Weekly Dish

Oh, I wish this post had a different title. I’ve been wanting to tell you about Josie’s forays into the world of solid food for some time now. You’ve all been so kind to be interested in her developments and to comment on how much she’s growing and to let me know that it’s okay that I devote a little bit of this space to talking about her and not just food, even though this is, technically, a food blog.

But, well, I really wanted to have some good news for you. I wanted to say how much fun it is to share the wonders of fresh fruits and vegetables with my little one. I wanted to tell you how much she loves to sit in her high chair, how she leans forward to welcome the spoon into her mouth, how she can’t wait for the next new food. Instead, I have only this to show you:

Some days are better than others—she seems to tolerate spinach and carrots better than anything else, and yogurt for breakfast is sometimes okay with her. But, very often, she turns her head from side to side, tightly closes her lips, and refuses. If she’s feeling particularly witty, she’ll perform her newest saliva trick and blow bubbles right as the pureed food meets her mouth for a fantastic fireworks display of vibrant green or orange (as you see in the photos above). We’ve tried it all, it seems: mashed avocado; applesauce, both freshly made and from a jar; carrots, in commercial baby food form and steamed and blended by hand; spinach; bananas; rice; oatmeal; yogurt; yogurt and oatmeal with pureed fruit mixed in; butternut squash; sweet potatoes. She seems to dislike it all equally, with rare exceptions.

She’s eight and a half months old now, and I’m starting to get discouraged. So I come to you, dear readers, to ask: What in the world do I do to convince my child to eat? Will she just eventually accept that food is part of her life? Am I worrying too much? Is her dislike of bland food somehow connected to the way I eat? I tend to like my food on the robustly flavored side, and my taste for seasonings seemed more pronounced when I was pregnant; the more well-seasoned, the better. That has not dissipated since I’ve been breastfeeding, so is it possible she has acquired a taste for more flavor than the average pureed fruit or vegetable has? Should we go straight to table food? Has anyone else encountered this problem, or is this my particular punishment for being a picky eater as a child? (So sorry, Mom!)

At this point, I’m willing to try most anything (well, within reason, of course; the point is to get nutrients into her body and to cultivate her taste for healthy foods, so I’m not willing to give her chocolate pudding or ice cream just so she’ll like it. At least not yet.)

She’s usually such a happy thing, disgruntled only for the expected reasons — hunger, discomfort, fatigue. Oh, and when we try to put a spoon in her mouth. So, if you have any ideas, I’d love to hear them. I want her to look like this when she sees food coming:

While we’re waiting for the happy, food-hungry Josie to emerge, we have needed food to sustain our own appetites, preferably of the hearty, comforting sort. More often than not this time of year, that comes in the shape of a warm bowl of pasta. Because locally grown broccoli is so plentiful right now, we buy it at the market every week, and this little dish has become something of a standby. I particularly like it with whole wheat penne or tiny shells; the toothsome noodles stand up well to the cloak of creamy, ham-infused sauce. Plus, it cooks quickly, so there’s time for, oh, I don’t know, dancing around a baby in her high chair begging her to open up. One day, I’m hoping I will feed her whatever I’m making, straight from the stove, with minimal cajoling, and we’ll have put this whole baby food stage behind us. I can’t say that I blame her all that much; I’d rather have this pasta than plain, pureed broccoli any day of the week. Wouldn’t you?
Oh, well, in the mean time, at least I won’t be starving.

Pasta with Ham, Mushrooms, and Broccoli

The trick to this being a quick recipe is the order of the steps: if you start the water to boil for the broccoli and pasta, by the time the noodles are done, your sauce should be ready too. In terms of flavor, this is a dish that benefits from frequent sprinkles of salt: don’t save the seasoning step until the end, instead, sprinkle a little in every time you add something new to the skillet.
1 head broccoli, chopped up into bite-sized pieces
16 ounces small pasta shells or penne rigate
4 ounces ham, diced (we used leftovers from a honey-baked ham)
1 t. olive oil
1 small yellow onion, diced
1 cup mushrooms, sliced
3 cloves garlic, sliced thinly
1 t. flour
1/2 cup white wine (if you don’t have wine on hand, chicken stock would probably work too)
1/4 cup milk
2 T. heavy cream
Coarse salt, to taste
Parmesan cheese, grated, for serving

Bring a pot of salted water to boil. You’ll use this pot for both the broccoli and the pasta.

Meanwhile, prep your ingredients: chop the ham, broccoli and onions, and slice the mushrooms and garlic.

When the water is boiling, add the broccoli, and blanch for about 3 minutes; it should be crisp-tender and bright green. Drain the broccoli and set it aside, but reserve the cooking water, putting it back in the pot. Let the water return to boiling, and add the pasta. Cook until al dente.
While the broccoli and noodles cook, heat the olive oil in a large, heavy skillet. Add the ham and cook over medium heat until well-browned. Remove the ham with a slotted spoon and set aside.

Add the mushrooms and onions to the skillet and cook over medium-high heat until the onion is beginning to turn golden. Add the garlic slices and stir them in, continuing to cook until all the vegetables are tender. Season well with salt. Rubbing it between your palms, sprinkle the flour evenly over the vegetables, stirring quickly to coat.
Pour in the wine, and cook over medium-high heat for a minute or two, then stir in the milk. Reduce the heat to medium. Season with salt. Keep stirring and cooking until the liquid has reduced by half, about 5-7 minutes. Stir in the reserved ham and broccoli, and finish with the cream. Cook for just a minute more. Serve the sauce over the pasta, and top with plenty of grated cheese.

My dad has always reveled in the curiosity of little ones. As I was growing up, the firstborn, I think he was always terrifying my mom by tossing me higher and higher in the air, spinning me faster and faster as he swung me in circles, coaxing me into trying all manner of new things. Now that I’ve given him his first grandchild, I have a feeling that he will turn his daredevilish attentions on my daughter.

Part of what’s magical about grandchildren, I think, is that the wonder of a baby who’s just learning her world never changes, but now, fearing for her safety is my responsibility. Dad gets to enjoy the unblemished joy of my daughter’s laugh when he places her face to face with her first live puppy without worrying about whether or not she’ll be afraid. If she gets upset, he can just hand her back over. The thrill-seeking of adventure has always been a favorite pastime of my father’s, so having a brand new pair of eyes to delight with his antics provides lots of entertainment when we visit, for both Dad and Josie. She lights up when he comes around the corner, greeting her with his big smile and booming voice. He wears the mantle of grandfatherly delight like he’s been doing this for a long, long time. Of course, my mom might tell you that fearing for our safety was never Dad’s territory; perhaps he’s been a doting grandfather at heart all along.

It is fitting then that it was Dad who first introduced me to raw oysters, what seemed to me at the time as the most adventurous of foods. He convinced me to try lots of different things simply by pretending that I wasn’t grown up enough; if Dad thought it would be daring and precocious for me to try it, I desperately wanted to. Which is perhaps the reason I started drinking coffee with my breakfast before junior high. I wonder what would have happened had he declared broccoli and spinach stuff for more mature eaters only.

But oysters it was, and joining my father in raw oyster consumption became something of a holiday tradition around our house; come December, they always seemed to appear in our kitchen, piled in a slippery mound in a colander, awaiting Dad’s famous cocktail sauce and Saltine crackers. That’s still my favorite way to enjoy them, but when I married David, I joined my culinary adventures to a man who does not share my love of raw mollusks. So over the years, I’ve experimented with different ways to cook them, and this is my most recent favorite. It’s perfect for our combined preferences — the oysters are poached just briefly enough to take the chill off, while retaining the silky texture I so love about raw ones.

Because of my association of oysters with the holidays, I tend to buy them this time of year, particularly when we’re having a meal to celebrate something, whether it’s our first Christmas as parents, or the start of my last semester before I start dissertating (Lord willing).Paired with champagne, this dish made for a deliciously simple celebratory meal a few weeks ago, as we toasted the end of our first semester juggling our roles as parents, teachers, and students. As we discussed what kind of eater our daughter would be, we both hoped that she would fall on the adventurous side, willing to try anything. As long as she spends time in her grandfather’s kitchen, I’d be willing to guess that she’ll be as eager to take culinary risks as I was; perhaps she’ll at least join us in our raw oyster revelry. And if not, there’s always this middle ground, which I like just as well so long as I’m sharing it with someone I love.

Poached Oysters with Bacon, Spinach, and Cream

We like to eat this just the way it comes out of the oven, with a couple of slices of bread to mop up the pan juices, but I can also imagine that it would pair nicely with thin pasta or a bed of mashed potatoes.

4 slices bacon, diced
Half a medium yellow onion, chopped
1/4 cup chopped green onions
2 cloves garlic, minced
4 cups fresh spinach leaves, chopped
1 pint oysters, shucked and drained, liquor reserved
2 T. heavy cream
2 T. reserved oyster liquor
coarse salt, to taste
1/2 cup fresh bread crumbs
1/4 cup Asiago cheese, grated (Parmesan will also work)
zest of 1 lemon
2 T. butter, softened

Preheat the broiler. In a large, lidded oven-proof skillet, cook the bacon until crispy. Remove the bacon pieces from the skillet, reserving a thin layer of the rendered fat (a tablespoon or two). Cook the yellow onion in the bacon fat over medium heat until very soft and golden, around 10 minutes. Add the garlic and green onions and cook for a few minutes more, until the garlic is soft and aromatic.

Add the chopped spinach leaves to the skillet and stir quickly, coating the leaves with the fat and wilting as you move them around the skillet. Add the cream and oyster liquid, stirring to combine, and cook and stir for a few minutes, until some of the liquid has reduced and the spinach is tender. Sprinkle with salt.
Stir in the bacon pieces, and spread the spinach mixture in an even layer in the skillet. Lay the oysters on top of the bed of wilted spinach, nestling them into the liquid, and put the lid on, allowing them to poach for just a couple of minutes, or just until the edges curl up slightly.
Meanwhile, combine the bread crumbs, cheese, lemon zest, and butter.

When the oysters are curling up at the edges, remove the lid, and stir them into the spinach. Spread the crumbs on top and broil briefly, just long enough for the crumbs to crisp and brown, about a minute (but watch carefully). Serve immediately, with crusty bread, if you like.

Did you have black-eyed peas and cabbage for your New Year’s meal? We did — twice, in fact; once, prepared by some friends who invited us over on the actual first, and Thursday too, because I had already bought the fixings for the traditional peas, cabbage, and cornbread.

This might sound strange to those who know me well, as I have never been a lover of either peas or cabbage. I have learned to fix them to my liking, though, mostly because my husband loves them so — the cabbage, I braise with a green apple and red onion, while the peas get a more Tex-Mex treatment: garlic, jalapeno, cumin, and chile powder. Perhaps not as traditional as it could be, but a definite improvement for me and my finicky relationship with both legumes and cruciferous vegetables.

Even if I have learned to like them this way, the whole time I was braising the cabbage and stirring the peas this year, I couldn’t stop thinking about salad. Oh, yes, it was in the twenties outside, frigid for this part of the world, even in January. And I enjoyed my hot meal of cabbage, peas, and cornbread, which we topped with poached eggs, just fine. After it was over, though, I was still thinking about what those ingredients would taste like in salad form, despite the chill in the air.

So salad it was, for dinner last night, a panzanella of sorts, modified with southern ingredients, particularly those considered lucky to eat on the first of the year. The pepper jelly vinaigrette softened the cornbread croutons and jazzed up the cabbage, while the goat cheese melted into the creamy peas in a way I wouldn’t have expected (I’m imagining the peas in dip form, blended with goat cheese…) to make a salad that was surprisingly tasty. In case you have some of these spare parts rumbling around in your fridge, post-New Year’s, here’s a delicious way to use them up. And it just might make you doubly lucky to boot.

New Year’s Cornbread Panzanella with Hot Pepper Jelly Vinaigrette

These proportions will make two dinner-sized salad. If you have a heartier eater on your hands, I think bacon or ham would work well to up the caloric anty; a poached or fried egg would also sit nicely atop this meal.

2 cups cornbread, cut into cubes
Olive oil
1 cup black-eyed peas*, cooked and cooled
1 T. red onion, finely chopped
2 cups green cabbage, sliced into ribbons
1 ounce goat cheese
Hot Pepper Jelly Vinaigrette (recipe follows)

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Toss the cornbread cubes with olive oil and toast them in the hot oven for about 20 minutes (or as long as it takes to chop everything else and mix up the dressing).

To assemble: lay the cabbage ribbons in a single layer on two plates. Top each pile of cabbage with cornbread croutons, peas, and red onion. Divide the goat cheese into two equal portions, and crumble it on top of each salad. Drizzle with dressing.

*I used frozen peas that had been cooked in water for about 25 minutes, but I think leftover peas, cooked as you like them, would work too.

Hot Pepper Jelly Vinaigrette

1 clove garlic, minced
3 T. hot pepper jelly
1/4 cup cider vinegar
Squeeze of lemon
1/4 cup olive oil
Salt, to taste

Whisk together the garlic, pepper jelly, vinegar, and lemon. Pour in the oil in a slow steady stream, whisking vigorously until well-incorporated. Salt to your liking.

Hey everybody. Happy New Year. Really, I mean that; I hope you won’t interpret my post title as an anti-New Year sentiment.

Because I actually love the idea of starting off the first day of the first month of a new year by looking ahead, thinking through goals I’d like to accomplish, dreaming about possible plans I’d like to make, anticipating what the future holds with ambition and hope and optimism.

But, for me, the looking back is more important, if only because it colors the lenses through which I see my future with a tint of needed realism. Glancing back over the past 12 months to see where I’ve been, what I’ve done, and how I’ve spent my time reveals that if I learned anything in 2007, it is that I absolutely cannot predict what my life will look like under any given circumstance.

For instance, everyone says that having a baby changes everything. But, I found, until you have one yourself, living under your roof, occupying space in your routine, working her way into every second of every one of your days, you absolutely cannot imagine how those changes will affect you personally. Yes, it is a universal truth that babies change your life. So many people told me that. But I think it might also be true that how a baby changes each person’s life is remarkably different, uniquely tailored to each individual parent and each individual baby. And no one told me that part. For, in January of 2007, when I looked ahead to May and tried to picture our life with a baby, I could not possibly have imagined the reality of Josie in all her Josie-ness. Perhaps that’s why we are almost forced to speak of parenting in cliches, because the experience, with its ever-nuanced individualism, evades articulation.

And still, here I am, trying to articulate what it has meant to be a mom, or more precisely, what it has meant for me to be a mother to this one little baby girl named Josie.

And that is perhaps the most surprising thing to me of all: that in the midst of the busiest I have ever been, I feel compelled to carve out at least a few moments here and there to get into my kitchen and make something and to return to this little space and write about it. Mostly about the food, but also, as it is impossible for me to separate food from how I understand myself, about how I am making sense of my life in these busy days. I may not be the most regular of bloggers, (here is where I am not promising to do better because who knows if that will be possible or not?), or the most consistent of commenters on other blogs (here is where I tell you that I would so, so like to promise to do better because I really do read lots and lots of your blogs when I find the time, but almost always it is after the commenting conversations are long over), or the most reliable of responders to the very nice comments left here (and here I am having to use every ounce of self-control I can muster not to promise, but just to say that I am making a concerted effort to do better on this front, to jump into the comment conversation, even if a few days late, even if just to say, “Hey Everybody, thanks for saying you were here. It really does mean a lot, and it is rude of me not to say so.”). But I am so very grateful for every one of you who take the time to read the words I put out there, to try the recipes I bring you, and especially to communicate with me about what you’ve read or tried.

My gratitude is really all I feel capable of promising at the beginning of this year, as I hate the thought of making promises I won’t be able to keep. We all have to start somewhere, though, and one could do worse than committing to feel thankful.

Now, it seems I promised you an egg white recipe.

If you made the orange butter cookies, you will find yourself with 4 lonely egg whites with nowhere to go. I hate to see much of anything go to waste, but especially egg whites, because it is so easy to whip them into something lovely. Like a meringue. If you have a pie to top, you can certainly make meringue for that purpose, but I like to make little meringue shells to have an easy dessert on hand for dinner guests. Once the meringues are baked, slice some strawberries, or top with a dollop of lemon curd or bittersweet chocolate, and you have a gorgeous presentation in a snap. They look like little pillows of cloud or piles of snow, and they crunch with the bite of sugar without any heaviness — almost like sweetened air, concentrated into a crispy white case. They won’t be the most complicated dessert on the table, but with the right filling, they can be quite pretty (unfortunately, I don’t have a photo of a filled one because all of mine got eaten.) At least you’ll have turned leftover egg whites into something pretty and sweet, a sort of blank canvas to fill as you like. Sort of like a new year. I won’t make any promises about what yours will turn out to be like, but here’s hoping it’s filled with many good things. Happy 2008, everyone!

Meringue Shells

–adapted from The All New Joy of Cooking

The one rule for making meringues is not to step away from the mixer. The texture changes quickly, and you don’t want to miss the right time to add the sugar or stop beating. I also have had better luck with the crispy texture I like on cold, dry days, which is perhaps why I always end up making meringues in winter. They will keep in an airtight container for about a week before they lose their crunch. My favorite way to serve them is by filling the cavity with sliced strawberries, drizzling a little strawberry jam on top, and finishing with a spoonful of plain whipped cream, but fill with whatever strikes your fancy. They are versatile enough to handle a lot of variations, just be careful with overly sweet fillings — the meringues themselves provide most of the sweetener you’ll need.

1/2 cup egg whites (the 4 whites from my 4 large eggs measured exactly 1/2 cup)
1/2 teaspoon cream of tartar
1 cup granulated sugar, whirred in the food processor for a couple of minutes
Preheat your oven to 225 degrees. Line 2 baking sheets with parchment paper or silicone mats.

In the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with a whisk, beat the egg whites and cream of tartar on medium speed, until soft peaks form and the whites are all foamy, like this:

Now, turn your mixer to high, and sprinkle in the sugar, a tablespoon at a time, very gradually, until the mixture holds stiff peaks and becomes very shiny, like this:

Now, spoon out puffs of meringue onto the baking sheet, carving out a hollow with the back of your spoon, so the shells look like this:

Bake for 1 1/2 to 2 hours, depending on how you like the texture. David likes his to be soft in the center still, sort of marshmallowy, so I tend to take them out after 1 1/2 hours. If you want them very crispy all the way through, leave them for the full 2 hours. You can also turn the oven off and leave them in there to cool and dry out even more. This recipe will make about a dozen fist-sized shells. They will keep in an airtight container for at least a week, longer if it’s cold and dry outside (at least in my experience).