Stay at Stove Dad

Slow-Cooker Virtual Cooking Class Coming Up

I get many nice notes in my inbox related to this blog. A recent message from a reader, Michele Hays, who commented on my post about the trouble I had getting my kids to eat my roasted red peppers, alerted me to a potentially helpful resource, It’s Not About Nutrition: The Art and Science of Teaching Kids to Eat Right. The blog is run by a sociologist named Dr. Dina R. Rose, and I know I’ll be spending some time reading it.

And the other day, I received a fun invitation from the folks behind The Motherhood. They’re putting on a virtual cooking class on Feb. 2 at 1 p.m. called “Game Day and Slow Cooker Recipes,” and they asked me to co-host it.

I hope you can join me. We’ll be asking and answering questions about getting ready for the big game by firing up the slow cooker. I’m a great believer in getting the cooking done before kick off (as I did by making Frikadeller when the Giants triumphed over the Packers a few weeks ago) and the slow cooker is a great, hands-off tool for feeding a lot of folks.

My father-in-law has a slow cooker, and I’ve used it a couple of times. What tips do you have for using a slow cooker? And if you have any questions, send them my way, or jump into the class on Feb. 2 at 1 p.m.

A Season of Giving

I received an early Christmas gift yesterday: I was shown the cover for my forthcoming book, "Man with a Pan." The artwork is not 100% finished, so I can’t reveal it here, yet, but I’m delighted with it.

It put me in the mood to think about giving, and getting. On the giving side, there’s a reading of food-related poetry and prose at The Old Stone House, in Brooklyn, tonight, that benefits the food pantry at St. Augustine’s Roman Catholic Church, in Park Slope. The writers are Greg Fuchs, Jim Behrle, Louise Crawford, Michele Madigan Somerville, Peter Catapano, Sophia Romero, Amy Gilbert and Jake Siegel, and there’ll be snacks, too.

On the receiving side, Michael Ruhlman has come up with an inventive set of cooking tools that solve some kitchen problems that only a hyper-busy home cook might have. My favorite of his are the All-Strain Kitchen Cloths, which are pictured below (photo thanks to Donna Turner Ruhlman).

I can’t say I’ve had as much trouble has with straining my chicken stock as Ruhlman has (he reverted to using his handkerchiefs), but I’ve always struggled with the task. I use a colander lined with cheesecloth, and it never really works. The cloth never stays in place and part of it often appears to dissolve as I pour the hot stock through it. Ruhlman’s invention would seem to solve that problem, and they look good, too.

The other creation of his that caught my eye was the Easy-Clean Knife Grabber. Like Ruhlman, I’ve always found magnetic knife holders beautiful and useful. Ever since I became a parent, though, I’ve been committing the sin of keeping my knives in a drawer (both Santa Maria and the babysitter refused to allow the knives on the wall in reach of the young children; for some reason the blades scared them). I hope that we'll be moving to a new apartment soon, though, and this is one thing I’d like to hang on the wall now that the kids are a little older.