dads cooking

Expectations about Thanksgiving (mine and others)

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Over the past few years, I've spent a lot of money, if not a lot of time, in therapy, and I've had such a good experience that I'm thinking about renaming this blog Stay on the Couch Dad. I won't, though, because what's going on in my kitchen is more universally appealing than what's going on in my head.

Still, it's hard to divorce family memories from food, and one of the biggest food-and-family fests of the year is rapidly approaching. That is, of course, Thanksgiving. Today's Times has a good article on the troubling family dynamics that can develop around the dining room table. My favorite part of the article is at its end:

"Betsy [a high school teacher in Boston] said her cousin also complained of holiday
meal tension with her own family, so the two devised a strategy to help
each other cope. Each made bingo cards, but instead of numbers, the
squares were filled in with some of the negative phrases they expected
to hear during the meal, like “That outfit is interesting” or “Your
children won’t sit still.” As comments were made at the separate family
celebrations, each woman would mark her card.

“Whoever fills up a bingo row first,” Betsy said, “sneaks off to call the other and say, ‘Bingo!’

For my own part, I'm getting a break from cooking. My sister Mary, who is the current winner of the family real-estate lottery with a nice house (two floors! a yard!) in Connecticut, is hosting. I'm delighted to be joining her. She is being very generous–much of the extended family will be there. I'll be bringing my in-laws along with the wife and kids. My contribution is minimal. I'll be making turnip as a side dish.

Turnip was one of my favorite dishes on Thanksgiving. The other was a spicy creamed spinach that my grandmother introduced and that my own mother has taken to making. Other than those dishes, I never much liked what is served at Thanksgiving. Of course, I feel heretical saying this, but it is true. Turkey? I could take it or leave it. Gravy? Never cared for the stuff. Stuffing? I had a weird thing about it. I only liked what I guess is called Stove Top Stuffing–the stuff my mother would bake outside the turkey. It was crunchy, and I liked that. My most embarrassing favorite dish–canned cranberry relish. I liked the way the can itself left rings around the tasty red circles.

One of the things I'm dealing with in therapy are the expectations I inherited. I'm now dwelling on what unconscious expectations I'm handing down to my own children. They're not pretty. I have a tendency to look on the dark side of things, for example. My father was a trial lawyer who specialized in malpractice and personal injury suits. For every cup of coffee, there was the case of the exploding coffee maker that burned a child. For every country road, there was an intersection in which a drunken driver mowed down two young lovers in a Volkswagen van. For every new building I lived in during college with a beautiful view of the treetops, there was a lack of a fire exit. Or so I was told by my father.

I'm now curbing my tendency to do the same thing to my kids. Nina wants to bring a toy to school to show her friends? I have to stop myself from saying, "You're going to lose it in the classroom." I'm working on it.

Thanksgiving presents an opportunity. The holiday is built around expectations. Turkey, gravy, stuffing, and a laundry list of sides. Family and friends and, what will it be? Arguments over politics? How to raise one's children? What to eat or not to eat? Those are just a few ideas I pulled from my own memory and from today's Times article. But I like to see my family, so I'm hoping that enjoying the company of family will be an expectation I'll be handing down to my children.

Speaking of expectations, I had a few of my own mangled last week when I saw a great article by Mark Bittman in the Times about what to make for the coming dinner. He offered 101 suggestions. The headline, though, is what threw me: "101 Head Starts on the Day." Missing its connection to the holiday entirely, I thought it was 101 ideas To Get Food Ready for a Given Workday. I was thrilled. Finally, an article I could really use. But, no, it was not about getting ready for the everyday, it was about getting ready for the big day. Alas.

Late Fall Salad with Peconic Bay Scallops Recipe

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Peconic_Bay_Scallop_salad
Saturday morning I was grumpy about all the work I had do to. Domestic work. The pile of laundry was knee high. The weekly food shop loomed. These things would have to be taken care of, and the number of leisure hours available to me was rapidly dwindling.

The food shop could wait. Taking care of myself could not. I've learned the hard way (cf: therapy bills, etc) that if I don't tend to my own needs, there's a price to pay. So I went out for a run in the park, and on my way there, I threw the soiled clothes in the laundromat up the block.

After a cathartic workout, I stopped at the Green Market to buy fish. I don't often run, but it works wonders on my psyche when I do. Out of breath and sweaty, I was full of good spirits. In that mood I tend to start dreaming of buying loads and loads of fish and inviting everyone I know to dinner. My run had been good, but not that good (it was short for one thing–that laundry needed to be put in the dryer), so I checked that impulse and kept to my original plan. I had my eye on our usual weekend meal–white clam sauce and sautéd flounder. I buy my seafood from Blue Moon Fish. Years ago, I worked in a retail fish market, and I know how to spot quality fish; Blue Moon's is unusually good. Typically, there's a long, meandering line of stroller-toting dads, young couples with coffee cups, and other devoted seafood eaters snaking halfway across the asphalt of the Greenmarket like some kind of Great Wall of China. On Saturday, though, there wasn't any line. I felt lucky, and when I  spoke to a clerk and saw that they had real Peconic Bay Scallops, an extremely rare treat, I felt luckier still.

Small and sweet, Peconic Bay Scallops, from the namesake body of water on Eastern Long Island, were once relatively common. When I was working in that retail fish market in the eighties, the scallops were one of the things we carried in our gleaming display cases. During their season, a guy named Peter, the head of one of the store's wholesale accounts who was permitted to mingle among the staff, used to walk up behind the counter, where I stood as one of the clerks, and reach into the display of scallops and pop them into his mouth, raw. This was well before the vogue of sushi, and I was always shocked. He would swear that they were the best that way.

Peconic Bay scallops have nearly disappeared since I hung up my seafood smock. A mean brown tide, which is a toxic algae bloom, swept through Peconic  Bay in the late eighties, devastating the stock. The brown tide has since waned (no one really knows why) and efforts to restock the bay are bearing fruit. This year's harvest promises to be the best in years, according to a recent article in the New York Times. I was beside myself with delight walking home with half a pound for lunch. I picked up a fresh loaf of French bread and some arugula to go with them.

Santa Maria had to go to a meeting, so I ate alone with the kids. I took the scallops out of the refrigerator and told Nina and Pinta that if they were very lucky they might be able to have one. Nina grabbed the plastic bag of scallops out of my hand and pretended to keep it from me. I acted horrified. Terribly horrified. I don't think they've seem me react this way to a joke about food. I thought it might entice them to try one. It didn't, which was just fine with me.

I heated chicken soup that I had on hand for the children and started to consider my lunch. I wanted to leave the scallops in their sweet and simple glory, but I wanted a full meal. I wanted them over the fresh arugula, but that felt a bit too summery to me. Caramelized onions, I figured, would add a bit of warmth. All it needed, I thought, was one more note. Toasted pine nuts would give it a savory flavor and a bit of crunch.

Getting this all together while feeding the kids was a bit like being in a Marx Brothers movie. Back and forth from the kitchen to the dining room I ran. Caramelizing onions is always a bit of hit or miss for me. I didn't have time to think about it, though, so I heated the cast-iron pan, added some oil, and threw in slices of onion. I bashed the onions with a spatula to break them up, covered the pan, and ignored it. Every so often I'd give it a shake or stir, until the pan was smoking and they were in danger of burning, at which point I turned off the heat, and really ignored it.

I served the children their soup, and started to put together my salad. The kids seemed content, and I poured myself a glass of white wine. I took my wine and my salad to the table, but tasting the scallops became another Marx Brothers comedy. Pinta was exhausted and she nearly fell asleep while eating her lunch (or more accurately, not eating her soup). I kept her from falling over, and was able to take one bite of the salad. The scallops were warm and they bounced in my mouth. The pine nuts crunched beneath my teeth. I took and other bite, and, hurriedly, another. But I knew that Pinta really needed to be put into bed. I got up and took care of that. I sat back down with Nina, who had finished her soup and was happily eating slices of French Bread. I had two more bites. Then Nina announced that she was ready for bed. I got up and got her dressed, and put her into bed.

Finally, I sat back down. I had three bites left. A perfectly equal amount of arugula, onion, pine nuts, and scallops. I had my wine. I had a slice of freshly buttered bread. I ate them all, and then wondered where the rest of my lunch had gone. Had I really eaten it? Was it as good as I hoped it would be? Was eating it quickly, in fits and starts, anything like the way Nina and Pinta's childhood is passing? Would I miss that as soon as it was over, and wonder what had happened to it?

Late Fall Peconic Bay Scallop Salad
  • 1 onion, sliced in half and then repeatedly, lengthwise.
  • t tablespoon or to taste pine nuts
  • fresh arugula
  • salt and pepper
  • 1/2 lb fresh Peconic Bay Scallops
  • Olive Oil
  • White wine vinegar

Heat some oil in a frying pan, preferably cast iron, and add the onion, stirring occasionally.

Cover the onions, stir every so often.

When the pan is so hot that the onions are at risk of burning, turn off the heat and let the onions sit, covered. There will be enough heat in the pan to sweat them sufficiently. If not, repeat the above steps a bit more rapidly.

Heat a second cast-iron frying pan and sprinkle the pin nuts on its surface. Shake and move the pan about until the nuts brown.

Remove the nuts from the pan, set aside

Wash the arugula and place in a bowl.

Heat the cast iron pan that was used to toast the pine nuts.

Put some oil in the pan.

Dry the scallops on paper towel and toss in pan.

Sear them about thirty seconds on one side, and thirty on another, keeping in mind that they don't really have to be cooked at all. (I only like them with a nice brown crust, though.)

When the scallops are reasonably browned, have swollen but not given up their liquid, remove them from the heat. 

Toss the arugula with olive oil and white-wine vinegar.

Add the pine nuts to the arugula, layer a bit of the caramelized onions on it, and top with the cooked scallops.

My First Time Baking: A Recipe for Pear Upside-Down Cake

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Pear_upside_down_cake
I don’t have many memories of my mother baking, which is not to say she didn’t do it ever. Though as Santa Maria says, who could blame her if she didn’t—she had five kids to care for.  I recall her making Christmas cookies with my sisters, and she successfully passed the female baking baton off to them. I owe most of my memories of baked goods, including snickerdoodles, butterscotch brownies, and lemon-meringue pie, to my sisters.

 

My mother stuck to making Irish soda bread, and someday I’ll share the recipe (as soon as I get her permission). She makes a new world version with less butter, and no caraway seeds (she was the eldest daughter in a family with five daughters and one son, my delightful uncle John. As a boy, John didn’t like caraway seeds so no one else got to eat them either).

One thing I do remember my mother making is pineapple upside-down cake, which was a syrupy and sweet dentist’s nightmare. If I close my eyes, I can still see the caramelized yellow cubes of fruit and taste the brown gooey bits of sugar. I loved it.

On Wednesday last week, Mark Bittman wrote in the New York Times about a variation on the pineapple upside-down cake, using maple syrup and pears instead of plain sugar and the Hawaiian fruit. I love pears and I was enticed to consider making it.

Santa Maria is correct in thinking that my mom was too busy to bake when I was young. Her mom, Jane, is a relentless baker even at eight-six years old—she has pies and cookies in the freezer every time we go to visit—but she only had two children. My mother was busy making school lunches, breakfasts, and dinners seven days a week. Seven days a week! We hardly ever ate out, and I’ve never once had a frozen dinner. She did an astonishing job.

I’m tired from cooking for just two kids, and I serve them frozen fish sticks three times a week. I basically want for my children what I had growing up—home-cooked meals and a balanced diet.

 

On his video about making the cake, Bittman talks about how little patience he has for the details of baking. Santa Maria is not known for her patience, but she is a seasoned baker with very particular tastes. She took one look at his recipe and made a few adjustments. I defer to her in all dessert-related matters, and, the truth is, I didn’t feel confident. I was happy to have her guidance. (She threw out the maple syrup, which she said she didn’t like the taste of in baked goods, and she twiddled with a few of the other proportions. She typically reduces the amount of sugar by at least a third.)

Cooking is easy for me because I’ve mastered a few basic techniques and I stick to them. I can take on new recipes fairly confident about how they’ll turn out because I’ll pick ones that build on these basic skills. Baking is another question. I’ve never been interested in doing it because I’ve been preoccupied with my needs and not my desires. I need to eat, and I need to eat well. Not too much sugar, and more daily calories than a high school football lineman would consume in a day. That takes a lot of work.

But as I’ve gotten better at managing the day-to-day cooking (and as my metabolism has slowed a bit), I’m starting to think about my desires. A slice of cake after dinner sounded mighty good.

 

I enlisted the help of Nina and Pinta, although once my eldest heard that there were pears in the cake, she said that she would only help make it if she didn’t have to eat it. She hates fruit that much. She is a fruitophobe.

I got the process underway by gathering all the ingredients. I put the kids in the kitchen with the laptop and let them watch Bittman’s video over and over. Pinta kept saying “upside-down cake.”

Soon, it was time to cream the butter and the sugar. I squatted on the floor of our kitchen with Nina at my side. I had the mixer going in my right hand.  A stick of butter stood rigid across the bottle of the steel mixing bowl. Sugar was sprinkled about. The blades of the mixer dug into the butter, and started throwing off curled clumps. The more I pushed into the butter, the more the hand mixer protested. Nina was crouched next to me. She thought it looked like popcorn. She liked the way the curled bits of butter were jumping all over. I was concerned they’d jump out of the bowl. It felt like a humbling process, but that’s just because I hadn’t done it before, and I wasn’t confident that I was doing it correctly. It certainly didn’t look like I was doing it right.

Santa Maria said that she would have let the butter soften up. I wish she had told me that earlier, I thought. Pinta had been playing with the stick of butter and I took it away from her because she was softening it up. I could have let her play to her heart’s content.

Santa Maria taught me about combining the dry ingredients with the wet ones, and soon enough we had a cake. She adores a pear tart dessert at our favorite local restaurant, Al di La. It has chocolate in it, so, at the last minute, she stuck some pieces of dark chocolate in one corner of the batter.

Nina asked if the work was done, and then said she was going to lie down (she’d been running a fever all day). I started to make dinner—our seafood feast.

After the cake was in the oven, the kitchen started to smell very nice. It smelled like a cake was baking. Is there a kinder, more nurturing scent out there? 

 

We all loved the caramelized pears on top, but Santa Maria thought the chocolate was too bitter. Next time she would make it with semi-sweet chocolate. Nina didn’t eat any because she was too sick. Pinta had so much that her stomach ached. I downed two pieces and enjoyed every bite. Then I got a headache from the sugar.

Later that night I had to barricade Santa Maria from the kitchen because she was sneaking leftovers. She’s powerless over sweets and I knew drastic action needed to be taken. I quickly called up a dear friend who lives nearby to offer her some (she said that we were laughing so much on the phone that she thought there was alcohol in the cake) and then I left some more on the doorstep of our downstairs neighbors. They texted me the next day to say they found it upon coming home after a few drinks and that it was a pleasant surprise. They said they loved the Guinea Pig role.  

Not a bad outcome for my first cake, though to give credit where credit is due, it was a success because of Santa Maria, who helped to make it, like all the good and sweet things in my life, possible.

 

Adapted from Mark Bittman, whose original recipe is here.

 

 

Santa Maria’s Pear Upside-Down Cake

 

  • 11 Tablespoons butter
  • ¼ Cup packed brown sugar
  • 3 pears, peeled, cored, and thinly sliced
  • 2/3 cups granulated sugar
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla
  • 2 eggs
  • 1 ½ cups flour
  • 1 ½ teaspoons baking powder
  • ¼ teaspoon salt
  • ½ cup milk
  • optional: 1/3 cup (2 oz.) semi-sweet chocolate pieces (broken from a bar into whatever size you prefer)

 

Heat oven to 350 degrees.

 

Melt three tablespoons butter in a small pan over medium heat.

Add brown sugar and cook, stirring, until sugar dissolves.

Bring to a boil and cook for two minutes.

Remove from heat and pour the mixture into a 9 ½ -inch baking pan.

Arrange the pear slices in the sugar mixture as you see fit.

In a mixing bowl, beat the remaining butter (one stick) and the sugar with a mixer until it is light and fluffy.

Add the vanilla and eggs and mix until smooth.

 

In a separate bowl, combine the flour, baking powder, and salt.

Combine the wet (butter) and dry (flour) mixtures in three batches with the milk. And mix until barely combined. Do not over mix. Lumps are okay.

Carefully spread the cake batter on top of the pears using a spatula.

Bake in oven about 45 minutes, until top is golden. A thin sharp knife stuck in the cake should come out clean.

Let the cake sit for five minutes.

Run a knife around the edge of the cake pan.

Put a plate on top of the cake and carefully flip it so the plate is on the bottom and the pan is on top.

Serve warm or at room temperature.

 

Note: Fold chocolate pieces into the batter before baking for a slightly richer cake.

What I Learned from “Julie and Julia”: How to Make Better Scallops

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Last night I watched "Julie and Julia," and I learned something. After seeing scene after scene of Julie Powell drying the meat for boeuf bourguinon, it occurred to me that I should be drying my scallops when I sauté them. 

I tried it this afternoon when making lunch. I patted down the scallops with paper towel before throwing them in the pan.  It really makes a difference. The scallops browned better, and stuck less. Who knew?

Roast Striped Bass Recipe, the Cobble Hill Way

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HopeULikeFish4
I recently introduced this blog to a friend of mine, Joe McCarthy, who’s a little further along the winding road of life in bucolic Brooklyn and whose children are mostly grown. He’s been cooking for his family for years, and he wrote me to tell me what he’s been up to lately. The following is his guest post.

These days, around my house, it is husband cooking for wife. My daughter is in the Middle East, and my son’s down south, so I’m not cooking for them anymore. I cook because I really enjoy the process, and generally the result. One of the nicest things about my relationship with my wife, if not the best one, is that I don’t have to do the dishes. It’s been that way since we got together. I’d say to her, “I can cook better that we can afford to eat out,” and she’d clean up.  Sometimes, I’d use a lot of pots and pans, and there’d be some complaints, but mostly now I clean up as I cook, so it’s not so bad. It’s only at big dinner parties that I make a major mess.

For the past thirty-one years, we’ve been keeping a Dinner Book listing all the meals we’ve cooked for guests. I thought about writing about that, but I haven’t gotten around to looking back on all those meals and contemplating what was going on as we made those choices. Lately, the decision about what to eat is based on our diets. One of us has genetically high cholesterol, and the other is working to take some weight off, so we’ve had lots of fish lately.

Monday afternoon I stopped by Fish Tails, our local Brooklyn fishmonger, expecting to pick up a fillet of some sort.  I’m trying to work down the food chain into fish that do not eat other fish.  Lately, we’ve been enjoying Branzino, a mild but very tasty product of the Mediterranean (not that far down the food chain, it seems). The price is right. I worry, though, that Branzino is the new Chilean Sea Bass, and the price is going to go through the ceiling, and it will hit a watch list before the health bills pass. Turns out, according to Wikipedia, that it is under pressure, and is heavily farmed in Spain. The store didn’t have any Branzino, only Sea Bream and Striped Bass. A picture flashed into my mind of an up-right fish with crackly skin splayed open and roasted, and I settled on the bass. 

Our vegetable guy, Carmine at Jim and Andy’s on Court Street, in Cobble Hill, has caved and no longer sells huge, dirty clumps of basil. Now he cleans them and nips off the roots. “The clients want it like at Trader Joe’s, all packaged and clean,” he says. (Don’t get me started on Trader Joe’s.) I picked up some basil to make pesto and some broccoli. There’s that diet again. It would be a green dinner.

Usually I’m a stove-top kind of guy.  I broil occasionally, but rarely do I put something in the oven and go read a book. Thirty to forty minutes of work, splash in some wine or vermouth at the end, and dinner’s ready; that my MO.  Sure, boeuf bourguignon might simmer in the oven for hours, and I’ve been known to roast a chicken, but I’ve never baked a cake, or made a chicken potpie.

I was in the mood for roast fish, though. I scanned a couple of cookbooks for cooking temperature and ideas, and settled on Marcella Hazan’s:  400° for 20 to 30 minutes.  Her recipe was for bass with artichokes, but I didn’t have any artichokes.  So I spread the gutted fish belly wide out to each side, so it sat up like a trophy, on a bed of thin lemon slices, having slathered it with olive oil and, as per Hazan’s recipe, sprinkled the pan and the fish with rosemary.

My wife was at yet another publishing party in Manhattan (‘tis the season, it seems), so I held off starting the fish until she called to say she was heading for the subway home. The fish was just out of the oven when she arrived a half-hour later. All I had to do was carefully separate the fillets from the body, spoon pesto sauce onto the pasta, and remember my favorite delicacy, the fish cheeks. I put a few of the lemon slices under it for looks. A modest Macon-Villages from Heights Chateau, our favorite local wine merchant, added a tart backdrop to the dinner.  The bass was terrific, delicate and flavorful, with strong hints of both the lemon and the rosemary.

Roast Striped Bass

  • 1 whole striped bass, about 1 to 1 1/2 lbs, cleaned but with the head and tail.
  • 2 lemons, sliced thinly sliced in rounds
  • Olive oil
  • Pepper
  • 1 tbs Rosemary

Heat the oven to 400 degrees.
Cover the bottom of a roasting pan with the lemon slices.
Coat the fish with the olive oil and sit it on the lemons with the flaps of the belly spread out in both directions.
Sprinkle the pan and fish with the rosemary and the pepper.
Roast for twenty to thirty minutes.

There’s BPA In My Daughter’s Soup?

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Bisphenol_A
On Sunday, The New York Times disrupted my menu planning.
One of the key things that I’ve relied upon to get me through the week is
Progresso’s canned lentil soup. I feel like I might sound like a housewife in
the fifties by saying this, but it felt to me like a miracle food. My daughter
Nina is crazy for it, and it’s very healthy (aside, perhaps, from its sodium
content).

Whenever I heard Nina say it was her favorite food, my heart
both sunk and soared. I was sad that she didn’t favor one of my home-cooked
meals, but I was delighted that she found such a nutritious dish so tasty.

Now, I learn, according to Nicholas D. Kristof , it is
nearly poison. The issue is Bisphenol A, or BPA, a synthetic estrogen that is
common in certain plastics and that has the nasty potential to disrupt
developing endocrine systems.  BPA
is not in the soup when they make it, but it is in the epoxy used to line the
cans. It then leaches into the food.

The science on this isn’t conclusive. Something called the
Business & Media Institute calls Kristof’s article scare mongering. But
then again, they led another story with “Somewhere in our office are old bumper
stickers proclaiming: “Proud Member of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy.”

No matter what the pundits say, when it comes to kids just a
hint of danger is enough to change behavior. So for the time being, we’re
dropping the soup from our weekly rotation. I’m going to miss it, as is Nina.

What I'd really like is a statistical analysis of the risks of BPA versus the benefits of getting the out-of-season nutrients that canning provide. As someone at risk for prostate cancer, I'm interested in as much lycopene as I can find. My primary source is canned tomatoes. I'm not ready to give them up.

There's another possible solution—having the
government get the chemical out of the food (though this is, apparently, not without its risks; swap out the epoxy and invite botulism). None the less, there has to be a better technological solution. In the meantime,  bills are before congress to ban the chemical from food containers. I’m going to get in touch with my senator, Charles Schumer, who is
one of the sponsors of one of them.

Crispiest Roast Chicken Ever

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My office isn’t really an office. The days of closed doors, private spaces, a little couch and wet bar, are gone. I work in a cubicle, a narrow pen lined up beside other narrow pens containing my colleagues, their computers, and their ambitions.

The upside of this arrangement is the easy transfer of information. We can communicate without barriers (projects get completed in record time!). The downside of this arrangement is the easy transfer of information (private phone calls are no longer private).

So it is pretty much known around my office that I like to cook. Occasionally, a friend will drop by to talk about what’s going on in his or her kitchen.

The other day I heard a most fascinating tale. A friend said that she likes to make a roast chicken on a Sunday night and eat just the crispy skin for dinner. Just the skin, and all of it. She’ll tuck into it just in time for the start of “Mad Men.”

Crispy skin is, of course, the holy grail of roasting a chicken, but I’ve long given up on eating it. With two kids to feed, it’s like stop-motion animation around my house getting the food to the table. It takes forever. I’m lucky if my chicken is still hot by the time I eat it, never mind if the skin is still crispy.

Recently, my friend and I were discussing ways of roasting a bird. She was telling me that she crosses the approaches of Julia Child (“butter ‘er up, stuff ‘er with lemon and sage”) and the Parisian restaurant Chez Louis (“start at a super high heat, then lower.  Baste with broth”). I don’t have much time for such refinements. I have only one trick to making a chicken-skin crispy, and it’s a sure fire one. I use it every time. I learned it from reading “D'Artagnan's Glorious Game Cookbook.” (D'artagnan, by the way, is a fantastic supplier of everything from chickens to the fanciest of wild game birds. You can learn more here.)

I told her to put the chicken in the roasting pan the morning before cooking and let it sit, uncovered, in the refrigerator before roasting it at a high heat, about 450 degrees. The skin dries out (“desiccated,” was her apt and wild-eyed description this morning when she stopped by to tell me it was “the best chicken ever”) and the skin gets wicked crispy. You can’t lose.

My favorite roast-chicken recipe is here.

Bread Recipe for Simpletons

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Eli_Bread
An old friend, Elisha Cooper, has recently developed an obsession with baking bread. Late last week, he paid me a surprise visit at work. He biked from his home to my office with a fresh, warm loaf on his back. I took it to my desk and my colleagues and I buttered the soft, salty, and cornmeal-encrusted slices and devoured them. The loaf was delicious.

We’re always running out of bread around the house, so I asked Elisha how long his loaf keeps. He doesn’t know. He always eats it fresh. It's so easy to make, he makes it all the time. After the dough is ready, it only takes about a half hour to finish the bread, so he’ll throw some dough in the oven while preparing the rest of his dinner. By the time his meal is ready, his bread is too.

Tonight, I left my office thinking about his bread. I was headed home to eat my Bolognese, which I was very relieved to find in the freezer this morning. I wasn’t in the mood to do any cooking when I woke. We’ve all been a little sick around the Stay at Stove Dad house. Given the limited amount of sleep we get (six hours is a wicked luxury, which makes me think of a sleep-related expression my mother-in-law introduced me to: “six hours for a man, seven for a woman, eight for a fool”), getting the necessary rest to get well seems like something reserved for the future, like say next May.

A loaf of warm fresh bread would have gone nicely with the Bolognese. I didn't have any intention of making it though. After my recent pizza debacle I’m a little gun shy. In time, I’m sure that will change. Meanwhile, here’s his recipe, which he got from his brother-in-law.

Bread For Simpletons 

  • 3.5 cups flour,
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 1.5  teaspoon yeast
  • 1.5 cups hot water
  • cornmeal

Mix the flour, salt, yeast, and water in a bowl in the morning.
Let it sit all day with saran wrap across top of bowl (think about other things, go on about your business).  

When ready to bake the bread:
Heat oven to 425 degrees.
Throw the dough in whatever shape on cornmeal-sprinkled pan and wait fifteen minutes.
After the quarter-hour passes, fold the dough over on itself. 
Place in oven and bake for 22  minutes (or however long), until it browns and it sounds hollow when you whack its belly.
Eat!

No Worry Chicken Tikka Masala Recipe

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Kids_Tikka_Spices
My friend Michael, a father of two who works for Slate,
recently wrapped up an interesting online series called “Freaky Fortnight,” in
which he swapped roles with his stay-at-home wife, Susan, who is also a
writer.  Michael’s final post was a
poignant entry calling upon himself and other young parents not to worry so
much. It’s good, albeit hard, advice to follow.

 

I was thinking about his column the other night. We have new
neighbors in our building, and they moved in one floor below us on Saturday.
I’m sure they’re nice people, but my mind raced—what if they smoke? What if
they’re noisy? What if they can’t tolerate the pounding of little footsteps up
and down the floor-through hallway? I thought of Michael’s column and put those
ideas out of my head.

 

On Sunday, I had other things to worry about, anyway, such
as whether or not my kids would eat my chicken tikka masala. One of my recent
triumphs around the dinner table was the successful introduction of the dish.
I’d made a giant batch of it the weekend before when I cooked dinner for twenty
people to celebrate Santa Maria’s birthday (I also made a roast leg of lamb,
dhal, rice, and a cauliflower-and-potato dish). The party was great fun, but
the best thing about it, from my perspective as the family chef, was that we were
left, after the guests departed, with about four days of food.

 

Imagine then, my joy on Sunday night a week ago when both
Nina and Pinta spurned the dhal they usually eat and in a fussy bit of madness
succumbed to the enticing flavors of the chicken tikka masala. Never, in a
thousand years, would I have been able to get them to even try the chicken were
it not for their strenuous disdain for the dhal. The kids loved the chicken
tikka masla, even though it was almost too spicy for my lips.

 

Chicken tikka masala has a most fascinating back story. I
know the dish through eating Indian food at restaurants with my wife, who back
in her student days spent a fair amount of time in the country itself. As a
recent article in Saveur points out, chicken tikka masala may actually have a
point of origin not in the subcontinent, but in the U.K. A Scottish parliament
minister maintains that the dish comes from Glasgow, where, according to him, in
the nineteen-seventies, a customer complained about the dryness of his chicken tikka at
a local restaurant, and the chef responded by whipping up the now-popular
sauce.

 

After my success a week ago with the chicken tikka masala, I
wanted to make the dish again, lest the kids forget their enthusiasm for the
dish. So I put together a batch on Sunday, and as I did so I started to worry
that they might not eat it. Could what had happened a week earlier been a
fluke? Would they torture me and reject it now?

 

That afternoon, Santa Maria had a conference call she needed
to take, so I was left in charge of the children. I enlisted them in making the
dinner, partly to keep them busy and partly to give them a vested interest in
the dish itself. Nina and Pinta (especially Pinta these days) love opening and
smelling the kitchen spices (ground clove is a particular favorite). Cooking
with the kids takes longer than usual, but the tax in time would be well worth
it to me if it meant that they would continue to eat the dish. Anytime I have a
chance to add a dish to our collective menu, I leap at the opportunity.

 

I’ve adapted a recipe from Food and Wine’s 2001 Cookbook.
It’s a little different than restaurant chicken tikka masala, in that it
doesn’t have any cream, but it is, to me and Santa Maria (and now our kids),
just as delicious.

 

After measuring the spices with the kids and having them
stir the pot, I slipped them bits of the cooked chicken coated with the sauce.
I wanted to prime their mouths with the flavor and get them interested in
eating the dinner. They gobbled up the slices of savory and spicy chicken. They
were hungry. Nina and Pinta snatched little handfuls of cooked rice. I was
pleased they wanted such and adult meal.

 

Come dinnertime, though, they quite naturally reasserted
their rights to be four and two years old. “No like that” said Pinta, when I
gave her a bowl of chicken, sauce, and rice. She insisted on eating just the
chicken. And not cut-up pieces. Nina, too. It wasn’t the sauce the set them
off, it was the little grains of rice. Aren’t children wonderful? Just when you
think you’re worrying about the right thing, they’ll come along and show you
how you should be worrying about something else entirely.

 

 No Worry Chicken Tikka Masala

  • 8 large garlic cloves, coarsely chopped
  • One 2-inch piece of fresh ginger, peeled and coarsely chopped
  • 1/4 cup water
  • one can (28 oz) peeled tomatoes, hit with an immersion blender or chopped by hand
  • 1/4 cup, plus 2 tablespoons olive oil
  • 1 large onion, minced
  • 1 1/2 tablespoons ground coriander
  • 1 1/2 teaspoons ground cumin
  • 1 teaspoon garam masala
  • a touch of cayene pepper, to taste
  • 1/2 teaspoon turmeric
  • 1 to 2 pounds skinless, boneless chicken thighs (or breasts) cut into 1 1/2 inch pieces
  • 2 teaspoons salt, or to taste
  • 1/2 cup coarsely chopped cilantro (optional)

        In a blender, puree the garlic and the ginger with the water until smooth.

        Heat the oil in a thick-bottomed pot and cook the minced onions over high heat until softened and golden.

        Add the garlic and ginger puree and cook stirring until golden and fragrant, about two minutes.

        Add the remaining oil and the spices, cook stirring constantly until lightly toasted, about one minute.

        Add the tomatoes and cook until thickened, about ten minutes.

        Add the chicken and season with salt. Reduce the heat and cook through. Add the cilantro. Serve over rice.

Win Some, Lose Some Puttanesca Recipe

by

Anchovies

As much as I would like to run the family kitchen like dictator and decide for everyone what they should eat, I don’t. I run it more like a very small restaurant, with a very limited  menu. The menu is not on a chalkboard (although that might help once the kids learn to read), and it is not printed up on paper. It is a verbal menu. I tell the kids what I can make for them on a given day, and give them a choice or two.

As simple as this is, it can be confusing for a young child, mostly because I’m giving them the choice of lunch and dinner before I’ve given them breakfast. At 7:45 a.m., I’ll say, “Do you want puttanesca for dinner?” and Pinta will reply in that plaintive way known only to two-year olds and mega-rich rock stars, “I want it now!”

I have to explain to her that I don’t have it made yet, never mind that it’s not something one eats for breakfast, and that the oatmeal that she was demanding moments ago is already boiling on the stove. She gets it, eventually.

So it went the other morning, when Pinta was tossing her head back and crying out for puttanesca. No problem, I told her, I’ll make it for your dinner. Lately, it’s been one of her favorites.

The beautiful thing about puttanesca, besides its rich and salty taste, is that it is one of the easiest things in the kitchen to make. And all of its ingredients are things that don’t spoil and
can, and should, be kept on hand at all times. I put the sauce together in the brief moment it took Santa Maria to get the milk and cereal from our kitchen to the dining-room table.

The sauce gives off a slightly odd smell for eight in the morning, but knowing that it would be ready for their baby sitter to give to them for dinner was very comforting.

Puttanesca sauce is perhaps one of the
oldest recipes in the world. It is a storied sauce, and no matter the hour. it’s a tale worth contemplating. Its
origins are often traced to Naples and to the prostitutes of that
seaside city. Puttanesca derives from the Italian for prostitute,
puttana, and for some, its pungent and enticing aroma calls to mind
what Courbert captured so gamely in l’Origine du Monde. The story I favor is that puttanesca sauce came into being because the prostitutes
needed something to make between customers, and they didn’t want to
waste time. I know what it feels like to be rushed.

I finished the sauce by throwing in the olives and capers while doing the breakfast dishes. As delicious as the sauce turned out, I learned later that Pinta spurned it that evening. Win some, lose some. And that means more sauce for me.

Puttanesca Sauce

  • 1 28 oz. can peeled plum tomatoes, crushed (or hit with an immersion blender, which is very fast)
  • 4 or more cloves of garlic, peeled and smashed
  • 3 anchovy fillets
  • 1 chili pepper
  • 1T capers
  • 12 or so black olives, sliced
  • herbs
    such as basil or oregano to taste (completely optional)

Heat some olive oil in a heavy-bottomed
pan. Add the garlic and anchovies and chili pepper. Saute until garlic is
soft, add tomatoes and reduce.

When the sauce thickens (in about fifteen minutes), add capers and olives and any herbs.

Serve over the pasta of your choice.