Market basket and Montessori-style meringue cookies

This week at work, I ordered, along with other coworkers a market basket from a local farmer for $16.00....this is less than what I generally spend on produce anyway.  It contained:

oranges, apples, spinach, onions, parsley, green beans, cabbage, zucchini and summer squash.  Well, of course, I had to get moving on that immediately because we can't let all these lovely fruits and vegetables go to waste, can we? 

I made some garden veggie soup with beans, carrots, summer squash, onion, cabbage, and garlic in a base of vegetable stock and tomato paste with some oregano and basil tossed in for good measure. Delicious and healthy!!



I still have three zucchini left which will likely become two loves of zucchini bread.



Homemade German Pretzels



Then I made some soft pretzels from scratch...they look yummy though I have yet to taste them (see picture) and the recipe called for egg yolks beaten with water to be brushed upon the top. 

Well of course, with egg yolks come egg whites and now here I was with two egg whites and nothing to do with them. 

I was not going to waste them...no sir...so I racked my brain for what to do with egg whites (besides omelettes which we already had for breakfast with market basket spinach and onions) and then I had an idea...

Pink chain of 3 and yellow chain of 4
Montessori Cookies

As you know, what propelled me to begin writing this blog was the fact that we became a one-income family. And what propelled us to becoming a one-income family is that Tad went back to school.

Well school is going well, and I daresay I have not seem my husband this happy, challenged and full of stuff to tell me about his day in years!  But wow, is it a lot of work. And a lot of lecture. And more lecture. And then some more.  So needless to say, he and his cohort are getting to that point where they feel like they need to be uplifted a bit.  So I decided that one great thing to make out of egg whites is meringue cookies.  But the cool thing about these cookies is that they are white and very easy to make into whatever shape you like.

I dyed 1/2 the batter pink and 1/2 the batter yellow and made my cookies into the Montessori math materials: The yellow chain of four and the pink chain of three.  See photos below. These will be for Tad to take to school for his classmates and teachers and they can really get into the Montessori teaching materials!