books about food and children

In the fall, I was briefly on a kick of reading books about children & cooking. In an earlier post, pre-baby, I talked about Jessica Seinfeld's cookbook, which involves making lots of purees and sneaking them into your children's food. I hoped I didn't have a child for whom I'd have to do this. And now that I actually have a 19-month old, that book seems incredibly fussy to me. Spend Sunday nights whipping up roasted butternut squash purees for the week, to be labeled and frozen in snack bags? I don't think so. I still make the effort to cook dinner most nights of the week, even if Sofia is clinging to my leg and demanding, "Up! Up!", which she does most of the time, particularly when she is hungry. But I'm not going to make special meals for her, unless I'm making something for us that is extremely spicy. However, I do recognize that childhood pickiness is a very real phenomenon, and I'm cringing as I wait for it to descend upon us. We may have seen signs of it in our winter trip to Japan. Sofia was extremely jet lagged for the first week, had a bad cold and then a stomach virus, and literally would not eat the entire time. I'm glad I brought a bag of O-shaped cereal with us for her to eat in our hotel room every morning, or otherwise she would have starved. We had tried making sushi, onigiri, teriyaki, you name it, prior to departing, which she seemed to enjoy, but faced with the actual food of Japan (and the fact she had her nights and days confused), she wasn't interested. Thankfully, now that we've returned, she's eating again.

During the fall I read two books that discuss children & food - one is Hungry Monkey: A Food-Loving Father's Quest to Raise an Adventurous Eater, by Matthew Amster-Burton, the other Too Many Cooks: Kitchen Adventures with 1 mom, 4 kids, and 102 recipes, by Emily Franklin. Hungry Monkey was by far my favorite of the two, though neither parent seemed to have much success in getting their children to eat adventurously. However, Burton writes humorously and self-deprecatingly of his own adventures as a food writer and some of the quirky foods his daughter likes, and some of his recipes are terrific. Particularly one for cowboy beans and enchiladas. Too Many Cooks just annoyed me. Not only do the kids and the dad in this book not seem to eat much of anything, but the author keeps reminding us how she cooked on a yacht and writes smugly of how well she manages her large and chaotic family while also stealing upstairs to write numerous (published) young adult novels. Struggling to raise one baby (and unable to imagine how you handle four), I had a hard time picturing this kind of life, and I'm amazed at people who can do it. But I still tried several of her recipes, because she did write very enticingly about them. I liked one recipe for chowder, zucchini muffins could have doubled as baseballs, and everything else was kind of lackluster. Here's her recipe for comfort food: hamburger, frozen peas, salt, and elbow macaroni. No spice, no creaminess, no cheesiness, just that. Hmm.

Here, however, is Burton's awesome recipe for cowboy beans. I highly recommend the book, though, both for entertainment value and recipes.

Cowboy Beans

4 slices bacon, diced (I used turkey bacon -would be even more delicious with the real stuff)
2 minced garlic cloves
1/2 can diced tomatoes (he recommends Muir-Glen fire roasted)
2 15 ounce cans pinto beans, not drained
1 Tblsp. minced pickled jalapenos
2 Tblsp. finely chopped cilantro

Cook bacon in large saucepan over medium heat until crisp. Add garlic and stir 30 seconds. Add tomatoes, cook and stir 4 minutes. Add beans, simmer over low heat 15 minutes. Add peppers (if using), then cilantro and salt to taste. Beans will be soupy. Great with his whole enchilada recipe, or as a side dish or accompaniment to other Tex-mex fare...

So for most of September, I was down with one daycare illness after another. It thwarted my plans to get back to updating this site regularly. But right now I'm okay - and making plans for a trip to Japan in December. Today we decided we needed to cook Japanese food in preparation. (An article on Bentoin the New York Times has been in the back of my mind for some time now, and I even went so far as to order a bento box to pack cute lunches for my daughter, but again, illness interfered with the cute lunches part.) With the help of the internet, a few good blogs on Japanese cuisine, a YouTube video or two, and a manga cookbook, we set out to make sushi rolls.

Our first step was going to an Asian supermarket -- I've been to a number of them on Colonial Drive here in Orlando, but today stumbled upon the best of all of them - Dong A on Mills Ave. They had absolutely everything, and one of their employees quickly led us around the store after every single thing we needed (I wanted to make miso soup too, and some other recipes). Dashi, miso, tofu, nori, sesame oil, sushi rice, mirin, curry mix, sushi-grade tuna, imitation crabmeat, scallions, sesame seeds, etc... see first pic, above. Back at home, we followed our rice cooker cookbook's recipe for sushi rice, which involved washing the rice in a special way and adding a vinegar-sugar-salt mixture at the end. Nour actually made the rolls-- california and variations on tuna-- and they were terrific. The best were the spicy tuna rolls.

Two great Internet finds: a recipe for a spicy tuna mayonnaise (1/4 cup mayo, 1 Tblsp. sriracha, 1 tsp. sesame oil), and a nice recipe for miso soup from this website:. The sushi rolls were perfect. We stuffed ourselves and calculated how much money we must be saving by making them ourselves, all you can eat. Our first venture into Japanese cuisine, hopefully more to follow.

Nutty about Quinoa

I've been on a cooking rampage since the semester started. The baby, well, she's a toddler now at 14 months, started daycare, we started back teaching, and cooking something good at the end of a long day feels like the best kind of stress relief. I'm always hopeful the next recipe I try is going to be life changing. Nine times out of ten it isn't (recent ehhh recipes included Cornish pasties and tomato pie), but experimenting is always fun. I'm also thinking about trying to send good foods to daycare with S, and happy that she still eats everything. So today I was reading somewhere about quinoa, and how it's a super food. Packed with protein, full of all 8 amino acids, plus iron, fiber, calcium, vitamins, etc etc. Claims that it can lower your blood pressure or improve your memory.

I've tried cooking with it before and wasn't that crazy about it, but I decided to give it another try. You can use quinoa as a substitute in recipes that would call for rice. Picked some up at Whole Foods, and for dinner, made a risotto I normally make with arborio rice, roasted butternut squash, and chicken. I roast 1 squash at 400 for 45 minutes, saute a shallot and garlic in butter, add 1 diced chicken breast, cook it for a minute until no longer pink, then add 1 cup quinoa and 2 cups water. After ten minutes, added half the roasted squash, chopped up small. Salt & pepper to taste. Topped with parmesan cheese, the first bite was interesting, but after that it grew on me. Something about the smell or taste reminds me of cruciferous vegetables, but just a hint.

Then I had some uncooked quinoa left over, so for dessert I adapted a Martha Stewart recipe for quinoa muffins. And this one was worth writing about. May top a previous Best Ever Muffins recipe, since it's probably better for you and also has an interesting nutty crunchiness to it. You can replace blueberries with whatever you have on hand-- raisins, cranberries, dates would all be nice...

Quinoa Muffins

1 cup quinoa, rinsed (You have to do this or apparently it's very bitter)
1/4 cup vegetable oil,
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 cup whole wheat flour
3/4 cup packed brown sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup (or more!) blueberries
3/4 cup whole milk (I'll try using lowfat next time)
1 large egg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Boil 1 cup quinoa with 1 cup water for about 11 minutes or until water is absorbed. Preheat oven to 350.

In a mixing bowl, whisk together flours, sugar, baking powder, and salt. Add 2 cups of the cooked quinoa (you might have slightly more) and mix well. In a small bowl, beat milk, egg, and vanilla. Add milk mixture plus blueberries to flour mixture, mix just enough to get the ingredients together or the muffins will be tough.

Pour into 12 muffin cups sprayed with cooking spray. Bake at 350 for 25-30 minutes. Cool in pan 5 minutes, then remove to wire rack.

Moroccan Foods for Ramadan

After being married to a Moroccan for almost a decade, I finally figured out how to make harira. Harira is a tomato-based soup with meat and chickpeas that Moroccans eat to break the fast during Ramadan. I've tried a number of delicious recipes, but none of them ever tasted quite like the harira made in my husband's family. Somehow, even though I got other cooking lessons, I never learned to make harira the way they did. So finally this past summer while in Fes, I wrote down my sister-in-law's directions. I pulled out the recipe a few weeks ago and realized it was just a giant list of ingredients, a little here and there, approximated using tea glasses or small spoons, most of said ingredients thrown into a blender and then a pressure cooker, with other things added later. So I worked on the measurements until I got the recipe right. Last night we finally had some authentic food-- I've also been tinkering with the recipe for bghrir, otherwise known as the "pancake of a thousand holes," and I think I've got that one down, too. I'm writing them down now for posterity, and so I can remember what I did next time.

Harira (Serves 4)

Part 1:

1/2 lb stew beef, cut into 1 " pieces
4 large tomatoes
1 large onion
3 stalks celery, with leaves
1/2 cup parsley
1/4 cup cilantro
1 Tblsp canola oil
1 tsp. salt, add more to taste
1/2 tsp. black pepper
A handful of chickpeas (literally)
2 teaspoons Better than Boullion, or beef boullion cubes, or beef stock

Part 2:

1/2 cup flour
1 cup water
2 Tblsp. tomato paste
1/4 cup long grain rice
1/4 cup cilantro
4 cups water

Part 3:

Small handful vermicelli noodles, preferably fideo, broken up angel hair noodles that they sell at Hispanic grocery stores.

Place stew beef in a pressure cooker, or large Dutch oven (will take longer). Blend tomatoes in blender then strain them through a colander, adding strained tomatoes to pot. Blend large onion with 1/2 cup water, add to pot. Blend celery with 1/2 cup parsley, 1/4 cup cilantro and another 1/2 cup water, add to pot. Turn on the burner, bring to a simmer, keep adding stuff: oil, salt, pepper, beef stock or boullion, chickpeas (You can use canned, but if so, don't add them now, add them at the end). Seal pressure cooker, cook 45 minutes, turn off heat. If using a dutch oven, simmer about 2 hours, or until beef is tender.

In a blender, blend flour, 1 cup water, 2 Tblsp tomato paste. Add to pot, along with rice, cilantro, and 4 cups water. Simmer uncovered for 30 minutes, stirring frequently to keep flour from sticking.

Best if you let it sit for another hour or two before eating. Salt to taste. It should be a slightly thick soup. If too thick, add more water. Just before eating, add a very small handful of fideo noodles.

Serve with lemon. Some people also put in lentils; you could do 1/4 cup or less at the same time you add the rice. This is the best soup ever; very filling.

Bghrir (Pancake with 1000 holes)

1 3/4 cups semolina
1/2 cup white flour
1 tsp. salt
1 cup milk, warmed slightly
3 cups water, lukewarm
3 eggs
1 Tblsp yeast (or a yeast packet)

Sift semolina, flour and salt. In a separate bowl, mix milk, water, eggs, and yeast with a whisk. Add SOME of the milk mixture to the semolina until mixture gets thick-- like a thick soup. Put that in a blender, blend for 3-4 minutes. Now strain it through a colander and then add the rest of your milk/eggs mixture. Allow to rise in a warm place for two hours.

Batter will be frothy. Stir gently with a ladle, and fry, crepe-style (not too thick) in a small frying pan coated with nonstick cooking spray over medium heat. Pancake will gather lots of tiny holes, but don't turn it over-- when it's golden on the bottom and done on the top, place it on a cookie rack or clean dish towel, but don't stack. This makes a LOT of tiny pancakes.

Before serving, heat another skillet with some butter (or butter substitute) and honey. Warm the pancakes you will be eating in the honey mixture, then stack on a plate to keep warm. Extra ones keep well.

The Julie/Julia Movie

We lived in New York in 2002, during the time when Julie Powell was writing her blog cooking through all the recipes in the Julia Child cookbook. I followed it religiously. I was trying to finish writing my PhD dissertation and working day jobs as a temp at places like Clinique and Tiffany's, in their corporate headquarters, or in big financial firms. The names of the places sounded glamorous but the work was not-- I remember being hired to fill in for a secretary on vacation at a big financial firm and being shocked that actual shoeshine men would go from office to office, collecting shoes, sitting outside and dutifully shining them. Always at these places there was a hierarchy, still with white men at the top (I'm thinking of Mad Men), and I was usually taking orders from some guy who needed Excel spreadsheets typed up rapidly, or else someone to help him fill out Evite invitations for a party, and who could care less that I was working on a doctorate. It was an interesting year, it was fun at times, and it was also a struggle. And I had my own food blog, site designed by my husband, on its own server (that we eventually stopped subscribing to so I could do a free blogger page). I wrote a lot more back then and loved reading other people's sites. So it was cool to watch Julie Powell's rise to fame, and to reminisce about living in New York in a similar time in our lives.

The movie was great fun, and it made me fairly hungry for French food, even though many of the scenes involved not fully cooked food but ducks being deboned, or other raw scenes. Not quite as mouth watering as other food movies, such as Big Night. So this past weekend for my birthday dinner, my family and I went to Cafe de France, one of the best restaurants in our town. It was terrific. I had veal piccata, with perfectly cooked asparagus and a potato galette, and creme brulee for dessert. Because he'd heard it was my birthday, the waiter propped a tiny candle on the side of my plate in wax, a perfect gesture. I went home and dug around for my copy of the Julia Child cookbook-- I know I bought it years ago at a yard sale-- and couldn't find it anywhere. Oh well. Instead I took several yellow potatoes, sliced them thin, layered them in a gratin dish with sliced onions, parmesan, salt, and pepper between the layers. I poured milk over the whole thing, baked it for an hour at 375, and added more cheese at the end. Would have been even better with gruyere on hand but not bad, nonetheless. But now I'm desperately searching for that cookbook.

Oven French Fries with Dijon Mayo

This is a fool-proof recipe for French fries, and it always turns out well for me. An adaptation of a Cooking Light recipe, with a dipping sauce that tastes like something you'd be eating in the south of France, at a seaside cafe somewhere, with lots of fresh grilled seafood.

2 lbs Baking potatoes or yukon gold potatoes
2 Tblsp. olive oil
1/2 tsp. kosher salt

1 tsp. white wine vinegar
1 minced garlic clove
3 Tblsp. mayonnaise
1 tsp. chopped parsley
1 1/2 tsp. Dijon mustard

Preheat oven to 450. Slice potatoes lengthwise, anywhere from 1/4 inch to 1/2 inch thickness. Place in a large bowl, fill with hot water, let stand ten minutes while you make sauce.

Combine vinegar and garlic, let stand five minutes. Add mayonnaise, parsley, mustard.

Drain potatoes and pat dry with paper towels. In a dry bowl, mix them with oil and salt. Arrange on baking sheet sprayed with cooking spray, place in preheated oven. Check after ten minutes to see if you need to turn them-- if they're golden brown on the bottom. Could take anywhere from 20-35 minutes total, depending on how thick you slice them.

Bibimbap with Salmon and Spinach

This recipe for Bibimbap, rice with salmon and spinach, has been in heavy rotation in my kitchen for almost a year now, since a NY Times article on the joys of rice cookers. The article made rice cookers sound so tempting that I ran out and bought one. You can get them for very cheap at places like Target, though there are also fancy versions. I got a large, basic one, and it's really great-- does excellent rice every time, and also acts as a slow cooker. This can also be made without a rice cooker, and I've improvised on it and taken a few liberties, so it's not fully authentically Korean, but the essential ingredient is kimchi, pickled cabbage. Our grocery store has it and it can also be found at stores like Whole Foods and Asian supermarkets.

Rice Cooker Bibimbap with Salmon and Spinach

10 ounces leaf spinach, fresh or frozen
Roasted sesame oil
Rice vinegar
Salt & pepper
8 ounces salmon filet, sliced into 1/4 inch strips
1 1/2 to 2 cups rice, medium or short grain, rinsed
5 Tblsp. kimchi, finely chopped
4 eggs
Sriracha (should be an authentic chili paste called Kochuj ang, but I don't like it as much)

Steam spinach in rice cooker steamer basket (with an inch of water below, boiling), or simply saute it until it just wilts. Drain and squeeze excess moisture out, season with salt, pepper, sesame oil and rice vinegar.

Seam salmon in top steamer basket of rice cooker, about 15 minutes. (Without a rice cooker, you could saute, quickly broil, or steam some other way).

Clean out cooker. Rinse rice a few times until water is no longer chalky. Add rice to cooker and cook with a bit of salt. (Here you could just make rice separately).

When timer goes off and rice is done, stir in kimchi, scraping bottom of rice cooker. Smooth top. Drizzle 4 tsp. sesame oil over rice, gently break eggs on top, one on each side of cooker. Cover, press "cook" on rice cooker again for 8-10 minutes. (Without a rice cooker, in a large pot, you could arrange everything and steam the eggs).

Switch rice cooker to warm, arrange salmon and spinach next to eggs, cover, and steam until egg whites turn white, yolks will still be runny. Place 2 tsps. chili paste in center, mix everything up. Serve.

I like to keep the rice cooker on because it makes a nice crust on the bottom of the rice. Serves 4.