Every Thanksgiving, I think, “Maybe I’ll make a different kind of roll this year. Maybe sweet potato. Or even Parker House. I don’t need so many dozens of rolls.” And every year, I dig up the recipe for my mom’s wheat germ rolls and every year, I am glad that I do. We have no trouble polishing off the whole batch before Thanksgiving weekend ends, one of the boys always helps me stir and knead and shape, and this year, Eli gratified us all by inhaling deeply over the bread basket as we gathered for our feast and sighing, “Oh, these rolls just smell like Thanksgiving.”
I can't imagine where he learned to treat dough like thatdough is funthis is my favorite kind of time in the kitchenyou'd think with 5-dozen rolls, I might get a picture before they're nearly gone
Years ago, Lisa wrote about her friend’s farm on a truck; now from the folks over at Good, this news about a roving educational farm on a truck!
“A literal ‘food truck,’ Truck Farm Chicago is a nonprofit organization that uses a 1994 Ford F-250 named Petunia to chauffeur a miniature farm. …While Truck Farm Chicago is one of about 20 truck farms sprawled across the nation, it’s set apart by its focus on educating Chicago youth and families about healthy eating. Visits to the truck typically last an hour and consist of a short tour of the farm, plant identification, taste tests, and sensory exploration. Off-truck activities include planting a seed in a newspaper pot to nourish at home and painting their favorite lessons straight onto Petunia.”
Read more about it — and see more pictures — over at Good.
I had just finished reading An Everlasting Meal, Tamar Adler’s wonderful, 21st century take on MFK Fisher’s lovely book about hunger and food, How To Cook A Wolf. Appropriately, I was hungry, and even more appropriately, there was not much in the refrigerator. To keep the wolf from the door, I had only some leftover cooked grains, a shallot, some turnip greens and eggs. In the past, turnip greens have become compost here; Adler convinced me to save them (as I already do beet and kohlrabi greens). But after the turnips, glazed with miso, had accompanied a stir fry earlier in the week, the turnip greens continued to linger in the crisper, becoming less crisp.
Adler’s book opens with an entire chapter on boiling water so that’s where I started — by just putting a pot of water on to boil — while I looked at my skimpy provisions and considered how to turn them into lunch. In Chapter Two, How To Teach An Egg To Fly, Adler remarks, “poached eggs…are especially good at turning what looks like two-thirds of a meal into a whole one,” and so I began to set my course.
By the time the water had boiled, I’d trimmed and washed the greens, and I tossed them into the water. Adler has me boiling more than steaming, and when you’re hungry, that’s a plus — it’s quicker. While they simmered, I chopped (should have sliced; it’s prettier and more pleasing to bite) the shallot into a dish and poured a splash of vinegar over it. Once the greens were tender, I scooped them out onto my plate with a slotted spoon and tossed in the cooked grains to warm in the rolling, now pale green water. Maybe the grains would pick up some color, or vitamins; maybe not. Still, it pleased me to keep the pot going. After a minute or two, I scooped the grains out onto my plate next to the greens, sprinkled the shallot over them both, and poured the shallot-y vinegar into the boiling water; then I lowered the heat and cracked an egg into the pot to poach. One, two, three minutes and the egg was set, ready to sit on its bed of grains and greens.
A drizzle of olive oil, a sprinkle of salt, and the meal was ready. Lunch, out of scraps and one pot of boiling water, in ten minutes flat. Thanks, Tamar.
All of these posts are always about feeding animals, of course, but today I’m not writing about the one who complains about quesadillas again or about whom I wonder if he’ll ever eat a cooked vegetable again.
Today, I am writing about my favorite creature of habit, our hamster, Waffle, a sweet, fluffy little critter that has become a quiet and unobtrusive member of the family. She eats like a bird — literally, a mixture of nuts and seeds (although her habit of stuffing them, six or seven at a time into her furry, elastic cheeks is not very bird-like.) We augment with fresh vegetable scraps –apple peelings and the ends of carrots — and she holds them delicately between her paws and nibbles them, a tiny compost machine.
It never occurred to any of us to do more for her (and honestly, I might have shot down any requests for more elaborate hamster meals, given the energy it takes just to feed the other animals in the family) but then a friend gave the boys this:
And we were all so charmed, we did this:
Making one raw vegetable pizza and one parsley bouquet:
And Waffle took it all apart and ate it like this:
If you said falafel, go read my post about the falafel in Paris and then come back. We did eat falafel in Turkey occasionally, always part of a meze platter; we never saw it offered on its own in a sandwich.
We prepared for our trip to Turkey by eating at Turkish restaurants and cooking from a Turkish cookbook, including baking two different kinds of bread: simit and pide.
We did not prepare for Turkey by seeking out, making, or eating any baklava, because we figured it would be a) an easy sell for the kids and b) ubiquitous in Turkey.
So of course, somehow we didn’t eat any. And then when we came home, the kids complained. So we made it at home.
They continue to complain because we didn’t make the phyllo by hand, but until someone buys me a bigger kitchen and a pastry sheeter, I’ll continue to buy phyllo from the grocery store. Because with store-bought phyllo, making baklava is easy enough for the kids to do while I just hang out snapping pictures:
I read many different recipes for baklava, from Joy of Cooking to Gourmet to my Turkish cookbook, and it can get rather complicated if you let it, but really all you need is phyllo, melted butter, nuts, and simple syrup and/or honey. We made one with some rosewater for flavoring, which tasted too much like potpourri, and another with a little cinnamon and orange zest, which we liked much better. Explore recipes, play with ingredients, and chop, brush and layer your way to a tasty dessert.
