Lisa is the author of the award-winning memoir, A Double Life: Discovering Motherhood, which was an National Book Critics Circle Top-10 Independent Press Pick for 2011. With Caroline, she's the co-founder of Learning to Eat and co-editor of The Cassoulet Saved our Marriage: True Tales of Food, Family, and How We Learn to Eat. She holds an MA in creative writing, a PhD in English and has taught literature and creative writing widely, most recently in the MFA Program at the University of San Francisco.
Usually, I make gnocchi from scratch because it’s not that hard and it’s fun for kids to roll out the ropes and cut the pieces. Think play-doh that you can eat.
But last weekend, I spent a blissful weekend in Los Angeles with my friend Melissa Clark (the novelist and creator of BraceFace, and blogger, but not the food writer!), and while we spent a lot of weekend eating out (which I’ll write about soon), we spent a lovely lazy Friday night drinking beer on her deck, overlooking the gorgeous spreading beach of Marina Del Rey, watching the sun set. She cooked me gnocchi with cherry tomatoes and basil, but the difference was that she pan fried them, something I’ve never done, and she used prepackaged gnocchi. (She got the idea from 101 Cookbooks). It was delicious, and so when I was in Trader Joe’s upon my return, and saw that same red package of gnocchi, I grabbed it. I’ve tried packaged gnocchi before, and they weren’t good. But these are. I fixed them for dinner last night and pretty much had to keep the kids from eating the whole batch so Kory and I had something to eat when he got home. The kids ate most of the corn, too, so I took the small amount left off the cob and tossed it in our gnocchi.
This is really, really fast. Maybe 10 minutes to the table. Another good one when you’re pressed for time. Which is pretty much every day these days.
Pan Fried Gnocchi with Tomatoes, Basil (and maybe corn)
1 package gnocchi
1 pint cherry tomatoes, or mixed golden & pear
1 clove garlic
4-5 leaves basil, shredded, choppped, or in a chiffonade–or whatever herbs you have on hand and like. Experiment with parsely, oregano, tarragon, chives….
Optional: 1 ear of fresh corn, cooked, cooled, and kernals cut off.
Mince the garlic & sautee in a couple of tablespoons olive oil and butter in a large sautee pan Add the gnocchi to the pan & cook until heated through and lightly golden brown. Toss in the tomatoes and cook until they’re warm, but a little wilted. Toss in the basil. If you’re using corn, toss it in now and give a stir. Toss in the basil.
Serve with grated cheese. Seriously, that’s it.
I plan to keep a package of gnocchi on hand all the time. It’ s not exactly as blissful eating it at home as it was on Melissa’s deck, but I’m eternally grateful to have such a great friend in my life, and this new recipe will remind me of her every time I cook it. My kids are grateful too.
Looking for a fast, economical, and really delicious fish dinner? One that’s appropriate for a school night, guests, or a weekend brunch?
The answer is Salmon Backs.
Pietro introduced me to them, and they’re basically a “throw away” part of the fish, and they do look like scraps and bones. But they cook up fast and truly do taste better than any other part. At about $4.95/lb., even now, they’re terrifically economical for a family. We’ve been eating them for a few salmon seasons now, and with the closing down of the California salmon fishing, and the rising price of salmon, they’ve been the only way we’ve been able to afford to keep salmon a regular part of our diet. Of course, they’re not locally sourced–Pietro gets them from a friend in Alaska, but buying from him does support him & his boat, and we regularly buy locally caught fish as well.
If you don’t have a Pietro but do have a good local fish monger, ask if s/he can get some for you.
To prepare:
Sprinkle the backs with salt on both sides. Pepper if you like.
Squeeze a little lemon, drizzle a little olive oil and white wine or sake if you like.
Grill on high heat for about 2 minutes on each side. Alternatively, you can roast/bake at 450 degrees for 5 minutes.
Let the salmon cool a little, then with a fork, flake the meat off the bones. This bit takes a little time, but it’s not hard, and the fish flakes easily. Be slightly careful of bones. They’re large and easy to see, but if you’re feeding kids I like to be extra careful.
You can serve any number of ways. I like to pile it on a plate with lemon wedges, sprinkled with tarragon or dill. You can mix it in salads or use it to top bagles. Good sides are a fresh Italian or French bread, white beans with olive oil, garlic, and salt, quick gazpacho, a green salad.
If you have any leftover, or are feeling ambitious, it’s also great in salmon cakes, which you can make by binding the salmon with egg, bread crumbs, and adding whatever other seasonings you like: parsley, tarragon, a little minced and sauteed onion, green or red peppers, etc. Use your imagination and whatever is in your pantry. Lightly flour the cakes and pan fry them in butter &/or olive oil.
Salmon backs are easily one of my kids’ favorite dinners, so I trust that all 5 of you who read this blog won’t buy them all up before I get to market on Sunday.
In our house, the only thing worse than a wasted tomato is a refrigerated one. Now that we’re back from our summer traveling, and a wicked blast of heat has descended on us (just in time for school, of course) we’ve found that tomato season is (still) in full force at our market. There are all kinds of great varieties: red and pink Brandywine, Early Girls, traditional beefsteak, Green Zebra, Jazz, Pineapple, sweet 100s….and even some new organic varieties from the very cool people at Baia Nicolas. I buy a lot of tomatoes. They might be my favorite food and we all eat them every night. At $2-3 a pound, they’re not cheap, but they last much of the week and for the brief few months they’re around, we can’t get enough. We eat them in Caprese Salad, Bread and Tomato Salad, sliced on white bread for simple Tomato Sandwiches with olive oil, mayonnaise, and a sprinkle of good coarse salt, or sometimes just whole like an apple.
However, when you’re making a sandwich or a a few beautiful slices, there’s always the problem of the ends. What to do with them? They don’t look that nice in the presentation, but they also are still really good parts of the tomato. So, for a few years, now, I throw all the unpretty scraps into a ziplock and throw them in the refrigerator because gazpacho is the only way that a fresh tomato should meet refrigeration.
In a few days, I have a nice bag full of ends and scraps, like this:
It’s enough to make a small portion of “gazpacho” in the blender, and the best part is that the tomatoes are already cold, so very little, if any, additional chilling is necessary. The tomatoes are so good, that I generally have to add little else to them.
The “Recipe”
I throw the tomatoes in the blender and add: some olive oil, a splash of red wine vinegar, a little salt, whatever herbs I feel like (fresh basil, tarragon, chives, parsley..or often none at all), a cucumber slice or two if the spirit moves me, a garlic clove. I know this is not a proper recipe–I’m sure many of you already have more formal, careful, and time consuming recipes–but this works, it’s really fast, and it’s delicious if you have excellent tomatoes. It’s also a recession-friendly way to get all the value out of those expensive tomatoes.
Because there’s usually not a lot of gazpacho, I usually serve it in pretty little aperitif or cocktail glasses, garnished with fresh herbs and a drizzle of oil oil, and more pretty salt. It makes a great first course, or amuse bouche, or small side dish.
After the long, excellent, fancy dinner the night before, and a long, excellent, exhausting day at SeaWorld, and a the promise of a long, maybe not-so-excellent night in the hotel alone because–at least for the day–I had become a ComicCon widow, I had no inclination to take the kids out for dinner by myself. I suppose I might have mentioned Room Service, or maybe Ella had read the In-Room menu, and rather than taking the elevator down 3 floors to the restaurant, I relented. The kids had a long, warm bath and soaked off the grime of the day, and by the time they emerged, pajama clad and sweet-smelling, the food had arrived replete with silver plate covers. We made some ceremony of setting up our little table, uncovering the food, and we feasted in our pajamas. The food was really excellent, including a Grilled Shrimp Cocktail with Bloody Mary Cocktail sauce, that was good enough to drink. (I refrained and had a really great local brew instead.)
Ella and Finn had burgers (no surprise there); I had a grilled cuban
sandwich. The kids were gleeful. We were all relaxed and we dug into
our food eagerly . The meal was the Antidote to Fine Dining, and in
its own way, every bit as good.
The Moral: sometimes it’s best just to give into the children’s begging, your own fatigue, and take the easy way out.
This is not what you should do when you plan to take the kids to a fine dining establishment: Make them drive 4 1/2 hours. Not feed them lunch. Check into a hotel and unpack while they run a little wild. Drive to Said Fine Dining establishment without a reservation, nor even any clear idea about where you will be eating that night, even though all four of you are very hungry for a Real Meal and tired and already more than a little road-fatigued.
Nevertheless, after checking-in and unpacking and putting on clean and reasonably nice clothes, the family (ok, Kory and I) decided to drive to the Hotel del Coronado for dinner. It was early–around 5 pm–and the beautiful old hotel was nearby, and we knew that there would be several food options once we arrived, but we really didn’t plan ahead aside from frantically scanning menus on my new iPhone on the 20 minute drive over. For some reason, my husband and I became fixated on eating at 1500 Ocean because the menu looked so nice and we were tired and just wanted a good meal. I know this is not what most normal, sane parents think when confronting dinner at the end of a long day of traveling: gee, let’s take our kids to the fanciest place we can find, so we grown ups can have a really good meal! And we don’t, usually. But, we were so far into vacation mode, and the kids had on cute-enough, clean clothes, so we did.
The Coranado is reputedly haunted, which story the kids loved, so we explored the gorgeous old lobby a bit while Kory got us a reservation, and then we descended in a magnificently ornate elevator to the restaurant. Unfortunately, we didn’t get a table outside, but we had a really lovely, cozy booth, replete with comfortable and chic back cushions, which Finn and Ella found very fancy.
One of the things which sold us on 1500 Ocean was the excellent kids menu, printed separately on a beautiful card, which made for a really nice souvenir (I’ve been collecting menus for years, but this is Ella’s first one):
There was beautiful bread :
with homemade butter sprinkled with (I think ) black maldon sea salt:
So the kids knew right away that this was someplace Special and Different and Fancy. They’re both at that great age where aesthetics are surprising and gratifying: they happily recognize and appreciate when things are “So beautiful!”
But one of the great things about this elegant place is that they do welcome well-behaved children who are ready to eat. The kids received their drinks in plastic cups with lids, which was funny and anomalous, but also nice.
Things picked up with the amuse bouche of smoked eel with heirloom tomato. While Finn wouldn’t touch it, Ella gobbled down hers, and his, and would have eaten ours, too, if given the chance.
and a shrimp cocktail that doesn’t seem to be on the menu anymore. It was very good, but had heat, so we kept it for ourselves.
During all this, the special occasion Shirley Temples and Ocean Cava cocktails of brut champagne, blood orange bitters, and rock salt kept us all very, very happy.
The kids both asked for mac-n-cheese, but we convinced them to get one mac-n-cheese and one steak with asparagus and mashed potatoes, which turned out to be a good thing. The server very kindly split the entrees onto 2 plates, so both got some of each.
Finn devoured the macaroni, which was more like a very rich, creamy deliciously fragrant pasta, and Ella, the carnivore, turned her nose up at pasta, but couldn’t get enough of the filet, which was delicious and perfectly cooked, even though the low light and the iPhone picture makes it look like a lump of charcoal. In real life, it was very pink and very tender.
and Kory had Kurabota Pork Tenderloin, which was more defined and pretty than this picture allows, and also delicious:
We splurged on dessert, too, including the Almond Brown Butter Cake, Cookies and cream, and Chocolate Chipotle cake, which had a lot of residual heat (but was really fun and excellent) and Ella bravely tried.
Through it all, the kids were completely terrific, in spite of their exhaustion. (That pillow was very tempting for Finn once the macaroni-fontina coma began to set in.) I’m certain they wouldn’t have lasted through the tasting menu (which Kory wanted and I vetoed immediately), but their manners, if not impeccable, were certainly very, very good, and they understood exactly what was expected of them in a restaurant. They tried new foods, and (Ella at least) liked almost all of it. They saw food in shapes and patterns they had never thought possible, which is always a fun aesthetic lesson. I think the fact that they understand basic restaurant etiquette, combined with the general Fanciness of the place was the formula that worked for us in spite of everything that could have conspired to make the meal a disaster. We did have to walk Finn outside during one break in courses, but to some extent that defeated the purpose because at a fine dining establishment, they won’t serve your next course until you are seated and ready. But again, both Finn and Ella sort of liked learning that fact, and were pretty amused by the ceremony of it all.
After, we wandered the hotel and its courtyard:
Made sand angels:
and watched the Navy Seals practice night landings on the beach until it got dark:
But the real icing on the cake was that in our wandering, on our way back into the hotel, we saw Hayao Miyazaki, sitting right there, in 1500 Ocean, just as we had (ok, maybe not just as we had) with half a dozen others, around an elegant firepit eating dinner in an elegant all white suit. Reader, it was like seeing Walt Disney. Only better. We told Ella exactly who he was, and her eyes opened wide because she knows and loves several of the Studio Ghibli films. We gawked as much as we politely could, then we spirited the kids away, back to our hotel, and put them safely, well-sated, to bed.
Made sand angels:
