Learning to Eat – Page 101

One City Garden

November 10, 2009 By caroline in Uncategorized Tags: farms and farming, gardening with kids, produce, salad, vegetables

by Caroline

I grew up in a little town (it calls itself a village, and while I find the word a little precious, it fits) of big, pretty houses on smallish lawns. The yards weren’t fenced, and my neighborhood didn’t have sidewalks, which made it a pretty soft place for a kid to grow up running around with her friends, racing from one yard to the next as our game developed. Our yard was part of the action, too, until my dad realized that the front got a lot more direct sun than the backyard, and so that’s where the vegetable garden went. Screened by a pretty hedge of deep pink and white beach roses, the garden produced peas, beans, tomatoes, broccoli and lettuce, among other vegetables. My dad established another small garden next to the side door and encouraged a patch of blackberries at the end of the driveway. Volunteer squash and tomatoes sprang up from the compost pile and, as my siblings and I grew up and needed less yard to play in, Dad cultivated gradually larger swaths of the backyard, too.

Now my parents have retired to a big piece of property in rural Connecticut, where my dad has an enormous garden and orchard, and I’m the one with an urban garden. Now, this is not the kind of really urban gardening that Lisa wrote about last summer. We don’t have a front yard here in San Francisco, but we can at least do our planting in the ground, not a truck (though honestly, my kids would prefer a truck).

For now, while my children are young and require a lot of my attention for their cultivation, we’re keeping the garden small. (A friend, whose youngest child is the age of my oldest, has recently converted her entire backyard into an edible space; no lawn at all, just paths made and lined with herbs, blueberry bushes and fruit trees in sunny spots along the fences, vegetables — some in beds, some (like the artichokes) standing alone — sprouting up in every spare nook. I dream of such a yard, someday). We’re still learning what we can
produce here in our foggy neighborhood; we don’t get a lot of heat or sun, but we have a pretty long growing season; greens do very well, tomatoes do not. And whenever one of my kids has an urge to plant a seed, I encourage the impulse even if I know, as with yesterday’s apple seed, it’s not likely to bear edible fruit. Some times, it’s important simply to plant a seed.

Apple Cake, Thanks to Mickey

November 8, 2009 By caroline in Uncategorized Tags: baking, breakfast, cooking with kids, dessert, fast, fruit, recipes, sweets, vegetarian

by Caroline
cake
It was late Sunday afternoon, and Tony was cooking dinner while the boys and I sat on the couch, reading. Ben was buried in his new book, The Mad Scientists’ Club and Eli and I were reading In the Night Kitchen. When I turn to the last page, I always stop reading and even Ben pulled his nose out of his book to sing out with Eli, “And that’s why, thanks to Mickey, we have cake every morning!”

Then came the inevitable epilogue: “Mama, why don’t we have cake every morning?” “Well, we have pancakes a lot,” I answered. But it sounded lame to me, so we made cake.

It needed to be quick, it needed to be something I could make easily with Eli, and it needed (after the recent Halloween orgy) to not be chocolate. I dug through my recipe binder with a dim recollection of a good recipe emailed to me by my sister and, miraculously, found it in less time than it takes to peel 5 apples for cake.

5-6 apples or pears
juice of 1/2 lemon (about a tablespoon)
2 t cinnamon
1 1/2 sticks of butter, melted
3/4 c sugar (brown, granulated, or a combination)
1 c flour
2 eggs

Preheat the oven to 350.

egg

Peel, core, and slice the fruit (I cut the apples into sixteenths) and toss into a pie dish. Sprinkle with the lemon juice and cinnamon. Next stir the sugar, flour and eggs into the melted butter and mix well.

baking
Pour the batter over the fruit and sprinkle with sugar and cinnamon. Bake for about 50 minutes, until the cake is browned and the fruit is tender.

Ella’s Table

November 6, 2009 By lisa in Uncategorized Tags: cooking with kids, family dinner, manners, recipes

by Lisa

We have good nights and bad nights as far as the manners go, as everyone does. Some nights are really peaceful. Other nights it looks like we’re feeding the dog we don’t (yet) have off our floor. Some nights we have a really fun conversation. Other nights, well, let’s just say other nights we seem to be living in the land of the loud people.

Kory and I try hard not to expect perfection, but aim for gradual improvement. For us teaching kids to eat involves an ongoing, sustained effort at involving them in the culture as well as the food at the table.

Some of our rules include:

no toys at the table
no singing at the table (though I know very happy, well-fed families who do sing at the table)
no falling off your chair

There are probably others, but they don’t include things like “If you don’t eat yer meat, you can’t have any pudding/How can you have er pudding if you don’t eat your meat?”

And I am not above bribing my kids to get them more involved. Ella gets allowance her automatically ($1/week), but if I need help with a task, I often promise to pay her. I do this with setting the table. Or sometimes I just ask her & Finn to set the table without proper remuneration. In any case, a small amount of money can be a great motivator, and Ella and Finn like to eat enough and, like all little kids, they appreciate beautiful things enough, that it can actually be fun to give them ownership of the table once in a while.

A recent night resulted in this:

I let her choose plates, table cloth, candlestick, napkins, etc. There is always some coaching about what utensil goes on what side (but seriously, I have to coach my husband about this fact eight times out of ten, you know how those artists are…), but she & Finn take this as a fun challenge/puzzle.

She took a lot of pride in her work: note the little flower hooked onto the edge of the glass:

On the menu was turkey sausage cooked in red peppers and carmelized onions:

Mini penne with butter and cheese and Erbette chard sauteed with cherry tomatoes:

It was an easy, pretty Saturday night dinner, but fast enough also to cook on a weeknight. And it’s even faster and easier if you don’t have to set the table yourself.

Pumpkin Apple Bread, because there’s still a whole lot of pumpkin puree to use

November 5, 2009 By caroline in Uncategorized Tags: baking, cooking with kids, snacks, sweets, vegetarian

by Caroline

The cooking division of labor in our household goes like this: my husband Tony handles the stove, and I manage the oven. In practice, this means that he generally makes dinner and I make The Accessory Foods: roasted vegetables, cakes, cookies, muffins, pies, bread, and other delicious — but not necessarily very sustaining– items. Tonight, Tony was out for dinner, and I didn’t have it in me to make my standard mom and the boys alone dinner, but luckily our local bakery, Arizmendi (which makes a different kind of pizza every day) was making roasted potato and pesto pizza, a big hit with the kids. With that and some carrot sticks and green beans, dinner was taken care of, and I turned my attention to our pumpkin puree. Remember the pumpkins that were sitting on our front stoop all October? I only roasted the big reddish one, and we’re still (two batches of muffins and one quart of puree in the freezer later) working our way through it. So I made pumpkin apple bread to give to Ben’s teachers. It has filled the house with such a fabulously cinnamon-y smell that I might have to bake a couple more for ourselves.

recipe adapted from The Gourmet Cookbook

For the topping
1 T flour
5 T sugar
1 t cinnamon
1 T unsalted butter, softened

note: I am, my sister might point out, one of the only people in America that doesn’t like streusel topping, but even I say don’t skip this one! it melts into a buttery, crackly cinnamon crust on the top of the bread.

For the bread
3 c flour
3/4 t salt
2 t baking soda
1 1/2 t ground cinnamon
1 t ground nutmeg
1/4 t ground cloves
1/4 t ground allspice
15 oz pumpkin puree (that’s one can of solid-pack pumpkin; I measured out a scant 2 cups in a liquid measure, which seems to have worked out fine)
3/4 c vegetable oil
2 1/4 c sugar
4 eggs
2-3 tart apples or firm-ripe pears, peeled, cored, and chopped (about 2 c)

Blend together all the topping ingredients in a small bowl until the mixture resembles coarse meal. Set aside.

Preheat the oven to 350, and butter two 9×5″ loaf pans (or line with parchment).

Sift together the flour, salt, baking soda and spices in a medium bowl. In a large bowl, whisk together the pumpkin, oil, sugar and eggs. Add the flour mixture, stirring until well combined, then fold in the apples.

Divide batter between the two loaf pans. Sprinkle each loaf with half the topping. Bake for 50-60 minutes, or until a tester comes out clean.

Cool loaves on a rack for a few minutes, then remove from the pans to cool completely.

Fast-Slow Roasted Garlic & Tomato Sauce

November 4, 2009 By lisa in Uncategorized Tags: family dinner, fast, recipes, roasted tomatoes and garlic, slow roasted tomato sauce, vegetables

by Lisa

My quest for fast, delicious, from-scratch weeknight meals continues. There’s the night I teach and I have to prep dinner at lunch, and there’s the afternoon soccer practices when we spend a lovely hour at the park, and a ballet night that doesn’t get us in until after 6 pm. So prep time is greatly reduced, and some nights, dinner needs to be on the table in 10 minutes or less, otherwise, bedtime is hopeless. I need food that gets to the table fast; I need food that keeps at room temperature, or that won’t be compromised by the refrigerator.

Here’s what I’ve learned: planning is vital.

Fish tacos work, all kinds of eggs work, so does a roast chicken (if you’re home to cook it early), and quiche. Then there are all the things that you can prep on the weekend and transform over the week. When you can get 2 different meals out of one thing, it’s also economical.

This weekend I brought home a few pounds of Roma tomatoes from the farmer’s market, spread them on a baking sheet, sprinkled with olive oil and salt and threw in a few sprigs of basil just because I had it AND two whole bulbs of garlic. I roasted the heck out of them in a 200 degree oven. After several hours they were totally deflated-looking. By then, it was 8 or 9 o’clock at night, and I didn’t want to deal with them anymore, so I stuck them in a covered dish and stuck it in the refrigerator.

A few days later, I remembered the tomatoes when I needed dinner. I dumped them in a pot, squeezing the roasted garlic out of its husks, added a little salt, about a 1/4 cup of white wine and after simmering for a few minutes to blend the flavors, I used an emulsion blender to smooth it out. You could easily blend everything in a blender and then heat it slowly after. Also, you can use any kind of fresh, flavorful tomato. Early girls are good if you can still get them.

The result was a creamy, garlicky, deeply flavorful sauce we ate over pasta. The kids loved it.

Two nights later, the same (leftover) penne, mixed with extra sauce and baked with a topping of fresh mozzarella and grana, made a faux, super-fast, what-the-hell-am-I-going-to-cook-tonight lasagna, which I think they liked even better.

We’re still at the very end of tomato season here, any maybe you are, too. If you can find good fresh tomatoes anymore, you can still roast the garlic and blend it into a can of good San Marzanos. But if you can still find some tomatoes, load up, slow roast, and freeze the tomatoes whole, right off the tray once they’ve cooled. Or make this sauce and keep it in ziplocks next to your frozen pesto. You’ll thank yourself on one of those cold dark nights that are just around the corner.

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