically at my butt in the air over the humongous pot. After everything was incorporated, I ventured a tiny taste. Then, I headed to the clean dish racks to get a cup. It was absolutely delicious. To this day, I haven’t found a recipe for rice pudding that is just as good as that one, and I’ve tried and enjoyed several.

I didn’t have an awesome military experience overall, but I will give some props where they’re due: The Chiefs I worked under were total foodies who took pride in their galleys. We didn’t usually do Armed Forces Recipe Service cards . . . We ate like kings. The AFRS cards were there as a resource, but so were mini libraries of cooking text books, personal cook books brought in by the entire galley staff and the Food Service computer. Being on a boat in the middle of the ocean, we didn’t always have a reliable Internet connection, but it was usually enough to get us by. The computer’s primary use was tracking our inventory and budget, creating menus and training, but we used it to search for new recipes all the time, as well.

I found Allrecipes.com in October of 2004, but I can’t remember exactly what I was looking for. I do know when I became a dedicate of the site, though. It was the December that came just after. I had never prepared an entire holiday meal by myself. We were docked, and not many people had to stay back and man the ship for Christmas, for which I was grateful. There was a later time when my entire crew was underway for Christmas, and we served them steak and lobster tails as a galley team. For the twenty people I had to serve for Christmas 2004, though, I wanted a traditional meal. I cooked Perfect Turkey, Tangy Honey Glazed Ham, Grandma’s Corn Pudding, and Christmas Chocolate Town Cake from the site. Each recipe was absolutely delicious.

From the ability to scale the recipes to the exact portions I wanted to the ease of searching through the literal thousands of recipes available on the site, I instantly became hooked. I returend to Allreipces.com again and again over the years. It’s become a near-daily habit at this point. I love to look through the daily photos, picking recipes that others have tried to add to my recipe box. I like that I can create shopping lists and access them from my mobile phone with the Dinner Spinner app. I thoroughly enjoy the community of Allrecipes users and the daily tricks and tips posted on the site.

My recipe for Strawberry Kiwi Tartlets (that I invented while on a Coast Guard ship, no less) was featured on the front page of the Allrecipes Allstars portal, where recipes from brand ambassadors like myself are featured. Now I can pin pictures of recipes to try on Pinterest!?! Wow, I may never get any work done around here. . . .

Do you remember when you had a photo just like this? Your hair is disheveled, your eyes are red with tears and the strain of childbirth and you have just made a tiny little person . . . No wonder we celebrate mothers each year!

ManifestMom is celebrating with another EXCLUSIVE giveaway. Yes, mom, here’s something special just for you!

I’m a huge fan of mother’s jewelry, and I hope you are, too! You can win a natural stone pendant surrounded by initial tags to represent your children from the ArtByNCollins Etsy shop. Check out these beautiful designs:

Image Courtesy of VeryBestBaking.com

As an Allrecipes.com brand ambassador, I’ve read some really awesome blogs this month about butter. Many people have talked about how their grandmothers would churn fresh butter or talked about adventures in making their own. I remember making some butter once. In fourth grade, my teacher made everyone in the class shake some heavy cream and salt in a baby food jar until we came up with a little ball of joy . . . but I digress.

I didn’t want to blog about homemade butter. I wanted to blog about my grandma, and the meal from her kitchen in which I most vividly recall the sweet, dreamy taste of butter. Potatoes. More »

Image courtesy missanthropistskitchen.com

I found this recipe on my friend Nikki’s Pinterest board, and I immediately set to work on them.

Now, I had given up soda because of the extra calories I was taking simply by drinking three or four daily, but when my sister visited with my nephews, I had some in the house. The cans came in handy when it was time to make my very own goldfish cutter. I wasn’t really sure whether I would be able to make one on the first go, but I found these pictures to be quite helpful. I couldn’t get a stapler in the tail to secure it, but the cutter seemed to work fine with a piece of tape holding the ends tight. My cutter was a bit large because I don’t have the patience for making a billion little fish. This baby’s about an inch and a half long.

I will say that my fish don’t look as appealing as the image in the recipe that I followed. I don’t have a food processor, and my KitchenAid didn’t break the cheese down as much as necessary to get a completely smooth texture. What I ended up with were fish with chicken pox.

They’re not as pretty as others on the pin board, I suppose, but they ARE delicious. As with others who have tried the recipe, my crackers never got crispy. They were more like mini cheese biscuits. I really liked them, and so did the kids. I think they would make an excellent homemade snack to go in my kids’ ZipPeaPods for school lunches. Maybe in the meantime I can get a food processor!

Speaking of ZipPeaPods, you still have six days to enter the A Thread of Grace giveaway before the winner is selected! Good luck!

Image courtesy of SheKnows.com

Do you pack your child’s lunches? I’ve read up on a lot of amazingly cute foods lately. I’m a big fan of the bento box craze: Check out my contributor Merry doing the bento boogie on her blog. How awesome do those meals look? I’m patiently waiting for the time when Chooch will head off to school with a boxed lunch, but I really have to broaden his food horizons before that point. A bento of chicken nuggets and French fries isn’t all that exciting, in my opinion. I’ll have to try those macaroni and cheese muffins before Kindergarten, though! Yum!!

The EPA estimates that each child who packs a brown bag lunch to school every day during the school year generates around 67 pounds of waste. That’s a sobering figure to me. While some of the trash can’t be cut out, environmentally-minded parents have a couple options to negate this much garbage generation. We can buy large bags or boxes of snacks instead of pre-packaged portions (it’s cheaper, too), we can pack only as much as our kids will eat and, most importantly, we can ditch disposable plastic bags. What can we use instead?

• Plastic containers. Tupperware and the like. Great for bento.
• Biodegradable plastic sandwich bags. These are a better option than non-biodegradable, but they must still be manufactured, packaged and sold. Plus, good luck finding them in your grocery store.
• Reusable, cloth sandwich and snack sacks.

I’ve seen lots of reusable sandwich bags, and I honestly think that ZipPeaPods are the best! Yes, they’re ridiculously adorable, but consider the competition. Many reusable sandwich and snack bags you’ll find on Etsy and elsewhere are made with velcro closures. I don’t know about you, but I can’t clean all of the crumbs out of velcro, even in the laundry. That means that the first sandwich I feed Chooch in Kindergarten will follow him until he wears through the sandwich sack. That’s a pretty gross thought. ZipPeaPods will come completely clean in the laundry because they have a smart zipper closure.

ZipPeaPods are also made with a 100 percent cotton outer layer with a water-resistant liner made of a silicone coated rip stop nylon fabric. When you wash them, the two fully serged layers won’t pull apart. They are pre-washed, so colors won’t fade or bleed. Every time you launder them, they will look as good as new.

Mary, the owner of the Etsy shop A Thread of Grace, has agreed to do a ZipPeaPod giveaway exclusively on ManifestMom. You can’t win these anywhere else! I got to pick the pattern, so I selected a handsome unisex apple pattern that will look great in your son, daughter or grandchild’s lunch box. I will be accepting submissions for the drawing until tax day, April 15, 2012. Get something good without spending a single penny of your tax return!!!

The winner will receive a 7.5×7.5-inch sandwich sack, a 7.5×5-inch snack sack and a 5×5-inch itsey-bitsey snack sack, as pictured in this photograph:

These are the exact pieces you will have delivered to your home if you are our contest drawing winner! Aren’t they cute?

How do you win?

• First, “like” ManifestMom and A Thread of Grace on Facebook. The winner of the contest must have both pages liked, or a new winner will be selected: We only want our fans to have this awesome opportunity.
• Second, leave a comment on this blog post. This counts as your entry. Duplicate posts will be removed. . . One entry per person, please. The winner will be drawn by random selection by And The Winner Is…, a WordPress plug-in that is specifically designed for blog contest drawings.

Thank you in advance for your participation in ManifestMom and A Thread of Grace’s FIRST EVER giveaway! Good luck!

Update 4/16/2012: Congratulations Erika Williams, our winner!