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).
As Lisa made clear with her post last week, the rules are different on vacation. We stay up later, sleep in (or so we hope), and we indulge in sweet treats and extra snacks — and so it is for the kids, too.
Now I’ve always been a milk shake and ice cream girl, but it turns out my son Ben is more of a fruit ice guy. At home we make tiny popsicles with toothpick holders in ice cube trays, sometimes dropping fresh berries inside them. On our recent trip to England, he discovered ice lollies and at Legoland (where I thought I might truly pass out from heat stroke), when Ben asked for a “star slush” for lunch, I asked only, “what flavour?”
This time of year the stone fruit is in all its glory, and Lisa’s already written about her family’s love of cherries, but it’s the peaches we love best around here. We eat them plain, standing over the sink to catch the drips, or cut into a bowl, sprinkled with a bit of cinnamon sometimes when we’re feeling fancy. We eat them sliced onto our cereal and our pancakes, with yogurt and with ice cream, swirled into smoothies and grilled on sweet pizzas. If pizza feels like too much of a production, you can achieve nearly the same effect with sliced peaches on toast spread with a dollop of ricotta cheese and sprinkled with cinnamon sugar:
I’m not much of a pie baker, but can recommend my sister’s recipe for a good and simple peach pie. And when friends are over, we bake the peaches into the easiest crisp: slice your fruit into a gratin pan, toss with a tablespoon or two of flour and maybe a bit of lemon juice. For the topping, combine equal parts melted butter, oatmeal, brown sugar, flour and wheat germ (I use a generous 1/2 cup for a 10″ gratin pan). Bake at 350 until browned on top and bubbly around the edges, about half an hour.
We are eating peaches every day, and we never tire of them; so tell me, how do you eat yours?
Every summer, I feel torn. The grasshopper part of me (do you remember your fables?) wants to gorge on all the varieties of stone fruit, gorgeous red tomatoes, tender peas and sweet corn, all the bright colorful variety of fruits and vegetables that remind me that even when it’s cold and foggy in my neighborhood of San Francisco, not far away the sun is shining on warm and summery farms and orchards.
And then there is the other part of me — the ant part– who can’t help thinking ahead to the days when it is cold all over the bay area, and our produce selections are far more limited: chard and kale, apples and pears, oranges, oranges, oranges. That’s when I want to freeze the berries, turn the stone fruits into interesting jams, make gallons of pesto for our winter pasta.
I’m trying to do both. Instead of being a miser with berries (or any of the rest of it), I’m trying to buy plenty to eat now, cook with, and stock for later. If strawberries are $4 a pint at the market but $10 for three, I’ll buy the three pints and freeze two. Basil is a couple dollars a bunch, so I buy four at a time for pesto now and more pesto in February. I’m spending more money at the market than usual, but with any luck this will translate into some winter savings and, perhaps just as important, a bright taste of summer when we’re deep in our rainy winter.
And at the risk of getting more “how-to” and advice giving than I am comfortable with, here is the new way we’re keeping pesto. Our ice cube trays (a gift to one of the boys from a friend) happen to be small stars and penguin shapes, and while they’re excellent for lemon and lime juice cubes, they’re a little small for pesto. So in the midst of my all my muffinbaking earlier this spring, Tony proposed we freeze cupcake-size portions of pesto. Works for me:
A friend, with boys about the ages of mine, takes comfort in the fact that my children are picky eaters. “I get that my kids don’t like my cooking,” she says, “but if your kids don’t eat, then it really must not be about the cooking!” And every time we talk, and we commiserate about the newest things our children have dropped from their diets, I reassure her that I really do think it’s about the kids, not the cooking.
But still, it’s hard. It’s exhausting to keep putting the food on the table when you know it will be met with frowns, groans, or worse. It’s tempting to give up and set out plain pasta every night — and I do mean plain, because a certain someone in this house won’t eat melted butter. And you do tend to forget what it’s like to set out food that people eat unquestioningly, not to mention with pleasure. It’s also, of course, incredibly worrisome (as Lisa and I have both written) as you begin to fear that your beautiful children will shrink and grow stunted from nutritional deficiencies.
This is where I’ve gotten with Eli and vegetables. Every night, no matter what else is on the table, I’ve gotten in the habit of putting out a bowl of carrot sticks because he will eat a good handful of those. That, and a taste of the spinach/chard/broccoli/etc that the rest of us are eating satisfies me. I’d given up even suggesting he try anything more.
But the other night I happened to notice him eyeing the salad. It was pretty, I agree; I wish I’d taken a picture. I’d tossed some gem lettuces with pea shoots and wild arugula, all from our mystery box. Ben, who is a big fan of salad (despite his reservations about taste and texture), was messily pushing leaves into his mouth.
“Eli,” I offered, “Would you like one of these crispy lettuce leaves?” “OK,” he agreed, “But just the crispy part.” So I broke off a pale white rib from a gem lettuce and handed it over. He munched it like a little bunny. I gave him another, and another, this time with some more tender green leaf attached. He asked for more, and I passed him a few leaves tangled up with the nearly translucent green pea shoots. “What are these?!” he asked happily. “Pea shoots,” I answered.
He pulled a tiny leaf off one of the pea shoots and ate it. He ate a couple more, and then started to sprinkle them on his pasta.
He took a bite of his pasta and smiled. He asked for more pea shoots, and again tore the leaves off the stems and flicked them on to his pasta. A small pile of pea shoot stems started to grow next to his plate (later, I scooped them up and ate them all in one bite). “This is my new recipe, Mama!” he said proudly. “My recipe is pasta and pea shoots.” Of course, if I’d offered it to him that way, I expect he would have turned up his nose, but that’s ok — I’m glad he’s finding his way to food he likes to eat, and the meal was just one more reminder to keep putting a variety of food out there, because you never know. Or as Eli put it, “Maybe if I start to eat all these foods, I’ll be someone who eats every food!”
But I’m not holding my breath. The next night I put out the pea shoots again and they were roundly rejected.
In the last couple days, I’ve experienced one of those funny swirls of coincidence that crop up sometimes: we received fava beans in our mystery produce box; before I could cook them, we happened to eat some grilled at a local restaurant; the next day, my email update from Heidi Swanson’s 101 Cookbooks blog offered a recipe for grilled fava beans.
The universe was telling me to grill fava beans.
However the grill, which turned out to be out of propane, was telling me to do something else with them.
Tony reminded me that roasting is a fine substitute for grilling, so that is what I did. You lose that nice smoky flavor that the grill imbues, but the beans are still incredibly tasty. Almost as important, this method of cooking the beans takes the effort of shucking and peeling the beans out of the kitchen (or wherever you prep your food) and onto the dining room table (or wherever you gather to eat). Prepping raw fava beans can be pretty labor intensive (shucking, blanching, peeling), and while it’s certainly something you can do with your kids, or delegate to them entirely, when my kids do it, they wind up eating all the beans raw and not leaving me any to cook. So this gets the cooking done fast, and then whatever’s left over of the roasted beans can be pureed into a delicious spread or thrown into a salad, a pasta or a risotto.
Preheat the oven to 425. Rinse the fava beans and spread them out on a roasting pan with a generous splash of olive oil and a sprinkle of salt and maybe some hot pepper flakes, to taste.
Roast, stirring once, for 10 to 15 minutes, or until they are blistered and tender. Toss them into a bowl and eat. We found them so tender (and the roasted skins so salty and delicious) that we ate them pods and all, but you can also pop the beans out, of course, and just eat those.
In the last couple days, I’ve experienced one of those funny swirls of coincidence that crop up sometimes: we received fava beans in our mystery produce box; before I could cook them, we happened to eat some grilled at a local restaurant; the next day, my email update from Heidi Swanson’s 
