family

Homemade French Fries: The Oven Way

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One of our favorite rituals is going to Bark, the high-end hot-dog place near our old house. Bark is wonderful, and I love it, but it has a few strikes against it. First of all, eating hot dogs, French Fries, and beer for dinner every night is a quick way to a short life. And if you frequent Bark, you risk going bankrupt before you get to the grave—it's expensive.

Don't get me wrong. I think Bark is amazing, and for a special treat, it's one of my favorite places to take the family. But as the dad who does most of the cooking at home, I need to feed everyone, whether it's a special night or not.

Recently, I tried to recreate the Bark experience at home. The hot dogs were easy to replicate (sort of, that is: my Applegate Farms organic dogs were delicious, but they were a far cry from Bark's, which are basted, “like a Peter Luger porterhouse," according to New York Magazine, "with housemade smoked lard butter”).

But the fries were another question. Could I make French fries at home? Or at least something close?

I don't have a deep-fat fryer, and I've never used one before. I wasn't about to start now, so I turned to the oven. It had worked for me before: my rosemary roasted potatoes are always popular, so I figured I had a chance.

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I started with three potatoes.

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I sliced them lengthwise.

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Then again.

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And kept little hands out of them.

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Then tossed them in a bowl with a bit of olive oil and salt.

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After spreading them out on a cookie sheet and roasting at 450 degrees for about twenty minutes (all the while carefully keeping an eye on them, and shaking them around every so often), I dropped them on paper towel to remove the excess oil.

The kids were happy enough with them, though they knew these weren't real French fries, and they knew we weren't at Bark. We had a good time, all the same, and next time I do it, if I don't get around to deep frying the potatoes, I will be sure to cut them into as small sticks as I can manage. The smaller they are, the faster they cook, and the crispier they become.

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

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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.

How Not to Make Quinoa Salad

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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.