dads

Stock Market Jitters = Scallop, Mint, Pea, and Couscous Salad

by

Scallop_mint_salad
I went food shopping on Monday evening, the day the DJIA dropped more than 600 points. I don’t have any more than your average Joe tied up in my 401k (and in fact I can’t even tell you how much it is worth, because I never look), but last I checked it was fully invested in the stock market.

I’m long equities, as they say on the Street, because I figure I have a long (ish) time to retire, and at which point things will be looking up. And, according to Nate Silver, in the New York Times, I should be okay: stocks revert to the mean over time (something they seemed to be doing in a hurry today, with their 430 point gain, but that came long after I was home with my groceries, and who knows where they will be by the time you read this.)

But watching 1 trillion dollars vanish from the stock market had a sobering effect. So I picked up the New York State Cheddar, but didn’t buy any Gruyere. I loaded up on vegetables, but didn’t pause at the case of grass-fed meat. I thought for a moment about what I had in the freezer, and I decided to eat those things up, instead of spending any large sums on protein.

A box of Henry and Lisa’s wild bay scallops has been kicking around our freezer for far too long, so I decided I would eat it that night. I texted Santa Maria, who was at home, and asked her to take it out to thaw. Then I tried to remember all the ingredients in a perfect summer dish I once made from the "Gourmet Every Day" cookbook: scallops with mint, peas, and couscous.

That wasn’t hard. Three ingredients. I knew I had peas in the freezer too, so all I needed to do was buy the mint. I finished up my shop, took the bus home with my bags of groceries (no spending cash on cab fare that night!) and started dinner the minute I got in the door. It was done twenty minutes later.

Nina and Pinta had eaten black beans and rice earlier that evening, so they were content to eat dessert while their mother and I enjoyed the our dinner. It was a quick, light, and delicious way to end the day.

Super Quick Scallop Salad with Mint, Peas, and Couscous

  • 1/2 cup couscous
  • 8-16 ounces of scallops (bay work fine, as do sea scallops; see note below)
  • 1 quarter cup frozen peas
  • 1-3 tablespoons chopped fresh mint
  • Lemon juice, to taste
  • Olive Oil
  • Salt

Make the couscous by bringing 1/2 cup water to boil in a small pot with a tight cover. Once the water boils, toss in the couscous, stir, and cover. Let sit about fifteen minutes, and then fluff.

Dry the scallops with paper towel.

Heat a cast-iron skillet until it is very hot, and then add a bit of oil.

Toss the scallops into the pan, but don't crowd the pan. If you are making more, use a two pans.

Let the scallops sit undisturbed as the pan continues to heat until the edge is caramelized.

Shake the scallops around with a spatula, and turn off the heat to let them finish cooking. If you are using sea scallops and they happen to be thick, flip them and heat the other side for a couple of minutes.

While the scallops cook, heat a bit of water in another pot and toss in the peas. Boil until they are a bright green and remove from heat.

Combine the couscous, peas, mint, and scallops in a bowl, and dress with the lemon, oil, and salt.

Note: The "Gourmet Every Day" recipe calls for sea scallops and suggests dressing them with sesame seeds. I've never made it their way, but I'm sure it is equally, if not more, delicious. And as a further note, that cook book has never failed me.

Serves two.

No Elbows on the Table: Corn and a Lesson About Table Manners

by

Round-Table-Of-Fourteenth-Century
We’re visiting the grandparents, and we arrived Sunday night to a beautiful home-cooked meal prepared, as usual, by Santa Maria’s father. He served roast chicken, stuffing, asparagus, and corn on the cob.

The corn might have been out of season, but it was very popular. Nina and Pinta gobbled it up. Nina sat across from me, and as she struggled to get the buttered kernels off the cob, she had her elbows on the table.

We’ve been teaching the kids manners, and this caught the attention of Pinta, who called out, “No elbows on the table.” I saw Nina struggling and said “Elbows are allowed on the table when eating corn on the cob. It’s a little known rule of etiquette, that when you eat something with your hands, no rules apply.”

I made that up, of course, but it sounded good. Later, I second guessed myself, so I did a bit of research into elbows and table manners.

  • According to a post on The Sydney Morning Herald’s site: “The great houses and castles of England during the middle ages did not have dining tables in the great halls, so tables were made from trestles and covered with a cloth. The diners sat along one side only; if they put their elbows on the table and leant too heavily, the table could collapse.”
  • Something called AllSands (“Over 7000 Grains of Knowledge & Counting…”) concurs that the rule dates back to the Middle Ages, but it suggests that it came about for different reasons: in those days everyone ate cafeteria style, at long tables, side by side, and if you had your elbows on the table it meant that one less person could fit there.
  • And an entry on Amazon’s Askville adds this: “In France, the general rule is, and not just at meal tables, keep your hands in view. I suspect the reason for this so that there can be no suspicion of any type of hankypanky under the table!"

After I looked around a bit, I felt that making something up was the right approach. What do you tell your children about table manners?

 

 

Deptartment of Do as I Say, Not as I Do: Once A Month Cooking

by

InHereSomewhere

When I was in high school, we were offered a choice of taking classes in wood shop or home economics. Most boys, including myself, chose the former, and most girls chose the latter. I knew a couple of guys who picked home-ec, but I was never that cool.

So, if I feel like I have a GED diploma when it comes to household management, I know that there are those who must have PhDs in the subject. They are the highly-efficient ones who can master a concept called "Once-A-Month Cooking," in which four-weeks of meals are compressed into one day of labor.

To me, it sounds like pure alchemy, the lead-into-gold of feeding one's family. I love the freezer, and make great use of it, but I also like freshly cooked food much too much to ever try this approach (plus I lack the brain cells to have any faith in it).

I've been in touch with the folks who run a leading website in the field, Once A Month Mom, and I once even wrote an item for them about  Slow Roasted Pork Shoulder, Puerto Rican style. The Christian-Science Monitor recently put the whole concept to a test, and they had a few pointers. The article is here.

 

 

A Super Quick Seasonal Pumpkin Custard Recipe

by

Big_Bambu_Line
As you know from reading this blog, I love to cook for my family. But man does not live on bread alone, and this morning we went to the Metropolitan Museum to tour the Starn Brothers' sculpture “Big Bambú” on the Museum’s roof garden.

We arrived at 9:20 a.m., only to discover that the morning tours had sold out an hour earlier. We took turns waiting on line until noon, for tickets at 2 and 3 pm. Children under ten aren’t allowed on the structure, so Santa Maria and I went one after another. We got home at about 5 this afternoon, just in time for the Halloween madness.

The sculpture’s subtitle is “You Can’t You Don’t and You Won’t Stop,” and that Beastie Boys lyric could easily be our kids’ motto. I was worn out by the day, and Santa Maria took over dinner, and graciously offered to weigh in here:

Pinta went to the museum in full mermaid regalia, Nina saved her Queen costume for trick or treating. Stay at Stove Dad drove, parked, spent his time waiting on line drawing in his sketchbook, then took the kids on a tour called “Start with Art” that he didn’t like: he texted me “this tour should be called Stop with Art, it’s so booooooring.”

The sculpture was a glorious chaos, and worth the wait. The wind whipped thorough the bamboo poles and the whole sculpture whistled. The views from high above the museum were stunning, and the craftsmanship was amazing. It was a real treat to see something at the Met that we were allowed not only to touch, but to walk all over.

When we got home, Stay at Stove Dad stopped off at the Park Slope Food Coop to do the weekly shop, and I sautéed flounder, roasted purple potatoes, and steamed some broccoli to provide a nice base for the candy deluge to follow.  I couldn’t get the flounder quite right – it stuck to the pan, then all the nice golden parts ripped off.  The next batch turned out worse; it was soggy. 

We had to run out of the house to take the kids trick or treating. If I had just five minutes more before making dinner (or if Stay at Stove Dad hadn’t passed out on the floor and had made the dinner as he usually does), I would have whipped up a pumpkin custard for dessert. The prep time is really only five minutes, and clean up is a snap: you mix the ingredients in the same dish it bakes in.

The truth is, the custard wasn’t missed at all. As Pinta pointed out earlier, “After we eat dinner, we won’t need dessert. We’ll have all our candy to eat!” How true. How true.

Superfast Pumpkin Custard

  • one 16 oz. can pumpkin
  • 1/2 c. whole milk (or 1% or skim)
  • 2 eggs
  • 1 t cinnamon
  • 1/2 t nutmeg
  • 1/4 t ginger
  • 1/4 t cloves
  • 1/4 t salt
  • 4 T sugar

Combine all the ingredients in a 9-inch pie or tart dish.

Bake approximately 30 minutes in oven at 350 degrees.  Let cool 10-15

minutes on your windowsill and the custard will set nicely.

Pumkin_custard

Note: This is a very wholesome and delicious desert, but if you want to make it a bit more impressive (albiet less healthy), serve it with a dollop of fresh whipped cream.

All American Oyster Chowder Recipe

by

Oyster_chowder
I miss the kind of meals I made before I had children, when I cooked for sport. It was always fun to try something new, and if a dish didn’t work out, there was still a very good chance that everyone would enjoy themselves all the same. Temper tantrums were confined to the kitchen, and dinners never ended in tears (shouts, maybe, but not tears).

Once, for New Years, I tried my hand at the Moroccan pigeon pie called pastilla. I had fallen in love with the sweet-and-savory dish on a trip to Fez a long time ago, and I wanted to make it at home. I hunted around for a source for pigeon, gave up, and settled on chicken. I had no trouble finding phyllo dough for the crust. Working with the dough was a different story, and I did something very wrong—the pastilla turned out as dry as the Sahara.

No one complained, though, and we just moved on to the next course. I can’t risk such things these days. It’s just no fun for me if my girls don’t eat. I tend to stick to the tried and true, and, after making breakfasts, lunches, and dinner, I don’t have the energy to try anything new.

At times, though, it can’t be avoided. On Saturday, I stopped my favorite fishmongers, Blue Moon Fish, at the Grand Army Plaza Greenmarket. I asked the clerk for a dozen small oysters. After I got home, I discovered that he’d given me six small ones (which Santa Maria and I slurped down that day), and six very large ones that were just far to big for me to eat on the half shell. I needed to find something to do with the oysters.

Chowder was the first thing to come to mind, but when I consulted a few cookbooks, I realized that I was in a slightly strange position. All the recipes for chowder called for a couple of dozen of them. I had but six.

I decided to improvise. When I did my weekly shop on Monday, I made sure to get things I might like to put in the soup. I bought blue potatoes, because I thought they’d look cool. Heavy cream, because that seemed vital. Bacon and celery, because you can’t loose with those.

I had half a red onion in the refrigerator. Red onion. White cream. Blue potato.  All American chowder! Why not? At this point I should issue a disclaimer. There are those who quite correctly challenge the quality of online recipes. The one I’m about to offer was tested just once, tonight. In its defense, I have to say it was delicious. Santa Maria concurs (in fact, her enthusiasm for it validated all my efforts, though she insisted on more salt).

I made the soup while getting the kids ready for bed. I started by softening the onion and rendering the bacon in a small pot. Then I ran down the hall to check on the kids. They were setting up a game in their bedroom. I dashed back to the kitchen and cut up the celery. I returned to their room. Everything was okay, but they wanted me to play with them. I said I would, in a second. “I’m making oyster chowder,” I told them as I ran off, suddenly realizing my folly.

I could make the chowder anytime, but I could only play with them at that very moment. I said I’d be right back. I quickly diced the blue potato and tossed it in the pot. I wasn’t sure about how to cook the potato (which would take a long time) and the oysters (which would take a short time), so I brought it to a boil with a little water. Then I turned it off and joined the children in their room.

We played for a while, then I did the whole bedtime routine in record time. Brushed their teeth, sat down to read their books. Santa Maria was on her way home, and I had to text her to tell her that I was a bit ahead of schedule. I think the chowder was calling me.

After the kids were in bed, I opened the oysters (with a lot of effort), chopped them up, and added them, along with a bit of cream and milk and thyme to the pot and simmered if for a few minutes.

It was creamy and delicious, and easy enought that I'll consider making it more often. Unlike the pastilla, it was a complete success. So much so that it made it hard for me to move on to the rest of my dinner, a more mundane plate of rice and beans, chicken, and spinach. 

All American Oyster Chowder

  • 1/2 red onion, diced
  • 1/2 slice bacon, diced
  • 1/2 stalk celery, diced
  • 1 small blue potato, diced
  • 6 large oysters, opened, juice reserved, and chopped
  • 2 oz heavy cream
  • 2 oz whole milk
  • thyme and salt and pepper, to taste

In a small pot, sauté the onion, bacon, and celery until the onion is soft and the bacon fat is rendered.

Add the potato and just enough water to cover them.

Bring to a boil and simmer until the potatoes are soft.

Add the oysters, cream, milk, and thyme.

Bring to a boil and simmer for a few minutes.

The Sounds of Pomegranate Season

by

800px-Pomegranate03_edit
I’ve promised myself that when I move, I will upgrade my kitchen equipment. I have a few exotic things—such as a fish poacher, a Moroccan tagine, and a Swiss pressure cooker—but as one of my readers recently pointed out, I’m lacking some important items. “Dude. Seriously. Buy a Kitchen Aid mixer. I mean, if you're going to go through the trouble of having this blog (which I just discovered) and do things in the kitchen, get 2 tools: 1) The mixer and a food processor,” wrote Jez, of the website Fresh Beer Every Friday.

He’s probably right, but I’m a firm believer that you do not need fancy equipment to make fine food. You need a few good knives and a few solid pots. Fresh ingredients are more important than anything else. A bread maker, fuhgeddaboudit.

I plan on staying in an apartment in the city, and not moving to a house with a huge kitchen, so I will always have to limit what I keep on hand. There is one thing I will be certain to improve, though—my kitchen stereo. At the moment, it has a half-broken old boombox that only plays the radio. I dream about installing a Sonos system that magically keeps the music flowing in all the rooms, but my budget will probably be too modest for that.

I have a sizable library of music, and I’m often on the lookout for new acts. Pomegranates, an up-and-coming quartet out of Ohio, just caught my eye. It is pomegranate season, after all, and the ruby fruit is one of Santa Maria’s favorites. (She recently left a half-eaten one on the counter, and I’ve seen her toting the bright red seeds around with her; last week she gave them to our friend Randall Eng, at a performance of his opera "Henry's Wife".)

It seems like a perplexing puzzle and an enormous amount of effort to open one and get the seeds out (though Santa Maria has never been afraid to do the work). A colleague of mine who is a fan of the fruit recently told me about a method involving a giant bowl of water. She swears it is easier, but I haven’t had the time to try it. As soon as I do, I’ll share the results here. 

In the meantime, I’ll leave you with Pomegranates, the band. They join a long list of quality acts from the Buckeye State, which includes the punk rock greats the Pretenders, Erika Wennerstrom’s raucous power trio the Heartless Bastards, the experimental blues-rock duo the Black Keys, and the eternally funky Ohio Players (“Love Rollercoaster”). The Pomegranates have a more contemporary and chiming sound (the remind me a tiny bit of the lovely English act the xx), and they even have a song called “In the Kitchen.” Enjoy.

 

 

Find more artists like Pomegranates at MySpace Music

How Not to Make Quinoa Salad

by

Burning Oven
In many ways, cooking for a family differs from running a restaurant, but in some ways it is similar. Restaurants serve several different entrees, and there have been nights when I’m deep into multiple dishes for each member of the family, such as when we have our seafood feast: Nina likes mussels, but Pinta does not. I try to limit the options each night, though. After all, I’m not trying to run a restaurant.

Both professional chefs and parents who cook also have to do more than one thing (or six things) at time. Chefs have training and develop skills to do this well. Take short order cooks. I learned a little bit about how their minds keep track of tasks from reading “The Egg Men,” Burkhard Bilger’s pulse-raising story about short-order breakfast cooks in Las Vegas, which ran in the Sept. 5, 2010 issue of The New Yorker (subscription required for the full article).

“Warren Meck, a neuroscientist at Duke University, has identified the neural circuitry that allows the brain to time several events at once. As it happens, short-order cooks are among his favorite examples. They’re like jugglers, he says, who can keep a dozen balls in the air at the same time. He calls them “the master interval timers.”
Whenever a cook sets a pan on a griddle, Meck says, a burst of dopamine is released in the brain’s frontal cortex. The cortex is full of oscillatory neurons that vibrate at different tempos. The dopamine forces a group of these neurons to fall into synch, which sends a chemical signal to the corpus striatum, at the base of the brain. “We call that the start gun,” Meck says. The striatum recognizes the signal as a time marker and releases a second burst of dopamine, which sends a signal back to the frontal cortex via the thalamus—the stop gun. Every time this neural circuit is completed, the brain gets better at distinguishing that particular interval from the thousands of others that it times during the course of a day. An experienced cook, Meck believes, will have a separate neural circuit set up for every task: an over-easy circuit, an over medium circuit, a sunny-side-up circuit, and so on, each one reinforced through constant repetitive use.”

In my case, I had a bit of trouble managing multiple tasks last night. I foolishly tried to roast the potatoes for my quinoa salad while at the same time trying to decide if acquiring a piece of real estate would be good move for my family. The house hunt is one thing that’s not giving me a dopamine rush, and I burned the potatoes.

A Marathon Cooking Session with a Shrimp and Fennel Risotto Recipe

by

Fennel_bulb
I cook an extreme amount of food. When I'm standing in the kitchen and my feet are aching, I wonder why I get involved in making so many dishes. On the day after, looking at a steaming bowl of leftovers for lunch, I have a an inkling why. I love to eat, and I'd rather not face a night of take-out or an afternoon of Midtown lunch specials. I want fresh and delicious food, and I can only afford it by making it for myself.

I find cooking for my family extremely hectic. I'm usually rushing through a recipe hoping to stave off a melt-down, either on the part of Santa Maria or on the part of one of the kids. It's rarely relaxing. Yesterday was different. Santa Maria took the kids to the Brooklyn Museum and I had a couple of hours to myself in the kitchen.

We were on a good roll when it came to taking care of domestic tasks yesterday. Santa Maria and I knocked off the weekly shop, did some laundry, and made chicken soup, all before noon. We were feeling good when we were shopping, and in those cases, the shopping list tends to grow. Waiting to pay, Santa Maria came up with all kinds of things she'd like to have for dinner–fresh salsa and guacamole, included. She ran off to get cilantro and a ripe avocado.

We settled on having an old favorite for dinner: shrimp-and-fennel risotto. The recipe is adapted from "Gourmet Everyday," a great cookbook the sadly closed magazine published a few years ago. All the recipes in it are fast, and most are delicious. This risotto is a perfect example.

When we got home, I realized that I had planned a different dinner for that evening, coq au vin. I had a chicken in the back of the refrigerator that needed to be cooked. Its sell-by date was Monday, and I could tell just from opening the refrigerator that it would barely make it that long.

We were having the chicken soup for lunch, though, and that was enough chicken for one day for me. The old chicken would have to wait.

When Santa Maria went out with the children in the afternoon, I got to work in the kitchen. I started chopping onions and fennel for the risotto. I started to prep the items for the coq au vin, which I would make the following morning before taking Nina to school and going to work. Time is short in the morning these days, and I would have to have all the prep work done in order to finish the dish and get Nina out the door on time.

Also, I wanted to make my weekly quinoa salad, so that meant more and more chopping and roasting. And I wanted to serve roasted cauliflower to the kids upon their return from the museum. And I wanted to chop the onion and the tomato and to wash and chop the cilantro for the fresh salsa and guacamole. In the midst of this frenzy, I suddenly wondered what other men do with their free time on a Sunday. Isn't there something called the NFL? Aren't there college bowl games at this time of year? Who knows? You can't eat them, can you?

Santa Maria and the kids came back from the museum (where, in the photo exhibition of rock and roll stars, Nina saw a singer mooning the camera and has since learned this vital and sophomoric skill herself), and we started eating. We all downed the cauliflower. Santa Maria whipped up the guacamole and homemade salsa, and melted the cheddar cheese on the organic corn chips.  I defrosted a bit of black beans for the children, who I figured would not eat the risotto. Nina tried it, but she didn't like it.

I can't imagine why she didn't like the risotto. It's a marvelous dish, and quite beautiful. The shrimp is pink and the fennel fronds are green. The rice is white and creamy. The fennel lends it a distinctive licorice flavor and the shrimp, when cut up my special way, are curly and tender and filling. The dish itself is low in fat, if you make it my way with just olive oil. The trick to the shrimp is to slice each one down its back into two long pieces. I usually don't have time to do this when the kids are around, but yesterday, I had the opportunity. When the shrimp are cooked at the end of the dish, they wind themselves up into little corkscrews. They are delightful. I thought so this afternoon when eating the leftovers for lunch. The nice thing about the way I cook, upping the proportions substantially, is that I have leftovers from my leftovers. I'll be eating some of it tomorrow for lunch again. I don't mind. It's that good.

Shrimp and Fennel Risotto
  • 1 onion, diced
  • 1 or more heads fennel, cored and diced, fronds reserved.
  • 1 T. Olive Oil
  • 1 cup Arborio or other short-grained rice
  • 1/2 cup or more white wine
  • 1 cup chicken stock
  • 4 or more cups of hot water
  • 1 lb. medium shrimp, peeled, deveined, and sliced lengthwise into two long pieces

Salt the shrimp by layering them in a bowl and putting 1/2 t. salt on them. Put another layer of shrimp on top of that and salt them as well. Continue until all the shrimp are salted. This step can be done as the shrimp are sliced into two pieces.

Heat the chicken stock and the water until boiling and then turn down to a low simmer.

Sauté the onion in the oil until soft.

Add the fennel and continue to cook until soft.

Add the rice and stir to coat each grain with oil.

Add the wine and cook and stir until the wine is absorbed.

Add a ladle of stock to the rice and stir.

Stir (on and off) until the stock is absorbed.

Repeat the last two steps until the rice is almost cooked. If you need more liquid, just add hot water to the stock mixture. The rice should be tender but still firm in the center.

Stir in fennel fronds and the shrimp and cook a few minutes until they are opaque and pink. Add salt and freshly ground pepper to taste.

Serve immediately.

Note: you can make this with butter if you prefer a richer taste.

Planning and Food Shopping Tips from the Trenches

by

Washing_parlsely
My late father had many colorful expressions at his disposal. He wasn't a man who swore a lot (at least not around the children), and he had a great faculty with language (he was a litigator). One the things he used to say when something wasn't going his way was, "I need this like I need a hole in my head."

That expression came to mind tonight when I came home. I have a number of recent and unexpected stresses in my life right now. One is a career-related project that I'm very excited about and will fully describe in the near future. As thrilling as this project is, it does take up a lot of brain power. The other stress is related to my living situation, and it remains in my best interest not to detail it here. Suffice it to say that I need it like I need a hole in my head.

I've been so distracted that I can barely cook. Usually, I do the menu planning and grocery buying, but this week Santa Maria volunteered to take on this task. She's doing her best to pick up much of the domestic labor as I throw myself into this new work project of mine, but she is also subject to the same living-situation stress as I am.

When I plan a menu, I try to think three or four steps ahead, and I'm proud of one of my more recent tricks that helps me balance work, play, parenting, cooking, and shopping. For a long time, I've been frustrated by the way fresh herbs spoil before you can use them up. Take parsley, for example. How many times have you thrown out three-quarters of a limp head a week after using a pinch to gussy up a dish? Parsley is on my mind lately because it is a key ingredient in the weekly quinoa-and-sweet-potato salad I make for Santa Maria's lunch.

Due to the recent distractions, I forgot to put parsley on the shopping list last weekend. But I was still able to make the quinoa salad because of the trick I've learned. As soon as a head of parsley comes into the house, I wash it well and dry it thoroughly in the salad spinner. It will then keep in the refrigerator for up to two weeks.

I'm very grateful that Santa Maria is helping out with the shopping and planning. Her menu for this week included mushroom risotto. Delightful, I thought. It was something I could put together tonight while the kids were playing before bedtime. I'm not of the persuasion that risotto needs to be stirred constantly. It's not necessary. I'm not a great chef, just a great eater. Though if you ate my food, you might quibble with that self-deprecating description. I can cook very well, and love to do it.

Tonight, though, I was stymied. I couldn't find any mushrooms in the house. I asked Santa Maria where the dried porcini were, or if we had any at all. "I don't know," she replied. "How could you not know, if you put the dish on the menu for the week," I snapped. 

"Porcini mushrooms are a staple." she said. "They should be in the house, like salt, Mr. Stay-at-Stove-Dad."

On to plan B, which was no plan. I found a head of cauliflower and Santa Maria offered to roast it. That was very nice of her, as it got me out of the kitchen. I was starting to feel angry because I wasn't going to have a delicious dinner. I sat with the kids while they played, and if ever there was an antidote to anger it's in their joyful laughter.

I snacked on some baby carrots, and gave my blood-sugar a boost. Pinta trotted around eating what she called a pequeño carrot, and I relaxed. There was left over asparagus from the kids' dinner, and I found some frozen empanadas to round out my dinner. A filling meal, but not one with any real culinary satisfaction.

One of my favorite artists, Prince, uses my father's expression in a slightly different context. It's not one of his better songs, but somehow it seems fitting. Santa Maria suggested it.

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

by

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.