For instance, he just ate a fish taco for breakfast.
Also, he loves rice with a passion that makes me wonder if his conception and birth were blessed by Buddha himself. (He has, too, a kind preternatural patience and even-keeled temperament that is positively other-worldly.) If there is rice on the table he will eat it. Whereas his sister, even as an infant, sprouted an indifferent attitude toward this versatile grain, saving her starchy passion for pasta and potatoes and bread, Finn has always chosen rice above all other forms of carbohydrates.
So, I cook it more, and that means leftovers, which both kids will happily eat for lunch, pressed into cute little star/animal shapes, and sometimes rice pudding, and most often, a dish that I just call Sweet Rice because it’s not really pudding. It’s more like porridge, and I’m certainly not the first to serve it for breakfast, but it’s so easy and versatile (think breakfast, snack, dessert) that it’s worth sharing. In fact, with some minor supervision over the stove, Finn can make it himself.
Sweet Rice
Leftover rice
Milk
Sugar
Cinnamon (part of a stick or powdered)
Vanilla (highly optional)
Spoon the rice, however much you have, into a saucepan.
All of it.
Cover the rice with milk.
Add sugar to taste. We used about 1/4 cup of sugar for maybe 2 cups of rice.
Sprinkle in a dash of cinnamon, or break off a small piece of the stick and plop it in.
Stir over medium heat until much of the milk is absorbed and the porridge thickens a little. This is the part I supervise, so no picture.
When we got married, a good friend, who had more foresight than we knew at the time, gave us as a shower gift a lovely glass cocktail pitcher and two martini glasses. Over the years, it saw some use, but never on a regular basis. We drank plenty of cocktails, but I just didn’t make a habit of bothering to use the pitcher to mix and serve, etc. etc. Then, my husband got me hooked on MadMen, and I remembered the pitcher. Most of our glassware had broken, too, so I made a trip to Ikea because I decided that I absolutely had to have new high ball and low ball glasses.
As in Caroline’s home, we’ve pretty much always honored cocktail hour. We buy Prosecco by the case in summer, and always have a couple of bottles on hand for guests, but we also enjoy a range of mixed drinks, depending on the season and the menu. And we also let our kids join in and frequently give them kid cocktails, which we serve in little flutes or the new glasses or the cool goblets which handle everything from everyday wine to more complicated mixed drinks. Generally, these involve a mixture of, say, bubbly water, Torani syrup, fruit juice, Italian sodas, and a fancy garnish. We don’t think we’re encouraging our kids to drink alcohol but we do think that we’re encouraging a social hour that involves something special and delicious and pretty. They know we drink alcohol and they don’t. They know that our cocktails and their soda (an infrequent treat) are something special. I like to think we’re encouraging a kind of ceremony, a winding-down time, a time for conversation, a pause in the day before dinner, a little refreshment to get us through the end of the day with some pleasure and a maybe a little grace. We eat padrones, or caper berries, or almonds, or olives, or edamame and wasabi peas…or nothing…whatever I have.
But while the imbibing hasn’t really changed over the years (if anything, we probably drink less now than we did years ago), the aesthetics of it has, and this is due entirely to the MadMen spree I went on last spring and my friend’s gift. I took the pitcher out of the cabinet and started using it, a lot, and it really did change my life. When we were home on the weekends, out would come the pitcher and one of us would mix the cocktails, and I’d finish dinner, or we’d sit on our deck and while it really was the same as always, it was different. Nicer. More elegant. It made us stop and pay a little bit of attention to each other, which is important when you have children and busy work schedules and lawns to mow and a two-story playhouse to build in the back yard.
This weekend, I made shaking beef for dinner and was looking for a cocktail to precede it. I had a bottle of sake, but I wanted a martini, and a quick google turned up several versions of the saketini, but we chose Bobby Flay’s because the greater sake to vodka version was more appealing. We used a lemon cucumber from the garden for garnish, and its flavor infused the drink in a deliciously cool and lemony way. It was pretty and perfect ice cold drink, and I can’t wait for an excuse to have another one.
Then Kory wondered what a kids martini would look like. What is left, after all, when you take out the sake and vodka? He shrugged, pulled out two more martini glasses, and mixed away. He added bubbly water, a little lemon torani syrup, and a pretty garnish.
May I repeat? He’s good with the garnish.
The kids gaped when they saw the drinks. “Whose is this?” Ella wanted to know. “FOR ME?!” Finn exclaimed. They were all wide-mouthed smiles, and Ella professed, “This is the Best. Kid’s. Cocktail. Ever.” But the thing is, it wasn’t anything she hadn’t had before, sans fancy glass and fancy garnish. It was just much, much prettier. And that made all the difference.
My father has always said, all things in moderation, and I believe him. So Caroline and I are pledging to you a moderate number of cocktail-inspired posts over the coming weeks. For your own MadMen viewing pleasure. And beyond.
Bobby Flay’s Saketini
2.5 ounces dry sake
1-ounce vodka
Chipped ice
1 Japanese cucumber, cut into 1/4-inch rounds, for garnish
Combine sake and vodka in a cocktail shaker with the chipped ice and shake well. Strain into a martini glass and garnish with a slice of Japanese cucumber.
Kory’s Kidtini #1
Soda Water
Lemon Torani syrup
Lime rounds and maraschino cherries for garnish
Inexpensive Martini glasses
Chill soda water, then fill glasses 2/3 full with it. Add syrup to taste. Put one lime and one cherry on a party-colored toothpick for garnish.
I did a favor for a writer friend recently, reading her manuscript and writing a blurb for her publisher. It was an easy favor to do– I’d enjoyed her earlier book, a collection of essays called Because I Love Her, and expected I’d like the new one, which I really did. So when we met up for a movie sometime after I’d finished, I was completely surprised and delighted to receive a shopping bag full of apples from her tree.
This is how our supply looked after a week:
In the meantime, I baked many apple-y things:
apple galetteapple walnut bundt cake
A couple batches of my mom’s apple crisp and my new favorite, apple streusel coffeecake, a recipe I adapted from good old Joy of Cooking:
Preheat the oven to 350 and butter a 13×9 baking pan.
Stir together and set aside the streusel topping:
2/3 c flour
2/3 c finely chopped toasted walnuts or pecans
2/3 c brown sugar
5 T melted butter
1 t ground cinnamon
1/4 t salt
Whisk together:
2 c all-purpose flour
1 t baking powder
1 t baking soda
1/2 t salt
Combine in another bowl and set aside:
1 1/4 c sour cream or yogurt
1 t vanilla
In a large bowl, beat well until lightened in color and texture:
4 T unsalted butter
1 c sugar
Beat in, one at a time:
2 eggs
Add the flour mixture to the butter mixture in 3 parts, alternating with the yogurt mixture, stirring until smooth. Scrape the batter into the pan and spread evenly. Top the batter with 2 1/2 cups diced, peeled apples, and then the streusel topping.
Bake for 40 to 45 minutes, until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.
Until recently, we have usually used dried beans around here mostly in craft projects: sandwiched between a stapled pair of paper plates, they make excellent tambourines; Ben’s made a mancala game with a handful of dry beans and an egg carton; and of course the possibilities with construction paper, glue, and beans are pretty endless. Except for lentils, I tend not to buy dried beans for cooking because half the family doesn’t much like them and they take a long time.
But I’m trying to get over that for several reasons. First of all, dried beans are cheaper; also, they pose no risk of chemicals leaching from the can into your food (as I just read about in Betsy Block’s The Dinner Diaries); and although they do take a while from pantry to table, most of that time they are cooking easily on their own without your attention. If you have a pressure cooker or crock pot (I do not), beans are even easier and quicker. But mostly, I am getting over my reluctance to use dried beans because my dad grows such beautiful ones for us, and Eli had such a great time picking and shelling them in Connecticut last month, and when food is presented to me with such love, I’m not going to let it gather dust in the pantry until it’s time to make a new tambourine. I’m going to make chili.
dried Jacob's Cattle beansEli shelling the beansa pretty bowl of shelled beansthe raw and the cookedthe very spicy chili
Chili’s the kind of thing that inspires great passion and thousands of recipes, but for me it’s always been a dump it in kind of thing, and I’m not a purist: I had some carrots that weren’t getting any fresher, so I tossed those in, and when my chili turned out to be a lot spicier than I wanted, I chopped and added several potatoes to calm it down. Fresh corn would be a great addition, too. Here’s the recipe for the chili I made, very loosely adapted from The Joy of Cooking:
First, soak your beans. There’s no need to do it overnight. Simply put them in cold water, bring them to a boil and then, with saucepan off the heat, allow them to remain in the water for 1 or 2 hours only. Drain and refrigerate until ready to cook.
To cook the beans, bring them to a boil in a big pot of cold water, and then lower the heat and simmer for 60 to 90 minutes, or until the beans are tender. Now you’re ready to make chili.
1 large onion, chopped, about 2 cups
2 large red bell peppers, chopped (I happened to have already roasted all the bell peppers I had in the house, so my chili used roasted bell peppers)
3 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 1/2 cups dry beans, soaked and cooked (I used the Jacob’s Cattle beans from my dad, but a variety of different kinds would be nice; 1 1/2 c dry=roughly 5 c cooked)
2 pounds chopped fresh plum tomatoes (or if you don’t have fresh, a big 28 oz. can of tomatoes)
a couple chopped carrots and/or potatoes, if you like
1 cup vegetable broth
1 cup dry red wine (or water)
1 fresh chile (serrano, jalapeno or the like) diced, to taste
1 T dried chili powder, to taste
1 T ground cumin
Salt and pepper
In a big pot, sauté onion, bell pepper and garlic in oil about 5 minutes or until soft.
Stir in remaining ingredients. Simmer uncovered, stirring occasionally, about 1 hour, adding more liquid (wine, stock tomato juice or water) as needed.
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.
