Mondays, menus, and Montessori
Monday, March 8, 2010 at 8:46AM I meant to make that last post more rounded, to show how my personal life colored my working decisions and vice-versa, and more cyclical, to show how my working life repeats its options over the last decade. I didn’t get there, which is my own fault for composing a post during naptime.
But Seamus is a preschool right now so I have some time to eat my toast, drink my coffee and blather on a bit. Mondays are good for that. It’s my cleaning and shopping day, a day of prep today is special, since I’ll be playing with “lesson plans” - games and projects dedicated to slipping the kid some skill sets.
First the food. I didn’t do any resolutions this year, but about a week ago I found a blog from a woman in Australia who wrote about adjusting to life in their new suburban home. (And of course now I can’t find it, and therefore can’t link to it, so there’s the Monday in this post for you.) In one post she makes a tart from Patricia Wells’ book of Provencal home cooking, and I thought about how a good third of our cookbooks are French or Californian cuisine, how we’re eating mostly locally and seasonally and in tune with those books. Not only that, but I’d begun teasing out recipes from my copy of Paula Wolfert’s Mediterranean Greens and Grains that looked possible even with an appliance-climbing monkey in the kitchen.
So I decided to start playing around with Provencal/Mediterranean food, to make it the backbone of my cooking repertoire. We have region-specific cookery books, along with Julia and Jacques, so the rest is up to how well I plan and learn. And of course, adapt to my refrigerator contents. Based on what’s in there right now, this is how the week is shaping up, keeping in mind toddler pickiness and other disasters.
Omelets, roasted asparagus, salad
“Wild” greens torta inspred by Cretan scarf pies (I’ll be using the tops of my beets, turnips, and carrots, rounded out with some braising greens)
Carrot soup (just Seamus and I that night, Patrick works late)
Roasted chicken with root vegetables and sauteed greens
Leftover chicken, vegetables and cous-cous
We often spend Saturdays gadding about so I’ll prep some cranberry beans for the crockpot and cook them in the chicken stock I’ll make overnight from the chicken carcass. We’ll eat the beans soupy with salad or sauteed greens, and the leftovers go into soups or pasta e fagioli. I’d like a fish for Sunday, so I’ll have to start figuring out where to get one that’s mercury/PCB safe and sustainably harvested. I’ll shop for it on either Thursday or Saturday, and if need be, swap the Thursday menu.
So that’s the easy list. Now for the DIY preschool thing.
We’ve kicked around home-schooling Seamus if we ended up in a crappy school district with no money for parochial school (I say parochial because they tend to be cheaper than the private secular schools, and after 400+ years of practice the Jesuits seem to have their fundamentals down. The preschool Seamus attends has play-based pre-kindergarten curriculum, but I don’t know how my wee maurader experiential learner is taking to it. So I’m paging through my copy of The Well-Trained Mind, Elizabeth Hainstock’s book on Montessori at home for preschoolers, and the Exploratorium’s snackbook for replicating the museum exhibits in the classroom. I’m breaking things down into subjects like so:
Letters (recognition and eventually writing)
Numbers (counting and character recognition, writing)
Shapes/spatial stuff
Natural science (animals, plants, stars, weather, environment, etc.)
Physical science (haven’t figured this out just yet)
Art
Music
Life skills
Yes, this would be a lot to cram into a day. Which of course, won’t be happening. I want to create a block schedule with room for playdates, maybe a class, and a ton of outside time. It should get interesting, and I hope to have a rough draft up this week.
And with that, it’s time to clean before heading out.


