Becoming My Mother, Part I

I think I'm becoming my mother. All summer long, all she'd ever eat was salad. All winter long, it was soup. Garbage pail soup, she called it. She'd pull odds and ends out of the freezer, throw it all in a stockpot, and cook. Then she'd eat it every day for a week, and start all over again.

The past two weekends, I've done just that, prompted in part by an ongepotchket batch of CSA vegetables cluttering up the fridge. There's a method in my madness, though, and the soup has been excellent, if I may, you know, say so myself.

Let it be known: this isn't a recipe, this is a manifesto. It almost doesn't matter what you put in it, it matters that you do it. What do you have?

Start with an onion. Everything savory always starts with an onion, chopped, and sweated in a few glugs of olive oil. Red onion, white, no matter. While the onion grows translucent and oh so fragrant, chop a carrot and a stalk of celery. Mince a jalapeno, just one, for a tiny tingle of hotness. How about some squash? A small butternut squash, peeled and seeded and diced, that'll work. When the onion is nice and ready, add a quart of stock - beef, chicken, pork - and all the chopped vegetables. Add some tomatoes - puree from a can, fresh chopped, whatever you've got. If you're incapable of tossing the Parmesan rinds and you have some in the freezer, now's the time to stick one in the soup pot, like you always say you're going to do. Simmer gently until all the vegetables are soft. Fish out the Parm rind (and throw it away). Whir the soup a bit with a hand blender, or use a potato masher - you want to get some of the solid chunks broken down to thicken the soup. Toss in a 1/4 cup of uncooked bulgur, or that dried out leftover rice. Finally, cut up some turnip greens, mustard greens, beet tops, anything green - slice them into ribbons and throw them in the pot. Turn off the heat. Cool it down and plan to eat it tomorrow - it'll be better then.

This will make enough for dinner, with leftovers for lunch for a day or two. Gussy it up at the table with a salad and some bread, and maybe grate a little cheese over the top. Garbage pail soup.

Tweet Beet

Two things happened last week while I was poking around the internet looking for news of the tiny valley in the Catskills where my father has a house.

First, while I like farting around on Twitter, its utility as a news source really became clear as I found people tweeting information about roads closed, bridges out, alternative routes, and utility services. I mean, it's one thing to read tweets about the revolution in Egypt or the assassination of Bin Laden - important, yes, but not as tangible as something happening in a place where you know the people, the roads, the streams, the landmarks, and where all the phone lines seem to be out.

Second, I found a recipe for a beet pie. I know, who'd a thunk it? Beets? In a pie? A dessert pie? It was on the blog of a person who has a house up there in the Catskills, who I'd found via Twitter. (I know. You were wondering how these two things were connected. Everything is connected to everything, if you just know where to look.) I was intrigued enough to make it, especially because I had beets in the fridge from the CSA. What I really wanted to do was make it for the assembled friends and family up on the Cape, and not tell anyone what was in it, but that didn't really happen; there were too many people in the kitchen. (Let's digress again - have you ever made the mock apple pie recipe on the back of the Ritz Cracker box? It's worth doing once, because it really does fool people.) Because I assumed (correctly) that the rental house kitchen wasn't going to be well-equipped, I prepped all the dry ingredients into a plastic bag, and got my husband to make a pie crust, and brought everything else that we needed. And, you know? It was really good. It's almost more like a mince pie, what with the dried fruit and nuts. The original recipe called for cooking the beets; I somehow failed to notice that step and used raw grated beets - it came out just fine. Also, I used the maple syrup called for, but because there was no detectable maple flavor, I might try it with Lyle's Golden Syrup next time. Here's the recipe, as adapted from Edible/Usable.

Beet Pie

• 1 single unbaked pie shell (9 inches)
• 2 medium beets
• 1/2 cup grade B maple syrup or Lyle's Golden Syrup
• 3 eggs
• 1/4 t white vinegar (I used balsamic, because it's all we had)
• 1 t vanilla
• 2 T butter
• 1/2 t salt
• 1 t cinnamon
• 1/2 t nutmeg
• 1/2 t ground cloves
• 3/4 cup brown sugar
• 1 T flour
• 3/4 cup raisins or dried cranberries
• 3/4 cup roughly chopped walnuts

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees.
   
2. Peel beets, and grate on a box grater - measure out one cup of grated beets (you may have a bit leftover).
   
3. Beat the eggs gently in a bowl. Add all other ingredients except walnuts and raisins, and mix well. Add beets, walnuts and raisins (or dried cranberries) and stir until blended. Pour into the unbaked pie shell.
   
4. Bake for 10 minutes at 400 degrees. Reduce temperature to 375 degrees and bake for 25-30 minutes or until pie is firm. Cool on a rack and serve still warm with vanilla ice cream.

The Eggplant Fainted

A couple of years ago, I got a copy of that Simon Hopkinson book, Roast Chicken and Other Stories, because everyone was going on and on about it. And though I've tried to understand the fuss, I just don't get it. There's no magic in the writing for me, and there's a certain superciliousness that doesn't belong in the kitchen. I like my cookbook writers to be people I want to just hang out with, like Julia Child and Nigel Slater and Deb Perelman. (Someday I'm going to run into Deb at the Union Square Market, and then I'll be all tongue-tied or something, but I really like her cooking sensibilities. And Nigel Slater? She Curmugeon and I are planning to stalk him together. Julia? Nothing needs be said.)

Anyway, I pick up the Roast Chicken book from time to time, hoping for clarity, and finally, I've found one thing in it that maybe makes it all worth it: an eggplant salad - a spiced eggplant stew-like salad to be precise. Hopkinson says it's from Elizabeth David, but I can't find it in any of the eight (8!) Elizabeth David cookbooks I have. (I know, what's the matter with me? Five are in a Penguin boxed set that I got at the library book sale because I just couldn't resist. And of those five I already had two, so would you like a copy of Italian Food or French Country Cooking? Tell me in the comments, and I'll send 'em out.)

The closest thing I found in Elizabeth David is her version of imam bayaldi - the seasonings and ingredients are almost the same, but she stuffs the eggplant and bakes it, unlike Hopkinson's rendition where the vegetables are all cooked on the stovetop. I liked the Hopkinson version enormously. It reminds me a bit of caponata, with an exotic hit from cumin and allspice. Eat the leftovers for lunch tomorrow with a blob of thick Greek yogurt on the side. Oh, and save the cilantro for sprinkling on at the table if you have one of those "cilantro tastes like soap" people in your household.

Spiced Eggplant Salad, adapted from Simon Hopkinson, who got it from Elizabeth David

• 1 large eggplant
• salt
• 1/2 cup olive oil
• 2 large onions, peeled and roughly chopped
• 3-4 ripe tomatoes, coarsely chopped
• 1 t. ground cumin
• 1 t. ground allspice
• 1/4 t. cayenne
• 4 garlic cloves, peeled and finely chopped
• 2 T. currants
• 2 T. chopped fresh mint
• 2 T. chopped fresh cilantro

1. Cut the eggplant into 1/2-inch cubes; place in a colander and sprinkle with 2 t.salt. Mix together with your hands and leave to drain (in the sink or on a towel) for 30 to 40 minutes.
2. Heat 1/4 cup of olive oil in a pan and saute the onions until golden. Add the tomatoes and spices. Stew for 5 to 10 minutes, then stir in the garlic and take off the heat. Stir in the currants.
3. Shake the colander to release some of the moisture from the eggplant, and then dump the eggplant onto a clean dishtowel and blot it dry. Heat up the remaining 1/4 cup olive oil in a big frying pan - to smoking hot - and stir-fry the eggplant until it's golden on all sides and cooked through, about 15 minutes. Add the eggplant to the tomato mixture, and add the fresh herbs. Transfer it to a bowl, and set aside to cool. Adjust the seasoning to taste.

Use Real Chicken Broth, People

Okay, since I didn't win a free trip to BlogHer with my recipe using Knorr's new shelf-stable concentrated chicken stock, I'm not biting the hand that feeds me when I tell you that the stuff is rather nasty and not worth cooking with.

Should I start at the beginning? Sometime last month, BlogHer set up a competition. 200 bloggers got samples of Knorr Homestyle Chicken Stock, a product about to be released in the United States, to use in the creation of a recipe. Recipes were submitted, 8 people were chosen; there'll be a cook-off at the BlogHer conference next week. I entered, out of curiosity, and because I do like to cook and I thought it might be fun to create a recipe to toss into the stockpot.

A package containing four little tubs of stock arrived by mail. We examined the label:

Water, salt, modified palm oil, autolyzed yeast extract, sugar, carrots, chicken fat, lactic acid, leeks, maltodextrin, xanthan gum, potato starch, garlic, chicken powder, parsley, locust bean gum, malic acid, thiamine hydrochloride, natural flavor, disodium phosphate, ascorbic acid, disodium guanylate, disodium inosinate, caramel color, succinic acid, spice, mustard oil, beta caratene, coconut oil.

Let me tell you something. To make chicken stock, take the carcass of the roasted chicken you had for dinner, fling it in a pot, cover it with water, and boil. Strain off the bones, and put the stock in the fridge. When it's cold, scrape the fat off the top. Divide it up into 1 cup plastic containers and stick it in the freezer. DONE. Two ingredients. Hardly any work.

We forged ahead, disheartened by the long list of unpronounceable ingredients. I peeled the foil off the top of a little container, and sniffed. Cat food! It smells exactly like cat food! I lovingly made the meatballs, with a package of ground free-range, organic chicken from the philosophical butcher. I harvested herbs from my garden, and used an onion from my CSA. And then I poured disodium this and disodium that in the pan around the patties and put them in the oven. And I used the rest of the gums and acids to make the couscous. And I cried a little in my heart, because I was selling my soul for a chance at a free plane ticket and a free hotel room and a free conference pass.

We ate the chicken balls and couscous, with cats on the prowl. They thought it smelled like cat food.

And I submitted my recipe, and I didn't win. I'm kind of relieved, because really? I couldn't have lived with myself otherwise.

Try my meatballs. The trick is that you brown them on top of the stove, and then you finish them in the oven. The stock reduces a bit, making a little sauce for your couscous. Substitute rice or orzo, or just serve the meatballs with some nice crusty bread to sop up the sauce. (Oh, if you'd like some cooking photos with acerbic commentary, click on that picture of the ingredients - it'll take you to a Flickr set.)

And remember what Michael Pollan said: Eat food, mostly plants, not too much.

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Chicken Balls with Couscous

4 T. olive oil (divided)
1 medium onion, minced
1 T. minced fresh tarragon
2 T. minced fresh parsley (divided)
¾ cup panko (Japanese bread crumbs)
1.75 lbs ground chicken
1 T. kosher salt
1 t. ground pepper
3 cups homemade chicken stock
1 T. butter
1 ½ cups instant couscous

1. Put 2 T. olive oil in a large oven-proof skillet. Add onion. Cook onion over fairly high heat for about 4 minutes, stirring often, until onion is softened and translucent. (Yes, start with a cold pan, it’ll be fine.) Add tarragon and warm through, about 1 minute.
2. Put chicken in a large bowl. Add panko, 1 T. parsley, salt and pepper. Scrape onion/tarragon mixture from skillet into bowl. Mix everything together gently, with your hands.
3. Form mixture into seven slightly flattened balls, and put on a cookie sheet to rest. They’ll be a bit smaller than a tennis ball. Set aside for about half an hour, and clean up the kitchen or supervise some homework – but don’t wash that skillet you cooked the onions in.
4. Preheat the oven to 375F.
5. Add the remaining 2 T. olive oil to that big oniony skillet, and put it on the stove to heat until the oil is shimmery. If the skillet’s not big enough for all seven patties to cook without crowding, work in two batches. Cook the patties for three minutes on each side.
6. Turn the pan off, pour 1 cup of the chicken stock around the patties, and pop the pan in the oven.
7. Bake for 25 minutes. [Another built-in pause! Make a salad, feed the cat and go water the herbs on the back porch.]
8. When the chicken is almost done (meaning, the timer’s about to go off), bring the remaining 2 cups of stock to boil in a small saucepan. When the chicken timer goes off, add the butter and couscous to the saucepan, put the lid on it, and turn off the heat. Set the timer for another 5 minutes. The patties and the couscous will be done at the same time. Fluff up the couscous with a fork, and mix in the remaining 1 T. parsley.
9. Serve patties with couscous on the side, with some of the now reduced chicken stock drizzled over both. Add a vegetable and you’ve got a meal.

Total time, about 90 minutes. Active time, about 30 minutes. In other words, you can do other stuff while you’re making dinner.

This will serve anywhere from four to seven people, depending on how hungry and/or greedy they are. In my house, the seven year old was so hungry that she needed two patties and more couscous and all of the ketchup.

Eat real food, people.

$5 plus a half hour =

Do you have any idea what these are?

If I hadn't seen the sign at the Greenmarket, I wouldn't have recognized them, at least not from just looking at them. Despite a lifetime of eating chickpeas in various forms, I'd never seen fresh ones before yesterday.

So I bought a pint, for the rather spendy sum of $5. I quizzed my husband when I got home - he didn't recognize them either, and guessed they were soybeans, which the pods slightly resemble. But these pods are smaller, and only have one or two chickpeas inside.

I set to work shelling them - if shell is what you do to chickpeas. Maybe you shuck them, husk them, peel them? (Maybe you call them garbanzos.) Shelling the pint took me a half an hour, and resulted in 3/4 of a cup of little fresh chickpeas, looking kind of like wrinkled peas.

The farmer had said to boil them for a five minutes, so I did that, and tossed them with a pinch of coarse salt and a drizzle of olive oil. And they were seriously good, toothier than a pea, less mealy than a dried cooked chickpea.



But $5 and a half hour for a small side dish for two adults? I'm unlikely to buy them again.

Garlic, Marrow, Galvanized Prune

Marrow?

Um.

Marrow on toast?

Better.

Marrow on toast with crumbs of grey salt?

Mmm.

Marrow on toast with salt and a dressed sprig of parsley and a caper and a slice of a cornichon?

Oh yes. Yes. Perfect explosion of crunch and unctuous and salt and brightness.

I had dinner at Prune, dinner on the heels of reading Gabrielle Hamilton’s "Blood, Bones & Butter". And the marrow bones are threaded throughout the book, so of course we had to have them.

Hamilton’s passion for simple food, expertly prepared from well-sourced ingredients leaps out of the book – I want to taste that, and make orecchiette with my Italian mother-in-law, drink a cocktail on the terrace in the south of Italy. So eating in her (little) restaurant, though she wasn’t in the (tiny) kitchen, felt perfectly familiar without my having ever been there before.

And oddly enough, the little restaurant was precisely the kind of place my mother would have liked, what with the funky mirror over the bar, and the mismatched steak knives, and the small galvanized metal tubs, and the brown paper “tablecloths”. I say oddly because one of the sections of the book that resonated strongly for me was the part about Hamilton’s mother - her frugal, stylish, divorced mother, about whom she says:

My most relieving, comforting experiences surrounding my mother are when strangers meet her and later say to me, “Wow. She is one piece of work.”

Because my frugal, divorced mother had an unerring sense of home décor, and too was a piece of work.

I ordered the lamb chop, a blade chop, the kind of chop even my mother wouldn’t buy. Too cheap, too déclassé. Actually, my mother never bought lamb chops: the good rib chops were too dear, the affordable blade chops weren’t worth eating. But Prune’s thick, rare, toothy blade chop, with skordalia and dandelion greens alongside – my mother would have loved it. And she’d have loved the fat grilled asparagus, thicker than my thumb, dressed with a haunting parsley béarnaise, a sauce I ran my index finger through again and again it was that haunting and delicious.

We skipped dessert; it seemed unnecessary, and proved so when the check came with a chunk of good dark chocolate for each of us – just enough.

And then I went home, back to my life. A book can be transporting; a meal can be too. I highly recommend both.

Marmalade

I made a glorious grapefruit/meyer lemon marmalade a couple of months ago - out of free fruit. The grapefruit had been a Christmas gift to my father, and I picked the lemons in a friend's backyard in California. I love marmalade. It suits my ornery self.

The basic technique (and canning instructions) came from the Times, which had adapted the recipe from June Taylor. Head over to the Times site to read up on the technique in comprehensive detail. But basically, you want to separate the fruit into three parts: flesh & juice, outer rind (peel), white pith & membranes. You remove the peel with a vegetable peeler and sliver it. You filet out the flesh, working over a bowl so you capture the juice. And then you tie the pith and membranes up in cheesecloth so that you can boil and remove them - they release pectin, which you want for thickening.

Instead of weighing the fruit, I eyeballed it before I started cutting it up. Two grapefruit and five small Meyer lemons got me 3 cups of peel/flesh/juice. 3 cups of fruit then needs 3 cups of water and 3 cups of sugar. (Easy ratio, huh? Adjust quantities as necessary.) You boil the fruit and water until the the peel is tender, then add the sugar and boil until it's done. I ended up with three (sealed) pints and a half a cup left over.

It's wonderful.

And it's going to be gone way too soon the way I'm slathering it on my toast every morning.

Popeye

One of my mother's go to vegetable side dishes was spinach with onions and sour cream. It wasn't a fancy dish, but rather something that could go alongside a meatloaf or a pork chop on a weeknight. She'd take a block of frozen chopped spinach, out of one of those waxed paper boxes, sprinkle it with dehydrated minced onions and steam it in one of the Revere Ware skillets she'd gotten as a wedding present. Just before serving, she'd stir in a big blob of sour cream. It was delicious - sort of like a tangy creamed spinach.

The other night, I was rooting around in the freezer looking for something green to go with a pork chop - it being that time of year when fresh greens are an occasional proposition - though the greenmarkets are starting to burst. Happily, I found a package of blanched spinach, from the CSA greens glut last fall. We had onions, we had the tail end of a container of sour cream, and I decided to reinvent my mother's old standby.

Spinach and Onions with Sour Cream
1 onion
2 T. butter
a pinch of cayenne
1/2 t. salt
1 package of spinach (fresh or frozen)
1/3 cup sour cream

Peel and trim the onion. Cut in half, vertically. Cut sides down, slice into little half moons about 1/8" thick. Melt the butter in a pan with a lid. Add the onions and a tablespoon or two of water. Cover and cook slowly, until the onions are tender, melted, not brown. Add spinach, cayenne and salt. Cover the pot and cook until heated through. Take off the lid - if there seems to be too much liquid, turn up the heat and boil some of it off. Off heat, stir in the sour cream. It's not beautiful, but it's awfully tasty.

Instant Dinner

For years, I've seen Dr. Oetker products in the baking and dessert aisles at the supermarket - glazes, flavorings, puddings. But until The Motherhood asked me to participate in a Valentine's Day chat, I had no idea that they made frozen pizza. But they do! (read more)

Antlers

Sometimes it gets interesting at the farmers market, like the day someone was selling warm delicious pancakes.

I had to tweet about it.



The Twitter and Facebook consensuses* were that they were, in fact, pulling my leg, and when I emailed my husband, he thought so too. That is, until curiosity got the better of him and he found that yes, yes there is a leavening made of reindeer horn:

Salt of hartshorn (Ammonium Carbonate)

Hartshorn is one of the oldest of "chemical" leavens. It was actually in use for many centuries before the predecessor of modern baking powder was developed in the middle of the nineteenth century.

The original hartshorn, as its name implies, was ground from deer antler and used primarily in Scandinavian countries. Today it is almost unknown although there is a chemical version of the original, better known as "baker's ammonia," available from King Arthur Flour.

A dough that contains hartshorn produces a strong smell of ammonia when it's in the oven, but the ammonia dissipates completely during the cooking process leaving no aftertaste or odor. Its unique action makes extremely crisp cookies and crackers.

Go figure.

But here's the really pressing question, courtesy of a comment on Facebook:

I'd love to know the backstory of how the baking properties of ground up deer antlers were discovered. What happens if I stew porcupine claws? Are discarded nail clippings the secret to a nice souffle? Hard tellin' not knowin'!

Would you all like to chime in and hypothesize as to just how someone found that ground reindeer antler would work as leavening?



* Doesn't that look wrong? I think it should be "consensi".

Eggs + Rice + Panko = Breakfast

I like to cook, and my husband likes to cook, and we both do a reasonable good job of it. Because he’s the stay-at-home parent and I’m the commuter, he does far more of the cooking than I do, but I do a lot of the inventing. I’ve dubbed myself the “executive chef” – I invent a dish, he makes it happen.

Somehow this morning the cupboards were bare of our usual breakfast fare. No bread, no Cheerios, no “snap, crackle, pop with brown sugar on top”. We could have had oatmeal, good real oatmeal (and I digress but if you haven’t read Mark Bittman’s piece about McDonald’s oatmeal go read it now) but I found a cup of cooked rice in the fridge – leftover from last night’s dinner – and the little wheels in my head turned 'round.

"How about little pan-fried rice and egg cakes?"

My husband looked at me sort of skeptically, but got out the rice and two eggs and beat them together. He paused, and added a handful of panko because the “batter” looked too thin. Then he melted some butter in a skillet and fried up two perfect little cakes using the silly little round silicone rings that he'd bought one day.

They were soft and crunchy and salty and delectable – a perfect little breakfast, for two. Alas, there were three of us, so I had to content myself with a half a grapefruit and some stolen forkfuls of goodness.

The moral of the story? We may need three of those silicone rings.

Cranberries and Brussels Sprouts

I know, most people think Thanksgiving is all about the turkey. And gravy. And mashed potatoes. And wet bread, also known as (yuck) stuffing.

Sure, a bit of turkey with a swath of perfectly cooked skin next to Julia's garlic mashed potatoes napped with my husband's gravy is a great thing. But to me, it's not Thanksgiving without cranberries in some form along with a cruciferous vegetable from the Brassica oleracea group.

I'm partial to the uncooked cranberry sauce where you fling an orange and a bag of cranberries into the Cuisinart, and add sugar to taste. But a beautifully simple way to get cranberries on the table is at dessert, in a "pie" that's really a cake. If you're having pumpkin pie, which you probably are, the cranberry cake makes a nice complementary dessert.

As for the cruciferous vegetable, it could be kale or broccoli or cauliflower (or collards or kohlrabi or cabbage). But some years back, I happened on a fine recipe for hashed brussels sprouts, the kind of preparation that is lightning fast and will make a convert out of almost any professed brussels sprouts hater.

The recipes follow - because although I've been making them for years, I've never passed them along to you.

What do you make, year in and year out?

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Nantucket Cranberry Pie/Cake (adapted from Laurie Colwin's More Home Cooking)

2 cups chopped cranberries
½ cup chopped walnuts (optional; I never use them)
½ cup sugar
2 eggs
¾ cup melted butter (1 and a half sticks)
1 cup sugar
1 cup flour
1 t. vanilla extract (or almond, or ½ t. of Fiori Di Sicilia)

Gently mix the cranberries, walnuts and ½ cup sugar and spread in a 10-inch pie plate (without a crust - this is really a cake, not a pie).

Mix eggs, melted butter, 1 cup sugar, flour, and vanilla extract. Stir till smooth.

Pour over cranberry walnut mixture and bake for 40 minutes at 350 F.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

Hashed Brussels Sprouts (adapted from the Union Square Cafe Cookbook)

1 lb Brussels sprouts
Juice of half a lemon
Zest of a lemon
2 T. olive oil
2 cloves of garlic, minced
1 T. poppy seeds
1/4 cup dry white wine
Kosher salt and pepper to taste

Cut the stems off the sprouts and halve them lengthwise. Thinly slice each half and toss them in a big bowl with the lemon juice.

Heat the olive oil in a big skillet (or wok) over high heat, almost to the smoking point. Carefully add the sprouts, garlic and poppy seeds to the hot pan (it'll pop and splash - don't get burned) and stir for about 3 minutes, until the sprouts are bright green and barely crunchy. Add the wine, and salt and pepper to taste, reduce heat to low and cook for another minute. Transfer to a bowl, toss in the lemon zest, and serve.

Let's Review: Chop Chop

Did you know that there’s a cooking magazine for kids, called Chop Chop? I learned of it through a blog post on Mark Bittman’s site, and I was intrigued enough that I emailed them to ask for a sample copy. The kid and I read the issue cover to cover, and talked through all the food. The recipe that she was most interested in was sesame-crusted tofu – which, coincidentally, was the recipe featured in the Bittman post. I was a little surprised that she wanted to try it - it’s not like tofu is a staple in our house. In fact, I think I’ve only bought it once before in my life.



After her homework was done, we set to work making the tofu. Daddy helped her with the 8" chef's knife, teaching her how to keep her fingers away from the blade. [He is standing just beside her in that picture, hands at the ready.]

The recipe was bone simple - cut the tofu into blocks, dip it in sesame seeds, cook it up in a hot pan, and season it with a little soy sauce. The girl did all of the coating of the tofu blocks with the sesame seeds.

Daddy helped her put the blocks in the hot skillet and then he finished off the frying for her. [It took rather longer than the 4 minutes a side that the recipe indicated.]

The magazine is earnest and practical - with lots of recipes, some tips, a few puzzles, and a smattering of nutrition information. It's ad-free because it's published by a non-profit; the issue I received had one page of "sponsor" logos, and a single coupon for some Stonyfield yogurt. In my not at all humble opinion, anything that helps get a kid started in the kitchen is a good thing. Cooking skills are essential if you're going to be successful at feeding yourself real food.

And success! We had tofu for dinner! It was easy to cook, and made a nice protein addition to our plate of stir-fried broccoli and plain white rice.



While we were eating dinner, enthusiastic about the tofu, we all agreed that the girl would have the rest of the rice and tofu for her lunch the next day. Alas, Daddy forgot and ate the leftover rice in the middle of the night. As a result, Daddy had to make new rice at 8:00 this morning, because the proffered jelly sandwich was categorically rejected. You promised me rice and tofu! Do things like that happen in your house?

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(No one paid me to write this, but I did get a single issue of Chop Chop for free.)

Eat Real Food

A couple of months ago, I had a PR pitch land in my inbox, with an offer to send me (on dry ice, I guess) a frozen meal in a bag, the supermarket version of a dish from a mall chain restaurant. I toyed with the idea of accepting the frozen product, preparing it, and snarkily ripping it to shreds, for you, dear Readers. But I decided that I couldn’t live with myself for even having it in my house. I wouldn’t buy it, and I don’t want to eat it, and I don't want to feed it to my kid, and I never eat in those kinds of mall chain restaurants anyway, so why would I want to try it at home? And because I don’t want to give them any undue publicity, I’m not even going to name them.

I did, however, go to their website to check the ingredients list for one of the varieties, their General Chang’s Chicken, just to see.

• Broccoli
• Fully cooked crispy battered chicken breast meat [chicken breast meat, water, corn starch, potato starch, soy sauce (water, soybeans, wheat, salt), tapioca maltodextrin, sodium phosphate, garlic powder, leavening (sodium acid pyrophosphate, sodium bicarbonate, monocalcium phosphate), egg white powder, ginger, xanthan gum. Fully cooked in vegetable oil (soybean oil, canola oil)]
• Water
• Sugar
• Red bell peppers
• Soy sauce (water, soybeans, wheat, salt)
• Concentrated chicken broth
• Garlic
• Canola Oil
• Corn starch
• Ginger
• Chili paste (red chili peppers, distilled vinegar, salt, xantham gum)
• Hydrogenated soybean oil
• Oyster flavored sauce [water, sugar, salt, oyster extractives (oysters, water, salt), modified corn starch, caramel color]
• Sesame oil
• Caramelized onion juice concentrate
• Distilled vinegar
• Spice

You like that? That label is impossible to read, what with being printed in all caps and full of nested parentheses, which is why I took the time to type out the whole list for you, dear Readers. Yum, yum, yum. Oh, I suppose you could argue that it's not *that* bad, but do I want to be eating chicken that was raised in some god-awful factory farm, prepped and frozen a dozen moons ago, doctored with xanthan gum and caramelized onion juice concentrate, containing more sugar than soy sauce?

Furthermore, look at this picture. Isn't it pretty? Doesn't it look like it's got lots of red peppers in it? Yes, but look up at that ingredients list again: this here General Chang's Chicken has more sugar than red peppers. That's a lot of sugar, and here we could spin off into the whole industrial-food-complex-added-sugars-equals-American-obesity business, but we won't because it's been said in plenty of other places.

What it boils down to is this: I want real food - a fresh chicken from a clean local farm, with a side of broccoli from my CSA. And you should too.

Scenes from a Weekend, Part 2

On Sunday, I baked.

I made the dough for my croissants (and rolled and folded and rolled and folded and rolled and folded) and it’s ready when I can figure out when to shape and rise and bake them. To have them for breakfast would mean shaping them at midnight, letting them rise for four hours, baking them at 4am, and letting them cool for another couple of hours. Daunting, and it makes you understand that whole "bakers who bake till the dawn so we can have cake in the morn" business.  But it’s got to be done, lest all that hard work and butter go to waste.

While I was rummaging for the croissant recipe in Baking With Julia, I found a recipe for a pumpkin yeast bread – so I made that with the cooked squash we happened to have in the fridge. I, true to form, didn't really follow the recipe - I left out the nuts and dried fruit, and I threw all of the (remaining) ingredients into the bread machine for mixing and the first rise. And then I baked it too hot and the crust was nearly scorched, but, no matter! It's an excellent bread, golden inside and sweetly spicy, perfect for toast.

And then, finally, I tackled the golden pucks. Oh yes I did, and so did De. She emailed me a photo of hers, sitting next to a cup of coffee (which is now up on her blog), while mine were still in the "bondin form a long" stage in the fridge.

They turned out to be a lovely little butter cookie - though nothing like the Financier palet breton that sent me off on this goose chase. It was, however, an oddly tiny recipe - it made precisely 12 small cookies. Perhaps scaled-down recipes accounts for that "french women don't get fat" thing.

So, what have you been baking lately?

Ice Cream and Brownies

The other day, we celebrated my father-in-law's birthday, one of those big round numbers which I'll keep to myself. I tossed around ideas for a dessert, but my husband kept rejecting them: he doesn't like x, he doesn't like y. Finally, I rifled through the big pile of recipes that I've printed out off of the intertubes (because I don't seem to be organized enough to use Delicious like a good index) and picked out an ice cream recipe that I've been meaning to try for a long time. And, because ice cream needed a little something, I made a batch of brownies.

Heaven in a bowl.

First, the brownies. My all time favorite brownie recipe is one that Laurie Colwin claims came from Katherine Hepburn's family; it is available on Epicurious. The Colwin-Hepburn axis is nearly enough to love something, but these brownies are seriously good and totally easy. So easy, in fact, that my six year old can almost make them by herself. You melt the butter and chocolate together in a small saucepan, and add everything else TO THE POT. One bowl! Easy! Delicious! No frou-frou ingredients! And a stellar pedigree!

Second, the ice cream. I love caramel. I love dulce de leche. I love all those butterscotchy flavors. And I love a hit of salt in my sweets. Also, I'm in one of my occasional periods of insane love for my ice cream maker, because it turns really simple stuff into wonderfulness. So, naturally, the recipe that leapt out of the pile was David Lebovitz's salted butter caramel ice cream. Oh, dear lord, it is the ice cream of my dreams. It didn't even matter that I screwed it up because we always keep a 1/2 cup measure in the sugar canister (and a one cup measure in the flour) and not 'til later when I was making the brownies did I realize that in fact there was a 1/3 cup measure living in the sugar bin which means that I made the ice cream with 1/3 less sugar than it should have had which could account for the fact that it was distinctly salty but no matter, it was still excellent. [When I make it again, I'll do it with the right amount of sugar. Also, I did pour my praline/caramel out onto a silpat sheet - and when it was time to crush the praline, I just rolled up the silpat. Clever, no? I am full of labor-saving tricks.]

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Incidentally, I availed myself of Blogger's recent addition of static pages, and added a recipe index to my site, which you can get to over there in the right sidebar. I did it for me as much as for anyone else, because I find myself rooting around in my own archives looking for thus and such, but maybe you'll like it too.

Bon appétit!

What Was For Dinner?

I'm not usually given to taking pictures of my dinner before I eat it, but this was such a beautiful plate that it cried out for documentation: pork chop (grilled with a sort of teriyaki marinade), asparagus (with lemon and butter) and a salad of quinoa, beets and grapefruit.

If I may say so myself, the salad was excellent. I cooked up a half a cup of quinoa, let it cool, and added diced cooked beets, snipped chives, and the flesh of a grapefruit. It's a pain in the ass to segment the grapefruit, but it's worth it. Do it over a bowl so you save all the juice, then use the juice and some olive oil (and salt and pepper) to dress the salad. I liked it so much, I made it twice last week.

My Garden

In mid-summer, we'll have lived in our house for six years, and I'm finally feeling like the garden is coming into its own.

I spent yesterday morning happily puttering around, rearranging the shrubbery, as it were. I was tired of looking at bare dirt under the blueberries, so I dug up some woodruff from under a boxwood, and tucked it in under my blueberries. I then hacked up a couple of clumps of liriope, and edged the berry bed with it.

From one small pot of white forget-me-not, I've now got a hillside - forget-me-not living up to its name - so I moved a clump into a pot and gave it to my mother-in-law. I also gave her an alchemilla that had self-seeded in a crack in the corner of the stone steps. The alchemilla might not make it, but I couldn't just pull it out and toss it in the compost. In turn, she gave me a baby spirea with pink flowers and yellowish foliage that she'd found under her big one. I don't know what variety it is, but I think I'll stick it in the privet hedge that borders the neighbor's driveway. I hate that hedge, and I am desperately trying to turn into a mixed hedgerow because the privet is both boring and labor-intensive. I have, thankfully, trained the neighbor to not clip the privet with the help of strings staked alongside; the ensuing straight lines made me twitchy.

There's a bed in the front of the house that got planted out a few weeks ago, mostly with stuff I bought by mail order. I'm a sucker for Bluestone Perennials; they sell tiny perennials in cheap three packs and even though I lose a fair share of them, I keep going back for more. Since I planted that front bed, and drew a little picture to remember what's what, I keep adding and moving. The poor little things are like pawns on a chessboard getting shoved hither and yon, and my little drawing is increasingly hard to read.

I'm also trying to beautify the wooded lot across the street - it's owned by the town, and completely unmaintained. So, every time I dig out more wild tawny daylilies or the gooseneck loosestrife that's meandering over from the other neighbor's house, I tuck it in across the way and hope it takes off. Since they both tend towards the invasive, I'm hoping for a riot of flowers uphill.

And, because I like to cook too, I like that the garden provides bits for the kitchen. Over the weekend, I made a rhubarb pie-cake (it was called a cake, but it was more like a pie, and while it was fine, I don't think I'd make it again), and two rhubarb upside-down cakes to give away. And snips from the chives and the Egyptian onions found their way into a beet-quinoa-grapefruit salad.

What's growing in your garden?

The Ramps of Spring

We are, happily, swimming in ramps this spring - rampant with ramps, I dare say. I've been buying them at the Union Square Greenmarket, and we cook 'em up and toss 'em with pasta and are happy little clams. The other night, I augmented the sautéed greens with some potato "croutons" - cooked potatoes, diced and tossed with olive oil, and run under the broiler until they were crispy. They added a lovely rough crunchy texture to the otherwise unctuous dish. While I was slicing and dicing, my sister-in-law stopped by with a bag full of ramps that she'd dug up herself, somewhere up in the Berkshires. We might be going to try some pickled ramps next. Or grilled, alongside a hamburger. Or maybe scrambled eggs stirred into a pan of sautéed ramps. Or ramp marmalade (which sounds more like chutney than marmalade, but sounds good none-the-less)! And, when I remember to buy some sparrow grass, we'll have a bowl of ramps and asparagus.

What's your favorite thing to eat come spring? What greens do you pine for in January? What makes your heart sing when you find it in your garden, or at your farmer's market?

Chicken And Potatoes

Ever since we started buying a huge amount of beef at once, chicken has become an infrequent luxury in these parts. The mere thought of a roast chicken, sizzling in the oven, filling the house with that ineffable scent - oh, it makes me weak at the knees. And hungry.

The other day, after an outing to see eagles - live eagles, a bald eagle and a golden eagle, but in a tent, not on the wing - we decided we needed to stop by and get a (dead) chicken born and raised in our NYC suburban county. I don't think that there's any connection between seeing the eagles flapping around (and that golden eagle was BIG) and wanting to eat poultry for dinner, but there you have it.

Later that day, I went upstairs to take a nap. About five minutes after I fell asleep, my husband started bellowing from the kitchen that he needed me. I stumbled downstairs, without my glasses, and found him waving the chicken around by its neck. Which was attached to its head. And its feet were dangling around down at the other end. It was quite a sight, and a distinct reminder that this was no Frank Perdue bird, no sir. Unfortunately, it turned out to be kind of a tough bird, the kind that probably would have been better off braised, not roasted. Its carcass became a lovely stock, enriched by the afore-mentioned feet.

Alongside the chicken, we had potatoes, (twice) cooked my new favorite way. Take some medium sized potatoes with thin skins. Wash them, but don't peel them. Pile them in a bowl, cover them with plastic wrap, and microwave them until you can stick a fork in them. (Or boil them, though this is one of the few things I countenance using the microwave for. That and making tea in the ingenious teapot.) Drain the potatoes and, working on a cutting board, gently smash them with the flat side of a big knife. You want to squish them down to about 1/2" thick. And the reason you left the skins on is because it helps hold them together. Smear some olive oil on a sheet pan, and carefully transfer the potatoes over. Drizzle olive oil on the top sides, and sprinkle with a little kosher salt. Bake them for about 20 minutes at 400°F - flipping them once if you're so inclined. They come out like the love child of potato pancakes, mashed potatoes, hash browns and baked potatoes - crispy and molten and earthy and wonderful. They needed nothing on them, though the child dipped hers in ketchup because she dips everything in ketchup.