Stay at Stove Dad

Thanksgiving Memories

As I mentioned earlier, I was busy last week with an illustration project. The piece, a reminiscence about Thanksgiving, is finished now, and it's live on Saveur's website. What are your favorite side dishes from your childhood? And do you still make them now?

Wordless Wednesday

The Return of the Jellymongers

When we moved a few months ago, Nina switched schools, and as a part of that process we promised her that we would have her old teachers over for dinner. They came by yesterday, and I served the roast pork called pernil, along with an assortment of other delights. I didn't have time to write about it, though, because I needed to install a new piece of computer software.

I did have time to find this nifty video about two of my favorite food artists, Bompas & Parr, a.k.a. the Jellymongers. I've written about them before, but couldn't resist passing on this new video about their remarkable exploits. Back shortly, with more adventures from my kitchen, and beyond.

Bompas and Parr: Return of the Jelly Knights from Gestalten on Vimeo.

 

 

 

 

 

Snap Peas and Snapshots: A New Food Photo Exhibit

Taking a good photograph of food is far more difficult than cooking a good meal. As someone who often struggles with a point-and-shoot camera to capture the delights I produce in my kitchen, I know what I'm talking about. One person whose blog does it right is Michael Ruhlman, but that's only because he's married to a wonderful photographer, Donna Turner Ruhlman (that's her amazing purple photo above, from a series of color images she's working on).

Today, "Food for Thought" opens at the Robert Mann Gallery, in Manhattan. A survey of the last eighty years of food photography, the group show features works by the likes of Irving Penn, Paul Outerbridge, and Ansel Adams. I'll have to check it out. Maybe I'll learn a few things. If you're interested in going, the show is up through May 14.

Wordless Wednesday

Things I learned about Moving, and a Crazy Video about Two Food-Loving Artists

As we slowly unpack and get settled, I wanted to pass along a few things I’ve learned about moving.

It is exhausting: For years I’ve been falling asleep while riding the subway (one dirty little secret, I have observed, of the “City That Never Sleeps” is that three-quarters of its underground commuters can be found head down and eyes closed on any given train), but only now have I made it a habit of sleeping through my stop.

It taxes the imagination: Making dinner every night is hard enough under normal circumstances, and sifting through empty cupboards and unpacked boxes doesn’t make it any easier (though the results can be excellent—later in the week I’ll share a new way of roasting a chicken).

It is entirely collaborative: I couldn’t have done any of it on my own. In the spirit of collaboration*, I want to share an entertaining video about two English artists who work with food, primarily with the gelatin desserts that they call jelly and what we know as Jell-O.

Sam Bompas and Harry Parr, a.k.a. Bompas & Parr, a.k.a. the “jellymongers,” create elaborate sculptures and environments using a multitude of foodstuffs. Last summer, at the Big Chill Festival, a music and art gathering in England, the pair built a Ziggurat of Flavor, an enormous steel stepped-pyramid structure filled with vaporized clouds of Fair Trade Fruit.

Working with fresh fruit posed a series of unexpected challenges. The pair turned to Dr. Oliver Firth, who they refer to as a space doctor, or one who specializes in “extreme-environment medicine.” On the video, Firth says, “one of the problems we ran across when we were designing the Ziggurat of Flavor is that if you make a gaseous cloud of pineapple, it is actually flesh eating. The pineapple contains a ferocious enzyme called bromelain, which we’re having to denature for every person who goes in there.” That sounds scary, but fun; just like moving. Enjoy the video:

 

 

 

*I found the video on New York Magazine’s Grub Street newsletter, a great resource for local food news.

Step in and Stand Clear of the Closing Doors

I carry a sketchbook around with me wherever I go, though I don’t draw these days as much as I used to. One of my regular places to sketch was the subway (which provided me with a never-ending source of models; the above image is from 2003), but now you’re more likely to find me nodding off—mouth open, head back, eyelids drooping—than holding a pen and paper. Working fulltime, cooking, grocery shopping, finishing the book, house hunting, watching the kids, and blogging takes its toll.

Despite my sleeping habits, art continues to fascinate me, and I was delighted to stumble across The Food Illustrator, a site run by the English artist David Meldrum, who has decided to draw what he eats. Unlike my other recent find, They Draw and Cook, where a given recipe is illustrated, Meldrum takes a slightly different tack—he’s spending a year drawing everything he eats. Everything. Take a look:

What a Difference a Day Makes

The night before last, I let Santa Maria know that I was leaving work and she texted me the following:

"yay!!! girls cutting kale! eating artichokes"

I came home and found Nina and Pinta satiated and amused. It was a pleasure to join them, but I didn't quite realize how much of a treat it was.

Last night, I called Santa Maria on my way home. "Nina has a fever of 102.5," she said. There's nothing like a sick child to make me miss the common joy of the everyday.

 

The Artful Bolognese

One of the great things I like best about being in the “EAT/ART” exhibit at the Atlantic Gallery (in addition to supporting Just Food, of course) is getting to know some of the other artists, many of whom like to cook. Some, such as Adam Van Doren, are fathers too, and he has offered to share the tale of one of his favorite dishes, Bolognese.

Van Doren, who has two children, is a kind of Renaissance man (he studied architecture, paints watercolors, draws cartoons (that's one of his, above), and has made two documentary films about The New Yorker magazine), and his Bolognese is different than any I’ve ever known. It’s made with beer, for one thing. It’s spicy, for another.

I’ve written before about the complex history of what makes a Bolognese a Bolognese. In Bill Buford’s “Heat,” his book about learning how to cook Italian food, he observes that “a Bolognese is made with a medieval kitchen’s quirky sense of ostentation and flavorings.”

Van Doren understands this. His recipe comes from a cousin, Robert Ashby, an actor who was raised England, but also lived in India as a child. “Strictly speaking it is an Italian dish,” Van Doren says, “but this version is a sort of hybrid, a kind of ‘Michelangelo meets Gandhi,’ if you will.”

I was a teenager in the 1970s when I first met my cousin, who was traveling through New York City as a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company. I have seen him every few years since then, whenever he passes through Manhattan, and he always makes a point of making his famous spaghetti sauce. From his days in India, he was used to very hot dishes. For a long time, I tried valiantly to eat what he made for me, but my tongue initially couldn't handle the strong, intense curry. My mouth would burn, and my face started to sweat. Eventually, I developed an ability to handle it, and loved it.

I actually found it intoxicating and couldn't stop once I'd started. He was proud of me when I could eat his creation with gusto (without having to run to the sink every five minutes for a glass of water), but he used to rib me that what I had sampled was what he considered MILD. The REAL stuff--which I don't touch--is beyond my reach, and he eats that himself.

In any case, I have since then created my own improvised variation of this sauce, which is different from my cousin's in terms of the specific recipe, but not in the overall concept--that is, of being somewhat fiery and spicy. My preparation requires a couple of hot pans working at the same time, one which has a pound of ground beef sizzling in butter to a nice brown; the other simmering on a low flame with  sliced garlic, yellow peppers and chopped onions in oil and butter. Once the beef is cooking nicely, I mix in whole tomatoes from a can, and add a small jar of tomato paste. After churning that over with a big spoon, I add two cans of canned spaghetti sauce into the ground beef--both from Patsy's famous Italian restaurant in New York: one is a jar of creamy vodka sauce, and the other a jar of spicy marinara.

As these sauces start cooking, I mix in a bottle of beer for flavor, and of course for consistency. Soon after that, I pour in my garlic, onion, pepper mix from the other pan, and let everything work together. Then I start adding some salt, some healthy dashes of curry power, and a good bit of ground pepper. Oregano also is sometimes added. I add a little more beer or water sometimes to make sure the texture is nice and gooey without being watery.

My family loves it, though I have had to be careful and modify it somewhat so that it doesn't get TOO spicy hot for them. They get a charge out of it, and really enjoy it. It is really tasty the next day, heated for a bit in the microwave, with the sauce nicely imbedded into spaghetti noodles!

 

The Artful Bolognese

 

• 1 lb ground beef
• Butter
• 8 gloves of garlic, chopped
• Half an onion, chopped
• One yellow pepper, chopped
• 1 28-ounce can peeled plum tomatoes
• 1 six-ounce can tomato paste
• 12 ounces Patsy’s creamy vodka sauce
• 12 ounces Patsy’s spicy marinara sauce
• Four pinches curry powder
• Ground pepper, to taste
• 1 12-ounce bottle of beer

Sauté the ground beef in butter in one pan until a nice brown.

In another pan, sauté the garlic, yellow peppers, onions in butter until the onion is soft.

After the beef has browned, add the tomatoes and tomato paste.

Add the jars of tomato sauce to the beef.

Add the beer.

Add the sautéed garlic, peppers, and onions.

Add salt (to taste), curry powder, ground pepper, and more beer or water, if necessary.

Also, oregano, to taste.

Teaching Our Children Well

The scary thing about being a parent is that children learn more from your behavior than they learn from anything else. Two weeks ago, I was late in getting my submissions to the curator of the “EAT/ART” show, and I had to bring my drawings to the gallery the morning work was being hung.

Workers were busy munching bagels and pounding nails in the walls. The artwork had been carefully laid out on the floor in front of where it was going to be displayed. Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria were with me, and the kids were as enthralled with the magical scene as they were with the free bagels. They tiptoed around the art, as I dropped my pieces off.

A week later at home, Nina took out a large stash of her old drawings, and started laying them out one by one on the floor along the wall in a long hall in our apartment. She then proceeded to hang them.

Yesterday morning when I was going out to work, my youngest, Pinta, was eating a toasted, buttered baguette that she had doctored. “Cinnamon toast,” she shouted. “I made it,” as proud as one would be upon discovering the cure for cancer.