Family Romance

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by Lisa

“I am more modest now, but I still think that one of the pleasantest of all emotions is to know that I, I with my brain and hands, have nourished my beloved few, that I have concoted a stew or a story, a rarity or a plain dish, to sustain them truly against the hungers of the world. ”   MFK Fisher


Yes, we did have pancakes on Valentine’s Day.  But it was such a lovely meal, and we were all so sated by it, that it’s worth writing about.

Aside from the memorable first Valentine’s dinner my husband & I had in Los Angeles, where Leo DiCaprio unwittingly paid for our dinner, I think we’re both inclined to take it or leave it.  But we wanted to do something for the kids, and so we (ok, I) started the grand tradition of Letting Dad Take Care of This One.  Kory came home with a lovely bunch of flowers and three little packages of cookies and chocolates. (He & I ate the chocolates, later.)

I had set the table the night before, and the children quite magically let us sleep in.

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When we woke, the board was written.

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I was out of baking powder for the panckaes , but had buttermilk, and so I did a quick subsitute in our staple griddle cake recipe and made buttermilk pancakes instead.  The pancakes were light, fluffy, and sweet, a nice alternative, and they held up to the fresh raspberry coulis/syrup we served on the side.   I whipped some fresh cream, set out the coarse pink sprinkling sugar, and a bowl of  Ella Bella Farm’s raspberries I had frozen in August.

Then, I used the very last of the raspberries to make a raspberry coulis, sweetened slightly with grade B maple syrup. Technically, I suppose, it wasn’t really a coulis, since it wasn’t pureed, but it wasn’t exactly syrup, either. It was tart and sweet and will be just as good on vanilla ice cream as it is on pancakes.

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The kids got pink-tinted vanilla milk (whole milk + vanilla + sugar), and we all chose how to top the pancakes.  Ella and Finn chose whipped cream and pink sugar and whole raspberries.  I chose the coulis + whipped cream + sugar.

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Kory & I took one bite of the pancakes and decided we needed to have some Valentine’s mimosas, but neither of us wanted to go outside to pick oranges and squeeze juice.  So we poured the prosecco straight and topped it with a few muddled raspberries.    Honestly, I can’t remember the last time I had anything even resembling a mimosa in the morning. I suspect it was before we were married, which would be nearly a decade ago.  But this may well be a tradition to revive.  We all lingered, then the kids played, and Kory and I lingered some more, and then with the house in order, we went the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco to see the Coraline show, which was truly amazing, then out for sushi, and a trip to the Japantown mall, all of which was so fun that I forgot completely that I was supposed to go to the markets to look for the giant fried squid.

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Buttermilk Pancakes

2 cups flour

1/4 cup sugar

1 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon baking powder

1 egg

2 cups buttermilk

2 tablespoons melted butter

1. Sift together all dry ingredients into a large bowl. This is an essential step. We just use a sieve, and work over the sink for easy clean up.

2. In a glass measuring cup beat the egg.

3. Add milk to the egg.

3. Pour egg and milk mixture slowly over dry ingredients, whisking to incorporate.

4. Add butter.

4. Cook batter on a hot griddle. Don’t turn the griddle cakes too soon! Wait until they are bubbling all over the center and a little dry around the edges.

For the Raspberry Syrup I simmered in a small pot about 1 1/2 cups fresh frozen raspberries, a few tablespoons of maple syrup, and about 1/4 cup of water until the raspberries began to slightly fall apart and the mixture was a nice consistency.

Food=Love, Not your Ordinary Valentine’s Day Menu

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By Lisa

Barton Rouse, the late and much-loved chef at Princeton’s Terrace Club taught me, and many of my friends how to eat well, how to eat in good company, and that food means more than sustenance. In Barton’s kitchen and dining room, food was a way to forge community, celebrate difference, and find exuberance in life. In very many ways, the idea for this blog and this book is due entirely to him.l

One of the greatest meals he ever cooked was on Valentine’s Day, for which he conjured a red & black feast and we decorated the club with scorched valentines, severed hearts, and pretty dismaying cupids.  The menu, in his honor, is below, along with a variation on his classic red & black squid ink pasta, which, alongside the whole pig he roasted once a year, might just have been one of the more exotic foods he introduced us too.   If I can find the pasta, we just might have this feast in his honor on Saturday.

From Barton’s cookbook, “Eating Ivy”:

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Learning to Eat Alone

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by Caroline

When I was a baby and my family lived in Japan, my parents took me along with them to attend a conference in Hong Kong, leaving my three older siblings in the care of a childless couple from the church. The pair fed my brothers and sister liver. This has never been forgotten, nor, I think, have my parents ever been quite forgiven this breach of trust.

When I was nine or ten, my mom went back to work full time. By this point my two oldest siblings were away at school, but every once in a while my mom had to travel for work, and my dad, brother and I were left to fend for ourselves. We knew our way around the kitchen. My dad spent most of his summer evenings processing the garden’s fruits and vegetables for the freezer; my brother and I, less healthily, spent our after-school afternoons, on our own, building tall stacks of peanut butter and jelly on Ritz crackers, or secretly baking and eating Stir n’ Frost cakes fast so that my mother would never know (except of course she knew). None of which should have instilled a whole lot of confidence in my mom that we could cook in her absence, but as far as I can recall, while she might leave ingredients and suggestions for meals, she did not cook meals for us in advance. I knew how to make meatloaf and minute steaks, there were plenty of vegetables in the freezer (thanks to my dad’s summer labors), I could follow a recipe. So we did not starve. Of course, there was the time we tried to bake potatoes, and didn’t know to prick them all over in advance. After a time, we heard a dull thud and opened the oven door to find shards of potato innards scattered all over the walls and floor of the oven. We turned off the oven and went out for pizza. But mostly we did just fine.

Now I’m about to go away on my first business trip as a mom, and while I’ve organized school pick-ups for my days away, supervised early Valentine-making and left my husband reminders about swim class and the school fair and a Saturday playdate, I haven’t done a thing about meals. He knows how to cook, and in fact while I’m gone, the three of them will probably experiment a bit in the kitchen; maybe I’ll come home to a new variation on puttanesca, or some leftover Saturday morning scones.

The big story here isn’t the family left to fend without the mom – in our house, dinner is every bit as likely to be cooked by my husband as myself – but the mom on her own for seven (of course I’ve counted) restaurant meals, seven meals without children. I’m both happy and anxious about exploring this unfamiliar terrain. I’ve assembled my airplane snacks and head off to Chicago with a list of restaurants and a couple of good books. It’s time for me to learn to eat alone.

My Kids Love the ’70s, & Yours Might, Too

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Or:  Real Kids Do Eat Quiche

Or:  Lisa Owes You a Meatless Post

by Lisa

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Yes, we absolutely ate quiche growing up in NJ in the 1970s and early 1980s.  My sister and brother sort of hated it, but I didn’t.  I don’t remember when my mother started making it, likely around the same time Pierre Franey and Craig Claiborne began to revolutize what was put on tables all across America, but it was in regular if not frequent rotation on our dinner table, and now I know why: it’s one of the fastest, easiest things you can make on any night, you can add whatever extras inspire you, and it pairs beautifully with whatever you have to serve on the side.

Another anecdote in my quiche-related food history:  I also worked at a restaurant for ladies-who-lunched which featured a quiche of the day which was extremely popular, and the whole scene was extraordinarily uptight and downright dismal.  Then that era ended, and I quite happily never ate another quiche until about five years ago, when I was served the best quich of my life at a child’s birthday party. Of course, the husband was French, and he had made the quiche in the classic mode, with cream and without any extra filling. It was perfectly rich, creamy, luxurious, and downright delicious.

But I didn’t think about it after that for many years, until sometime after Finn turned 3, and was addicted to cheese, and I had nothing in my pantry to eat and those magic staples:  milk, eggs, cheese, pie crust, came together and traveled some long forgotten synapse and Voila! I had dinner:  quiche.

I called it cheese pie, of course, to trick my son, and made it as my mother had, with a pile of swiss cheese grated into the pie plate and a scattering of pancetta (ok, my mom used ham). Neither Ella nor Finn like anything but the crust, but I was determined to make this work. Since it tasted nothing like the one I remembered from the party, some time later, I pulled down my copy of Julia Child’s Kitchen Wisdom, which is kind of like crib notes for Julia, found the classic recipe for quiche, and tried again.

The quiche was a huge hit, I tell you.  Huge.  Now, it’s become one of Ella & Finn’s favorite things to eat. The cheer–quite literally–when I tell them it’s on the dinner menu.  I have to hide if I cook it early, which is why I have only a photo of the ingredients to show you.  And I have to restrict their servings, or else they’d eat the whole damn thing.

Best of all, it takes about 5 minutes to whip up, and for a family of 4, it’s good for 2 meals, and it keeps extremely well at room temperature, which means it’s the perfect thing to make on the nights that I teach and have to leave the house by late afternoon.

The recipe is a general guide for proportions. You can add whatever cheese(s), diced or chopped vegetables, or meat that you like.  Be inspired. Bon appetit & happy time travel.

Classic Quiche: The Basic Recipe

1 large egg for every 1/2 cup milk or cream. It really is much better with all or part cream, but it’s just fine with whatever milk you have on hand.

A grating of nutmeg

A pinch or so of salt

Mix above ingredients together and pour into:

1 Pie crust.  Of course it’s best to make your own, but I always keep TJ frozen crusts in my freezer because these days I don’t always have time. Though I could have whipped up a pie crust or 2 or 4 in the time it took to write this. But that is another story altogether.

If you’re going to add grated cheese or any vegetables, sprinkle these into the pie crust before adding the cream and egg mixture.

Bake at 350 degrees for 30-40 minutes, until puffed and golden brown. You can even use your convection oven.

Ritual Cooking: Granola

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by Caroline

As a child, one of my favorite books was Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Farmer Boy, which details in mouth-watering specificity the meals cooked in Laura’s husband’s family when he was growing up. I remember beautiful descriptions of the breakfasts, particularly: pancakes stacked high with dollops of fresh butter and maple sugar; two kinds of fruit pie; a pinkly glazed ham …

I liked the abundance, sure, but I also liked the ritual and regularity of it all. Saturday mornings: the feast. Saturday nights: bath. Sunday mornings: church.

My childhood moved with some ritual and regularity, too, marked largely by the specific rhythms of church and garden, which I associated with my dad. My mom gave us our household routine; for instance, I remember a period of Saturday mornings when she would wash her long hair, and since she liked to let it air dry, we wouldn’t leave the house till afternoon. So she’d stir together bread dough; I’d help knead, and by the time the bread was ready to come out of the oven, her hair was dry and we could go out someplace.

My current life doesn’t feel like this at all. The routine feels very ad hoc, always shifting in response to the boys’ school and practice schedules. Laundry day comes whenever dirty clothes overflow the hampers, bread gets baked rarely, marketing happens at different grocery stores or farmer’s markets (we’re lucky to have so many to choose from) when we can squeeze it in between other errands.

The one fixed weekly cooking event, often but not always on Monday night, is baking granola. I eat this every morning, and usually Eli joins me for some “mama breakfast” too. The recipe is adapted from Nigella Lawson’s wonderful Feast (an aside: if you don’t have this cookbook, run out for it now. It doesn’t just offer great recipes, it’s beautifully written; the section on funeral feasts brings me to tears. The Chocolate Cake Hall of Fame is worth the price of the book alone [just please ignore her insistence that plastic wrap lining a cake pan won’t melt in the oven. It will. Skip that step.])

So here’s the granola recipe. It’s a fine thing to make with kids, as the measuring doesn’t need to be exact, and they love to scoop up the ingredients, dump them into a big bowl, and stir it all up with their hands.

6 cup rolled oats and/or raw multigrain cereal flakes (Trader Joe’s carries a nice barley-oat-rye-wheat flake mix that I use)
2 cup raw slivered almonds
1 cup raw pumpkin seeds
1 cup raw sesame seeds
1 cup raw sunflower seeds
1/2 cup ground flax meal
1/2 cup wheat germ
2 tsp cinnamon

2 tbsp vegetable oil
1 scant cup honey, rice syrup, maple syrup, or some combination thereof (I use half brown rice syrup and half honey)

1-2 cups dried cranberries or raisins (optional); add these after the granola has baked, otherwise they get too hard

Preheat oven to 320. Stir together all the dry ingredients in a large bowl until well combined (this part can be done with little kid hands).

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Add the oil and honey or syrup, and combine well. Pour into two large, lightly oiled baking pans (I use two metal roasting pans) and bake for about 45 minutes, stirring two or three times along the way.
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Remove from the oven then cool completely before storing in an airtight container.

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