Stay at Stove Dad

Super Bowl Sunday Pork Shoulder Recipe

We've now gone from simply obsessing over our impending move to doing something about it. We spent the morning and the afternoon driving all over Manhattan and Brooklyn and making the acquaintance of a number of real estate brokers. I spent a lot of time in various kitchens, but I didn't do any cooking. The move is becoming all consuming. While watching the Super Bowl at my brother's place, a nice 1,000 square foot, pre-war Elevator 2 BR, 1 Bath apartment (it's hard now not to think entirely in real-estate terms), I enjoyed a delicious pork roast that he cooked up. I think this is the recipe he used. I've used it many times before and can vouch for it. It works just as well in an oven. I don't have time to write it out, but the recipe can be found here.

Super Simple Tomato Sauce Recipe for Fresh Pasta

Cooking for a family often feels like running on a treadmill--keep moving, or fall off. I would like nothing more than to get out of the kitchen and spend all my energy solving our housing crisis (we're facing eviction), but I can't. We still have to eat.

The truth is, we are in a crazy limbo right now. Even though we will be moving out of the apartment in the near future, at the moment there's a great peace. It is relaxing to know one's fate, and to enjoy the absence of insane neighbors down below, screaming every time our kids run down the hallway. It's okay now, go ahead jump and thump to your heart's content.

Towards the end of December, I had my last last verbal interactions with the now ex-neighbors. It was a weeknight, about 7:45 when they called on the phone. The man was upset, for the umteenth-time, about the noise the kids were making. He accused me of being disrespectful because he said that we knew that he was moving out. That was a shocker. Did he have any idea how much time I spent chasing after the kids and telling them to quiet down? Did he have any idea about the anxiety their every footfall created? The man became more and more accusatory on the phone. "You won," he said. "We're moving out and you get to stay."  After he got of the phone, I sat down and thought about his call. I suddenly realized what day it was. It was the final day of December. He was calling to complain about the noise of two little kids playing at 8 pm on New Year's Eve!

They are gone, now, so there are no more phone calls. And while we plot our next move, I have time to spare in the kitchen. They say that behind every great man, there's a woman. I don't know about that, but, in my case, behind every great dinner, there's a woman (and two girls). Yesterday, Santa Maria proposed that we make fresh ravioli with pork, porcini, and parmesan stuffing. I was game. It is one of my old favorite dishes.

We've made fresh pasta three or four times before. The first time was years ago, before we had kids. It was one of the most revelatory cooking experiences I've ever had. Nothing I'd ever made tasted as wildly different than what I expected and as uniquely delicious as fresh pasta. That first time was remarkable. 

We still haven't quite mastered the technique of rolling out the dough and cutting the pasta, though Santa Maria might have a different opinion. She's the one who, with her baking experience, tends to take care of this task. Our guidebook in to the country of fresh pasta is Mark Bittman's ever-useful "How to Cook Everything." He gives tips and techniques about making the dough (it's easy, but not as easy as he makes it out to be), and basically it comes down to mixing flour, eggs, salt, and a bit of water into an easy to work dough. 

Santa Maria makes the ravioli after I take care of the stuffing. It is a mix of ground pork, garlic, red wine, and chopped porcini. I'm not completely content with the way the ravioli turned out. They were mighty delicious, but I want to refine the recipe and method a bit more before share how to cook them.

Before cooking last night, I took a look through Marcella Hazan's "Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking." She goes into a bit more detail than Bittman, and soon, perhaps as soon as we find that future apartment with an open kitchen and acres of counter space, I'll try some of the things she recommends. First order of business: finding "a good lumber-supply house" to cut a pasta rolling pin from a hardwood dowel. Make that the second order of business. The first one will be getting a pasta rolling machine. That will simplify my life.

I did learn something exceedingly useful from reading Hazan, and that is how to make a simple and delicious marinara sauce for the ravioli. I used to make a sauce with butter, canned tomatoes, and a diced onion. My kids have that typical fear of onions, though: they don't like to see them in their food. They don't dislike the taste. I know, because I watched Nina recently devour a hot, buttered bialy (just picture the confused look on her face when I told her it was full of onions.)

I was contemplating a way to make the sauce so they would eat it (i.e. with no onions visible), when I came across Hazan's recipe. It is genius. She calls for the same ingredients--tomatoes, onions, and butter--but she simply says to cut the onion in half and let it simmer in the sauce for forty-five minutes. Amazing. It has much the same flavor as the one I'd made previously, and, miraculously, no onions were visible. I adjusted the ratio of butter to tomato a bit, and I increased the size of the recipe. She calls for five tablespoons of butter to one can of tomatoes. You can make it that way if you prefer. My recipe is a bit lower in fat, but still mouthwatering. She says of hers, "This is the simplest of all sauces to make, and none has a purer, more irresistibly sweet tomato taste. I have known people to skip the pasta and eat the sauce directly out of the pot with a spoon."

We enjoyed making the meal so much that, in spite of the stressful times, we spent a deliriously happy evening in our tiny kitchen. We were so enthralled in the mixing, kneading, and simmering that we couldn't make it the ten feet to our dining room. Santa Maria was rolling out the ravioli. I was dipping them in the boiling water and fishing them out moments later. All four of us were elbow to elbow, scarfing down fresh pasta and that wonderful sauce. I didn't have a place to sit. I kept saying that it felt like we were eating on a train, at rush hour. It was a real joy.

Tomato Sauce with Onion and Butter

• Two 28 ounce cans of peeled tomatoes, diced (I use an immersion blender)
• 3 tablespoons butter
• 1 large onion, peeled and cut in half

Place the onion in a large sauce pot with the tomatoes and the butter. Simmer for forty-five minutes. Salt to taste.

Note: I added fresh basil at the end. It's a nice touch, if that's what you're looking for. Also, this recipe is for a large serving for four or more hungry eaters. I had a pint left over and I froze it. 

How to Cook an Egg

I've found it hard to cook these days for a couple of reasons. The first is that finding a new place to live is a massive task. Instead of chopping onions, I'm talking on the phone with friends about real-estate lawyers and the ins-and-outs of other neighborhoods. We need to move someplace with decent subway access to Manhattan, proximity to a great grocery store (nothing we find will land us as close to the Park Slope Food Coop as we currently are, alas), and good public schools. The first two points are not as much of an issue as the latter one. A good school will most likely determine where we end up next. Figuring out what makes a school good, is another question. Answering that will require more time on the phone and in front of the computer.

The other reason is a bit more ironic. It's really quite a shame that our over-sensitive ex-neighbors moved out when they did. One of the things that drove them crazy was the sound of the kids in the early morning. When they came to complain about it, I told them that I sympathized completely--the sound of the kids in the early morning drove me crazy.

The kids slept until 8:30 this morning. The later they sleep, the less time I have to cook before going to work. Back when Pinta used to wake at 5 a. m., I would make soups and stews with her beside me on the floor of the kitchen. I think I dirtied every non-lethal utensil daily during those days. I would toss her pots, pans, spoons, empty plastic containers, and anything I could get my hands on to keep her busy. I got a lot of cooking done back then.

But this morning the house was silent until 8:30 a.m. I was shocked when I woke. We had a mad dash to get out to school and work. I didn't have time to do any prep work in the kitchen for tonight's dinner. When I got home from work, I was tired and hungry. Fortunately, I had made chicken soup over the weekend, and I ate some of that for dinner. We have a freezer full of old bread, and I used three pieces to make grilled cheese. Still, I wasn't satisfied. I needed more protein. The best thing I could find in the fridge to eat were eggs.

When I was a child, my mother made eggs a special way for me. She called it a "Chopped Up Egg." It caused great confusion whenever I slept over at a friend's house. "Eggs for breakfast? Over easy, sunny side up, or scrambled?," the parent would ask me. "Chopped up, please," I would reply, not knowing anything else to ask for. "What?" was usually the response.

It is a poached egg in a dish, chopped and served with some butter and salt and pepper. My mother usually served it in a tea cup. I loved it. I don't make it very often anymore, but it still tastes good in my memory. I was too lazy to make chopped up eggs this evening. I just boiled and peeled the eggs and ate them. I'm not proud, but I am well rested.

Chopped Up Egg

• 1 egg
• 1 teaspoon butter
• salt and pepper

Bring a pot of water to a boil and then reduce the flame until the water is barely simmering.

Crack the egg and slip it into the water gently.

Poach it for three or four minutes, depending on how well done you like your eggs. I like the yolk bright yellow and solid, but you may not.

Put the butter into the bottom of a teacup, along with some salt and pepper.

When the egg is ready, remove it from the water and pat it dry with a paper towel.

Transfer it to the teacup and chop the egg up with a spoon, mixing the butter and the salt and pepper together.

Enjoy.

Note: This is also delicious with a bit of toast crumbled into the cup.

The End of an Era, and a Zucchini and Mint Pasta Recipe

The ability to handle change is a skill that I want to instill in my children. The best way to teach something, of course, is by example. Unfortunately, I'm about as good at being adaptable as an elephant might be at riding a bicycle. Change is not something that comes easily to me. It took me decades to get into therapy (representing more of a cause than a symptom, perhaps), and I've lived in the same apartment for fifteen years. That is about to end.

I like my apartment, despite its four flights of stairs, its crazy lack of heat in the middle of the night, and its ugly-as-sin kitchen cabinets. All of its flaws have always been redeemed by two key facts--its price, which has been below market for years, and its location, which in real-estate parlance is all that matters, matters, matters.

The cracked bathroom tiles and the odd placement of the refrigerator (it's actually in the hall) are not driving me from my nest. My landlords are. I've never had a lease, and on Friday I received a notice of termination. We've been given thirty days to get out. The low-rent bohemian dream is over. It is time to wake up to the realities of the current real-estate market. 

I'm confident that we'll manage the transition to a new place just fine. For the past few days, though, it's been rough going. I'm shocked, of course, to be served a notice from a lawyer. During those fifteen years, I was never once late with the rent, and I kept an eye on the building when the landlords, who live on the second floor, weren't around. How many times have I shoveled the snow from the sidewalk in front of the building while the owners were off in Florida? Who made sure that the building's garbage cans didn't blow down the street on a windy day? Who didn't chop vegetables on the kitchen counter, lest the knife mar the Formica? I treated this place like it was my own.

I'll get around to telling the story of how we ended up getting thrown out. It has its funny parts, but as the maxim goes, comedy equals tragedy plus time. I need a little more time to deal with it. The short story: our new downstairs neighbors, who have since moved out, could not tolerate the pitter-patter of little feet. The day they arrived, before even saying hello, they ran upstairs at 6pm to complain about the sound of our kids running around the apartment.  They acted as if we were raising pachyderms, not children. They were implacable. We did our best to keep them--and by extension our landlord--happy. It didn't work. Neville Chamberlain never had it so bad.

Now I have a grand opportunity to demonstrate my own adaptability. Fortunately, there's one arena where I often get to practice the skill: cooking. Take the other night, for example. I had been planning to make a zucchini-pasta recipe from Mark Bittman. The recipe calls for basil. I had purchased the fragrant herb earlier in the week. I washed it right away, which helps it last longer in the refrigerator. Life intervened, though, and I never got around to using it. The leaves turned black and soggy and I had to throw the bunch out.

I never made the dish. The zucchini, on the other hand, held up just fine. So, a week later, when I wanted to cook the dish I had almost all the ingredients. I was out of basil, but I did have mint. Santa Maria had purchased a bunch a few days earlier for a leg of lamb I was making for an erudite friend, and my former roommate, in town from London. We ate the lamb, but not the mint. So, there it was. Would the mint taste as good as the basil in the recipe? I was pretty sure it would. In the end, I think, it was better. Hopefully our housing situation will turn out the same way.

Pasta with Zucchini, Ricotta, and Mint

• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 3 or 4 small zucchini, rinsed and diced
• 3 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 cup ricotta cheese
• 1/2 to 1 cup fresh mint leaves, washed, dried, and chopped
• Penne or other pasta
• Grated Parmigiano-Reggiano, optional

Bring a large pot of water to a boil and salt it.

Heat a large frying pan and add the oil.

Sauté the zucchini, stirring occasionally, until it browns and gets tender. Do this in batches if necessary. The important thing for browning is insuring that there's sufficient surface area on the pan for the zucchini.

Start to cook the pasta.

Stir the garlic in with the zucchini.

Warm a serving bowl and put in the ricotta. When the pasta is ready, drain it and reserve the cooking liquid. Use this, a little at a time, to thin the ricotta until it is the consistency of a sauce.

Toss the pasta, zucchini, and mint into the bowl. Add the Parmesan, salt and pepper.

Serve.

How to Tell You When You are Over Tired plus A Recipe for Roast Chicken Breasts with Lemon, Tomatoes, and Olives

Working all day and much of the night and cooking for a family of four can be tiring. After years of enduring extreme sleep deprivation thanks to the erratic nocturnal habits of my youngest child, I know the signs of exhaustion well.

Take yesterday, for example. After eating some leftover aloo gobi for lunch, I was washing my fork in my office's communal kitchen. I dried it with a paper towel, opened the garbage can, and then held on to the wrinkled paper towel and thew the fork in with the refuse. Whoops.

Then I went home to eat a delicious 'in the hills of Provence' dinner of roast chicken breasts, olives, tomatoes, potatoes, and lemon. It's a simple dish that I learned from the "Gourmet Everyday" book I'm so fond of. I chopped the potatoes and sliced the lemons in the morning and laid out the chicken in the pan, so all Santa Maria had to do was put the dish in the oven and roast it. No real work on her part, and a fine dinner for her, the kids, and me. A perfect combination.

There was one catch, though. While I was cleaning up after dinner, Santa Maria opened the garbage can in our kitchen and pulled out a big white clump of who knows what. She said, "you cooked one of the pads." I didn't know what she was talking about. She said, "from the package of chicken." Apparently, when I mixed the chicken breasts with the lemon and garlic in the morning, I included one of the absorbent pads from the chicken's packaging. Double whoops. So much for eating organic chicken. Fortunately, Santa Maria found the errant pad about midway through the roasting session and pulled it out. I don't think it had much of an effect on the flavor, but then again, I was tired.

Chicken Roasted with Potatoes, Tomatoes, Lemon, and Olives

• 7 garlic cloves
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 3 tablespoons olive oil
• 1 large lemon, sliced
• 1 chicken breast, bone in, halved (two pieces)
• 6 to 8 small red potatoes, quartered
• 4 plum tomatoes, halved lengthwise
• 12 black olives, pitted
• 1 tablespoon rosemary, dried or fresh
• juice from half a lemon

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Dice two of the garlic cloves, salt the pieces, and dice some more.

Mix the garlic with the lemon juice and 2 tablespoons of the oil and whisk.

Coat the chicken breasts with the garlic-lemon mixture.

Make a bed of the lemon slices in the bottom of a roasting pan.

Put the breasts on the lemons, skin side up.

Combine the remaining garlic cloves, the potatoes, and the tomatoes with the remaining oil in a bowl and mix until coated well.

Arrange the vegetables around the chicken in the roasting pan.

Toss in the olives and sprinkle with rosemary.

Roast in the oven for about an hour, or until the interior of the chicken breasts registers 175 on an instant-read thermometer.

Note: The amount of chicken in the recipe can be doubled, but that may reduce the room in the pan for the vegetables. If doubling the chicken, plan on spreading some of the vegetables out in a second roasting pan.

Harried Dad's Aloo Gobi

I believe cooking is all about planning--get the things you need and then get dinner on the table. I'm not one of those people who has to run out in the middle of making a dish to get an ingredient. I keep my larder stocked with everything from anchovies (for the quick puttanesca) to zucchini (at least during the summer).

I draw up the week's menu before going shopping. I do my prep work in the morning so dinner is easy to make in the evening. I keep bolognese and chicken soup and dhal in the freezer. 

Sometimes, though, my plans go awry. I was set to make aloo gobi, a traditional Indian dish mixing potatoes (aloo) and cauliflower (gobi) for dinner this evening. We had a birthday party to go to this afternoon, and if I could get it done before we went out, it would be ready for dinner when we returned.

My plan fell apart when I decided to nap instead of cook. What can I say? It's impossibly hard for me to resist a little siesta on a Sunday afternoon. Or a Saturday afternoon, for that matter. (I swear, if I had a private office, I would nap during the workweek, too; Churchill, Edison, and Da Vinci were reportedly ardent nappers, so I would be in good company).

When we returned from the party, I was hungry and the mad dash was on to get dinner ready. I was pairing the dish with salmon because I need protein with every meal. The kids had gorged themselves on brownies and ice cream at the party, so I wasn't concerned about them needing more calories (nutrients are another story). I cooked salmon filets, which they both like, and didn't expect them to eat the aloo gobi, even though they like potatoes, cauliflower, and Indian spices (they gobbled up leftover take-out chicken tikka asala for lunch).

I discovered another hole in my plan: I was missing a key ingredient. We were out of ground cumin. I couldn't believe it. My vaunted spice rack was letting me down. Where was my full larder when I needed it? Fortunately, I had cumin seeds on hand, so I ground them up, but not after a frantic search for the spice grinder, which I hadn't used in a year or so.

Eventually, I got my ingredients assembled and made the dish. Though it's only the second time I've made it, I found it very fast and easy. It is very delicious, too.

Santa Maria, who has spent time in Benares, Calcutta, Poona, and Rajastan, loves my aloo gobi. It's not really mine, of course. I wouldn't have thought this up in a thousand years. The recipe comes from my friend Paul, a master chef and father who is always amazing me with the multi-dish feasts he serves up. I first had the aloo gobi at his house. He got the recipe from one of Julie Sahni's cookbooks.

The best thing about the recipe is its simplicity. Indian food is not known for being easy to make. Santa Maria always says that it's a cuisine built on having a house staffed with servants. This version is quite within the reach of the single-handed man, and quiet rewarding.

In the end, the kids didn't eat it, but Nina picked out the whole cumin seeds and crushed them between her front teeth. That's a start, I guess.

Quick and easy Aloo Gobi

• 1 head cauliflower, cut into 1 inch florets
• 3 potatoes, cut into small cubes
• 1 twenty-eight ounce can of peeled tomatoes, chopped
• 2 tablespoons vegetable oil
• 1 cup frozen peas
• 1 tsp. whole cumin seeds
• 1 tsp. cumin powder
• 1 tsp. turmeric
• 2 tsp. coriander
• 1 dash cayenne pepper
• 1 cup boiling water
• salt and pepper to taste

Heat the oil in a large pan.

When it is smoking, add the cumin seeds and cook for about twenty seconds.

Add the remaining spices and then the potatoes and cauliflower.

Stir to coat the vegetables with the spices.

Add the tomatoes and the water and simmer until the potatoes are soft, about twenty minutes.

Add the peas and cook until they are defrosted.

Serve and garnish with chopped cilantro.

Love Doesn't Always Mean Love Handles

On Tuesdays, Santa Maria always reads the Science section of the New York Times. Today's edition prompted her to write a guest post. Here it is:

Stay at Stove Dad is a pretty fantastic husband and father.  Sometimes he goes overboard (see last weekend's cookfest of chicken soup, coq au vin, shrimp fennel risotto, quinoa salad, etc. etc. etc.), but this is a fairly benign form of excess.

Like Stay at Stove Dad, I love to eat. Unlike Stay at Stove Dad, who is Irish and has a lean and lanky physique thanks to a ultra-high speed metabolism, I'm from German stock and I have Valkyrie proportions.  I am unhappy when I can't fit into my pants, and was even unhappier when I was still wearing my pregnancy sackcloth, a full year after I'd given birth to our second child.

Apparently, this is a common outcome.  According to an article in today's New York Times, "Study Says Women With Mate Get Heavier," over a decade, married women with a baby gain twenty pounds; married women with no kids gain fifteen pounds; and childless women with no partner gain eleven pounds.

These women are suffering because their mates can't or won't cook.  We women still are doing so much more around the house and with the kids, how can we take on shrimp fennel risotto too?

Here's how I reversed this unhappy flabbiness: Weight Watchers (I know it's not for everyone, but I love it! I liked Girl Scouts and Candy Stripers, and WW is another up-by-your-bootstraps diverse group of women). Eating healthily is made easier and more fun by Stay at Stove Dad's cooking. His awesome delicacies are shorn of much of their fat yet still have plenty of protein and flavor.  I especially like his two versions of quinoa salad (extremely yummy and filling), one summer, one winter version; and also his chicken soup (a lemony fantasia and excellent cure for the common cold). The day he baked his first cake, a buttery carmelized pear upside down cake, it is true that he had to barricade the kitchen and call all of our friends and neighbors to "rescue" the cake from me (or was it me from the cake?), but that's another story.

According to the same article, there's an increase in obesity in men who father children as well. This news may not be worthy of a headline, but it's worth noting. It's not just moms whose health is in jeopardy as we pair off and reproduce.  Men, pick up your spatulas and save yourselves and your families!

A Marathon Cooking Session with a Shrimp and Fennel Risotto Recipe

I cook an extreme amount of food. When I'm standing in the kitchen and my feet are aching, I wonder why I get involved in making so many dishes. On the day after, looking at a steaming bowl of leftovers for lunch, I have a an inkling why. I love to eat, and I'd rather not face a night of take-out or an afternoon of Midtown lunch specials. I want fresh and delicious food, and I can only afford it by making it for myself.

I find cooking for my family extremely hectic. I'm usually rushing through a recipe hoping to stave off a melt-down, either on the part of Santa Maria or on the part of one of the kids. It's rarely relaxing. Yesterday was different. Santa Maria took the kids to the Brooklyn Museum and I had a couple of hours to myself in the kitchen.

We were on a good roll when it came to taking care of domestic tasks yesterday. Santa Maria and I knocked off the weekly shop, did some laundry, and made chicken soup, all before noon. We were feeling good when we were shopping, and in those cases, the shopping list tends to grow. Waiting to pay, Santa Maria came up with all kinds of things she'd like to have for dinner--fresh salsa and guacamole, included. She ran off to get cilantro and a ripe avocado.

We settled on having an old favorite for dinner: shrimp-and-fennel risotto. The recipe is adapted from "Gourmet Everyday," a great cookbook the sadly closed magazine published a few years ago. All the recipes in it are fast, and most are delicious. This risotto is a perfect example.

When we got home, I realized that I had planned a different dinner for that evening, coq au vin. I had a chicken in the back of the refrigerator that needed to be cooked. Its sell-by date was Monday, and I could tell just from opening the refrigerator that it would barely make it that long.

We were having the chicken soup for lunch, though, and that was enough chicken for one day for me. The old chicken would have to wait.

When Santa Maria went out with the children in the afternoon, I got to work in the kitchen. I started chopping onions and fennel for the risotto. I started to prep the items for the coq au vin, which I would make the following morning before taking Nina to school and going to work. Time is short in the morning these days, and I would have to have all the prep work done in order to finish the dish and get Nina out the door on time.

Also, I wanted to make my weekly quinoa salad, so that meant more and more chopping and roasting. And I wanted to serve roasted cauliflower to the kids upon their return from the museum. And I wanted to chop the onion and the tomato and to wash and chop the cilantro for the fresh salsa and guacamole. In the midst of this frenzy, I suddenly wondered what other men do with their free time on a Sunday. Isn't there something called the NFL? Aren't there college bowl games at this time of year? Who knows? You can't eat them, can you?

Santa Maria and the kids came back from the museum (where, in the photo exhibition of rock and roll stars, Nina saw a singer mooning the camera and has since learned this vital and sophomoric skill herself), and we started eating. We all downed the cauliflower. Santa Maria whipped up the guacamole and homemade salsa, and melted the cheddar cheese on the organic corn chips.  I defrosted a bit of black beans for the children, who I figured would not eat the risotto. Nina tried it, but she didn't like it.

I can't imagine why she didn't like the risotto. It's a marvelous dish, and quite beautiful. The shrimp is pink and the fennel fronds are green. The rice is white and creamy. The fennel lends it a distinctive licorice flavor and the shrimp, when cut up my special way, are curly and tender and filling. The dish itself is low in fat, if you make it my way with just olive oil. The trick to the shrimp is to slice each one down its back into two long pieces. I usually don't have time to do this when the kids are around, but yesterday, I had the opportunity. When the shrimp are cooked at the end of the dish, they wind themselves up into little corkscrews. They are delightful. I thought so this afternoon when eating the leftovers for lunch. The nice thing about the way I cook, upping the proportions substantially, is that I have leftovers from my leftovers. I'll be eating some of it tomorrow for lunch again. I don't mind. It's that good.

Shrimp and Fennel Risotto

• 1 onion, diced
• 1 or more heads fennel, cored and diced, fronds reserved.
• 1 T. Olive Oil
• 1 cup Arborio or other short-grained rice
• 1/2 cup or more white wine
• 1 cup chicken stock
• 4 or more cups of hot water
• 1 lb. medium shrimp, peeled, deveined, and sliced lengthwise into two long pieces

Salt the shrimp by layering them in a bowl and putting 1/2 t. salt on them. Put another layer of shrimp on top of that and salt them as well. Continue until all the shrimp are salted. This step can be done as the shrimp are sliced into two pieces.

Heat the chicken stock and the water until boiling and then turn down to a low simmer.

Sauté the onion in the oil until soft.

Add the fennel and continue to cook until soft.

Add the rice and stir to coat each grain with oil.

Add the wine and cook and stir until the wine is absorbed.

Add a ladle of stock to the rice and stir.

Stir (on and off) until the stock is absorbed.

Repeat the last two steps until the rice is almost cooked. If you need more liquid, just add hot water to the stock mixture. The rice should be tender but still firm in the center.

Stir in fennel fronds and the shrimp and cook a few minutes until they are opaque and pink. Add salt and freshly ground pepper to taste.

Serve immediately.

Note: you can make this with butter if you prefer a richer taste.

How to Get Your Kids to Eat Healthy Food

Ever since I became a parent, I've tried to get my children to eat tasty food that is good for them. I'm hardly alone in this quest. At cocktail parties, other parents have come up to me and asked, upon hearing about this blog, how I get my kids to eat what I cook. I told one father that my eldest likes mussels and clams. "That'll change." he said. Then he asked me for advice.

I didn't have any to give him, other than the old saw about putting a new food in front of a child a dozen times before giving up. Not that that's ever worked. I didn't tell him about some of the other techniques that I had witnessed. I once saw a friend tip his screaming toddler's mouth back and force him to eat whatever it was that we had at the table at that moment. That didn't work, either. 

I've always thought that what children eat or don't eat has less to do with the flavor of a given food than it does to do with the social dimensions of their lives. Children have very few opportunities to fully exert their power. The dinner table is a rare chance for them to control what goes into their mouths, if not what goes on around them. Ever have to sit through a dinner while parents exhorted their children to eat their vegetables? It can take the air out of the whole evening.

Tonight, the mystery deepened. The children ate quesadillas and broccoli with their babysitter, a fine dinner by any standard. I whipped up a mini-Mexican feast of black beans, rice, pan-fried chicken thighs, spinach, and sliced avocado for Santa Maria and myself. I love this dinner. Most of it is cooked ahead of time (the beans freeze well; the rice I cooked this morning while eating breakfast), and can be on the table in about ten minutes.

We sat down to eat while the children played at the table beside us. Then, Nina asked for chicken. Pinta requested black beans. Suddenly, Nina, too, wanted black beans. I raised an eyebrow. The black beans are certifiably delicious. I would take them anywhere and serve them to anyone and challenge them to resist their rich and savory flavor (I make them with bacon), but Nina has spurned them on so many occasions that I've stopped offering them to her. 

Here was further evidence of the social dynamic at play. Nina and Pinta both knew that after eating their snack, they would have to go to bed. The longer they spent at the table, the longer they could stay up. They would never say as much, but I wonder if this influenced their hunger. They each had two small bowls of black beans and rice. Promises were made to serve them more of it for lunch tomorrow. I'll be curious to see how that goes. In the meantime, I was thrilled to have them eating it. It verified my belief that the beans taste good, and that's always a relief.

More practical advice on how to get kids to eat healthily is available here.

Old Springsteen Eases Transition Back to the Kitchen

Between traveling and celebrating, the Christmas holiday has disrupted my culinary activities, in a mostly welcome and joyful way.

Santa Maria gave me an iPod Touch for Christmas and I took it out for an inaugural run on Sunday. More accurately, I used her iPod Nano because I couldn’t figure out how play music on mine. I’m a little late to the portable, digital-music game, though I’m not a late adopter of digital music per se: my hard drive has some eight-six gigabytes of music, which caused all kinds of confusion when synching it for the first time with my new, thirty-two gig Touch.

The important thing here is what I was listening to. All that time in the car driving back and forth from Pennsylvania to New York led to a dose of classic rock, which seems like the only thing I can ever find on the F.M. dial. Now that I’m past forty I’ve had the unfortunate experience of finding those familiar tunes on WCBS FM, the oldies station. When I was a kid, that spot on the dial reeked of doo-wop and the like. I hated it. Now it’s where I’m likely to find old Rolling Stones or Bruce Springsteen. This makes me feel old.

I was a huge Springsteen fan in high school, ever since my sister brought “Darkness on the Edge of Town” into the house. One of my first entrepreneurial projects involved standing on line (not going online) overnight to secure seats to his Giants Stadium shows for “Born in the U.S.A.” and then scalping a bunch of the tickets and turning a tidy profit. As a teenager, I would drive around playing that album and his earlier works, in particular “Greetings from Asbury Park,” which I always admired for its crazy lyrics. I’ve lost interest in Springsteen’s later work, but those early songs are etched into my psyche.

A few years ago, Springsteen released “Hammersmith Odeon London '75,” his fourth official live album. Springsteen is famous for his live shows, and this early concert shows why. The Boss had already been on the cover of Time magazine as the future of rock, but this was his first appearance in England. No one there really knew him, and he had to prove himself. Recorded shortly after the release of “Born to Run,” it is solely his early material, and I just love it. The quality of the recording is excellent and the set list impeccable. "Backstreets," "Thunder Road," "She's the One," are all there.

On Sunday I knew that the weekly shop needed to be completed. I listened to the album while running through my list—carrots, onions, whole chickens, etc., etc.—at the Park Slope Food Coop. Because of the holiday, the coop was less crowded than usual. I’m not sure how I would manage under its crowded, regular conditions with a head full of Clarence Clemons and the E Street Band, but those empty aisles were perfect for my first excursion with an iPod. I drifted around in a sonic haze, never before so pleased to be buying food.

The way I've been cooking lately, I do much of the work for the week on Sunday night. I prepare a week's worth of quinoa salad and poached chicken breasts for Santa Maria's and my lunches. I can do these tasks while finishing off the dinner dishes, and I put the headphones back on while doing this work. I enjoyed listening to the album on my iPod, but I would caution against buying the collection from the iTunes store.

For some mystifying reason, the digital version doesn't include one of the best songs—"Kitty's Back." It was midway through the album's rollicking, seventeen-minute rendition, when the band is vamping and jamming, and everyone is taking a solo (sometimes at what seems like the exact same moment), that I realized how music can enhance cooking. Marshall McLuhan talked about hot and cool media and the ability of technology to extend and alter our senses. He reasoned that when one sense is overloaded, the others start to shut down.

I was experiencing some mighty hot media in the kitchen. Not only was the stove on, but my iPod was cranking. With the late Danny Federici reaching heights of ecstasy during his keyboard solo, my other sensory perception were altered. McLuhan was only half right, though. My sense of smell was not shutting down. It was enhanced. I was standing over the poaching chicken as I had done many times before. On this evening, though, a delightful fragrance filled my nostrils—the scent of thyme. It was as thick and wonderful as the smoke of another, less-legal herb might have been at a rock concert years ago.

The concert was also released as a DVD, and the rendition of "Kitty's Back" has made it onto YouTube. Here it is.