On Sunday, I went with my family to see my ailing father, who has late-stage prostate cancer. Very late stage. He lives in northern Westchester, and though his home is not all that far away, it always takes a long time to get there. This time, the trip involved multiple forms of transportation—a car service, a MetroNorth train, and a borrowed automobile. The kids never nap well at my parents’ house and they were exhausted by the time we left to return home, after dinner. I was exhausted too, from traveling with the kids and from the draining nature of my father’s last days. I never know when I go to see him lately if it will be the last time I see him.

Traffic was light on the drive home and I managed to keep my eyes open long enough to steer us safely through the Bronx, across the Triborough Bridge, and into our home borough. I am borrowing my father’s car for the week, so after dropping the wife and kids off and helping get them settled, I had to find a parking space. It took me more than a half an hour. All of which is to say that it was approaching 10 p.m. when I got home to confront the fresh squid that was lingering on the bottom shelf of my refrigerator.

I had bought the squid the day before at the Greenmarket. We had been walking in the park and trying to decide what to eat for lunch when my three-year old, Nina, started clamoring for mussels. Mussels are easy to cook, so I headed over to buy some. As sometimes happens to me when I stand before the fishmonger’s offerings, I lost my head. I bought mussels, flounder, and squid. For no real reason other than it seemed like a good idea at the time. The flounder I ate for lunch. The kids had the mussels for dinner, and I planned on cooking the squid for an easy lunch on our trip to visit my father. But I never got around to it. The fishmonger told me that the squid could go one day, and that was it.

I wasn’t really hungry, having eaten some pea soup before leaving my fathers’ (as well as a pile of Thin Mint Girl Scout Cookies on the way home courtesy of my wife, Santa Maria, who poached them from my mother’s freezer). Still I needed to cook up the squid.

I sliced it into rings and heated two cast-iron frying pans on the stove until they were smoking. I poured olive oil in and wondered about the flash point of olive oil (what would I do if it burst into flames?) and then tossed in the squid. I scorched it and salted it. It was great. Done in a matter of minutes. I nibbled some before going to bed and then put the leftovers in the refrigerator, not certain what to do with the rest. I’ll address that tonight, hopefully before ten.

Occasionally, I get confused about what to eat. Take today, for example. I took the children to the daycare center in my office building so Santa Maria could have time to work. We’ve started doing this about once a week, and when we do we promise the kids pizza when we get home. They love it. We love not having to clean up and not having to cook.

But pizza is not what I call dinner, at least not for myself. Not often, anyway (the infrequent trip to Patsy’s or some similar thin-crust specialist aside). I knew I would not get enough to eat for dinner so I had a big afternoon snack—three glasses of milk, a yogurt, a banana, and a piece of pound cake (it’s shouldn’t be a suprise that I have the emotional maturity of a teenager; I still have the gastronomical capacity of one). Then I had a slice of pizza with the kids.

When I got home I was somewhat full, but not at all satisfied. Did I need to cook dinner for myself or not? I was confused. Hungry or not? I had
a craving for vegetables though, green vegetables. This much I knew. I took some broccoli out of the refrigerator and steamed up a head for Santa Maria and myself. The kids were in bed and we were lazily eating what we could find. Santa Maria supplemented her broccoli with leftover Indian food. I popped some frozen empanadas in the oven (I had determined that I was hungry). Once the broccoli was done, we started to eat it out of the pot (we were hungry, after all).

Santa Maria left her broccoli plain. I looked at mine and recalled an article I’d seen in the New York Times on Monday, which had a special section on children and health. It was called the six mistakes parents make when feeding their children. One of them, apparently, is to serve plain, boring vegetables. (We don’t do that with our kids. They love broccoli dressed with a balsamic vinaigrette). The article said it was a mistake not to add a sauce to vegetables, and not just for taste. It said that some fat in the sauce could unlock the fat soluble vitamins in the vegetable. Who knew?

In any event, I decided to put some olive oil and sea salt on the broccoli. This might sound boring, but it was anything but. The olive oil was fruity and the sea salt crunchy. The combination was so good, I would do it again as a side dish for a dinner party. The recipe couldn’t be simpler:

1 head of broccoli, washed, chopped, and steamed.

Olive oil and salt to taste.

Delicious.

My wife, Santa Maria, and I had made plans to go out last night. Faulty plans, I should add. Faulty plans that were mostly my fault. We’d been invited, through my job, to the fifth anniversary of a very fancy restaurant in Manhattan that shall remain nameless. We were excited to go.  Santa Maria went to great length to find a babysitter who could work for the evening.  Our regular babysitter couldn’t work, but her cousin Evie could. Then, the night before, our eldest, Nina, kept us up with requests for water and trips to the bathroom. We didn’t get any sleep, and we were exhausted, and I decided that we shouldn’t go out. Santa Maria tried to cancel Evie, but she couldn’t reach her because her cell phone was broken. She was coming in from her home in New Jersey to work the night for us and she is our regular babysitter’s family; we couldn’t send her away when she arrived. So we decided to go to a local restaurant that we adore, and that we don’t often get to visit, Al Di La. Unfortunately, half of Brooklyn also adores Al Di La, and it was full when we got there. We were too tired to wait for a table so we decided to go home and pay the Evie for more than the hour we had been away from the kids. Evie protested, but in the end we paid her forty dollars. We were still hungry, so we ate the Bolognese I’d made that morning. I felt lucky to get the table.

I’ve gotten so quick at making some of my favorite dishes that I could make them in my sleep. Which is a good thing, because I’m often half asleep these days. Having two young children is the most taxing thing I’ve ever experienced. Only recently did I come to fully understand the Army’s old advertising slogan, “We do more before six A.M. than most people do in a day.” I heard that as a young man and thought, “wow, they are productive, early risers.” But now, after a year of waking before dawn, I know that to do something before six A.M. means you don’t just get up early, you don’t get much sleep.

Last night was one of those nights, although I didn’t do much more before six A.M   than get my three-year old sippy cups of water. I know I didn’t sleep. And that I probably wouldn’t have cut it in the army, unless I was a cook. For in my bleary eyed, heavy limbed, and foggy-mind state, I did make a mighty tasty Bolognese sauce this morning. I’ll consider the arguments about the best ways to make Bolognese when I’m less sleep deprived. In the meantime, I’ll leave you with my recipe.

Stay at Stove Dad’s Basic Bolognese 

• 1 onion, chopped
• 2-3 carrots, chopped
• 1 stalk of celery, chopped
• 2 slices of bacon, chopped
• 1 cup chicken stock
• 1/2 cup white wine
• 1 1/2 lbs. ground beef
• 3 cans of peeled plum tomatoes, diced to bits with an immersion blender
• Cinnamon and nutmeg to taste
• Saute the onion, carrot, celery, and bacon until the vegetables are soft and the bacon fat rendered.

Add the beef and cook it until it is brown (crushing it with a potato masher to make bits of meat small).

Ad the wine and cook it off.

Add the stock and the tomatoes and the spices and simmer until thick (about three hours).

Note:  It freezes very well.

Last night we ate our big seafood feast: Mussels cooked in a cast iron frying pan with nothing but their smoky juices. I got this recipe from a column by Mark Bittman years ago. It couldn’t be easier: clean the mussels, put them in a cast-iron frying pan in a single layer, and cook until they release their juices and those juices bubble off. I never really liked mussels until I had them this way. My wife Santa Maria loves them. And so does Nina, my three year old. They’ve been a bit of a hard sell for my toddler, Pinta, though she has shown a great interest in chewing on the salty shells and shattering them in her mouth. Last night things changed. She started gobbling up mussels themselves.

The second half of the meal was spaghetti with clams in a white wine sauce. The first time I had this dish was when I was a teenager and I was working at a retail fish market.

One of my coworkers was a down-on-his luck chef who was working off a debt to the store owner from his failed restaurant by putting in hours behind the counter slinging fish. Johnny, a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America, was a big bearded fellow who drove a massive tan Cadillac and enjoyed a life of excess. One afternoon he decided to make lunch. He gathered some little neck clams, chopped some garlic and parsley, and threw it in a pot with some parsley and white wine. He said it was going to be so good that it “will make your socks go up and down.” And it did.

I’ve been serving the same dish to my family for a while now. Nina is usually full from eating mussels by the time it reaches the table and she’s not so keen on the clams (in all fairness to her, they usually get overcooked, which is how it goes while getting all this food to the table). Last night, she needed some persuasion to eat the clams with her pasta. I said they’re just like the mussels and you’ll like them. Saying that she’ll like something is usually a way of insuring that she won’t eat it. Yet last night, she quietly did. And then she exclaimed, “You are right, they are really good.”

This afternoon I was cleaning mussels for our weekly seafood feast (mussels cooked dry in a frying pan; more on this later, I promise, as it is the best way I’ve ever had mussels and spaghetti a la vongole) when I noticed something odd. We get our mussels from our local greenmarket, which has the freshest fish in the city. I rinse them, pull the beards, and make sure they are alive and ready to be eaten. Some of the mussels, I noticed, had snails attached to their shells. As a matter of course, I pulled them off and discarded them. I’ve seen this before, but today I had so many of them that I could have made a meal of them. Or at least an appetizer. Yet I didn’t, because I didn’t know what they were. Once, before we had children, we took a trip to San Sebastian, in Spain. When we were there we had the most delicious street food–caracolitos, or some kind of snails from the sea. We at them by using pins to pick them from their shells and marveled at their taste. Could these have been just as good? I’ll never know. Having grown up in the suburbs and moved to the city, I have a fear of the natural world. If a food doesn’t come packaged or at least labeled in a way that I can understand, I don’t know what to do with it. Knowing what to do with caracdolitos is not a problem for others. Apparently they are good for more than just eating.

My name is John Donohue, and this blog chronicles my efforts to feed myself and my family. I write it with the hope of making this essential task easier and more delicious for all who stop by here. Plus, it helps me remember what I ate for dinner.

I am a journalist, artist, and digital marketer based in New York. I have two children, and I’ve published one book, “Man with a Pan: Culinary Adventures of Fathers who Cook for their Families,” a best-selling anthology featuring recipes and essays by Mario Batali, Mark Bittman, Mark Kurlansky, Jim Harrison, Stephen King, and many others. You can find it here. My cartoons have appeared in The New Yorker, where for many years I was an editor in the Goings On About Town section. I have a daily drawing practice and my subjects range from my dish rack to All the Restaurants in New York (coming soon).

Dramatis Personae

The Family

John: the father and author.

Nina: his eldest, who was five when this blog started but is now much older.

Pinta: his youngest, who was three at the start of these musings and is now, like her sister, growing up.

Santa Maria: the wife and mother, who has remained faithful through it all.

The Extended Family

The Abuelita: John’s mother.

The GP and the GM, short for grand-père and grand-mère: Santa Maria’s parents. (So christened because of the GM’s interest in giving scatological subjects a Continental veneer:she prefers that her grandchildren say “petard” for fart, and “caca” for poop.

The Friends, who early on made more frequent appearances but whose presence has lagged.

de Balboa: a Manhattan-based writer and fan of all things Italian.

Vasca Nuñez: his wife and the mother of their two young children.

Vespucci: a Manhattan-based writer and fisherman.

Ameriga: Vespucci’s esteemed girlfriend and the mother of his youngest.

Jim Blandings: A professional musician with a country house.

Muriel Blandings: His wife.

(Some names have been changed to protect the innocent.)

Buddhists say, more or less, that if one is unhappy while doing the dishes, then one isn’t really doing the dishes at all. When I was cleaning up this evening, I wasn’t exactly unhappy, but I was distracted by a few thoughts. Such as “What do we remember learning? And how does it help or hinder us as we grow?” When I was little, I played with childish things. Now that I’m older… Well anyway, we don’t have a dishwasher, so I was up to my elbows in suds.

One of the challenges of washing dishes for a family of four is fitting all the clean dishes into the dish rack to dry. I do not believe in hand drying the dishes at night. Why not let them dry on their own and put them away in the morning? Often, though, there isn’t enough room in the rack for all the dishes, and I’m forced to stop and dry a few. Tonight,  I happened to have washed all the smaller cups and kids bowls before I got to the big pots and pans. As I did this, I noticed that I had plenty of room to pile those on top of the others.

This notion of putting the smaller items in the rack first contradicted a lesson I’ve been holding onto for all my life. When I was a child and I had to put away my Lincoln Logs, I learned that the only way to get the pile of them back into the can was to put the big ones in the first. Tonight I discovered that we can learn more by dropping the lessons of our youth. Sometimes the opposite of what you know is best.