dads who cook

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.

Another Sunday Night Dinner is Suddenly Something New

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Croissant Earlier this week, Santa Maria took a business trip to
Philadelphia, and we went with her. A highlight of the trip was a visit to the
Franklin Fountain, a sweet-toothed locavore’s paradise known for its handmade
ice cream, well worth a visit no matter what time of the year.

 

Since getting back, we’ve been very busy, and I haven’t had
much time to cook. One of the things that keeps us going is the social
hamster-wheel—a friend’s dinner party here, an other’s child’s birthday party
there. A nice thing about this schedule is that it saves me the trouble of
cooking—most of my friends are very skilled in the kitchen.

 

Then there is the gravitational pull of culture and fine
art. This afternoon we went to the New Museum to see the Urs Fischer
installation. My favorite piece (and Nina’s): the floating croissant and
butterfly sculpture. Pinta’s favorite: the levitating cake, athletic bag, and
subway-seat sculpture. Santa Maria's: the tongue that shoots out of a wall. Then, we went to a party thrown by the Mario Batali Foundation,
which raises money to help children in need. Dan Zanes played a set and
delicious cupcakes were enjoyed by all, but the next thing I knew, it was Sunday night and I was
facing dinner for four.

 

Cooking for the family never really leaves my mind, so it
wasn’t as if I didn’t have something ready. Before leaving for our trip south,
I had dashed to the store and purchased a pack of chicken thighs. They are the
center piece of one of my standard weeknight meals. I sauté them in a cast iron
pan with salt and pepper until they are crisp and brown, and serve them with
rice, spicy steamed spinach, and my black beans, which I defrost and top with a bit of
grated cheddar.

 

I had this meal ready in about a half-hour. What I wasn’t
ready for was the reaction: Lord knows when, but Nina has decided that she
hates my black beans. Hates them. In what I assume is a foreshadowing of her
teenage years, she said, “they’re boring. So boring.”

 

My black beans are many things, but they are not boring. Still, Nina could not be persuaded
otherwise. She just wanted the chicken and the rice. I told her she had to have
one more thing, either the black beans, or the spinach. I figured she’d opt for
the black beans, but she out witted me (another foreshadow of the teenage years?),
and said she’d have the spinach—provided she could douse it in soy sauce, which
she discovered the other day when I served fried rice for the first time.

 

I was upset that she didn’t want my black beans, which to be
clear she’s had countless times before and enjoyed, so it was momentarily hard
for me to see the genius in her approach. Chicken, rice, spinach, and soy
sauce? What’s wrong with that? It’s nearly a perfectly balanced meal. Maybe she was giving me her first recipe.

 

It didn't quite work out that way She wanted each of the
items in a separate dish, not mixed together like some kind of junior Asian
stir fry. And in the end, she combined the rice with grated cheddar cheese, a
dish fit for a four-year old, but not one I can recommend to others (despite
her helpful critique of the dish, which “had to much rice in it”).

 

Still, this was the start of her bona fide culinary
exploration. I praised her for taking the things I’d prepared and combining
them in new ways. One of the main goals I have as a parent is to get my kids to
think for themselves. It looks like I’m well on my way.

Image Credit:

Cumpadre, 2009
Fishing line, croissant, and butterfly
Dimensions variable
Courtesy the artist; Galerie Eva
Presenhuber, Zürich; Gavin Brown's
enterprise, New York; and Sadie Coles
HQ, London.
 

 

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.

Quinoa and Sweet Potato Salad Recipe

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Roasted_Sweet_Potato
I’m a writer and an editor by trade, and as a consequence, I
spend a lot of time in my head. It’s my job to trade in ideas and concepts. It
can be hard to know, though, how those thoughts match what is going on in real
life.

Lately, it feels like I’m always working in the kitchen.
Time at home has become a much more scarce commodity ever since Nina started
school, so in fact I’m probably not always working in the kitchen. One truth is
that I’ve been going to work earlier.

However, to get roughly the same amount of cooking done,
I’ve shifted my prep work and other tasks to the night before. So, even if I’m
literally spending less time in the kitchen, I’m doing it more often, which
makes me feel like I never leave the sink, counter, and stove.

I come home from work, eat dinner, and, even though I’m full
and it would make more sense to flip on the television or open a book, I start
cooking again. The shift in how I make my quinoa salad is a good example. While
I’m doing the dishes, I’m simmering the grain. By the time I’m done with the
clean up, it’s finished. That saves me about ten-to-twenty minutes the next
day. All that’s left to do is to chop some vegetables, which is something I can
do in my children’s company.

I’m so in love with quinoa that I’ve started to use it in a
new salad. Like many of my recipes, this one comes from Mark Bittman (Today’s
New York Times report on the closing of Gourmet magazine had a great lede,
“It’s Rachael Ray’s world now — we’re all just cooking in it.”; I don’t know
about Rachael Ray, but I do feel like I live in Bittman’s world).

I’ve been making this sweet potato and quinoa salad for a few
weeks now. I’ve varied Bittman’s recipe slightly. He calls for boiling the
sweet potatoes. I roast them, to concentrate their flavor. I chop and roast
them at night to use the next morning, just like the way I now prepare the
quinoa itself. I don’t bother to peel the sweet potato and I prefer the salad
with a white-wine vinegar, but that might just be me.

In my head, I think about my cooking in very grandiose
terms. I’m not just making meals for my family, I’m running a small, exclusive
restaurant. Its clientele is very special and very dear to me, and one of the
terrible ironies of my opening this restaurant is that their very patronage
makes it harder and harder for to keep it up and running.

When my children were infants, cooking was a guilt-free way
to avoid dealing with their physical and emotional demands. I discharged my
domestic responsibilities with a creative flair that kept me satisfied and fed
me and my family. I would even get a pat on the back for being the dad who
cooks.

Now that they’re a bit older and aging at what feels like an
exponential rate, standing in the kitchen leaves me feeling like I’m missing
out on their growing up. It’s an exaggeration, of course, (we spend time
together in the kitchen and eat meals together), but I am feeling the pressure
to manage my time more carefully.

I don’t plan on shutting down the restaurant in my mind, but
I might have to expand my staff. I have an idea that I know just the young
folks to hire.

Quinoa and Sweet Potato Salad
  • 1 cup quinoa, rinsed well
  • 2 sweet potatoes, scrubbed
  • 1 red bell pepper, diced
  • ¼ of a red onion, minced
  • ¼ cup chopped fresh parsley
  • olive oil
  • white wine vinegar
  • salt and pepper, to taste

 

        Preheat the oven to 350 degrees

        Cook the quinoa in 2 cups of water as you would cook rice,
about twenty minutes

        Chop the sweet potatoes into small squares, about a half
inch each. Coat with a tiny bit of olive oil, salt  and pepper, and spread out
on a baking sheet or in a large frying pan and roast in the oven until the
potatoes are soft on the inside and slightly crispy on the outside

        Toss all the ingredients and dress with the oil and vinegar.

        Note: dress only as much of the salad as you would like to eat in a given sitting. The remainder of the salad will keep  for days, so long as it is not dressed before consuming.

The Hopping Best Recipe for Roasted Cauliflower

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Roast_cauliflower

Parents who want  their children to eat vegetables often find themselves in a typical predicament–they start repeating themselves. It’s hard not to do so. The conventional thinking is that kids need to be exposed to vegetables over and over (consider, even, the “50 Exposure Rule”) before they’ll start eating their greens.

I don’t know if this is true. Nina and Pinta have their own crazy logic when it comes to vegetables. They’ll eat broccoli, asparagus, the occasional green bean, spinach (if it’s on pizza or in a frozen empanada), which, come to think of it, is not bad at all. Pinta also loves peas, especially if they are left frozen. How strange is that?

There are a number of tricks that can be employed to get kids to eat what’s good for them. I’m not an advocate of some of them, such as sneaking greens into foods a la Jessica Seinfeld’s “Deceptively Delicious,” but as the King put it, “50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong.” People are looking for an easy way to get children to eat better.

I will share a few of my methods. The first and most reliable one is to employ a balsamic vinaigrette. It’s easy to make–go with about one part vinegar to three parts olive oil and add salt and pepper. The children like to dip the heads of broccoli in it. They love it with their asparagus. The dressing will sweeten everything it touches.

Tonight, I came home from work early to have dinner with the family, and Santa Maria introduced me to another way. Actually, Nina told me about it, and I was shocked. I had no idea things like this went on when I was out of the house. Nina said her mother let her jump on the couch (she calls it our trampoline) and eat cauliflower in the living room.

As a rule, we don’t let the kids take food out of the kitchen. Also, I thought that we would want to discourage them from jumping on the furniture. When I was a child I would have gotten in big trouble for jumping on the couch. I told Nina this and asked her which was more crazy–jumping on the couch or eating in the living room. Her answer was “eating in the living room” which goes a long way towards explaining why she calls the couch a trampoline.

Santa Maria had called me on the way home and asked me to pick up a head of cauliflower. She cooked it while we were eating pasta and bolognese. It was ready by the time we finished the dishes. It was almost the children’s bed time, but it’s important to bend the rules when it means they’ll eat their vegetables.

Off we went to the living room, where Nina pulled the cushion off the couch, tossed in on the floor, and proceeded to bounce up and down on the piece of furniture, its slip cover riding up in fruitless protest, while Santa Maria and myself sat on a neighboring couch and watched with one bowl and two plates of the cauliflower in our laps. Pinta joined her and their giddy laughter filled the room. Every so often they’d stop, hop down, and pop a floret in their mouth. We’d enjoin them not to jump while chewing. Most of the time they’d oblige. This repeated itself until the cauliflower was gone. At which point, the jumping continued until Nina hit her head on the wall. Maybe my parents were on to something.

The truth about the cauliflower is that the children don’t need to hurt themselves in order to want to eat it. When roasted the following way, it’s irresistible. I first blogged about roasting cauliflower in April, but at the risk of repeating myself, I’ll post the recipe again. It’s that good.

 

Roasted Cauliflower

  • 1 head cauliflower
  • a very little olive oil (about a teaspoon)
  • salt and pepper to taste

    Turn the oven to 350 degrees.

    Wash and cut the cauliflower into florets.

    Toss the cauliflower in a roasting pan with the olive oil and the salt and pepper.

    Put the pan in the oven, and stir occasionally.

    It should be done in about twenty minutes (the smaller you cut up the head, the faster it will cook).

 

A Recipe for Breadcrumbs That Will Simplify Your Life

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Breadcrumbs I’m still striving to stop complicating my life. It’s a hard thing to do once children come along, but I believe it is possible. I’m just not sure about how to accomplish it.

Santa Maria took over the menu planning duties this week, and I was thankful. Lord knows that by her putting pen to paper and figuring out what we might eat next Wednesday, I would have a few extra brain cells to devote to more pressing matters, such as where to park the car.

All last week, the car sat just about in front of my apartment on my side of the street, which has spots valid all the time except Mondays, from 11:30 to 1. What I’ve learned, the hard way, about keeping a car in my neighborhood is that you have to move it the night before the sign says it needs to be moved. So a spot that’s good through Monday, needs to be vacated on a Sunday.

Therefore, we used the car on Saturday, to check out Buzz-A-Rama 500, the city’s last remaining slot car track and to have pizza at Di Fara’s with my brother, Tom, and his wife, Liza.

When we got back Sunday night, we found a place across the street from my apartment that’s good through Thursday. What good fortune.

Alas, I complicated things this morning, when I tried to simplify my life by moving the car.

On my way back from dropping off Nina at school, I caught sight of a woman loading groceries into her car on the Monday side of the street. Thinking that I would be able to leave the car in her spot for another week, I asked her to wait until I could cross the street and quickly moved the car. Alas, only after squeezing it in between a stopped Postal truck and an idling milk delivery, did I realize that it was only nine in the morning, and I had just put the car into a spot that would have to be vacated two hours later. I was toast.

As it turned out, I was able to find a new spot rather quickly and it wasn’t a big deal.

A similar thing happened in the kitchen last night: I made an anxious mistake and it turned out okay. In fact, for me, it turned out to be a revelation.

Santa Maria put meatloaf on the menu for this week. Meatloaf requires breadcrumbs, of which we had none (I hate store bought ones). I flipped through Bittman’s “How to Cook Everything” to review the making of breadcrumbs. I have tons of old bread in the freezer. It is very easy to make them. Drop a few pieces of old bread into a blender, and give it a whir. Soon you’ll have bread crumbs. Toast them in a 350 degree oven for a few minutes if you’d like.

While the breadcrumbs were toasting, I experimented with making a mint pesto. I’m sick of the amount of fresh herbs that I throw out and I realized with my pesto chicken sandwich of the other day, that a tasty pesto would come in handy at lunch time. I had a little bit of Pineapple Mint (whatever that is) left over and I tried making it into pesto. I didn’t have enough leaves though, for the blender to function properly, and I just made a mess.

During the pesto-making experiment, I took the breadcrumbs out of the oven and left them on the baking tray to cool. The bottle of olive oil was on the counter next to them. At one point, I reached for it and it slipped out of my hand, tipped over, and emptied its contents onto the cooling breadcrumbs. Nightmare! I was annoyed with my clumsiness and frustrated by having ruined my breadcrumbs.

Thing is, when I scooped up the breadcrumbs to store them, I tasted the olive coated ones. They were delicious. The crispiness of the crumbs and the fruitiness and slipperiness of the oil were amazing. I had never tasted anything like this.

I’ve seen recipes for pasta with fresh breadcrumbs and always thought, “how stupid, to put breadcrumbs on pasta.” Now that I’ve tasted fresh breadcrumbs with olive oil, I’m thinking I might be the stupid one not to try such a dish. The nice thing about those recipes, is how simple they all seem.

 

The Summertime Blues, or How Not to Cook Mussels on the Grill

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CrabRawBarSASD While on vacation, I managed my cooking responsibilities quite comfortably, which means I spent less time at the stove than I did on the beach.  One night we ate crabs (see below), another night one of my brother-in-laws grilled chicken on the barbecue, and yet another night we threw together some salads in the afternoon and relaxed with cocktails come evening time, salads being dishes that don’t get cold and don’t suffer from sitting around while you watch the sun set.

Last week’s dining section of the New York Times had a couple of articles addressing the challenges facing home cooks when they go on vacation. Julia Moskin wrote about the pitfalls of a sharing a kitchen, and she offers up a handy list of items not to forget. Jhumpa Lahiri contributed a cover essay on the essentials she needs to throw in the car. Chief among them, the cast-iron frying pan.

I thought of her essay this weekend while visiting the Abuelita. Usually, when we see her, we travel by train and try to limit the amount of things we carry. These days, though, we happen to be in possession of my late father’s Chevrolet, and our attitude towards luggage is quite a bit more liberal. “Want it? See it? Take it,” is more the thinking. Among the things we carted up there: my cast iron frying pan (Santa Maria discouraged me from taking both of the ones I own).

I took the frying pan to make Mussels a la Plancha. You can’t make them without it. Unlike Lahiri, though, I encountered another hitch. I didn’t bank on the Abuelita’s concern for the cleanliness of her new sealed-top electric stove, the surface of which happens to be white. She wanted to protect its pristine surface from my charred black frying pan.

So I did want any man would do when faced with female resistance in the kitchen: I started a fire. I figured the old Weber grill would be as good as anything to heat the frying pan. I had dreams that it might make the mussels even better. Grilling usually improves everything.

Alas, my experiment was a failure. The frying pan got hot enough to open the mussels, but the fire didn’t generate enough heat to cook off the liquid and give them that concentrated, explosive fresh-out-of-the-sea flavor. I had to plead with the Abuelita to give me access to her stove, which she did. Fortunately, the pan did not mar the surface and everyone was happy.

I think the effort failed because the pan was too far from the fire. I had placed it on the wire grilling surface. Maybe next time I’ll stick it in the coals. Anyone have any experience using a cast iron pan with an open fire?