fathers

A Friend Writes In: A Tale about Eating Mussels in Brussels, plus a Recipe

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Mussels3
Due to the disastrous turn of events on Saturday, I was not in a position to cook very much. We had planned to go to the greenmarket, to buy fresh flounder from Blue Moon Fish, which is something we love to do. On past weekends we’ve made linguini alle vongole (pasta with white clam sauce) and mejillones a la plancha (skillet roasted mussels). But not this weekend.

Cooking might have been out of the question for me, but it wasn’t for a friend of mine, who has his own tale about eating mussels that he was kind enough to share.

Dan Kaufman is a musician with an excellent avant-rock band called Barbez. It often tours in an old school bus, but this story is from a bit further afield. He has a ten-month old son, who we shall call Primo here, and he is just back from a trip abroad:

Last Mussel in Brussels    

It was our last meal in Brussels, where we had been living for one glorious month, and I hadn’t yet decided what to cook. We were here because my wife had been invited to teach at a modern dance school and I went along to help care for our ten month old son, Primo.

We lived in a sort of hotel room/apartment (there was a kitchen) with a few drawbacks such as an inexplicably angry, bald, desk attendant and the epilepsy-inducing florescent lights in our bedroom that flickered dimly and constantly through the night.  But the kitchen was quite spacious. There was also a low cut window in the living room where we set up a little play area for Primo. He loved to look out at the city and its low-rise skyline of spires and modernist office buildings.
 
We lived downtown, in the area called Sainte Catherine, near two long pools of water. The area is also a center for fish restaurants, and, according to what I had heard, until the 1970s was a bit like the old Fulton Fish market, with fisherman selling their offerings alongside the quays. There are still some fish stores in the area and there was also a man with a little stand in front of the Sainte Catherine church who sold mussels and oysters (and a glass of muscadet for two euros) that you could eat standing up.
 
Right nearby was another church, the 17th-century Eglise du Beguinage, situated on a quiet square and in which Primo and I spent hours enjoying its silence, or rather I enjoyed the silence as Primo slept in his Ergo carrier. It was better than walking the streets trying to avoid the trucks and other loud noises, which could jolt him awake quite easily. There was something quietly magical and anonymous about this European capital that suited us. It seemed to be no one’s destination of choice except EU bureaucrats and NATO officials.
 
The city also had great grocery stores. Coming from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where one can purchase bacon coated donuts, but not a decent head of lettuce, we were taken with the neighborhood Delhaize, a local chain packed with a vast array of cheeses, ham, bread, yogurt, waffles, wine, water, chocolate, and God knows what else.

Before we left for this trip, l had taken to driving my school bus (long story) to Fairway for groceries. On my last trip there the bus broke down in the parking lot. After several hours pacing the lot and fending off a perturbed security guard, a tow trunk finally arrived and carted us off before quickly stranding me, because the bus was too large. Eventually I jumped in a cab with the perishables. The next day I was able to cajole a nervous but kind Indian tow truck driver to take me on a bumpy journey through Brooklyn (though his boss chewed him out for it) to find a shop that might resuscitate a 1992 eight-cylinder diesel school bus.
 
But back to the supper. After some Talmudic discussions with my wife, we narrowed down the choices for our last dinner abroad to two Belgian classics: moules or carbonnade flamande. We had gone on a rare date a week earlier, to a festive, unpretentious place called Le Pre Sale and had settled on the moules (mine with white wine, hers, a better choice, with garlic) though the carbonnades were rumored to be the best in the city.

Our narrow culinary choices were reflective, I suppose, of who we are. We’re the kind of people that prefer to put on Led Zeppelin with windows rolled down on a road trip rather than chance screwing up the moment with, say, the new record by Animal Collective. Sometimes the classics suffice, especially when you have limited time.
 
The night before our last we had our second date in Brussels, and despite both of us fighting off a hacking cough we savored steak frites and an enormous quantity of wine. All that beef made choosing mussels for the last night, much, much easier.
 
Though we loved our nearby Delhaize, one thing became clear: it is not the place to buy mussels. I had to toss two thirds of them out as they were open. As my wife put Primo to bed, I decided to improvise a Moules a L’ail, inspired by the delicious one she had had on our first night out.

Here is what I came up with, followed by a few reflections on my time away:

Moules a l'ail au basilic (Mussels with garlic and basil)

  • 6 cloves garlic, chopped finely
  • 1 small onion, diced
  • 4 lbs. mussels, cleaned and de-bearded
  • 1/2 cup dry white wine
  • 3 Tbsp butter
  • 10 basil leaves, chopped finely
  • Salt and Pepper to taste

Heat a saucepan and add butter.
Allow butter to melt and add onion.
After about three minutes add garlic, wine, pepper, salt, and basil and cook for 3-4 minutes.
Add mussels and cover.
When mussels open (4-5 minutes) remove from heat.
Serve with green salad and baguette.

During the meal my thoughts drifted, prompted perhaps by the garlicky liquidI was soaking up with my bread. I remembered many things about our month, especially, in those last mouthfuls. The long walks with Primo in the Parc du Bruxelles and the morning the two of us stood hypnotized by the fountain at the park and the smile on Primo’s face whenever we saw the fountains at Sainte Catherine.

There was another taste too, that I recalled. The taste of social democracy we experienced at Babbo’s, a beautiful state-run children’s center with hand made wood toys, a slide that led into a giant tub of plastic balls, and pots of coffee for parents placed on top of a large table where they can sit and talk. I remembered the sweet Muslim boy named Osama and the effortless intermingling of people speaking Arabic, Flemish, French, Polish, and English. And as I downed my last mussels, my thoughts kept coming somehow, appearing now in a run-on fashion, as though in a Gertrude Stein novel.

The mussels reminded me of that morning. We had gone to Charli, a sweet little bakery, for a last coffee and pain au chocolat. Primo watched the bakers through the glass. A very nice new baker, who had just started there, smiled at Primo, who gave his incredibly warm smile back.

Brussels_church

Before we had our pastry, we had gone to say goodbye to the Beguine church. Once inside, Primo really looked at it, all the different sides of the building and we were so amazed, both of us, by the light and the high vaulted arches and the stained glass windows.

When we walked outside, everything was magical, especially this unremarkable pole on the corner—I tapped it and he smiled widely when he heard the sound. Then he tapped it himself, and then it became our pole. And then we moved on. Ten minutes later, after we had played along the quay, we passed by it again. Primo yelled out his yearning yelp; he wanted to see it, so we returned to it and said our goodbyes one more time. Somehow that pole had all of Brussels in it. We danced all the way home, and greeted the desk man with joy and euphoria and thought maybe we lifted his spirits a little.

Finishing my meal, I felt a bit sad to leave Brussels, our church, Charli’s, the swings at the Parc du Bruxelles, our pole. But as I took a last drink of wine, suddenly, the voice of Bob Dylan came into my head singing “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues,” an old favorite. “I’m going back to New York City,” Bob sang, “I do believe I’ve had enough.”

The Sounds of Pomegranate Season

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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

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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.

Cheating Heart: Leftovers are an Easy Way to Improve Quinoa Salad

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I make a quinoa salad just about every week. Santa Maria loves it, and she eats it for lunch almost daily. It's a tasty, healthy, economical, and easy-to-prepare dish. One nice thing is that it keeps. If you don't dress it, the salad will stay reasonably fresh for days. Make it Sunday night; finish it Thursday at noon.

I usually eat it once a week, but I need more protein than it provides, so I often pair it with poached chicken, or whatever leftovers I might have on hand. Yesterday, I was in a rush and I supplemented it with some prepared and marinated soy bars from the coop (which we almost always have on hand) and half a ball of mozzarella cheese. The salad is so low fat that I always need to add something rich, such as bag of potato chips or a half an avocado, to really feel full. The cheese did the trick. Like the soy bars, it was approaching the end of its usable lifespan, having lingered in the refrigerator for more than a few days. I was happy to eat them (part of my job around the house is cleaning out the refrigerator, a task I take literally), but I would not suggest it on a regular basis. It didn't taste very good.

Today, however, was a completely different story. I had a bit of the quinoa salad left in my office refrigerator, and I paired it with a real delight. Last night, Santa Maria was out at a business dinner at Community Food & Juice, a restaurant on the Upper West Side. She had the steak of the day, a slab of "sustainably raised Piedmont beef," she called it. Now I don't know if she meant that it came from Italy or from the Eastern Seaboard of the United States. I do know, though, that she brought half of it home, and gave it to me. It was delicious. I sliced it up and had it, along with a bit of the restaurant's broccoli, with my quinoa salad. I couldn't have been more pleased.

 

How to Get Your Kids to Eat Healthy Food

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Clock1
Ever since I became a parent, I've tried to get my children to eat tasty food that is good for them. I'm hardly alone in this quest. At cocktail parties, other parents have come up to me and asked, upon hearing about this blog, how I get my kids to eat what I cook. I told one father that my eldest likes mussels and clams. "That'll change." he said. Then he asked me for advice.

I didn't have any to give him, other than the old saw about putting a new food in front of a child a dozen times before giving up. Not that that's ever worked. I didn't tell him about some of the other techniques that I had witnessed. I once saw a friend tip his screaming toddler's mouth back and force him to eat whatever it was that we had at the table at that moment. That didn't work, either. 

I've always thought that what children eat or don't eat has less to do with the flavor of a given food than it does to do with the social dimensions of their lives. Children have very few opportunities to fully exert their power. The dinner table is a rare chance for them to control what goes into their mouths, if not what goes on around them. Ever have to sit through a dinner while parents exhorted their children to eat their vegetables? It can take the air out of the whole evening.

Tonight, the mystery deepened. The children ate quesadillas and broccoli with their babysitter, a fine dinner by any standard. I whipped up a mini-Mexican feast of black beans, rice, pan-fried chicken thighs, spinach, and sliced avocado for Santa Maria and myself. I love this dinner. Most of it is cooked ahead of time (the beans freeze well; the rice I cooked this morning while eating breakfast), and can be on the table in about ten minutes.

We sat down to eat while the children played at the table beside us. Then, Nina asked for chicken. Pinta requested black beans. Suddenly, Nina, too, wanted black beans. I raised an eyebrow. The black beans are certifiably delicious. I would take them anywhere and serve them to anyone and challenge them to resist their rich and savory flavor (I make them with bacon), but Nina has spurned them on so many occasions that I've stopped offering them to her. 

Here was further evidence of the social dynamic at play. Nina and Pinta both knew that after eating their snack, they would have to go to bed. The longer they spent at the table, the longer they could stay up. They would never say as much, but I wonder if this influenced their hunger. They each had two small bowls of black beans and rice. Promises were made to serve them more of it for lunch tomorrow. I'll be curious to see how that goes. In the meantime, I was thrilled to have them eating it. It verified my belief that the beans taste good, and that's always a relief.

More practical advice on how to get kids to eat healthily is available here.

Old Springsteen Eases Transition Back to the Kitchen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Easy Guilt-Free Basil Pesto Recipe

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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?