Lunch

Poached Chicken For School Lunch

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Poached_chicken_lunch
The first full week of public school wrapped up here
recently, and in deft move by higher powers, the reward seems to be two days
off—there’s no school Monday or Tuesday, because of Rosh Hashanah. So, just
when I’m up to speed making school lunches in the morning, my services are not
needed.

Not that I’m complaining. Making lunch every day is both a
blessing and a, er, vexation. The clock is always ticking, and there never
seems to be enough time in the morning. And finding the time to shop and make
sure everything you need is on hand is a real labor. Having had a few years
experience doing this, though, I have a few things down pat, and recently, I
was asked by Saveur.com to write about what I make each day for my children. I
talked about sandwiches—my salvation for the past few years has been the
sunflower-butter sandwich (and more recently, a red-pepper-humus sandwich) that
my girls would eat without fail. Every day.

I was slightly ashamed about serving them the same thing all
the time, but the exigencies of the working life always trumped my culinary
concerns. I mentioned this in the Saveur article, ending it by saying that “The
lack of variety, though, is something I'd like to work on!”

The miracle of children, of course, is that they are forever
giving us opportunities to work on things, and just after I wrote that Saveur
item, Nina said to me that she’d like some other items in her lunch, such as
cold chicken. I was a bit shocked that she would be so specific, but glad, too,
to get such healthy direction from her. 
I jumped on the case.

Lately, I’ve been buying an extra whole chicken each week,
and cutting it up myself to make various dishes. It’s slightly more economical
to do this (rather than buying pre-cut breasts or legs, for example), though
buying organic, as I do, renders the whole idea of saving money a bit silly,
but never mind that for now. So, I happened to have two breasts of chicken,
bone in, waiting in my fridge when Nina made her request for cold chicken in
her lunch.

I love poaching chicken breasts because the meat plumps up,
stays moist, and takes on the flavor of the poaching liquid. I fill a pot with
water, turn the heat to high, drop the meat in, and add the following:

 
Dried_thyme

I start with a good shake of dried thyme, as it’s something
that I always have around the house, and it’s flavor can’t be beat.

 
Salt

Then I add salt; another good shake right out of the container is fine.

 
White_wine_for_Poaching

And, of course a good pour of white wine. It’s a nice way to
use up a bottle that’s been open for a few days, and maybe on the edge of its
drinkability.

Poached_chicken_two

I cover it, and once the water comes to a boil, I turn it
down to a low simmer. The chicken is done when it’s internal temperature is
about 165 degrees. It will take about ten to fifiteen minutes or so.

The cooking itself infuses the whole kitchen with some
lovely scents. When I was making this last weekend, I brought Nina over to
enjoy the aroma. I lifted the lid of the pot, and a nice cloud of wine and thyme
floated over towards her nose. I said, “Do you know what that is?” She shook
her head. “It’s thyme,” answered. Her face lit up, and she said, “I’d like to put some in my room so it would
smell like that."

Damn-the-Tornadoes Corn-Tomato-Feta Salad

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Corn_Tomatoes_Salad Up North, there were clouds and showers every day, but the dramatic setting and the great company made up for it. I was joined by a bunch of
really entertaining food bloggers—Cannelle et Vanille, Family Fresh Cooking, A Less
Processed Life, Sippity Sup, La Tartine Gourmande, and The Wicked Noodle—who
have already (or will soon, I suspect) start telling their versions of the
trip, and I encourage you to check out their postings.

I’ll be telling my Alaskan tales soon enough, but what I
want talk about today is something that the two chefs on the trip, Dan Enos, of
The Oceanaire Seafood Room, in Boston, and Patrick Hoogerhyde, of The Bridge,
in Anchorage, kept mentioning. And that is “Flavor Profiles.” They kept saying
that each fish or mollusk had its own flavor profile, and that was what
mattered most.

Restaurateurs, of course have their own set of concerns,
such as how to satisfy each “guest,” as they kept calling their customers. Home
cooks who work full-time have another set of concerns, such as how to remain employed
and find the time to shop, or how to use up that feta you happened to have
bought too much of and that is at risk of going to seed in the back of the fridge.
Home-cooking working parents have yet another set of concerns, such as how to
do all the above and not end up with TMJ, an ulcer, or divorce.

I kept the idea of balancing flavor profiles in mind on
Saturday morning when I was rushing to make lunch for a quixotic trip to the
beach. We thought we could enjoy one last summer day at the shore, but it ended
up raining on us, which reminded me of my trip to Alaska (and those two twisters made me think of Kansas).

I made simple sandwiches for Nina and Pinta, but I wanted
something savory and satisfying for myself and Santa Maria. I had a bit of corn
on the cob left over from the night before, and I had that aforementioned feta.
Also, I knew I had an extra tomato, so I was three-quarters of the way to a
decent salad. I added some olives to give the salad a bit of salt, and I
dressed it with a cider vinegar to give it a bit of sweet acid. To give it a
bit of a bite, I tossed in dried oregano and thyme, but if I had any fresh
herbs on hand I would have used those instead. Finally, I finished it with
olive oil, because that is good on everything.

We ate the salad in the car after giving up on the rainy
beach. The dressing had collected in the bottom of the container, and once the salad
was gone, we sopped it all up with ends of fresh bread. Like Alaska, it didn’t
matter that it had rained—the food was so good.

Quick Damn-the-Tornadoes Summer Feta Tomato Salad 

  • 1 ripe tomato, chopped
  • An ear or two of cooked corn, kernels sliced off the cob
  • Feta to taste, chopped
  • ¼ to ½ onion, diced
  • A handful of black olives, cut into quarters.
  • Dried oregano and thyme, to taste (or other fresh herbs if available)
  • Cider vinegar and olive oil, to taste.

Combine the ingredients in a bowl, and serve with fresh
bread.

 

Memorial Day Surprise: Limes in my Dhal

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Old_ginger, makes videos about food and families, and this past weekend we traveled to her alma mater to give a talk during reunion weekend. It was called “7 Secrets to Transforming the Way We Eat — in Our Kitchens and in Our Country,” and my half of the talk featured many of the cartoons I’ve posted here, along with many of the tips I’ve mentioned, including the following: "Secret Number 2: Keep a Fully Stocked Larder."

So, you can imagine my surprise and chagrin this morning when, back at home and halfway through my favorite dhal recipe, I had to stop cooking because I was short two key ingredients. The only ginger I could find in the fridge was a shriveled piece that looked more like a witch’s knuckle than anything I could cook with (the bit of green mold was a nice touch). And I was fresh out of lemons.

Santa Maria was out on a bike ride, so I frantically texted her. She picked up the ginger, but the coop didn’t have any lemons. There must have been a memorial-day run on lemonade. Or maybe it has been the warm winter and early spring that has caused a shortage. Apparently, the weather has caused massive troubles for Good Humor, which, the Wall Street Journal is reporting, has run out of its famous Toasted Almond Bar for the whole summer. Because of the high demand during the warm spring, their whole supply is gone. 

But I wasn’t going to let global warming stop me from making my dhal. Luckily, I had limes on hand that I could substitute, and they worked just fine. I used them same way as the lemons, but took them out a bit earlier to keep the soup from getting bitter. 

Red Lentil Dhal

  • Olive oil
  • 1 onion quartered lengthwise and thinly sliced crosswise 
  • 2 bay leaves 
  • One 2 inch or so cinnamon stick 
  • 2 teaspoons (or more) of minced fresh ginger 
  • 3 cloves of garlic 
  • 1 dash of cayenne pepper 
  • 2 cups small red lentils, about a pound, rinsed
  • 1 lemon, halved and juiced (seeds removed) or a lime!
  • 3 or 4 cups of chicken stock 
  • 3 or 4 cups of hot water  
  • 1 teaspoon salt 

Heat the oil in a heavy sauce pan

Add the onion, bay leaves, and cinnamon stick
Saute until the onions are translucent
Add the garlic and the ginger and the cayenne
Continue cooking another few minutes
Add the lentils and stir to coat them with oil
Add the chicken stock and the water
Add the lemon juice and the squeezed halves of the fruit
Add the salt
Bring to a boil
Reduce to a simmer
Cook for about a half hour, until the onions mostly break up and the lentils more or less dissolve. If it looks like it needs more water, add some. 
Notes:
This freezes remarkably well. It is best served with rice. To make it more fancy, caramelize some onions to go on top, along with some plain yogurt, and some chopped cilantro. 

 

Lentil Bulgur Soup with Andouille Sausage

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Andouille

I think of my freezer as a metaphor for my life. Recently, I reorganized it, and I can now see clearly what’s going on there. In the freezer, that is. Not my life. I'm still working on that. 

I have my bread lined upon one side of it, my prepared foods (Bolognese, dhal, black beans, etc) on another. I put all the loose little bags of frozen corn, peas, and other vegetables in a clear plastic bread bag, and I gathered my stock of frozen salmon fillets into another one. I put all my meats together, and now everything is in its place.

My little exercise paid some benefits—I discovered a lone D'Artagnan Andouille Sausage, left over, presumably, from making black-eyed peas at New Year’s. I love that sausage, and I always thought it would go well in my lentil-bulgur soup. I love that soup, but my metabolism has always demanded that I eat more that it at one sitting. I figured the sausage would cure that.

Adding the sausage is a bit of a sacrilege, of course, because the recipe for the lentil-bulgur soup comes from "Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant," a vegetarian cookbook classic. But I’m not actually a vegetarian, so I didn’t hesitate. For me to worry about adding meat to the soup would have been a little like an atheist worrying about not getting into heaven.

So I whipped up a batch this morning. That sausage is so spicy and smoky it made the soup into something more like a chili. And one bowl left me more than satisfied. This is what a bit of clarity brought me today. 

Lentil Bulgur Soup with Andouille Sausage

 

  • 1 cup lentils
  • 5 cups water (or chicken or vegetable stock)
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • Olive Oil
  • 1 large onion, chopped
  • 3 cloves garlic, chopped
  • A dash cayenne
  • 2 bay leaves
  • 1/2 cup raw bulgur
  • 1/4 cup chopped fresh parsley
  • 1 28-ounce can peeled plum tomatoes, chopped
  • 1/4 cup tomato paste
  • Pinch of dried rosemary
  • Salt and pepper, to taste
  • 1 Andouille sausage, cut into pieces

 

Rinse the lentils and bring them to a boil in the salted water or stock. Reduce heat to a simmer and cook, covered, for about forty minutes.

While the lentils are cooking, heat the olive oil in a heavy soup pot and saute the onions until they are translucent.

Add the garlic, cayenne, bay leaves, and bulgur. Stir, until the onions and bulgur are lightly browned.

Mix in the tomatoes and parsley.

Pour the cooked lentils into the pot.

Add the tomato paste and rosemary.

Simmer for another 15 minutes or so; until the lentils are tender. If the soup looks too dry, add some boiling water or hot stock.

Add the sausage and cook for about five more minutes.

Remove the bay leaves and serve, stirring in fresh spinach if you have it.

Sardines, a Quick and Easy Lunch Unless You’ve Been to Art School

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Sardines_Lunch
I wanted to write about the savory rabbit stew that I made while on vacation in Lake Placid, but I’ve encountered a small problem. I know I’m a food blogger, but I often get so hungry after making a meal that I forget to photograph it before I’ve eaten it. So it was with the rabbit stew. I don't have a decent photo of it.

I have some nice shots of the early steps, such as when I was sautéing the leeks and adding the mushrooms (are you hooked, yet?), but none of the actual rabbit stew. So I’ve decided to draw a picture to represent the dish, but I won’t get to that until over the weekend.

In the meantime, I do have a nice snapshot of one of the lunches I ate while away: sardines, bread, olives, and pistachios. I was inspired to try sardines after reading a chapter on them in a lovely book I recently came across, “What We Eat When We Eat Alone: Stories and 100 Recipes,” by Deborah Madison and Patrick McFarlin. The two are husband and wife, and the husband is an illustrator. The book is an entertaining collection of stories and recipes, but what I liked best were the drawings. In the chapter about sardines, McFarlin admits that he can no longer eat them—he had too many, too often, when he was in art school.

I never had the chance to go to art school, so when I swallow one of the salty and oily fillets, I engage in a bit of play. I pretend I’m in art school, and that makes them taste all the better.

I mention the meal because lately I’ve been bringing lunch to work to save money. I think a couple of slices of bread, some sardines, and a side of olives and nuts will soon become a staple of my diet. Art school was always something I wanted to go to.

What quick, easy, and healthy lunches do you make for yourself, if any? I could use a few more ideas.  

Croque Monsieur

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Croque_monsieur
I was making lunch for Nina and Pinta yesterday, and our options were limited. At least that’s what Nina thought. I had cooked up a batch of dhal, but that only satisfied Pinta. Her older sister wanted a grilled cheese, but we were short on cheddar, so that made things difficult. Santa Maria suggested using Parmesan, but I didn’t think that would quite work.

Nina had a solution. “What about gruyère?” she said, “does that melt well?”

“Yes, it does,” I said, remembering that we had a bit in the fridge.

“And can you make that sandwich with the ham and two pieces of bread?” she asked.

“A Croque Monsieur?” I said. “Yes, we can. We do have ham and gruyère.”

She started to run around the house crying “Croque Monsieur, Croque Monsieur, Croque Monsieur!”

And so it was. We had Croques Monsieurs for lunch. Along with the dahl.

 

Croque Monsieur

  • A few slices of ham
  • Two pieces of bread
  • Butter
  • A few slices of gruyère (or other cheese such as cheddar, which I combined with the gruyère because that’s all we had on hand)

 

Sauté the ham until it is brown on each side.

While the ham is cooking, butter the bread on one side, and put it in a frying pan on low heat butter side up.

As soon as the bread is warm, but not toasted, flip it so the butter side is down.

Place cheese on each piece of bread, and put a slice (or more) of the ham on one side of the bread.

Flip one piece of bread so it makes a sandwich with the other, with the ham in the middle.

Toast on a low heat until the cheese is melted and the bread is toasted. Use a weight, such as a kettle, to compress the sanwich to speed things up.

Red Lentil Dhal Saves The Day

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Word-search
James Joyce's last words were "Does nobody understand?" I ocassionally think of this while trying to make plans with friends and family members. Despite, (or is it because of?) the ease of text messages, emails, Facebook postings, tweets, and other means of staying in touch, communicating with loved ones can be a little bit like modernist literature: utterly confusing.

So it was over the weekend, when plans with old friends suddenly coalesced around a midday walk in the park with the kids. To any ordinary human, this might seem perfectly sensible, but it sent my mind racing. I quickly wondered, “What will we eat? What can I serve them?”

Because I’m constantly obsessing about food, my larder is almost always well stocked (after my trip to the store this week, Santa Maria started a new shopping list with the words “NO MORE CHEESE” written atop it). After a moment’s thought, I conjured a quick answer: my old favorite, spicy red-lentil dhal. It takes less than an hour to make, and, after all, I already had a pot of rice cooked, and waiting, in the fridge.

Red Lentil Dhal
  • Olive oil
  • 1 onion quartered lengthwise and thinly sliced crosswise 
  • 2 bay leaves 
  • One 2 inch or so cinnamon stick 
  • 2 teaspoons (or more) of minced fresh ginger 
  • 3 cloves of garlic 
  • 1 dash of cayenne pepper 
  • 2 cups small red lentils, about a pound, rinsed
  • 1 lemon, halved and juiced (seeds removed) 
  • 3 or 4 cups of chicken stock 
  • 3 or 4 cups of hot water  
  • 1 teaspoon salt 

Heat the oil in a heavy sauce pan

Add the onion, bay leaves, and cinnamon stick
Saute until the onions are translucent
Add the garlic and the ginger and the cayenne
Continue cooking another few minutes
Add the lentils and stir to coat them with oil
Add the chicken stock and the water
Add the lemon juice and the squeezed halves of the fruit
Add the salt
Bring to a boil
Reduce to a simmer
Cook for about a half hour, until the onions mostly break up and the lentils more or less dissolve. If it looks like it needs more water, add some. 
Notes:
This freezes remarkably well. It is best served with rice. To make it more fancy, caramelize some onions to go on top, along with some plain yogurt, and some chopped cilantro. 

The Sound of Blood Sugar Rising

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How certain behaviors are handed down through the generations is of great interest to me. I'm a legendarily bad-tempered hungry person. It runs in my family. My father was iritable when he was peckish. My siblings and I get "cranky" if our blood sugar dips for more than ten minutes. It's a terrible personality trait, but it can't seem to be helped. I'm tall and thin and well known for my high metabolism. This is clearly a genetic issue. Nina and Pinta? Here's how they are developing.

On Saturday, they went to a birthday party. I figured lunch would be served, at least pizza. It wasn't. Their midday meal consisted of cake with a cupcake chaser.

About forty-five minutes after we got home, a piece of chalk went astray on the floor, and this precipitated a series of sharp comments between the girls. Tears, and an "I-hate-my-sister" moment followed.

Don't ask me what happened. I was busy getting their lunch–grilled cheese, which I made using slices from the magical Leviathan loaf that I wrote about in yesterday's post about French Toast. I cut the bread extremely thin, and went for a high cheese-to-carbohydrate ratio, based on the theory that they had had plenty of calories that afternoon. What they needed was a bit of protein.

The girls eventually made it to the table and ate their lunch. Midway through their sandwiches, Pinta started reciting a nonsense word of her own devising, "bombacolupio." A few bites later, "bombacolupio" was a refrain in a duet they were singing. And by the time they had finished, there was a Bombacolupio dance, and a whole lot of laughter. Genetics at work?

Open-Face Grilled Cheese

  • Slices of bread
  • Slices of cheddar cheese

Place the bread on a baking sheet and lay the cheese slices on the bread.

Place under the broiler until the cheese has melted.

Created by Man: Leftovers

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Cylon_Race

The refrigerator in our new apartment has a surprising feature—it beeps when the door is left ajar. We hear its high-pitched call every now and again, and, since we’ve lately been watching old episodes of “Battlestar Galactica” on Netflix, Santa Maria has taken to saying “Is that a Cylon?

The refrigerator also beeps when you stand in front of it with the door open for a while. If I had a teenage son, who might be inclined to stand there and drink milk from the spout of a gallon jug, the beeping might come in handy. As it is now, it just beeps at us when we’re doing more mundane tasks, such as going through it to see what’s on each shelf a week after shopping.

Last night, Santa Maria and I were doing just that, reviewing what was left in there, what needed to be thrown out, what could be frozen, and what could be eaten later. Shopping for a family is a tricky thing. Buy too little, and you’ll find yourself short of a key ingredient on a cold weeknight. Buy too much, and you’re wasting food and money.

I couldn’t have foreseen the strep throat last week, and I neglected to consider what it would mean to be out of town shooting a video. Long story, short: I was left with a half-eaten roast chicken, two whole chickens, two pork loins, and a batch of Puttanesca. Clearly I had too much food on hand. What to do?

One of the chickens had a sell-by date of the 19th. I’ll make soup with that. One of the tastiest chicken soups I ever made was with a stinky old bird, and I wouldn’t mind replicating that experience. The other bird has a sell-by day of the 23rd, so I have time to cook that up later in the week. I froze the Puttanesca.

I picked the half-eaten roast chicken, and made a salad using a bit of celery, onion, fresh ginger, and lime. I plan on eating that for lunch today, and I’ll let you know how it tastes. As for the beeping fridge, I think it would be most useful if it beeped when I was buying too much food. I hate to see anything go to waste. How do you all handle the big shop, leftovers, and having too much food on hand?

Sweet Talking: A Lentil Bulgur Soup Recipe

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Kitchen1
Long before I was married, I had a dream of what my domestic life would eventually look like. I saw a place where a large pot of something—a stew, a soup, a sauce—was always simmering on the stove. I’ve started to realize that vision, slowly.

When Pinta was very young, she had the charming habit of waking at about 5:00, and not going back to sleep. I would let Santa Maria stay in bed, and I would get up to take care of her. There was much I didn’t enjoy about this period of my life, but rising at that early hour gave me time to cook, which I liked.

These days, I’m better rested (we’re all better rested), but I have to scramble to get my cooking done. Lately, I’ve been making that big magical pot of food on the weekends.

One Saturday earlier this month, I made my dhal. Last Saturday, I made another old favorite, a Turkish lentil soup from the “Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant” cookbook. This lentil soup is different from any other that I’ve ever tasted. It is made with bulgur wheat, which releases a sweet and divine aroma when it is browned in the pan. Adding bulgur to the lentils makes for a complete protein, so the soup is very filling. It is seasoned with rosemary, and I just love it. Finished with fresh spinach, it really is a complete meal.

My girls, on the other hand, don’t care for it. They prefer Progresso’s canned lentil soup. They haven’t been reacting well to what I’ve been serving lately, but it won’t stop me from making good food for them. I tried using an immersion blender to puree the soup and its onions, but I wouldn’t suggest that. It made the soup look ugly and taste a bit weird. Pinta wasn’t fooled, and she chose not to eat any. She went hungry. Nina ate a bit (the blended version didn’t taste that bad), but she wasn’t really keen on it.

Earlier, when the soup was simmering, I took down a can of the Progresso soup and read the label to Nina. It’s a very healthy soup (aside from any BPA concerns), but I was surprised to read that sugar is among its ingredients. I shouldn’t have been. Many commercial foods cheat with a bit of sugar to hook the consumer. When I gave Nina my Turkish lentil soup, she tasted it and said, “It needs sugar, dad.” Believe, me, it doesn’t.

Turkish Lentil Bulgur Soup

  • 1 cup lentils
  • 5 cups water (or chicken or vegetable stock)
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • Olive Oil
  • 1 large onion, chopped
  • 3 cloves garlic, chopped
  • A dash cayenne
  • 2 bay leaves
  • 1/2 cup raw bulgur
  • 1/4 cup chopped fresh parsley
  • 1 28-ounce can peeled plum tomatoes
  • 1/4 cup tomato paste
  • Pinch of dried rosemary
  • Salt and pepper, to taste
  • 2 cups washed baby spinach

 

Rinse the lentils and bring them to a boil in the salted water or stock. Reduce heat to a simmer and cook, covered, for about forty minutes.

While the lentils are cooking, heat the olive oil in a heavy soup pot and saute the onions until they are translucent.

Add the garlic, cayenne, bay leaves, and bulgur. Stir, until the onions and bulgur are lightly browned.

Mix in the tomatoes and parsley.

Pour the cooked lentils into the pot.

Add the tomato paste and rosemary.

Simmer for another 15 minutes or so; until the lentils are tender. If the soup looks too dry, add some boiling water or hot stock.

Remove the bay leaves and serve, stirring the fresh spinach into the soup (I do this in each serving bowl) until it wilts. Garnish with more parsley, if you would like.