cooking dads

Do’s and Don’ts of Making Pesto: A Taste of “Man With a Pan”

by

MapleBat8
On a recent Saturday, while walking to the Green Market, Pinta remarked that she missed my pesto, which we haven't had since last summer. I was touched, and her comment got me to thinking about one of the interviews from my forthcoming book, "Man With a Pan: Culinary Adventures of Fathers who Cook for their Families." Henry Schenck, a mathematician with the University of Illinois and the father of three, revealed one of his early experiments with making pesto.

Once, when I was learning to make pesto, which I make with a mix of spinach and basil, I had trouble with the greens, which were sitting up above the blade of the blender. I hadn’t added the olive oil, and I thought I could tamp them down with a wooden spoon. I tried this, of course turning off the blender first. But, then they immediately went back to the top.  And then I tamped them down again, and they went back up to the top. I decided to tamp them down while the blender was running. It turns out, it’s rather hard to estimate how close the wooden spoon can get to those swirling blades. The wooden spoon hit the swirling blades, and I learned that pesto can become a projectile. It hit the ceiling, and the chunk of the wooden spoon that surrendered to the blades fragmented. The pesto had a bit of a woody taste. Usually you hear woody associated with a red wine, but this was woody pesto. I tried to pass it off as a “chunky, oaky” new version, but my wife soon put together the big green splotch on the ceiling of the kitchen with the woody taste in the pesto. My advice: Turn off the blender before putting in the wooden spoon. Turn off the food processor.

When we returned from the Green Market, I looked in the freezer and found a bit of pesto for Pinta. She was delighted, and I was relieved. That's one of the nice things about the sauce, it keeps very well.

Spinach-Basil Pesto

  • 1 medium-sized head of basil (about the size that is typically sold as a unit in stores)
  • An equal amount of spinach.
  • ½ cup nuts (Pine nuts are popular, although walnuts work equally well. I've also used pecans or almonds, which result in a slightly sweeter pesto.)
  • ½ cup olive oil

Rinse and wash the greens well.

Place them in food processor or blender (If the stems of basil are tender, they can be tossed in also; late in the season stems are often woody and should be discarded).

Add the nuts and the oil and blend for about twenty seconds.

Note: Most recipes call for adding ½ cup of Parmesan, but I think it works fine without it. This is also true for adding a clove of crushed garlic. Add salt to taste. Most important part: After blending, taste and add what you think it needs! For a creamier pesto, add more nuts and/or olive oil and blend longer.

Oysters Save the Day

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Oysters
This weekend I took charge of the children. Santa Maria was facing a major work deadline, and I told her that I would take care of things around the house. For me, this meant planning lunches and dinner. Saturday, I went to the greenmarket for fish. Flounder for dinner that night. Clams for dinner the next. Oysters for me.

Weekend lunches bedevil me. I reach my mental capacity planning two or three meals at a time. For Saturday lunch, I punted, and took the girls out to eat.

We’ve never been big on restaurants, partially because of the expense, and partially because I can cook better food at home than I can get at the restaurants I can afford. I’m not talking about a Per Se level of expense (though that was fun and memorable, from the black salt from Molokai to getting to drink my wine flight and most of Santa Maria's, the one time we went a few years ago and spent about a month’s rent on a meal), but I’d have to spend at least $75 a head to start tasting things that couldn’t come out of my kitchen.

There’s another reason we don’t eat out very often. Our children don’t really know how to behave in a restaurant. Once, while visiting the grandparents, I watched my preschool nieces and nephews sit patiently at a table at the Olive Garden while we pored over the menus. My kids didn’t know what to do with themselves. They wandered over to check out the food on other tables and gaze at the baffled diners.  Pinta began squealing and chasing Nina. Breadsticks became daggers. I’d like to think that they were protesting the chain restaurant (which is what I felt like doing), but the truth is less appealing. Because we eat at home, they haven’t had a chance to learn what do to while eating out.

We’re working on teaching them how to behave in a restaurant, and the only real opportunity we have to do so involves pizza. It’s the absolute surefire thing that they will both eat. And it’s best if I don’t make the pizza, as the one time I tried, I didn’t exactly succeed. A pizzeria is not necessarily the best school, however.

Our favorite low-priced option, Roma Pizza, is a typical slice joint, without waiter service (which is why we like it). The neighborhood’s go-to family pizza place, Two Boots, knows its clientele too well: kids are encouraged to run to the kitchen window, where the pizza makers toss raw dough to the kids to play with while they wait.

Campo de Fiori, which opened recently, is different. It serves slices, but they are unlike any other slices you will find in Brooklyn. Most New York City pizza is Neopolitan, round with a thin crust. Their pizza is Roman, square with a crisp but thick and airy crust.  The dough is made in Rome, frozen, and then flown to Brooklyn, where it is baked and topped with extremely fresh ingredients. Everything at the place tastes like what I would like to cook with at home. My favorite is the matriciana, full of smoky bacon and spicy tomato sauce.

I love the food at Campo de Fiori, but there’s another aspect of it that I like even more. The restaurant has a relaxed elegance. The décor is crisp, clean, and unassuming. The owners, Andrea and Yari, are welcoming hosts. I get to sit with my girls while they practice proper restaurant behavior. Andrea and Yari don’t use plastic cups. They have nice glasses. They serve the slices on little wooden planks. These little touches add up to a nice experience for me, and the girls. And apparently, I have a lot to learn myself about the Campo de Fiori. This New York Times review focuses on the pastas and other dishes that I have yet to try.

There’s one small point that makes it complicated for me to eat pizza, especially pizza as fancy and expensive as that at Campo de Fiori. It’s never really filling enough for me, unless I eat six or so pieces.

So, to prepare for my latest visit, I prepared a little snack before hand. I had six raw oysters from the Greenmarket. Raw oysters are one of life’s greatest pleasures, and they are very easy to make at home. The ones I ate on Saturday were the sweetest tasting ones I’ve ever had. I ate them in a rush, standing in my kitchen. I found a great video from Coastal Living magazine that explains how to open them. It is really very simple.

 

 

 

Long Story Short: How Is My New Black Bean Recipe Going to Turn Out?

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Black_beans
A week ago, I was at my desk in Manhattan late in the afternoon and my cell phone rang. A mother I know from around our neighborhood in Brooklyn was on the line. She was on the playground. Nina had fallen. Something about monkey bars was mentioned. The word “ambulance” registered in my brain. My cell phone is crap. It’s the one Verizon gives away. I can’t really hear anything on it. I wondered why she was calling, and not Nina's babysitter.

I called the mother back from a landline, and quickly got the story. Nina’s babysitter’s phone-battery was dead. Nina had fallen off the monkey bars. When our babysitter picked her up, Nina was groggy. There was a bit of drool, followed by a moment of panic, during which a nearby dad was enlisted to call 911. The EMTs were on their way.

About three years ago, Nina fell off a couch at a friend’s house, and hit her head. We took her to the pediatrician. She sat in the doctor’s lap and appeared to be happy. Then she vomited on the doctor, and we were off to a long night in a pediatric emergency room for a CAT scan. She turned out to be fine, but I’ve since paid attention to the high levels of radiation in a CAT scan, and I don’t want her to have another one.

In this case, Nina had fallen on her back. The wind had been knocked out of her. She was upset, but she seemed to be okay. That’s what the mother told me, though I didn’t really have any way of knowing. I was miles away, and I was stuck for a moment. If I left my desk to get on the subway, I would be without cell-phone coverage for about thirty minutes. During which time the EMTs were expected. I needed to stay where I was until I could talk to them.

The EMTs arrived and checked her out. They told me that she was fine, but because of her age they had to take her to the hospital. Apparently, if the ambulance comes in New York City for a child under five, the law says that child has to be taken in for an examination.

One of the EMTs was so sure that Nina didn’t need to go to the hospital he invited me to lie to him. “If you tell me she’s six, I won’t have to take her,” he said. I thought for a minute, and suddenly imagined Nina waking the next morning and being unable to walk. What if that happened? I told him the truth, that she was five-and-a-half, and they were on their way.

I hate going to emergency rooms. Often you have to wait for hours. Often they are confusing. Often the staff is busy with a major medical emergency and does not have the time, energy, or patience to deal with anything else. Getting a simple question answered can be a struggle. And, I’m convinced that if you go to the emergency room, you’ll come out with a gram-negative bacteria, the Swine Flu, or something worse. Hospitals are full of germs and sick people. I avoid them like, well, the plague.

On Thursday, it was not as bad as I had feared (there was rudeness, but no superbugs), and we were out in time for dinner. This pleased me greatly. I wanted to see if Nina and Pinta would like a new black-bean recipe I’ve been working on.

It’s not really a new recipe, of course, but it is new to me. I’ve pieced it together from references on the Internet and in various cookbooks. I've been tinkering with it. The first time I made it, the kids didn’t like it. Pinta objected to the onions. Onions are non-negotiable, though, so I had to find a way to make them palatable to her. I diced them very fine for this batch.

I love black beans. They are cheap, healthy, and delicious. They can be made in advance, and then they are extremely convenient. They freeze well, and can be defrosted with impunity on the stovetop, for quick weeknight dinner, after working late for example, or on those nights when your kid ends up in the emergency room.

We sat down at the table and started eating. Pinta said to me, “you can’t taste the onions in this,” and I knew I had a hit.

Delicious Black Beans

  • 1 onion diced finely
  • 3 cloves garlic, minced
  • 2 cups dried black beans, rinsed but not soaked
  • 6 cups water
  • 1 tablespoon chopped cilantro, or more to taste
  • 1 teaspoon salt, or to taste
  • the juice of one or two limes, to taste

 

           Saute the onion in a large stock pot, using a little oil, until translucent.

           Add the garlic, saute for a minute or two more.

           Add the beans and the water, and bring to a boil.

           Turn down the heat and simmer for an hour or two, until the beans are tender.

           Add the cilantro, salt, and lime juice.

           Enjoy.

Note: I make these almost every week, and I never measure the cilantro. Just use a big bunch of it. Make sure to add the salt and lime juice at the end of cooking, and speaking of cooking, there have been days when I have started the beans on the stove in the morning, cooked them for an hour or two, turned them off, left the house, come back hours later, and finished the dish with the lime and salt. It's almost impossible to mess this up, so long as you leave enough time for it. They also freeze and reheat very well.

Cheating Heart: Leftovers are an Easy Way to Improve Quinoa Salad

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I make a quinoa salad just about every week. Santa Maria loves it, and she eats it for lunch almost daily. It's a tasty, healthy, economical, and easy-to-prepare dish. One nice thing is that it keeps. If you don't dress it, the salad will stay reasonably fresh for days. Make it Sunday night; finish it Thursday at noon.

I usually eat it once a week, but I need more protein than it provides, so I often pair it with poached chicken, or whatever leftovers I might have on hand. Yesterday, I was in a rush and I supplemented it with some prepared and marinated soy bars from the coop (which we almost always have on hand) and half a ball of mozzarella cheese. The salad is so low fat that I always need to add something rich, such as bag of potato chips or a half an avocado, to really feel full. The cheese did the trick. Like the soy bars, it was approaching the end of its usable lifespan, having lingered in the refrigerator for more than a few days. I was happy to eat them (part of my job around the house is cleaning out the refrigerator, a task I take literally), but I would not suggest it on a regular basis. It didn't taste very good.

Today, however, was a completely different story. I had a bit of the quinoa salad left in my office refrigerator, and I paired it with a real delight. Last night, Santa Maria was out at a business dinner at Community Food & Juice, a restaurant on the Upper West Side. She had the steak of the day, a slab of "sustainably raised Piedmont beef," she called it. Now I don't know if she meant that it came from Italy or from the Eastern Seaboard of the United States. I do know, though, that she brought half of it home, and gave it to me. It was delicious. I sliced it up and had it, along with a bit of the restaurant's broccoli, with my quinoa salad. I couldn't have been more pleased.

 

Super Simple Tomato Sauce Recipe for Fresh Pasta

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Ravioli
Cooking for a family often feels like running on a treadmill–keep moving, or fall off. I would like nothing more than to get out of the kitchen and spend all my energy solving our housing crisis (we’re facing eviction), but I can’t. We still have to eat.

The truth is, we are in a crazy limbo right now. Even though we will be moving out of the apartment in the near future, at the moment there’s a great peace. It is relaxing to know one’s fate, and to enjoy the absence of insane neighbors down below, screaming every time our kids run down the hallway. It’s okay now, go ahead jump and thump to your heart’s content.

Towards the end of December, I had my last last verbal interactions with the now ex-neighbors. It was a weeknight, about 7:45 when they called on the phone. The man was upset, for the umteenth-time, about the noise the kids were making. He accused me of being disrespectful because he said that we knew that he was moving out. That was a shocker. Did he have any idea how much time I spent chasing after the kids and telling them to quiet down? Did he have any idea about the anxiety their every footfall created? The man became more and more accusatory on the phone. “You won,” he said. “We’re moving out and you get to stay.”  After he got of the phone, I sat down and thought about his call. I suddenly realized what day it was. It was the final day of December. He was calling to complain about the noise of two little kids playing at 8 pm on New Year’s Eve!

They are gone, now, so there are no more phone calls. And while we plot our next move, I have time to spare in the kitchen. They say that behind every great man, there’s a woman. I don’t know about that, but, in my case, behind every great dinner, there’s a woman (and two girls). Yesterday, Santa Maria proposed that we make fresh ravioli with pork, porcini, and parmesan stuffing. I was game. It is one of my old favorite dishes.

We’ve made fresh pasta three or four times before. The first time was years ago, before we had kids. It was one of the most revelatory cooking experiences I’ve ever had. Nothing I’d ever made tasted as wildly different than what I expected and as uniquely delicious as fresh pasta. That first time was remarkable.

We still haven’t quite mastered the technique of rolling out the dough and cutting the pasta, though Santa Maria might have a different opinion. She’s the one who, with her baking experience, tends to take care of this task. Our guidebook in to the country of fresh pasta is Mark Bittman’s ever-useful “How to Cook Everything.” He gives tips and techniques about making the dough (it’s easy, but not as easy as he makes it out to be), and basically it comes down to mixing flour, eggs, salt, and a bit of water into an easy to work dough.

Santa Maria makes the ravioli after I take care of the stuffing. It is a mix of ground pork, garlic, red wine, and chopped porcini. I’m not completely content with the way the ravioli turned out. They were mighty delicious, but I want to refine the recipe and method a bit more before share how to cook them.

Before cooking last night, I took a look through Marcella Hazan’s “Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking.” She goes into a bit more detail than Bittman, and soon, perhaps as soon as we find that future apartment with an open kitchen and acres of counter space, I’ll try some of the things she recommends. First order of business: finding “a good lumber-supply house” to cut a pasta rolling pin from a hardwood dowel. Make that the second order of business. The first one will be getting a pasta rolling machine. That will simplify my life.

I did learn something exceedingly useful from reading Hazan, and that is how to make a simple and delicious marinara sauce for the ravioli. I used to make a sauce with butter, canned tomatoes, and a diced onion. My kids have that typical fear of onions, though: they don’t like to see them in their food. They don’t dislike the taste. I know, because I watched Nina recently devour a hot, buttered bialy (just picture the confused look on her face when I told her it was full of onions.)

I was contemplating a way to make the sauce so they would eat it (i.e. with no onions visible), when I came across Hazan’s recipe. It is genius. She calls for the same ingredients–tomatoes, onions, and butter–but she simply says to cut the onion in half and let it simmer in the sauce for forty-five minutes. Amazing. It has much the same flavor as the one I’d made previously, and, miraculously, no onions were visible. I adjusted the ratio of butter to tomato a bit, and I increased the size of the recipe. She calls for five tablespoons of butter to one can of tomatoes. You can make it that way if you prefer. My recipe is a bit lower in fat, but still mouthwatering. She says of hers, “This is the simplest of all sauces to make, and none has a purer, more irresistibly sweet tomato taste. I have known people to skip the pasta and eat the sauce directly out of the pot with a spoon.”

We enjoyed making the meal so much that, in spite of the stressful times, we spent a deliriously happy
evening in our tiny kitchen. We were so enthralled in the mixing, kneading, and simmering that we couldn’t make it the ten feet to our dining room. Santa Maria was rolling out the ravioli. I was dipping them in the boiling water and fishing them out moments later. All four of us were elbow to elbow, scarfing down fresh pasta and that wonderful sauce. I didn’t have a place to sit. I kept saying that it felt like we were eating on a train, at rush hour. It was a real joy.

Tomato Sauce with Onion and Butter
  • Two 28 ounce cans of peeled tomatoes, diced (I use an immersion blender)
  • 3 tablespoons butter
  • 1 large onion, peeled and cut in half

Place the onion in a large sauce pot with the tomatoes and the butter. Simmer for forty-five minutes. Salt to taste.

Note: I added fresh basil at the end. It’s a nice touch, if that’s what you’re looking for. Also, this recipe is for a large serving for four or more hungry eaters. I had a pint left over and I froze it.

The Importance of Chicken Stock

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Chicken_stock1
As I've mentioned recently, I've been facing issues that keep me from cooking as much as usual. Our living situation has become complicated and we're preoccupied by having to deal with a vexing set of circumstances related to our apartment.

Monday I was out at a holiday party and Santa Maria roasted a chicken that I had dressed the night before. It was just about all I could bring myself to do over the weekend, though there was one other thing I did manage to put away before going to bed on Sunday night.

I made a gallon and a half of chicken stock. It is a beautiful thing to turn water, old bones, a carrot, an onion, and a bit of celery into a flavorful base for countless dishes.

It takes me two days to complete it. This is not two days of active labor, of course. It is ten minutes of chopping, a day of unattended simmering (one of my favorite stories about stock comes from a guy I once met years ago who would put on a pot of stock before going to bed and then let it simmer all night while he and his girlfriend slept; I don't have the courage to do that), followed by ten minutes of straining out the bones and other bits, and then a day of refrigeration followed by ten minutes of skimming off the fat and ten minutes of packing it all up and placing in the freezer. 

I always have bones around to use for stock. Whenever I roast a chicken, I freeze the leftover carcass. They are there for me whenever I need to make stock.

Part of the pleasure of cooking for my family is knowing that I'm executing my domestic labors in a loving way. Occasionally Santa Maria and I will get into a disagreement over who is doing more work around the house. One of her more radical ideas is to institute a time clock, measuring the exact number of minutes spent by each of us taking care of domestic duties. I'm all for using this kind of measure, figuring that my three-hour Bolognese and my two-day chicken-stock will fill up hours and hours of labor on my part and put me well ahead of her. Fortunately, our relationship hasn't devolved to the point where we've broken out the time clock, but if that moment comes, I'll be ready.

Making chicken stock has more traditional culinary benefits, of course. It enriches everything.  The trouble with our living situation is really taxing my well-being. With all the stress in my life at the moment, I'm really glad to have the opportunity to make and freeze the stock. It makes me calm just thinking about it.

Basic Chicken Stock

  • 1 or 2 chicken carcasses
  • 1 onion, roughly chopped
  • 1 carrot, roughly chopped
  • 1 stalk celery, roughly chopped

In a large soup pot, briefly sauté the onion, carrot, and celery.

Toss in the chicken bones.

Cover the bones with water.

Bring to a boil.

Reduce to a slow simmer.

Simmer for as long as you can manage, the longer the better.

Strain out the bones with a colander.

Strain the stock through cheese cloth to remove any bits of bones.

Put the pot of stock in the refrigerator for at least a day.

Remove the pot from the refrigerator. The fat will have congealed on top. Skim it off with a spoon and discard.

Freeze the stock in quart containers.

A Rough Mushroom Pasta Recipe

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Mushroom
I like mushrooms, and I always have. When I was growing up we got to have whatever we wanted to eat for our birthday dinners. When I turned eight, I angered my siblings by asking for spaghetti with mushroom sauce (and pineapple upside-down cake for dessert). My brothers and sisters couldn't figure out why I hadn't asked for steak or lamb or something fancier.

After last week's mushroom debacle, Santa Maria went to the coop and bought a bag of crimini. I later went out and bought a bag of dried porcini. We now are well stocked when it comes to mushrooms.

Tonight, Santa Maria had a meeting to attend and a party invitation to enjoy. I was alone with the girls for dinner. Nina has become infatuated with tri-color bow-tie pasta. She likes the way they look (saying they are the only pasta one can wear in their hair), and she's experiencing her first dose of nostalgia around them. She's four-and-a-half, which, apparently, is old enough to have had a friend who once ate the pasta and who has since moved to Chicago. She misses her friend and remembers the pasta.

I was serving flounder for dinner. I gave the kids a choice of cauliflower or asparagus as a vegetable, and they both chose cauliflower. I had been planning to make fried rice, but was happy to substitute the bow-tie pasta.

So the kid's menu was set, but what was I going to eat with my fish and vegetable? I wasn't about to make fried rice for one. And I wasn't interested in bow-tie pasta with olive oil, which is the way the girls like their "plain" pasta.

I knew there was a serving of leftover spaghetti in the refrigerator, and I thought of those cremini mushrooms. When I was single, I used to make a half-lame dinner of mushrooms, garlic, and pasta. It was tasty enough for myself, but it's not the kind of thing to serve someone else and I hadn't made it since Santa Maria entered my life.

She wasn't joining me for dinner on this evening, though, so I took a page from my bachelor days. I'd put the mushrooms with the pasta. But I've grown since becoming a husband and father, and I wanted something more than just mushrooms, garlic, and pasta.

Yesterday afternoon, Santa Maria searched through our jumble of yellowing newpaper cut outs and fading hand-written recipes to get us out of our (relatively tasty) rut.  She came across a 2005 recipe from the New York Times for pasta with zucchini, ricotta, and basil. I intend to make this dish later in the week and I've already purchased the necessary ingredients. The recipe calls for mixing a bit of the cheese with the pasta water to make a sauce. I figured if it worked for zucchini, it would work for mushrooms. And a bit of basil might give my original dish its needed boost.

What I didn't figure on was the children running around and distracting me. Without Santa Maria to corral them, they were free to run roughshod over the living room. I think that during the time it took me to boil the water for their pasta, they managed to take every toy in the house out of its proper place.

Nina then wanted to watch television, and when I told her that she couldn't do so until she put away the toys she was no longer using, she started to cry. I was late in getting them dinner, and I wasn't surprised that she was over-sensitive.

I was rushing to get their food to the table, and I didn't have time to re-read the original recipe, so I didn't know that the ricotta should be combined separately with the pasta water before tossing it with the vegetables and the pasta. I tried to do it all in the same pan.

The girls were crowding into the kitchen. I wanted to get them to taste the ricotta. I thought it would cut their hunger. The mushrooms were browned, and the garlic was at risk of burning. I needed to cool the pan right away. I told them to back up or else they might get burned. I splashed the pan with pasta water, which cooled it just fine. But when I put the cheese in it, I didn't get a a sauce. The cheese broke up into clumps instead of becoming creamy. I tossed in some basil and enjoyed it just the same. The whole point of the dish was the mushrooms, after all.

I haven't quite figured out the best way to make this dish, but I'm going to post a recipe for the way I did it tonight in case anyone is as fond of mushrooms as I am. I would advise combining the ricotta and the pasta water per The New York Times recipe, rather than the way I did it, though. 

After I refine this recipe, I'll post another version of it.

A rough recipe for Pasta with Mushrooms, Ricotta, and Basil (inspired by Mark Bittman)
  • 1 big bunch crimini mushrooms, cleaned and sliced
  • 1 or 2 cloves garlic, diced
  • fresh basil, to taste
  • ricotta cheese, to taste
  • spaghetti, or pasta of choice

Boil a pot of water and cook the pasta per its instructions and drain, reserving some of the pasta water.

Heat a cast-iron frying pan until hot, and add a bit of olive oil.

Sauté the mushrooms in the pan until brown.

Toss in the garlic.

Sauté a minute or two more.

Douse the pan with a bit of the pasta water.

Stir in the ricotta cheese and basil.

Add the cooked pasta and serve.

Winter Salad of Savory Satisfaction

by

Winter_salad
We crossed a major developmental milestone with Nina on Saturday afternoon. She told her first fully formed, all original joke. Santa Maria was at the other end of our apartment with the kids, who had just gotten up from their naps, and I was, as usual, holed up in the kitchen. I was trying to prep things for dinner that night. We were having friends over and I didn't want to be cooking while they were here. I wanted to be free to talk with them.

It was getting late in the day and I wanted to go outside to play with the kids. Santa Maria was exhausted from the Thanksgiving weekend, but I was hoping she could get them out of their pajamas and ready to go. I yelled down the hall to her, "Can you at least get the kids dressed?"

Nina heard me and said to her mother, "Does that mean you are going to cover us with olive oil and vinaigrette and eat us up?"

Last night, I crossed a developmental threshold myself. I tried to improvise a dish out of leftover ham and rice and some frozen peas and corn. I failed. Santa Maria likes to say "He who dares, wins." Not always. "Ham and curry," she said, "there's a reason you've never heard of that before."

The curry powder didn't work out last night, but no big deal. This evening, I had another chance to scale the mountain of food presently in my refrigerator. We had plans to go to dinner at a friend's house, but Nina is running a fever and has a bit of an earache, so we stayed home.

Recently, I've been in the habit of poaching chicken breasts at the beginning of the week and eating them for lunch and some dinners over the ensuing days. This week, I felt like a change, and I decided to roast an extra chicken on Sunday night, and use those leftovers to meet my protein needs for the week.

Nina's sickness started that Sunday night, and she didn't have much appetite. Santa Maria, myself, and Pinta ate a fair amount, but two chickens is a lot of, well, chicken. I realized this when I cut up and picked the carcasses clean that night. I had enough meat for a small standing army.

So, it seems like my task these days is to find new ways to eat the chicken. I often wonder what I would do for food if I didn't like chicken. It is the meat I eat most often. Having just read Jonathan Safran Foer's new book, "Eating Animals," which details and dismembers the factory farms that provide nearly all of our meat, it's getting a little harder for me to eat the bird. I tend to purchase chickens from Murray's Farms, and they are free-range and local and antibiotic free, etc. etc. They come with all the feel-good labels you can imagine. But the fine print reveals that they contain up to 5% retained water. I now know what that means, and it isn't pretty. Believe me, you don't want me to go into it now. You can read his book to find out what it means. Maybe later I'll find the courage (and cash) to change providers, and then I'll blog about it.  For now I'm practicing a sublime form of denialism. At least it doesn't taste bad.

We have some fresh arugula in the house because we were going to bring it to our friends this evening. I used that as a base for a salad with beets, bacon, goat cheese, and red onion. I had some leftover baked potato, and, of course, that chicken, on hand, so I threw them into the mix as well. This is the kind of meal that works on many levels for me. It is nutritionally rounded, with a green vegetable, a starch, and a protein. But it is also full of individual flavors–bursts of goat cheese, sweet bits of beets, savory and crunchy bacon. Delicious, sensual, and full of variety, no joking.

Winter Salad with Beets, Arugula, Bacon, Chicken, Potato, Goat Cheese, and Red Onion
  • A bunch of pre-washed baby arugula
  • 1 beet, boiled until a fork goes through it and then peeled and cut into cubes
  • 1 slice bacon, cooked and crumbled
  • Diced red onion, to taste
  • 1 cold baked potato, cut into cubes
  • goat cheese, to taste
  • 1 chicken breast, cooked and cut into cubes

        Toss the arugula with the beets, onion, chicken, bacon, and goat cheese. Dress with balsamic vinegar and olive oil. Salt and pepper to taste.

Santa Maria’s Shrimp and Flounder Recipe From Memory

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Corn
For the most part, cooking for kids means introducing them to new foods and flavors. Occasionally, it works the other way around. The introductions are not always pretty when they are being handled by a two-and-a-half-year old, but they happen nonetheless.

Sunday afternoon, Santa Maria was out at yoga and Nina was wrapped up in bed nursing an ear infection. Pinta was in great spirits, playful as could be. I wanted to leave Nina in peace and to get dinner started, so I asked Pinta to help me in the kitchen. She was eager to join me, and as she turned to head for the kitchen, she ran smack into a door jam. Bam, she had a shiner on her head and she was crying like crazy.

I dashed to the freezer for a cold pack. We don't actually have cold packs, so we use bags of frozen peas and the like. They're more tasty and they work just as well. This isn't the first time that Pinta has encountered the sharp edges of our apartment and had the resulting lump treated with a bag of organic garden peas. She knows the drill. She also knows that she likes to eat frozen peas, something I had forgotten.

I was holding her in my lap with the bag pressed to her head, and she said "pea, pea, pea." Usually when she says this word it would be spelled "Pee," as in "I have to pee." So I asked her if she needed to go to the bathroom. She said no."Pea," she repeated. Finally, I understood. She wanted to eat some of the frozen vegetables.

Her head was feeling better, so I gave her some of the peas. When I first went to the freezer, I had also grabbed a bag of frozen corn, so I had those in my lap, too. I gave her some of the icy golden kernels. She liked them as well, and feeling friendly, she wanted to share some with me. I think I like cooked corn better.

Later that night, when I was roasting chickens for dinner, Pinta helped me to dump some corn into a sauce pan and cook it. I coated the kernels in butter and salt and she gobbled them up. I'm always happy to introduce a new vegetable to one of my girls, and I'm looking forward to eating it off the cob with her come summertime.

Besides the chicken and corn dinner, I haven't been cooking much over the past few days.  It's impolitic to go into the reasons for this at present, but some of them have to do with our living situation, which has become much more stressful in recent weeks, and some of the other reasons have to do with the season. Thanksgiving means family, and that means a roiling of the psyche. Real estate stress plus family stress is very distracting, to say the least.

Family stress led to a filibuster of a fight with Santa Maria on Saturday afternoon. Filibuster in that I was talking and talking and talking and not making any progress. I'm not even sure progress was the goal. Real estate stress led to a sleepless night and an attendant falling-off of productivity in the kitchen on Sunday.

I've been cooking less over the past week, but we've been eating the same. Who's been doing the cooking? Santa Maria (see fight, above).  Her parents stayed with us for Thanksgiving, and went with us to my mother's house for the holiday. She cooked for them, the kids, me, and any other blood relation within ten yards of her. She was relentless. I was impressed, as she was also doing multiple loads of laundry and tending to the kids. Why I became resentful is good fodder for this week's therapy sessions.

But before things went south between Santa Maria and myself, I was on the receiving end of a delightful dinner. The first night her parents visited, I had to work late. She whipped up a flounder and shrimp dish as good as anything I'd ever tasted in New Orleans, a culinary capital of mixing shellfish, white fish, and heavy sauces. (She also make luscious homemade chocolate pudding, in the time it took me to put the kids in their pajamas).

The roots of her dish, which she improvised that evening and which combined shrimp, flounder, and a tarragon-cream sauce in a heavenly fashion, stretch back not to the Big Easy, but to Europe and a childhood memory of hers.

"When I was a little kid, about eight years old," Santa Maria later told me,"I went with my family on a canal boat down the Thames, and we docked in a little town once where there was a place called the Rose Revived Inn. They served a local founder called plaice prepared in this fashion, and it was the only fish dish that my mother ever liked, so I recreated it from my girlhood memory to welcome my parents to town for Thanksgiving."

Santa Maria enjoys eating well but also fitting into her pants so she created a rich-tasting sauce while minimizing the amount of butter and cream (though this is far from a calorie-conscious dish).  There is considerably less butter and cream than in similar dishes.

Santa Maria's mother, who usually doesn't like fish, loved it so
much that when she was done with her plate, she scooped the leftover
sauce out of the skillet with her baked potato skin. Little kids can
really come through in the kitchen, once they get a little experience.

Here's the flounder recipe. Tune in at a later date for her luscious chocolate pudding recipe.

 A la Recherche du Flounder Perdu
  • 4 fillets flounder
  • 1/4 c. flour for dredging (mixed with a few shakes of salt and fresh black pepper)
  • 2  tablespoons butter
  • 1 small shallot, minced
  • 8 ounces chopped shrimp, raw (can be frozen and thawed)
  • 2 shakes nutmeg (less than 1/8th teaspoon)
  • 2 shakes cayenne pepper (less than 1/8th teaspoon)
  • 1/3 cup white wine
  • 1/3 cup water  
  • 1/4 cube vegetable bouillon
  • 1/2 cup heavy cream
  • 2 tablespoons chopped fresh tarragon
  • salt and pepper to taste

Mix the shrimp with the nutmeg, cayenne, and salt.

Heat 1 tablespoon of the butter in a frying pan, and sauté the shrimp.

Set aside the shrimp and keep warm.

Add shallots and remaining butter to pan, and sauté until they are soft.

Dredge the flounder in the flour and sauté on both sides until cooked, about two minutes per side.  If you use a large skillet, you can probably fit all four fillets in at the same time.

Set aside and keep the cooked flounder fillets warm.

Deglaze the pan with the wine.

Add the water and partial bouillon cube.

Reduce by half.

Pour in the cream, and add the tarragon and cook for about three minutes.

Assemble the dish by putting the shrimp on top of the flounder and pouring the sauce over everything. Serve immediately.

The Turnip Chronicles, or What I Learned this Thanksgiving

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We spent the afternoon getting ready for Thanksgiving dinner at my sister Mary's house. I had volunteered to bring a side dish. I picked turnip because I like it and it's easy to make.

Turnip may a cinch to prepare, but it turned out to be a bit confusing to buy. The turnip I grew up eating on Thanksgiving was pungent-tasting and orange in color. Raw, I remembered it being big lumpy balls with a mottled purple color. Earlier this week while shopping for turnip at our local food coop, I found out that what I thought of as turnip was actually rutabaga. The vegetables labeled "Turnip" were sleek purple-and-white roots.

I bought both. I prepared the rutabagas the way my mother told me to–peeled, sliced, and boiled until soft; then mashed with a bit of salt and pepper. I threw in some olive oil and two slices of cooked-and-crumbled bacon. It was delicious, and just what I expected.

The turnips, I prepared the same way, with one variation. Instead of bacon, I added some sautéed garlic and fresh ginger a the end. I wish I could tell you how it tasted, but it got lost in the shuffle.

When we arrived at Mary's house, I dropped the turnip and the rutabaga (along with a bottle of wine, a wonderful 2004 Tempranillo I promise to share the name of as soon as I return to my Brooklyn home–we love it so much we bought a case of it) in her kitchen, and I went into the livingroom to snack on cheese and crackers and catch up with my siblings. Later, the constant churn of dishes in and out of her kitchen didn't include the turnip. I didn't notice its absence, my eyes having been blinded by brussels sprouts, spicy creamed spinach, stuffing, turkey, and the rutabaga. Not until I was back in the kitchen after dessert (an astonishing array: pumpkin, homemade apple pie, courtesy of Santa Maria, homemade apple cake, spice cake, and cookies) did I realize that we had forgotten to eat the turnip. I'll have to get a report from my sister about how it tastes, as I'm sure she'll eat it over the next day or so.

The day was not turnip-free for me, though. When I was peeling the vegetables this morning, I was quite taken by the fresh, light, and clean scent of the turnip. I pressed the vegetable peeler into the side of the root and drew off a nearly translucent slice. I popped it in my mouth. It had a crisp and refreshing flavor, like a mild radish. I sliced off another one, and ate that too. Then yet another. I really liked it. I enjoyed it so much, that I reserved one turnip to experiment with at lunch time.

We had a light lunch today, logically, given the Thanksgiving meal that we were about to eat. I made a green salad with a bit of poached chicken on top. I shaved a slew of raw turnip slices into my salad and found them most agreeable.

If I had more time, I would consider baking those turnip slices in a bit of salt and oil to see if they might crisp up nicely. Or try stir-frying them to get a similar effect. Maybe next Thanksgiving I'll try something like that.