Carol is freshly back in Moscow from a “gastro-sabbatical” year working on organic farms in France and Italy with her husband and son .

Carol’s website contains her enjoyable biweekly columns and recipes, reader forums, links to food-related resources for parents and amusing quotations about food. The focus of the site is to encourage people to cook at home and to get our children involved in cooking with us, too.

While Carol has tons of great ideas on cooking for and with children, she is also trying to avoid giving the impression in her writing that her “life is fabulous and perfect all the time. Some days it’s all I can do to order a pizza. Ideally I would be cooking with my child three or four nights a week, but it doesn’t happen that way. I get comments from people who say, ‘You must eat really well at your house all the time,’ but the truth is, sometimes it’s just mac ‘n cheese out of a box. Organic mac ‘n cheese, but…”
With that in mind, we’ll focus here on a number of Carol’s suggestions for “fallback” meals that can save the day when things are heading downhill fast.

1. Veggies and dip. To tide kids over while you’re throwing the rest of the meal together, Carol likes raw baby carrots and broccoli florets with the bleu cheese and ranch dressings from the cold dairy case at the Co-op. “Most hungry children will barely be able to resist.”
2. Enchiladas. The great thing about this recipe (see below) is that one can aim to always have the basic ingredients on hand (refried beans in a can, tortillas in the freezer, bottled salsa and even bottled guacamole).
3. Scrambled eggs. “If there’s nothing else we have eggs and toast. If we’re lucky we have eggs and potatoes and toast,” though, Carol acknowledges, home fries take an extra 30-45 minutes.
4. Pasta. Carol’s husband, Walt, likes to make fettuccine with a white sauce, while Carol prefers pasta with things such as frozen peas mixed in with onions sautéed in olive oil, plus maybe some pine nuts or diced tomatoes or some herbs like basil (recently she’s discovered that fresh herbs keep well in the freezer).
5. Fried rice with already cooked rice. (See below.)
6. Couscous with leftovers. “Where does one get those?” Carol tries to cook something big once or twice a week like roast chicken, steak, or lamb and then uses that throughout the week, putting bits in pasta or enchiladas or fried rice. Along with frozen peas, Carol likes to have things on hand like carrots and potatoes and onions that keep fairly well. That way, she says, you can usually come up with something if you have rice or pasta or couscous.
7. A big salad that stays in the fridge for a few days. Lately Walt’s been using The Co-op Cookbook to make things like kale slaw and broccoli almond curry salad.
8. “We also have these nights where we say, ‘O.K., clean out the fridge!’ Reed carries out everything and sets the table and we’ll eat whatever we feel like: hummus, cottage cheese, leftover fried rice, pickles.”
9. Pizza: For those occasions when any of the above is too much, “go right ahead and order a pizza and call it good. Tomorrow is another day.”

Eager to put a few of Carol’s ideas into practice, I was surprised by how my kids gravitated to the veggies and dip. I was too mayonnaise-averse to buy her suggested dressings, so substituted some shelf-stored dressings instead.
We also tried fried rice, which gleaned mixed reviews from the kids and enchiladas, which the kids liked so much they asked to save some for lunch the next day.

SORT OF FROM SCRATCH BEAN ENCHILADAS (www.kids-in-the-kitchen.net)
Serves 4
The first five ingredients can be replaced by a can of prepared refried beans — just skip the whole sautéing step and go straight to dividing the beans among the tortillas.
15 oz. can cooked pinto beans, drained
1 small onion, diced
1 sweet red pepper, diced (optional)
Olive oil
Dashes of chili powder, paprika, ground cumin, garlic powder, dried chipotle chile pepper and salt, to taste
8 soft flour tortillas
8 oz. cheddar and/or jack cheeses, grated
1 jar or can enchilada sauce (approximately 1-1/2 cups)
Olive oil or butter for greasing the baking dish
Guacamole, sour cream and salsa to serve on the side

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. In a frying pan on the stove over medium high heat, sauté the pinto beans, the onion and the red pepper with a small amount of olive oil until the onions are translucent, about 5 minutes. Use a potato masher to smash the beans into refried beans consistency and season to taste.
Arrange the tortillas on a clean work surface and divide the beans evenly between them. Spread the beans out slightly on the tortilla with a spatula or table knife. Sprinkle a generous handful of grated cheese on top of each dollop of beans (save about 1 cup for later), roll up the tortillas and nestle snugly in a greased baking dish. Pour the enchilada sauce over the top of the rolled-up tortillas, covering them completely if you can. Sprinkle the remaining grated cheese on top. Bake in the oven for approximately 30 minutes, until the cheese and sauce are browned and bubbling. Serve hot with guacamole, sour cream and salsa.

FRIED RICE
Using rice she’s already cooked, Carol heats it in sesame oil and adds soy sauce and whatever veggies are in the fridge. “We always have frozen peas and we try to always have mushrooms. It’s great to use the stems of broccoli this way. You can cut off the outer edges and cut the stems into cubes. If we have any leftover meat we can cut it into cubes and use little bits that way. And I think fried rice needs to have a scrambled egg. I also like to have something like hoisin sauce that I bought at the store.”

Judy Sobeloff has way more to say about Carol Spurling and her website than could fit in one column, so looks forward to more next month.