dads who cook

Men Who Cook Get a Little Love

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A friend of mine sent me an article today that warmed my heart. Sara Leeder, a producer at CNN, wrote about exactly what I’m doing over here. "More Men Manning the Family Meal Making?" tells her story about being a working mother whose husband does the cooking.

In it, she makes an important point. “While cooking is the last thing I want to do after putting our little boy to bed, my husband seems to like it. Maybe it lets off stress, or is a release after a long day of work,” she writes. She is right.

The role of men in society is quite different now than it was even a generation ago. Women charged into the workforce in the seventies, and they haven’t looked back (consider how things have changed since the days depicted on “Mad Men”). Except in very rarified precincts of theoretical physics, no two objects can occupy the same place at the same time. If women’s participation has been going up in the workforce (both in status and in numbers) then it follows that men’s has been going down. In fact, very shortly, because of the nature of the latest recession, there will be more women with jobs than men.

For many, work is a place of enormous stress these days. There is a place, though, where men are wanted, where their efforts are rewarded, where they can be in charge, and where they can enjoy themselves. That place is the kitchen. The pay may not come in dollars (though cooking at home can save money, and a dollar saved is more than a dollar earned: when you figure taxes in, it takes about a $1.25 to bring home one buck), but men who cook are highly compensated. Their homes are flush with moments of happiness that take-out or frozen food can’t provide. Who doesn’t feel better after a good meal and a glass of wine?

A growing number of men understand this. The poll at the end of the article demonstrates it. Of the 6,000 or so responders, in more than half the relationships, the men do more cooking than the women.

Poll3
 

 

 

 

 

 

Lunchtime Surprise

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Jjdpear2
Pinta, who is three-and-a-half now, likes to say little sentences to me. At bedtime, before I turn the lights out, she'll say "I hope you have a good sleep, daddy," and, earlier today, as I left for the office, "I hope you have a good day at work." These are sweet gestures, but nothing is as sweet as what she did this morning.

She was up early with her sister, and Santa Maria had started on their breakfast. Pinta is still young enough to be a terror upon waking if she doesn't get food into her stomach pronto. She loves fruit, and would eat it all day if she could. Santa Maria handed her a small bosc pear, and Pinta turned it upside down, like an ice-cream cone, and started to eat around it as if she was licking a scoop of Van Leeuwen vanilla.

Pinta offered to share the pear with me, but I wasn't in the mood. I like fruit well enough, but it is a taste that came to me late in life, and a 6:53 a. m. pear is not really my thing. Pinta was undeterred, though. She asked if I would like to take one to work. I said sure, and she trotted off to the kichen to get one for me. Santa Maria washed it, and I put it my bag, along with leftover scallops and fried rice that I had made the night before.

I forgot all about the pear until lunch today, when I opened my bag and found the little treat. I think it was the most delicious piece of fruit I've ever had. I enjoyed it before I even tasted it. My camera is broken, so I drew a little picture of it on my desk, next to a reporter's pad. Then I gobbled it in about three bites.

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.

Old Springsteen Eases Transition Back to the Kitchen

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Between traveling and celebrating, the Christmas holiday has disrupted my culinary activities, in a mostly welcome and joyful way.

Santa Maria gave me an iPod Touch for Christmas and I took it out for an inaugural run on Sunday. More accurately, I used her iPod Nano because I couldn’t figure out how play music on mine. I’m a little late to the portable, digital-music game, though I’m not a late adopter of digital music per se: my hard drive has some eight-six gigabytes of music, which caused all kinds of confusion when synching it for the first time with my new, thirty-two gig Touch.

The important thing here is what I was listening to. All that time in the car driving back and forth from Pennsylvania to New York led to a dose of classic rock, which seems like the only thing I can ever find on the F.M. dial. Now that I’m past forty I’ve had the unfortunate experience of finding those familiar tunes on WCBS FM, the oldies station. When I was a kid, that spot on the dial reeked of doo-wop and the like. I hated it. Now it’s where I’m likely to find old Rolling Stones or Bruce Springsteen. This makes me feel old.

I was a huge Springsteen fan in high school, ever since my sister brought “Darkness on the Edge of Town” into the house. One of my first entrepreneurial projects involved standing on line (not going online) overnight to secure seats to his Giants Stadium shows for “Born in the U.S.A.” and then scalping a bunch of the tickets and turning a tidy profit. As a teenager, I would drive around playing that album and his earlier works, in particular “Greetings from Asbury Park,” which I always admired for its crazy lyrics. I’ve lost interest in Springsteen’s later work, but those early songs are etched into my psyche.

A few years ago, Springsteen released “Hammersmith Odeon London '75,” his fourth official live album. Springsteen is famous for his live shows, and this early concert shows why. The Boss had already been on the cover of Time magazine as the future of rock, but this was his first appearance in England. No one there really knew him, and he had to prove himself. Recorded shortly after the release of “Born to Run,” it is solely his early material, and I just love it. The quality of the recording is excellent and the set list impeccable. "Backstreets," "Thunder Road," "She's the One," are all there.

On Sunday I knew that the weekly shop needed to be completed. I listened to the album while running through my list—carrots, onions, whole chickens, etc., etc.—at the Park Slope Food Coop. Because of the holiday, the coop was less crowded than usual. I’m not sure how I would manage under its crowded, regular conditions with a head full of Clarence Clemons and the E Street Band, but those empty aisles were perfect for my first excursion with an iPod. I drifted around in a sonic haze, never before so pleased to be buying food.

The way I've been cooking lately, I do much of the work for the week on Sunday night. I prepare a week's worth of quinoa salad and poached chicken breasts for Santa Maria's and my lunches. I can do these tasks while finishing off the dinner dishes, and I put the headphones back on while doing this work. I enjoyed listening to the album on my iPod, but I would caution against buying the collection from the iTunes store.

For some mystifying reason, the digital version doesn't include one of the best songs—"Kitty's Back." It was midway through the album's rollicking, seventeen-minute rendition, when the band is vamping and jamming, and everyone is taking a solo (sometimes at what seems like the exact same moment), that I realized how music can enhance cooking. Marshall McLuhan talked about hot and cool media and the ability of technology to extend and alter our senses. He reasoned that when one sense is overloaded, the others start to shut down.

I was experiencing some mighty hot media in the kitchen. Not only was the stove on, but my iPod was cranking. With the late Danny Federici reaching heights of ecstasy during his keyboard solo, my other sensory perception were altered. McLuhan was only half right, though. My sense of smell was not shutting down. It was enhanced. I was standing over the poaching chicken as I had done many times before. On this evening, though, a delightful fragrance filled my nostrils—the scent of thyme. It was as thick and wonderful as the smoke of another, less-legal herb might have been at a rock concert years ago.

The concert was also released as a DVD, and the rendition of "Kitty's Back" has made it onto YouTube. Here it is.

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

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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.

More Thoughts on Thanksgiving, include Cosmic Ones

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Astronaut

I’ve arrived after much effort at my mother’s house on Thanksgiving Eve, with my wife, two children, and two in-laws in tow. Leaving Manhattan this evening after attending a party there, we looked like an immigrant family en route to Orchard Beach–three adults on the front bench of my father’s Chevy, two kids and a mother squeezed in the back.

My twenty-year old nephew Sean is also visiting. Santa Maria and I spent the evening running around, bathing the kids, reading them books, and getting them into bed. Meanwhile, Sean, who is 6′ -2″ and 185 pounds, started to eat everything in sight. He saved me some leftover chicken from the night before, but then he polished off half a block of cheddar cheese.

I was watching him out of the corner of my eye, and it reminded me of growing up. As one of five, I often felt like I couldn’t get enough to eat. There was plenty of food around the house, but there were plenty more mouths getting up earlier (or staying up later) and eating all the remaining Girl Scout Cookies, for example, or downing the last of the Cheerios in the cupboard.

Every time Sean made a move, it felt to me like the rustling of the dinosaurs in the movie “Jurassic Park.” Thump. Thump. Thump. The water in the glass ripples. A shadow falls around a corner. The horror! It’s the Consume-asaurus Sean coming. Run for the hills!

The family stress of Thanksgiving leave me feeling like I’m being pulled in eight different directions. It’s what I imagine being in space is like. As for what astronauts actually eat, Space.com has all the details, including what’s served to orbiting crew members on Thanksgiving.