If our lives were the movie “Frozen,” come the holiday season we wouldn’t be living in the Kingdom of Arendelle, but rather the Kingdom of Cookies. And, instead of being able to turn everything into ice, the reigning power, Santa Maria, would have different abilities. As it is, she’s the Sovereign of Sweets, the Monarch of Meringues, the Queen of Quick Breads. This year, with assistance from my fine friends at Kraft, who are sponsoring this post (and you thought it was Disney!), we decided to mix things up. Christmas recipes are never in short supply, and the Christmas cookie shouldn’t be trifled with, but I couldn’t help myself. I just had to try something new.

With Santa Maria’s help, I built on a gingerbread cookie recipe to make marshmallow fluff sandwich men. The cookies are fun to make with kids. Not only do you get to cut out the shapes, but you get to poke holes in the figures, and squish them together. The layer of Jet-puffed marshmallow flows up through the holes and makes decorating easy. Eating them is even more fun. The kids tend to pry them apart and the white topping of the gingerbread men is very festive. The full recipe is here.

Pinta made this drawing last night. I don't know where she got the idea for Squawkgiving, but it sounds about right to me. And on another note, here's one of Billy Collins's favorite poems for the holiday:

By Edward Thomas 

In recent years, Thanksgiving has become one of my favorite holidays, and I’m looking forward to celebrating it. As a boy, the importance of the get together never really dawned on me, but just as I’ve outgrown canned cranberry sauce, I’ve come to appreciate the significance of the gathering. My siblings and I have aged, and in doing so have gone off into our own orbits; the chance to join in a meal together is rare. When we do meet, the table is now very large, and that creates challenges of its own. Last year, my youngest brother hosted the entire family, and he could only do that because his house is just a tad bigger than his heart. The year before, I hosted Thanksgiving for the first time, and I could only feed about three-quarters of the family, and at a total of fifteen people, that was enough for me. 

Putting together a Thanksgiving dinner menu requires more than just planning. It takes courage. If you have never hosted before, it's not too late to pick up Sam Sifton’s book, “Thanksgiving: How to Cook it Well.” Lord knows, it helped me that first time around. There are many classic Thanksgiving recipes, and he covers them all. The holiday also offers the chance to start your own traditions. Every since my first Thanksgiving at home, I’ve added cornbread to my offerings. My latest twist on it, inspired by the Kraft Tastemaker’s program, which is funding this post, is to add dried cranberries. They contribute a bit of sweetness and make the holiday all the more rich. One nice thing about this recipe, is that it adapts nicely whether you are the host or a guest. Make it for your home gathering, or take it with you when you go to the house of your uncle, nephew, sister or brother. It will be most welcome. The full recipe for Thanksgiving Cranberry Cornbread is here.

I don’t know about you, but I find it hard after a day of cooking, commuting, working, commuting, and cooking to find things to talk about at the dinner table. I know that the family dinner is held up as an ideal, and that we should all gather around the table at least once a day to purify our souls and become whole as a family. And yet, I often find myself staring in disbelief at the state of things when we sit down. Someone is often whining about something. If, as Tolstoy has it, “Happy Families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” I would add, every family dinner is conversational disaster in its own way.

But tonight I stumbled upon a new gambit. Santa Maria was out of town, and I was on on my own with the kids. We were eating pasta with Bolognese (from the freezer), and the conversation was stalling, stalling, stalling. To pull it out of the nose dive, I grabbed the pepper grinder, which was on the table, and anthropomorphized it. 

Tipping it back and forth playfully, I gave the pepper grinder a voice, and it wasn’t a kindly dad voice. It was more of a PG-rated Andrew Dice Clay voice. The grinder wasn’t full of pepper, it was full of something that rhymes with “sloop” and makes elementary school kids laugh. 

As soon as I gave it this forbidden personality, Nina and Pinta’s faces lit up. They loved it. They ran with the scatological jokes, and then I made Pepper hate Salt. EventuallyI recanted, and Pepper admitted to liking Salt, if being a bit jealous (oceans and all that). Eventually, Pinta dashed to the kitchen and got the salt. I found them side by side on the table when cleaning up and they reminded me that the family dinner can be fun, with a bit of effort (and I'm not talking about the cooking).

Back when my book “Man with a Pan” came out, I was often asked about how hard it is to learn to cook. I had a good answer, I thought. I used to say that learning to cook is like learning to ride a bicycle: Tricky at first, but once you get it, you can go anywhere.

Only recently did I fully realize how apt a metaphor that is for the home cook. A bicycle might take you anywhere, but it won’t take you very far, very quickly. For a home cook, that’s just fine. You learn a dozen or so techniques, the recipes follow, and soon enough (meaning a couple of years, but when you are raising kids, that goes by in a blink), and, well, you’re cooking every day, and everyone is happy.

That pretty much describes my life, which is fine except for, perhaps, this blog. I’ve hit a limit with what I can offer. I’m riding a bike, not a motorcycle (which might be the metaphor for someone who goes to culinary school—watch out, don’t open a restaurant and crash!), so I find it harder and hard to find useful things to post about. I might want to eat my roast chicken, black beans, and Bolognese once a week, but does anybody want to read about it over and over? (John Lanchester, in the current New Yorker, talks about this much more eloquently.)

Also, as much as I love cooking and writing, my true love is drawing. I’m figuring out how to motivate myself to draw more (it’s complicated, just ask my therapist), and I took note of a recent piece in the New York Times about a Japanese organizer named Marie Kondo. Her new book, “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up,” advocates discarding “everything that does not ‘spark joy’,” according to the article. She give instructions to carefully fold (and consider) everything in one’s possession, imbibing them with the utmost care. 

Believe me, my kitchen (to say nothing of my house and life) could use a bit of tidying up, so I was interested. I’m not convinced I should follow her advice completely, but I realized that I could draw my possessions instead of folding them, and in that get better organized (in every sense of the word).

Drawing sparks joy in me every time I do it. I’m going to start with things in the kitchen, because that’s where I spend the most time. I’ll draw my staples. I’ll draw my storage containers. I’ll draw my drying dishes. I’ll draw anything. And I hope to learn how to run my kitchen better by taking such care. As I do, I’ll share my insights with you. 

In honor of Halloween, I present a drawing of one of my key staples, garlic. It is something that everyone should have around the house at all times. It keeps well, and is beyond useful, and not just in repelling vampires. Tell me how you use garlic, in a comment or by email, and I’ll send the person with the most creative response (and best recipe) a print of the drawing.

Every year we make special Halloween treats—candied kale chips with crystallized tofu-and-powdered shiitake puffs. Just kidding! That sounds too scary, even for a natural-food, organically minded home cook like myself. Something like that would give me nightmares.

Halloween food should be fun. When I was a boy, I remember my older sisters having sleep-over parties on the holiday, where they would play games involving cold cooked pasta and blindfolds, making miniature haunted houses. Or so I imagined, because, apparently, I was too frightening a figure to be included in their games. What little I learned came by listening from the top of the stairs after bedtime to their distant squealing. But it’s no longer so hard to get information on Halloween parties. If you want to make a killer Halloween dish, the Internet is full of ideas, from Halloween cupcakes to monster cakes.

I have a contribution to that graveyard of sweet delights—Burbling Blood Blondies. They are Santa Maria’s invention, and they are gooey and delicious. I hope you like them. You can find the recipe here, on the page for Kraft’s Tastemaker program, which sponsored this post.

About a month ago, we had a typically harried night. Actually, about a month ago, it was just the start of school, so what I might have thought of then as being “typically harried,” was, in retrospect, part of a significant transition during the year. Sometimes we can’t see what’s happening until we get a bit of perspective on things. Lately, I've been trying to give myself the space (mentally, emotionally) to find that perspective in a given moment. As soon as I figure out how, I’ll let you know. I might have a PhD in something or another before I reach that level of achievement (or be six feet in the ground), so for now, I’ll stick to what I know: making dinner

Making dinner can be a pain in the neck. But once dinner is made, it can be transformative. On that September night, I was tired, and not yet used to getting up at 5:45 A.M. during the week (which is the hour I need to rise to exercise, get myself ready for work, and get lunches for the kids—Santa Maria usually makes breakfast, and, yes, I like to allow myself time to eat that, too), so I did not feel like making dinner when I came home from work.

I knew that it was going to be tough in the evening, so I was prepared. That morning, I had pulled some wild Alaskan salmon from the freezer, and it was defrosting in my refrigerator. And earlier that morning, I had chiffonaded some kale, for a quick and easy, kid-pleasing salad. Not wanting to do any other work in the kitchen that night, I bought a bit of fresh bread from a Le Pain Quotidien near my office. I was feeling pretty good about things when I rolled through the door at 6 p.m.

But things didn’t go exactly as planned. The salmon wasn’t fully defrosted, and the kids were cranky (having not yet adjusted themselves to being back in school), and they were protesting the notion of fresh bread. They wanted pasta. Luckily, when I gave them a piece of bread, they changed their mind. Kindness can have that effect on people.

While I waited for the salmon to finish cooking (it was taking a while, being half frozen), I couldn’t just stand there. I had to do something. So I make raita. I diced a cucumber, chopped some dill, and mixed it with a bit of yogurt and olive oil. 

When sat down to dinner, the raita turned the salmon into a proper dish, adding flavor and chunkiness. The kids adjusted, as their blood-sugar levels stabilized, and before we knew it, everyone was having a good time. I asked Nina about her day, and she didn’t respond. I said it was an earnest question, and she replied, “Earnest? Then she and her sister stared singing “Ernest and Rebecca; Ernest and Rebecca; Ernest and Rebecca,” over and over, and laughing. It didn’t make any sense to me, but it made my day. 

• 1/2 cucumber, peeled, seeded, and chopped.
• 1 cup non fat yogurt
• 1 fistful of dill, chopped
• 1 Tablespoon or more olive oil
• Sea salt and pepper to taste

Combine the ingredients and enjoy. It can turn any salmon or chicken dish into something special.

A little while ago, Santa Maria and I sat down and did something rare—watched a movie from start to finish. The film was “Her,” Spike Jonze’s 2013 drama about a guy who falls in love with his computer’s operating system. I have to say, it wasn’t my first choice of film to watch, but it’s really compelling. Joaquin Phoenix is an amazing actor, the story has a surprise twist, and when Santa Maria mentioned that the operating system’s was voiced by Scarlett Johansson, my interest in the film was piqued. I recommend it for anyone with even the slightest curiosity about relationships.

During the movie, the relationship between the lead, Theodore (played by Phoenix), and the operating system, Samantha (voiced by Johansson), evolves, and at one point she tells him that she needs to have thousands of conversational partners, at the same time. He’s a bit perplexed, obviously, and I was relieved: Santa Maria is a human, and the only demands that she puts on me are culinary.

Such as earlier that evening, when I was about to make her a special dinner. She had requested steak, and I planned on making a mushroom risotto to go with it. Just before I headed to the store that afternoon, a few hours before the meal, to buy the meat, though, she casually mentioned that she wanted a potato au gratin, or scalloped potatoes, or some such. Scratch that mushroom risotto, I thought, as I started paging through cookbooks and scrolling web pages to find a recipe. 

I couldn’t really find anything worthwhile, and after a while, I decided, enough was enough. If I could wing it successfully in my marriage, I could wing it successfully in the potato au gratin department. At the store, I bought some gruyere and a few potatoes and I came home and got to work. Besides, I knew that I had something going for me in the fridge: duck fat, which is reportedly as good for potatoes as a week’s vacation is for a marriage. It’s serious stuff.

I knew I needed the potatoes to be thin, so I sliced them lengthwise and laid them flat, before cutting them in slim half-moon shapes.

 I knew I needed onions, so I cut them in half-moon slices, just for silly consistency—it keeps a marriage strong.

I sautéed the onions.

I browned the potatoes.

I layered them in a small baking dish; first potatoes, then onions, then grated gruyere cheese, topped with a bit of dried thyme and some fresh parsley.

After about three layers, I was out of potatoes and onions, so I added a about a quarter cup of chicken stock and a quarter cup of white wine, before baking, covered with foil, in a pre-heated oven for about 45 minutes.

It was delicious, the intensity of the gruyere was completely balanced by the smoothness of the potatoes, just like a good relationship.

Potatoes au Gratin a la Spike Jonze

• 2 potatoes, cut in half and then sliced thinly
• 4 oz gruyere, grated
• .25 cup chicken stock
• .25 cup white wine
• One large or two small onion, sliced into half moons
• A bit of thyme
• A bit of parsley
• Duck fat for sauteing 

Saute the onions first, until completely soft and nearly brown.

Then do the same to the potatoes, working in batches as necessary, until they are also browned a bit.

Layer the potato, onion, cheese, a bit of thyme, and some parsley; repeat.

Pour the wine and stock over the layers of potato, cheese, and onion.

Baked covered for about 45 minutes at 350 degrees.

Serves 4

Note: It's fine if this sits for a while before eating. I left it for about twenty minutes after taking out of the oven. Also, if it's not exactly a potato gratin it is still extremely delicious. 

School-bus lines have replaced tan lines, and fall is underway. Change is in the air, and not only around the Stay at Stove Dad household. I wasn’t aware, but A.1 steak sauce is now A.1 Original Sauce. It’s just a labeling change, though. They haven’t touched the recipe. I was told this by the fine folks at Kraft, for whom I’m working as a Tastemaker this year. They asked me to come up with a new recipe for the sauce. I’m always looking dinner ideas (one can only eat so much pasta, chicken breast, or pork), and I was excited by the challenge.

People like A.1 for its savory flavor, and wanted a way to deliver that classic taste without involving steak. Some folks can’t eat steak for financial and health reasons, but they should still be able to enjoy A.1, if that’s their sort of thing. And the good news about A.1 is that it will keep in the fridge, so even if there’s some leftover after making this recipe, the sauce will still be there, ready to go for it’s traditional use on a burger or piece of meat.

I wanted something quick and easy, too, so I started to play around with flavored crackers. Made with just water and flour and seasonings, crackers are incredibly easy to make at home, though a wise-guy friend of mine remarked, “You know, they sell crackers in stores,” when I told her what I was doing. Don’t listen to her—homemade crackers are a snap.

Using flour, semolina, salt, and olive oil, I made such big and wide crackers that they came out more like flatbreads. I enlivened them with a dollop of A.1, and then set out to make a meal out of them. I marinated tofu in A.1, and fried it up, and topped it with sautéd mushrooms, caramelized onions, and a bit of thyme, butter, and the like. Finished with fresh parsley, it was everything I wanted from an A.1 sauce recipe: tasty, quick, and satisfying. The recipe is here.

I once saw a poster that said something like “success is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration.” I won’t argue with that, and I have developed a related equation: inspiration is 100% the product of failure. In other words, you can’t succeed unless you fail first. With that in mind, here’s one of my latest kitchen adventures. Perhaps it will inspire you.

I was in the store the other day and the eggplant caught my eye. I decided to make eggplant parmesan that night. I took the vegetable home, but before I left the store I picked up some ricotta and some fancy jar sauce. Also a bit of prosciutto, as I was in the mood to experiment.

At home, I decided to make some sort of eggplant parmesan/lasagna/napoleon. I wanted some extra flavor, and I didn’t have time to salt and drain the eggplant, so I decided to roast it under the broiler. I sliced it lengthwise, rubbed it with a bit of oil, and salted it lightly, before placing under the broiler until it looked like this:

After I roasted the eggplant, I layered stacks of eggplant, cheese, ham, basil, and sauce. Like this:

Until topped with a bit of grated Parmigiano Reggiano, it looked like this:

And then I baked it in the oven for about thirty minutes at 350 degrees, until it looked like this:

My mistake, as I learned later when I ate dinner, is that I didn’t roast the eggplant long enough. It didn’t taste right. None-the-less, the meal was tasty enough for me to try again. Next time, I will roast the eggplant longer. How might you improve this recipe?