This time of year, I start baking even more than usual and Eli doesn’t want to eat anything but another quick bread, be it apple, pear, banana or pumpkin. So I get him to bake with me, which he is happy to do, wielding his whisk with great care. I also try to adjust the recipes a bit to make them more nutritious; he thinks he can live on bread alone, and with this and some milk or yogurt on the side… Well, I still want him to eat green vegetables. But this is pretty good.
I started with a recipe from Gourmet magazine which hasn’t turned up on line yet; I cut the sugar, replaced the white flour with whole wheat, and replaced some of the oil with ground flaxseed. It’s light and delicious.
2 c whole wheat flour
6 T ground flax
3/4 t baking soda
1/2 t ground cinnamon
1/4 t ground allspice
1/4 t ground cloves
1/4 t ground ginger
1/4 t salt
2 large eggs
1/3 c water or milk
1 c brown sugar
1 c pumpkin puree
3 oz vegetable oil
1 t vanilla extract
1 c chopped toasted walnuts (optional; I leave them out because the kids don’t like them)
Preheat the oven to 350 and line a 9 x 5 inch baking pan with parchment.
Whisk together the dry ingredients in one bowl, then whisk together the remaining ingredients in a second bowl. Add the wet to the dry and whisk until blended and smooth. Pour batter into prepared pan.
Bake for 45 minutes, until the bread is firm to the touch and a tester inserted into the middle of the loaf comes out clean. Baked goods with flax in them tend to brown pretty quickly, so if your bread is getting dark and the loaf isn’t cooked through yet, just cover it lightly with foil and continue baking.
My offer was innocent enough, and both kids leapt at it, but there was a semantic conflict that nearly brought down the house.
“I want pancakes,” Finn shouted.
“I want griddle cakes,” Ella countered.
“No,” he protested. “Pan. Cakes.”
“They’re Griddle Cakes,” she insisted.
“I. Want. Pancakes.” Finn stomped.
“Finn! They are the same thing!. They are GRIDDLE CAKES!”
“NOT I WANT GRIDDLE CAKES! I WANT PANCAKES.”
At which point I held up the griddle, and Ella said, “Finn, pancakes are griddle cakes.”
He looked at the familiar evidence: the yellow melamine mixing bowl, the whisk, the griddle on the stove, and the tears stopped. He laughed. “Oh! Not I know that pancakes are griddle cakes.”
I grew up eating pacakes on Sunday mornings, which my father made from Bisquick, and which I don’t buy. I have tried recipe after recipe, mix after mix and never quite found the perfect formula until Ella brought home from the library the excellent Fannie in the Kitchen: The Whole Story from Soup to Nuts, a nonfiction story about how Fannie Farmer got her start.
The recipe is a dream: simple, straightforward, failproof, and it makes the perfect pancake. The griddle cakes, as we now call them, because that’s what Fanny called them are not to thin, not too thick, easy to cook, easy to eat. WIth Grade B Maple Syrup, you may well rediscover the family breakfast table. While I do keep a box of mix on hand for emergency dinners, it gets used maybe once a year.
In the book, Fanny teaches her young charge how to cook many things, including griddle cakes, so of course Ella, now 6, has taken this lesson to heart, and so has Finn, age almost-4.
We had few extra frozen blueberries stashed, which we sprinkled on her griddle cakes, and Ella remembered to watch the griddle cakes until they were bubbling and dry around the edges, and then she carefully slid the spatula under the disc and… flip! the perfect pancake.
She stood on a step stool, and I was close by, talking her through the steps, what was to safe to touch, what not. She does have basic knife & kitchen safety skills, so I felt relatively okay about the safety aspect of the experiment. I was less okay about what would happen if the pan–I mean griddle cake collapsed in a gooey mess. But the recipe is, as I said, a dream.
But then Finn wanted a turn.
I took a deep breath. I said okay. I tried to help him, but he is stubborn. I showed him how to flip the pancake a few times, hand over hand. Then I showed him what was very, very hot. Then I stepped back. He, too, has been in the kitchen a lot with me. Kory stood just behind him.
And just to prove that you, too, can make the perfect pancake, my not-quite-4-year old really did flip his own griddle-pancakes.
Of course, the real cooking was nearly as big a hit as the eating, and soon Ella was clamoring:
“It’s my flipping turn!”
And so, for your eating and flipping pleasure:
Fannie Farmer’s Griddle Cakes
2 cups flour
1/4 cup sugar
1 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1 egg
2 cups milk
2 tablespoons melted butter
1. Sift together all dry ingredients into a large bowl. This is an essential step. We just use a sieve, and work over the sink for easy clean up.
2. In a glass measuring cup beat the egg.
3. Add milk to the egg.
3. Pour egg and milk mixture slowly over dry ingredients, whisking to incorporate.
4. Add butter.
4. Cook batter on a hot griddle. Don’t turn the griddle cakes too soon! Wait until they are bubbling all over the center and a little dry around the edges.
I realize that just by writing that title, I run the risk of losing once-happy eaters from our dinner table; somehow they will sense that I consider this meal a winner, and they’ll cringe and complain next time it appears on the table. Eli, using the phrase he adopted from our winter-long reading of the Pooh books, will shake his head and say mournfully, “I’m not in cauliflower corner anymore.”
But, in the interest of spreading the word about a couple things that have worked for us, in the hopes that they might work for you, here is one dinner that my children have, at least in the past, reliably eaten. Check in next week to see if the power of the blog has somehow reduced its appeal.
Pasta with Roasted Cauliflower
1 head of cauliflower
1/3 c pitted olives, very coarsely chopped (or more, to taste)
2-3 tbsp capers (again, more or less depending on how salty you like things)
1 pound of pasta
olive oil
freshly ground black pepper, grated Parmesan cheese, and chopped parsley to taste; toasted bread crumbs would be a nice addition, too, if you happen to have them
Preheat the oven to 400 and put up a big pot of water to boil.
Break the cauliflower up into bite-sized florets (this is the most time-consuming part of the recipe). Toss the cauliflower onto a large baking pan, with the olives and capers, and drizzle a couple tablespoons of olive oil over the lot. Roast, stirring once or twice, for about 20 minutes, until the cauliflower is tender and starting to brown a bit around the edges.
Toward the end of the cauliflower-cooking time, boil the pasta. When it’s done, drain, reserving a half cup or so of the pasta water. Toss the pasta back into the cooking pot with the roasted cauliflower, olives and capers. Add some of the pasta water if it seems too dry. Serve with lots of freshly ground black pepper, grated cheese, a sprinkling of parsley, and some bread crumbs.
Kory was supposed to take Ella and Finn to soccer while I cooked dinner in peace and let the medication work.
Instead we had a fight. Someday Kory may tell his side of the story in his own, excellent blog in graphic form. However, this is my blog.
Somehow, he could not manage, as sometimes happens with X-chromosome-challenged beings to get the children out-the-door-on-time-without-screaming (by which I mean on the part of all involved parties), nor could soccer socks be found, etc, etc, which led to the rescinding of bike-riding promises, which led to the utter devolution of the generally sane family culture we imagine we maintain, which led to the utterance, on my spouse’s part of a tirade of language which is absolutely Not Fit to Print in a family friendly blog, especially when said writer is trying to sell said anthology to a reputable publishing house. And so, in a final burst of anger, guess who walked both children to the park–late– for Finn’s soccer class with her ratty nap clothes and her bed head and her lingering migraine and two still sniffing, shaken-up children?
My only revenge was that I had uttered the stern caveat, “Dinner better be on the table when we get back.”
On the counter was a jar of pizza sauce and a bag of premade pizza dough.
It was not so bad at the park. It was a beautiful afternoon and we had one of those half hours that’s more of a meditation than anything else. Ella and I kicked around the soccer ball a bit, then cheered for her brother then sat quietly on the sidelines. Finn ran around joyfully. Ella & I talked a little about what had happened, how her Dad was wrong to use that language, how I wasn’t quite sure what we’d find when we returned. That Dad might not be at home, which was something he had threatened in his anger. Emptily, I imagined, but there might always be a first.
“You mean he might go to a hotel?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said. “Maybe.”
“Well, I hope he doesn’t do that,” she said. “That would be a big waste of our money.” To which I could only laugh. It was turning into an okay afternoon.
But we did consider that the kitchen might be a disaster. Which is generally the state of things when Kory cooks. That there might not be dinner. But that I would I make dinner if he hadn’t. We prepared ourselves for whatever might be waiting for us, and that whatever it was, would be okay.
We walked home, less than an hour later. I prepared both kids to be respectful and calm, whatever lay inside. They took off their cleats and we opened the door.
The table was set beautifully, with all the utensils in their proper places.
There were little pots of carrots.
A little pot of sliced pinot grigio salami.
A bowl of steamed, dressed broccoli di cicco.
A plate of fried pimentos di padrone (little hot and sweet fry peppers which are addictive).
The deer tongue lettuce was washed and ready to dress.
The pizza was ready to cook.
The oven was actually preheated.
The counters were clean and the floors were swept.
We got an apology, but as soon as I had seen the table, and the food, and the care he had taken, I hadn’t needed much more.
A very long time ago, the late and much loved chef Barton Rouse taught me that food=love. This does not mean that you reward with food, or anything so simple as that you give a kid food to show them how much you love them, but rather that the context and culture of how you eat says something about how you take care of each other.
It means that food means something.
It means that the small gestures we make every day can sometimes matter in very big ways.
The fact that my husband took the time to forage for the things we loved in the refrigerator, that he prepared them with care, and presented them beautifully, that he cleaned up after himself–that was him loving us. That was him saying he was sorry. That was him saying that our family matters–not through food, exactly, but through the culture of the meal. I would have cooked exactly the same thing, but I was glad nearly to tears that I didn’t have to.
I made sure that both Ella and Finn saw exactly what Dad had done. I made sure that they both saw that the kitchen was clean. Ella was duly impressed. Finn was hungry.
After, we lit the first fire of the season and watched Hercules. The Muses sang.
After that, when I mentioned how great the meal had been, and that I would have to blog about it, Ella corrected me. She insisted I would have tell the whole story, and when I asked her what, exactly, that was she gave me my title.
Ella is much more a child of Silicon Valley than either Kory or I.
As soon as the weather turns warm, she begs for a lemonade stand.
She’d be outside three days a week if someone would sit with her, and while she’s constantly got a plan to buy a Barbie Peek-a-boo or some such Pony-&-Rainbow-pink-bespangled-toy, mostly she saves her money. She has, however, also had Lemonade Stands For The Greater Good and raised Lemonade Money for Sea Turtles. This has resulted in all sorts of good things like literature and calendars and personal letters addressed to her about the turtles and what She Can Do To Help Turtles and thus the earth. This has meant an ongoing campaign in our house for fewer plastic bags, etc. It really has helped her global awareness in a local sort of way. She can go in our back yard, pick lemons, make lemonade, sell lemonade to her neighbors, send the money to the Nature Conservancy, get a really nice letter back, and feel like she’s really made a difference to a turtle or two. It does help that she’s seen one or two in Hawaii. The lesson here is that as far as activism goes, here at least, I am sure that Maria Montessori was right.
So, it was quite natural, I tell you, for Ella to want to sell Lemonade for Obama.
We bought red and blue cups, napkins, and a tablecloth, a blue star balloon. We had lemonade and cookies for the kids and my homemade limoncello for “major donors” (which was everone). Ella and Finn spent Thursday night making signs. I sent out word through Facebook and email, we set up shop in our carport. You can read about the recipe below, over which Ella has always had complete control, and the full cost of the even on my personal site.
I had suggested, in the expediency of time, that we use frozen lemonade, but Ella demurred, “That WON’T be as special,” she said. That point certainly was not up for debate.
Ella’s Lemonade
1. Fresh squeezed lemons :
We juice a lot at once, and freeze the extra in ice cube trays, so we can make the lemonade quickly from the cubes whenever we like.
2. Simple Syrup
Boil 2 parts sugar & 1 part water until the sugar dissolves, we make a lot and store it in the refrigerator so we always have some on hand. You can use it to make all manner of cocktails as well as lemonade.
3. Distilled Water
This can be from your refrigerator, your tap, bottles..whatever you like.
Directions
In a large pitcher mix approximately 1 part lemon juice, 2 parts water, 1 part syrup to taste. If I make it, Ella will always correct me to make it perfect. The trick is to have the cool simple syrup on hand. You can add some bubbly water for fizz if you like.
