Not So Hot

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By Lisa

I know this happens to you: the kids ask what’s for dinner, you tell them, they groan. Or whine. Or pout. Or lament the lousiness of what you have to offer.  Usually the question comes around 4 or 5 PM, when they’re most hungry and ready to have a melt down. I’m sick of it.  And I’m most sick of it not because my kids are hard to please at the table. I’m sick of the complaining because it’s not true. On almost every night that they whine and complain, they end up eating dinner happily. So, I know, maybe I shouldn’t be whining myself, but I am really, really sick of the complaining, and climbing that hill of anguish that leads up to the table (we all have our battles). I  have taken to doing 2 things to avoid it: 1)  Responding “I don’t know” or 2) Telling them in no uncertain terms that they are not getting anything other than what’s on their plate….

So, it was with some trepidation that I made chili on Sunday–the first batch I’ve made in years.  It was unfamiliar, to them, & soup type things are not always a hit. So I kept my mouth shut, and warned them not to complain when they sat down. There was corn bread. Which may be their favorite thing on earth right now, so that helped. Still, I was expecting the very worst.  Even my husband gave me a hard time for expecting the worst. And I was so very, very wrong.  The corn bread was the lure, and the chili was a big hit. So much so that Ella asked if she could bring it to school for lunch (with corn bread of course)–and leftovers for school lunch are pretty much verboten in her mind.

So I offer this story for three reasons, and none of them have to do with chili, because my chili recipe is really nothing special. Heck, I’m not even sure it’s chili. But for what it’s worth: 1) don’t let whining keep you from introducing new food 2) don’t underestimate your kids; they may love something now they didn’t a year ago 3) stick to your guns 4 ) serve corn bread.

Sunday Chili

  • Sautee 1 chopped red onion & 3 cloves garlic & 1 bay leaf
  • Add 1 stalk chopped celery, 1 large chopped carrot
  • Add 1lb ground beef and sautee until no longer pink
  • Add 1 can tomato paste and cook for 3-4 minutesto
  • Add 1 large can plum tomatoes, 1 can kidney beans, 1/2 cup dark beer, 1-2 Tablespoons chili powder, and enough vegetable juice to make a consistency you like.
  • Cook on very  low heat for 30-60 minutes, to let flavors blend.
  • Serve with cornbread.

And children: This is how you should answer your mother when she tells you what’s for dinner:

Birthday Cake

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by Caroline

Five years ago today, in honor of her milestone birthday, I organized a virtual birthday celebration for my sister by having her many friends post birthday cake pictures on their blogs.

This year, with fewer of us blogging and more of us on Facebook, her friend Becca and I organized a somewhat different celebration of the day. But here I am, still blogging, and still with cake-baking energy, so in her honor I want to post the recipe for the first cake we ever baked together. It’s known by many names — Crazy Cake, Cockeyed Cake, 6-Minute Cake — but no matter what you call it, it’s always delicious. I usually make it now with revisions Libby first suggested to me — adding espresso powder and chocolate chips; using raspberry vinegar for the white vinegar — but whether you use those variations or not, the result is always surprisingly chocolate-y and rich. It happens also to be vegan, which is often convenient these days.

So for Libby on her birthday:

1 1/2 c white flour
1/3 c unsweetened cocoa
1 c sugar
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp espresso powder (optional but good)
1/2 tsp salt

1 c water or coffee
1/2 c vegetable oil
2 tsp vanilla
2 tbsp vinegar (any old vinegar will do, but red wine or raspberry is particularly nice)

1/2 c semisweet chocolate chips (optional, but what’s not better with some chocolate chips?)

Preheat the oven to 375.

Combine the dry ingredients in an ungreased 8″ square or 9″ round baking pan. In a 2-cup measure, combine the water, oil and vanilla. Pour the liquid ingredients into the baking pan and mix the batter with a fork until smooth (make sure to get into the corners so that you don’t get dry floury bites in the finished cake!). Now add the vinegar and stir quickly. There will be pale swirls in the batter from the baking soda and vinegar reacting. Stir just until the vinegar is evenly distributed. Sprinkle the chocolate chips on top.

Alternatively, line a cupcake pan with liners, mix the dry ingredients in a bowl, then carry on with the directions as above.

Bake a single cake for 25 minutes, bake cupcakes for 15, cool briefly on a rack, and enjoy.

Valentine’s Hearts

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by Caroline

In years past, I have made heart-shaped chocolate sandwich cookies, I have made heart-shaped brownie ice cream sandwiches, and even homemade Ring Dings (or Ding Dongs, depending on whether your family bought Hostess or Drake’s Cakes). Last year, apparently not so much in the mood for sweets, I made a bright pink beet pasta for Valentine’s Day. This year, with a kid at home — not quite sick but not quite well– taking a midwinter personal day off from school, I wanted to make a Valentine’s treat that involved him. I had a vague recollection of a stained glass cookie, and Ben’s the one who found the recipe in his Spatulatta cookbook. And because we already had a supply of pomegranate-tangerine lollipops (long story) available for crushing, we didn’t even need to go to the store!

12 T (one and a half sticks) unsalted butter, at room temperature
1 c granulated sugar
2 eggs
1 t vanilla
2 1/2 c all-purpose flour
1 t baking powder
1 t salt
clear red hard candies, like Life Savers, crushed

First, enlist a willing young helper to crush the candies. Stick them in a big ziploc bag and use a rolling pin or a can of beans for pounding:

He is *definitely* going to school on Friday
They're rather pretty when smashed, aren't they?

Next, beat together the butter and sugar until pale, add the eggs one at a time, and then mix in the vanilla. Now add the flour, baking powder and salt, and mix until well blended. Form two discs of dough, wrap well and refrigerate for about an hour.

Toward the end of the hour, preheat the oven to 375. Line two cookie sheets with parchment.

Sprinkle a work surface with a bit of flour and, working with one disc of dough at a time, roll out to 1/8″ thick. Cut out large hearts and put them on a cookie sheet, then cut out small hearts from the middle of each large heart. If you are lucky, you’ll have another willing helper to do this part for you:

Fill the heart-shaped hole with crushed candies:

Sprinkle the small hearts with colored sugars, or simply bake them with the large hearts and frost them (or not) after they have baked and cooled.
Bake the cookies 7-9 minutes, until lightly browned.

Let the cookies cool completely on the cookie sheet before removing them to a rack, or else when you lift the cookies, your candy hearts will remain behind!

sweets for my sweets

Spaghetti with tomatoes, red onion & caper

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by Lisa

I’ll admit: I’ve been winging it a lot lately when it comes to dinner.  There hasn’t been a lot of planning and I haven’t been very motivated to invest a whole lot of energy finding & trying new things, or doing anything time consuming for dinner.  With my book coming out a little sooner than I expected, I’ve spending as much time as possible promoting it. And so last night, once again, I had no clue what to cook for dinner at 4:15 pm–which gave me 30 minutes before soccer pick up and then a short bit of time after soccer while the kids showered, or did homework, etc.   I resorted to scouting my pantry and freezer, which is what I often do, searching for clues or that single ingredient around which I can make a meal. I found it last night in the pantry: a small jar of salt packed capers, which I had picked up on a whim on Superbowl Sunday at our terrific Italian deli. I remembered an old recipe that involved very little cooking and in 15 minutes had the quick sauce prepped and the table set.  This sauce, in which the onion cooks directly in the tomatoes (not unlike Marcella Hazan’s simple tomato sauce, which recipe I can’t seem to find right now to link too…) is sweet and briny at the same time. It’s a simple but rich tasting sauce.

If you have these ingredients + tomatoes, you can have dinner

Spaghetti with Capers, Red Onion, Tomatoes

  • 1 lb pasta
  • scant 1/4 cup olive oil
  • 1 anchovy
  • 1 medium red onion, sliced thin
  • a few tablespoons salt packed capers, rinsed (or brined)
  • 1-32 ounce can tomatoes
  1. Set large pot of water to boil
  2. In olive oil, quickly sautee anchovy over high heat until dissolved
  3. Add onions and sautee for 2 minutes, until they just begin to soften.
  4. Add tomatoes and capers, cover and let simmer for about 20-25 minutes, until onions are soft.
  5. Cook pasta according to package directions, then drain and return to sauce. Mix well and serve immediately.

Pilgrimage

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by Caroline

I was in Washington, DC for a conference last week and the main non-conference plan on my to-do list was to visit, finally, Julia Child’s kitchen at the Smithsonian.

I love Julia Child. I have happy memories of her voice trilling from the TV in my mom’s kitchen when I was growing up, and I spent a significant portion of graduate school watching her various cooking shows, too. Her memoir, My Life In France, is one of the most honest and lively I’ve ever read, and her cookbooks, of course, are classics. I’d seen pictures of her kitchen, read descriptions of it, but none of that is the same as seeing it in person.

So, my sister and I made a very long and rainy pilgrimage from one side of DC to the other last Saturday to visit Julia Child’s kitchen. There was the wall of copper pans, their outlines marked in pen by Child’s husband, Paul, so she would always return them to their proper spot on the pegboard:

There was the bookshelf holding different editions of Joy of Cooking (just like my mom’s kitchen bookshelf, just like mine). There was the big kitchen table, with comfortable-looking chairs around it. It’s not a fancy kitchen at all, just really well-designed and organized. And there, outside the kitchen, among the photographs and newspaper stories about her career, was this plaque with a quote from the cook herself:

That’s why I love Julia Child, really. Because all her enthusiasm about people learning to use cream and butter and wine in their cooking didn’t matter at all if they weren’t then enjoying that cooking with other people, together, right in their kitchens. It’s that table (that table I didn’t take a picture of! but you can look at some images here), it’s that table that symbolizes more than any wall of copper pots and pans.

I don’t actually have a kitchen table. I have a renovated kitchen with modern features like an island and a raised bar behind the stove that we sit at for breakfast. But you don’t actually need a kitchen table — only a kitchen — to get what Julia Child wants us to get. It’s what Lisa and I say, in various ways, regularly in this space and now I have Julia Child’s version of it, too. It bears repeating: Gather people in your home and feed them. Make this a habit. Bon Appetit!

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