dads

There’s BPA In My Daughter’s Soup?

by

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hard Family Times, Easy Fried Rice Recipe

by

Fried_Rice
Yesterday was a very long day, literally. Daylight savings
time ended, which for most adults means an extra hour of sleep, but not for
those with young children whose biological clocks take a few days to reset.
Pinta was up at 5:39 in the morning, and there was little that could be done
about it. We were up too.

 

It was also a long day emotionally. A year ago, my father
died after a long bout with prostate cancer. We spent the anniversary of his
death in church upstate and then eating ham, poached salmon, and quiche with my
extended family. The death of one’s father, no matter how expected, is a
roiling event that both defies discussion and spurs expression. Yesterday,
there was a lot of reminiscing, some arguing, and an opportunity to
connect with the living. I don’t get to talk very often face to face with one
of my brothers, who lives in Pennsylvania, and I was glad to see him.

 

Faulkner said, “The past is not dead. It’s not even past.”
The same could be said of the dead. They’re not past. We remember them in ways
large and small. In my father’s case, it’s in small ways such as looking up the
aisle at church or watching the New York Jet’s play on the television, and in
large ways like looking up the aisle at church or finding it difficult to
plainly reveal one’s emotional state. I’ll take a stab at the latter. Yesterday
was draining.I was sad, angry, morose, and probably a half-dozen other things I've yet to articulate.

 

We left upstate early and returned to the house before dark.
After a quick dash to the playground for some fresh air, we headed back inside.
I started to cook dinner while the girls played. I had a pound of flounder and
a head of asparagus and a questionable lack of plans for a starch.

 

The best I could come up with was mashed potatoes, which for
reasons that flummox me, the girls don’t really like. I didn’t actually feel
like making or eating mashed potatoes, but I needed something to go with the
fish and the vegetables. Somehow, I thought of fried rice. I have never made
fried rice before, but how hard could it be?

 

There were about two cups of rice already cooked in the
refrigerator, and I had three old scallions that it would be a potentially
poisoning crime to serve anyone without cooking them first. I looked in Mark
Bittman’s “How to Cook Everything” and took careful note of one detail. He said
it would take twenty-minutes to make; less, with pre-cooked rice. I was all
set.

 

Nina was excited for dinner. She wanted to help make
something. The asparagus was cooking, the fish kind of takes care of itself,
and the rice was well underway. There wasn’t any easy task for her to handle.
She loves to set the table, though, and she seized on this idea. She even wrote
and cut out place cards with everyone’s name. And she and Nina loved the rice.
It was the easiest and most relaxing dinner in a long time, a perfect antidote
to a challenging day.

 

 

 Quick Fried Rice

  • 1 or two garlic cloves, diced
  • 3 scallions, diced
  • about a half-inch or so fresh ginger, peeled and diced
  • vegetable oil
  • 2 to 4 cups of cooked rice
  • 1 to 2 eggs, lightly beaten
  • 1 to 2 teaspoons soy sauce

        Heat the oil in a large frying pan or wok.

        Saute the garlic, scallions, and ginger for about a minute.

        Add the rice, stirring constantly.

        Clear a spot in the center of the pan and pour a bit of the egg on the surface and continue to stir.

        Repeat until the egg is used up and mixed in with the rice.

        Add the soy sauce.

 

Bread Recipe for Simpletons

by

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!

Why Pay for Pizza?

by

 

Kneading_dough
Pizza is perhaps the perfect food. It makes for cheap night
out with next to nothing to clean up (other than the kids). It is fairly nutritious
(lycopene, anyone?), and children almost universally love it. There’s just one
catch, as I discovered today—for all of its appeal to be evident, it must be
made by a professional.

 

This afternoon, a friend from Manhattan and her young son
stopped by before dinnertime for a quick visit. They had spent the day at the
Brooklyn Botanic Garden. We had spent the day getting ready for dinner, which
Nina announced as they were leaving. “We’re making plain pizza for dinner,” she said.

 

I overheard her and was torn. Should we have invited the boy
and his mom to stay for dinner? Maybe. I would have liked their company, but I
hadn’t planned on their coming over and I didn’t think I had enough food to
offer. So I didn’t say anything, and it turned out to be the best decision. Not
because there was a shortage of food, but because the pizza was terrible.

 

For father’s day earlier this year, Santa Maria gave me a
pizza stone. I had asked her for one after reading in the Sunday New York Times Magazine an enticing account   by Sam Sifton about
making pizza.

 

The stone has sat at the bottom of our oven since June, but
this morning, Nina asked me “When are you going to make pizza?” I’ve been
looking for dishes to cook with the children, and it occurred to me that pizza,
with the messy dough and the drippy tomatoes and the bits of herbs, was a
perfect thing.

 

This conversation took place at about seven in the morning.
Santa Maria was asleep. I went to the computer and looked up Sifton’s article
on the Internet and found his recipe for pizza dough. I read it closely to see what
I would need to buy.

 

A few things posed a problem. Bread flour, was one. I had no
idea what that is. Santa Maria, though, has done her share of baking, and would
be able to help decode that mystery. Sifton said the dough needed to be made
the night before, but that the morning was okay. It was early enough in the day,
so we were still in business. A larger challenge loomed, though. His recipe
called for a standing mixer. I didn’t have one of those.

 

I was sitting with Nina and Pinta on a bench in our kitchen,
with the computer on my lap. What to do now? The online version of his article
comes with a charming video tutorial. Kids love videos. So we watched it
together. It tells you what to do if you don’t have a
standing mixer: You can knead the dough. Problem solved.

 

When Santa Maria got up, I told her about my plan to make
pizza from scratch. This idea made her want to go back to bed. After a cup of tea, and a walk through the park, though, Santa Maria
came around to the notion of making the pizza. We made the dough before the
children’s naps, to give it time to rise. Nina and Pinta enthusiastically
measured the flour, salt, oil, and other ingredients. Everything was fine until the yeast and the water
went into the mixture. Then, I started to panic.

 

Santa Maria proved her commitment to the project (and to me)
by fending off my shouts to review the recipe and the video. She
calmly dusted the countertop with flour and gave a quick tutorial to Nina,
Pinta, and myself on the finer art of kneading.

 

Our fingers were sticky with dough and flour covered the
floor, the girls’ dresses, and somehow, the chair in the next room, but
eventually we had a nice ball of dough. It smelled remarkably fresh and
delicious. I started to think about buying a standing mixer. Wouldn’t it be
nice to make this all the time? We napped and the dough rose. Later, I started to actually make the pizza.

 

In college, I worked in a pizzeria and I know how to toss
the dough in the air. With my children beside me, I relived my undergraduate
days. It was a great show, but soon I had stretched the dough until it was much
larger than my little pizza stone and wooden peel. I folded the dough over
itself and fit it on the wooden surface. Mistake number one.

 

Together we spread the tomatoes and cheese on the dough. I slid
the pizza into the oven without incident and felt a happy tingle of
anticipation. I had been anxious about the pizza sticking to the peel, so I had
covered it with extra flour. Mistake number two.

 

As the pizza cooked, the kitchen started to fill with
smoke (that extra flour started to burn the minute the pie went into the oven). Before I could deal with the smoke, I realized that I didn’t have any way to get the cooked pizza out of the oven.
My pizza stone came with a wooden peel, but not with the thin metal thing
necessary to slide under the cooked pie and pull it from the heat. Mistake number
three.

 

According to the recipe, we had seven minutes to come up with a solution. I wielded a
spatula. Santa Maria stood by with a baking sheet and a ceramic plate (as small
as the pie was, it was still wider than the largest baking sheet we had).
Eventually, we pulled a delicious-looking pie from the oven.

 

We sprinkled it with fresh basil and grated Parmesan, and
brought it to the table. The girls were waiting with their little knives and
forks. We sliced up two pieces each for them, and that’s when the futile nature
of the whole enterprise became evident.

 

Pinta didn’t like the tomatoes. Neither did her older
sister, who kept calling them “the orange stuff.” Soon neither one of them was
eating anything.

 

Santa Maria was suspiciously silent at her
end of the table. There’s a silence when people are eating that’s good. It
means they are so interested in their food that they have forgotten to talk. There are
usually a couple of periods like this during every dinner party. This was not
one of those silences. This was more like a “I don’t know how to find the words
to tell you, dear husband who spent nearly the whole day involving the family
in this lark, that the pizza tasted like something I can’t say in front of the
children.”

 

I went back into the smoke-filled kitchen to redeem myself
with another pie. I told Santa Maria that she would like the next one I made
better. “That wouldn’t be hard,” she replied.

 

The first pie had been plain and the crust too thick and
floury. I halved the amount of dough, doubled the tomatoes, added fresh
mushrooms and garlic. I was going to make a thin-crusted masterpiece. Into the
oven it went. When I tried to take it out, I pulled a hole in the center and
was left with what could charitably be called a donut.

 

The kitchen was a flour-covered mess. The sink was full of
dirty dishes. No one had been fed. I told the kids that next time we have pizza we'll go out for it. And I told myself, that at least I won’t have to spend any money on
a standing mixer anytime soon.

 

 

 

 

Win Some, Lose Some Puttanesca Recipe

by

Anchovies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Puttanesca Sauce

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

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

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

Serve over the pasta of your choice.

The Many Ways to Make a Bolognese Recipe

by

My brother Tom and his wife, Liza, recently brought into this world their first child, a beautiful little boy, Luca. Last week, I took one look at him swaddled on their Brooklyn couch and said to myself, “Yes, I’m ready to be a grandparent.” Then I thought about what advice I might give my brother.

When I first became a parent, I learned that there are at dozens of different ways to do any child-related task, from breast-versus-bottle feeding, to plastic-versus-glass bottles, to milk-versus-soy-based formula to co-sleeping, attachment parenting, and Ferberizing. What I took away from the surfeit of opinions was that there was no right way to do anything. No right way, therefore, no wrong way. I was in business as a father.

I considered how I could sum this up to him. I concluded that the easiest thing to tell him is that there are as many ways to make a Bolognese as there are to parent.

In his book about learning how to cook Italian food, “Heat,” Bill Buford enumerates a few of the variations: “A Bolognese is made with a medieval kitchen’s quirky sense of ostentation and flavorings. There are at least two meats (beef and pork, although local variations can insist on veal instead of beef, prosciutto instead of pork, and sometimes prosciutto, pancetta, sausage, and pork, not to mention capon, turkey, or chicken livers) and three liquids (milk, wine, and broth), and either tomatoes (if your family is modern) or no tomatoes (if the family recipe is older than Columbus), plus nutmeg, sometimes cinnamon, and whatever else your great-great-great-grandmother said was essential”

Most Americans I know have little knowledge of what their great-great-great grandmothers might have cooked (or what she might have thought was essential when it came to child rearing). My brother and I are no exception. In a great-grandparent’s place, we have authorities like Marcella Hazan and Mark Bittman.

Hazan’s “Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking” outlines her requirements for a good Bolognese:

  •     The meat should not be from too lean a cut; the more marbled it is, the sweeter the ragù will be. The most desirable cut of beef is the neck portion of the chuck.
  •     Add salt immediately when sautéing the meat to extract its juices for the subsequent benefit of the sauce.
  •     Cook the meat in milk before adding wine and tomatoes to protect it from the acidic bite of the latter.

She goes on, but I won’t. I adapted my recipe from Potato masher

Recently, however, she has cut back on her consumption of the sauce. It could be that her tastes have changed, or might just be the fickleness of a four-year-old. Either way, I wanted to get her eating it again, so I made a slight adjustment to my method.  I realized that my meat was clumping (perhaps a consequence of skipping the milk step?), and I remedied that by crushing the cooked ground beef with a potato masher. I wasn’t sure if the more finely pulverized beef made a bigger difference than fact that I told her that I’d made it special for her, but Nina loved my latest version of it.

One note on the sauce: It may take hours to cook (during which period your house will smell heavenly), but it freezes extremely well and, if packed in quart or smaller container, defrosts on a low heat in the brief amount of time it takes to boil water and make pasta, making it a perfect alternative to a weeknight take-out dinner. Plus, it will taste much better than anything that comes out of a steaming cardboard box.

Bolognese Meat Sauce (the Park Slope Way)

  •  1 onion, chopped
  • 2-3 carrots, chopped
  • 1 stalk of celery, chopped
  • 2 slices of bacon, chopped
  • 1 cup chicken stock
  • 1/2 cup white (or red) wine
  • 11/2 lb ground beef
  • 3 cans of peeled plum tomatoes, diced to bits with an immersion blender
  • Cinnamon and nutmeg to taste

 

Saute the onion, carrot, celery, and bacon until the vegetables are soft and the bacon fat rendered.

Add the beef and cook it until it is brown.

Add the wine and cook it off.

Add  the stock.

Add the tomatoes and the spices and simmer until thick (about three hours).

Where I’ve been

by

Last week, we headed out west to see Santa Maria’s folks, and spent five days in their company. They have many things at their place, from a grand piano that needs tuning in their living room to an old Mercedes coupe that’s going to seed in their garage. But they don’t have wireless Internet access, so I wasn’t able to blog.

Instead, I went swimming at a nearby lake where evergreens ring the water and canoes slip silently by. Another day we went to a family-run amusement park out in the country where green mountains stand sentinel over the gleeful screams of children and piped-in strains of country rock.  It was a fine way to end the summer.

We make the two-hundred-fifty-mile trip to visit them once or twice a year. Sometimes the journey goes well for me. Other times, not so well.

A low point of recent memory: Thanksgiving last year. Pinta screamed through dinner. I lost my temper and tossed some thoughtless verbal barbs at those gathered around the table before retreating to the kitchen. I’m forever grateful to Santa Maria’s brother for the sly comic line he let loose as I departed the dining room. I don’t remember what he said, but I remember that it was funny and that it made me feel a little bit better.

During this visit I happened to be sitting outside a local shop drinking an iced coffee. It was Sunday, and I watched a father and his family leave the shop. One of his boys was whining about something he wanted to keep. His father insisted that he throw it out. The child was about eight, and he had his heart set on holding on to it. I heard them arguing before I saw them, and when I looked at the father I could see how angry he was.

Why are dads typically so angry? My dad was angry. I’m often angry. If I thought for a minute, I could find many more examples than the guy at the coffee shop, my dad, and myself, but three examples constitutes a trend so I’ll stop there.

Perhaps it is because men are conditioned to succeed in the business world, where controlling, managing, and more-or-less avoiding emotions are part of the unofficial office rule book. Except for anger (see professional football, traffic cops, and investment bankers at the top of their game). Anger is ok.

Children, on the other hand, are nothing but pure emotion. They cry. They scream. They have temper tantrums. All things grown men wish they could do around the cubicle, but can’t.

Put men with children, and out comes anger, the single emotion men are most versed in. Of course this is not true for all men, and it's not true all the time for any man. But there's some truth to it, I'm sure.

I'm sure this dynamic can change, and the thing I'm banking on is awareness. If we can see it, we can change it.

What does this have to do with cooking? Emotions are at the root of why I cook so
much: where else do I experience the same sense of control and reward?

I found some reward in my lunch today. Because we were away for few days, we're a little behind on the shopping. There wasn't much in the kitchen this morning, but today I found enough left-overs to make a nice sandwhich. The key was basil pesto. I had it in the fridge from the other day.  I put it on some poached chicken and had it with fresh bread. It changed two simple ingredients, bread and chicken, into a tasty treat.

An Easy Recipe for Dressing up a Simple Salad

by

Allium sativum Woodwill 1793

Trying to do anything with kids around is like swiming with your clothes on. Covering the same ground requires a whole lot more effort and takes a great deal more time. So, quite naturally, after having children, a lot of things start to slide. When Nina was first born, bathing and getting dressed in the morning went out the window (there were days during her infancy when we didn’t get out of our pajamas). As she grew, we kind of got the hang of living again.

Then we had Pinta, and the clock was rewound–I can’t even remember the things I forgot to do. Movies? Out of the question. Recently I had the pleasure of watching, via Netflix, a German film called “The Lives of Others.” It was one of the finest pieces of filmmaking I’ve ever seen. It won the Oscar for Best Foreign film in 2007. I wondered how I missed it until I remembered that Pinta was born that year.

Now Nina and Pinta are a bit older and life is getting easier. Last night I even returned to one of the small but rewarding things Santa Maria and I used to do in the kitchen. Years ago, when we were dating, Santa Maria used to rub the bowl with garlic before putting a simple salad in it. It doesn’t seem like much work to crack and peel a clove of garic and press it against the salad bowl, but somehow it was too much. Doing it, though. pays off handsomely. We dress the lettuce with nothing more than oil and vinegar, but with the garlic in the bowl, it takes on a sharp and pungent edge. Try it, you’ll see.

Easy Guilt-Free Basil Pesto Recipe

by

Basil_pesto

Nina starts pre-K in a few weeks, and this morning, the parents at her school had a picnic. We were very excited about this event and have scheduled our remaining summer plans around it. One of those plans included visiting the Abuelita this afternoon, which meant a harried morning getting ready not just for the picnic, but also preparing for an overnight stay, upstate. The idea was to hop into my late father’s Chevrolet right after the picnic and let the kids nap while cruising up the Major Deegan.

We weren’t that busy this morning, though. Santa Maria went out to yoga. I took care of the kids and got things ready for the trip, although not necessarily in that order. I had to make pesto.

I happened to mention this to Santa Maria before she left for her class. She shuddered and  heaved a sigh. The flag was up: a great, blaring non-verbal sign that I was out of my mind for thinking this way. She went further. Her eyebrows lowered, she said, “You might want to spend some time with your children. They really need you.” I replied that I would be spending all weekend with them, and thought to myself, “What am I missing here?” She left for yoga, and I was left with the feeling of having to choose between playing with the kids and cooking. I felt awful, because I knew which one would win out—the cooking, of course. I had a head of basil in the refrigerator that wasn’t going to last much longer.

Nina and Pinta I had fun getting packed. We stacked the beach towels, swimsuits, stuffed animals, and all the other things a young child might want for an overnight trip to the Abuelita’s (we were planning on visiting the town pool where she resides). Two-year-old Pinta earned my eternal gratitude when she reminded me to pack their swim shirts.

I read them books—“Wacky Wednesday” and a Clifford lift-the-flap book about Christmas. That last one was a little out of season, but in keeping with Nina’s choice of music this morning: Bing Crosby’s “The Voice of Christmas” collection. She loves “Jingle Bells.”

Then I started to make the pesto. Nina ran into the kitchen and asked if she could help me. “Of course,” I said, and felt relief spreading through my veins. I wouldn’t feel guilty about standing in the kitchen while they were left to their own devices. It would be a clean-conscious batch of pesto. No childhood neglect lurking in the shadows. Instead, a future-happy memory of standing counterside and tossing salt and pine nuts into a blender. Oh, what a happy day.

Pinta wanted to join in. Together, we measured pine nuts and toasted them in a cast-iron pan. Together, tossed the sea salt atop the washed basil. They took turns pushing the button on the base of the blender and sending the food-processor attachment blades whirring. Pinta kept repeating “not putting hands in there,” which is what she gleaned from my running narration about how dangerous the machine is.

We made it to the picnic, but we never reached the Abuelita’s. Nina got sick in the car a block from our house and we turned around, unpacked, and took it easy this afternoon.

Santa Maria went to a friend’s house for dinner and Pinta and I ate pesto pasta with her before she left (Nina downed two bowls of plain pasta, so maybe she’s getting better). Actually I was the only one to eat it: Pinta showed a distressing lack of appetite that made us wonder if she was getting sick, too. Santa Maria loved the pesto. She had a small bowl, and I caught her eating more in the kitchen, later.

Basil Pesto
  • 1 head fresh basil
  • 2 cloves garlic, or to taste
  • just under 1/4 teaspoon sea salt, or to taste (I like even a bit less)
  • 2 tablespoons pine nuts
  • olive oil

Pick the basil leaves and wash them thoroughly. I soak and rinse them three times in a salad spinner, which I use to dry them.

Peel and crush or chop the garlic

Toast the pine nuts in a cast iron pan with no oil. Heat until they are brown.

Combine the basil, the pine nuts, the salt, and the garlic in a food processor or blender.

Add olive oil, and run through the machine until you have a sauce. This will require stopping every so often, opening the top, and scraping down the sides with a rubber spatula.

Notes: Pesto at this stage in the game freezes well. When you serve it, combine it with grated Parmigiano-Reggiano. Also, pesto is an open-source sort of recipe. Some call for walnuts. Others, like my brother-in-laws, incorporate a stick of butter. Feel free to experiment (advice that applies to all recipes, by the way)

Pesto Pasta with Chicken and Mozzarella

There’s no right or wrong recipe for this dish. Poach some chicken breasts, or fry up some boneless thighs, and chop. Or pick a roasted chicken. I happened to have some left over breasts and thighs on hand, and I liked the combined taste of those two meats. Chop the chicken and toss it with chopped Mozzarella and dress with the pesto over the pasta of your choice. My latest discovery is that whole-wheat fusilli is better than the regular pasta. Who knew?