Stay at Stove Dad

Roasted Red Pepper Recipe for Arugula Salad

A year or so ago, I was making my winter quinoa salad—the one with sweet potato, red onion, and red pepper—just about every week. Lately, though, I haven’t been eating it as frequently. The last time I thought I was going to make the salad, I bought a red pepper and the rest of the ingredients, but I never got around to using them.

The red pepper sat in the fridge for weeks, and I saw it every time I opened the crisper. It sat there mocking me. Why did I really buy it? What was I thinking? What was I going to do with it?

A few days ago, shortly before it would have gone bad, I came up with an answer: I would roast it. A roasted pepper, marinated in oil and vinegar, is not only delicious, it will last a while on its own. I could buy time to find a use for it.

Roasting a pepper at home is very easy. You just put the pepper in the flame of the gas burner on your stove, either by standing it up on the stove itself, or by holding in the flame with a pair of tongs. Move the pepper around so it gets charred on every side. Once that’s done, put the pepper in either a brown bag or place it in a bowl and cover with plastic wrap.

Leave the pepper until it cools, at which point the skin will come off very easily. Rinse the pepper to get the seeds out and any little bits of skin that may remain. Slice the pepper into long narrow strips, and then marinate them in olive oil, vinegar, and a bit of oregano, or other herb.

The peppers will keep a few days, at least, in the fridge, and they’re great on their own, on a sandwich, or, as I discovered, in an arugula salad with shavings of Parmesan.  The sweetness of the pepper counteracts the tartness of the arugula, making it a colorful and perfectly balanced salad.

The Perfect Kale Chip Recipe

Around our house, kale chips are a snack of first and last resort. Santa Maria whips them up nearly every day, or so it seems, and she's found a perfect way to make them. Or, perhaps, the perfect way to make them found her.

One recent weekend day she was preparing a batch in the morning, and then she had to run out to a yoga class. She turned the oven off before she left the house, and the kale chips sat in the oven while she was gone.

When she came back, a couple of hours later, she had the best kale chips ever. Sometimes, all you need to do in life is leave things alone. If you take this approach to kale chips, you can't go wrong.

Super Super Simple Kale Chips

• 1 head kale, leaves washed and dried; center stalk removed
• 1 teaspoon olive oil, or from a spritzer
• 1/2  lemon or lime, juiced, or to taste
• 1/4 teaspoon salt, or to taste

Preheat oven to 205 degrees.

Lay the kale out on a baking sheet, and spritz with olive oil, sprinkle with the juice, and dust with salt (if you don't have a spritzer, mix oil, kale, and seasonings in a bowl).

Bake in the oven about 30 minutes, or until the leaves are crisp.

Turn the oven off, and let them rest in the oven for an hour or so.

Ma Bell! Kids Pick up Red Peppers

The conventional wisdom about getting kids to eat new things says that you should cook with them, and they will try what you are making. I've had mixed success (read, next to none) with this, but last night I was blown away.

Santa Maria was working late, and I was home after work with Nina and Pinta on my own. As usual, I was hungry and I wanted to rush dinner into the oven, so it would cook while I did the get-the-kids-into-bed Kabuki dance. My plan was to make my favorite Summer Chicken and Arugula Salad; by the time the chicken, potatoes, onions, and peppers were done roasting in the oven, the kids would be asleep and my dinner would be ready.

The girls wanted to help me in the kitchen, so I grabbed two chairs from the dining room, and they stood beside me as I chopped the vegetables. I started with the red pepper, which, according to The Worlds Healthiest Foods, is a remarkably beneficial vegetable, extremely high in vitamins A and C, and not-so-shabby with B-6, K, and other desirable nutrients. Also, red peppers then to be more healthy in their natural state; according to once study cited on The Worlds Healthiest Foods, the raw ones have higher levels of phytonutrients than cooked ones.

When Pinta saw the peppers on the cutting board, she said, "What's that?" I told her, and offered her some. She smelled it, smiled, and took a bite. She liked it. I gave some to her sister, who was a bit more skeptical, but who also tried it. They both liked it. I gave the girls more pieces, and Pinta put her her curved slice of pepper to her ear and said, "It looks like a phone!"

In a Hurry Kale Chips Recipe

One night last week, Santa Maria was working late, and I needed to feed Nina and Pinta dinner. I went to the refrigerator, and suddenly had a crisis on my hands. There weren't any green vegetables left. That is, there weren't any that the girls would have been happy to eat. Asparagus is one of their favorites, but the head I had on hand had gone moldy. I had to throw it out.

All that I could find was kale. Nina has been known to eat my Fly Sky High Kale Salad, but her sister Pinta turns her nose up at it. I needed to get dinner on the table in a hurry, and I really wanted them to have a vegetable with their salmon and rice. Kale chips sprung to mind. They've been a pretty good bet with the girls before, and they tend to go for anything salty and crispy.

Completely forgetting that Santa Maria once went through an infatuation with kale chips that culminated in her devising not one, but two recipes, I decided to wing it. I wanted them to cook quickly, so I cut them in a chiffonade. I sprinkled them with a little olive oil, salt, and Parmesan cheese. I had to watch them so they wouldn't burn, but they were done before the salmon was ready to eat.

Both of the girls had a fair share of them, and we had a fun time coming up with a name for the long crispy bits of kale. "Kale Spears," was one idea. "Kale Splinters," another. My favorite was "Kale Shards," but no matter what you called them, they were fast and delicious. Mission accomplished.

Crispy Kale Shards

• 4 or 5  lacinato kale leaves, stems removed, washed
• a bit of oilve oil
• salt
• grated parmesan cheese, to taste

Heat oven to 350 degrees

Ciffonade the kale, and, in a bowl, combine it with the olive oil, salt, and cheese.

Spread the kale out on a baking sheet and bake for ten or so minutes, until the pieces are crisp. Keep a careful eye on them as they bake, and shake them around a bit every few minutes.

Popcorn Stirs a Memory

I'm often asked how I started to cook, and I don't have a simple answer. Ask me why, and that's easier to field: I was always hungry. How I learned is a more complicated, and the truth is that I'm still learning. Bob Dylan once said "he not busy being born is busy dying," and I believe that's true.

My mother did the cooking around the house when I grew up, but I didn't learn many techniques from her. She was too busy to teach me. I picked up a great body of knowledge, though, from what she served. She always used fresh ingredients and leafy greens. We had fish once a week, and she made almost everything from scratch (no wonder she was busy).

We had such a healthy diet that I thought eating iceberg lettuce was a treat. And it was for me. Whenever we ate at a restaurant, I would order a huge wedge of it slathered with Thousand Island dressing. My mother would make a face and roll her eyes, which made it taste all the better.

I have one memory of learning to cook from my mother, and it came back to me yesterday when I was reading Mark Bittman's blog, which featured an entry on homemade popcorn. It was one of the few things that my mother taught me how to make. We didn't have it often, but we would have it occasionally on a weekend afternoon.

I can still see the inside of the tall Revere pot with it's shimmering layer of vegetable oil in the base, and hear the plink of the single kernel of corn going into the pot. I can feel the heft of the handle as I put it on the burner. I remember well the sound of it popping and the rattle of the rest of the kernels going onto the hot oil. Moments later it would burst into a drumroll and when the rat-a-tat-tat of delight subsided, we would pour the steaming white kernels into a big wooden salad bowl, and top them with salt and butter.

On Saturday, I cooked almost a whole meal with Pinta (she also helped me make the guacamole, but as she herself said, she was too little to open the oysters), and the popcorn article on Bittman's blog, which was written by Freya Bellin, made me very excited. It is one more thing I can make with her and her sister. And the nice thing about Bellin's entry is that it is full of suggestions for flavoring the popcorn, if you feel like learning something new.

 

 

 

My Back Goes Out, but Guess What? I'm Still Hungry: A Time for Pumpkin Seeds

I have been extremely busy lately, preparing for the publication of my book, “Man with a Pan: Culinary Adventures of Fathers who Cook for their Families,” finding a new place to live, concentrating on renovating the apartment, and contending with old-school Brooklyn landlords whose idea of conflict resolution starts with a baseball bat and ends before a judge. Monday night it all caught up with me: I threw out my back.

I was relaxing with Santa Maria after dinner, and I suddenly felt as if a vise had been tightened around my lower spine. Soon, standing upright was out of the question, and shortly after that, moving at all was nearly impossible.

This was the third time in my life on the lumbar-pain merry-go-round, and fortunately, Santa Maria was there to hand me a hot-water bottle. The last time my back went out, I was alone in the house—just imagine how long it took me to fill a hot-water bottle; it felt like decades.

The first time was the worst. One Sunday evening about four years ago, I was stretched out on the floor, taking it easy after a casual dinner at a friend’s house. Suddenly, I couldn’t move. Seized with pain, I rolled over on my back and I was as stuck as upside-down tortoise on the hot asphalt of a mountain highway in August.

This time, it hasn’t been as bad. I’m fairly mobile and I hope that like the other times, the pain will go away within a few days. It did mean, however, that I wasn’t able to go out last night with Santa Maria as I had planned. I went home instead, and I needed to figure out what to eat for dinner.

Over the weekend, before I hurt my back, I made one of old favorites, a green-olive Moroccan beef tagine (I promise to share the recipe for it shortly), and there was some of it leftover. There was a problem, though. Most of the meat had been picked out of the dish, and all that remained was the sauce of tomatoes, potatoes, shallots, cinnamon, and other spices. It was very tasty, but it lacked protein.

Not being in a position to cook anything, I looked through the cupboards for something easy to eat with the tagine. I found a bag of pumpkin seeds, the perfect supplement for last night’s dinner, and a good snack for anytime. The seeds are high in protein, full of zinc and other minerals, and reportedly contain compounds that take care of the prostate. Keeping that healthy is even more important that protecting my back.

The Truth About Kale Chips

Given that I have recently written about wild boar stew and sage-and-apple pork roast, I think I can produce one more post about kale chips without this site turning into a kale ghetto. Shortly, I will share my weekend adventures in making flan, but first I have a confession to make.

I never liked the New York Naturals Kale Chips that were Santa Maria's gateway drug to the vegetable, and I wasn't really all that fond of her home-cooked version that she wrote about yesterday. I didn't see this as consequential. An old friend once said that for a couple to be happy, its members should have "sympathetic neuroses," and I think embracing the foibles of one's spouse is the foundation of a good marriage.

It's hard to blame Santa Maria for her kale addiction. I enabled it with the Fly Sky High Kale Salad, which her father said was great because he didn't taste the kale. I wouldn't go that far, but something about toasted pine nuts is incredibly mouth watering. And I'm proud of her for figuring out a way to make her own kale chips.

Kale is an amazing vegetable. It has been cultivated for more than 2,000 years. It grows in almost any kind of weather, and becomes sweeter after a frost. In some regions, folks leave the vegetable in the garden through the winter and pick the frozen leaves to eat as needed. It is rich in vitamins A and C, folic acid, calcium, and iron.

Last night, Santa Maria roasted up yet another batch of her kale chips. Because we were out of Parmesan cheese, she made them with nothing more than salt and lime juice, which leads me to another confession: These I liked, a lot. I would even call them addictive.

Super Simple, Super Addictive Kale Chips

• 1 head kale, leaves washed and dried; center stalk removed
• 1 teaspoon olive oil, or from a spritzer
• 1/2 lime, juiced, or to taste
• salt, to taste

Preheat oven to 225 degrees.

Lay the kale out on parchment paper on baking sheets, and spritz with olive oil, sprinkle with lime juice, and dust with salt (if you don't have a spritzer, mix oil and kale in a bowl).

Bake in the oven about 20 minutes, or until the leaves are crisp. This may take longer. Be patient.

Doubling Down: Santa Maria Strikes it Rich with a Kale Chip Recipe

On Sunday afternoon, while I was resting after making a pot of Bolognese and a batch of  black beans, Santa Maria slipped into the kitchen to experiment with kale chips. Here is her report:

I love, love LOVE the Fly Sky High Kale Salad, but alas, the kids don't. Sometimes, Nina will have a bit, but not much more. Pinta, won't even try it.

Because our big girl, Nina, can't eat nuts, I was dismayed when she looked with such interest at my New York Naturals Kale Chips—they're yummy, but quite expensive at $6-9 for a small box -- and covered in pulverized cashews (and other stuff).

I looked around and made up my own recipe for kale chips, which she loves. Everyone gobbled them up!  And I am happy to have made a delicious healthy snack. It really takes just ten minutes.

The Deep Fragility of All Existence As Represented in a Vegetable Snack (a.k.a. Santa Maria's Kale Chips)

• 1 head kale (washed, spun dry, with the stiff spines ripped out)
• 1 Tablespoon lime juice
• salt to taste
• 1/4 cup micro-grated parmesan cheese
• olive oil (about a teaspoon) or from a spritzer

Preheat oven to 225 degrees

Place the leaves on a piece of parchment paper, spritz with olive oil, then sprinkle with lime juice, salt (not too much!), and cheese (or, if you don't have a spritzer for the olive oil, toss everything in a bowl, and then lay the leaves out on the parchment paper).

Bake about 15 minutes.

Note: Watch them carefully while they are baking. They don't taste great if the edges blacken, and all ovens are different. Other recipes I found on-line said to bake them at 350 degrees. I did, and I burned my first version. Other recipes often simply suggest just the olive oil and salt -- but I like them a bit more piquant.