Stay at Stove Dad

Grilling Made Easy and Healthy (though not as easy as having someone else do it)

As a man, I feel like I'm supposed to like barbecuing, but the truth is that I don't. Every few months, however, I forget this. Thoughts of fire and smoke and meat incite some kind of atavistic urge, and I'll find myself standing over hot coals. My amnesia usually coincides with a major holiday, such as Memorial Day, which is the last time that I did some grilling. 

Because it is now high grilling season (see Mark Bittman's article in today's New York Times on "101 Fast Recipes for Grilling"), I'll share a bit of what I learned that day, and since.

I was at my mother's house and she suggested that we have a few of the aunts and uncles over for a start-of-summer barbecue. I was game to cook. Talk turned from chicken to burgers to steak. I pressed for the latter, and headed to the butcher. At the the market, I relied on the clerk to suggest a cut, as I know next to nothing about steak. I didn't want to spend a whole lot, and he suggested skirt steak. "Four minutes a side" he said.

The other thing that I didn't know that day is that grilling can be carcinogenic. A little piece in the Times a few days later, on May 27, by Anahad O'Connor, set me straight. Apparently, the high temperatures that are so prized, "create toxins called heterocyclic amines, which have been linked to some cancers. Marinating lowers the risk by preventing the formation of the toxins." Especially effective is rosemary. The article gives a couple of suggested marinades that sound both tasty and healthy.

I didn't know about the benefits of marinating when I was cooking the skirt steak. The clerk ended up being wrong about the timing, but I liked the cut anyway. It wasn't just the taste that appealed to me, it was the speed with which it cooks. I'd say it only needs two minutes a side. As far as I'm concerned, the less time at the grill, the better.

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.

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.

Great Monkfish Recipe Doesn't Lead to Domestic Harmony, Alas

The latest installment of "Cooking with Dexter," Pete Wells's column in the New York Times Magazine about the culinary and dietary habits of his son and family, details his effort to get home from the office and eat with his wife and children. It's a dangerous enterprise. Arrive too late, and one runs the risk of the unfed kids "bursting into flames."

I know what he means. When Nina and Pinta are hungry, there's no telling how they will behave. If the criminally accused can escape punishment because of temporary insanity, then children, by all biological laws, should have the opportunity to plead a low-blood sugar defense.

According to Wells, eating with the kids doesn't take so much a heroic effort as it does a simple pot of boiling water (and leaving work an hour early). He's an advocate of boiling his vegetables and rice and nearly everything else that he wants to eat. He also relies on the stars aligning enough to insure that there are groceries in the house. "There were sausage and a stalk of brussels sprouts in the refrigerator and, for once, an onion and a garlic clove in the cupboard when I needed them," he writes.

I have a different approach to weeknight meals. First of all, it's not luck that insures there are staples like onions and garlic in the house. It is shopping and planning. According to the nineteen-sixties English television cooking personality Fanny Cradock, Escoffier said that menu planning is the hardest part of a chef's job. I often detest the amount of creative mental energy that's required to draw up a weekly shopping list, but I love beyond words knowing that I won't have to look for ingredients when I'm trying to cook a dish on a weeknight.

My second strategy for weeknight dinners involves doing the prep work ahead of time. I'll chop the vegetables or dress the chicken for roasting before I head to work. That way, when I come home I can just start cooking and the time from stove to table is reduced like a fine French sauce.

My third strategy is a bit trickier to execute. It involves getting Santa Maria to actually do the cooking. Often times this is an easy thing to do, such as when all she has to do is put the chicken in the oven to roast, or defrost the Bolognese and make some pasta. If things are more complicated, it's less likely that she'll have the time or inclination to get involved.

On Monday, I was excited by the prospect of eating with the children. I had monk fish in the refrigerator following my Saturday trip to the Green Market (Strategy One: planning and shopping), and I wanted to make a fantastic old Mark Bittman recipe that I've enjoyed on a number of occasions over the years: "Poached Monkfish with Lemon Sauce," from his "Fish: The Complete Guide to Buying and Cooking." Leeks are a central ingredient in the recipe; I diced two before breakfast that morning (Strategy Two: getting a jump on prep work). I was running late, so I called Santa Maria and had her start the recipe (Strategy Three).

Everything was in order, but for all my planning, there were two potential problems. The first was unseen. That Monday afternoon, I started to feel a bit ill, slightly nauseated, as if I was fighting a bit of food poisoning (maybe I shouldn't have had that sushi for lunch). By the time I got home, I wasn't even sure if I wanted to eat anything at all.

The other potential problem, I was aware of from the start. I was taking a risk with the kids. This was the first time I would be making the monk fish for them. I didn't know if they would like it at all. Logically, it should have worked. They like flounder. Monkfish is similar enough. The like lemon. They like butter (another key ingredient). I dutifully picked out all the leeks from their bowls to try and tip the odds in my favor, but it was not to be. Never bet against the house, I learned.

The kids hated the dish.The refused to try it. I can't say it was only because of the dish, though. It might have been because I was a few minutes late. They were howling when I got home. Things could only go downhill from there, and they did. I enjoyed the fish, though. It tasted so good that I forgot that I was sick. The kids ended up eating a bit of dried out and leftover pork. They loved it. Go figure.

(Note: Monkfish is considered a problematic fish to consume when it comes to the health of its stock--though those in the Northeast are thought to be okay—and the consequences of methods used to catch it.  You can learn more here.)

Poached Monkfish with Lemon Sauce (adapted from Mark Bittman)

• 2 tablespoons butter
• 2 leeks, washed, trimmed, and diced
• 1/3 cup white wine
• 1 cup chicken stock
• 1 teaspoon dried thyme (or fresh, if available)
• 1 lb monk fish, membrane removed and cut into medallions
• 2 tablespoons lemon juice

Melt the butter in a casserole pan.

Sauté the leeks until they are softened, at about ten minutes.

Add the wine, stock, and thyme, and bring to a boil.

Add the monkfish and reduce the heat. Simmer for about four or five minutes, until the fish is just about cooked.

Remove the fish with a slotted spoon, set aside, and keep warm.

Reduce the sauce to desired thickness. Add more butter if you want a richer sauce.

Add the lemon juice.

Serve the fish and sauce in a bowl with fresh bread.

Planning and Food Shopping Tips from the Trenches

My late father had many colorful expressions at his disposal. He wasn't a man who swore a lot (at least not around the children), and he had a great faculty with language (he was a litigator). One the things he used to say when something wasn't going his way was, "I need this like I need a hole in my head."

That expression came to mind tonight when I came home. I have a number of recent and unexpected stresses in my life right now. One is a career-related project that I'm very excited about and will fully describe in the near future. As thrilling as this project is, it does take up a lot of brain power. The other stress is related to my living situation, and it remains in my best interest not to detail it here. Suffice it to say that I need it like I need a hole in my head.

I've been so distracted that I can barely cook. Usually, I do the menu planning and grocery buying, but this week Santa Maria volunteered to take on this task. She's doing her best to pick up much of the domestic labor as I throw myself into this new work project of mine, but she is also subject to the same living-situation stress as I am.

When I plan a menu, I try to think three or four steps ahead, and I'm proud of one of my more recent tricks that helps me balance work, play, parenting, cooking, and shopping. For a long time, I've been frustrated by the way fresh herbs spoil before you can use them up. Take parsley, for example. How many times have you thrown out three-quarters of a limp head a week after using a pinch to gussy up a dish? Parsley is on my mind lately because it is a key ingredient in the weekly quinoa-and-sweet-potato salad I make for Santa Maria's lunch.

Due to the recent distractions, I forgot to put parsley on the shopping list last weekend. But I was still able to make the quinoa salad because of the trick I've learned. As soon as a head of parsley comes into the house, I wash it well and dry it thoroughly in the salad spinner. It will then keep in the refrigerator for up to two weeks.

I'm very grateful that Santa Maria is helping out with the shopping and planning. Her menu for this week included mushroom risotto. Delightful, I thought. It was something I could put together tonight while the kids were playing before bedtime. I'm not of the persuasion that risotto needs to be stirred constantly. It's not necessary. I'm not a great chef, just a great eater. Though if you ate my food, you might quibble with that self-deprecating description. I can cook very well, and love to do it.

Tonight, though, I was stymied. I couldn't find any mushrooms in the house. I asked Santa Maria where the dried porcini were, or if we had any at all. "I don't know," she replied. "How could you not know, if you put the dish on the menu for the week," I snapped. 

"Porcini mushrooms are a staple." she said. "They should be in the house, like salt, Mr. Stay-at-Stove-Dad."

On to plan B, which was no plan. I found a head of cauliflower and Santa Maria offered to roast it. That was very nice of her, as it got me out of the kitchen. I was starting to feel angry because I wasn't going to have a delicious dinner. I sat with the kids while they played, and if ever there was an antidote to anger it's in their joyful laughter.

I snacked on some baby carrots, and gave my blood-sugar a boost. Pinta trotted around eating what she called a pequeño carrot, and I relaxed. There was left over asparagus from the kids' dinner, and I found some frozen empanadas to round out my dinner. A filling meal, but not one with any real culinary satisfaction.

One of my favorite artists, Prince, uses my father's expression in a slightly different context. It's not one of his better songs, but somehow it seems fitting. Santa Maria suggested it.

Anotherloverholenyohead - Prin...

Santa Maria's Shrimp and Flounder Recipe From Memory

For the most part, cooking for kids means introducing them to new foods and flavors. Occasionally, it works the other way around. The introductions are not always pretty when they are being handled by a two-and-a-half-year old, but they happen nonetheless.

Sunday afternoon, Santa Maria was out at yoga and Nina was wrapped up in bed nursing an ear infection. Pinta was in great spirits, playful as could be. I wanted to leave Nina in peace and to get dinner started, so I asked Pinta to help me in the kitchen. She was eager to join me, and as she turned to head for the kitchen, she ran smack into a door jam. Bam, she had a shiner on her head and she was crying like crazy.

I dashed to the freezer for a cold pack. We don't actually have cold packs, so we use bags of frozen peas and the like. They're more tasty and they work just as well. This isn't the first time that Pinta has encountered the sharp edges of our apartment and had the resulting lump treated with a bag of organic garden peas. She knows the drill. She also knows that she likes to eat frozen peas, something I had forgotten.

I was holding her in my lap with the bag pressed to her head, and she said "pea, pea, pea." Usually when she says this word it would be spelled "Pee," as in "I have to pee." So I asked her if she needed to go to the bathroom. She said no."Pea," she repeated. Finally, I understood. She wanted to eat some of the frozen vegetables.

Her head was feeling better, so I gave her some of the peas. When I first went to the freezer, I had also grabbed a bag of frozen corn, so I had those in my lap, too. I gave her some of the icy golden kernels. She liked them as well, and feeling friendly, she wanted to share some with me. I think I like cooked corn better.

Later that night, when I was roasting chickens for dinner, Pinta helped me to dump some corn into a sauce pan and cook it. I coated the kernels in butter and salt and she gobbled them up. I'm always happy to introduce a new vegetable to one of my girls, and I'm looking forward to eating it off the cob with her come summertime.

Besides the chicken and corn dinner, I haven't been cooking much over the past few days.  It's impolitic to go into the reasons for this at present, but some of them have to do with our living situation, which has become much more stressful in recent weeks, and some of the other reasons have to do with the season. Thanksgiving means family, and that means a roiling of the psyche. Real estate stress plus family stress is very distracting, to say the least.

Family stress led to a filibuster of a fight with Santa Maria on Saturday afternoon. Filibuster in that I was talking and talking and talking and not making any progress. I'm not even sure progress was the goal. Real estate stress led to a sleepless night and an attendant falling-off of productivity in the kitchen on Sunday.

I've been cooking less over the past week, but we've been eating the same. Who's been doing the cooking? Santa Maria (see fight, above).  Her parents stayed with us for Thanksgiving, and went with us to my mother's house for the holiday. She cooked for them, the kids, me, and any other blood relation within ten yards of her. She was relentless. I was impressed, as she was also doing multiple loads of laundry and tending to the kids. Why I became resentful is good fodder for this week's therapy sessions.

But before things went south between Santa Maria and myself, I was on the receiving end of a delightful dinner. The first night her parents visited, I had to work late. She whipped up a flounder and shrimp dish as good as anything I'd ever tasted in New Orleans, a culinary capital of mixing shellfish, white fish, and heavy sauces. (She also make luscious homemade chocolate pudding, in the time it took me to put the kids in their pajamas).

The roots of her dish, which she improvised that evening and which combined shrimp, flounder, and a tarragon-cream sauce in a heavenly fashion, stretch back not to the Big Easy, but to Europe and a childhood memory of hers.

"When I was a little kid, about eight years old," Santa Maria later told me,"I went with my family on a canal boat down the Thames, and we docked in a little town once where there was a place called the Rose Revived Inn. They served a local founder called plaice prepared in this fashion, and it was the only fish dish that my mother ever liked, so I recreated it from my girlhood memory to welcome my parents to town for Thanksgiving."

Santa Maria enjoys eating well but also fitting into her pants so she created a rich-tasting sauce while minimizing the amount of butter and cream (though this is far from a calorie-conscious dish).  There is considerably less butter and cream than in similar dishes.

Santa Maria's mother, who usually doesn't like fish, loved it so much that when she was done with her plate, she scooped the leftover sauce out of the skillet with her baked potato skin. Little kids can really come through in the kitchen, once they get a little experience.

Here's the flounder recipe. Tune in at a later date for her luscious chocolate pudding recipe.

 A la Recherche du Flounder Perdu

• 4 fillets flounder
• 1/4 c. flour for dredging (mixed with a few shakes of salt and fresh black pepper)
• 2  tablespoons butter
• 1 small shallot, minced
• 8 ounces chopped shrimp, raw (can be frozen and thawed)
• 2 shakes nutmeg (less than 1/8th teaspoon)
• 2 shakes cayenne pepper (less than 1/8th teaspoon)
• 1/3 cup white wine
• 1/3 cup water  
• 1/4 cube vegetable bouillon
• 1/2 cup heavy cream
• 2 tablespoons chopped fresh tarragon
• salt and pepper to taste

Mix the shrimp with the nutmeg, cayenne, and salt.

Heat 1 tablespoon of the butter in a frying pan, and sauté the shrimp.

Set aside the shrimp and keep warm.

Add shallots and remaining butter to pan, and sauté until they are soft.

Dredge the flounder in the flour and sauté on both sides until cooked, about two minutes per side.  If you use a large skillet, you can probably fit all four fillets in at the same time.

Set aside and keep the cooked flounder fillets warm.

Deglaze the pan with the wine.

Add the water and partial bouillon cube.

Reduce by half.

Pour in the cream, and add the tarragon and cook for about three minutes.

Assemble the dish by putting the shrimp on top of the flounder and pouring the sauce over everything. Serve immediately.

The Turnip Chronicles, or What I Learned this Thanksgiving

We spent the afternoon getting ready for Thanksgiving dinner at my sister Mary's house. I had volunteered to bring a side dish. I picked turnip because I like it and it's easy to make.

Turnip may a cinch to prepare, but it turned out to be a bit confusing to buy. The turnip I grew up eating on Thanksgiving was pungent-tasting and orange in color. Raw, I remembered it being big lumpy balls with a mottled purple color. Earlier this week while shopping for turnip at our local food coop, I found out that what I thought of as turnip was actually rutabaga. The vegetables labeled "Turnip" were sleek purple-and-white roots.

I bought both. I prepared the rutabagas the way my mother told me to--peeled, sliced, and boiled until soft; then mashed with a bit of salt and pepper. I threw in some olive oil and two slices of cooked-and-crumbled bacon. It was delicious, and just what I expected.

The turnips, I prepared the same way, with one variation. Instead of bacon, I added some sautéed garlic and fresh ginger a the end. I wish I could tell you how it tasted, but it got lost in the shuffle.

When we arrived at Mary's house, I dropped the turnip and the rutabaga (along with a bottle of wine, a wonderful 2004 Tempranillo I promise to share the name of as soon as I return to my Brooklyn home--we love it so much we bought a case of it) in her kitchen, and I went into the livingroom to snack on cheese and crackers and catch up with my siblings. Later, the constant churn of dishes in and out of her kitchen didn't include the turnip. I didn't notice its absence, my eyes having been blinded by brussels sprouts, spicy creamed spinach, stuffing, turkey, and the rutabaga. Not until I was back in the kitchen after dessert (an astonishing array: pumpkin, homemade apple pie, courtesy of Santa Maria, homemade apple cake, spice cake, and cookies) did I realize that we had forgotten to eat the turnip. I'll have to get a report from my sister about how it tastes, as I'm sure she'll eat it over the next day or so.

The day was not turnip-free for me, though. When I was peeling the vegetables this morning, I was quite taken by the fresh, light, and clean scent of the turnip. I pressed the vegetable peeler into the side of the root and drew off a nearly translucent slice. I popped it in my mouth. It had a crisp and refreshing flavor, like a mild radish. I sliced off another one, and ate that too. Then yet another. I really liked it. I enjoyed it so much, that I reserved one turnip to experiment with at lunch time.

We had a light lunch today, logically, given the Thanksgiving meal that we were about to eat. I made a green salad with a bit of poached chicken on top. I shaved a slew of raw turnip slices into my salad and found them most agreeable.

If I had more time, I would consider baking those turnip slices in a bit of salt and oil to see if they might crisp up nicely. Or try stir-frying them to get a similar effect. Maybe next Thanksgiving I'll try something like that.

A Sweet Request From Nina

The moment between coming home from work and getting the kids into bed is an elastic one, stretched mostly by Nina and Pinta's desire to spend time with us and contracted by my need to eat before the nightly news comes on.

Usually, we are very good about getting them into bed by eight or eight thirty. Tonight it was on the later side, as my two darling daughters, having dined on my Bolognese and Halloween candy with their babysitter, talked me into feeding them more.

They wanted pasta with olive oil and Parmesan. I had some leftover spaghetti in the refrigerator. It wouldn't take long to get it ready for them. How could I deny them? I couldn't, of course, and I was rewarded.

I put their snack on the table and started to make Santa Maria some Quickly Spiced Spinach, or what Santa Maria calls Hot Robot Spinach*. I stopped for a minute to bring Nina a glass of water. Then I dashed back to the kitchen, to continue making our dinner.

From the kitchen, I heard Santa Maria, who like me is always trying to teach proper manners to our children, prompt Nina to thank me for bringing her water. She asked Nina, "what do you say now?" Nina replied without missing a beat, "Daddy, will you come join us please?"

*Hot Robot Spinach, per Santa Maria: "Remove the green core from the garlic clove (my Italian friend Ivana taught me to do this when we lived together in Madrid) then slice cross-wise and you will have little white disks that look like sprockets; add a sprinkle of chili pepper to 'power' the robot; olive oil to 'grease' the gears.  And spinach, of course, is the vegetable that gave Popeye such other-worldly strength.  Perfect for growing girls and boys and their inventors."

My First Time Baking: A Recipe for Pear Upside-Down Cake

I don’t have many memories of my mother baking, which is not to say she didn’t do it ever. Though as Santa Maria says, who could blame her if she didn’t—she had five kids to care for.  I recall her making Christmas cookies with my sisters, and she successfully passed the female baking baton off to them. I owe most of my memories of baked goods, including snickerdoodles, butterscotch brownies, and lemon-meringue pie, to my sisters.

My mother stuck to making Irish soda bread, and someday I’ll share the recipe (as soon as I get her permission). She makes a new world version with less butter, and no caraway seeds (she was the eldest daughter in a family with five daughters and one son, my delightful uncle John. As a boy, John didn’t like caraway seeds so no one else got to eat them either).

One thing I do remember my mother making is pineapple upside-down cake, which was a syrupy and sweet dentist’s nightmare. If I close my eyes, I can still see the caramelized yellow cubes of fruit and taste the brown gooey bits of sugar. I loved it.

On Wednesday last week, Mark Bittman wrote in the New York Times about a variation on the pineapple upside-down cake, using maple syrup and pears instead of plain sugar and the Hawaiian fruit. I love pears and I was enticed to consider making it.

Santa Maria is correct in thinking that my mom was too busy to bake when I was young. Her mom, Jane, is a relentless baker even at eight-six years old—she has pies and cookies in the freezer every time we go to visit—but she only had two children. My mother was busy making school lunches, breakfasts, and dinners seven days a week. Seven days a week! We hardly ever ate out, and I’ve never once had a frozen dinner. She did an astonishing job.

I’m tired from cooking for just two kids, and I serve them frozen fish sticks three times a week. I basically want for my children what I had growing up—home-cooked meals and a balanced diet.

 

On his video about making the cake, Bittman talks about how little patience he has for the details of baking. Santa Maria is not known for her patience, but she is a seasoned baker with very particular tastes. She took one look at his recipe and made a few adjustments. I defer to her in all dessert-related matters, and, the truth is, I didn’t feel confident. I was happy to have her guidance. (She threw out the maple syrup, which she said she didn’t like the taste of in baked goods, and she twiddled with a few of the other proportions. She typically reduces the amount of sugar by at least a third.)

Cooking is easy for me because I’ve mastered a few basic techniques and I stick to them. I can take on new recipes fairly confident about how they’ll turn out because I’ll pick ones that build on these basic skills. Baking is another question. I’ve never been interested in doing it because I’ve been preoccupied with my needs and not my desires. I need to eat, and I need to eat well. Not too much sugar, and more daily calories than a high school football lineman would consume in a day. That takes a lot of work.

But as I’ve gotten better at managing the day-to-day cooking (and as my metabolism has slowed a bit), I’m starting to think about my desires. A slice of cake after dinner sounded mighty good.

I enlisted the help of Nina and Pinta, although once my eldest heard that there were pears in the cake, she said that she would only help make it if she didn’t have to eat it. She hates fruit that much. She is a fruitophobe.

I got the process underway by gathering all the ingredients. I put the kids in the kitchen with the laptop and let them watch Bittman’s video over and over. Pinta kept saying “upside-down cake.”

Soon, it was time to cream the butter and the sugar. I squatted on the floor of our kitchen with Nina at my side. I had the mixer going in my right hand.  A stick of butter stood rigid across the bottle of the steel mixing bowl. Sugar was sprinkled about. The blades of the mixer dug into the butter, and started throwing off curled clumps. The more I pushed into the butter, the more the hand mixer protested. Nina was crouched next to me. She thought it looked like popcorn. She liked the way the curled bits of butter were jumping all over. I was concerned they’d jump out of the bowl. It felt like a humbling process, but that’s just because I hadn’t done it before, and I wasn’t confident that I was doing it correctly. It certainly didn’t look like I was doing it right.

Santa Maria said that she would have let the butter soften up. I wish she had told me that earlier, I thought. Pinta had been playing with the stick of butter and I took it away from her because she was softening it up. I could have let her play to her heart’s content.

Santa Maria taught me about combining the dry ingredients with the wet ones, and soon enough we had a cake. She adores a pear tart dessert at our favorite local restaurant, Al di La. It has chocolate in it, so, at the last minute, she stuck some pieces of dark chocolate in one corner of the batter.

Nina asked if the work was done, and then said she was going to lie down (she’d been running a fever all day). I started to make dinner—our seafood feast.

After the cake was in the oven, the kitchen started to smell very nice. It smelled like a cake was baking. Is there a kinder, more nurturing scent out there? 

 

We all loved the caramelized pears on top, but Santa Maria thought the chocolate was too bitter. Next time she would make it with semi-sweet chocolate. Nina didn’t eat any because she was too sick. Pinta had so much that her stomach ached. I downed two pieces and enjoyed every bite. Then I got a headache from the sugar.

Later that night I had to barricade Santa Maria from the kitchen because she was sneaking leftovers. She’s powerless over sweets and I knew drastic action needed to be taken. I quickly called up a dear friend who lives nearby to offer her some (she said that we were laughing so much on the phone that she thought there was alcohol in the cake) and then I left some more on the doorstep of our downstairs neighbors. They texted me the next day to say they found it upon coming home after a few drinks and that it was a pleasant surprise. They said they loved the Guinea Pig role.  

Not a bad outcome for my first cake, though to give credit where credit is due, it was a success because of Santa Maria, who helped to make it, like all the good and sweet things in my life, possible.

 

Adapted from Mark Bittman, whose original recipe is here.

 

Santa Maria’s Pear Upside-Down Cake

 

• 11 Tablespoons butter
• ¼ Cup packed brown sugar
• 3 pears, peeled, cored, and thinly sliced
• 2/3 cups granulated sugar
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 2 eggs
• 1 ½ cups flour
• 1 ½ teaspoons baking powder
• ¼ teaspoon salt
• ½ cup milk
• optional: 1/3 cup (2 oz.) semi-sweet chocolate pieces (broken from a bar into whatever size you prefer)

 

Heat oven to 350 degrees.

 

Melt three tablespoons butter in a small pan over medium heat.

Add brown sugar and cook, stirring, until sugar dissolves.

Bring to a boil and cook for two minutes.

Remove from heat and pour the mixture into a 9 ½ -inch baking pan.

Arrange the pear slices in the sugar mixture as you see fit.

In a mixing bowl, beat the remaining butter (one stick) and the sugar with a mixer until it is light and fluffy.

Add the vanilla and eggs and mix until smooth.

 

In a separate bowl, combine the flour, baking powder, and salt.

Combine the wet (butter) and dry (flour) mixtures in three batches with the milk. And mix until barely combined. Do not over mix. Lumps are okay.

Carefully spread the cake batter on top of the pears using a spatula.

Bake in oven about 45 minutes, until top is golden. A thin sharp knife stuck in the cake should come out clean.

Let the cake sit for five minutes.

Run a knife around the edge of the cake pan.

Put a plate on top of the cake and carefully flip it so the plate is on the bottom and the pan is on top.

Serve warm or at room temperature.

 

Note: Fold chocolate pieces into the batter before baking for a slightly richer cake.

Pinta is Getting Smart

My youngest girl, Pinta, is getting smarter and smarter. She's two-and-a-half, but there's no fooling her. She likes to come into the kitchen, look up at the stove, and ask "What you making daddy?"

I point out to her whatever I'm cooking, unless I decide it is in my best interest not do do so. This evening, for example, I had two big pots going on the stove. One of chicken-rice soup and another of Bolognese, which happens to be one of her favorite things to eat lately.

I wasn't planning to serve the Bolognese for dinner. In the refrigerator there was a pound of fluke that needed to be eaten. The fish was for dinner, not pasta. I didn't want anyone else getting any other ideas.

So when she asked me, "What you making daddy," I said that I had some chicken soup going. She looked at me and said "I smell Bolognese." Indeed, she did.