small tastes

so, it turns out...

2010-11-09T15:00:00.000-08:00

...that I want to write about more than just food. So you can find me over at a new blog called Becoming Gezellig for now. Sure, there'll still be food, and it'll mostly be seasonal, because that's how I roll. (For example: head on over there to see what to do with a glut of late, not-so-great tomatoes.) But I also wanted a space with fewer rules, more photos, more fabric. Hope you'll come along.

wherever you are, here you go

2010-10-28T19:42:00.000-07:00

I'm just going to take a guess here: Either you have distinctly crisp fall weather and a bin full of the last straggling zucchini, or you have bright, warm Indian summer and markets full of winter squash. Call it Cucurbit-Induced Cognitive Dissonance: a condition endemic this time of year.

Well, I have a remedy.

First, turn on your oven. Gather up some squash of whatever variety (I suppose you could even mix summer and winter), cut them into chunks, and roast them with butter. That bit is important, there's just something about the way the flavor of squash marries with butter, trust me. When those squash chunks are nice and soft toss them into a casserole dish along with some pasta and a simple cheese sauce.

The dish is an adaptation of a recipe for macaroni and cheese with butternut squash that has been round and round the Internet several times but I'm pretty sure originated here. My version simply swaps out the winter squash for summer (but of course, you can swap the winter squash back in). And, because I couldn't find my printed recipe when it was time to cook (I recently organized my recipes, and now I can't find any of them), I just worked from memory, and I may have ended up making it a little less...unctuous...than the original.

Which is a good thing, really. Because you're going to have to make this more than once, with all the squash out there of one sort or another.

Cheesy Noodles with Roasted Squash
Adapted from My Madeleine

2.5 lb summer squash (or about 3 lb winter squash, untrimmed)
4 Tbsp butter
salt & pepper

1 lb shaped pasta

2 Tbsp butter
2 Tbsp flour
2 C milk
12 oz cheese, grated (a nice sharp cheddar is good but feel free to mix it up and use what you have on hand)
1 Tbsp dijon mustard

Panko or other bread crumbs

Preheat oven to 400 F. Wash and trim the squash (deseed and peel if it's winter squash), and cut it into roughly 1-inch chunks. In each of 2 large baking pans, put 2 Tbsp butter, and put the pans in the oven to melt the butter while the oven is preheating.

When the butter is melted, take the pans out of the oven, put half of the squash in each, add a little salt and pepper, and stir to coat with the melted butter.

Roast for 40 minutes, stirring at the 15- and 30-minute marks.

Meanwhile, cook the pasta in boiling water until al dente.

And make the cheese sauce: Melt the butter over medium heat, add the flower, and stir with a whisk to make a light roux. Pour in the milk and whisk until smooth and slightly thickened. Add the cheese and stir until melted, then add the mustard and stir until combined.

Combine the pasta, cheese sauce, and roasted squash (the pot you cooked the pasta in is generally good for this) and fold together until everything is evenly distributed. Turn into one of the baking dishes. Sprinkle the bread crumbs on top.

Bake at 400 F for 20 to 30 minutes, until bubbly. Run under the broiler for a minute or two at the end to toast the bread crumbs.

Makes one big pan (so, you know, like 2 servings).

this weekend

2010-10-09T12:55:00.000-07:00

Give me your tired....

your poor...

your huddled masses of green tomatoes....

yearning to turn red.

Also:

-Roasting the red ones

-Blanching the kale

-Wishing I'd planted some seeds back in August

-The rains are here

-Saturday afternoon beer?

summer miracle

2010-08-04T19:31:00.000-07:00

In college, my vertebrate physiology professor had a New Yorker cartoon posted on her office door showing a couple of people slumped lazily in armchairs. The caption read: "Tropic of Torpor." (A kind of in-joke about her research--my professor studies hibernation in small mammals. As for me, my only excuse for still remembering that cartoon and finding it hilarious is that I am a huge nerd.)

So. For me: summer = Tropic of Blogger. Or Torpor of Blogger, or something. I don't know why I've been struggling so hard to find the motivation to cook and struggling even more to find the motivation to write about it. But there you go.

As if to prove my point, there's this recipe--when the weather turned hot here in Seattle (finally!), my response was to create a dish based on two of my winter staple recipes. The soba noodles at the base are from this dish of boiled kale, and the stew is based on this recipe from Just Hungry that I can't believe I haven't written about here yet (hmm, I blame torpor), because we really do make it all the time.

A recipe that improbably got me into the kitchen for one brief instant: hence the title of this post, a summer miracle. Even more miraculous? The dish caused Monkey to utter the sentence, "Mama, can I have some more turnip?" I still can't believe it myself.

Summer Vegetable Stew with Tofu and Soba Noodles
Even more food for your summer torpor: this stuff is great eaten cold for lunch the next day.

2 large-ish turnips
A dozen big radishes
1/2 of a small onion
1 Tbsp sesame oil
1 package atsu-age (deep-fried tofu cutlet)
2 Tbs. sake (mirin is okay too)
3 Tbs. soy sauce
2 Tbs. dark (grade B) maple syrup
1/4 lb. sugar snap peas

200 g soba noodles
3 tsp kecap manis (or you could use a combination of soy sauce and molasses or maple syrup)
1 1/2 Tbsp rice vinegar
A pinch of ground ginger

Wash and peel the turnips, and cut them into chunks. Wash and trim the radishes, and cut them in half. Slice the onion thinly.

Heat the sesame oil over medium heat in a large skillet. Add the turnips, radishes, and onion, and stir to coat with the oil.

If you want, you can unwrap the tofu cutlet, place it in a large bowl, heat some water to boiling, and then pour the water over the cutlet. Drain and rinse--this gets some of the oil off of the tofu. But you know what? When I made this it was too hot, and I was too lazy! So I skipped this step, and everything was fine.

Cut up the tofu into chunks and add it to the pan, stirring again to mix everything together. Add the sake, soy sauce, and maple syrup and stir. Reduce the heat to low, cover, and simmer about 20 minutes or until the vegetables are tender.

Meanwhile wash and trim the sugar snap peas. Add them to the stew after about 20 minutes and cook about 10 minutes more. You want them to be tender, but not too mushy.

Also while the stew is cooking, heat some water in a saucepan and cook the soba noodles. Drain and toss them with the kecap manis, rice vinegar, and ginger.

To serve, put a mound of soba noodles on a plate and the stew on top.

Makes 4-6 servings.

handy

2010-06-29T18:29:00.000-07:00

Here's a recipe to put on your calendar for a few weeks from now, when local tomatoes are really, truly in season.

Or, then again, it might come in handy now--say, if you have a child whose response to every item sold at the grocery store is "I want that." And if that child also, theoretically of course, has a parent (I'm not saying which one) inclined to indulge her every whim. And if grape tomatoes bought on such a whim turn out, predictably, to be rather tough and flavorless, prompting the child to sensibly decline actually eating them. And if you're therefore wondering what to do with a few handfuls of grape tomatoes starting to shrivel up in your fridge.

Then--THEN--this recipe will be right up your alley.

Whether you make it now or later, it's summer cooking at its finest--a short list of ingredients, steps you can do ahead of time, a quick final assembly, and a result that goes nicely with a cold, fruity wine.

Pasta with Roasted Tomatoes, Fennel, and Italian Sausage

1 bunch baby fennel, or a medium-sized fennel bulb
1 C grape or cherry tomatoes
olive oil
salt and pepper

6 oz dried pasta--penne or rotelle or a similar short, chunky shape
About 3.5 ounces Italian sausage or veggie Italian sausage
olive oil
balsamic vinegar

Preheat the oven to 400 F. Wash the fennel and chop it into 1/2-inch pieces. Wash the tomatoes. Put in a square baking dish and toss with a little olive oil, salt, and pepper. Put in the oven and roast for about 20 minutes, stirring once or twice, until the tomatoes start to wrinkle and the fennel is tender. You can do this ahead of time--in the morning if a hot afternoon is in the offing, or even a day or two ahead.

When you're ready for dinner, put a large pot of water on to boil for the pasta. When the water boils add the pasta and cook according to package directions.

Meanwhile, heat a little olive oil in a largeish skillet. Slice up the sausage and saute it for a few minutes, until it's nicely browned--turning once halfway through. Deglaze the pan with a little balsamic vinegar. Then add the roasted fennel and tomatoes and heat through.

When the pasta is done, drain it and add it to the skillet, tossing everything together. Pour the wine.

Serves 2 or 3

more bok choy ideas

2010-05-29T17:57:00.000-07:00

Here's another idea I came across when I was looking for something different to do with baby bok choy. The original recipe, from Jane Spice, has you pour a coconut milk-red curry sauce over steamed bok choy. I didn't have any red curry paste, so I decided to use curry powder instead. To the bok choy I added a bunch of teeny-tiny carrots (they always look so cute sitting there at the farmers market but I pass them by because I never know what to do with them), to end up with spring vegetables in a kind of gentle Massaman curry sauce. (Now if only we could get some gentle spring weather to go with it, right?)

I also added some leaves from a lemon balm plant that I recently bought, wondering if it would be a good lemongrass substitute for those of us in temperate climes. (Here in Seattle, lemongrass is grown as an annual, so I'm hoping that lemon balm might be a way to keep this flavor handy year-round.) The verdict: I think so, though the best method for getting the flavor into the dish might require a bit more experimenting. Next time I'll try steeping a sprig in the coconut milk from the beginning and then discarding it before serving, to try to get a subtler flavor more evenly throughout the sauce. (For those inclined to similar experiments in their garden: lemon balm is in the mint family, so for the love of all that is holy grow it in a pot.)

I'm sneaking this in under the wire before the end of Meatless Week on The Cookbook Chronicles. Unfortunately--given that event's purpose of reducing your food's carbon footprint--this supper includes one ingredient that's really pretty bad from a greenhouse-gas point of view. Anyone care to guess what it is?

Spring Vegetables in Coconut Curry Sauce

For a heartier dish, add tofu. To tell you the truth, I kind of wish I had!

1 medium shallot
2 cloves garlic
1 tsp vegetable oil
A sprig (about 9-10 leaves) of lemon balm
1 bunch baby carrots
1 C coconut milk
1 tsp kecap manis
1 tsp curry powder
1/8 tsp salt
About 1 lb baby bok choy
Cooked jasmine rice

Peel the shallot and slice it thinly crosswise. Peel the garlic.

Heat the vegetable oil in a large nonstick skillet over medium heat. Add the shallot and stir for a moment or two. Press the garlic into the pan and stir for a moment more.

Let the shallots and garlic cook for a few minutes while you wash the carrots and trim off the tops. Wash the lemon balm and add it to the pan. Add the carrots to the pan and stir to coat with the oil.

In a small bowl stir together the coconut milk, kecap manis (or a little bit of soy sauce and sugar), curry powder, and salt. Add the sauce to the pan and gently fold it in to the vegetables. Cover the pan, reduce the heat to medium low, and let cook for about 5 to 7 minutes.

Meanwhile, wash the bok choy, trim the ends, and separate the leaves. Then--after the carrots and coconut milk have been cooking for 5-7 minutes--add the bok choy to the pan. Fold the leaves into the sauce, then cover and cook for about 5 minutes more. Remove the lemon balm and serve the curry over rice.

Serves 2.

turnips rise to the challenge

2010-05-25T12:14:00.000-07:00

This week, local food writer Lorna Yee of The Cookbook Chronicles is challenging her meat-loving self to go vegetarian for a week, and inviting other food bloggers to join her. A fun and worthy endeavor, but at first I thought I couldn't really participate, since we already cook vegetarian every week. Then I started thinking about how dependent my cooking is on milk and (especially) cheese, and how dairy production is almost as bad as meat from a greenhouse-gas point of view. (Shorter food system problem: cows fart, a lot.) So I decided I'd challenge myself to add some vegan recipes to the blog this week.

My first dish, a salad of thinly sliced young turnips, comes from Cackalackyfoodie, a brand-new but already awesome food blog penned by a friend of a friend. The writer, Lynn, gives not so much a recipe as a brief description--a digression on her way to turnip gratin--but it was evocative enough to get me intrigued.

I suppose a vegetable salad doesn't sound like much of a stretch for this assignment. I mean, so I made a salad that was vegan--whoopdeedoo, right? But it's relevant in an unexpected way. Introducing her project, Lorna notes, "I’ve always wondered why we don’t hear people wax poetic about vegetables in the same way they do about meat. Why does the mere mention of bacon cause so many of us to slide off our seats? Are vegetarians in general just simply more restrained in their food-love, or is it something else?"

The answer is: something else. Specifically, I think she just hasn't met the right vegetarian recipes yet. I know I positively swoon for garlicky greens served with poached eggs and toast. And a humble rice and cabbage soup. And unassuming boiled kale. And that's just for starters. Hey, Lorna, you meat eaters can keep your bacon.

So that's where this salad comes in. Okay, so I wouldn't call it quite swoon-worthy, but it's much closer than you might imagine just from looking at the description of barely-adorned unpopular vegetables below. The truth is, even I was expecting a recipe that I wanted to like more than I would actually like it. But it's scrumptious--cold, fresh, and crisp, the slight bite of the vegetables balanced by the fruity richness of the olive oil. A reminder of how delicious it can be to challenge yourself.

Simple Spring Turnip Salad
Adapted from Cackalackyfoodie

This salad is good made an hour or so ahead and chilled, but I like it best the first day it's made.

1 bunch of small Japanese turnips, or a mix of turnips and radishes--about 8 oz. total
1 Tbsp mild, fruity vinegar (I used orange muscat champagne vinegar from Trader Joe's)
Pinch of salt
Freshly ground black pepper to taste
1 Tbsp olive oil
A few sprigs of fresh thyme

Wash and trim the vegetables. Slice them crosswise very thinly using a sharp knife or a mandoline. Arrange them on a serving plate.

In a small bowl, combine the vinegar, salt, and pepper. Whisk in the olive oil. Pour the dressing over the vegetables.

Wash the thyme and pull the leaves off the stems, strewing them over the top of the salad.

Serves 2 or 3.

bok choy for a change

2010-05-18T19:07:00.000-07:00

Here's the bad news: our camera lens broke. This means that my photos are going to be even more mediocre than usual for the next little while.

But here's the good news: I found something different to do with baby bok choy.

I'd seen the stuff at the farmers market for several weeks running, and it seemed like it might make a good change from the endless bunches of chard and kale we've been eating (that's how you can tell you live in Seattle: your idea of a welcome change from greens is...a different kind of greens). But all I could think of to do with it was to make stir-fry with garlic sauce. Which, don't get me wrong, is delicious, but I wanted something...different.

This recipe fits the bill--roast the cabbage briefly in a very hot oven, then douse it in lemon juice and lemon zest. It's a kind of Marco Polo of a recipe, transporting bok choy from Asia to the Mediterranean.

The original recipe, from Eating Well, is a side dish, but I wanted to make it into a main (translation: I am lazy, and prefer one-dish meals). I glanced at the package of soba noodles sitting in a canister on the counter but initially dismissed them as a possibility--I wanted to keep the dish in the Western Hemisphere. Because I wanted something different. Then I remembered that Italy also has a buckwheat pasta tradition--pizzoccheri, or buckwheat noodles that are typically combined with greens and cheese. Bingo. We have a winner: a quick spring supper that nods to the flavors of a famous peasant dish.

Making this dinner also made me think about the sometimes contradictory and inconsistent rules I have about cooking and eating local food. For example, if a food grows here but isn't in season (tomatoes), I won't buy it. But if a food doesn't grow here at all (lemons), I'll freely use it any time of year. Except that doesn't even quite cover it. I buy bananas nearly every week (though mostly for the sake of my Monkey)--but I'd never buy a pineapple. That totally doesn't make sense, does it? This kind of thing is exactly why I say this blog is about cooking local "in theory and practice"--sometimes there's quite a gap between the two.

How about you--do you have rules, informal or strict, logical or wildly inconsistent, about buying local produce?

Buckwheat Noodles with Lemony Roasted Bok Choy
Adapted from EatingWell

The original recipe calls for tarragon, which I left out because I didn't have it on hand. I think I might add about a teaspoon of fresh thyme next time.

A large bunch of baby bok choy
1 Tbsp olive oil
1 clove garlic
Salt

Freshly grated zest of about 1 lemon
Juice of 1/2 lemon
1 teaspoon mirin, or sherry with a pinch of sugar
Ground black pepper

About 6 oz. dried soba noodles
1 Tbsp olive oil
1 clove garlic
Salt
Red pepper flakes

Parmesan cheese

Put a large saucepan of water on to boil for the pasta. Adjust an oven rack to the lowest position and preheat the oven to 450 F.

While you wait for things to heat up, wash the bok choy, trim the ends, and quarter each head lengthwise. (Really you will probably end up with a lot of loose leaves--that's okay.)

Put 1 Tbsp olive oil in a large baking dish. Peel a garlic clove and press it into the dish. Add about 1/4 tsp salt. Add the bok choy and toss to coat.

Meanwhile, add the soba noodles to the boiling water. They'll need to cook for about 6 to 8 minutes.

Aim to put the bok choy in the oven, on the lowest rack, a minute or two after you begin cooking the noodles. Roast for about 6 to 8 minutes, stirring a couple of times, until the bok choy is wilted but still a little crisp.

Meanwhile, in a small bowl whisk together the lemon zest, lemon juice, mirin or sherry, and black pepper.

Drain the soba noodles and rinse them with cold water.

Take the bok choy out of the oven and pour the dressing over it.

Heat 1 Tbsp olive oil over medium heat in the pan you cooked the noodles in. Add a little salt, some red pepper flakes, and the other clove of garlic, pressed. Stir around for a minute or so. Put the noodles back in the pan and toss around a bit. Add a little water to prevent the noodles from sticking if you need to.

To serve, put some noodles in a bowl, top with some of the bok choy (tongs are your friend in both cases), and grate a bunch of Parmesan cheese over the whole mess.

Serves 2.

deja vu all over again

2010-05-11T17:13:00.000-07:00

You know what's nice on a spring night in Seattle, when the days are getting longer but the sky's still gray with rain? A good hearty salad...oh wait, did I say that already?

Well, here's the thing. Around these parts when I find an approach to dinner that works I use it over and over again. And again. And then a few more times. I wouldn't call these patterns ruts, exactly--more like kicks. There's only so much creativity I can muster at the end of a long day, you know? So I tend to fall back on variations on a tried-and-true theme.

But for me there's a lot of pleasure in this repetition. I like the reliability of this kind of cooking. And the seasonality of it prevents it from becoming boring--the calendar page will flip and one of these days we'll move on to a new dinner kick (I'm so looking forward to grilled artichokes), so we may as well enjoy this one while we can.

So last week's warm sweet potato salad is followed by this week's warm asparagus salad. This one could hardly be simpler--just roasted asparagus, tossed with fresh herbs and a splash of vinegar while it's still warm, and strewn with a bit of crumbled goat cheese. We're entering that dead-simple-cooking time of year that I love.

We ate this with poached eggs on toast. Of course we did.

Roasted Asparagus Salad

1 pound asparagus
2 large cloves garlic
1 to 2 Tbsp olive oil
salt
black pepper
A large roasted red pepper--or half the contents of a 7-oz. jar
1 to 2 Tbsp red wine vinegar
Chopped fresh herbs--a few tablespoons altogether. I used chervil, parsley, thyme, and chives. Whatever you have in your herb garden will be just fine, I bet.
About 2 to 3 oz. fresh goat cheese (chevre)

Preheat oven to 425 F. Wash the asparagus, break off the tough ends, and cut the stalks into 2- to 3-inch pieces. Peel the garlic. Toss the asparagus in a large baking dish with the olive oil, salt and black pepper to taste, and pressed garlic.

Bake the asparagus--stir once or twice--until the stalks are tender but still firm and bright green, about 15 minutes. If you want delicious little charred bits you can turn on the broiler for the last few minutes of cooking.

While the asparagus is cooking, chop the red pepper into shortish strips and wash and finely chop your herbs.

Remove the asparagus from the oven and let it cool slightly. Then place it in a bowl along with the red pepper strips, splash some red wine vinegar on it, add the herbs, and toss together. Crumble some goat cheese over each serving (best to do this right before eating it so that the cheese doesn't get soggy).

Makes about 3 side-dish servings.

the in-between season

2010-05-04T20:34:00.000-07:00

You know what's nice on a spring night in Seattle, when the days are getting longer but the sky's still gray with rain? A good hearty salad, even better if it's one that's served warm. Something with bright flavors and fresh vegetables to match the spirit of the season, but cozy and comforting enough to match the actual weather.

This is an adaptation of a salad that made the rounds of the food blogs a few autumns back. To make it a little more spring-like, I added some sumac--a tart, sunny spice--and changed up the vegetables. The winter squash called for in the original recipe are gone from the farmers markets by now, but I found sweet potatoes at the Ballard market a couple weeks back, and that's what I used. But I think you could make this dish with just about any hearty vegetable that will go soft and sweet when roasted--carrots, rutabagas, maybe even cauliflower. Again, it could be almost a recipe template, easily adaptable.

Roasted Vegetable and Chickpea Salad with Tahini Dressing
Adapted from Casa Moro via Orangette

1 1/2 pound sweet potatoes, or a mixture of roastable vegetables
2 Tbsp olive oil
1/2 tsp ground allspice
1/2 tsp sumac
Salt
1 medium clove garlic

1/4 to 1/2 of a medium red onion
Juice of 1 lemon

3 Tbsp well-stirred tahini (that's what the original recipe requests, but I can vouch for the fact that half-assedly stirred tahini will work okay too)
2 Tbsp water
2 Tbsp olive oil
1 medium clove garlic
Salt

1 15-ounce can chickpeas (or 1 1/2 to 2 cups cooked chickpeas, if you're a better person than I am and cook your own beans)
A few handfuls of arugula
Chopped flat-leaf parsley

Preheat the oven to 425 F.

Wash and peel the sweet potatoes (or other vegetables), and cut them into 1-inch cubes (or roughly equal-sized chunks). Place the olive oil, spices, and salt in a large baking dish. Peel the garlic and press it into the dish. Add the sweet potatoes and toss everything together with a spoon or with your hands. Put in the oven and bake for 15 to 25 minutes, until the sweet potatoes are soft. Remove from the oven and cool a bit.

While the vegetables are cooking, chop the onion very fine and place it in the bottom of a serving bowl. Squeeze the lemon juice over it and stir with a fork. (This step is optional, but good to do if you don't like your onion very strong.)

In a small bowl, stir together the tahini, water, and olive oil. Add salt to taste. Peel the garlic and press it into the bowl. Stir everything together to combine.

Drain and rinse the chickpeas. Wash the arugula and spin dry.

When the vegetables are out of the oven and cooled to somewhere between piping hot and room temperature, assemble the salad. Add the chickpeas and vegetables to the bowl with the onion and lemon juice, and toss gently to combine. Add tahini dressing to taste and toss again--or, let each person drizzle the dressing over their individual serving. If you're really together, sprinkle each plate with a little chopped parsley.

Makes 4 to 6 servings.

revising my remarks

2010-04-20T21:51:00.000-07:00

Okay, I lied before. This is as close to meat and potatoes as we get in our household: fake meat, and actual potatoes.

The recipe is Potatoes Colcannon, and it comes from June Platt's New England Cookbook, which I got for 50 cents at a tag sale on a weekend trip to Arizona last month.

Yes, fifty cents. Can you believe it? It has an introduction by James Beard, the copy is in perfect condition, and how awesome is that cover image?

The book was published in 1971--I'm really interested in vintage cookbooks these days. I just think that in many of these books, mixed in amid the charmingly old-fashioned writing style and the hilariously outdated recipes, are likely to be some forgotten but delicious ways to prepare seasonal vegetables.

Ms. Platt's recipe for Potatoes Colcannon delivers. I suppose it's not really the traditional approach to colcannon (I'd never heard of making it with spinach rather than cabbage), but it's fantastic. And I think you could make it with just about any of those spinach- or chard-like greens that are so abundant in Seattle ~~this time of year~~. Any time of year. (In fact, I'd intended to make it with braising mix, but I must have grabbed the wrong bag at the farmers market. Oh well--next time. Soon.)

There are actually two approaches to serving this dish. If you're in a hurry, you can just stir the potatoes and greens together and serve immediately--the dish is soft and silky. Or, if you want to be a stickler for Ms. Platt's method, you can turn the stuff into a baking dish, put it in the oven for a while, and then unmold onto a plate.

I think both options are great.

Potatoes Colcannon
Adapted from June Platt's New England Cookbook

Russet potatoes--a little less than 1 pound
Greens--a big bunch of chard, about 1/2 lb spinach leaves or braising mix, or a 10-oz package of frozen spinach
2 Tbsp butter
2 large cloves garlic
1/4 C cream
Salt and pepper to taste

Wash and peel the potatoes, and cut into medium-size pieces. Place them in a large saucepan, cover with cold water, and add 1/4 tsp salt. Cook until they are tender through, or for about 25 minutes. Lift the potatoes out of the water with a slotted spoon and cool in a colander.

If you are using frozen spinach, defrost it and squeeze out the water. If using fresh greens, wash them to remove any dirt, and then cook them in the potato water for a few minutes, until they are bright green and just tender. Drain in a sieve, press the water out of the greens with a spoon, and then when they are cool enough to handle chop them finely.

If you're going to bake the colcannon, start preheating the oven to 400 F now.

Melt the butter in the saucepan, peel the garlic, and press the cloves into the pan. Saute over medium heat for a few minutes, until fragrant. Turn the heat down as low as it will go, return the potatoes to the pan, add the cream, and mash until the potatoes are light and fluffy. Add the chopped greens and continue to mash until the potatoes and greens are well mixed. Add salt and pepper to taste (I like a generous hand with the pepper, though little ones may disagree).

Serve immediately, or pack the mixture into a well-buttered deep 3-cup mold or small baking dish. Place in the hot oven and allow to heat thoroughly, about 10 to 15 minutes. Run a knife around the edge of the dish, and turn out, like a mud pie*, onto a hot serving dish.

Serves 2 to 3 as a main dish with sausages or poached eggs.

*That sentence is directly from June Platt's original. "Like a mud pie"--I love imagining her trying to think of a description that would be as broadly accessible as possible, and finally hitting upon this. Everyone knows about unmolding mud pies--oh yes.

round and round we go

2010-04-13T20:53:00.000-07:00

The funny thing about seasonal cooking is that it leads to seasonal thinking. About this time two years ago I was making excuses for posting a chili recipe, noting that it would still be chili weather in Seattle for some weeks yet. And now, the same thoughts having apparently gone round and round in my head along with the months, here I am in high spring, offering you a hearty soup.

But what a soup! This version of caldo verde, or Portuguese kale soup, comes from Emeril (yes, that Emeril...I know! But stick with me) via The Splendid Table. It's simple, savory, and makes a ton. And it's a great use for the greens that are so plentiful at Seattle farmers markets this time of year. (See? Seasonal. Q.E.D.)

The notes to the original recipe say that the kale should be cooked just a bit and stay crisp-tender, but since I made this a day ahead of eating it the kale ended up pretty thoroughly soft, and I have to admit I really liked it that way. But the best thing about the soup? Is the way the potatoes cook until they start to fall apart--they get almost silky and the starch that they release thickens the soup a bit. Fantastic.

Caldo Verde

Adapted from The Splendid Table

2 medium yellow onions
3 small/medium cloves garlic
2 Tbsp olive oil + a little more, divided
2 lb. potatoes
7 C stock or water
Salt and pepper to taste
2 Tofurkey Italian sausages or similar (or 1/2 lb. chorizo or hot smoked sausage)
1/2 lb. kale (I used lacinato kale because I can't get enough of the stuff; curly kale is probably more authentic)
Crushed red pepper (or add 1/2 tsp to the pot)

Peel the onions and chop them finely. Peel the garlic. Heat 2 Tbsp. of the olive oil in a large soup pot, add the onions, and press the garlic into the pot. Cook, stirring occasionally, until they are soft and translucent. Meanwhile, peel the potatoes and cut them into 1/2-inch cubes. Add the potatoes and stock or water to the pan. Then add salt and pepper, and the crushed red pepper if you don't have sensitive palates in the house. Cover the pot, bring to a boil, then reduce the heat and simmer until the potatoes are tender, about 20 minutes.

While the soup is cooking, wash the kale, cut away the tough center ribs, and cut the leaves into thin strips. When the potatoes are tender, add the kale and simmer until the leaves are softened, about 15 minutes longer. (I put the kale in the soup, turned the heat off, cooled the soup and refrigerated it overnight, then reheated the next day. If you're making the soup the day you plan to eat it and you want the kale really soft, you may need to simmer a little longer. If you're making it a day ahead and want the leaves to stay a little crisp, don't add them until you start reheating the soup the day you're going to eat it.)

Meanwhile, cut the soysages into small dice (or crumble or dice the sausages), and saute in a small skillet in a little bit of olive oil until they are crispy. Then slide them into the soup.

To serve, ladle into bowls and sprinkle each serving with crushed red pepper to taste.

Makes at least 6 servings.

ribs

2010-03-31T19:33:00.000-07:00

Or stems, if you prefer.

No, not pork ribs, or human stems--nothing quite so decadent. But stay with me. It's just that--now that you are addicted to Swiss chard I bet you are wondering what to do with all those chard middles languishing in your crisper drawer. Am I right?

I am here to help you out.

Well, I'm doing my best anyway. I'm going to tell you up front. My husband's comment on this dish was "I'm glad we're using up the chard stems." As you know, what I'm really aiming for here is more like "Hot damn! Chard stems for dinner!"

And this wasn't quite that. But it has potential, and I think my main mistake was being in too much of a hurry. I recommend that you cook the chard stems until they're downright silky. I took them off the heat when they were still rather crisp and celery-ish.

Give it a try--just be patient.

Swiss Chard Ribs with Goat Cheese and Pasta
Adapted/elaborated from Simply Recipes

Ribs from 2 bunches of Swiss chard
2 Tbsp butter
2 large cloves garlic
1/2 C half-and-half
about 8 oz. dry pasta
3 oz.or so fresh chevre
Salt and pepper

Put a large saucepan or soup pot of salted water on to boil. Wash the chard ribs, trim them, and chop into large-ish pieces. When the water boils, blanch the chard ribs for 3 to 5 minutes. Lift them out with tongs and drain them in a colander. (I know that sounds really specific, but the point is you can save the water to boil your pasta in.)

When the chard ribs are cool enough to handle, chop them into 1/2- to 1-inch pieces. Heat the butter in a large skillet on medium heat. Peel the garlic and press it into the skillet. Saute for a minute or two, then add the chard ribs and saute for a few minutes more. Now add the cream, cover the skillet, turn down the heat, and really just braise the heck out of those chard ribs. Add a little more cream, stock, or water if the skillet gets too dry.

Meanwhile turn on the flame under your pan of water again, and when it returns to a boil add the pasta. Drain when it's al dente.

When the chard ribs are nice and silky, add the drained pasta to the skillet, along with the chevre (crumble it up into little pieces). Toss to heat through and combine, and season with salt and pepper.

Makes 3 to 4 servings.

green day

2010-03-17T16:38:00.000-07:00

I'm at most 3 or 4 percent Irish. I was going to say 0 percent, but then I remembered that my grandmother once described her mother as "a duke's mix"--by which I gathered she meant some amalgam of English/Scotch/Irish, though it turns out that the phrase "a duke's mixture" has a more general, and quite fascinating, definition.

(Also, now I want this Duke Ellington CD. Just on principle.)

Anyway I'm certainly 0 percent Irish Catholic. (My great-grandmother must have been vehemently Protestant, else my Dutch Calvinist great-grandfather would never have married her. I'm just reporting, not endorsing, you understand.) I'm sure you know where I'm going with this: St. Patrick's Day has never been a big deal in my household. Still, eating more greens is something I can get behind any day of the year.

Originally, the recipe below was the sauce for a baked chicken dish called Chicken Ala Maria (doesn't that just sound hopelessly '80s?) that we ate fairly frequently when I was growing up. Somewhere along the line, as my family became more veg-centric, the chicken dropped out and the dish turned into a kind of spinach gratin. My mom used to make it with frozen spinach, but I thought I'd see if it would work with chard.

Yes, it would.

In fact, with all apologies to my mom, I think it's better than the original. This version is creamy and comforting but still has a bright-green taste; it's satisfyingly retro without tipping over the top into kitsch.

In light of the discussion above, it also pleases me to realize that I've just taken what started out as a horribly inauthentic American attempt at Italian (?) food, further mongrelized it, and presented it to you for St. Patrick's Day. A duke's mix!

Anyway, whatever you call it, it's very tasty. We ate it with veggie sausages (slice up a small onion and a couple of mushrooms, saute them in olive oil in a large nonstick skillet until caramelized, then deglaze the pan with a bit of balsamic vinegar, and cook two sausages, sliced lengthwise, in the pan), and pasta tossed with oil, garlic, and chili flakes. As close as we get to meat and potatoes around here.

Chard Gratin

3/4 C Italian seasoned breadcrumbs (actually, I think you could decrease this to 1/2 C)
1/4 C grated Parmesan cheese
1 medium yellow onion
2 T butter (or oil)
2 T flour
1 C milk (or broth)
2 good-sized bunches chard, about 12 oz. total

In a small bowl, combine bread crumbs and cheese.

Wash the chard, remove the thick center ribs, and chop roughly. Chop the onion.

In a large skillet melt the butter, then saute the onion until tender. Blend in flour and stir in milk all at once. Cook and stir until thick and bubbly. Stir in the chopped chard and cook, stirring, until wilted.

Spoon into a greased casserole dish and bake, uncovered, at 350 F for 40-45 minutes.

Serves 4 as a side dish.

dear sweet lacinato rabe, where have you been my whole life?

2010-03-05T08:15:00.000-08:00

When I made this dish two weeks ago I figured I wouldn't post it, because it's nothing very original, nor even anything you haven't seen before on this blog.

Then I spent the whole week thinking about the meal I'd had, and decided: who cares about groundbreaking, the entire world MUST be told about this!

So I made it again. Not without trepidation (I was afraid it wouldn't be as good as I remembered--you know, the same feeling that makes you hesitate to re-read your favorite novel or re-watch your favorite movie). But this stuff--this "lacinato rabe," which I'd bought on a whim at the farmers market two weeks ago--delivered.

Weird name, right? What is lacinato rabe? Well, it has stems and little flowers like broccoli rabe (or broccoli raab or rapini or whatever you want to call it)

And leaves like lacinato kale (or tuscan kale or dinosaur kale or, again, whatever you call it)

I found it at Nash's Organic Produce, which has a booth at the University District market on Saturdays, and Ballard on Sundays. Go forth, Seattleites, and enjoy!

In the past I've had bad luck with rapini--I'd cook it and cook it but the stems always seemed to stay stringy and inedible. This particular variety seems to have gloriously juicy, tender stems. But I think the secret to broccoli rabe in general is this: don't wait too long to harvest it, and don't wait too long to cook it.

What you do is this: blanch the lacinato rabe, then saute it with olive oil, garlic, and chile flakes. Dump the whole mess over garlic-rubbed toast and a couple of poached eggs (I know, I know--I never promised you originality) and grate a bunch of Parmesan cheese over the top. After dinner, think about how you could eat nothing else for the rest of your life.

The Dinner You'll Keep Thinking About

It can be tough to time everything just right with this recipe. To keep everything from happening all at once, you could blanch the greens and toast the bread a bit ahead of time.

1 bunch lacinato rabe (or other variety broccoli rabe/rapini)
olive oil
garlic
crushed red pepper
salt
4 thick slices crusty bread
4 eggs
2 Tbsp white vinegar
Parmesan cheese

Put a large pot of salted water on to boil. Wash the greens. Peel about 4 good-sized cloves of garlic.

Fill a large skillet with water, and add 2 Tbsp white vinegar and some salt. Crack each of the eggs into its own small bowl.

When the big pot of water boils, throw the greens in and blanch them for a couple minutes, until the leaves and stems are bright green. Drain.

Turn on the skillet to boil the water for the eggs. Toast the bread and rub it with one of the garlic cloves. When the greens are cool enough to handle, chop them roughly.

In another skillet, heat the olive oil over medium heat. Press the remaining garlic cloves into the pan. Add some salt and crushed red pepper. Stir around for a minute or two. Throw in the blanched greens and saute for a few minutes.

Meanwhile, poach the eggs. To assemble the dish, put a couple pieces of toast on a plate, put a poached egg on top of each one, throw the sauteed greens on top, and grate some Parmesan cheese over the whole works.

Serves 2

linguine with brussels sprouts barigoule: a conversion story

2010-03-01T13:28:00.000-08:00

The first, and most important, thing you need to know about this dish is that after he finished his bowl my husband, the Brussels-sprouts hater, turned to me and said, "Those were the best Brussels sprouts I've ever had." And he didn't mean "Well, they were good...for Brussels sprouts," either. He meant he really enjoyed them.

The second thing you need to know about the dish is that the recipe, from the March 2009 issue of Gourmet (yup, it's that time again--this is my Gourmet, Unbound submission for this month), will make you say, "What the--?" Probably several times. After struggling through cooking it, I wished I'd read up more on the Barigoule preparation beforehand, so that I would have understood better what I was aiming for.

Except that there's not much available online about what Barigoule means. As best I can sleuth out, it's a Provencal preparation, usually applied to artichokes, and its defining characteristic is the presence of a kind of orange mushroom--the mushroom is called "barigoule" in the Provencal dialect, and hence the name of the dish.

Except, of course, there aren't any mushrooms in the Brussels sprouts recipe. So that background is no help at all.

Here, then, is what I wish I'd known before I started cooking: When you glance at the ingredients and technique, you might think, "Oh, okay, pasta tossed with braised vegetables. Sounds familiar." But as you actually read through the recipe it's likely to sound less and less familiar. And when you get to the part where you are supposed to add four cups of water to the cabbage you might even say, "Oh ho, Gourmet magazine, do you think I don't remember how you told me to add way too much water to those braised turnips recently? I'm not going to be fooled by you again!" You might even decide that since cabbage contains a lot of water you can just braise it in its own juices and so you're not going to add any water at all.

And then you might scorch the cabbage.

But do not fear! Even if you do scorch the cabbage the final dish will still be delicious. Don't ask me how I know.

The thing is, you aren't making braised vegetables tossed with pasta. What you are really making is a kind of a soup. Sauteed leeks, garlic, and Savoy cabbage--like a variation on a mirepoix--form the base of a white wine and lemon broth. The Brussels sprouts are added just at the end of cooking, so that they stay bright-green and a little bit crisp. Meanwhile you'll cook pasta until it is not quite done, then combine it and some of its cooking water with the vegetables--there you'll simmer the pasta the rest of the way to al dente. The technique lets the broth flavor the pasta, and the pasta thicken the broth slightly. It's quite brilliant, once you grasp what the recipe is driving at.

The dish is finished with a generous grating of Parmesan cheese, and please don't skip this part. That little bit of richness just makes the dish. (And about now you're probably realizing that this recipe has much in common, flavor-wise, with Rice and Smothered Cabbage Soup--and we all know how fantastic that stuff is, right?)

My husband did have one quibble with the recipe--he wanted a greater proportion of vegetables to pasta. That's right: he wanted more Brussels sprouts. I can't quite believe it myself. But I think he's right. Especially because if you have leftovers the pasta will sit and soak up all the broth while you're eating, and then you're left with no broth for the next day. The Brussels sprouts and broth, sans pasta, would also be good ladled over a thick piece of crusty bread that has been rubbed with garlic, piled high with grated Parmesan, and run under the broiler. You could even add a poached egg on top. What? How did you know I was going to say that?

Anyway, one way or another, I recommend giving it a try.

Linguine with Brussels Sprouts Barigoule
Adapted from Gourmet magazine

2 leeks
A small head of Savoy cabbage (about 1/2-3/4 lb.)
2 Tbsp extra-virgin olive oil
3 Tbsp butter
1/2 tsp salt, divided
1/2 tsp pepper, divided
4 cloves garlic
2/3 Cup dry white wine
4 Cups water
Juice of 1/2 lemon
1 tsp fresh thyme leaves, divide
1/2 lb Brussels sprouts
3/4 lb dried linguine (I used spaghetti, which was fine, but it really would be better with a wider noodle. And, as mentioned, I'd cut this down to maybe 1/2 lb next time.)
1/4 C chopped parsley
Plenty of Parmesan cheese

Wash the leeks and thinly slice the white and pale green parts. Quarter the cabbage, core it, and slice it thinly.

Heat the olive oil and 2 Tbsp of the butter in a heavy, 12-inch skillet over medium heat. Add the leeks, cabbage, and 1/4 tsp each salt and pepper. Cook, stirring occasionally, until softened, about 5 minutes. Meanwhile, peel the garlic. Then press the garlic into the pan and cook, stirring, for another minute or so. Add the wine and simmer until most of the liquid has evaporated, about 2 to 3 minutes. Add the water, lemon juice, 1/2 tsp thyme, and the remaining 1 Tbsp butter. Cover and simmer briskly until the cabbage is very tender and the liquid has reduced by half, about 15 minutes.

When the cabbage begins to simmer, put a large pot of salted water on to boil for the pasta.

While the cabbage cooks, wash the Brussels sprouts, trim the stems, and pull off any discolored leaves. Quarter the Brussels sprouts lengthwise.

When the cabbage is just about done, add the pasta to the boiling water. Then add the Brussels sprouts to the broth with the cabbage and simmer, covered, stirring occasionally, for about 5 minutes, until the sprouts are bright-green and slightly tender.

When the pasta is not quite al dente, remove and reserve 2 cups of the pasta cooking water and drain the pasta. Transfer the vegetables to the pasta pot, and then return the pasta and cooking water to it, along with the remaining 1/4 tsp each of salt and pepper. Simmer for a couple of minutes until the pasta is done.

Off the heat, stir in the parsley and remaining 1/2 tsp thyme. Serve in shallow bowls with some of the broth. Grate a generous amount of Parmesan cheese over each serving.

4 to 6 servings.

maven

2010-02-27T18:09:00.000-08:00

Spring will be here soon.

I should be excited. Asparagus, rhubarb, strawberries, peas!

And the promise of summer and tomatoes to come.

Best of all, a break from root vegetables. Everyone keeps talking about how they're sick to death of root vegetables right now.

Granted, I might feel differently about bidding goodbye to winter if I lived in the frozen, snow-blanketed East.

But the truth is, I'm not that eager for spring. I'm kind of enjoying hanging out with all these root vegetables, and I'm not really looking forward to leaving them behind. Not now when I feel like I'm just getting to know them.

I guess I've developed a strange new ambition--I'd like to become a maven of unpopular vegetables.

See how pretty they can be?

Here's a simple preparation for those rutabagas above. The recipe is from a January New York Times article by Melissa Clark. She describes cooking rutabagas for the first time, roasting them, and writes that they were "so good, in fact, that I couldn’t stop eating the cubes straight from the pan."

I read that and I thought: Sign me up!

Clark combines her rutabagas with farro and ricotta salata cheese for a hearty winter salad. Which sounds fantastic and is on my list to try--but I just roasted them up and put them over some pan-fried cakes made from leftover pilaf (I'll have that recipe for you soon as well).

Or you could just eat the rutabaga straight from the pan. Roasted, it's sweet and soft, with just enough bite underneath to remind you you're not eating dessert.

Roasted Rutabagas
Recipe from Melissa Clark

1 1/2 lb rutabagas
2 tsp olive oil
1 Tbsp maple syrup
1/2 tsp salt
freshly ground black pepper

Turn on the oven to 400 F. While the oven heats, peel the rutabagas and cut them into 3/4-inch cubes. In a large baking dish, toss the rutabaga pieces with the remaining ingredients. Put them in the oven and roast, stirring once or twice, until they are caramelized in spots and very soft, about 30 to 40 minutes.

Serves 4 as a side dish.

egg-free apple muffins and a love letter to my mother

2010-02-24T13:49:00.000-08:00

Way back when, I promised you that I'd post about what I cook for and with Monkey, and I figured it was time to finally deliver just a little bit. The bonus is that these apple muffins (which are also great with pear or Asian pear) also more or less fit the seasonal produce theme.

We took a batch of these muffins to a playdate last Friday. In fact, I'd asked Monkey on Thursday night what she wanted to do on Friday and she said, "Go to T.'s house and eat muffins." Awww, so sweet, right? She really likes her friend T.!

Except that I'm pretty sure the truth is that T. is great and all but what she really likes are the muffins.

I don't know where the recipe originally came from; my mom used to make them a lot when I was a kid and they were a fixture of college care packages (and post-college care packages. Okay, my mom still sends me care packages--and that's just how I like it).

We made this batch without eggs, because Monkey has an egg allergy that was diagnosed when she was a little over a year old.

Yeah. So my best advice if you want to know how to prevent food allergies is don't rant on the Internet about how overblown they are.

Anyway, adapting baked goods to be egg-free has actually been relatively easy, thanks to this substitution trick that, again, comes from my mom. You see, my little sister was vegan for a while (then she was freegan, and now she's just a vegetarian like a normal person), and my mom wasn't going to let a little thing like veganism stand in the way of sending care packages.

The trick is this: for each egg, substitute 1 Tablespoon cornstarch mixed with 1 Tablespoon water. That's it.

No really, that's it. That's pretty much the only egg substitution trick I know. I mean sure, I've heard about flax and tapioca flour, but I've never tried them. Recently another mom with an egg-allergic kid asked me what I thought about that Ener-G egg replacer and I said, "Ummmmm." I live under a rock. But next time I went to the store I checked it out and was very gratified to see that the stuff is mostly cornstarch, plus a few additives, for $6 a box. I'm sticking with cornstarch from the bulk bins.

That said, I'm not going to lie to you: recipes often don't turn out exactly the same with cornstarch as they do with eggs. But this apple muffin recipe works particularly well with the cornstarch substitution, so it's become a go-to recipe for us. I mean, look at these beauties! You wouldn't guess they were egg-free, would you?

Egg-Free Apple Muffins

1 3/4 C flour
1 Tbsp cinnamon
1 tsp cardamom
1 tsp baking soda
4 Tbsp softened butter
1/2 C granulated sugar
1/4 C brown sugar
1 Tbsp cornstarch dissolved in 1 Tbsp water (or, of course, 1 egg)
1 C buttermilk (I usually use milk soured with a little lemon juice and left a few minutes to thicken*)
1 large apple, cut into 1/2 inch chunks

Preheat oven to 400 F. (While the oven is preheating you can soften the butter by putting it in a large bowl and sticking it in the oven for a minute or two.) Spray muffin tin or fill cups with paper liners.

In a large bowl, mix together the flour, spices, and baking soda.

In a separate bowl, cream together the butter and sugars. Stir in the cornstarch-water mixture. Quickly fold in the buttermilk or soured milk. Do not overmix or the batter will curdle.

Gradually add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients, making sure there are no lumps, but mixing no more than necessary. Fold in the apple chunks. Divide batter into muffin tins and bake 15 minutes.

Makes 1 dozen.

*I learned just yesterday as I was writing up this post--crazy coincidence, right?--that this is called "clabbered" milk. Or more precisely, it's a quick version of clabbered milk, which traditionally is made by letting milk sour and then putting it in a warm spot to let good bacteria grow, which in turn prevents bad bacteria from growing. Hey, come to think of it, that process sounds exactly like making creme fraiche. Hmm, how did human beings come up with all this stuff? Anyway, "clabbered." Good word.

sunday morning breakfast links, 2/21/10

2010-02-20T17:33:00.000-08:00

Two blogs I've recently added to my reader:

Edible Geography - Gorgeous (and information-rich) images, thoughtful commentary on the structure behind how our food is grown, transported, stored, and eaten. Catnip for nerds.
Feeding Little Foodies - This is exactly what I originally wanted to do with this blog, and never got it together.

Food for thought:

How to start a food lit/cookbook book club (The Kitchn) - I kind of want to do this, but I know that's insane.
How the beverage industry is fighting a proposed tax on soda - Impressive investigative piece from the L.A. Times (h/t Accidental Hedonist)
How a teacher would fix school lunches (Fed Up)

Menu planning? Here are some recipes that use vegetables currently in season (I haven't made any of them but they look good; tell me if you try any!):

Cauliflower and Caramelized Onion Tart (Smitten Kitchen)
Miso Slaw (The Kitchn)
Thai Red Curry with Root Vegetables (Sassy Radish)
Kabocha French Lentil Soup (101 Cookbooks)
Cream Cheese Spread with Beetroot and Horseradish (Nami-Nami) - and much more from the blogosphere's queen of beets

also, something different with broccoli

2010-02-18T22:00:00.000-08:00

This recipe comes from The Hungry Tiger, who got it from Alice Waters's The Art of Simple Food. In the past few weeks I have bookmarked at least four recipes on various blogs that are originally from The Art of Simple Food. Hmm, this makes me wonder if Alice Waters has already done my project for me.

That darn Alice Waters. Always getting there first.

Anyway, long-cooked broccoli intrigued me because it's so different from the usual crisp-tender approach to this vegetable. I think the soft texture makes it more accessible to wee ones' palates as well; Monkey really liked this, even though it's quite lemony.

The Hungry Tiger served the broccoli over pilaf, and that's what I tried first too. (I'll have the pilaf recipe for you a little later, because it's a good staple.) But I felt like there wasn't enough texture contrast between the broccoli and the grains, so when I heated up the leftovers I put it over toasted bread and served it with a poached egg. (The poached egg is becoming a major culinary crutch in our house. On Valentine's Day I even told my husband he was my poached egg on toast, and I really meant it too.) I liked that setup better, the contrast between the meltingly tender broccoli and the crisp toast, and the runny egg yolk there pulling everything together. So those are the instructions I've given you here.

One note of caution: Don't go overboard with mashing up the broccoli. I think I did, either that or I cut it up into too-small florets to begin with, and I ended up wishing that the dish had just a little big more texture. Let yourself be guided more by what looks good to you than by the recipe (and find some way of getting out your frustrations besides the potato masher, okay?).

Long-Cooked Broccoli with Eggs and Garlic Toast

A big bunch of broccoli (about 1.5 lbs.)
1/4 C olive oil
6 cloves garlic (really)
Big pinch of salt
1 C water
1 lemon
Red pepper flakes
Parmesan or similar cheese

Eggs (1 per person)
2 Tbsp white vinegar
salt

Thick slices of good crusty bread (1 or 2 per person)
1 smallish garlic clove

Cut the broccoli heads into smallish florets. Trim the stems, peel, and cut into 1/4-inch slices. Peel the garlic.

Heat the oil in a large heavy pan over medium heat. Add the broccoli, press the garlic into the pan, add the salt, and saute for a few minutes. (If you don't have little ones at your table, you can also add the red pepper flakes at this point--I wait and add them to each serving at the end.) Add the water and bring to a boil.

Turn the heat down very low and cover the pot. Cook until the broccoli is very, very tender, almost melting--the recipe I have says 30 to 40 minutes and it was closer to 30 minutes for me, so check and keep an eye on it.

After the broccoli has been cooking for about 15 or 20 minutes, fill a large skillet with water. Add the vinegar and a big pinch of salt, cover and turn the heat on high to bring it to a boil. Crack each egg into a small bowl. When the water boils, slide each egg into the water, quickly turn off the heat (if you are on an electric stove remove the pan from the burner) and cover the pan. Let the eggs poach in the residual heat for 3 minutes, then remove them from the water with a slotted spoon.

When the broccoli is done, uncover the pan and use a wooden spoon or a potato masher to break up the broccoli a little bit. If there's too much water turn the heat up for a few minutes to boil it off. Grate the zest of the lemon into the pan and squeeze its juice in too.

Meanwhile toast the bread. Peel the last clove of garlic. When the bread is done, rub each slice of toast with the garlic clove--just hard enough to start to grate the garlic so that little bits of garlic come off on the bread. (I never believed that this would work until I tried it, but it really does.)

To serve, place a piece or two of toast on a plate, spoon a generous amount of the broccoli over top, sprinkle with a little bit of crushed red pepper, then add a poached egg, and grate a big flurry of Parmesan cheese over top.

Makes 3 or 4 servings.

and now for something completely different...with beets

2010-02-16T22:00:00.000-08:00

Are you in a pancake stupor? I have an antidote for you: a light, piquant, but earthy-tasting dish featuring chopped beets, walnuts, and ground coriander seed.

Sounds different from the beet recipes you're used to seeing, right? (I guess that makes it...offbeet. Yeah. Sorry. I'm not giving up bad puns for Lent.) That's exactly why I clipped the recipe from an issue of Cooking Light a while back.

The original name, "Beets with Walnut-Garlic Sauce," is a little bit misleading--I didn't really get a sauce out of the walnut-garlic mixture, so I ended up turning it into a spread or maybe a hearty dip. The notes to the recipe say that this dish is made throughout the Balkans, Russia, and Turkey, and it would be a great addition to a mezze table.

I served it at a recent brunch-time playdate with two girls about Monkey's age and their families, and it was a big hit at least among the adults. (I also served this goat cheese, walnut, and date spread, which is dangerously tasty.) What you think of it will depend on how you feel about raw alliums. Personally, I am a delicate flower, with a palate to match, and even though I significantly cut the amount of onion called for I still found it very sharp at first. After a day or two it was much mellower, but still, I'll probably omit the onions next time. Raw garlic is enough for one dish.

Maybe if my guests are reading they can tell you if they really did love it as-is, or if they would have liked a little less onion. Or a lot less onion, actually. Or if they didn't like it at all and they were just being polite. (I hope it's not that last one! A food blogger would rather have honesty than politeness, I think.)

Anyway. Tread carefully.

I liked the beets on top of cream cheese on a bagel. I liked them even more in a sandwich--two slices of whole grain bread, toasted and spread thickly with cream cheese, then a generous layer of beets, a sliced hard-boiled egg, and some lettuce leaves.

Beet Spread with Walnuts and Garlic (Pkhali)

To roast beets, wash them, trim stems, and cut into roughly equal-sized chunks. Place on a baking sheet or in a roasting pan and toss with a little olive oil, salt, and pepper. Roast at 425 F until tender, about 45 minutes (depending on the size of your chunks). Let cool and then remove skins.

1/4 C chopped onion (optional)
1/4 C walnuts, toasted
2 Tbsp red wine vinegar
3/4 tsp salt
Pinch to 1/8 tsp cayenne pepper
1/2 tsp ground coriander seed
1 garlic clove
3 C roasted beets

Combine first seven ingredients in a food processor; process until smooth. Roughly chop the roasted beets, add them to the food processor, and process until you have an even, finely chopped spread.

you, too, can enjoy parsnips

2010-02-09T21:49:00.000-08:00

This recipe comes from Faye Levy's International Vegetable Cookbook, which is a real workhorse where learning what to do with new and unfamiliar vegetables is concerned. This book not only taught me how to make parsnips palatable, it also taught me what to do with daikon, and red cabbage too. And I still have a ton of other recipes marked to try.

For this dish, you boil some parsnips, then swathe them in a creamy yogurt sauce spiked with garlic, sweet paprika, and dill. When I put it that way it sounds kind of busy, but it's a great combination. Somehow the other sharp flavors--dill, garlic, tangy yogurt--help balance out and tone down the sharpness of the parsnips.

Levy's notes say that this sauce is also good with potatoes or carrots. I imagine so, but I've never tried it--because, hey, how awesome is it to have something to do with parsnips! If there's a better vegetable out there to enrobe in this sauce, I kind of don't want to know about it.

Last time I made this recipe, I was trying to figure out how to simplify and streamline it. I thought I could cook the parsnips in a big pot of water, scoop them out (along with a bit of cooking liquid to make the sauce), and then cook the noodles in the same pot of water while I made the sauce. But I'm going to be honest with you: my parsnips--due to my own laziness, not any fault of their own--were kind of, well, marginal by the time I got around to cooking them. And that cooking water smelled really, really bitter. So I just tossed it and started over with fresh water--and the parsnips themselves were delicious, tender and sweet. Crisis averted, but the point is, if you're a better, less lazy person than I am and are therefore working with fresher parsnips you might be able to save a little water and a little time here.

The one quibble that I have with Levy's cookbook is that a lot of the dishes seem like sides, and it can be difficult to figure out how to turn them into a vegetarian main course. With this recipe, I had the idea to serve the parsnips over buttered egg noodles, which seemed consistent with the Central/Eastern European origins of the dish.

My mom's vintage salt and pepper shakers--a couple of guys who look like they know a thing or two about goulash and the like--seem to approve.

Parsnips with Bulgarian Yogurt-Dill Sauce

1/2 C plain yogurt (full-fat is best, I think)
1 pound parsnips
1 C water or vegetable stock (or cooking liquid from the parsnips)
8 oz. dried egg noodles
1 medium garlic clove
2 1/2 Tbsp butter, divided
2 Tbsp flour
1tsp sweet paprika
1 Tbsp chopped fresh dill or 1 tsp dried
Salt and freshly ground black pepper

First, get the yogurt out of the refrigerator and put it in a medium bowl (you want it to be at room temperature by the time you add it to the sauce); stir until smooth.

Put a large pot of water on to boil with a pinch of salt. Wash and peel the parsnips, and cut into 2-inch lengths. Quarter any thick pieces (larger than 3/4 inch in diameter) lengthwise. Trim any woody centers (I find this instruction kind of confusing--I'm never sure how to distinguish between a woody center and a not-woody one--so I tend to err on the side of trimming them out).

When the water boils, add the parsnips to the pan, cover, and simmer over medium-low heat until tender, about 15-20 minutes. If it seems like a good idea, remove the parsnips from the pan with a slotted spoon and scoop out 1 Cup of the cooking liquid, setting both of these aside. Otherwise, just drain the parsnips and put on a new pot of water for the noodles.

When the water for the noodles boils, add them to the pot. Peel the garlic.

Then, in a large skillet, melt 1 1/2 Tbsp butter. Add the flour and paprika to the melted butter, and cook over low heat, whisking, about 1 minute. Remove the pan from the heat and whisk in the water/stock/cooking liquid. Put the pan back on the heat and bring to a boil, whisking. Press the garlic into the pan and cook over low heat, whisking often, about 2 minutes.

Take the pan off the heat again and gradually stir the sauce into the bowl with the yogurt. Return to pan and whisk until smooth. Gently heat through; do not boil. Stir in dill. Add parsnips and heat through without boiling. Taste and adjust seasoning.

The noodles should be done now; drain them. Return them to the pan, add the remaining 1 Tbsp butter, and toss to coat the noodles with butter. Put the buttered noodles on a plate and the parsnips on top. Serve hot.

Makes 3 servings.

sunday morning breakfast links, 2/6/10

2010-02-06T19:30:00.000-08:00

A couple of notes on that carrot soup I posted about the other day (which I made again for dinner tonight):

A big fat onion instead of the leeks? Sour cream in place of the creme fraiche? Totally, totally fine.
No really, simmer it for an hour and a half. I know it sounds over the top but the flavor just gets crazy rich that way.

I wanted to link to this month's Gourmet, unbound roundup of recipes. I think I mentioned before that this is a project in which people are cooking through the Gourmet magazine archives month by month (so recipes from February are posted in February, and so on) to keep the spirit of that magazine alive. The rap on Gourmet, after its demise, was that it had gotten--or maybe always was--too fancy and out of touch. That's one reason I decided to participate--I thought it would be an interesting challenge to see if I could find recipes relevant to my project of simple, seasonal cooking for a busy working parent. Could Gourmet keep it real? Well, in a word, yes--I've had a lot of trouble narrowing things down to just one (or two, in February's case) recipe for the month.

It's also interesting to see what the other cooks participating in the project come up with. Some folks go all out with, yes, fancy and complex creations--I love reading about them but when it comes to my own kitchen I have to admit I think: No way. Other participants though have found some simple and accessible stunners. Here are a few that stood out to me this month, all featuring seasonal produce:

Butternut Squash Galette from Doable and Delicious
Pasta with Parsley Sauce and Cauliflower from Hungry Bruno
Ginger and Garlic Broccoli with Brown Rice from Taste as You Go

More goodness from the Interwebs:

A while back I was wishing that I had more recipes for simple legume dishes that I could use to round out our plates of vegetables. Mark Bittman, as always, has my back, with a roundup of easy dal recipes.
From The Kitchn, more cookbooks for kids/books on cooking with kids.
10 tips for reducing food waste. Because I was raised Protestant by a woman who was raised Catholic, I love the "guilt list" idea.

And finally:

I really hate how bulleted lists look in this template. Sorry folks.

soup by-the-seat-of-the-pants

2010-02-05T16:56:00.000-08:00

We ate this carrot soup on Christmas Eve. It was a big hit, which was especially gratifying because the cooking was totally fly-by-the-seat-of-the-pants.

I had originally planned to make a roasted squash soup, and had gathered these two recipes from Melissa's Produce and a blog called Seed to Table. Then the Mr. (who also snapped the photo for this post--thanks hon!) reminded me that we had a bunch of carrots in the garden that needed to be used, so I switched gears a bit. Just a little bit--I basically combined the two recipes, and substituted carrots for the squash. To simplify things, I decided to just simmer the carrots on the stove rather than roasting them.

So the carrots for the soup were hyper-local, but the chestnuts, of course, were quite the opposite. Despite their hefty tally of food miles, I was curious to try cooking with chestnuts, which just seem like a quintessential luxurious winter ingredient to me. And indeed, they gave the soup a gorgeous velvety texture. Hopefully soon, those of us in North America will have access to closer-to-local chestnuts again.

This soup is not particularly quick--it takes a long, slow simmer--but it is very easy. Just a few minutes at the beginning chopping vegetables and tossing them into the pot, and a quick whiz in the blender at the end. Dinner practically makes itself.

The soup is garnished with a dollop of chipotle creme fraiche, which makes a nice contrast to the creamy, slightly sweet vegetable puree. You will probably end up with a little bit of extra chipotle creme fraiche. It would be good in an omelet, in a buckwheat crepe, spread thinly on a sandwich, or even just smeared on a cracker and topped with a bit of fresh chevre. Not that I have extensive personal experience with that last option or anything.

Carrot, Leek, and Chestnut Soup with Chipotle Cream

2 Tbsp. butter
2 leeks
2 lb. carrots
4-oz. package shelled chestnuts
1 tsp salt
freshly ground black pepper to taste
4 C vegetable broth or water

1/2 C creme fraiche
2 tsp tomato paste
1/4-1/2 tsp chipotle chili powder, or to taste

Heat the butter in a medium saucepan over medium heat. Meanwhile, wash the leeks and cut them (white parts only--reserve the green parts for another use) into 1-inch chunks. Add the leeks to the pan and saute, stirring occasionally. Wash, peel, and roughly chop the carrots, and add them to the pan. Then add the chestnuts, salt, pepper, and liquid. Bring to a boil then turn the heat down and simmer, covered, until carrots and leeks are very, very tender--at least an hour, and an hour and a half doesn't hurt.

Meanwhile, stir together the creme fraiche, tomato paste, and chipotle powder. Refrigerate until needed.

When the vegetables are done, remove the soup from the heat. Puree in batches in a blender--be careful not to fill the blender too full, so that it does not spatter. Return the soup to the pan and heat gently.

For each serving, stir a dollop of the chipotle creme fraiche into the bowl.

Makes about 5 servings.

a contradictory combination

2010-02-01T16:01:00.000-08:00

Here are two recipes I chose for my February Gourmet, Unbound submission. Both are from a menu of Algerian dishes put together by Farid Zadi for the February 2008 issue.

So the two recipes--Braised Turnips with Poppy Seed Bread Crumbs, and Fennel and Carrot Slaw with Olive Dressing--are meant to be eaten together, yet I'm calling them a contradictory combination. That's not because of the flavors or textures--the two dishes are a great balance to each other in that sense--but because of timing. The salad really needs to be made way ahead, but the turnips are best right away. (Actually, come to think of it, that makes them a convenient combination for busy parents, since you don't have to do all the cooking at once.)

The turnip recipe needs a little tweaking, I think. First, there is just no way you need a cup and a half of braising liquid (I'd say a scant half-cup should do it). Second, the turnips really don't need to cook for a full hour. Mine were done after half an hour--then I started trying to boil down the excess liquid, realized it would take forever and result in overcooked turnips, and finally just fished the turnips out of the broth, tragically leaving all that delicious butter behind. There's got to be a better way. So I'm just going to link to the original recipe for now; I'll post it in full once I've made it my own.

Ignoring my quibbles with the method, the result is fantastic. The turnips end up meltingly soft, but retain just enough of their mustard-y bite. Some of the bread crumbs fall down into the braising liquid on your serving platter and get pleasantly soggy, while others perch on top of the turnips and stay delicately crisp--the combination is just perfect. (And it's this combination that doesn't keep--the leftovers are tasty, but the contrast of textures is lost.) The poppy seeds are, surprisingly, a key element of the dish, adding a nice nutty flavor--but I recommend that you go out and buy some fresh ones; admit it, your current stash has been hanging around your spice cabinet since 2003.

On to the salad. I've been looking for winter salads--something crisp and astringent to pair with those soft, long-cooked winter main dishes. And this one is definitely a good option. With one caveat. The original recipe says to refrigerate for at least 30 minutes to let the flavors blend, but I found that even after an hour or so the fennel was overpowering and the rest of the salad was kind of blah. But after sitting overnight--oh my goodness. The dressing made things all briny and savory, and the fennel retreated to become a grace note rather than a bazooka (yeah, yeah, mixed metaphors--so sue me). I've made a couple modifications to the original recipe, so my version appears below.

Fennel and Carrot Slaw with Olive Dressing
Adapted from Gourmet, February 2008

If you can't find fennel, I think this recipe would also be great with cabbage or grated radishes in place of the fennel, or even carrots alone.

Juice of half a lemon
1 Tbsp balsamic vinegar
3 Tbsp extra-virgin olive oil
3/4 teaspoon dried Aleppo chile or Espelette pepper flakes
1/2 tsp salt
1 medium fennel bulb with fronds
5 carrots
1/4 cup Spanish green olives
2 Tbsp finely chopped sun-dried tomatoes packed in oil
2 Tbsp chopped flat-leaf parsley

Place the first five ingredients--lemon juice through salt--in a medium serving bowl.

Chop enough fennel fronds to measure 3 tablespoons and reserve. Discard remaining fronds and stalks. Quarter the fennel bulb and cut each quarter into very thin crosswise slices. Peel and grate the carrots. Remove the pits from the olives (if necessary) and finely chop.

In the bowl, whisk together the dressing. Add the fennel fronds, fennel, carrots, olives, tomatoes, and parsley. Fold together to combine thoroughly. Refrigerate 8 hours or overnight to let the flavors blend.

Makes 5 servings.

sunday morning breakfast links, 1/31/10

2010-01-30T16:40:00.000-08:00

Happy weekend, friends! I'm hitting post a little early today as I'm headed out to celebrate a dear friend's birthday.

I found those seasonal produce calendars that I mentioned in a previous link roundup. All via Apartment Therapy/The Kitchn:

PDF download from The Cottage Industrialist
From Claudia Pearson, available in poster or tea towel (swoon!!) format
My favorite, a perpetual gardening calendar from Krank Press

the easiest soup in the world

2010-01-28T18:58:00.000-08:00

Here's another dish for which Nigel Slater deserves the credit. (Oh, and looking through my previous posts on this blog I just realized that my braised carrot recipe is probably from him as well. I hope I'm not going to turn into some weird kind of stalker, clutching a handful of recipe cards like a goth pre-teen with the latest by Neil Gaiman.) It's a revisiting of the red lentil and sweet potato soup from The Kitchen Diaries that I made last year, except I've simplified it even further. Instead of pureeing the soup I just left it chunky (a certain member of our household does NOT approve of the blender these days, and can make her displeasure known at high decibels). And in place of the garnish of sauteed onions, I added a bit of coconut milk--otherwise the soup would be fat-free, and I'm sorry, I just can't do fat-free, especially in winter. The result is creamy and spicy--but gently so, since the heat the comes mostly from the generous dose of ground ginger.

And the method, basically, amounts to throwing a few ingredients in a pot and letting them simmer. It's almost as easy as ordering a pizza. It's definitely easier than ordering Thai food (and takes roughly the same amount of time to get on the table). You can do this.

Simplest Red Lentil and Sweet Potato Soup

1 small onion
2 cloves garlic
1 C + 2 Tbsp red lentils
2 medium sweet potatoes
1 1/2 tsp ground ginger
1 1/4 tsp turmeric
1 1/4 tsp chili powder
1/2 tsp salt or to taste
1 C coconut milk

Chop the onion and place it in a medium saucepan. Peel the garlic and press the cloves into the saucepan. Add the lentils and 6 cups water, and bring to a boil.

Meanwhile, peel the sweet potatoes and cut them into one-inch chunks. When the water in the saucepan boils, turn down the heat to a simmer and add the sweet potatoes, spices, and salt.

Simmer covered, stirring occasionally, until the lentils and sweet potatoes are very tender, about 25-30 minutes. Add the coconut milk and heat gently. Serve.

Makes 4-6 servings.

sneaky me

2010-01-26T18:49:00.000-08:00

This recipe is another small tastes original. My husband asked me what inspired it and I replied, "Monkey."

The idea started brewing a couple of weeks ago, when Monkey ate half a log of goat cheese for her mid-morning snack. For real. I'd give her another few chunks and she'd gobble it up--just unadorned goat cheese--and ask for more. So I started thinking about what I could make that would capitalize on this new enthusiasm of hers but also be something we would all enjoy. I figured I'd combine goat cheese and pasta--something not too different from her beloved "cheesy noodles" (a.k.a. Kraft dinner), because we wouldn't want to push our luck too far, would we?

Then for the veggies. Here I was inspired by two of Monkey's favorite entertainments: The Little Engine That Could, which features "fresh spinach for [the good boys' and girls'] dinners" (but which, I have to tell you, is also a totally, totally insipid piece of literature. I mean, the little blue engine just chugs over the mountain! Where is the trying and trying and the almost failing and the trying again and finally overcoming adversity? It is not the story I thought it was, at all.) And an episode of the delightful animated series Harold and the Purple Crayon (which is narrated by, believe it or not, Sharon Stone), in which Harold is sent to his room for refusing to eat squash but turns out to think squash is quite yummy in the end. Sneaky me, I thought this all might function as peer pressure to encourage her to at least try what I came up with.

The first time I made this I even used tiny alphabet-shaped pasta, which Monkey's grandparents had sent in her Christmas package. But that first batch needed work. I'd tried to keep the method really simple by just stirring melted goat cheese into the pasta. The result was okay, but not great. I really wanted this to be smooth and creamy, almost like a risotto. I would have to actually make a white sauce.

The good news, though, was that this gave me the opportunity to add some garlic to the dish. Have I mentioned that I've been craving garlic recently?

And in truth, making a quick white sauce isn't all that burdensome. The method is just like making boxed macaroni and cheese, really (I know this sounds sacrilegious, but stick with me here) and it doesn't take much more time.

Anyway, I loved the result--I actually think it's company-worthy, a rich, creamy dish that's also pretty gorgeous on the plate. And Monkey? Well, the fad for goat cheese seems to have passed, I'm sorry to say. But try it she did. She might have even eaten two bites, though I'm sure completely by accident.

Orzo "Risotto" with Spinach, Goat Cheese, and Butternut Squash

4 Tbs butter
1 3-pound butternut squash
salt
pepper
whole nutmeg

8 oz orzo
6 oz frozen chopped spinach*

1 Tbs butter
1 or 2 cloves garlic, to taste (I used 2 and it was pretty dang garlicky)
1/8 tsp salt
1 Tbs flour
3/4 C milk
4 oz chevre (fresh goat cheese)

Put 2 Tbs butter in each of two large baking dishes. Set them in the oven and turn it on to 400 F. Peel and seed the squash, and chunk it into one-inch pieces.

By the time you finish with that, the butter in the baking dishes should be melted. Take the dishes out of the oven and add the squash, dividing it evenly between the two dishes. Sprinkle a little salt (no more than 1/4 tsp total) over the squash, grind on some black pepper, and then grate a little nutmeg over it all. Put the baking dishes back in the oven and roast the squash, stirring once or twice, for about 35 minutes, or until very tender.

Once the squash is in the oven, put a pan of water on to boil for the pasta. When the water boils, add the orzo and cook until it is al dente--the label on the bulk bin at the store said 5 to 8 minutes, but really it took me about 10. Add the spinach to the pasta pot in the last couple of minutes of cooking*. Drain the pasta and the spinach--a fine-mesh strainer works better than a standard colander in this case.

Now, in the pan you used to cook the pasta, melt the remaining 1 Tbs butter over medium heat. Peel the garlic and press it into the pan. Add the salt, and stir the butter and garlic for a minute or two, until the garlic begins to soften and becomes fragrant. Then add the flour and stir until the butter and flour form a paste. Add the milk, 1/4 cup at a time, stirring to incorporate each addition. Now add the goat cheese and stir until you have a smooth sauce. Then add the pasta and spinach back to the pan, and stir to combine and heat through.

Right about now, your squash should be done, so remove it from the oven. To serve, place a big spoonful of the orzo on each plate and top with a generous heap of squash.

*I used frozen chopped spinach because this was what I had on hand. There are a couple of ways to do this, I think. Instead of adding frozen spinach to the pasta water, you could defrost it separately, squeeze out the water, and then add it to the cheese sauce when you add the cooked orzo. Or, you could use fresh greens--I think that would make for an even better and prettier finished dish, actually. If you use baby spinach or something similarly delicate, I think you could again add it to the cheese sauce along with the orzo. If you use something more substantial, like grownup spinach or chard, I would recommend chopping the greens and adding them to the pasta water in the last few minutes of cooking. The key, in any case, is to make sure you are not adding a lot of extra water to the cheese sauce.

Makes 4-5 servings

smbl, 01/24/10

2010-01-23T21:35:00.000-08:00

Are you sick of listening to me rant about the food system? To tell you the truth, I'm a bit tired of listening to myself. And anyway, too much environmental proselytizing can be hazardous to your marriage. (Wow, don't I know it. I shudder just remembering the Great Thermostat War of '09. For the record, I was on the not-green side of that battle.)

So I'm going to try to keep things light this week. Let's start things off with a little shameless consumerism, shall we?

I have nowhere to put this root vegetable storage box but I want it. Those trays look like wide, laughing mouths to me. Wide, laughing mouths munching on carrots and potatoes. Adorable.

This moleskine recipe journal, by contrast--I think I need it. You see, all the recipes I've been working on (ohhh, I have some GOOD stuff lined up in the coming weeks) currently exist in the form of post-it notes and chicken-scratch on the back of other recipes printed out from the computer. A purpose-built moleskine just sounds much more...reliable. Hmm, I wonder if my Valentine reads this blog?

A couple of other things:

I'm desperate to make this homemade bouillon from 101 cookbooks. Absolutely brilliant idea. I don't really care for most powdered veggie broths (always the wrong ratio of celery, or something--I love that you could customize this recipe) but I just don't have it sufficiently together to keep homemade broth on hand. I don't know why making bouillon from scratch seems way easier than making broth, but it just does, okay?

Fed Up: School Lunch Project is a new blog I discovered this week. A public school teacher has decided to eat school lunch every day in 2010, and posts a picture and description of each day's lunch. I think that I have come up with the best possible way to appreciate this blog: Create a category called "Food" in your RSS reader, and then subscribe to Fed Up and also a whole bunch of unapologetically food porn-type blogs. Read by category so that you are scrolling through a whole bunch of posts from different blogs all jumbled together. I feel a rant coming on so I'll just say that the cognitive dissonance created when a Fed Up post pops up is very, very useful.

Oh, before I sign off! I know the whole New Year's resolution thing is like sooo three weeks ago, but I wondered if anyone has any food-related goals for 2010? Mine is to learn to like sun-dried tomatoes.

a winter dinner salad

2010-01-20T20:12:00.000-08:00

With the new year, a food-loving mother's thoughts turn to Nigel Slater. At least that's true in my house, apparently. This time a few years ago I was enjoying the British food writer's memoir, Toast, which I had received as a Christmas present. Last year, I was reading his Kitchen Diaries and making his lentil soup. This year, on a trip to the library with Monkey, I couldn't help perusing the cookbook section (even though I need more recipes like I need a hole in my head) and plucked his book Real Fast Food off the shelf.

I really just love Slater's sensibility--he's opinionated but unpretentious, taking pleasure in both first-quality fresh produce and the comforts of takeout. He's tongue-in-cheek without ever quite tipping over into twee (though his nationality probably helps him there--the Brits can just get away with more in the almost-twee department, don't you think?).

Real Fast Food might just be my favorite of his books that I've read. His focus here is on "fast home cooking, the sort of food you throw together when you come home tired and hungry." Simple omelets, cheese-and-bread in its various forms, a steak salad. So good with such little effort--there's almost a luxuriousness to this kind of food. And a romance to it. It makes me think of the movie Amelie--the emblematic food moment in that movie is supposed to be the title character cracking the crust on a creme brulee with the delicate tip of her spoon, but to me it's her, alone in her gabled apartment, tipping a pot of macaroni into a colander. Beautiful--strange as that may sound.

There are many, many recipes in Real Fast Food that I'd like to try, but for a first foray I picked a substantial dinner salad of spinach with bacon and poached egg. In summertime, we eat a lot of Nicoise salads, and I thought this recipe might be a good winter alternative. I don't usually go in for fake meat, but lately we've been enjoying veggie sausages (and anyway, sausage isn't really meat so much as a spice-and-umami delivery system), so I thought one of those could substitute for the bacon. And I'd just been to the farmers market and bought a bag of bright-green mache, unsure of how I would use it--so when this recipe bubbled to the top it seemed meant to be.

I'm sorry I held out so long because mache is pretty fantastic--sturdy, springy even, tasting of chlorophyll. However, despite its sturdiness on the plate, mache does not keep well--a day or two at best before you'll have to go sorting out slimy leaves. So consider this a recipe for dinner on farmers market day.

And one more warning--I recommend preparing all of the ingredients for this salad before you start cooking:

The dish comes together quite quickly and once things get going you won't have time even to slice up a sausage, let alone whisk up a quick dressing. You'll also leave an unholy mess in the kitchen when you are done. Well, okay, it's not that bad, really--but don't think you're going to clean as you go. This is truly lickety-split.

After polishing off his salad, my husband asked if I could make him another one. Not because it didn't satisfy his hunger, but because it was just that good. Beautiful--and I don't think that sounds strange at all.

Winter Salad with Poached Egg and Sausage
Adapted from Real Fast Food, by Nigel Slater

For the salad:
6 oz. or so mache (or baby spinach)

2 eggs
1/2 tsp salt
2 Tbs white vinegar

1 tsp olive oil
1 large vegetarian sausage (we like Tofurkey Italian sausage flavor. or, of course you could use actual sausage, or bacon)
2 slices bread

For the dressing:
4 Tbs olive oil
4 tsp red wine vinegar
2 tsp Dijon mustard
salt
black pepper

First, prepare your ingredients. Wash the mache very carefully--it can be quite gritty. A good trick is to put it in the basket of a salad spinner, put the basket inside the bowl of the spinner, and then fill with water. Let sit for a couple minutes to loosen the dirt, swish it around some, and then lift the basket out to drain off the water. Pour the dirty water out of the bowl and repeat. Spin the greens dry and divide onto two large plates.

Slice the sausage up into 1/4-inch thick slices. Cut the bread into large dice. Crack each egg into a small bowl--the size you use to serve food to a very young baby would be good. Whisk together the dressing ingredients.

For the poached eggs, fill a large, shallow skillet almost full of water. Add 1/2 tsp salt and the white vinegar (the latter lowers the pH of the water and helps the egg whites hold together a little better). Cover the skillet and turn the heat on high to bring the water to a boil.

Meanwhile, heat 1 tsp olive oil in a small skillet, and saute the sausage until the slices are brown on both sides. With a slotted spoon or pancake turner, remove the sausage from the skillet and scatter it on top of the greens. Add the bread to the skillet and stir occasionally until toasted on all sides.

When the water for the eggs starts boiling, quickly slip the eggs from the bowls into the boiling water, immediately cover the pan, and remove from the heat. The residual heat from the water will cook the eggs. After 3 minutes, use a slotted spoon to remove each eggs from the water, let it drip-drain for a moment or two, and then place one egg in the center of each plate, on top of the greens.

Now it will be time to turn off the heat under the small skillet and take the croutons out of the pan, scattering them over the greens. Quickly whisk the dressing again and pour it into the hot pan. (It will hiss and spit quite a bit--if you have an extra few seconds it might be worth tying on an apron.) Then pour the dressing over the salads. Serve at once.

Serves 2.

monday, uh, afternoon, breakfast-for-dinner links, i guess: 1/18/10

2010-01-18T16:08:00.000-08:00

Well, this is what happens when the Monkey gets sick the day before her mother has a writing deadline. I'm behind on everything. Moving along...

Lately it seems like I've seen quite a lot of talk about calendars or charts detailing local, seasonal food choices. Sadly, when it came time to type up these post I found that I'd not kept track of these links as well as I'd thought. But here are a few thoughts anyway:

Via Re-Nest, Apartment Therapy's green site, a chart of seasonal foods put together by a London restaurant, Leon.I love that it includes seafood, an overlooked aspect of seasonal food I think. The general outlines do seem to translate pretty widely, but I'm not sure about all the specifics. Some of this is cultural (according to the chart, Spring foods include "Hoggett:" what?), but some of it is simply due to the climatic quirks of different regions. Here in Seattle, for example, prime tomato season is the last smidge of August and early September; last year we were harvesting red-tinged fruits until the beginning of November.

Speaking of different regional climates, Good Magazine and Always With Honor put together a chart of when common fruits and vegetables are locally available in different places around the United States. Of this chart Ezra Klein of the Internet Food Association (where there has recently been a highly entertaining smackdown concerning fresh dill) commented on his other blog (can't find the exact post--dude writes a lot of words. But good ones!) that it illustrates why the local foods movement is based in California.

What this chart made me think of is that there may be a difference between when foods are locally available, and when they can be grown in a particular place. In the United States, the centralization of agriculture in recent decades means that many crops that can be, and once were, grown in a particular place aren't anymore. Iowa, corn and hog capital of the U.S., used to grow an enormous diversity of crops--it was once one of the largest apple-producing states, plus grapes and peaches and, and.... Today, few of these crops are grown in any significant quantity in the state. Though this is changing, people who want to eat locally are up against not just the limitations of climate but also the limitations of the market. And that's one reason why I think that building a sustainable food system can't be accomplished solely by the aggregate decisions of individual consumers. It's not just about what you choose to buy, it's about what choices are available, and how those choices are influenced by public policy.

That said, there are a ton of resources online describing local produce availability in different states and regions. The most targeted one I have found for my area is the set of harvest schedule charts on the Puget Sound Fresh Website. But even that, in my experience, is not all that accurate--perhaps because harvest schedule isn't exactly congruent with market availability.

And for me, dividing things up by season or even by month misses some of the beauty inherent in the seasonal round of local produce: the way different fruits and vegetables wink in and out of farm stalls week by week, almost literally a round, in the musical sense. And getting to know the sequence of local crops throughout the year: here, strawberries, then blueberries, raspberries, and finally, finally, it's August and there are blackberries. So I think I've concluded that the best way to find out what's in season is to go to the farmers market and see what's in season. Sometimes there's just no substitute for being there.

a new year and yogurt-barley soup

2010-01-13T14:33:00.000-08:00

I've had this soup recipe since forever. Last time I made it, earlier this week, it was even better than I'd remembered; maybe I've found the exact right moment of the year to eat it. It does make a perfect New Year tonic: soothingly creamy, rich enough to stand up to winter but with the healthy tang of yogurt, extremely simple to make but just enough offbeat spice (offbeat to this American palate, anyway) to remain interesting.

To make the soup, you saute some onion and garlic in olive oil, then stir in some spices, chopped scallions, and cooked barley. It occurred to me this time that you could stop right there and have a pretty nice side dish:

But today we're making soup. So to the barley you then add a mixture of broth, yogurt, and beaten egg, and heat ever so gently until it gets thick and velvety. Sprinkle on some chopped mint and serve. See? I told you it was easy.

I can't remember where I got the recipe--probably from some cookbook that I borrowed from the library way back in high school. Like all the other cool kids, I spent quite a lot of Saturday nights back then copying out intriguing-sounding recipes from library cookbooks. What, that's not what the cool kids at your high school did on Saturday nights?

My notes say that this is the soup that Armenian mamas make for their children when they are sick, and while I can't vouch for the reliability of my long-forgotten source, I can vouch for the reliability of the soup. It'll cure what ails you, especially if what ails you is January.

Armenian Yogurt-Barley Soup (Tanabour)

Traditionally this soup contains ground lamb, but I have always made this vegetarian version. If you add meat, you will probably want to cut the amount of barley down some.

1 C (a generous one) pearled barley
4 C water
1/2 tsp salt

3 T olive oil
1 small onion
1 large clove garlic
4-5 scallions
1 tsp ground cumin
1/2 tsp ground allspice
1/4 tsp white pepper
2 eggs
4 C vegetable stock
3 C plain yogurt
2 T finely chopped fresh mint (or 1 T dried, or, uh, one peppermint tea bag, supposing your mint died back at the end of summer and what was in your spice cabinet turned out to be horribly stale)

In a large saucepan, bring the barley, water, and salt to a boil over medium heat. Lower the heat and simmer, covered, until the barley is plenty tender--about 45 minutes. (You could do this part ahead, of course.)

When the barley has been cooking for about 25 or 30 minutes, start heating the olive oil in a large soup pot. Finely chop the onion and add it to the oil. Peel the garlic and mince it if that's the way you roll, or press it if you're like me--either way, add it to the pot. Saute the onion and garlic over medium-low heat until they are soft but not brown.

Meanwhile, slice the scallions (white and some of the green parts) thinly. Get your spices out and measure them into a small bowl so they're handy. When the onion and garlic are nice and soft, stir in the spices and the scallions.

The barley should be done right about now. Turn it into the soup pot, along with any water that hasn't been absorbed, and stir together. Turn off the heat.

Crack the two eggs into a large bowl and beat them lightly with a whisk. Add the stock and yogurt to the bowl and whisk together. Then gradually stir this mixture into the soup pot. Heat slowly over low heat, stirring occasionally with a wooden spoon, until thickened. Absolutely do not boil, or the soup will curdle. The recipe says that this step takes 10 minutes, but I am going to be honest with you, if you're being really careful about the not-boiling thing, it's probably going to be longer, maybe more like 20.

Ladle the soup into bowls and sprinkle a little bit of mint over each one.

Makes 4 to 6 servings.

sunday morning breakfast links, 1/9/10: special food-and-music edition

2010-01-09T17:57:00.000-08:00

I love Facebook. Okay, not so much the phony breast-cancer awareness stuff, but still--hear me out.

Recently, an unconscionably talented music journalist of my acquaintance posted a link on Facebook to this L.A. Times piece, in which L.A. Weekly food writer Jonathan Gold argues that "While nobody was paying attention, food quietly assumed the place in youth culture that used to be occupied by rock 'n' roll."

I'm not very rock 'n' roll these days (nor was I ever, truth be told), but Gold's description of "a barren parking lot in Rosemead, where 600 people shivered in the cold, glancing at their iPhones and awaiting the arrival of a food truck bearing Korean tacos and kimchi quesadillas" is somehow affecting. In fact, I could swear I recently read a similar-feeling description of music fans lined up for some underground show in Brooklyn in the late 60s. (It must have been in The New Yorker?--drat, I can't find the reference right now.)

Anyway, lively debate about the article ensued, and one commenter posted a link to this long feature from Seattle Weekly food writer Jonathan Kauffman, who argues that "the local-foods movement has also been wildly successful because it taps into the way the indie-rock generation forms its ever-shifting musical allegiances." (Full disclosure: I used to freelance for the Weekly's food section, though before Kaufmann arrived; I've never met him.) In other words, foodies collect knowledge of obscure potato breeds and wine varietals in the same way that indie rock fans collect knowledge of obscure bands. And in both movements, there's a tension between being in-the-know and bringing favorites to wider acclaim. I think Kauffman is spot-on; to his piece I would only add: Etsy.

This pair of articles really brought home to me the difference between food as a cultural beat and as a scientific one--in many ways, the latter is how I come at the subject. (The scientist in me also wants to argue here that our delight in farmers market displays of dozens of varieties of potatoes, or kale, or squash is also an expression of what E. O. Wilson calls biophilia: we love the diversity of the biosphere, its variations on a theme.)

So while Kaufmann perfectly captures the cultural meaning of the local foods movement, I'd argue that there's more to it, from a scientific point of view. Agricultural biodiversity in general, and heirloom varieties in particular, aren't just useful for helping foodies establish their hipster cred. In fact, they can help people eat--healthfully, independently, and more locally--regardless of where they are in the world.

And that's where Facebook comes in again, because a day or two later another friend (a sublimely talented musician, coincidentally) posted a link to this heritage seed company founded and run by a 17-year old in Nova Scotia. Yes. A seventeen-year-old.

The total self-evident awesomeness of this has me at a loss for what to say next, but I guess the point is that the best vegetable varieties to grow in Nova Scotia are different from the best ones to grow in Seattle and different from the best ones to grow in Boulder and so on. So keeping all these different varieties alive and growing is important, and not just because urban hipsters will use them to establish ever-finer-grained distinctions of indie-ness. Sometimes, food isn't just culture--it's also food.

Edited 1/13 to add the musician!

date night: Portage

2010-01-06T16:20:00.000-08:00

The prospects for Date Night were not looking good. It was my turn to pick the restaurant, but all of my suggestions were deemed too far away, in the wrong direction, too expensive, etc. I was getting pretty close to "Well FINE then, I don't really want to go out at all!"

Fortunately, the husband salvaged the discussion by poking around on the Internets and discovering Portage, a little jewel-box of a restaurant on top of Queen Anne Hill. Occupying a slender storefront space, the restaurant is what you get when you cross a neighborhood French bistro with a Northwest seasonal menu. Soon after we arrived, our suitably Gallic-looking waiter mixed me a cocktail of sparkling wine, Lillet Rouge, and house-made brandied cherries--a nice twist on a Kir Royale. Okay. The evening's earlier sniping and carping was forgiven.

Portage is not a vegetarian restaurant, but it is extremely vegetarian-friendly: the menu is divided into two columns, "Plats" and "Vegetarien," with a roughly equal number of dishes in each. When we confessed we were having trouble deciding what to order, the waiter suggested we come back sometime and try the tasting menu. Duly noted. (In fact, I suspect the tasting menu--$40 for either vegetarian or non-vegetarian version--might have been a better deal than ordering a la carte, as we did. Though I'm not complaining; any meal that opens my husband's mind to Brussels sprouts is well worth the price, as far as I'm concerned.)

So what did we decide on? A salad of endive and mandarin oranges with caramelized fennel vinaigrette that tasted exactly like January: spare, ascetic, and bracingly astringent.

Next, a plate of Brussels sprouts and soft, pale-yellow sweet potato gnocchi, all tossed with very finely chopped preserved Meyer lemon--I'm telling you, I had no idea that winter vegetables could taste so lively and energetic.

Way over at the other, comfy-and-cozy end of the winter-food spectrum, but equally pleasant, was my husband's dish of thinly sliced root vegetables (I tasted a lot of celeriac, with a slight bitterness that contrasted nicely with the rest of the plate) baked under a blanket of cheese and served over brown lentils speckled with bits of carrot and more of those Brussels sprouts. My husband said he liked the way the Brussels sprouts were just crisp-tender instead of having had the heck cooked out of them. Again, duly noted.

I think his favorite dish, though, was the potato and shallot rosti: shredded potatoes and sweetly caramelized shallots, formed into a neat cake and crisped in a cast-iron pan. Simple, but perfectly executed.

Maybe we were just overstuffed, but dessert didn't seem to live up to the precision or inventiveness of what had come before. The flourless chocolate cake seemed heavy-handed, and the cardamom-vanilla pot de creme contained just a whisper of cardamom (admittedly, I may be biased here; I am part Swedish and like my cardamom fairly shouted from the rooftops).

Still, I'll be back for that tasting menu. And that dinner gave me a few ideas for things to try at home, especially now that Brussels sprouts on the table are now, well, on the table.

Portage
2209 Queen Anne Ave. N. Seattle, WA 98109
206-352-6213
Open daily, 5 pm

sunday morning breakfast links, 1/3/10

2010-01-02T22:42:00.000-08:00

Saturday night was girls' night out so I'm behind on my typing--I'll be brief. A few links from Apartment Therapy/The Kitchn's year-end roundup that caught my eye:

25 Vegetarian and Vegan Meals: I'm going to try that banh mi with lemongrass tofu as soon as humanly possible.
25 Quick and Easy Weeknight Meals: The uova in purgatorio are a must-try, based on name alone. Also like the idea of lentils with ditalini...which reminds me of a Syrian dish called rishta, with wide noodles and brown lentils and a little allspice.
25 Tips for Frugal Cooking and Shopping: Ooh, muhjadarrah, lentils with rice this time.
Which in turn reminds me of Francis Lam's koshary recipe.

Okay that last one isn't from The Kitchn, but now that I've got a theme going here I'll note that in general I'd like to learn how to make better use of "seasonless" dishes of grains and pulses to round out our plates of vegetables. Do you have any favorites in that category?

all pretty satisfied

2010-01-01T08:39:00.000-08:00

This dish didn't turn out quite as I'd envisioned it, yet I found myself going back for seconds. That's something, right?

In basic outline, this recipe is similar to the dish of pasta with fennel and cauliflower that I posted recently: you cook some vegetables on the stove (in this case, winter squash and radicchio) while your pasta boils, and toss it all together with a little cheese at the end. Sure, there are some fiddly bits there at the beginning of this one--you have to brown some butter and then saute some pine nuts in it (I started this process later than I'd intended, just after adding the pasta to the boiling water, and oh my word, butter has never taken so long to melt over medium heat) before getting started with the squash. The radicchio goes in at the last minute, just to wilt a bit.

The original recipe, from the January 2009 issue of Gourmet, calls for six whole tablespoons of fat, in the form of butter and olive oil. You are going to be tempted to cut that down, but I have to tell you, if you are going to brown butter and saute pine nuts in it and then remove the pine nuts (along with, unavoidably, a good bit of the butter) from the pan you are going to need to add some more...something to prevent the squash from sticking. You can try tipping in a bit of water, like I did, and that works okay, but the outer layer of the squash may get a little soggy and melty and form a kind of orange goo that will coat the pasta, once you toss it in. Which is not really a bad result, come to think of it.

The recipe gets largely good reviews on Epicurious.com, but some cooks mentioned that they found the dish rather bland. Sage was suggested by several to kick up the flavor, but while sage is a classic combination with winter squash I wasn't sure how it would pair with the radicchio. I added some garlic instead. I've really been craving garlicky dishes lately. I guess a cloud of garlicky steam just smells like midwinter to me.

I also added a little half-and-half when I tossed the pasta with the vegetables. (And yes, I realize I've just lost all standing to complain about the amount of fat in the original recipe.) I did this mainly because I had some in the refrigerator, but also because I thought it would tone down the bitterness of the radicchio a bit. The cream is a nice addition, but the truth is the radicchio is still fairly bitter--and that's a good thing. It's a fantastic contrast to the starchiness of the pasta and the sweetness of the squash. (But, then again, I like bitter. I am the only person I know who enjoys Campari and soda. If you do too you should tell me--we could form a club, and drink Campari-and-sodas without anyone else asking us for a taste and then making a face. That would be nice.)

The main reason I cooked this recipe was that I wanted to be part of a totally inspiring project called Gourmet, unbound, in which a bunch of food bloggers are keeping the spirit of that magazine alive by cooking from its archives, month by month. But I think this dish will become part of my regular rotation. When I make it next I'll probably fiddle with it a bit, to try to make it a bit less--well, fiddly. In the meantime, though, we are all pretty satisfied.

Pasta with Winter Squash and Radicchio
Adapted from Butternut Squash and Radicchio Papardelle, Gourmet, January 2009

1 1/2 lb winter squash, untrimmed (the original recipe calls for butternut; I used kabocha)
2 Tbsp butter
1/3 C pine nuts
2 large cloves garlic
1/2 lb pasta (original recipe says pappardelle, which I think would be great--due to poor planning I used regular old spaghetti)
1 large head radicchio (mine was about 6 oz.)
1/2 tsp salt
freshly ground black pepper
1/3 C half-and-half
Parmigiano-Reggiano or ricotta salata cheese

Put a pan of water on to boil for the pasta.

Peel and seed the squash. Cut into 1/2-inch cubes. Peel the garlic. Mince it if that's your preference; otherwise just have your garlic press at the ready.

In a large, heavy skillet over medium heat, melt the butter, then continue to cook until it is golden brown, about 2 minutes. Add nuts and cook, stirring, until they are toasty-colored and fragrant, about 2 minutes. With a slotted spoon, remove the nuts and set aside.

Add the squash to the skillet, along with a little bit of water to prevent it from sticking. Add the garlic--either minced or just push it through your press right into the pan. Cook the squash over medium heat, stirring occasionally, and adding a little more water if needed.

When the water boils, put the pasta in to cook. When it is al dente, reserve 1 cup of the cooking water, and drain the pasta.

Meanwhile, as the squash and pasta are cooking, quarter, core, and thinly slice the radicchio. When the squash is just tender (after 8 to 10 minutes), add the radicchio, salt, and pepper to the pan and cook, stirring, until the radicchio is wilted and just tender, about 3 minutes.

Add the cream to the vegetables, then add the drained pasta, and a bit of the pasta water if necessary to moisten. Over low heat, toss the pasta with the vegetables until heated through.

Serve topped with nuts and cheese.

About 4 servings.

a quick nibble

2009-12-30T21:55:00.000-08:00

When I was growing up, we always stayed home on New Year’s Eve. My mom would drape curls of ribbon over the brass chandelier above the kitchen table, all evening long we would watch TV and nibble on crackers and dips out of a silver and crystal lazy susan that my parents must have received as a wedding present back in the sixties. I remember lots of Triscuits and Wheat Thins, and a clam dip for my dad, and a so-called “tuna pate,” some amalgam of canned tuna, cream cheese, and Worcestershire sauce that surely wouldn’t pass culinary muster today but was my absolute favorite then.

This all sounds—and is—hopelessly dorky, but my parents were pretty strict, especially when it came to mealtimes, so having nibbles instead of dinner always seemed incredibly festive and, from my childhood perspective, sophisticated.

So I'm pretty excited that this is what we'll be doing this New Year's Eve. Monkey's aunt and uncle and cousin will come over in the afternoon and we won't worry about a proper dinner, we'll just nibble on a bunch of tasty little appetizers. Sure, the party will end at 7:30 or when the girls turn into pumpkins--whichever comes first--but it's a lot better than nothing (and these days, nothing is pretty much the alternative).

Here's one of the dishes that I plan to contribute to our gathering. It doesn’t have much to do with seasonal or local fare, but I figured I’d share it because it’s dead easy—basically just goat cheese with some chipotle mashed in--and it always gets raves.

I love the flavor of chipotle chilies, but every time I open a can of chipotles en adobo they either get moldy in the fridge or freezer-burn in the freezer. I’ve recently discovered that chipotle powder plus a little tomato paste (from a tube, which lasts forever in the fridge) is a good substitute. To give the dip a bit of texture, this time I added a few chopped piquillo peppers.

The quantities in the recipe below are approximate—just add a glop of this and a squirt of that and stir it together until you’ve reached a good taste and consistency.

Chipotle-Chevre Dip or Spread

This recipe will be even easier if you remember to leave the chevre out to soften a bit before you mix everything together.

1 5-oz log chevre
1/4-1/2 tsp chipotle powder
1 tsp tomato paste
2 Tbsp sour cream or crème fraiche (I think yogurt would work too--basically, you just need something creamy to mix in and make the cheese a little more spreadable)
2 or 3 roasted piquillo peppers, finely chopped

Combine all ingredients and mix thoroughly. That's it.

sunday morning breakfast links: 12/27/09

2009-12-26T15:46:00.000-08:00

Catching up on some food-blog reading I found that Clotilde of Chocolate and Zucchini had answered my plea for awesome spaghetti squash recipes before I even uttered it--here's her recipe for a spaghetti squash gratin, embedded in a post that includes a half-dozen other mouthwatering suggestions. I'll be trying at least one and probably several of these very soon.

From the inimitable (believe me, I've tried) New York Times science writer Natalie Angier, an article arguing that vegans aren't exempt from the ethical dilemmas involved in killing other living things for food. Okay, so her piece is tangential at best to the project of home cooking, but it's a fascinating romp (really!) through the biology of plant defense and you should click over and read it and marvel at the pageant of life on our planet.

While we're geeking out, another Times science piece, reporting on the excavation of an 800,000-year-old hominid dwelling that suggests we had kitchens even before we were fully human.

From the American Prospect archives, a kind of flip side of the Hanna Rosin piece I linked to last week: Noy Thrupkaew argues that there's a kind of unarticulated anti-feminist undercurrent to some of the recent calls to revive the art of home cookery. I found myself nodding right along with this piece too.

got dinosaur (kale)?

2009-12-23T10:14:00.000-08:00

In its original form this recipe (from the Zuni Café Cookbook via Orangette) is a kind of simple Italian peasant supper—garlic-rubbed toast topped with kale, a fried egg, and maybe some Parmesan shavings and torn prosciutto. That sounds fantastic, and I can’t remember why I decided to take the recipe in an Asian direction—maybe I had an open package of soba noodles that I wanted to use up?—but this way is fantastic too and so I’ve stuck with it.

Both versions have in common a long simmer of kale in just enough liquid to cover (Orangette recommends homemade chicken broth, but I’ve always used water and the final dish is plenty flavorful). The greens end up—well, the best way I can think of to describe them is pillowy: soft and yielding, with the dimples in the leaves holding on to fat drops of the savory cooking liquid.

What I do next is spoon the boiled kale over soba noodles that have been dressed in a quick sauce, and slide a fried egg over the top. You end up with the bright-yellow yolk running out into a steaming, spicy broth, and oh my—it’s heavenly, and just perfect for a cold winter’s night.

Do make sure that you fry the eggs in sesame oil. Last time I made this I used olive oil, and the dish as a whole didn’t seem as stellar as I recalled. Then the next day I remembered to use sesame oil to fry up an egg to eat with some of the leftovers, and Oh. Yes. Somehow the sesame flavor mellows the slight bitterness of the soba noodles and it all comes together.

Boiled Kale with Fried Egg and Soba Noodles

Dinosaur kale is also known as Tuscan kale, cavolo nero, or lacinato kale—but let’s stick with “dinosaur” in hopes we might fool some of the little ones into eating it.

A large bunch of dinosaur kale
3 Tbsp olive oil
1 medium yellow onion
1 tsp Sriracha, or to taste
2 large garlic cloves
3 cups water or broth
Salt to taste

8 oz soba noodles
3 tsp kecap manis (or you could use a combination of soy sauce and molasses or maple syrup)
1 1/2 Tbsp rice vinegar
A pinch of ground ginger

Sesame oil
Eggs
Black sesame seeds

First, cut up the vegetables. Dice the onion, and thinly slice the garlic. Cut the tough ribs out of the center of the kale leaves (nope, you haven’t washed them yet, we’re going to do a neat trick in a minute or two), and slice the leaves crosswise around 1/2 to 1 inch thick.

In a large saucepan, heat the olive oil over medium-low heat. Add the onion and cook, stirring occasionally, until it starts to go translucent. In between stirring the onions, put the cut up kale into the basket of a salad spinner. Fill the bowl of the salad spinner with cold water and dunk the basket in and swish it around to loosen the dirt. Let it sit for a minute so that the dirt has time to settle, then lift the basket back up out of the bowl. Pour out the water and repeat the fill-swish-sit-drain process, then spin the kale leaves dry.

Add the kale, garlic, and Sriracha to the onions and toss until the kale is thoroughly wilted. Now add the water or stock, bring it to a boil, and then cover the saucepan and turn the heat down to a simmer.

You'll simmer the kale for about 30 minutes. Okay, so you have ten minutes or so before you need to start thinking about the soba noodles. This would be a good time to do a few dishes, or build a big tower of blocks with a toddler, if you happen to have one on hand.

After about ten minutes put a pan of water on to boil for the noodles (I usually just use a small saucepan here, so that affects how long the water takes to boil). You can do some more dishes or build another tower while you wait. Then put the noodles in the water, and make the sauce: in a small bowl, stir together the kecap manis, rice vinegar, and ginger.

Now start working on the eggs. One for each person is probably sufficient. Heat the sesame oil in a nonstick sauté pan and then crack the eggs in. When the whites start to set up a bit sprinkle a pinch or two of black sesame seeds over the top of the eggs (this is probably not essential, but it’s very pretty).

When the noodles are done drain them, return them to the pan, and toss them with the sauce. Keep an eye on the eggs so that they don’t overcook. (This is a tricky watchful part and I’m sorry but there’s just no way around it.) Now check the kale—it should be nice and tender by now. Add salt to taste, and don’t be shy—I use about a teaspoon full.

To serve, place a big tangle of soba noodles in the bottom of a bowl, top with some of the kale and a little bit of its cooking liquid, and finally a fried egg.

Makes 4 to 5 servings.

sunday morning breakfast links

2009-12-19T17:18:00.000-08:00

From the angry chicken archives, a “recipe cheat sheet:” a baker’s dozen essential recipes crammed onto one sheet of paper for posting on the fridge. Once I get to the point where I don’t need recipes so much as mnemonics I’m totally making one of these—or maybe one for each season.

At DoubleX, Hanna Rosin has a piece (with a ridiculous/over-hyped headline, but you already knew that) about the paradox of feminists resenting husbands who cook. The thing is, I’ve kind of felt this way from time to time, right down to being agog at the absurdity of my own feelings. I think this happens because when takeout and/or convenience food is an option, cooking becomes less about mere drudgery and more about identity. Or, more to the point, it’s the most interesting and creative task one can get “credit” for as contributing to the running of the household. I mean, no one fights for the privilege of cleaning the bathroom. (Or maybe you do? In which case, Marry me!)

I’m not likely to be dining out in New York anytime soon, but I still read the New Yorker’s Tables for Two column every week. I love the gem-like quality of reviews that brief, the way so much information and imagery are packed into such a small space, so that the best reviews almost become prose poems. Anyway, the December 7 review, of The Vanderbilt in Brooklyn, contains a description of a dish of “roasted Brussels sprouts, dressed with sriracha, lime, and honey, each bite a perfect combination of sweet, spicy, and tart.” YES. I must make this.

now that's what i'm talking about

2009-12-11T07:12:00.000-08:00

Sometimes when I say I don't have the energy to cook what I really mean is that I don't have the energy to figure out how to make a recipe. Will I be surprised by a step that involves letting something soak or chill or simmer for two hours? Will I end up chopping vegetables into tiny dice until 8:30 pm? That's a huge part of the appeal of having an arsenal of tried-and-true favorites. Because once I've made a dish several times, I know how long it takes to make. And I can figure out little multi-tasking tricks to make it happen in the most efficient way. Think of it as Old World grandmother cooking--guided by muscle memory as much as by recipe.

So as I type up the recipes that I'll share for this project, I'm going to try to channel that Old World grandmother, and let you in on the little tricks that I've found to make a recipe come together as smoothly and quickly as possible. My ingredient list won't call for a chopped onion--instead, I'll just ask for an onion, and then I'll tell you when I chop it. That might seem silly, or overly prescriptive--and you might find your own, better tricks. But knowing that kind of detail makes a big difference in actually getting me into the kitchen. So I'll try to pass it along to you.

There are three reasons I'm starting off with the recipe below. First, I'm insanely proud of it--I made it up all on my own a while back, in a fit of farmers market inspiration. Second, in Seattle at least locally raised fennel and cauliflower are available just about year-round, so this is a dish we can enjoy pretty much anytime.

Third, it's exactly the sort of recipe that I'm looking for more of: simple ingredients, simple preparation, and crave-worthy results. You hack up some fennel and cauliflower, braise them until they're meltingly tender and mellow in flavor, and then toss them with sturdy pasta and some crumbles of sharp feta cheese. A sprinkle of zatar, a Middle Eastern spice blend featuring wild thyme, sesame seeds, and sumac, ties it all together. (Really fresh, flavorful zatar is key here. I buy mine from World Spice Merchants near Pike Place Market.)

In fact, it's more than a recipe--in our house it's almost become a recipe template. You can vary the spices or the vegetables (just about anything sturdy enough to stand up to a braise would do, I think--carrots, turnips, shallots, and so on), or substitute chevre for the feta, or even add meat if you are carnivorously inclined. Just chop the vegetables while the water heats, cook the vegetables while the pasta boils, and then toss everything together at the end. Easy.

Pasta with Braised Fennel and Cauliflower

If you can find it, orange cauliflower is gorgeous in this dish.

1 Tbs olive oil
1 Tbs butter
1/2 of a large onion
3 large cloves garlic
1 large bulb fennel
1 small head cauliflower
1/2 tsp salt, or to taste
2 tsp zatar
6 oz feta cheese
8 oz penne or other short, stocky pasta

Put a pan of water on to boil for the pasta.

While you wait for it to boil, slice up the onion into quarter-rings. Peel the garlic and cut the cloves into thin slices. Quarter the fennel bulb and cut each piece into 1/4-inch slices. Cut or break the cauliflower into small florets.

Now heat the butter and olive oil together in a large saucepan over medium heat. Add the onion and garlic, and saute for a few minutes until the onion starts to get translucent. Add the fennel and cauliflower and stir it up. Then add the salt (don't go overboard; remember that the feta cheese you'll add later is pretty salty) and zatar, and stir again so that everything is nicely mixed together. Turn down the heat a bit, cover the saucepan, and let the vegetables do their braising thing. You might want to check them once or twice as they cook just in case they need a quick stir or a smidge of water to prevent them from sticking.

When the water boils, add the pasta. While the pasta cooks, crumble up the feta cheese. Cook the pasta until it is al dente and drain. Now check the vegetables--with any luck, they should be getting all tender and silky right about the time the pasta is done. Return the pasta to the cooking pot, dump in the vegetables and cheese, and toss to combine. You can sprinkle a little extra zatar over each serving if you like.

Makes about 4 servings.

so much for keeping it real

2009-12-07T18:45:00.000-08:00

Well that last experiment--way back in January, was it?--went nowhere. And yet--blog, I can't quite quit you.

In recent weeks I've been thinking a lot about writing in this space again, but the truth is, feeding a two-year-old isn't always that much fun to write about. At least not my two-year-old. My monkey is a child who can spend two days mooning about how she "loooooves pizza," but, confronted with an actual piece of pizza, declares, "You don't want it." (This is also a child who hasn't quite got her personal pronouns straight.) And a child who will absolutely devour a burrito from Taco Bell (yes, Taco Bell--there, I said it), but greets a burrito made at home with a sniff and "You don't like the beans."

Very well then. Let her eat Kraft dinner.

Or carpet lint. Or some invisible nourishment drawn from the many kinds of pretend food that she mimes eating with great gusto. Whatever it is that sustains her. Because with a cute little roll of chub above each knee and extensive vocabulary and climbing abilities, she must be doing reasonably okay, right? Give her a multivitamin and let's call it even.

So I still want to write about what she likes to eat, and what we cook together (pumpkin waffles, apple muffins), but I also have a project of my own in mind. Lately when I cook for the grownups in the house I feel caught between two competing objectives. One is simply to cook--to make something with my own hands, that is, rather than heating up yet another frozen pizza--in a way that's compatible with the limited amount of time and energy I have on hand. (As I typed that last sentence it occurred to me that I've been writing this post in the evening hour that I might otherwise spend cooking--I can do this instead because we're having leftover takeout for dinner. Nothing like a little irony to whet the appetite.) And the other is to cook with seasonal ingredients--because, well, yes, I'm a stereotypical earnest coastal urbanite, but also because that's really what I like to eat best.

The first goal lends itself to the kind of weekly menu rotation that many of us grew up with--tacos on Monday, lasagna on Tuesday, and so on. The second goal lends itself to hours spent poring over the latest farmers' market cookbook and fussing over sublime preparations of lovingly hand-raised produce. What I need is some combination of the two--a kind of loose seasonal menu rotation. So I want to try to master a few fantastic recipes for a variety of seasonal vegetables--recipes that are reasonably quick, uncomplicated, and delicious enough to eat every couple of weeks.

Basically, in other words, I'm looking for some really freaking awesome things to do with spaghetti squash. Is anybody with me?

i was much too hungry to take pictures

2009-01-13T21:27:00.000-08:00

January 5: Baked potatoes with the vegetarian works: cheese, broccoli, sour cream, sauteed mushrooms. I made an extra one for Monkey to have the next day; she enjoyed flinging it around.

January 6: Weird dish of pasta baked with stuff that was threatening to go bad in the refrigerator: tomato and roasted red pepper soup from Trader Joe's (we did not really enjoy this as soup), about a third of a container each of cottage cheese and ricotta cheese, shredded mozarella on top. I called it "weird" but in fact my husband had seconds and Monkey absolutely loved it. I think she's sick of macaroni and cheese but she ate several good meals of this.

January 7: Takeout from our neighborhood Ethiopian place: a vegetarian combo and two veggie sambusas. When I was picking up our food I ran into one of the dads from my parents' group doing the same thing. It's an unstoppable force.

January 8: Leftover Ethiopian takeout, supplemented with some homemade red lentil and carrot wot. I think that the amount of food included in a vegetarian combo at an Ethiopian restaurant could serve as a leading economic indicator: we used to be able to get two meals out of this takeout, but in the last few months I swear the portion has gotten smaller.

Also, our favorite (stunningly gorgeous, down-to-earth, and incredibly kind) waitress doesn't seem to work at the restaurant anymore. Truly, the Good Old Days are over.

January 9: My husband convinces me to order pizza. He does not have to try very hard.

January 10: Celery and shallots (yes, really--we're cleaning out the refrigerator, here) baked with a little milk (it was supposed to be heavy cream, but the cream had developed a smell that was just very wrong) and Parmesan cheese. Potatoes roasted with garlic and herbs. In my imagination this meal was very French, you know? But in reality I was kind of underwhelmed. I blame the lack of heavy cream.

Also, it was not enough food. So later we had some bread (oh yes, I am still baking bread almost every day, because I am crazy) and cheese, and chocolate leftover from our Christmas stockings.

day by day, by day, by day...

2009-01-05T12:43:00.000-08:00

The title of this post is a tribute to my sister, who recently managed to turn a dedication in a second-hand book into a "Meet the Parents" reference. If that's not talent, I don't know what is.

The book in question (a Christmas present from her to me) is a copy of The Kitchen Diaries, by Nigel Slater, and it's fantastic. It's full of simple, wholesome, seasonal recipes, of course, beautifully described and lushly photographed--everything you'd expect from contemporary food writing. But what I really appreciate about the book is its honesty. Slater intersperses his original recipes with occasional descriptions of takeout dinners, an ode to the joys of frozen fish sticks, and a confession that some days he just can't be arsed (his word, of course) to cook.

Here, for example, is his entry from March 3:

In my smug haze of good housekeeping from yesterday's baking session, not to mention my arch disdain for factory-produced foods, I fail to notice there is bugger all to eat in the house. At seven thirty I dash to the corner shop, returning with a can of baked beans, a bag of frozen fries and some beers.

That sounds familiar.

The book got me thinking about food blogs--diaries of another sort--and how heavily curated they often are. Nobody talks about the night they just gave up and ordered pizza, or the bunches of Swiss chard that they intended to make into something Alice Waters-worthy but kept putting off until the greens went slimy in the back of the crisper drawer.

By "they," of course, I mean "me." So I thought it would be an interesting experiment to catalog our dinners for the month of January. I won't post every day (obv.!) but I will confess what we ate--what we actually ate, not what I intended to cook, and would have if I were a better person--each day. Hopefully this will shame me into (1) cooking; (2) blogging.

I suppose I could write about Monkey's dinners, as well, but truth be told I don't think it would be very interesting. At 17 months she eats little other than boxed macaroni and cheese (to my deep chagrin) and yogurt with lingonberry jam (to my everlasting delight), when she eats anything much at all. I doubt my blogging would shame her into expanding her repetoire--though I suppose it might help inspire me to make more of an effort with her food.

January 1: Dinner at the home of Monkey's aunt, uncle, and cousin. My sister-in-law, who supposedly does not cook, made pumpkin risotto and a kale and beet salad, with pumpkin pie for dessert. Monkey loved the risotto, and this, combined with the fact that we managed to get through the evening without her investigating the fire in the fireplace OR pulling the glass-ornament-bedecked Christmas tree down on top of her, made me wonder if she might be turning just a teeny bit civilized.

January 2: Mushroom and barley pie with mushroom gravy, leftover from our belated Christmas celebration (we were sick on the 25th, not to mention snowed in)a few days ago .

January 3: Fresh corn cakes for me, barbecued field roast sandwich for the Mr., and fries filched from Daddy's plate for Monkey--we stopped at the Elysian Brewpub after a visit to the Frye Art Museum. Occasionally we like to pretend to be hip urban parents, but we can only keep up the charade for a couple of hours at a time.

January 4: The year's first cooking. Red lentil and sweet potato soup, a variation on the first recipe in The Kitchen Diaries (I notice that Nigel managed to hit his stride right on the 1st while I didn't manage to cook anything until three days later--well, he is a professional after all).

We ate the soup with what seems like the year's umpteenth baking--a loaf of no-knead bread with 3/4 teaspoon of smoked paprika and some olives leftover from our New Year's Eve nibbles chopped up and stirred into the dough. Yes, I'm the last person in the world to jump on the no-knead bread bandwagon, but now I've officially jumped. It's fantastic stuff (I use the speedy version of the recipe--the original version is a giant pain in the ass, for bread that is not much superior), but good grief, I can't keep up. It feels like I am baking bread every day! There are worse things I suppose.

Monkey, who went to bed before the soup was ready, was offered macaroni and cheese and some sauteed mushrooms, but preferred to dine on air and a piece or two of carpet lint instead.

Red Lentil and Sweet Potato Soup
Adapted from Nigel Slater. The original version of the recipe called for pumpkin, but sweet potatoes were what I had on hand. I also simplified the technique a little bit.

For the soup:
1 small onion, peeled and chopped
2 cloves garlic, peeled and crushed
Fresh ginger (Slater specifies "a walnut-sized knob." I don't know what that means. My soup ended up pretty ginger-y.)
1 C plus 2 T split red lentils
1 1/4 tsp ground turmeric
1 1/4 tsp chili powder
2 medium sweet potatoes, peeled and chopped

For the onion topping:
2 medium onions
2 T olive oil
1/4 tsp cayenne pepper
2 cloves garlic, peeled and thinly sliced

Put the onion and garlic in a medium saucepan. Peel the ginger, cut it into thin shreds, and add it to the pan. Add the lentils and 6 cups of water. Bring to a boil, then turn down the heat to a simmer. Add the turmeric, chili powder, and sweet potatoes, along with some salt. Simmer, covered, for about 20 minutes or until everything is very tender.

While the soup is cooking, make the onion topping. Peel the onions and cut into thin rings. Cook them in oil in a skillet until they begin to color. Add the cayenne and garlic, and continue to cook until the onions are deeply caramelized.

Remove the lid from the soup and cook it down a bit (you can do this, per Slater's instructions by "turn[ing] up the heat, boiling hard for five minutes," or you can do it more lackadaisically, like I did). Remove from the heat and puree in small batches in a blender, pouring the pureed soup into a bowl. Check for seasoning, and serve with a spoonful of the onions on top.

it's too bad we have plenty of diapers

2008-07-08T15:33:00.000-07:00

That is the conclusion my husband and I came to last night, as we sat in the living room after dinner, watching a baseball game online and trading commentary that was, as usual, ever-so-much snappier than that of the actual announcers.

Our reasoning went something like this: He was craving some dessert, preferably pastry. An almond-and-chocolate bear claw from Whole Foods, in fact. Which we always buy a pair of (cue Newman from Seinfeld) when we go there to buy diapers. Thus, especially since I now wanted a pastry too, it was a shame there was no diaper run imminent.

We hatched all kinds of crazy schemes, starting with driving all the way to Whole Foods right then just for pastries and winding up with quitting our jobs and starting a dessert delivery service ("Do you think people would order takeout dessert?" he said. Hello! Raise your hand if you're not currently fantasizing about obscure flavors of small-batch ice cream and brownies knocking at your door.) Then I said, "Well, I could make a pastry."

For about a minute that seemed like the craziest idea of all. But then I went into the kitchen and fired up the oven. I rummaged through the cupboards and chopped walnuts and dark chocolate and threw shredded coconut around willy-nilly. I rolled out the last sheet of puff pastry from the freezer and, in a drift of flour, brushed it with butter, sugar, and spices and folded it into something like a messy braid.

People, this was so much fun. It was the antidote to my Memorial Day dessert. It was possibly the purest, most carefree enjoyment I have had in the kitchen in the past year. Nobody's empty stomach was waiting for the results of my efforts, and there was no recipe to measure up to. It was just cooking for the sheer creative pleasure of it.

And that's a good note on which to return to this blog. We were out of town for part of last month, and then I felt like I'd fallen way behind, and feeling behind is a recipe for procrastination. I've actually started a post a couple of times since we got back, but each time it felt like a burden and went unfinished. This is supposed to be fun, right?

Anyway, we stayed up way too late (until 10:05!) waiting for the pastry to come out of the oven, and the result was not at all subtle or refined, but I think it was worth it.

Dark Chocolate-Walnut Pastry Braid

3 T butter

2 T brown sugar

1/2 tsp ground cardamom

1/4 tsp ground cinnamon

1/3 C walnut halves, chopped

2 oz. dark chocolate, finely slivered

1/4 C shredded coconut

1 sheet puff pastry, thawed

Preheat oven to 400 F. Melt the butter and sugar together in a small saucepan, and stir in the spices. In a small bowl, mix the walnuts, chocolate, and coconut together.

On a floured work surface, roll the puff pastry into a rectangle about...um, 14 by 10 inches, I guess?...and transfer it to a lightly greased baking sheet. Pour all but a teaspoon or two of the melted butter mixture onto the pastry, along the long axis in the center third of the dough. Put the walnut-chocolate-coconut mixture on top of that.

Then use a table knife to make about 7 or 8 angled horizontal cuts to make a sort of "fringe" on each of the outer thirds of the pastry. Lap the fringes toward the center to create a braided effect. It helps if you've had a glass or so of wine. Drizzle the remaining butter mixture over the top of the braid.

Bake at 400 F until you absolutely cannot stand waiting any longer, or about 20-25 minutes.

getting cultured

2008-05-31T20:30:00.000-07:00

I mentioned in a comment on a previous post that yogurt is one of Monkey's favorite foods. She eats so much yogurt, in fact, that I think almost any food is starting to taste better to her with a little yogurt stirred in. She has it with fruit and oatmeal for breakfast, and more often than not with vegetables and rice or multigrain cereal for lunch and dinner.

For a while I didn't even realize that I was making all her meals on essentially the same template. But it's more or less how we eat--a vegetable, a grain, and a little dollop of dairy just seems like a balanced meal to me. It's funny to realize how early and how unconsciously one transmits one's food culture to a baby.

The Mr. and I have been eating a lot of yogurt lately, too--over carrots for dinner, on top of muesli for breakfast, in a brunch dish I haven't even told you about yet, and in the dish of sauteed zucchini and chickpeas pictured above.

And we're not alone. The New York Times food section recently published a whole feature on yogurt. Over at 101 cookbooks, Heidi marinated tofu in yogurt and spices (we tried out that recipe, in fact, and it was tasty but also convinced me once and for all that even vegetarians need a grill); Luisa of The Wednesday Chef spooned it over fish and then rubbed it onto chicken. I don't know what's behind this sudden interest in yogurt from all quarters. Maybe that combination of heartiness and healthfulness makes a perfect spring tonic.

Zucchini and Chickpeas in Creamy Tahini Sauce

Adapted from kardemumma

1/4 C plain yogurt
2 T tahini
1 medium clove garlic, minced fine (next time I’ll use 2)
Salt
Ground black pepper
1 T olive oil
2 small zucchini (I’d use 3 next time, as a matter of fact)
1 15-oz can chickpeas, drained
A wedge of fresh lemon

Combine the first five ingredients in a bowl and stir to combine. If possible, put this in the refrigerator for an hour or so to let the flavors blend.

Slice the zucchini and saute in olive oil until the slices have a nice color (that’s kardemumma blogger Viktoria’s wording; isn’t it nice?). Add the chickpeas and heat through. Squeeze the lemon juice over the top.

Transfer the zucchini and chickpeas to a serving bowl, add the yogurt-tahini mixture, and stir to coat the zucchini and chickpeas with the dressing. Serve immediately.

Makes 2 or 3 servings.

*****

A crunchy carrot salad makes a nice companion for the creamy zucchini. The recipe below is adapted from The Ethnic Paris Cookbook, which, despite its unfortunate title, is an excellent book. In addition to recipes it contains reviews of restaurants, food shops, and markets, making it one in a long and growing list of food-related things that make me want to visit Paris again.

Carrot Salad with Fresh Citrus Juice

3 carrots, peeled (that is what the original recipe called for but I think they must have been working with some honkin' big carrots--next time I'll use more, maybe as many as 6)
Juice of 1/2 of a red grapefruit or 1 orange
1 T sugar
1/4 tsp ground cinnamon
1/8 tsp ground cumin
2 T toasted pine nuts

Combine the first five ingredients in a bowl and stir together. Sprinkle the pine nuts on top.

Makes 2 servings.

not really a day off

2008-05-28T08:59:00.001-07:00

But we did manage to capture a deceptively restful-looking picture or two.

For a moment, though, when my brother-in-law announced "I'll take some more of that dessert please," as four of us sat around in the backyard alternately eating a Memorial Day picnic dinner and wrangling Monkey and her two-year-old cousin, I thought that this apple-ginger galette might disappear without any record of its existence at all.

And that would have been a shame, because this was a possibly miraculous dessert, that resisted numerous opportunities for ruin.

I had started out intending to make a Rhubarb Ginger Galette from Simply Recipes, which my friend x. had recommended and my friend T. had also given the thumbs-up. Except I planned to make mine with apples, because that's what we had on hand. (So much for seasonal cooking, right? Well, in my defense, or perhaps just the opposite, the apples were in season when I bought them.) So, while the Mr. cleaned up the backyard in preparation for the picnic, I set up the playpen in the kitchen and settled Monkey in with some toys and a favorite book or two. By the time I'd sliced the apples she was hungry for lunch, so I left them to soften slowly on the stove while I fed her. Then she was ready for a nap, during which I thought I'd make the pastry for the galette.

Except that after putting Monkey down in her crib I realized I was exhausted. So I folded a couple loads of laundry and then thought I'd lie down for just a few minutes. Which stretched into, well, quite a while.

Fortunately, I happened to have a library copy of Deborah Madison's Local Flavors handy, and paged through it while I was lying down. (Because what's more relaxing than lying down? Lying down and looking through a cookbook, that's what.) In that book is a recipe for a "Rustic Tart of Quinces, Apples, and Pears" made with puff pastry. And we happened to have some puff pastry in the freezer leftover from dinner a few days before:

(Asparagus and Gruyere Tart from Under the High Chair)

This was quite a happy coincidence--I'd never bought or cooked with puff pastry before last week. Brilliant, I figured, worst case scenario I'll just use puff pastry instead of a homemade crust.

Which, of course, is exactly what came to pass, because after naptime the Mr. needed to make the rest of our picnic dinner, and somebody needed to mind Monkey, who these days not only army-crawls alarmingly fast, wants to pull up on any and every vertical surface, and generally thinks that sitting around looking at books is for chumps, but also, this day, was having a particularly rough time of it. We think she's working on some teeth. At least eight of them, I should hope, for all the misery they seem to be causing her.

So to be honest, I'm not quite sure how long I ended up leaving the galette in the oven, because by the time I got it ready to bake it was time for Monkey's dinner, and I had to keep popping into the kitchen to check on the pastry in between spooning bites of carrot and yogurt into her mouth. (Yes, that's right, I sauteed the apples while feeding Monkey lunch and baked the galette while feeding her dinner. People, it took me all afternoon to make this dessert! But you should try it--it's really easy, I swear!)

I was multitasking quite impressively at this point, because along with baking dessert and feeding Monkey dinner, I was also doing a little silent fuming, along the lines of why can't I get just five uninterrupted minutes to do something in the kitchen, etc., etc. And that brings me to the rather obvious point that there is no such thing as a three-day weekend, or even really a day off, when you have an infant in the house.

I'd like to say that sitting on the picnic blanket later on and feeding Monkey little bites of apple from the pastry--her first taste of dessert--made it all worthwhile. And it did, of course, but one of the most difficult parts of parenting for me is the way that there's just not enough time for everything. There's the housework and the paid work and the childminding, and when that's done one needs to take care of oneself, and what's left over for creative work is pretty close to nil. So each time I go into the kitchen lately I find that I have to revise my plans and pare down my expectations, sometimes more than once. And to me it seems especially difficult when that happens in relation to cooking, which is not only self-expression but also a way of showing care for loved ones.

So it was nice, after Monkey went to bed for the night, to have a few minutes to check in with the Mr. and realize that he is struggling with some of the same thoughts (a point I hope I can bring myself to remember the next time I am tempted to engage in some silent fuming). And nice, then, to have a few minutes to myself and write up the notes for this recipe.

Apple-Ginger Galette

Sort-of adapted/melded from Simply Recipes and Local Flavors, with thanks to Aimee of Under the High Chair for teaching me how to use puff pastry.

3 apples
2 T + 1 tsp butter, divided
2 T sugar
1/4 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp ground ginger
1 sheet (about 7 oz.) frozen puff pastry
1 T finely chopped candied ginger
1 oz (or so) sharp cheddar, grated
Flour for work surface

Peel, core, and slice the apples. Melt 2 T of the butter in a large skillet and saute the apples over low heat until they soften a bit. Add the sugar, cinnamon, and ground ginger, and continue to cook over low heat until the apples are soft and syrupy. Remove from heat and let cool. Meanwhile, take the puff pastry out to thaw.

Preheat the oven to 400 F. Stir the candied ginger and shredded cheese into the cooled apples. On a floured work surface, roll the puff pastry into a square about 12 inches on a side. Don't worry if it's messy and uneven; after all, you're making a galette precisely because you don't have time or don't want to worry about such things. Carefully fold the pastry in quarters, transfer to a lightly greased baking sheet, and unfold. Spoon the apple mixture into the center of the puff pastry. Pull the corners of the pastry toward the center (they won't touch).

Melt the remaining 1 tsp butter in the skillet in which you cooked the apples. With a pastry brush, snag the little bits of left-behind spices and mix them into the butter, then brush the butter over the top of the galette.

Bake the galette at 400 F for 15 minutes, then reduce the heat to 375 and bake for about 30 minutes more, until the pastry is puffy and golden-brown.

Serves 6

what to do with leftover baby food, part 1

2008-05-10T10:37:00.000-07:00

Lately we've gotten into a pretty good routine with making baby food here at home, but making sure Monkey has something to eat if we're going to be out and about for one of her mealtimes is a different story. There is the mixing up her food, the storing it (we have a set of nice little glass bowls with ill-fitting plastic lids that are just bound to result in a mess one of these days), the figuring out how to refrigerate it, and so on. Last weekend we went out to brunch and it took us an hour to get out the door.

So I thought it might be useful to have a few jars of purchased baby food on hand to throw into a bag for impromptu outings, and last time I was at the grocery store I stocked up. We were a bit late getting home, so I figured, what the heck, let's crack one of these puppies open just to test it out and make sure Monkey likes it.

She did not. She ate all of three bites out of a jar of carrots before turning away in disgust.

I am secretly pleased about this, but even more secretly a little bummed out.

Though to be honest, I thought the carrots were kind of watery and tasteless, myself.

Of course, since I had been so confident that Monkey would eat them (she loves carrots! and babies are reputed to prefer the smooth bliss of jarred food to lumpy old homemade), I fed her straight from the jar, and now I was stuck with a nearly full jar of baby food that nobody much liked and that couldn't be fed to the baby at a later meal. So that's how my lunch yesterday came about:

I apologize for the ugly picture, but that's what happens when a girl tries to sneak off for a hurried assignation with the camera in the middle of the workday.

First, I made a quesadilla with shredded pepper jack cheese and spread a tablespoon or two of the carrot puree on one side of the tortilla before closing it up. That was pretty tasty, and the flavor of the carrots improved with a little heat.

But there were still some carrots left in the jar after I folded up my quesadilla, so I dumped them into the last little bit of leftover chili that I planned to have on the side. (I suppose it's a little odd to post a chili recipe in mid-May, when the rest of the food blogosphere is kvelling over ramps, asparagus, and strawberries. But my neighborhood farmers' market doesn't open until (sob!) early June, so I was trying to use up what was in the pantry. Plus, here in Seattle we'll probably be getting little pockets of chili weather for the next month or so anyway.)

I'd invented the chili on the fly a couple of nights before and been pretty happy with it, but it's possible that the carrots make it even better. They give the dish a creaminess that's unexpected in a chili but not unwelcome. And they thicken it up a bit, too--adding some vegetable puree might be a good last-minute trick for thickening a too-watery soup or stew, if you don't have time to reduce it by simmering. (Similar, it now occurs to me, to the technique of pureeing a portion of a soup and then adding it back to the pan.)

Either of the recipes below would work pretty well with another orange vegetable--winter squash, sweet potatoes--in place of the carrots.

I've heard several parents say that their babies suddenly stopped wanting pureed food, leaving them stuck with a freezer (or a cupboard) full of baby food, so I think this post will be the first in an ongoing series about what to do when you're in that fix.

Carrot Quesadillas

For each quesadilla:
1 large (burrito-size) flour tortilla
about 1 oz. cheese (pepper jack is nice), shredded
1-2 Tbsp pureed carrots

You know how to cook a quesadilla, right? And I won't insult you by giving you permission to add other ingredients if you want--coz you know you can.

Lentil and Sweet Potato Chili (with Pureed Carrot Variation)

1 onion, chopped
6 smallish cloves garlic, minced
2 Tbsp olive oil
1 28-oz can diced tomatoes
1 C brown lentils, washed and picked over
1 Tbsp mild chile molido
1/2 tsp cumin
1/2 tsp oregano
1/8 tsp cayenne pepper
1/2 tsp salt
Water (or stock)
1 roasted red pepper, diced
1 large sweet potato, peeled and diced
1/2 C (or more?) pureed carrot (optional)

Saute the onion and garlic in olive oil until they are soft and just beginning to color. Stir in the tomatoes (with their juices), lentils, spices, and salt. Add some water--exactly how much depends on how thick you like your chili, but make sure that it is at least enough to cover the lentils. Cook on low heat, covered, until the lentils are soft. (The Joy of Cooking says brown lentils take 20 to 30 minutes to cook, but mine were awfully old and wizened, and required at least twice that amount of time. Since brown lentils retain their shape when cooked, you don't need to worry much about overcooking them.) Add the diced pepper and sweet potato, and simmer until the sweet potato is cooked, about 20 minutes more. Stir in the pureed carrot, if using, and heat through. This is good topped with shredded pepper jack to serve.

Makes 4 to 6 servings.

101 uses for dried fruit puree

2008-05-08T09:55:00.000-07:00

Well, maybe not quite 101, but I promised some more ideas about how to use the puree of apricot, prune, and raisin that sweetens the muesli recipes I recently posted, so here goes.

Before we get started, I wanted to say again that this puree was inspired by a similar one that was part of the Bircher Muesli recipe from delicious:days. I think I mentioned that in the text of my previous post but forgot to give the nod when I typed up the recipe.

And on a different introductory note: yes, I do realize that dried fruit puree looks like poop. Let me tell you, my husband was a little alarmed the first time he saw an ice-cube tray full of it sitting in our freezer. (Freezer contents in houses I have previously lived in have included a dead storm petrel and several tupperware containers full of assorted insects, so I guess he had reason to be concerned.) And now that we have broached the subject of poop, I will say that ever since Monkey started eating a spoonful of this stuff with breakfast every day, she has not had any trouble in that department. So if you (or more precisely, I hope, your baby) are feeling the effects of too much rice cereal, I highly recommend dried fruit puree as a tasty cure. (There, yes, I just blogged about my kid's poop. But I have managed to avoid the subject for nearly four months, so really, I think you should consider yourself lucky.)

Anyway, on to topics of conversation more appropriate for the table....

I think the fruit puree would be delicious in this carrot variation on muesli from A Veggie Venture, which I'm dying to try. In fact, Monkey has already had the baby version of this recipe; substitute an equal quantity of pureed carrots for the applesauce in my Baby Bircher recipe and call it (because I can't resist) Baby Bunny. She might like it even better than the apple version, to be perfectly honest.

And of course it would also be good stirred into either oatmeal or yogurt on its own. Sweet and fruity with no refined sugar--take that, YoBaby!

Spread it on toast fingers for a snack for the baby, or pair it with peanut butter for a sandwic for toddlers on up. Add it to pancake or waffle batter (or maybe heat it up with some maple syrup to go on top). Use it in a quickbread or carrot cake.

And then there are the savory possibilities. Combined with some braised alliums and a bit of vinegar, the puree could be a player in a nice chutney. Throw it in with some cooked carrots and a pinch of cumin for glazed carrots--doesn't that sound pretty? And--this is going to be a bit vague, because I don't know a thing about cooking meat--I'm pretty sure you could also add some to a skillet after deglazing to make a rather sophisticated sauce for chicken or pork.

But more simply, it's delicious spread on a cracker and topped with a thin slice of aged cheese (that's Parmigiano-Reggiano in the photo above). The high proportion of apricot in my version of the recipe gives the puree a sunny flavor that's especially nice paired with the cheese's bite. If you wanted to get really fancy, you could add a bit of mustard to the puree for an impromptu mostarda.

I didn't invent the pairing of dried fruit and cheese, of course, but I am pretty tickled to have figured out, quite accidentally, how to do it on the cheap. This puree is not much different from the stuff they were recently peddling at my local grocery store, asking $6 for about a quarter-cup nubbin. (Six dollars! And it didn't even look any less like poop* than the homemade version!)

*Hey, if I'm going to talk about poop in a post I may as well go all out, right?

Anyway, I think I may try to keep this stuff on hand, even after Monkey outgrows the habit of eating a bowl full of mush for breakfast.

And here, to save you a click, is the recipe once again:

Dried Fruit Puree

Adapted from delicious:days

Most any combination of dried fruits could be used in this puree (I'd like to try adding some candied ginger, too); just use an equal volume of fruit and water.

1/2 C dried apricots
1/4 C prunes
1/4 C dark raisins
1 C water

Combine all of the ingredients in a small saucepan and simmer, covered, over low heat for about 20 minutes or until the fruits are very plump and tender. Let cool a bit and then puree in a blender or food processor until smooth.

This puree keeps in the freezer for quite a while, but (due to the high sugar content, I think) it may not freeze solid. Test this out before tying up an ice cube tray!

nine months

2008-04-29T21:08:00.000-07:00

It's that time again.

Here's what Monkey thought of this month's new tastes:

Yes
Aged cheddar
Cumin*
Cumin + cinnamon*
Ginger*
Multigrain cereal (Rice + Oats + Millet. Have you ever had millet? I don't think I have but my kiddo LOVES it, apparently.)
Maple-Roasted Root Vegetables (carrot, sweet potato)
Peas as a finger food (I am sorry I waited so long!)

No
Avocado (not a new taste; what's new is that I am admitting that Monkey really does not like it. She finally convinced me by gagging dramatically on a spoonful of beautifully ripe avocado the other day. And then doing it again.)
Dill
Havarti with dill
Mango**
Rice as a finger food (too sticky?)

*Or possibly she is willing to eat anything as long as it is mixed with sweet potatoes. Except avocado! I think I've tried that and it was a no go.

**Sounds astonishing, doesn't it? But this is another installment in our series of occasional essays on the topic of "Hey, guess what? Babies don't like gross food!" I pureed a couple of pieces from a bag of frozen mango bought because I wanted to add a new fruit to the rotation, and when Monkey didn't seem to like it I used the rest of the bag in a mango version of this bread salad from 101 Cookbooks. I fed the bread salad to some families from my parents' group last weekend, unfortunately before realizing that the bagged frozen mango was really not very good at all (now that I type that out, it seems like it should have been obvious). It was unripe and tasted...fishy. Yes, fishy. My guests were very polite about it, and I am very sorry. Please do not let my error dissuade you from trying the bread salad linked above, because it is really an excellent recipe, the ever-so-slightly-caramelized bread cubes playing off the sweet-tart fruit dressing. Also, if any of the members of my parents' group are reading, please do not let my error dissuade you from coming over to my house for a meal in the future. I am resolved to do better next time.

I thought we'd been getting into a groove with this solids thing, but on reviewing the short list above I realize that in fact it's a rut. I guess this is one of the downsides of making your own baby food: once you have a stock of reliable favorites in the freezer, it's hard to find the time and motivation to branch out. Our staples, day in and day out, seem to be muesli for breakfast, banana, sweet potato, carrot, peas, yogurt, baby cereal, and upscale hippie cheerios (which brand I continue to buy because it is the only one I can find that does not contain sugar. Which I feel compelled to tell you because I apparently don't want to admit that I am, in fact, an upscale hippie.)

Anyway, to keep us on track, or possibly just because I love to make lists, here are some things I'd like to get Monkey to try over the coming month:
A good mango
Asparagus
Broccoli
Lentils
Peaches
Potatoes again (one of my husband's colleagues recommended trying Yukon Golds, which I think is an excellent suggestion--they're buttery and smooth all on their own)
Those Damn Teething Biscuits
Winter squash
Yam and Carrot Tagine (oh you betcha there will be a recipe to share)
Zucchini

a bowl full of mush

2008-04-26T21:26:00.001-07:00

As I was thickening applesauce with some baby oatmeal for Monkey's breakfast one morning, I was reminded of a once-loved recipe that I hadn't thought of for years. It used to be one of my favorite breakfasts, in fact: a combination of oatmeal and grated apple, soaked in liquid overnight to make a dish that's soft, comforting, and--odd as this may sound in relation to a breakfast food--distinctly refreshing.

I was pretty sure the prodigal recipe was called muesli--I could picture its yellowing newsprint, glued to a plain white index card. But neither my mother nor I knew where the index card was.

Disorganization has its benefits, I guess, because a quick Google search of what I remembered about the recipe (muesli + grated apple) revealed that this "fresh muesli" (as distinguished from dry muesli, those flakes with little bits of dried fruit more familiar to us inhabitants of the land of Kellogg) is in fact the original muesli (I know, Google and Wikipedia cited in one post! The librarian in my life will be so proud), invented a century ago by the Swiss physician Maximilian Bircher Benner and sometimes known as Bircher Muesli in his honor. And appropriately enough, it turns out that the word "muesli" is derived from the German for "mush."

In light of that coincidence, how could I resist creating baby and adult versions of the dish, and sharing breakfast with Monkey?

Figuring out Monkey's version was pretty straightforward: just a slight elaboration of what I'd already been feeding her for breakfast. But the question of what to put in my own bowl was more daunting, because there are about as many variations on muesli as there are cooks out there. I kept it simple, with just oats soaked in apple juice, a bit of lemon juice and cinnamon, grated apple, and some yogurt to serve. But you can also add other fresh and dried fruits, nuts, and any number of additional grains, seeds, and spices if you're so inclined.

To this I added a puree of mixed dried fruits, which sweetened the muesli recipe from delicious:days. I changed up the mixture of fruits (I wanted to get some prunes in there since I know Monkey loves them), and simmered them for a while to soften them up before blending, and wow am I happy I tried this out. I think this puree has a ton of potential uses, in both baby and adult diets. I'll share some ideas on that in an upcoming post--but for now, it's breakfast time.

Bircher Muesli

This recipe does require some forethought, since the oats need to be soaked in liquid overnight to soften. But resist the temptation to double the recipe--this dish is better the first or second day. After that, the grated apple loses its crispness, and with that goes the dish's refreshing quality.

1 C old-fashioned rolled oats
1 C apple juice
1 medium apple, grated (leave the skin on for color!)
A squeeze or two of lemon juice
1/4 tsp cinnamon
Plain yogurt
Dried Fruit Puree (recipe follows)

Place the first 5 ingredients in a bowl and stir to combine. Cover and refrigerate overnight. In the morning, dish the muesli up in individual bowls and top each serving with a dollop of yogurt and a smaller dollop of Dried Fruit Puree.

Makes about 3 servings.

Baby Bircher

1 Tbsp applesauce (or 1 ice-cube's worth, for those of you freezing along at home)
1 Tbsp (dry) baby oatmeal
2 tsp plain yogurt
1 tsp Dried Fruit Puree (recipe follows)
Pinch of cinnamon
Apple juice or water

Place the first 5 ingredients in a small bowl and stir to combine. If necessary, thin with apple juice or water to the desired consistency. Serve immediately.

Serves 1 baby.

Dried Fruit Puree

Most any combination of dried fruits could be used in this puree (I'd like to try adding some candied ginger, too); just use an equal volume of fruit and water.

1/2 C dried apricots
1/4 C prunes
1/4 C dark raisins
1 C water

Combine all of the ingredients in a small saucepan and simmer, covered, over low heat for about 20 minutes or until the fruits are very plump and tender. Let cool a bit and then puree in a blender or food processor until smooth.

This puree keeps in the freezer for quite a while, but (due to the high sugar content, I think) it may not freeze solid. Test this out before tying up an ice cube tray!

spicing things up

2008-04-24T19:03:00.000-07:00

Monkey's lunch yesterday: sweet potatoes and rice cereal, with a little yogurt and a pinch of cumin. Lunch today: the same, with a pinch each of cinnamon and cumin. Both days she ate the whole bowl. She's not crawling yet, but I couldn't possibly be prouder. Do you see where I'm going with this?

family dinner: could i see a menu, please?

2008-04-23T13:38:00.000-07:00

Via the handy food-news aggregator at the blog delicious:days comes this article from The Observer (UK), with the surprising headline "Fruit and veg diet 'danger for toddlers.'" The piece describes a recent study that found daycares in the UK are serving meals with too little fat, too few calories, and too much fiber--meals that, in hewing closely to dietary recommendations for adults, are inappropriate for young children.

I don't know the exact state of things on the other side of the pond, but here in the U.S. fat has become so thoroughly demonized (unless you're on the Atkins bandwagon, I guess) that it's not hard for me to believe people would go overboard and forget that it takes plenty of fat to grow a proper brain. (I would even go further and suggest--gasp!--that adults need some fat in their diet too. Pass me that full-fat yogurt I bought for the baby, please; I'd like to drizzle it atop some carrots braised in olive oil and butter.)

The article also makes me wonder whether some of the picky eating that's famously endemic among the toddler set is, once again, just kids being sensible. Maybe expecting them to eat the same proportions of protein, starch, and vegetables that we put on our own plates is not appropriate, and by balking they are following what they know their own bodies need. (Maybe. Can you tell I don't have a toddler yet?)

But mostly, this article just pushes my buttons, with its multiple quotes from experts about how children 1 to 4 years old "have entirely different [nutritional] requirements" from older children and adults; and how "it is completely inappropriate to simply purée a meal that would be healthy for a four-year-old and feed it to a two-year-old" (side note: barring developmental or other health issues, what the hell are you doing pureeing food for a two-year-old anyway?); and how "The nutritional content of toddlers' meals is a proper science." That last quote is my favorite of the bunch, for its ability to induce a profound wonder as to how we have ever managed to survive as a species until now.

I don't doubt that what a toddler needs to eat to be healthy is not exactly what an older child needs is not exactly what an adult needs. But it seems to me that all this "entirely different" talk just reinforces the notion, increasingly prevalent nowadays, that there is kid food and there is adult food and never the twain shall meet. That notion is making family dinner times fraught and helping to turn countless parents (ok, let's have a moment of gender solidarity here: mostly moms) into short-order cooks. And as I look ahead to a time not so far in the future when the three members of my household might share regular meals together, I'm more and more bothered by this kind of thinking. Is it so outlandish to imagine that a girl could just, you know, cook dinner and feed it to her family?

cooking with chaos

2008-04-17T09:06:00.000-07:00

Many thanks to my friend a. for mentioning maple syrup as a good sweetener for yogurt and other baby foods, and thus inspiring the following recipe.

Maple-Roasted Root Vegetables

I used carrots and sweet potatoes in this recipe because that's what I had on hand, but I think almost any root vegetable would be good prepared this way--I'd like to try parsnips, rutabaga, and maybe some shallots too.

2 T olive oil

1/4 tsp salt

1/2 tsp cumin

1 tsp Aleppo pepper or mild chili powder

1 T maple syrup (we like the more strongly flavored Grade B for this sort of cooking)

4 medium cloves of garlic

1/2 of a large Spanish onion

1 medium sweet potato

3 medium carrots

First, as you read over the list of ingredients above, recognize that the precision of measurements is somewhat artificial and could just as easily read "two large glugs," "one smaller glug," etc.

Preheat the oven to 375 F. Place the olive oil, salt, spices, and maple syrup in a rectangular baking dish and stir with a spatula to combine.

Peel and roughly chop the garlic. Peel, trim, and roughly chop the onion. Peel the sweet potato and cut into 1-inch cubes. Peel and trim the carrots, and cut into chunks roughly the same size as the sweet potatoes.

Add the vegetables to the baking dish and toss with the spatula to coat with the olive oil mixture. Put in the oven. When your sweetie comes home from work, suggest that these veggies would be good with some guacamole made with that last avocado that really needs to be used up.

Realize in a panic that it's past time for the baby's bath, so stir the vegetables quickly before going to start the water. Give the baby her bath. Afterwards, consider asking your sweetie to keep an eye on the vegetables, but decide against it because he seems so dang grumpy, and you've already asked him to make guacamole. Instead, hope he might think of giving the vegetables a stir or two on his own, and go put the baby to bed.

Once the baby is asleep, re-enter the kitchen to the following peeved query from your sweetie: "So what's happening with these vegetables?" Realize that your sweetie is not in fact a mind-reader and has not stirred the vegetables. Cover up your panic with an airy statement to the effect that, "Oh, they're probably about done." Remove the vegetables from the oven, stir them up to coat with the caramelized olive oil and maple syrup mixture in the bottom of the pan, and decide that they're just about perfect after all.

So, officially, that's roast at 375 F for 40 to 50 minutes, stirring once about halfway through.

Roasted Vegetable Burritos

1 recipe Maple-Roasted Root Vegetables

2 burrito-size tortillas

A couple ounces grated cheese

Sour cream

Guacamole made from 1 medium Hass avocado

Tortilla + vegetables, sprinkle with cheese, top with sour cream, roll up. Put the guacamole on top. Enjoy the little nuggets of caramelized garlic and the fact that you really can taste the maple syrup in the vegetables. Use dinner as an opportunity, after the grumpy chaos of earlier in the evening, for you and your sweetie each to say that you appreciate everything the other does around here, and realize that you actually mean it.

Serves 2, with a few vegetables left over for the baby to try.

Monkey enjoyed a few cubes of roasted carrot and sweet potato the next day--she didn't talk to them quite as enthusiastically as she does with Cheerios, but she seemed to like them pretty well.

the whole is greater than the sum of its parts; or, three wrongs make a right

2008-04-08T18:02:00.001-07:00

Monkey does not like green beans, rice cereal, or yogurt. But mix all three together and apparently they become tolerable enough to eat for dinner. Very mysterious.

eight months

2008-04-06T20:17:00.000-07:00

Nom Nom Nom Nom Nom

Banana

Oatmeal

Prunes

Sweet potato

Peas

Carrots

Apple

Bagel/bread

Cantaloupe

Yogurt in combination with other ingredients

Absolutely perfectly ripe avocado

Baby Mum-Mums (sigh)

Cinnamon

Rice cereal in combination with other ingredients

Cloves

Pear

O-shaped cereal that is so outrageously expensive it makes me cry when I find one stuck in the seams of her highchair (a friend calls them "free-range Cheerios," hee!)

Dried fruit puree (more on this in an upcoming post!)

DO NOT WANT

Potato

Any other sort of avocado

Yogurt by itself

Green beans

Cardamom (my favorite spice! can you hear me weeping?)

Nutmeg

Rice cereal by itself

I don't want to mislead you with the impressive length of that first list. It's not as though Monkey licks the bowl clean every time I feed her one of these foods--they are merely things that she has eaten either thoroughly or with evident pleasure at least once (and sometimes only once--it's hard to hit the sweet spot with avocado).

Readers with advanced math skills will notice that although I like to freak out about these things on the Internet, in real life I have started to rebel against the wait-four-days rule. Though we've just noticed that Monkey has some eczema on the backs of her knees--maybe we should back off the wheat and dairy for a bit? But what would she do without her beloved (and wheat-containing) Os? At random times throughout the day I keep noticing that she has her thumb and forefinger pressed together, compulsively practicing her pincer grasp.

This past month we've seen other milestones, too. A few weeks ago the Mr. and I took Monkey out to dinner with us and for the first time she sat in a highchair rather than in her carseat. We went to a conveyor-belt sushi restaurant (a fantastic place for babies, incidentally: plenty to look at, with lights and motion and a giant screen showing obscure Japanimation, and just cacophonous enough to camouflage any fussiness), and I shared my food with her. I peeled the tempura batter from one of my green beans and handed it over. She brought it to her mouth, tasted, grimaced at the awfulness of it, and then repeated the sequence several times before finally dropping it on the floor. Perhaps she would have liked it better if I'd left the batter on.

Anyway, I defy you to imagine anything cuter than a baby in a highchair bellied up to a sushi bar.

a little bit about why i love my husband

2008-04-04T12:13:00.001-07:00

This is relevant, I promise (click through the link below for proof).

There are many reasons, but foremost among them in my mind right now is the fact that he gets me a little choked up right in the middle of my work day by sending me sweet and beautiful things to read.

Happy National Poetry Month, all. And happy Friday. May your weekends be full of good things to eat and good things to read.

carrots for everyone

2008-03-30T20:55:00.000-07:00

I didn't want to say anything before, for fear of jinxing things, but Monkey really seems to be getting the hang of this eating business.

It happened quite suddenly one afternoon--we were out of her favorite sweet potatoes, so I pulled some carrot puree out of the freezer. I didn't think she'd eat much of it, but I put two cubes in a little bowl anyhow--that's all that was left in the bag and they were sort of wan and smallish, so I figured, what the hey. I added some rice cereal and a little water and--whoa, before I knew it the bowl was empty. Next day she plowed through a full serving of peas (more recently, I swear I've even heard her say "Mmmm" between bites of that previously scorned vegetable), then scarfed down her oatmeal three mornings in a row.

All of this happened within a few days of the emergence of her first two teeth. I suppose that is just coincidence, but the combination makes me feel a little sad that my baby is growing up so fast.

It's sweet in equal measure as bitter, of course, which is why I decided to celebrate Monkey's newfound enthusiasm for food by making one of my favorite carrot recipes for the grownups' dinner earlier this week: a simple recipe for braised carrots topped with yogurt (a friend from the Internets described the basic method to me, calling them "Nigel Slater's Turkish Braised Carrots," though I couldn't find the original recipe online to confirm the source), to which I've added some warm spices as well as extra good things on top. The result is what my mom would call "slickery" (that's a good thing), in a nod to one of my favorite books from childhood.

Usually we have these carrots as a side dish, but I figured they could pass as a main if served over rice. Come to think of it, carrots with rice (cereal) and yogurt was what Monkey had for dinner one evening recently before sleeping through the night--7 hours anyway, which apparently counts if you're a baby--for the first time in months. I know the supposed link between solid foods and sleep is all a big myth, but hey, I'll throw a little party for that particular correlation-without-causation any day.

*****

Turkish-ish Braised Carrots

(Quite possibly adapted from Nigel Slater)

8 medium carrots

1 T butter

2 tsp olive oil

1/4 C water

1/4 tsp ground ginger

1/4 tsp ground coriander seed

pinch of salt

about 1/4 C full-fat plain yogurt

1 tsp zahtar

2 tsp pomegranate molasses

Peel the carrots and cut them in large chunks (I cut them in half crosswise, then slice the fat end in half lengthwise).

In a medium saucepan over low heat, melt the butter and olive oil together. Add the spices and stir to distribute. Add the carrots and water, and stir to coat the carrots with the fat. Turn the heat up to low-medium and cook, covered, until the carrots are tender, about 15-20 minutes. Stir things up now and again, but don't be afraid if the carrots get some brown, caramelized spots on them--that's where the deliciousness lives. Well, there and in the next step:

Place the carrots in a serving bowl and spoon the yogurt over top, sprinkle with zahtar, and drizzle with pomegranate molasses.

Serves 2 as a main dish over rice, more as a side dish or mezze.

*****

The Mr. and I rounded out our plates with a kind of olive oil-based pizza made with pita bread. Now, I'm aware that bestrewing some store-bought pita loaves with toppings hardly counts as cooking, but I'm including the recipe anyhow because I'm charmed by the sort of intellectual stone-soup process by which it came about: I had a brainstorm about using up the leftover feta in the fridge, and somehow when it occurred to me to add some lemon zest the capers came tagging along behind; the Mr. suggested adding garlic to the olive oil and was also responsible for buying the whole wheat pita bread (I would surely have chosen white, but the whole wheat variety is much better for this recipe, the nuttiness playing off the tangy cheese).

Also, I'm including the recipe because these are so, so simple, and freaking delicious.

*****

Flatbreads with Feta

2 T olive oil

2 medium (or 1 large) cloves garlic, sliced crosswise very thin

2 loaves whole wheat pita bread

2--hmm, no, make that more like 3-ish--ounces crumbled feta cheese

zest of 1/2 lemon

2 tsp capers, roughly chopped

Place the olive oil in a small bowl, add the sliced garlic, and let sit for a half hour or so.

Preheat oven to 425 F. Split each pita loaf into two rounds and place the rounds, insides (rough sides) facing up, on a pizza pan or baking sheet. Brush the bread rounds with the oil and distribute the garlic evenly over the four pieces. Then top with the feta, lemon zest, and capers. Bake for 5-7 minutes, or until the edges of the bread get slightly brown and crispy.

Serves 2

*****

Finally, I wanted to compile a little list of carrot baby food recipes to leave you with, but yikes, there is just not that much out there. Just a bunch of sites that tell you to peel some carrots, steam them, and then puree them. Yeah, thanks. And also--wow, so boring! In my mind I am clamping my mouth shut, turning my head resolutely to one side, and banging my hands impatiently on my highchair tray.

But here are a couple of recipes that I thought could be adapted--or at least serve as inspiration, in their combinations of flavors--for feeding little ones:

Carrot and Cardamom Mash (Ambrosia and Nectar)

Roasted Carrot and White Bean Dip (Cook Like Mad)

Do you have a story about your baby suddenly becoming enthusiastic about food? Or was it a more gradual process in your house?

then again, maybe i'm just neurotic

2008-03-21T08:22:00.000-07:00

Just as I was winding up my rant about the lack of consistent guidance on introducing solid foods, I came across this post in which Swedish food blogger Viktoria reports that for the first time her whole family, including her 8-month-old daughter, has eaten the same thing for dinner.

"It felt almost like a little holiday," she writes, and I think I know what she means. To my mind that first meal all together might be an even bigger milestone than a baby's first taste of solid food.

In Viktoria's flat, the celebration featured a meat pie. She says that she made a few concessions to the baby, pureeing the filling in the food processor and leaving out the salt, but her recipe also contains several ingredients that come up pretty frequently on lists of things not to feed the baby: tomato juice, milk, eggs, cheese. (The recipe also features onion, garlic, Dijon mustard, a chili, and mixed chopped fresh herbs--but those ingredients don't scare me, they just impress me.)

Is it possible that I am--or perhaps we Americans in general are--just really freaky and uptight about baby food?

In fact, some experts argue that much of the current advice dispensed in the United States--and in Western cultures in general--on the topic of introducing solid foods is based on myth and convention rather than sound science. (I don't want to make too much of the article behind that last link: it's nearly three years old, prevention of food allergies does not seem to be the primary research interest of any of the researchers quoted, and it doesn't seem to have any connection to any peer-reviewed study. But still, isn't it a breath of fresh air?)

I think of Michael Pollan's contention that, having lost touch with where food comes from, lacking a solidly rooted food culture of our own, and buffeted by the constantly shifting winds of nutrition science, we have become fearful about food and anxious about what to eat. I am a real-butter-schmearing, bread-loving, farmers-market-visiting moderate hedonist, so I never thought his description would apply to me. Yet ever since my daughter started eating solids, the idea that food is dangerous seems to come naturally.

The question of food allergies, which is what I'm worried about, is different from the obsession with nutrients (such-and-such will prevent cancer, such-and-such will give you heart disease, such-and-such will make you smarter) that Pollan critiques. Yet some of the rhetoric is surprisingly similar. Take, for example, the frequently encountered advice to wait four days between introducing each new food. That is perfectly logical when it comes to being able to pinpoint a food that is causing a reaction. But in practice, this approach transforms eating into a minefield to be navigated with the utmost caution. When what I really want to do is feed my baby with joy.

Amongst all these warnings, though, are some hints that we have already taken some of the most important steps to avoid food allergies: breastfeeding, and waiting until around 6 months to start solids. In fact, I'm starting to wonder whether some of this calculus about what foods to introduce and when and how long to wait and so on might be a holdover from an era when children were given solid foods much earlier. Parents with children just a few years older than mine were told that 4 months was definitively the time; a generation ago it was 2 months, or even earlier than that.

So I'm trying not to worry about the fact that I've unwittingly and quite blithely been feeding my daughter one of the most allergenic spices around (cinnamon--who knew?); instead I'll try to focus on the fact that it doesn't seem to bother her. In fact, I think she likes it.

oh for the love of pity pete, would somebody just tell me what i can feed the baby?

2008-03-14T15:23:00.001-07:00

A few weeks ago I had a chat with the nurse at our pediatrician's office about whether it was okay to give Monkey a teething biscuit.

The pediatrician had recommended them at Monkey's six-month appointment, but I was a bit doubtful about the long list of ingredients in the ones I bought--especially the common allergens corn and milk, neither of which Monkey had had before. (Yes, yes, I know the box clearly says for nine months and up--but the pediatrician said teething biscuits; the box also says that crawling is a sign that the baby is ready for these biscuits, and I don't know what on earth crawling might have to do with food allergies). So the box sat on the counter, taunting me, for two weeks, until I finally decided to just go ahead and be That Mom and call and ask about it.

I talked to the nurse for about five minutes, but I still have no idea whether it's okay for my daughter to have one of these teething biscuits.

There were any number of answers that I would have been happy to hear from the nurse. "Sure, go ahead!" for example. Or, "No, not until 8 months," or maybe something like, "Corn and milk are fine at this age, but introduce them separately first."

Instead what she told me went more like this: "Is there any family history of food allergies? Is she sitting up pretty well? [Insert several sentences full of referent-less pronouns here.] Mmm-kay [this in that chipper-yet-impatient tone of voice that implies we really need to wrap things up]?"

You might imagine that what I am really complaining about here is our pediatrics practice, but I don't think so, because after I got off the phone I poked around several published sources and other handouts I've accumulated on the subject of introducing solid foods, and I am more confused than ever.

A handout from a lecture I went to says no dairy until 9 months and "wait on corn" (until...kindergarten? college?). A handout from our pediatrician says cow's milk should not be introduced until 1 year, but nothing about corn. But a poster-style chart (also received from the pediatrician--is this a test to see if I'm paying attention?) assures that at 6 to 7 months one can introduce "teething foods" including teething biscuits.

Our reference book from the American Academy of Pediatrics is worse than useless on this subject, full of airy obscurantism (representative passage: "If you started with cereal and your baby has accepted it, you can start introducing him to other foods slowly. One possible order is meat, vegetables, and fruit." We didn't, and we keep a vegetarian kitchen, so now what?). And the Searses are not much more helpful, mentioning teething biscuits at 7 to 9 months, but implying that dairy should wait until 9 to 12 months, and keeping mum on the subject of corn.

The only really useful advice I found came from a handout from the "First Foods" seminar (scroll down) that Pregnancy, Childbirth, and the Newborn coauthor Ann Kepler, RN, MN, runs quarterly in Seattle. (I haven't attended the seminar, but my sister-in-law passed the handout along to me and it has 104 references, be still my heart!) Keppler writes, "By 7 months, an infant's intestines will have matured to the point that they are not as likely to take the whole protein molecules from his food into the system which are the cause of allergy," citing Ellyn Satter's book Child of Mine: Feeding with Love and Good Sense--which I'd been meaning to check out and has now been vaulted to the top of my list.

So I thought I'd wait a couple of weeks, then try dairy and corn separately, and if that turned out well I'd let her go to town on the teething biscuits.

In the meantime, the nurse recommended some rice-based biscuits called Baby Mum-Mums. If you can get past the unnecessarily cutesy name, the horrendous overpackaging, and the total lack of stimulation for the taste buds (they're basically rice crackers, but without the sweet, umami-spiked glaze--so, without anything to recommend them, really) they are alright I guess. When I hand one of these biscuits to her Monkey reaches for it and gums it eagerly, makes her "Really? You want me to eat this?" face, and then soldiers on. They disappear pretty fast--"teething biscuit" is a bit of a misnomer, but their quickness to dissolve is said to reduce the possibility of choking. I've seen Monkey make chewing motions to mash up the pieces of biscuit that break off in her mouth, so at least she is learning a useful skill.

Oh, and the second ingredient in Baby Mum-Mums, right there on the label after that hallowed hypoallergenic rice? Skim milk powder.

Mmm-kay, indeed.

seven months

2008-03-06T19:31:00.000-08:00

I thought it might be interesting to post monthly updates of the foods Monkey has tried, and what she likes and doesn't like at any given point. Here's a list as of her 7-month birthday (which was last week; I left off more recent experiences such as those ill-starred potatoes).

Look, Monkey likes it! She really likes it!

(1) banana (in mesh feeder)

(3) oatmeal

(5) prunes (in mesh feeder)

(2) sweet potato (pureed, or steamed spears in mesh feeder)

Monkey is not, however, so sure about:

(7) peas (pureed)

(6) carrots (pureed, or steamed spears in mesh feeder)

(4) apple (pureed, or steamed spears in mesh feeder)

Now that I look at it, that doesn't seem like much of a list. Perhaps I need to spend less time blogging and more time, you know, feeding my kid.

Although there are foods that Monkey definitely seems to like, I'm not sure that she really "gets" solid foods yet. With oatmeal and sweet potato puree especially, it's often just a few bites before she gets tired and/or bored. The only food that she full-on devours is banana. She hadn't had any for a couple weeks, and then I gave her a chunk in the mesh feeder yesterday and today, and was surprised by how enthusiastically she slurped it through the mesh. But otherwise, solids meals can feel a little futile these days (especially compared to the ease and convenience of breastfeeding, with which we've been lucky to have a very smooth road).

Monkey usually gets two meals of solids each day, about an hour after waking in the morning and again in the late afternoon a couple hours before bedtime. It can be hard to find the sweet spot where she's hungry enough to be interested, but not too tired to bother.

Some other babies we know who are about Monkey's age seem to eat with much more gusto, spooning through jar upon jar of purees. (Well, they are not doing the spooning I suppose, but now I'm tickled by the image. Are you picturing a monkey with a wee spoon and a big grin, surrounded by a dozen little jars?) I suppose eating is like rolling or crawling or walking, and happens on each baby's individual (and largely inscrutable) schedule. A little patience, then, is on the menu.

Update, March 10: Yesterday a friend was asking about the order in which we introduced foods, so I added numbers (as best I can remember!) before the items in the list above.

potatoes. puh.

2008-03-01T17:54:00.000-08:00

The other day I made some pureed potatoes (mashed nothing-but-potatoes, you might call them) and sat Monkey in her high chair, excited to introduce her to this wonderful comfort food . But she wasn't a fan, making a face at the first bite and definitively refusing the second.

I was pretty surprised by her reaction at first. I mean, who doesn't love a potato? Then I tasted what was in her bowl and it was terrible--bitter almost to the point of being metallic. Who could love that sort of a potato?

Babies often have a reputation for being picky eaters, but some of what we expect them to eat is frankly unappetizing. A gray slurry of overcooked chicken and peas? No, thank you. Maybe in some cases babies aren't being picky so much as discerning. And maybe a good approach, going forward, is for me not to expect Monkey to eat anything that I wouldn't eat myself.

As for the potatoes, I guess I'll try to salvage them for my own dinner--an undertaking that I'd wager will involve lots of butter. Then I'll make another batch of puree (I used a russet potato for this ill-fated attempt--maybe a waxy potato would work better?) and try once again to convince Monkey of the wonder that is the spud.

rice and smothered cabbage soup

2008-02-23T19:35:00.000-08:00

Certain dishes are so lacking in appeal to the eye that their appeal to the belly is all the greater. One look at this sort of food and you know it's going to be good, because it's not pretending to have any aspirations beyond being as tasty and nourishing as possible.

So ugly it's beautiful pretty well describes this soup, from Marcella Hazan via The Wednesday Chef. It's just a beige and lumpen bowl of cabbage and rice--until you taste it. Then it's something close to perfect: hearty without being heavy, the richness of cheese cut by the tang of cabbage, given substance by rice and all smoothed out with a little bit of butter.

An added bonus is that this is a pretty forgiving recipe. You can use a medium-sized head of regular old green cabbage if you can't find Savoy. Substitute vegetable bouillon for the meat broth if you like; the soup will still be plenty rich and savory. And if, following the new-parent principle of not generating any more dishes to be washed than absolutely necessary, you skip the saute pan and go straight to the soup pot to braise the cabbage, you might even be glad you did (that's a pretty large volume of cabbage there at the start).

It's such an easy dish, and so perfect for the kind of cooking that I'm able to do these days, that I like to imagine it was invented by the mama of a young infant in some Italian hill town on a blustery late-Winter day: no time for pretty fillips, just get dinner on the table as simply as possible, and preferably with a maximum of gladness for the taste buds.

It's not quick, exactly, but don't let that scare you off--by some mysterious alchemy it pretty much makes itself. Oh, sure, there's some chopping to do at the beginning, but that can be taken care of while the baby rolls around on her blanket (or during naptime, if you prefer--even that short last nap of the day would give you enough time to get this dish going). Next play with the baby for about an hour while the cabbage melts down into tenderness. Then add the broth and rice, and go put the baby to bed while your sweetie keeps an eye on the stove and throws in the butter and cheese there at the end.

Putting the baby to bed being what it is, the rice might end up cooked well beyond the suggested al dente stage, but I promise you'll still manage to empty your bowl, maybe even twice.

Mid-February cooks take note: pairs nicely with the last few swigs of champagne left over from Valentine's Day.

baby food for mamas (and dads)

2008-02-17T18:06:00.000-08:00

My friend s. has been sampling the banana, apple, pea, carrot, sweet potato, and avocado purees she's been preparing for her 6-month-old son. "Making purees is fun! Why don't adults ever eat them?" she wonders, pronouncing the carrot puree "surprisingly good."

Mashed potatoes, hummus, guacamole, applesauce--sounds like a balanced diet to me.

Actually, aren't vegetable purees The Thing at certain fancy restaurants these days? Or is that over now? (It's a measure of how little I get out nowadays that I'm not sure of the answer to either of those questions.)

Well, be they trendy or no, I've tasted a puree or two myself recently--I don't want to force or coax or cajole Monkey into eating, but I can't bear to waste baby food. The last thing I ever wanted to be is a garbage-disposal parent, but I see those little dollops of leftover carrot or sweet potato or applesauce and realize that this pretty much represents the sum total of my kitchen labors for the week, and I think, I am NOT dumping that down the drain. So into my own mouth goes the tiny, rubber-coated spoon.

And I'm struck by how rarely we adults experience the pure, unadulterated taste of a single thing. Even those simple recipes that are supposed to celebrate high-quality, farmer's-market-fresh ingredients by doing as little as possible to them usually include a little salt, fat, and/or sugar--all verboten ingredients when you're making baby food.

The purees I'm feeding Monkey, on the other hand, contain just a single vegetable or fruit and a little bit of its cooking liquid (I'm oven-steaming, about which method I would provide more specifics if it weren't an absolutely seat-of-the-pants operation). It's amazing how much nuanced flavor these absolutely unadorned foods have.

(And this, without even using the best possible ingredients. Yes, yes, everything is organic--you don't have to confiscate my Mama Merit Badge after all--but bought from the supermarket; the carrots came out of a bag--a plastic bag, people!--and the apples had been hanging around in the fridge for weeks.)

I think I can taste not only what I am eating but also--unless my jaded palate is playing tricks on me, and projecting my memory of what's not there--hints of the ingredients that are often paired with those foods. That is, I'm getting a glimpse of why those flavors go so well together.

Carrots have a bright, almost citrusy sweetness, and an undertone of earth.

Sweet potatoes are more caramel and brown sugar, with a buttery smoothness that fills my mouth.

Apples are surprisingly tart--Braeburns are, at least--but a floral taste lingers behind.

I'm not ready to give up butter and salt, dressings and sauces, altogether, but I'm glad to have had a taste--a real, though small, taste--of these things.

And for those adults inspired to eat more purees themselves, a few grownup ideas:

Delicata squash and celery root (The Wednesday Chef)

White beans (Orangette)

832 more possibilities (Epicurious)

show don't tell

2008-02-06T13:02:00.000-08:00

Last week I made chickpea and potato curry, in an effort to use up a rainy afternoon and a bag of potatoes moldering in the crisper drawer of the fridge.

First I spread a blanket on the floor in a corner of the kitchen (away from the knives and stove), and set Monkey down with a few toys to explore. I chopped onions and melted butter, while she gummed and babbled to her current #1 toy, which we've dubbed the Butterbee. After reacquainting myself with the spice cabinet, I looked up to find that she had rolled onto her belly and was kicking her feet and grabbing at the blanket, deeply entranced by its texture.

By the time the onions and spices had melted into ochre silkiness, Monkey was getting a little fussy, so I picked her up and showed her what was happening on the stove. I told her the names of all the spices--ginger, coriander, turmeric, cumin, allspice, cayenne--and carefully, carefully raised the lid on the saucepan to reveal the clutch of round potatoes boiling away.

I set her down again and added some diced canned tomatoes to the onions; drained the potatoes, peeled them, and set them in the pan; and rinsed off a can of chickpeas in the colander. By this time Monkey needed another little cuddle (it had taken me a long time to peel the potatoes), so I picked her up and showed her how the potatoes that we'd seen before in the saucepan were now nestled amongst the onions in the skillet, dyed yellow by the spices like Easter eggs.

I pointed out the chickpeas in the colander, and thought to myself, "Ummmmmm, legumes are okay at this age, right? I think so. I think." I mashed up a chickpea between my thumb and forefinger, worked the skin of the bean away from the flesh, and held the makeshift puree up to Monkey's lips. I'm not sure how much she actually swallowed, but she got a taste, so I've optimistically decided that we're on our way to curry and hummus and all sorts of delights.

Chickpea and Potato Curry

3 Tbs. butter

1 medium onion, chopped

2 large cloves garlic, minced

1 tsp. ground ginger

1 tsp. ground coriander

1 tsp. ground turmeric

1 tsp. ground cumin

dash allspice

1/4 tsp. cayenne (or to taste--if you're a new parent, you know how many stars you like)

Salt to taste

1 C. diced canned tomatoes (with juice)

1 C. plain yogurt (full-fat would be best)

The moldering potatoes, boiled and peeled (The original recipe calls for "12 very small new potatoes," which seems a bit precious even for a blog about baby food, don't you think? I used about 9 average-sized ones--that's what I had on hand, but it came out about right.)

1 15-oz. can chickpeas, drained and rinsed

Heat the butter in a large skillet and saute the onions and garlic over medium-low heat, stirring frequently, until they are very soft. Add the spices and stir to combine. Add the tomatoes and heat through. Then, turn the heat very low and stir in the yogurt. Simmer, uncovered, over very low heat for 5 minutes. Add the cooked potatoes and gently coat them with the yogurt and spice mixture. Finally, gently stir in the chickpeas and continue to simmer, covered, over very low heat for 10 more minutes, stirring occasionally. Serve over basmati rice right away or, better yet, tomorrow night.

(Adapted from The Versatile Grain and the Elegant Bean. The original recipe is for Mung Bean and Potato Curry--but chickpeas come in a can.)

into the mouths of babes

2008-01-31T18:12:00.000-08:00

The mouth of one baby, that is.

This is a blog about food and parenting. My daughter--my first child--has just turned six months old, and over the past few weeks we've begun tentatively exploring the world of solid foods. So at first this will largely be a blog about feeding babies, reporting our experiences and sorting through which foods to introduce and when and in what format. (I'm a science geek, so expect to hear some crankiness about the conflicting advice and lack of evidence on this topic.) I'm excited about introducing her to the pleasures of food, and want to record this time when each small bite is a whole new experience, a little venture into the wider world that we all share.

But I also want to write some about what that baby's mama and daddy are eating. When I was pregnant I suffered from nausea from week 6 until, oh, 40-plus, and I missed food and cooking. I still miss cooking, as a matter of fact. Only by the grace of Trader Joe have we survived this long, and I hope that writing this blog will also inspire me to get into the kitchen a little more.

After a few months I hope I'll also be able to start sharing news about food and recipes that all three of us enjoy together. But now I'm getting ahead of myself (and possibly engaging in some wishful thinking to boot). We'll have to see what develops.

As for the baby: I'll call her Monkey herein--actually, that's what I do call her more often than not! I'm still getting to know her myself, so I'll leave it at that for now--but I think you'll soon come to agree with me that she is a delight. In fact, delicious.

baby food recipes

2006-02-02T10:37:00.000-08:00

dried fruit puree and baby muesli

year-round recipes from pantry staples

2006-02-02T10:32:00.000-08:00

dips, spreads, schmears
chipotle-chevre dip or spread

soups
armenian yogurt-barley soup (tanabour)

easy recipes for seasonal produce

2006-02-02T10:26:00.000-08:00

apples
apple-ginger galette
bircher muesli

cabbage
rice and smothered cabbage soup

carrots
fennel and carrot slaw with olive dressing
turkish-ish braised carrots

cauliflower
pasta with braised fennel and cauliflower

fennel
fennel and carrot slaw with olive dressing
pasta with braised fennel and cauliflower

greens (spinach, chard)
orzo "risotto" with spinach, goat cheese, and butternut squash

kale
boiled kale with fried egg and soba noodles

mache (miner's lettuce)
winter dinner salad with poached egg and sausage

radicchio
pasta with winter squash and radicchio

squash, summer
zucchini and chickpeas in creamy tahini sauce

squash, winter
pasta with winter squash and radicchio
orzo "risotto" with spinach, goat cheese, and butternut squash

sweet potatoes
simplest red lentil and sweet potato soup