Video games CAN be good for you!

Children are perverse.

Sometimes you can fool them--reverse psychology works like a charm. Other times...well, not so much. I've learned that you cannot give them a choice between something you want them to pick and something you don't; invariably, they'll choose the latter. "Do you want to go to the BEACH (voice goes up and out to indicate This Is The Best Option) or to the park (barely enunciated in hopes it won't register)?" always ends in "The park!!!"

Likewise, I once bought a Ratatouille-themed game for my 4-year-old, hoping that he'd merrily fry his brain while the game implanted subliminal "I love cooking!" messages. Instead, he ditched it for two years in favor of the Cars game, narrated by some redneck-y sounding NASCAR dude. #momfail

However, at some point during this school year, Max began playing Ratatouille on our daily commute to Tampa. I imagine this happened because the commute is long and boring and he had exhausted his less educational games. Desperation leads us down many unlikely paths.

So but anyway, a few weeks ago, Max says to me (apropos of nothing), "I know how to make eclairs. Chef Gusteau says I do it perfect. Let's make them for reals."

Let's hear it for delayed gratification.

Afraid he'd lose interest in French cookery faster than I lost interest in the first LOTR movie, I grabbed Amanda Hesser's beautiful New York Times Cookbook, found to my delight that we already had every ingredient in the list (including ONE BILLION EGGS), and pulled out the aprons.

I'm happy to report that Max read the recipe, fetched the ingredients, measured them out (after an impromptu lesson on fractions), and pretty much did everything except beat the living shit out of the pastry dough, which turned out to be my job. (It also turned out to be really, really hard, because I did not have a wooden spoon, but Max did--"in my baking kit," as he triumphantly announced--which was about five inches long, being obviously optimized for use by a toddler.) Oh, okay, I piped the dough onto the baking sheet and filled a few of the more deflated and difficult-to-fill eclairs. But he did the rest.

Normally, I'll copy recipes from books up here because I usually alter the hell out of them anyway and that's how I roll, but in this case not, because I don't fuck with baking recipes and because everyone should buy Ms. Hesser's book RIGHT NOW and use it every day.

They were delicious, if slightly unglamorous (they were made by a 6-year-old and an adult with the baking prowess of a 6-year-old), and fun to make. Except they took about 15 minutes longer to bake than the recipe suggested, and beating that dough SUCKED. Eating them, however, did not suck.

Perfect Meals

I turned...well, /older/ this week, and I celebrated with dinner at Bella's. This South Tampa eatery is a perennial favorite, and while toasting over a glass of Prosecco and a bowl of homemade noodles with peas and basil, I had occasion to think about perfect meals.

To me, a perfect meal denotes great food in the perfect context. The timing, ambience, service, and spirit of the meal must at least equal and at best surpass the quality of the food itself. It may surprise anyone who knows me that I'd rank /anything/ as important as the food, but I've had stellar food under miserable circumstances. In such instances, context taints the meal. By contrast, a perfect scenario can elevate the humblest cuisine to the status of "perfect meal."

Here are, in no particular order, a few of my Perfect Meals:

On our honeymoon in Florence, Dori and I stumbled into a tiny eatery down the street from our pensione. We were staying far away from the more ritzy or touristy parts of the city, and this joint was suitably "local" in feel. Our young waitress was so earnestly adorable that we still think of her and wonder what she's up to. She delivered to us mammoth plates of spaghetti alla scoglio, rich with chile-spiked olive oil, pungent with garlic, and piled high with briny clams and mussels. We were poor, young (well, one of us was!), and giddy with love, and nothing before or since has captured that essence as faithfully as the Florentine spaghetti.

Having successfully escaped Delaware after five miserable years, we never imagined that we'd miss anything from the First State. But we do miss something: Ali Baba's, a casual Lebanese place on South College right by the University. In grad school, this place was a divine gift--inexpensive, healthy, unusual, delicious, and suitable for a casual lunch or a take-your-parents-out-when-they're-in-town dinner. We ate there more than once a week. Last year, we drove to Maryland to visit my folks, with a side trip to Philly to see my sister. Full of great city food and exhausted from driving and walking, we nonetheless stopped at Ali Baba's on the way home (2 hour detour not really being "on the way") and grabbed late-night take out: eggplant salad, fattoush, Lebanese gyros, hummus, and ice-cold pear nectar. We couldn't even begin to eat it all, but it was a beautiful, joyful meal. And the waiter remembered me!

I recently attended a conference at Georgetown University, which put me in my old DC stomping grounds. As will surprise exactly zero members of my family (and Caron), my first thought was not about my paper or my outfits, but about when and how I might fit in a meal at Jaleo. I used to eat there with my mentor professor as a tender undergrad before performances at the Shakespeare Theater next door. I had no idea it was run by a celebrity chef, just that it served the most sophisticated and exquisite food I'd ever encountered. I /pine/ for this food, these beautiful tapas, nearly every day. So after I delivered my paper, we broke for lunch and headed off on a brisk walk to Jaleo. The food was, as always, transcendent (grilled octopus with pine nut praline, patatas bravas, wild mushroom risotto, smoky mussels), but it was the smart, witty, company and the day of melding my past and present lives that made this lunch stand out against all my other trips. I'll never forget a moment of it, and I'll never have another tapa or watch an episode of Made in Spain without being transported directly back to that bliss.

What are your Perfect Meals?



- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Insta-dinner

I hate cooking dinner after a prolonged grocery store visit. I rarely do it. Usually I claim wifely privilege, saying, "I just did all the shopping. I'll be doing all the cooking, all week. But not tonight." And so we get a pizza or something. This time, however, I noticed that we had all the makings of a fondue in the grocery bags, and I thought even exhausted I could handle some rough chopping and a little grating.

I steamed some baby potatoes (I didn't cut them or peel them, cuz, hey, this was supposed to be easy) in the same pot as a head of broccoli, ripped into florets. I tore up a chunk of sourdough baguette, chunked up a few apples, wiped off some button mushrooms, and I was ready.

The fondue came together so quickly! I boiled a bottle's worth of Guiness, threw in some whole-grain mustard, minced garlic, and English mustard powder, then added handfuls of grated sharp Cheddar (tossed with a tablespoon of cornstarch to prevent clumping). I whisked after each addition until smooth and kept going until my pound of cheese was all smooth and bubbly and delicious.

Poured into my fancy-pants All-Clad fondue pot, this did a great job of pretending to be a classy, time-consuming meal. We ate like pigs, and not for the first time (well beyond, in fact, the four thousandth time), I thanked the universe for not making me lactose intolerant.

Why I Am Not A Baker

I am not a baker, I am a cook.
Why? I think I would rather be
a baker, but I'm not. Well,


for instance, Max wanted
to make a blueberry pie. I said yes.


This is what happened:

I thought it would be adorable to make little pocket pies, and I just happen to have a heart-shaped sandwich cutter. Sounded easy and foolproof. But for me, no baking is fool-proof--because baking is Not. For. Fools. You have to be able to measure, for godssake. And that requires numbers. So right away I'm doomed.

I didn't know I was doomed until Max had cut out all those cute little hearts and painstakingly piled tablespoon-fulls of blueberries on top of each one. (NB: Do you know how many fresh blueberries fit in a tablespoon? Three. So, as I say: doomed.) (NB2: Do you know how hard it is to get a 5-year-old to painstakingly do anything? Much less pile three blueberries into the center of irregularly-shaped pie crusts? DOOMED.) The full force of the doom hit me when I went to place the top crust on each pie and realized--a tad belatedly--that the top crust couldn't possibly be the same size as the bottom crust, or it wouldn't fit over the berries. But I had just the one cutter. So I stretched and cajoled the unwilling dough, eventually just saying "fuck it" and patching up the edges with dough scraps.

When I pulled them out of the oven, they were so browned and crunchy with sugar crystals and beautiful and fragrant...and completely empty. Every single drop of filling had leaked out of every single pie and coated my expensive cookie sheet and my baking stone.

Good thing I thought to pour the leftover berries into some ramekins and stretch a little extra dough over the top. One even made a smiley face. See?

He seems to be saying, "Clearly, I was the better idea, dumbass." Yeah? Thanks a lot, pie.

** My sincerest apologies to you for both the blurry photographs and my egregious (and awful) appropriation of one of the loveliest poems I know: Frank O'Hara's "Why I Am Not a Painter."

#CookTeaseThanksgiving

Normally, I am crap at cooking big fancy dinners. In theory, I love to do it, but really what I like is the impressing-the-hell-out-of-people part and not so much the actual execution of it. This year, however, I made the same Thanksgiving meal for the third year in a row and, I must admit, it went swimmingly. I actually planned ahead, cooked things in advance, and stuck to a schedule. Yes, I forgot to make the cornbread until the last possible second, but otherwise I count this year's Thanksgiving a tremendous success.

I tweeted the steps as I completed them, which was fun for me, if not necessarily for everyone who had to read my incessant, smug tweets. It kept me focused and entertained. I had every intention of writing a for-reals blog post about the meal, but the tweets were pretty sufficient, I thought. Hence, I'm going to plead lazy and overworked, and I'm just going to post them below with pictorial accompaniment. Naysayers, this is all I can muster up right now, so tell yourself it's better than nothing.

Oh, and by the way, my entire menu comes from the greatest Gourmet menu of all time. You can get all the recipes (and see the shit I was too lazy to make) at Epicurious.com.

1/50: Groceries purchased, sorted, and minimally prepped.

2/50: 10 poblanos have been roasted, peeled, seeded, and made into rajas.

3/50: rum and nutmeg custard base for ice cream.

4/50: Chiles guajillo, ancho, New Mexico, chipotle, and de arbol toasted and soaking in boiling water.

5/50: Adobo red chile rub for turkey pureed and in the fridge.

6/50: Onions caramelized and joining yesterday's poblano strips in the rajas bin.



7-10/50: Dishes washed, dried, put away; plastic containers for leftovers washed, dried, and stacked.

11-12/50: roasted pineapple and onion for cranberry salsa; made salsa.

13-14/50: Roasted squash; mixed with coconut milk and brown sugar; pureed.

15-16/50: Rum ice cream frozen; cornbread for stuffing baked.

17/50: Turkey rubbed with red chile adobo; marinates for 24 hrs.

18-21/50: Potatoes peeled, sliced, and fashioned into gratin strewn w/ poblano and onion rajas; gratin baked.

22-24/50: Cooked veggies, chorizo for stuffing; browned giblets, neck; simmering w/ veg and broth for turkey stock.

25-29/50: Toasted cornbread; baked stuffing; made piloncillo syrup; prepared apples/syrup, poured into pie shell.

30/50: Took break to make pumpkin-butter filled pancakes for my family. Haven't fed them properly in three days.

31-33/50: Apple-pilocillo pie baked; pomegranate, mango ready for guac; scraped caramel from pie off bottom of oven.

34/50: Made emergency pumpkin pie. Well, actually, my 5-year-old made it. Read the recipe and everything. LOVE him.

35/50: Pomegranate-mango guacamole done.

36-40/50: Dishes.

41/50: Round of Pomegranate Kir Royales made, toasted, and working its way into our bellies. Ahhhh.

42/50: Green beans blanched and sauteed w/ lemon, garlic, thyme.

43-47/50: Red-chile roux made; gravy simmering; sides reheated; turkey resting.

48/50: Emergency #2--gratin is still cold, but everything else is ready. Fail. Jack up oven temp to 450.

49/50: Turkey sliced. Possibly by beavers, from the looks of it. 

50/50: And...done. Everything superb. Standouts: poblano gratin, cran-pineapple salsa, mango-pom guac, caramel apple pie.

Choose Your Own (squash) Adventure!

In the past week, I made butternut mac and cheese TWICE. This is unprecedented, as I repeat meals less frequently than Victoria Beckham repeats outfits. I don't even eat leftovers. This fact alone should help convince you that both of these recipes were very, very good. [Food blogger fail: I have pictures of neither dish. Sorry.]

They are also extremely different. Both are easy and delicious. Only one has any nutritional value to speak of, and one is decidedly grown-up food. So, I'll let you choose.

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M-N-C #1
Last weekend, my family joined forces with another awesome family and rented a cabin near Unicoi State Park in north Georgia. On the first full day of the trip, we took the kiddoes to Burt's Pumpkin Farm for hayrides and...well...pumpkins. There were about 30 different varies of squash and pumpkin, laid out in the sun and bunched together in wooden trays under a rustic lean-to, and every one of them called out to my root-vegetable-loving heart and demanded that I Cook Them That Very Night.

Enter the first squash success: butternut mac-n-cheese. Quick, kid-friendly, delicious, and surprisingly good for you. Since we're all friends here, I'll admit that, if I had read the recipe carefully and realized how healthful it was, I probably wouldn't have made it. Because anything calling itself mac-n-cheese that has so little cheese it in would just piss me off on principle. But hear me out, because it really was delicious. Just, maybe, don't think of it as mac-n-cheese--more like a butternut pasta casserole or something.

Saint's Butternut Mac-n-Cheese
--Cut 1 large butternut squash into 1 1/2" cubes.
--Boil squash in mixture of mostly water w/ some stock and a little 2% milk (enough liquid to just cover squash), 15-20 min.
--Puree or mash squash w/ liquid; add pinch dry mustard, nutmeg, salt and pepper.
--Mix squash with 1/2 C part-skim ricotta and 4T grated Parmesan.
--Taste and adjust seasoning.
--Combine squash with 1 lb cooked penne pasta. Mix well.
--Coat lasagna pan w/ cooking spray; add pasta.
--Sprinkle with panko crumbs (mixed with 2T Parmesan and 1t of butter or oil).
--Bake at 375 for 10-15 min, or until brown.


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M-N-C #2
In the middle of the week, I needed an emergency dinner idea. I was really hungry, and I actually had some time to prepare a decent meal (as opposed to the twenty minutes in which I normally have to cram prep, cooking, and eating). I had a butternut squash in my fridge (don't you? at all times? just in case?) and a large block of Cheddar, so I thought, what the hell?, and I went for my second m-n-c of the week.

Browsing around Tasteologie always gets my creative juices flowing, and it has pretty enough photos to convince Dorian to try almost anything, so I relied on those fine contributors for my recipe. This one is adapted from A Good Appetite. They have buckets of yummy recipes, so go check them out! At any rate, it was far easier than I'd anticipated, what with the whole roast-the-squash-then-make-a-cream-sauce thing. By the time the pasta was cooked, the squash was roasted and the sauce simmered patiently on the stove.

Sinner's Jalapeno Butternut Mac-n-Cheese
--Roast cubed butternut squash w/ olive oil, salt, and pepper until browned.
--Cook 1 lb penne pasta (I used whole wheat to great effect here).
--Melt a little butter in a saucepan, and saute 1/2 minced onion and 2 chopped jalapenos.
--Add 2 T flour and cook, stirring, for 1 min.
--Whisk in 1/2 C heavy cream and about 1 C milk; stir for 2 min. until thick.
--Stir in 10 oz grated sharp Cheddar and 1 T dry mustard.
--Season with salt and pepper.
--Combine pasta and squash in saucepan.
--Pour mixture into buttered/sprayed lasagna pan.
--Sprinkle with panko (tossed with Parmesan and olive oil); bake at 425 for 10 min.

If I had planned this meal instead of throwing it together at the last minute, I would have also made a fresh pico de gallo with tomatillos. Nothing makes cheese more delicious than tomatillos and onions and chiles. Seriously. Try it.

I also put some broccoli on the plate for this, as an alibi.

I will warn you, in advance, that the first m-n-c gets a little dry when you reheat it, so add a little stock or water or cream. The second m-n-c gets a little oily when you reheat it, as the cream and cheese begin to separate into their components. Still tastes awesome, though. And maybe it's a good thing--you can pour some of the grease out and then you don't ingest it.

Victory for the Forces of Democratic Freedom!

Well, okay. There’s nothing intrinsically democratic about vegetarian cuisine. Egalitarian, maybe. Ethical, certainly. But democratic is a stretch. I was just going to go with “Victory!” but then the little David Foster Wallace in my head forced me to submit to his perverse will.

Back to the victory: two delicious meatless meals last week, both wild successes, neither eliciting any form of “this would be good with meat” commentary from Dorian. Unfortunately for you, gentle reader, we once again put this food in our bellies before the camera could climb out of its case. But no matter—curry isn’t the most attractive foodstuff in the world. Damn tasty though.

Before the curry, I made a zucchini taco filling from Rick Bayless’ Mexico: One Plate at a Time, which has been my kitchen bible for over a decade. Bayless’ tome is my Joy of Cooking, my Mastering the Art of French Cooking; it’s how I taught myself to cook. If I’d had the foresight, I could have blogged my way through it and scored a lucrative book deal. Except I had no particular desire to change my name. (To Ricki. For the blog. Ricki and Rick. Like Julie and Julia. Get it?)

And but so, I’ve made nearly everything in the Bayless book except these tacos, which I have oft eyed up but never had the courage to serve to my family. Zucchini? In a taco?? Blech. That’s what their faces said, anyway. But I finally did it, and I’ll have you know, it was freaking amazing. Dorian LOVED it, and begged me to make it for dinner again as soon as possible. Say it with me, people: VICTORY FOR THE FORCES OF DEMOCRATIC FREEDOM!

Zucchini Taco Filling
--Broil 2 poblanos 10 min or until black all over. Put them in a bowl covered with a kitchen towel for 10 min. Rub the blackened skins off and pull out the seeds and stem. Slice into ¼” strips.
--Saute 1 chopped onion in a little veggie oil until browned, 8 min.
--Add 2 cloves minced garlic; sauté 1 min.
--Add 1 small can crushed tomatoes (or 4 small tomatoes, pureed); reduce heat to medium-low, cover, and cook 5 min.
--Turn up heat to medium-high; add 3 zucchini, diced into ½” pieces, 1 C corn kernels, and poblano strips; add 3 T chopped cilantro, 2/3 C whipping cream, and 1 t salt. Sauté 8 min.
--Serve on warm corn tortillas with crumbled feta or queso fresco.

The second win of the week was this sweet, spicy, rich-but-healthy veggie curry from a deviation on a recipe found Cook’s Illustrated. I don’t want to impinge on their copyright (they guard those recipes very closely!), so I can’t give exact measurements here. But if you are a moderately adept cook, you’ll find great success in just throwing stuff in a Dutch oven and letting it simmer. Note that you can also change the veggies to suit your tastes.

Curry with Eggplant, Sweet Potato, and Green Beans
--Saute 2 chopped onions in a couple T veggie oil. Use a Dutch oven or large sauté pan.
--Add a large sweet potato, cut into ½” dice; sauté until potato and onion are browned.
--Add aromatics: a dollop of minced garlic, a couple dollops of curry powder, a sliced jalapeno, a dollop of garam masala, and some grated fresh ginger. Don’t fret; you really can’t screw this part up as far as amounts/ratios go. Saute 1 min, until fragrant.
--Add other veggies. I used a diced eggplant, a couple of handfuls of fresh green beans (cut into 1” lengths), and a can of chickpeas. Cauliflower would also be good. Stir around until veggies are coated with the spices.
--Throw in a small can of diced tomatoes (make sure you avoid the basil-flavored ones; I almost had a disgusting kitchen misstep because of these insidious bastards), a dollop of tomato paste, and about ½ C water, and cook over medium-low heat for about 20 min, or until the veggies are tender.
--Swirl in just a couple of tablespoons of heavy cream or coconut milk.

This was delicious by itself, but its yummy factor was amped up tremendously by the addition of some mango chutney and a Greek yogurt-cilantro-mint—grated cucumber-garlic mixture. And a generous squeeze of fresh lime.

This curry reheats exceptionally well, and so is ideal for a weekend meal with weekday leftovers. AND it takes about a tenth of the time that most curries require. AND it’s meatless (vegan, even, I think, if you use the coconut milk). AND it has no butter, unlike much Indian food. The only potential drawback is that my son couldn’t eat it; it was just too spicy for a kindergartner. Next time I might leave out the jalapeno, and grate it into the raita instead.