Caroline is the editor-in-chief of Literary Mama, the associate director of The Sustainable Arts Foundation, and co-editor of The Cassoulet Saved Our Marriage as well as Mama, PhD: Women Write About Motherhood and Academic Life (Rutgers University Press, 2008).
The one day a year I am very happy to take orders from my kids is on their birthdays, when they know they can order up a day of special meals, culminating in whatever birthday cake they like.
Ben’s birthday today falls on a school day, so I have no say over his lunch, but I’m mixing up waffle batter for breakfast. Then for dinner at home, the boy has requested homemade sushi and a lemon layer cake for dessert.
The layer cake is one I haven’t made since a friend’s baby shower four years ago, but it’s a classic 1-2-3-4 cake that’s a good one to have in the repertoire. I’m using the Martha Stewart recipe for a lemon version, with The Joy of Cooking’s lemon curd filling (because it uses whole eggs rather than the just-yolks version Martha suggests) and a lemon cream cheese frosting. And then, because my boy loves candied citrus peel, I’ve made candied lemon peel to decorate the top. Ben, claiming birthday boy prerogative, is not assisting with the baking (even I don’t bake my own birthday cake), but his younger brother volunteered as an enthusiastic sous chef, and wound up pretty much handling the project on his own. He just needed me to read the recipe:
I don’t think I’ll leave the baking entirely to him anytime soon; after all, it feels like a privilege to bake something delicious for my favorite nine-year-old.
I am a big fan of letting the kids experiment in the kitchen to discover what tastes good to them. Ben, for example, went through a period of snacking on sun-dried tomatoes and graham crackers — a snack I never would have thought to offer the child but kept him happy for countless afternoons. At home, my boys have a pretty well-stocked pantry to explore, with a nice variety of nuts and dried fruit, as well as a good supply of fresh fruit, yogurt, and other snacking ingredients, and it’s always interesting for me to see what they come up with.
When we are traveling, though, our supplies are necessarily more limited. So it was the other afternoon in Lake Tahoe, where we spent some of the boys’ winter break. Eli was snacky and also, after a full morning in a ski lesson, a little tired. He needed something mellow and fun to do as much as he needed something to eat. So, I looked out on the balcony at the quickly-accumulating snow and asked him if he wanted to eat some of that. “Really, Mama? I can eat the snow?” “Sure,” I reminded him; “We can make sugar on snow like we do at Granddad’s, we just don’t have syrup.”
So, I thought about Lisa’s Hawaiian shave ice treats and we improvised with the ingredients at hand.
First, snow sprinkled with cocoa mix:
Surprisingly, not a huge hit.
Then we tried snow with raspberry jam heated into a syrup:
I liked it, but Eli didn’t.
Finally, the winner: snow drizzled with honey!
It’s not, of course, the most power-packed nutritional snack; ultimately the activity was more important here than the appetite. It was fun and easy and the boy was in charge: a winner in my book.
There is something so 1950s about this recipe that I almost feel like I should wait until Mad Men starts airing again before posting it. But this time of year, with winter dragging on and spring not quite here, I need something new and fun (and yes, always quick) to get out of these cold weather doldrums. So I present to you:
Here’s what I love about puffs:
they’re versatile: the puffs can be round or oblong, big or small, sweet or savory
they’re easy to make ahead and keep until you want them
they’re fun to make
they require no special ingredients
Technically, these are pâte à choux, or choux pastry, but don’t let the French put you off. If you can boil water, you can make these.
Once they are baked and cooled, you can fill them with sweetened ricotta cheese, whipped cream, or jam; you can slice them in half and make ice cream sandwiches; you can dip them in chocolate syrup; spread them with Nutella; or sprinkle them with chopped, toasted nuts.
You can also make them a savory snack or appetizer by adding half a cup of grated cheese (Gruyere is traditional) to the batter, and/or a bit of lemon zest or chopped fresh herbs. Brush the unbaked puffs with egg wash and sprinkle them with sesame seeds, poppy seeds, grated Parmesan and/or ground pepper. Fill the baked, cooled puffs with herbed cream or goat cheese, or slice and spread them with a bit of cheese, a dab of roasted red pepper, smoked salmon… the possibilities are really endless.
Obviously the guests at your next cocktail party would be delighted to see these, but (and let’s be honest about where the bulk of our cooking energy is directed) so would your kids when they get home from school. Puffs can be fancy or familiar, depending simply on your imagination and presentation.
The recipe couldn’t be simpler:
½ cup butter
1 cup water
¼ teaspoon salt
1 cup all-purpose flour
4 eggs
Preheat the oven to 400 and line a couple baking sheets with parchment.
In a medium saucepan, melt the butter in the water. Add salt and flour, and stir until the batter starts to pull away from the sides of the pan. Remove from the heat and beat in the eggs, one at a time, until the batter is smooth.
Pour the batter into a piping bag fitted with a large tip, or into a large ziploc from which you then snip open one corner. Pipe the pastry onto the baking sheets into whatever shape you like: small puffs, big puffs, or oblongs. If you like, smooth the tops with a fingertip dipped in cold water. Bake for 20-25 minutes (smaller puffs will bake more quickly), until golden brown, crisp and dry. Let cool before filling.
To fill, slice in half and spread with filling, or put the filling into a pastry bag fitted with a large tip (or a ziploc bag with its corner cut), poke a small hole into the bottom of the puff, and simply squirt in the filling.
If you want to keep some for later, let cool and then freeze (unfilled) in a ziploc bag; they’ll thaw and reheat quickly in a hot oven.
Ben was sick. He lay on the couch, with neither an appetite nor a fever nor any other symptoms. It was starting to get worrisome, the lack of symptoms. At least when a child is sneezing or vomiting you have a general idea of how to make them feel better and when they might turn the corner. He’d missed two and a half days of school, and I was just starting to think I should consider calling the doctor when he got up off the couch, pulled a couple books off the kitchen bookshelf, and took them back to his cozy spot under the blanket, now paging through his Spatulatta cookbook, showing more energy than he had in days.
“Can we make this, Mama?” he asked. And without even knowing what recipe he was looking at, maybe Stained Glass Cookies or Extra-E-Z Fudge, I said yes, we can make that. And we did, and we will again because it is a) delicious; b) healthy; c) quick; d) easy enough for even a sick kid to make. We added a carrot and some black sesame seeds (Ben is wild about sesame seeds) to the recipe, but otherwise followed it as written. Here’s how you can make it, too:
3″ piece fresh ginger
1 carrot (optional)
10 oz tofu
2 scallions, sliced in rounds
2 T soy sauce
sesame seeds of any color, to taste (optional)
Peel the skin from the ginger and grate with a microplane or the small side of a box grater. Peel the carrot and grate with the large side of the box grater. Slice the tofu into 1″ cubes and place in a serving dish. Sprinkle the sesame seeds, carrot, ginger, and scallions over the tofu, drizzle with soy sauce and serve.
I have to admit that a food article about cooking post-kids is speaking to me when I read, “Well, I used to actually cook…Now I just make food.”
I might like to think I resist this cliché, but really, the days of poring over cookbooks to find new recipes, making spontaneous market trips (or multiple market trips) to assemble ingredients, and knowing that whatever I put on the table will be greeted warmly by my dining companions — those days are pretty much on hold right now. Oh, they aren’t over entirely; we do find new things to cook, especially when we take the kids with us to the market, but the priority these days is not on the new, but on what’s quick, reliable, and healthy.
When I do want to innovate, I follow a friend’s advice to make sure there’s at least something on the table I’m confident the kids will like. Like Lisa using cornbread to ease the way to chili earlier in the week, I usually make sure there’s either bread or rice on the table (our standard rice/quinoa mix) when I offer something new. In this recipe, I was fairly confident they’d eat the tofu (though the lemon juice made it a question), and pretty sure I’d get at least one thumbs up on the kale (from my 3rd grader; the kindergartner’s on a bit of a vegetable strike at the moment). The chopped peanuts were a plus, too; my kids, like most, adore any extras they can sprinkle on the top of a dish and in our house we’ve retained Ben’s early malapropism and delight the boys by calling these extras not condiments, but contaminants.
So, Eli, the kindergartner took one bite of the tofu, pronounced it delicious, and only ate one more bite. He tried one dainty scrap of kale and pushed the rest aside in favor of carrot sticks, a big helping of rice, and a handful of peanuts. His older brother ate the entire meal, as served. That’s a success in my book, and I’ll be making this one again.
I’m copying in the recipe just as it appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, in an article by Amanda Gold.
10 ounces extra-firm tofu
1/4 cup low-sodium soy sauce
1/4 cup lemon juice (from about 2 lemons)
2 tablespoons honey
1 tablespoon toasted sesame oil
3 tablespoons olive oil
Kosher salt and ground black pepper, to taste (I left these out)
1 or 2 bunches Lacinato or Tuscan kale (about 8 cups, chopped)
1/3 cup roasted, salted peanuts, coarsely chopped
2 tablespoons thinly sliced green onions
Cut the tofu into 1-inch cubes, and place on paper towels to
drain while you make the marinade.
Whisk together the soy sauce, lemon juice, honey, sesame oil, 2
tablespoons olive oil, and salt and pepper to taste in a medium-sized bowl. Add the tofu, and gently toss to coat; let marinate for about 15 minutes.
Meanwhile, remove the tough stems and ribs from the kale, and cut the leaves into 1/4- to 1/2-inch slices. Rinse and dry very well. Take care to remove grit and water, either in a salad spinner or by hand. Place into a serving bowl and set aside.
Set a large, nonstick frying pan over medium-high heat. Add the remaining 1 tablespoon olive oil and heat until shimmering. Use a slotted spoon to lift the tofu out of the marinade and add to the pan in one layer; cook, undisturbed, until bottoms are golden brown, about 2 minutes. Stir the tofu and continue to cook for another 3 minutes, gently stirring every
minute or so, until golden brown on most sides.
Add the marinade and let boil down for about 1 minute. Pour the contents of the pan over the kale, toss gently to fully coat the leaves with the dressing, and garnish with peanuts and green onions. Let stand for a few minutes to slightly wilt the kale, toss once more, and serve warm.
