Category Archives: Food

One day soon…

February 19, 2013 Kate 2 Comments

…I will find my way back here. I am slowly coming to grips with the daily ups and downs of life with two, with the complete lack of time to get things done, and with the incredible emotional roller coaster of parenting a 2.5 year old. But I’m finding myself thinking more about what I will do with myself as things start to open up a bit, and looking forward to the end of this tunnel vision period. I know there are a million blogs that talk about how relentless and thankless being a parent is, but I still don’t think I truly got it. Day after day, no breaks, no exceptions, no sick days. I’ve been away 6 nights, I believe, since Tuck was born. I envy B’s business travel. But I wouldn’t trade it, and can’t see another path that would work for me right now. I treasure these amazing kids even when they are bafflingly difficult, and I know how incredibly lucky I am to have the choice to stay home with them.

Ellie is 6.5 months old already. She sent the world a Valentine last week:

Currently, though, she is quite under the weather. Ear infection and wheezing; we picked up a loaner nebulizer today to try for a day or two. Sad sweet girl; she’s still been a total trooper, trying her best to smile through it.

Tuck, though he has learned new and exciting tantrum techniques in these last couple weeks before he’s officially 2.5, is also delightful. Verbal and hilarious, full of unbelievable statements. (“I’m going to the airport. I’ll be back shortly,” he says, as he carries a silverware caddy and a lunchbox out of his room, while wearing a hard hat. Or, “Hush, I’m on the phone. Hewwo, Onora?”)

(This time he was going grocery shopping.)

He enjoyed cooking with his uncle Tom this weekend:

And we enjoyed a quiet Valentine’s Day picnic by the fire (B took a trip to the unbeatable Formaggio Kitchen for the second year: our favorite new tradition):

And of course, when Tom visits we always eat well:

Speaking of Valentine’s Day, Bridge said it best when she tweeted that crafting and cooking with toddlers is not how it looks on the internet. We managed to get through three valentines before Tuck got bored and refused to add any more paint. I completed the rest using art he’d made in his art class. But still: cute.

Finally, we are still getting the old CSA! It’s now year-round, though erratic in winter. Check out The Kitchen Garden if you’re in the area and want a CSA. We’ve been pleased with the quality since Stone Soup merged with them last year. And now Clover is adding a pickup on Saturdays in Harvard Sq.! B picked up the vegetables last week and brought home this ludicrous carrot:

…hee.

Family, Farm Box, Feeding kids, Food, General, Travel

As summer sweeps by…

July 28, 2012 Kate 1 Comment

Shelling peas

Here we are, almost at the end of July, and I don’t think I’ve posted one summer meal! We’ve been enjoying the CSA, as always, of course. Tuck has finally gotten on board with corn on the cob, though I haven’t been able to budge his bias against tomatoes yet. We’ve been sticking with the Family Dinner program, though vacations threw things off a bit and my increasing level of exhaustion means that we’ve fallen back on pasta with pesto one too many times already. (Tuck can out-eat us in the tortellini-with-pesto championships.)

Recommended: Watermelon agua fresca w lime juice and mint. (Blend watermelon in blender. Strain. Add lime juice to taste, squeeze some mint and throw it in the pitcher.)

All local!

All-local leftovers became killer panzanella.

We were lucky enough to spend a long weekend in Maine with some very dear friends earlier in the month, and then a week at our favorite lake in NH with more great friends, and it’s a bit of a let-down to be back in Cambridge and still facing lots of summer. The lakes, though… Oh, summer on lakes:

Maine.

Happy family walking to dinner through the woods.

Glass.

—

Tuck is such a *boy* all of a sudden. He had a great time at the lakes, digging in the sand and wading in up to his swimmies. He’s 23 months old, and never stops talking–repeating everything we say with extreme relish and care. As fun as it is, I’m a little heartbroken as he starts saying things correctly instead of using his made up words. He has always called his little orange doll (the beloved Ned; we’re on #4) “Neigh,” but about a month ago moved to “Net,” and now “Netty.” My friend Suzi was “Sitty” and is now…Suzi. I wish I’d shot more video of him talking over the last six months! I need to capture “Itchu” (thank you) before it’s gone. My very favorite thing at the moment is the way he appends “time,” pronounced “Taaahme!” to things. So…”Eating taaaahme!” “Measure taaaahme!” “Screwdriver taaaahme!” Cracks me up every….well, you know.

His current obsession is with our step-stool, which he has decided is a cherry picker (“Chitty Picker Taaaaahme!”). He plays on it every day while I finish my breakfast, and has started concocting complicated schemes where he parks all his trucks on top of it, climbs on with them, and then gestures at them wildly. I’d love to know what he is thinking but he just says “tow truck, dump truck, backhoe, picker.” Sometimes he wears his hardhat for this exercise.

I’ve also noticed a real shift in his sense of humor over the last month or two. Ages ago he started laughing (or fake laughing) when we said “funny” or “silly,” but now he’ll say “silly,” crack up, and make a funny face or do something goofy. He also runs up to me and makes a crazy face and then starts dying laughing. He has a “silly face,” which he pulls on command or when he’s trying to get out of trouble, and has recently developed some hilarious dance moves (with sound effects) for truly hysterical moods. What a crazy thing, to watch a baby turn into a toddler turn into a boy.

Thanks for this totally terrible idea, Whole Foods.

He’s also far moodier and more easily heartbroken lately. I know some of it is age, but I wonder if there’s also an element of understanding that things are about to change? We’ve been talking a lot about his baby sister and what it will be like when she arrives. Two weeks till my due date!

Cooking, Family, Feeding kids, Food, General, Recipes

Status report: 3 weeks of Family Dinner

June 5, 2012 Kate 1 Comment

So here we are, a few weeks in to our new system. Overall, I’d say I’m about 1000% less stressed by feeding Tuck than I was before. I’m much less concerned about buying special foods or worrying what he’ll eat if we go out, and I’ve enjoyed the new rhythm of our evenings, with Tuck’s bedtime meaning we’re done for the night, not just starting our own dinner, cleanup, etc. Ben makes it home most nights, though we’re still working on the timing and order of operations. Tonight I’m going to try bath first and dinner at 7ish, instead of dinner earlier and bath after.

First night of Family Dinner! Very focused.

The first meal I cooked was one of the most successful. I made simple chicken cutlets (pounded chicken breast, dunked in beaten egg, dredged in Italian-style bread crumbs, pan-fried) and served pasta with pesto and a salad. After refusing to touch any kind of meat, including chicken strips, for months, Tuck ate the chicken up and demolished the pasta.

Frittata, yum!

The most fun we’ve had has been with fruit, since he is obsessed with it and will eat as much as we’ll give him. We even played with chopsticks last week, inspired by a current favorite book, the adorable Spoon. (Little Spoon is jealous of his friends knife, fork and chopsticks until his mom points out that he gets to do fun things like dive into ice cream and stir hot cups of tea. So cute.)

Ok, so his technique isn’t 100%, but he got them to work!

I’m grateful that we’re heading into summer and berry season, since I don’t love buying a bunch of stuff trucked in from who-knows-where. Still, his joy over a bowl of blackberries is hard to deny!

We were traveling this weekend, for a wedding, and I was thrilled by how he ate. Breakfast was best, just because there were a lot of non-kid’s-menu options. (Other meals ended up involving a lot of chicken fingers and pasta.) One morning he ate pancakes, eggs, bacon, some of Ben’s cereal, several bowls of strawberries, and some pineapple! At home he’s now routinely eating his big bowl of yogurt and an english muffin or piece of toast with peanut butter.

—

I know there haven’t been any good photos or recipes lately–that’s up next! I’ve been relying heavily on my phone, and Instagram, but pictures I take of dinners end up being pretty unappealing. Here’s my peace offering: Since June is acting like March (and it was 90 degrees in March, so….who knows), I made a slow cooker stew for dinner last night. Tuck rejected it and ate a bit of bread for dinner, but Ben and I were deeeeelighted. I hate sweet potatoes but didn’t mind them here. If you’re the person who sent me this recipe, which I had pasted into a note page on my phone for the last 6 months, please speak up so I can give you credit!

Below is a direct quote from whoever sent me this. I did brown the beef, but thanks to a genius-time-saver-brainwave, I just browned the 2 big sides of the hunk of chuck instead of chopping it up before browning. Then I cut it into pieces, each with two browned sides, and added it to the slow cooker. The addition of tomatoes totally makes this. My usual Guinness stew uses only the beer and last batch it turned out bitter (burned flour, I think, actually). This had great flavor and was, of course, even better today. Super-quick prep, too.

“Also — in other news — easiest beef stew crockpot recipe ever:

1 can of Guinness
1 can of diced tomatoes
1 sweet potato, peeled and chopped
1 onion, chopped
4 garlic cloves, pressed (or less, if you don’t love garlic as much as I do)
2 bay leaves
1 pound (+) of stew beef (not too lean, or it’ll be tough) [Note from Kate: I used 1.5 lbs of chuck and I wouldn’t have wanted much less meat in the mix]

Sizes and amounts can change, depending on your tastes. Throw it all in the crockpot and cook it for 2 or 3 hours on high, or 5 or 6 on low. Technically, you’re supposed to brown the meat before you stew it, but I didn’t bother with this recipe, and it was delicious anyway.”

—

First real summer CSA pick-up this week! I signed up for a fruit share and they’re promising strawberries AND rhubarb; such riches. I plan to make this ridiculously appealing cake from Smitten Kitchen, but let’s be honest, I’m awfully lazy about baking. We’ll see.

Family, Feeding kids, Food, General

On Snacks

May 29, 2012 Kate Leave a comment

We don’t, much. Snacks, I’ve found, are a major reason Tuck, at least, didn’t try things at meals. We were always strict about snacks–he had one at 10 and one after nap (usually 3:30); they were limited in size, and he never had a snack cup or anything that allowed him to determine when he’d eat. No eating in the car, or anywhere but at the table when we were at home. Out and about things flexed a bit. Usually the morning snack was in a park, but if we happened to be at Target I might let him munch on his crackers out of his snack bag to keep himself occupied. Still, he was getting pretty demanding, and was never satisfied once he’d finished what I offered. It was a lot of carb-heavy Annie’s Cheddar Bunnies or stoned wheat thins, raisins, etc., since he wouldn’t eat cheese in non-shredded form.
But I was struck by the passages about snacks in “French Kids Eat Everything.” The author is much more reliant on snacks than we ever were–her kids always eat in the car, at stores, and any time she needs them quiet. But her quest to break the habit made me think a lot about the whole “shut them up with food” concept that we are all so used to. After all, don’t most of us snack in the car occasionally? Most Americans probably eat at least one MEAL in the car every day! Is it really so bad?

I honestly think it is. I’m working a lot with Tuck on being patient, and I think the French idea of hunger not being a bad thing (as in, feeling hungry when you sit down for a meal) is one that we as a society need to embrace.

I’m a hypocrite, by the way, because one of the only things that controls various pregnancy symptoms for me is to snack several times a day to keep my blood sugar very level. Ahem.

Since we started the new approach to food, the morning snack has disappeared about half the time. Depending on what we’re doing and whether I think he needs it, he sometimes has a little cheese or shares a cookie with me. In the afternoon, he generally has a decent snack after nap, but if he sleeps later than normal and it’s getting too close to dinner, we skip it. I’ve noticed that even after just a couple weeks the demands for snack (“Sack? Sack? SACK?”) at specific times or in certain places have diminished. I don’t think it’s a bad thing that they are unpredictable now!

Skipping snack at the playground today–he didn’t even freak out when everyone around him whipped out fruit pouches and crackers!

(Another element is that he’s been eating breakfasts that would, in Ben’s words, choke a horse, so I’m not concerned that he’s starving two hours later. One morning this weekend he ate his usual big bowl of plain yogurt with applesauce and fortified infant oatmeal, a huge slice of bread with peanut butter, cereal with banana, blackberries, and half a leftover blueberry pancake (large) from lunch out the day before. He may be five feet tall by July.)

—

I’m just over 29 weeks along now, and looking down the tunnel at the next couple months. Over the long weekend we made a list of 45 things to get done before Tuck’s early birthday party at the beginning of August, and then we proceeded to check 16 of them off. It was thrilling: Tasks included “scrub front porch,” “swap out board and picture books” and “hang art in guest room,” but man, is it satisfying to get stuff done. I planted things in the pots on our patio, at long last, so it looks less like an abandoned lot:

And we ended with a fun afternoon playing in the driveway with the water table, hose, and, eventually, a long-overdue scrubbing of the car. Tuck was extremely helpful (and figured out how to use the hose nozzle VERY quickly, much to my (damp) surprise).

Happy summer! More to come soon on what we’ve been eating over the past week.

Cooking, Family, Farm Box, Feeding kids, Food, General, Travel

Feeding a toddler: I refuse to be beaten

May 21, 2012 Kate 5 Comments

How can this face be such a troublemaker?

I’ve been thinking a lot about what I should be doing with this blog. (Obviously more than nothing, which has been the status for far too long.) Honestly, this pregnancy has been much harder than the first–chasing a very active toddler is incredibly draining, and I’ve been much sicker than I was the first time around. Still, right now I am feeling positive and excited about food, namely food for Tuck. Bear with me while I explain:

As I mentioned in my last post (ahem), months ago, I got fed up with catering to Tuck’s increasing pickiness, and started doing a bit of research. I quickly got to Ellyn Satter, whose dense-but-seminal “Child of Mine” is a classic “good sense” approach to feeding children of all ages. She basically says that parents are responsible for what, when, and where children eat, and the child is responsible for how much (or whether) they eat. Full stop. Family meals, one set of options, control of snacks, no catering, bribing, food as an emotional reward or punishment, etc., also play into it, but all of that fits into those zones of responsibility. According to Satter, if a child refuses what you give them (as long as it’s a reasonable selection; ie. things they can physically eat), they’ll be hungry enough to eat the next meal. No jumping up four times to make a new meal or present a quesadilla because the mac and cheese didn’t pass muster. She recommends having bread and milk on the table at every meal, and otherwise letting the child eat whatever the family is eating.

Greens from our spring CSA

Now. Obviously family meals are a wonderful thing, something we’d all love to do, but modern life dictates that timing can be a bit tricky. So for a couple months I got stricter with sticking to one set of offerings at each meal (he even went to bed without dinner a couple times), but since I was still cooking a meal for Tuck separate from our own dinner, we kept falling back on quesadillas, grilled cheese, or bread with hummus, always with some vegetables offered first but never with much success. He wouldn’t eat pasta. No rice. NO BREAD, except sometimes toast. He stopped eating meat at around 14 months (maybe earlier?), so his protein came from hummus, peanut butter and cheese, and his iron came from the fortified oatmeal we stir into his breakfast yogurt with applesauce.

He does like pie.

After a few spurts of obsession with fruit, he wouldn’t even eat that, aside from applesauce or Plum Organics packets. I hated that his diet was comprised of carbs, cheese and snacks like raisins and Annie’s Cheddar bunnies. This was not what I envisioned; I’d always sworn to myself that I wouldn’t fall into the trap and allow my child to live on “kid” food.

Before our recent trip to the West Coast (about which, much more in a minute) I read that “Bringing up Bébé,” and then “French Kids Eat Everything.” I much preferred the latter, which is basically a memoir version of Satter’s wisdom (though she’s only mentioned by name once) with a few variations to fit French society (only an afternoon snack, kids *are* required to taste things, though not to finish them). It reminded me of how much I wanted to beat this thing, and the approach of our trip, combined with the increasingly obvious need to push Tuck’s bedtime a bit later, made me think it might be time to start sitting down together at the table.

Well.

We started in San Francisco for four nights, where we rented an apartment and Tuck ate hummus. But he did grab a few mandarin oranges in the grocery store, and try to eat them whole.

View from the roof of our friends’ building. I mean, honestly.

We went on to Carmel for a couple nights. Tuck ate grilled cheese (made with gruyère, on one occasion) and french fries. He refused plain pizza. I knew better than to try buttered pasta.

Carmel

Distracted by the view (um) at dinner in Carmel.

Then we landed in Eugene for six nights with my parents. My mom and I had been discussing this for ages, and she was strongly in favor of a shock-therapy approach, letting the sudden influx of new foods and timing be part of being at Nama and Poppa’s house. I mostly cut his morning snack, so he was hungry for lunch. The afternoon snack was small but a real treat, like toast with the all-natural version of nutella. Every night we all sat down at 6:30 and ate appetizers–crudités, cheese and crackers, olives–while Tuck ate dinner. On night two he wanted the goat cheese, and then decimated it.

Goat cheese is an excellent facial toner, you know. (I don’t know that. I made that up.)

On night three he grabbed for the carrot sticks and gnawed on them a bit before using them to scoop up more goat cheese. He picked out and tried a bell pepper, though he didn’t like it. One night I gave him some pieces of mandarin and he mushed them around for a while; the next night he ate the whole thing so fast I couldn’t get the peel off quickly enough. He wanted apples, and ate them. He ate almost an entire mango over two days. He ate gruyère, manchego and cheddar in slices and chunks (he’d previously refused any cheese that wasn’t grated, of all things).

He ate THAI FOOD.

Here’s my theory (I always have theories):

Around 12-18 months, babies develop “neophobia,” or fear of the new. I think it’s probably a leftover self-preservation instinct from our hunter-gatherer days. They’re old enough to get around by themselves, which means that in the bush they’d have had the opportunity to pick berries or find mushrooms or whatever. The babies most successful at not being poisoned would probably stop eating anything they hadn’t eaten before, until they were old enough to do a bit more research (neophobia is usually gone by age 3, though of course by that point many children have been taught that being “picky” means “being catered to” and stick with the refusal to try). But what if the baby watches a trusted adult eat something? They might wait until they’ve seen it a few times, but then maybe it will seem like a safe idea to give it a little try–at least a poke or prod or lick. And after a few cautious attempts, that food will be added to the no-longer-new list and get into the regular rotation. [Note: I can’t wait to read my friend Stephanie’s book about REAL picky eaters (my brother was the pickiest ever until he was a teen, despite NO catering at all in our house), due out this July. Pre-order Suffering Succotash (hee!) now!]

Satter says it takes up to 20 exposures to a food for a child to accept it. She says to just keep putting it out, not forcing them to try, just letting them see it. As far as I can tell she’s right. We got home on Saturday morning, and he’s been eating everything from peaches to fig-almond cake with stinky cheese on the sample tray at Whole Foods. After never once getting him to eat eggs, he’s now a fan of “pancakes” made from leftover rice or pasta (it’s a frittata, honestly) and beaten egg. We haven’t figured this out completely, but I feel like his mind is open now, and he’s ready to try. It makes me excited to cook and share meals with him, and to have Ben at the table with him as well.

I just can’t believe it could work so quickly! Fingers crossed that we don’t backslide.

So I hope to start recording our family meals here. Not every meal, but the ones I’m happy with. I already find myself thinking about dinner differently, knowing I need to try to get it on the table at 6:30 instead of after Tuck is in bed. And maybe we will find that it’s not feasible, that Ben can’t be home, that the compromise of vegetables and cheese while he eats is what we can handle right now. That was enough to make him fascinated by radishes while we were in Oregon! It’s fun to go grocery shopping and choose lots of different fruits for him to try for dessert (he fell in love with blackberries last night, but refused to taste raspberries). Our last Spring Treat CSA share is this week, and the weekly shares start the first week of June–I can’t wait to take Tuck to help pick out the vegetables. The new baby is due in early August, and hopefully by the time she comes along to rock the boat, we’ll have a decent routine figured out.

Will you come along for the ride? Do you have any questions? I feel like I poured out a lot there, and I’m not sure if it makes any sense!

Tuck’s food glossary, partial, May 2012:
Apple – Appoo
Pineapple – Appoo
Cheese – Chees
Grilled cheese – Chees
Pancake – Cake
Peach – Peachy
Blueberry – Blueboo
Milk – Mack
Crackers – Crackah
Pizza – Pizzie
Pasta – Pahttie
Yogurt – Yogi
Applesauce – Sauce
Water – Wahttie
Strawberries – Stawboo

By the way, food isn’t the only thing we’re up to! Look who was a cool customer helping assemble our new patio table after we got back this weekend:

Ok, that’s still kind of food-related. More house stuff to come, though. The curtains have been made, the new doors are in, and I just need a curtain rod installed in the dining room!

Cooking, Design/Living, Family, Food, General, Good stuff, The Apartment

Well, hello!

January 25, 2012 Kate 3 Comments

I thought I’d log in to make sure I still had a blog out there somewhere. Turns out it’s still here! Shocking. I can’t promise thrice-weekly updates but I would like to get back to something more frequent than every three months.

It feels like forever since the holidays–a lot has changed around here, about which more in a moment–but I guess Christmas was only a month ago. Tom joined us again, and cooked basically every meal while he was here. It was bliss. Among our projects:

Carnitas, per The Homesick Texan, as published by Smitten Kitchen:

After 3.5 hours of braising, during the brown-in-their-own-fat stage

As tacos

The leftovers were a boon for almost a week–we ate lots more tacos as well as a number of quesadillas, and I think Tom scrambled them into eggs a few times. The citrus juice in the recipe made for a brighter flavor than other batches I’ve made. Definitely one to repeat.

For Christmas Eve, Tom made duck confit.

Those three magret legs rendered TWO CUPS of fat. I have so much duck fat, you guys! I need to start roasting potatoes, stat. Unfortunately we were too excited to eat for me to remember to take any decent photos. Oops. This is the feel of the meal (we had roasted potatoes and a sharp salad with the duck):

And then we descended into chaos. We moved, you guys. Mid-January. It was a mad scramble, especially because our babysitter suddenly left us two weeks before. My parents were here for a last-minute visit, and then Ben’s mom came up and saved our butts, and his brother/brother’s girlfriend joined for the day of and were also lifesavers. Man, moving is horrible.

Tuck hated seeing his books packed but he was a very, very, very big fan of the crane that moved the piano:

And now that we’re getting settled in, things like this are happening:

It’s going to be great. And the kitchen is 100% white (not as good as our old one, but better light), so it’s a lot easier to take pictures of, say, the only thing I currently want to eat, that asian-inspired butter lettuce/avocado salad:

Ok, that is a scarily large picture of a grapefruit supreme. But still. You know you wish you were eating that right now.

HOLD THE PHONE, I never wrote up that salad dressing? That will come soon. I promise. It’s too good not to share.

Cooking, Cooking techniques, Food, Recipes

Aarti’s Kheema

September 28, 2011 Kate 2 Comments

Among my guilty pleasures is “The Next Food Network Star,” which I have found to be a fairly interesting look at what makes someone a good TV host (not simply a good cook, like on Top Chef). I like the judges and find their discussions of the business of TV fascinating. And last season I loved one contestant from the very first episode on: Aarti Sequira, who went on to win the whole shebang with her combination of warm TV persona and delicious-looking Indian twists on familiar foods.

We watch her show, Aarti Party, regularly, and it’s the only cooking show aside from Jamie Oliver’s Jamie at Home that has ever inspired me to actually look up the recipes online and try them. A few weeks ago Aarti made Kheema, a beef dish that she described as ultimate childhood comfort food. (She was raised Catholic, so beef isn’t an issue in her cooking; my friend Kabir is from a similar background and came over shortly after I’d made this; he apparently loved kheema as a kid and was more than willing to eat up the leftovers.)

This recipe is VERY easy. I’m enjoying my new forays into Indian cooking; the technique is very different from what I’m used to: recipes (from Aarti and elsewhere) tend to start with slowly browning onions and then combining them with spices to make almost a sticky paste to which you add liquids and additional ingredients.

Go here for the actual recipe.

Pretty spices at the ready (coriander, paprika, garam masala, cumin, cayenne):

Onions get going:

Lots of garlic and ginger–by far the slowest part of the recipe is prepping them; easily avoided by having Aarti’s ginger-garlic paste (“recipe” at the end here) on hand in the fridge–join the browned onions:

Cook in the spices:

Add a pound of ground beef:

Cook it through, then add water, salt and pepper, tomato (and peas):

Simmer briefly, add some cider vinegar for kick and cilantro if you’re more organized than I am (also I hate cilantro) and you’re done.

We ate it rapidly, with naan.

I know that doesn’t look like much but it really was a very comforting, warm dish. I need to make it again, this time with something green added at the end–maybe parsley in place of the cilantro?

By the way, I think I’ve nailed down another reason I haven’t been blogging. We got recessed lights put into our kitchen last spring, and while the light is now much, much better for cooking, it’s horrible for photos–shadows no matter where I go, harsh light that makes everything look greasy and gross. Blah. I wonder what the solution is for kitchen lighting that works for cooking AND for photos: So much everywhere that the shadows aren’t a problem?

Cooking, Farm Box, Food, General

Oh look, summer

July 20, 2011 Kate 3 Comments

Maybe if I take the pressure off and post Instagram pictures from my phone I’ll update more often? Worth a try. Last night we ate a delicious (and deliciously-local) simple summer dinner.

Beautiful baby new potatoes from the farm:

I brought them to a boil with a couple halved cloves of garlic, then simmered until they were done. Drained, put back in pot (covered) to dry out, and tossed while hot with a vinegary dressing of cider vinegar, olive oil, salt, pepper, a little mustard, the mashed up garlic cloves, and a tiny bit of sugar. They were creamy and delicious and I can’t wait to dive into the leftovers for lunch today.

Aside from some hydroponic tomatoes from Maine that I got at Whole Foods (blah), the rest of the meal came from the little Harvard Sq. farmer’s market, which I frequent most Tuesdays. (Mariposa Bakery pretzel rolls!) Yesterday I got local pork sausage and a couple ears of corn; I managed to hold back from the local mozzarella or burrata that I end up splurging on most weeks.

I steamed the corn for about 2 minutes. It was crazy tender and sweet like candy. It reminded me of how my mom used to lecture about proper corn technique: Bring the water to a boil. Go next door to Williams’ Farm (this is in her hometown in Western Mass). Pick the corn and leave your quarters in the can on the doorstep. Shuck the corn, boil briefly, eat. I cooked it once everything else was ready to go, and man was it good.

To drink:

I muddled slices of ginger with gin and let it sit for a few minutes (longer would be better), then shook with ice, limeade, and fresh lime juice.

The corn was a great clue, but the other way I know it’s really summer (aside from the sweltering, repulsive heat) is my iced coffee obsession. Two summers ago, when I had time and energy, I was brewing stovetop espresso, sweetening and chilling it according to my dad’s recipe. I considered it “quick and easy” at the time; now the mere thought of cleaning the Moka makes me cringe. We had breakfast at Clover Harvard Square last week, and I was surprised by how delicious the iced coffee was, since the woman was drip brewing it straight over ice, then adding more ice once it was done. I expected a weak or bitter cup, but it was terrific. I asked what the trick was, and she said espresso-ground beans slow it down enough to make strong coffee that survives the ice. I’ve been doing it at home and it works!

Family, Food, General, Travel

France: First stop, Giverny

June 8, 2011 Kate 3 Comments

We seem to have plunged straight into summer here on the East Coast (mid-90s today? really?), but I’m still longing for spring. We got back from our annual vacation a couple weeks ago; this year we spent a little more than two weeks in France. It was Tuck’s fourth experience with air travel, but his first time overseas, and he did so well.

We visited Giverny for two nights–I had longed to go ever since reading Linnea in Monet’s Garden as a little girl–and while Monet’s grounds were beautiful, I preferred the many other amazing gardens all over the town, simply because the crowds overwhelmed me a bit.

Monet’s gardens:

Giverny:

Above, the setting for a dinner al fresco at our wonderful B&B, Le Moulin de Giverny. A lovely evening with guests from all over Europe:

The amazing window in our room:

This was my dinner another night. Yes, it’s a big melted cheese. On some bread. It was amazing.

I have lots more to share–we spent a week in the Loire Valley, and six nights in Paris. All my garden pictures are in a set here, and food pictures are here. The whole kit and caboodle (hundreds) are here. Of course, I have to grab my moments on the computer when I can; there’s a lot of this sort of thing happening here at home:

Cooking techniques, Farm Box, Food

How would you like a Spring Treat?

March 31, 2011 Kate 2 Comments

Well hello! It’s spring. Supposedly. It is going to snow tonight, but we’re ignoring that because the CSA has started up! This year Stone Soup is offering “Spring Treat” shares every two weeks until the summer shares begin in June. They include fun stuff like eggs and treats from other farms–this week we got two pounds of whole wheat flour from another farm in Western Mass. Most of the share was stuff that stored over the winter in the root cellar–Carrots, turnips, potatoes–but the new flock of hens has started laying and there was spinach and arugula from the cold frames. Oh frabjous day!

Speaking of spring treats, I’ve been on a risotto kick, and a couple weeks ago I sprung for some early asparagus and made big batch. Of course, leftover risotto is…not great. Sticky. I like my risotto almost soupy, and the leftovers are sort of depressing. I decided to try to make crispy cakes out of it, figuring that the worst that would happen is that I’d have heated it up in a pan instead of the microwave.

I found that the key was manhandling the cakes. I scooped out each one with a tablespoon (the kind you actually use at the table, not…you know.) and mashed it into cake form.

Each one took a dip in panko crumbs, and then went into the pan with a bit of olive oil over medium/medium-high heat.

Flipping them required a bit of ginger handling–they aren’t the sturdiest–but they held together.

I basically kept poking at the side of one with my finger until it felt like it was heated through. And then we ate them really really fast.

Kate Flaim