I’m surprised to find I haven’t written about dessert yet in this forum, since I have a lotto say about the subject. And despite how healthy I try to keep my family, we certainly don’t avoid dessert. We’re just as likely to make an afternoon project of making cookies as making paintings, and if we have a bowl of apples, I’m just as likely to bake them into a crisp than to slice them up to feed the kids.
Today, after a late-afternoon romp in Golden Gate Park with frisbee and soccer ball, we walked up to one of our favorite local restaurants, a casual place where they bring the kids mason jars full of crayons and the silverware waits for use in repurposed cans of Hershey’s chocolate syrup. We eat there often (despite some memorably bad evenings there, no fault of the restaurant). After a simple supper (a roasted artichoke to share, pasta of various sorts all around, a nice salad of roasted beets, arugula, endive and manchego), Tony slipped in a quiet dessert order. The ginger cake here is so good we don’t even order the excellent chocolate cake anymore, which might be all you need to know about it. The cake is spicy and moist, a little crispy round the edges, and sits next to a generous scoop of homemade pumpkin ice cream, all surrounded by a pool of rich dark caramel sauce. It might be my favorite restaurant dessert in a city that’s rich in excellent desserts.
Tonight when the waiter put the dessert down, the boys fell on it. Eli practically snarled at me when I used my spoon to force his back down onto the plate and reduce his giant bite by half. Ben, with longer arms, snuck in for bites from the side while Eli stood up to get better access. “Eli!” I cried, appalled at his manners; “Do you even know what the cake tastes like?” He didn’t even pause to answer; didn’t, in fact, even swallow, but answered by shaking his head no. When it was gone, he took a deep breath and sat back, satisfied.
The subtlety of texture and flavor was lost on him; it was sweet and good and for now that’s all he needs. But in the interest of refining his palate, we’ll keep ordering this cake. In fact, I think next time we’ll order two.
Caroline’s gorgeous post about berries highlighted one fundamental way that our families are different. We write about the very many ways that our family food cultures overlap in our introduction and some of the ways that we don’t. We thought a lot about cooking and meat and picky eaters. But we didn’t think about berries.
Every Sunday, when I go to market, I wish (oh, how I wish) that I had some of Caroline’s restraint. But, here, we’re sort of profligate with the berries.
It doesn’t matter the kind: blackberries, red raspberries golden raspberries, ollalieberries, strawberries. Whatever Ella Bella Farm or Swanton Berry Farm has in season, we buy.
At the height of berry season we go home with six baskets. At $3 a basket you can do the math. Every spring, I brace myself for the summer market bill as the season ramps up. It gets very, very expensive. I get anxious. But we get by. Berries have not yet bankrupt us, and they’ve given us a lot of pleasure.
Ella and Finn eat them at a fierce rate. This began when they were in strollers, and we would buy an extra basket for them to munch on while we shopped. But the problem was always that they didn’t just pick at one or two berries–they ate the whole basket. This was an expensive snack. But we indulged. As explanation, I can offer the fact that I descend from a long line of Irish Catholics on my mother’s side. My father was a Presbyterian with Roman Catholic sensibilities, who converted in the early 1980s.
So a berry basket gets ported to the table daily and generally devoured. Sometimes, they don’t even make it to the sink for the prerequisite rinse (I know, I know). In fact, Kory and I? We steal the berries when we can. There are very, very rarely leftovers, but when there are, I make ice cream. Last week, I had a very rare 2 pints of blackberries and some basil leftover, and with 1/3 cup of sugar, 2 cups cream, 1 cup milk I made blackberry basil soft serve ice cream. I think it was the best ice cream I ever made.
But I draw the line with blueberries, which was Caroline’s post was so compelling for me. I just can’t bring myself to buy them, ever. At $4 for 1/2 pint, they are just too expensive. Even for me.
But my husband’s Grandmother lives in Oregon, and she picks all her own berries, pounds and pounds and pounds of them. All varieties, every summer, which she freezes and jams and shares with friends. Enough to feed herself all year, and to give pound to us and several of her children. For the last two years she’s developed a system where she picks, packs, and mails fresh Oregon blueberries to us, so a box of midnight blue goodness, probably five or six pounds arrives on our doorstep ready to freeze.
These are so coveted, I can usually bring myself to ration them. But Ella and Finn had two bowls each that first day. Maybe 3. I made a small pie. We had blueberry pancakes three weeks straight. They ate them frozen, right out of the bag. We got them In late July. It’s late September. The berries are gone. Kerplink, Kerplank, Kerplunk…
There’s no way to soft peddle this one: We like the luaus.
Last year, we attended a really terrific one at the Grand Hyatt Kauai: great food, fun entertainment, and an unparalleled site in the garden at the edge of the beach. The appeal was doubled by the fact we could walk there, so there was no limit on the mai tais for me and Kory. Which meant no limit on the juice for the kids. Which was much fun for all, even though we didn’t know that our children were capable of using the bathroom 47 times in 3 hours. This year, Ella and Finn knew a little about what they were getting in to: the music, the dancing, a big feast. They dressed up.
This year, we opted for Smith’s Tropical Paradise, regularly voted “best on the island”, which we had to drive to, but we hoped the spectacle and setting would balance out the restricted liquid consumption.
And Smith’s gardens are gorgeous, well worth a visit even if you’re not there to eat and see the show.
Abundant native fauna, roving peacocks and other fowl, and a short tram ride that can take those with more limited walking capabilities (like those with young children) to the farther corners of the property. We bought bird food, and lobster boy and luau girl had much diversion feeding them.
The center of any luau is the imu pig. An imu is an underground Hawaiian oven, in which one can steam a whole pig, sweet potato, breadfruit, rice puddings, etc. It’s filled with porous rocks, and wood, then lit on fire, the fire heats the rocks, and after the food is lowered, covered with banana leaves, and sealed with dirt, the rocks’ residual heat cooks the food over several hours.
Smith’s has several ovens on their property which at the end of cooking look like this.
The exhuming ceremony begins with a blessing, and a resonant blowing on conch shells to the four points of the compass, after which the earth is dug out.
And yes, it is sort of sexy. Ella and Finn were spellbound.
The banana leaves are lifted, out, then the pig.
And the pig is a wonder to behold.
After the ceremony we proceeded into the open air dining area to eat. There were long tables, and we sat with some other nice tourists, and as Kory & I helped ourselves to the mai tais, Finn & Ella helped themselves to the hawaiian punch, which may well have been the very thing we drank in the 1970s. It was red and sweet and probably full of corn syrup, and they thought it was just great. Finn, especially, drank it in enormous gulps, like a fish, or a boy who had been deprived of liquid sustenance for many hours.
We had to wait for our turn at the food, which was served buffet style, but there was some great live music, to enjoy with the drinks. And a hula lesson which lobster boy and hula girl had been looking forward to.
The food was good, if not excellent, and it was pretty standard luau fare. The centerpiece was the pig, about which the kids were very excited. And even though it was delicious, I had my doubts about whether they would eat it. It’s very brown, and shredded. But when we set the plates in front of Ella and Finn, the imu pig got 4 big thumbs up.
In spite of the juice jag, they ate pretty well, and so once more, it seemed to be the case that the more they know about where their food comes from, the more likely they are to try something new. It was certainly not just about the taste of the pig, which was excellent–tender, highly seasoned–and by far the best part of the meal, but about the whole culture of the meal: the grounds, the train ride, the peacock, the imu, the unearthing ceremony, the fact of the entire enormous pig cooked to perfection right in front of them, the music, the dancing, and even the company of the other guests at our table. They knew that it was special, and that the new food was part of the general excitement. It didn’t matter to me so much that the food was not as good as it had been at the Hyatt, or that they drank more juice in one night than they had in the previous year, but that they had a night where the food was really different, and they began to understand it was part of a larger and different culture, even though, of course, it was a big tourist event.
And, yes, after dinner, there was a show, in an open air theater, with a live volcano, and a lagoon separating the dancers from the audience. It seemed to be the case that this celebration of Pacific Rim cultures has likley not changed since the 1950s, but parts of it were pretty great. The kids, of course, loved it.
And as we left, the tiki torches were lit, which are always magical. And a good photo opportunity for our little warrior.
After a week in Paris, we headed south for a week unlike any we’d ever experienced (or likely will again). To celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary, my parents gathered our family on a barge that toured rivers and canals in the south of France. We were the only passengers, cared for by a crew of five including –most importantly, for this blog’s purposes–a chef named Charlie.
Charlie had his work cut out for him. Among the 13 of us are five vegetarians (two of whom sometimes, depending on the circumstances, eat fish), one vegan, two on low-salt diets, one who tries to avoid chocolate (quel dommage!). We had been in touch about our dietary preferences ahead of time, but in Charlie’s broken English and my faltering French, we spent an hour the first afternoon going over the details, a conversation that resulted in this list:
Later it was simplified to this:
Only Ben and Eli never learned how to eat Charlie’s cooking, and he never quite learned how plain they really wanted their food. By the end of the week, when even unsauced pasta didn’t appeal, I realized it wasn’t his food that they were objecting to; they just wanted home cooking. Failing that, we rationed our one precious jar of peanut butter, spreading it ever-more-thinly on each day’s crusty baguette. The rest of us learned to eat like royalty, trying unfamiliar flavors and combinations, indulging in rich sauces and a week’s supply of wine and cheese served at every meal; the boys stuck with the most prosaic meal of all: pb&j.
