Tapas (or The Dangers of Telling Kids Things, Though Sometimes I Get Lucky)

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Ever since my older kid found out about High Tea, he’s been (even more) intrigued about the different ways people eat. The other day we told him that people in Spain eat snacks around 5pm (aka after school time) and dinner really late. So, of course, he wanted to try it.

Tonight we had “appetizers” around 6pm and are planning on dinner at 8:30pm. (NB: there’s no school tomorrow.) Because we’ve stretched out the evening*, and because we shook up our routine, we were all much more relaxed and I found myself eating bluefish paté**, drinking a martini***, and listening to my spouse explain hexadecimal to two actually interested kids. Magic.

Now the problem is explaining why we can’t do this every night. (Or maybe figuring out how we can do it every night, though I suspect it would require siestas.)

*generally dinner is at 6:30, then there’s arguing about clearing the table, then one brief thing like a game, then arguing about getting ready for bed, then…

**apps menu: smoked salmon and bluefish paté from the farmers’ market, crackers, teeny pumpernickel toasts, cornichons, and blue corn chips (because kid the younger did not trust me to make the pumpernickel toasts the right degree of crunchy and wanted a back-up)

***because I’m extra lucky

Root Vegetable Pancakes (Which Are Kinda Latkes & Kinda Not)

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Ah, November, when New England thoroughly enters the long, dark time of root vegetable season. We’ve still got Brussels Sprouts at the market, but we’re also seeing more & more radishes, beets, potatoes, parsnips, and turnips and less & less of anything else. (No one except me, in my family, will eat a beet. Parsnips are only slightly more popular.)

So… what’s a a nice person who tries to eat local & seasonal (at least some of the time) to do? Enter the root vegetable pancake, aka these-are-not-really-latkes. They’re tasty! They can count as an entree for Meatless Mondays! Best of all, you can slather them with apple sauce and sour cream.

Basic formula:

~2 lbs shredded root vegetables, such as potatoes, turnips, parsnips, or even beets if you’re not in my house. I generally include some onion, maybe one small onion for every two lbs. of total veg. People who don’t like turnips will be happier if you use at least 1 lb potato and save the weird stuff for the other 1 lb.

1 egg

1/4 cup flour

salt and pepper

chopped herbs if you feel like it

oil for frying

Basic method:

Shred the veggies, then place them in a flour sack dishtowel or piece of cheesecloth and sprinkle with some salt (~1 tsp). Let sit for a minute or two, then squeeze out any possible liquid by twisting the veg. in the towel over the sink or a bowl. Squeeze hard.

Mix the now drier veg. with the egg and flour. Add pepper and chopped herbs to taste.

Fry (in ~1/4 cup rounds) in olive oil (or bacon fat if you’re really not going to call them latkes) over medium heat until both sides are medium brown and crisp. Keep warm in a low oven while frying the rest.

Serve with sour cream and apple sauce. Celebrate that you actually remembered to use your turnips.

For much more thorough directions of almost exactly this same thing, check out Food52’s How to Make Latkes Without a Recipe.

A Life Should Have Secret Plans*

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Surprise! I started a food blog.

I decided a few weeks ago, since I’m currently between paying gigs and November was approaching, that I should do something akin to NaNoWriMo. I even pondered doing the traditional challenge and pounding out a novel. Truth is, however, that all my novel ideas thus far haven’t because actual novels for a reason (or maybe multiple reasons). My spouse suggested a poem a day, but, while I actually do write poetry at times, a poem a day seemed a challenge that I was sure to fail at. Poetry is fickle, at least for me. I finalized my November goal as “Publish something every day in November. Twitter doesn’t count.” Then, I didn’t tell anyone, at least not at first. I wanted to have started the project before I announced it.

So here we are. My goal is one post per day in November, weekly posts thereafter. Anything related to food is fair game. If you’re reading this (and now someone might be, because I’ve started to admit this blog exists), please let me know what topics might interest you! Let’s see where this goes.

*Title stolen, with love, from A Softer World

Market Mornings, Roaming Kid

picture of pastries, turnips, salmon and mushroom growing kit
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My 7 year old and I have a new routine. For the past few weeks, we’ve gone to the local Farmers’ Market together, then to the café, every Saturday morning.

I’ve been trying to get my kids to enjoy going to the market with me for years. In California, land of grandmothers*, free samples, and pozole, they go happily. In Massachusetts, where it’s just Mom buying vegetables and occasionally relenting on chocolate or popsicles, it’s not as appealing. I finally discovered the secret formula, however – I get market tokens (which work as cash, but only at the market), hand some over to my kid, and let him roam independently. He finally loves it.

There’s one rule**: no sweets. It is amazing to me how well this works. He has happily come back to our rendezvous point with carrots, mushrooms, eggs, a decorative gourd, discount apples, and more. This week’s haul was a croissant, a ciabatta roll, a mushroom growing kit (specially budgeted for after he found out its price last week), smoked salmon, and two turnips. NB: He won’t actually eat the turnips; those he picked out for me. I am still charmed.

This is, for the record, a kid who is pretty darn choosy and restrictive about what he eats, a kid who has marked reticence regarding talking with strangers and trying new things. He politely waits in line, inquires about prices, and delights in his finds. He also ate smoked salmon for lunch. It’s great.

It may not last long, but I’m appreciating the heck out of it while it works, and tomorrow he said he’d help make potato/turnip pancakes, even if he doesn’t want to actually eat them.

*Two of their grandmothers that is. They also have grandmothers in Indiana and Oregon.

**One rule re: buying things that is, general rules such as do not run people over with your scooter and ask before petting someone’s dog also apply.

Chocolate Chip Cookies & Why I <3 Twitter

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I love the Internet. Sure it’s distracting, bubble-prone, priority mangling, full of vitriol, etc., but it also facilitates conversations in ways that make my life richer, better informed, more connected, and more fun.

Yesterday, I was reading food articles on the bus, like ya do, and came across Food52’s article on Ovenly’s chocolate chip cookies – chocolate chip cookies that just happen to be vegan. I sent a link to my twitter account with one word “Skeptical”. Almost immediately, a couple friends replied that they were going to try it (for science!). Because sometimes peer pressure is great, I decided to try it too. (I even almost followed the recipe! I added 1 tsp of vanilla though. Couldn’t help myself. Oh, and I scooped them smaller so the recipe yield was 25 rather than 18.)

Results:

Friend the First concluded that while these are definitely chocolate chip cookies, they are not chewy enough for her (probably due to the lack of egg). (I haven’t yet heard from Friend the Second.)

I baked the first dozen of my 25. They are… OK. I miss the depth of flavor they’d get from butter and I don’t love how crumbly the dough is (probably due to lack of egg). They also didn’t spread as much as I’d like, so for future batches I think I’ll squash them a bit before baking. I’d definitely make these for office parties, so vegan compatriots could have a tasty dessert that just happened to be vegan. For myself, though, I’ll stick with Toll House, letting the batter rest overnight whenever I manage to plan that far ahead.

Add Another Thing

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Once upon a time, in a life before kids, I took a short series of cooking classes with John Ash. He’s a nice guy, with a much pickier palate than mine.

I’ve retained three things from those classes, though I only practice two of them:

  • If you blanch your basil for pesto, it will stay green rather than oxidizing. (I never bother.)
  • You can tame raw garlic (for pesto or salad dressing or …) by blanching it in boiling water for about a minute. (This one I do bother with. Tossing individual cloves in a small sauté pan in water to cover is quick and easy and does make a difference.)
  • If a dish doesn’t taste quite right, add a taste element that isn’t yet represented: sweet, salty, bitter, spicy, sour, umami.

That last one, while possibly obvious, is a trick which has saved me from a boring dish countless times. Today, it was squash soup. A simple base of sautéed onions, squash, chicken stock, a middle-eastern spice blend from a friend. This was good! But… it needed something. It had sweet, umami, and a bit of spice. I added some sherry (round and nutty, yet still counts as sour) and it was much better.

Then, of course, my 7 year old refused to even try it (though he did have several servings of salad).

Talking About Cows with Kids

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Recently we were on a lovely, Halloween candy detoxing, ramble through the local woods when the conversation turned to pollution and greenhouse gases. My eight-year-old chimed in with the sober, mostly accurate news that cows burp methane, a greenhouse gas, at alarming rates. Yep, they sure do, I agreed, though I don’t know if your numbers are exactly accurate and there are many factors to consider regarding meat.

I talked some about what I do, which is try to source our meat as carefully as possible, from farmers I feel are doing their best for their land and their animals, and to try to eat nose-to-tail, and then we talked about what more we could do. He suggested if we have salad with every meal we might eat less meat. I brought up meatless Mondays. The truth is neither of us (or anyone else in the household) wants to give up meat altogether. I’ve learned, through trying many different ways of eating, that eating meat makes my body and brain feel better than being vegetarian or vegan, despite knowing something about nutrition and how to prepare a good vegetarian diet. I also have a younger child who already limits what he’ll eat to relatively few things; eliminating chicken and ham would take out major protein sources, eliminating milk would be a huge nutritional blow. In the end, we didn’t come to any conclusions.

Honestly, I don’t know what to do about this question. I want my family to eat delicious, nurturing food. I want to live responsibly in the world. I’m a car driving American who is very fond of good steak, living in a place where it’s much much easier to make a good salad in July than it is in November. I have a kid who would gladly live solely on bread, butter, and milk if I let him and will rarely try something new. (I have another kid who is an adventurous eater, for which I am grateful, but I still have to feed both of them.) I think about this, a lot. I also, sometimes, just feed my family hotdogs and boxed mac and cheese.

I <3 Food Writing (More than Recipes)

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I own a full bookcase worth of cookbooks. It is only one bookcase because every time (OK, sometimes a year after every time) it goes over, I do an emotionally traumatic cull and let something go. I love my cookbooks.

I don’t cook much out of books, though. I read them, often cover to cover when I first get them, and then I keep them around for inspiration. If I’m attempting something new or complicated (or old and beloved but not set in stone), I’ll pull out a few different books to read their variations on the theme. I’m generally too non-compliant to follow any recipe word for word. (Unless its chemistry dictates that as the only wise choice, and sometimes, to my chagrin, not even then.)

I sometimes forget that my non-compliance runs deep when I discover new (to me) online food writing. I love reading food blogs as much as I love cookbooks. When I fall in love with a writer, I’ll often try their recipes word for word. And then, after the first few, I relearn the lesson. I’m just not wired that way.

Today, it was the Food Lab’s Ultra-Gooey Stovetop Mac and Cheese. This is an awesome article, full of both science and cheese. I wanted to love the recipe, too. More than that, I hoped to convince my kids to love it, especially the one who refuses to eat “good” mac and cheese, but loves the box kind. This one has real cheese! No dice, though. Too gooey. I suppose I should have guessed from the name and I definitely should have guessed from the cheese to pasta ratio, but I wanted to believe! Next time, I’ll use twice as much pasta. (You may love it as written! I know people who do! Maybe we’re just weird anti-goo people. Sure is a lot of cheese to pasta though.)