Dinner in 20

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by Lisa

I  love to cook.   I do not always want to cook. These statements are not mutually exclusive.

While I will very often prep a little bit of dinner at lunchtime (the virtue of working from home), one day last week I had done nothing for dinner.  I hadn’t even taken a mental inventory of my produce and pantry to come up with a quick game plan, which is something I do daily. But on this day, I was just so tired I hadn’t done any of that. And  all of a sudden it was 5:35 and there was nothing in the way of dinner suggesting itself.  I took a deep breath, walked into the kitchen,and opened the refrigerator.

For a busy parent, perhaps the greatest virtue of shopping at a farmers market is that you always have something so fresh and so good that it can be cooked very simply and quickly.  That night, I took from my produce bin:

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Italian parsley, sage, basil, chives, green leaf lettuce, a few green beans, 8 eggs

I’ve written before about how eggs are your friends and how simple is very often best, and about how in many ways, cooking for my young family very involves making small, new changes to staple ingredients to keep seasonal ingredients a little bit exciting.  That evening, from some pre-conscious part of my brain “Omelette aux fines herbs” suggested itself. This was a much loved dinner for Kory and me, but a new twist on the omelette for the kids.

I chopped up the herbs, par boiled the green beans until they were tender-crisp, then rinsed them in cool water to stop the cooking, and washed the lettuce.  I made a quick jar dressing:

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One part red wine vinegar, one part mustard and 4 parts olive oil, a smashed clove of garlic, a pinch of salt and a sprinkle of pepper.

Let the dressing sit for 10 minutes so the garlic infused the dressing. Put the top on before you shake it up.

I made a quick omelette with the herbs and the eggs, and tossed the green beans in with the lettuce for a really lovely, tender green salad. The dressing went on the greens.

Dinner was on the table by 5:55 pm.  That’s less than 25 minutes from concept to table, and the hardest part was snipping the stems off the beans and washing the lettuce.

Of course, both Ella and Finn complained about the green bits in the omelette, protesting that they didn’t like them.  I told Ella they were chives, Finn that they were basil, and they both raised an eyebrow and dug in and one bite was all it took to convince them that it was, in fact, delicious.

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The fringe benefit to this fast, easy meal is that it is also an easy, manageable fun meal with which to work on table manners.  Eggs are easy to cut, and whenever possible, I encourage Ella and Finn to use their knife and fork in the continental way. This is how Kory & I eat, and both Ella and Finn at 7 & 4 are old enough to control their utensils. It doesn’t always happen in the ideal way, but this kind of dinner is the ideal place to practice.  It becomes a kind of quiet contest to see who can rise to the challenge of eating like a polite little French child. Of course, it doesn’t always happen like this, but  it really can be done.

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So, while I wished, for a minute that night, that I had a stash of TV dinners to plop on the table, I didn’t really need them.  There was enough in my kitchen to make something fast and delicious, and the lovely fall flowers that live on our table reminded us that even the hastiest, thrown-together meals  can be an occasion.

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Table Matters

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By Lisa

I am not proud of this fact, but I have occasionally been known to watch the show about the former couple who has more than a dozen children, even though it makes me feel dirty  and I generally can’t tolerate more than about 15 minutes.

However.

I am going against my better instincts here to dwell on this family because last night, as the brood sat down to lunch, I noticed that the 5-year old kindergartners, were sitting at the table in high chairs. High Chairs, people.  At 5.  That would be school age. They were also drinking their beverages out of plastic cups with lids and straws, which to my mind is just one step up from sippy cups. Or lunch at SeaWorld.

Part of me gets it. The high chair, for instance, keeps the kids still. (Um, trapped?)  I have certainly witnessed my 5-year old fall flat to the floor in the middle of dinner over a cooked carrot.  Yes, this makes me crazy, but the behavior is cause for immediate reprimand. The choice in our house is to sit still, on your bottom, or leave the table for good. And I have thrown dinner away after a warning.  But the point is, I believe in agency and choice, and treating little kids like kids–not like babies who have no control over their own behavior.  Learning to eat in our house also means learning how to sit still, and how to behave appropriately at the table, and allowing our two to attain a certain amount of pride and confidence in being able to  handle a meal.

Of course, I can’t really t imagine what it’s like to have 6 squirmy kids around the table, but still.  We have dear friends with triplet boys, all of whom have some of the best eating habits and manners of any children we know.  And I’m pretty sure they weren’t in high chairs at five.  As for me, I would never put my nearly five-year-old in a booster seat, much less restain him.  In fact, he would scream bloody hell if I did.

As for the cups-with-lids, I understand that, too:  they’re meant to control spills and, thus, mess at mealtimes.  But again, when do you let kids learn to sit at the table and feed themselves neatly and independently?

I have some experience here:  My daughter is a spiller.  When she was very young, nary a meal went by when something wasn’t spilled.  It was a pain in the ass.  She gets this from me, a chronic spiller for most of life. It was the joke in the family, to the point where my sister would not let me drink coffee in her house outside of the kitchen.  I have, with motherhood, gotten better. But it still drives my husband nuts. He never spills. (Nor for that matter, does my son. I suspect there’s a gene for it.)    But instead of giving Ella a lidded cup and letting her bang her drink all over the table with impunity, we gave her size-appropriate cups and coached her on how to be careful at the table. It took a long time. Years, really.  But she learned (and yes, she learned before kindergarten.)

The bottom line for this rather ungenerous post is less about criticizing the choices of That TV Family and more about what my husband and I think is generally important for teaching kids to eat, which is: teaching them manners at the table, inviting them to be fully a part of the meal, in every respect, without special treatment or exceptions. I deplore made-for-kid food and tableware.   With the exception of substituting smaller, salad forks for regular forks, and teaspoons for tablespoons, our kids get the same place setting we get.  This is an aesthetic choice, clearly, but also a behavioral one.   On the one hand, it just looks better to have a nice table setting, but a real place setting also sends the message that your children’s behavior at the table should be just like an adults.   Kids don’t get special treatment, or exceptions, or, for that matter, excuses for their manners or behavior. They should learn to eat neatly, and a five year old can eat without spilling or falling off his chair. He can learn more, in fact, but that”s another post.

And believe me, the kids notice all of these things. Everytime I light candles, or use a new tablecloth, or give Ella and Finn special glasses, they notice and feel special, and thank us. Really, they do.  They’re learning to respect the meal and the food and the people around the table.  As a corollary, teaching manners and behavior also makes dining out a lot more pleasant. The moral: make your kids fully a part of your meals.  Introduce them to the aesthetic as well as the gastronomic pleasures of the table. Even if they eat early (which ours do on weekdays), don’t hurry too much.  Take time to set a basic table for them, sit down and join them as often as you can, with a glass of bubbly water or wine or maybe a small appetizer for yourself.   Remember that meals feed your family in many ways. Don’t shortchange your kids, and they won’t shortchange you.

Losing Gourmet

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by Caroline

It’s not like I grew up with it. My mom learned to cook mostly from her own mom (though luckily got an excellent pie crust education from her mother-in-law). When we moved to the US in the early 70s, I remember seeing The Galloping Gourmet and The French Chef occasionally on our black & white kitchen television, but I think they were on more for entertainment than education. Mom subscribed to the Time-Life series of international cookbooks (the hardcovers now live in my house; the paperbacks, with more recipes, continue to get a workout in her kitchen) but never a cooking magazine, that I recall.

It was after college that I started to pick up Gourmet occasionally. It was a glimpse into another world. It was like a travel magazine to me, so glossy and beautiful. I tore out the occasional recipe – and if it looked good on the page, it always turned out well– but at the time mostly just dreamed over the beautiful pictures. And that’s one small reason I’m sad about losing Gourmet; for someone who doesn’t subscribe to fashion magazines or anything else with beautiful photography, and whose nightly dinner table can get a little dull with plates of pasta, every month Gourmet showed me lovely tables I could aspire to, and reminded me to set out a vase of flowers or put the vegetables in a pretty bowl.

When I moved to California, I had more time for cooking, and although I didn’t have much money, I saved a few dollars every month to pick up Gourmet. It was always fun reading, a perfect escape from my dense graduate school reading lists. When I broke up with my boyfriend and moved into a place without a kitchen, I would amuse myself trying to make some of Gourmet’s recipes with just a toaster oven, hot pot, rice cooker and electric skillet. I made great stir fries, a fabulous (small) lasagne, and baked cookies by the half dozen. When I moved in with a roommate (partly, to be sure, because of the kitchen) we shared a subscription to Gourmet, and celebrated when she passed her oral exams with a cocktail party fueled by the magazine’s recipes. Whether for a single woman without a kitchen, or two budget-conscious grad students who wanted to eat well, those recipes always worked. And that’s another reason I’m sad about losing Gourmet.

And then just as I was finishing graduate school, I met Tony, and we bonded over food. I discovered, at his mom Nancy’s house, a veritable library of cooking magazines, refreshed with new issues every month: Fine Cooking, Food and Wine, Saveur, Cooks Illustrated, Gourmet. Ruth Reichl was the editor of Gourmet by then and it was becoming a home for writers, terrific writers like Laura Shapiro and Michael Lewis and Anthony Bourdain and Jane and Michael Stern. We would hang out at Nancy’s house leafing through all the magazines and tearing out the recipes, but Gourmet was the one to read and we would talk about the essays over dinner and long Scrabble games. I remember in particular an essay by Michael Lewis that came out the month Ben was born, in which Lewis describes a trip to Masa’s for dinner with his wife and toddler. For ages afterward, I paraphrased a line from the piece (which sadly I can’t find online), “If you won’t [fill in the blank with whatever I wanted Ben to do] we’ll just have to stay at home and eat broccoli.”

The magazine was always smart, relevant, and delicious, and I routinely incorporated its recipes into our life, from cookies or savory biscotti for our annual New Year’s Day party to banana muffins for preschool bake sales. Gourmet’s vodka-spiked tomatoes came camping with us this summer, and the magazine’s roasted potato and kale salad is now one of my favorite ways to eat those two favorite vegetables. Flipping through my messy binder of saved recipes tonight, I see that over half of them come from Gourmet. Without their monthly infusion of fresh recipes, the binders will stop bursting from their seams, which is probably a good thing, but it’s another reason I’m sad about losing Gourmet.

After Nancy passed away, we had her mail forwarded to our house and that meant two copies of Gourmet each month. I called the customer service people, who were happy to consolidate her subscription and mine, but there was a little confusion over the name and so it has come to me each month with her name on it. If Nancy liked something, she put her money on it, so the subscription was supposed to go deep into 2012. It was a monthly reminder of the meals and conversations we shared, and that’s the last, biggest, reason I’m sad about losing Gourmet.

Shaking Beef

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By Lisa

Before I was married, before San Francisco’s  Mission district became gentrified and way too hip for me, The Slanted Door on Valencia was someplace I went for lunch.  Lunch was affordable back then–even for a grad student of modest means, and you could get in without a reservation.  I absolutely knew how good I had it.

It was there that I fell in love with Shaking Beef, which my husband & I have since eaten in several restaurants, including one in Paris on our honeymoon. So I was thrilled a few years ago to find this adaptation of Charles Phan’s recipe in the New York Times.  It’s become a family favorite and I’ve made it for family dinners as well as for company. Everyone loves it. The kids beg for it if I haven’t made it in a while.  There’s something about the family-style platter and big bowls of rice and greens that accompany it that make the meal always feel festive.

We haven’t taken the kids to the restaurant yet, but we tempt them often with stories about how good it is, and one day, we’ll go together. Until then, we have a little bit of Vietnam in our own home.

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**I should note, that I rarely use filet to make this. It’s just too expensive. But I have had terrific results with skirt steak.  Just don’t over cook it. If I don’t have red leaf lettuce, I’ve successfully substituted Romaine. And I portion equal amounts of salt and pepper into little dipping bowls, and pass lime wedges at the table so each diner can mix his own dipping sauce. This is a lot more fun for the kids. It also looks pretty.**

SHAKING BEEF

Adapted from Charles Phan

Time: 20 minutes, plus 2 hours’ marinating

  • 1 1/2 to 2 pounds beef tenderloin (filet mignon), trimmed of excess fat and cut into 1-inch cubes
  • 2 tablespoons chopped garlic
  • 2 tablespoons sugar
  • Salt and pepper
  • 5 tablespoons neutral oil, like corn or canola
  • 1/4 cup rice-wine vinegar
  • 1/4 cup rice or white wine
  • 3 tablespoons soy sauce
  • 1 tablespoon fish sauce
  • 1 red onion, peeled and sliced thin
  • 3 scallions, trimmed and cut in 1-inch lengths
  • 2 tablespoons butter
  • 2 bunches watercress, washed and dried, or 1 head red leaf lettuce, washed, dried and separated into leaves
  • 2 limes, cut into wedges.

1. Marinate meat with garlic, half the sugar, 1 teaspoon salt, 1/4 teaspoon pepper and 1 tablespoon oil for about 2 hours. (Refrigerate if your kitchen is very warm.) Meanwhile, combine vinegar, remaining sugar, wine, soy sauce and fish sauce. Taste, and add salt and pepper if necessary. Mix about 1 tablespoon salt and 1 teaspoon pepper in a small bowl.

2. Divide the meat into 2 portions, and do the same with the onion and scallions. Put a wok or a large skillet over maximum heat, and add about 2 tablespoons oil. When the oil smokes, add the meat in one layer. Let it sit until a brown crust forms, and turn to brown the other side. Browning should take less than 5 minutes. Add half the onion and half the scallions, and cook, stirring, about 30 seconds. Add about half the vinegar mixture, and shake pan to release the beef, stirring if necessary. Add half the butter, and shake pan until butter melts. Remove meat, and repeat.

3. Serve beef over watercress or lettuce leaves, passing salt and pepper mixture and lime wedges at the table.

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Keeping Seasonal Eating Fresh

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by Lisa
Just about everything we eat is seasonal–including all of our produce and much of our meat as well.  Which basically means that if the produce, meat, fish, and sometimes even eggs are not at our farmers market, we don’t eat it.  We’re incredibly fortunate that our market runs year round, which ensures that the majority of our diet is local, too.  I don’t buy strawberries in the winter, or apples in the summer, or lamb in the fall.  I refuse to buy an apple in July, even if it is at Whole Foods, and I’ve fought that battle with my kids when they were very young, so now they know better than to ask.  They might ask, “Is this in season?” if we’re in a market, or “When is it going to be blackberry season again?” if we’re at the kitchen table and they’re dreaming of something they love.  But both Ella and Finn understand that their fruits and vegetables are available at different times of the year, and each new season ushers in a gratitude and joy that really is a little like a muted version of Christmas morning.  A few weeks ago, for instance, I held up a pomegranate to Finn, not sure he would remember what it was, and he nearly fell out of his chair, “Is it pomegranate season?!”  I nodded.  “YES!” he exclaimed pumping his fist in the air, and we’ve been eating them happily after school ever since.

Eating seasonally is generally a terrific way for a family to eat. It’s affordable, sustainable, fresh.  You need very few processed foods.  Ella and Finn, who both accompany me to the farmers market every week now, are learning about growing seasons, why certain foods are linked with certain times of year & certain holidays. They know how and where things grow, as well as who grows them, what they look like before and after.  This means that our table almost always has a sense of place and time, and our meals have a kind of sense carpe diem, or seize the day, quality to them.  We appreciate the things we’re given each season, for as long as we’re given them, which, come to think of it, is a kind of spiritual, reverential, thankful way to eat, too.

But it’s also true that seasonal eating can put you in a rut, since you are, after all, faced with similar ingredients week after week, and we all have our old habits and patterns.  Most of the time this isn’t a problem, but sometimes you want to mix it up a little, and there are simple ways to do this, even for a busy parent. For instance, take our Salmon Backs. We eat them a lot. We all love them. But even I can get bored with myself.

Last weekend, however, I had just been to Ikea, bought a carton of Rye Bread Mix, a sleeve of Rye crackers, and got a hint of something new when I spied a jar of mustard dill sauce.  I bought a feathery bundle of dill at the farmers market the next day and began to toss my regular meal in another direction.  This was a big deal for me, the dill, because while for many years I happily ate dill, when I was in graduate school, I ate so many tuna sandwiches with dill at our student union that  I may have become the first person in the history of the world to poison herself with dill.  The tuna I continued to eat, but the dill I could no longer abide. Until a week ago.

Sunday night, I made a small effort in setting the table. This always makes a difference.

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Earlier I had made the bread, which involved pouring hot water into the carton, letting the dough rise, and baking–a job the husband was able to oversee–and set out the crackers.

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I found a bar platter for condiments–capers, dijon and yellow mustard, lemons, and a homemade mustard/dill sauce.

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I cooked & garnished the salmon.

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I tossed a familiar dish with a mustard-based dressing instead of balsamic vinegar.

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The result was a meal that looked like a lot of other meals at my house, but was utterly different.  The kids immediately proceeded to make “sandwiches” with the crackers, topping them with salmon, capers, lemon, mustard….whatever. They found it unreasonable silly to mix everything up.  The thing was, that all the flavors on the table went together, so it didn’t matter what they did–it all tasted good and was good fun in the tasting.

Homemade Mustard Dill Sauce

  • Dijon mustard
  • Rice or white wine vinegar
  • Brown sugar
  • Olive oil
  • Fresh dill

In a jar with a lid, mix equal parts dijon mustard and white wine vinegar and a teaspoon or so of brown sugar.  Then add 2 parts  olive oil (so there is twice as much olive oil as mustard/vinegar mix.  Add a good handful of chopped dill. Shake and serve.

Yellow Beans and Cherry Tomatoes with Mustard Vinaigrette

  • Dijon vinegar
  • White balsamic vinegar
  • 1 clove garlic
  • Olive oil
  • Yellow beans
  • Cherry tomatoes

Steam or boil yellow beans in well-salted water until tender-crisp. Slice cherry tomatoes in half.

When beans are cool, toss them with the tomatoes in the serving dish.

Make a vinaigrette by mixing equal parts mustard and white balsamic vinegar.  Add two parts olive oil (so there is twice as much olive oil as mustard vinegar) and a pinch of salt. Smash a clove of garlic and let it sit in the vinaigrette for as much time as you have.

Toss the salad with the vinaigrette and serve.

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