Hot Food in the Summertime

So it's officially summer now, and though I haven't posted much since spring, it doesn't mean I haven't been cooking. No, that activity is relentless -- every morning shortly after breakfast I start thinking about dinner -- shopping for it, defrosting, prepping, cooking. My family seems never to be prepared to start sharing preferences that early in the day, but I need to start planning long before anyone has an appetite for it. Including me.

Some of the culinary highlights of the last couple months:

• We got a waffle iron! I splurged on the Breville when it went on sale, and against my husband's wishes for another appliance in the kitchen. It's been a huge hit though, and even he's sold on it. Highlights include making four big waffles at a time, a well to hold all the inevitable excess spillage, a non-stick, easy-clean surface, and a timer that lets you go off and do other things, like stare morosely into your coffee, while you wait for them to be done. Oh, and waffles are a great way to use up buttermilk you bought for other recipes. These are now in the Saturday morning breakfast rotation, and one of these days I will get around to experimenting with savory waffles for dinner. Blue corn waffles with chicken in gravy sounds really appealing to me.

 

• I figured out that my smoothie maker can be put to even better use if I skip the kale and add booze! After drinking what was essentially a delicious sugary glass of half-melted peach sorbet and alcohol at a waterside bar, my friend Sam and I experimented with making frozen Bellinis at home. Mixing frozen peaches (and some strawberries if you like) with peach liqueur in the Magic Bullet, and topping with inexpensive local sparkling wine makes for two very happy moms on the back deck on a Friday afternoon.

• Spatchcocking isn't only fun to say! It's also the best way I have learned to get a roasted chicken on the table that is (a) not half-raw and (b) is done before bedtime. I have my butcher remove the backbone (and save it in my frozen chicken parts bag destined for stock) and I rub that sucker with lots of rosemary and garlic in olive oil. Crisp on the stove, put the skillet in the oven with something heavy pressing it down, and in less than an hour we have crispy but juicy roast chicken. I like to serve with lemon wedges and a little pan gravy. 

• I don't hate fennel if it's roasted and/or sliced super thin in a slaw. And it's really nice to continue the theme and serve with Pernod-orange juice cocktails over lots of ice.
• Fish schnitzel (sole filets crusted in panko and pan fried) is a surefire way to get even Lucas to eat fish with enthusiasm. I served with tiny cheese ravioli in brown butter sauce, carrots, and salad. The kids dipped in ketchup, while the grownups got a little brown butter-white wine-lemon-caper sauce, though I did catch Mr. Gateau hitting the ketchup on seconds.
• File under everything is better with bacon -- creamy fresh corn soup with bacon and some swirls of pesto.

• Grilling season is, in fact, the most wonderful time of the year. No fuss, no muss. Extra points when we eat outside and just sweep the crumbs onto the ground. I've been doing a lot of pork tenderloins, which take to all kinds of seasoning very well and cook quickly while staying moist, and chicken skewers, generally either in a malai kebab yogurt marinade or a red wine-olive oil-garlic marinade.

Family Dinner Continues Apace

Greetings Earthlings! I am pleased to report that my family has not yet starved to death under my care. In fact, I have hit on some dinners that have gotten the much-sought Lucas Two Thumbs Up rating.

The first thing that has happened is that Lucas started art classes at the amazing Arts Umbrella, which offers high-quality visual and performing arts instruction to children from preschool through high school. The school is located on Vancouver's famous Granville Island, which is packed full of art studios, galleries, restaurants, and the amazing Public Market, where I now spend a couple of hours every Friday busting our food budget for the week while Lucas takes his mixed media class. Even with the best of intentions, I can't help but return home with bags stuffed with endless varieties of delicious goodies -- lately I can't resist the pyramids of neatly stacked strawberries and blueberries, the multicolored bunches of kale, and the huge variety of grains, spices, and other nifty ingredients at the Grainry. And I never fail to stop by Oyama Sausage Co., whose massive selection of creative sausages made from local high quality meats has become the center of our Friday dinner. I can't even bring myself to look at their full selection of charcuterie, pate, and cheese, or I might never leave.

Sausages with herbed couscous, stewed zucchini, and fruit plate.

 

Yes, Friday night is Sausage Night. Each week, I select three or four varieties (this is hard! they have dozens and dozens, and the selections change daily) and as soon as I get home I pop them into the oven while I put away all the produce and other tasty bits, and put together some simple and quick side dishes (couscous is a favorite). I've started cutting up a little fruit plate for Lucas and Baby Gateau, so at least they get some plant matter into them.

This week we sampled Toulouse pork sausage (mild and perfect for kids), Chicken with Preserved Lemon (a little dry, but tasty), Elk with Huckleberry (gamey in a good way), and Pork with Prune (delicious, but deemed "too fruity" by the kids). Others we've tried have included Duck with Truffle, Smokey Bison (Lucas's favorite), Pork with Red Wine and Herbs (fantastic), and Japanese Chicken (kids raved).

Ham night.

Another gift that kept on giving was the procurement of a spiral-sliced ham from Costco when we ventured across the border to Bellingham, WA. They have most of the stuff we're used to getting at the Vancouver Costco, but some of our favorite American products can only be found if we drive down to Washington State. Fortunately, I now know where to go when I run out of the supply of A-1 Steak Sauce my mother brought me when I whined that what they sell under that label in Canada is a totally different product.

The ham, cooked with a simple maple glaze, served us for umpteen meals. The first night, I served it with mashed sweet potatoes and a green salad, but everyone clamored for "regular" potatoes, so I made that the next night too. The ham showed up in school lunch sandwiches, in cold cut platters at home, and finally its bone and last scraps of meat produced a phenomenal French Canadian Pea Soup with yellow split peas.

My bella chicken.

And my crowning achievement was the Julia Child-inspired roasting of a chicken. I took a midweek trip to Granville Island to obtain a haggis for our cousin's Robert Burns Day party, and while at the butcher purchased a huge chicken. The last time I had tried to roast a chicken was a complete disaster -- it would not cook through, and only later did I realized that both my meat thermometer and the temperature gauge on the oven were busted. I have remedied that with an oven thermometer and a new meat thermometer and all is well.

French chef-type roast chicken is not a set-it-and-forget-it project. You have to baste and turn that bastard every 10-15 minutes, but boy is it worth it. It came out succulent, with a well-seasoned, brown and crisp skin and gorgeous drippings for a gravy. I roasted some potatoes in a dish alongside it and served a bowl of my favorite flash-fried kale with lemon, and it was a truly fine meal. It was big enough to give us a second night of roast chicken, plus its carcass tipped the balance and allowed me to clear out my freezer stash of chicken bits and vegetable trimmings to make the best chicken stock I ever made, following Gabrielle Hamilton's instructions in the Prune cookbook. I'd added a few extra drumsticks to the pot, and the meat from those later went into a batch of chicken tacos, while about the stock is what made that pea soup so rich and delicious.

 

But the very best part of all about my weekly trips to Granville Island may not be the delectable things coming out of the kitchen. It's that I have a little extra time to myself. After all the shopping is done, I settle myself down in a cafe or, better yet if I'm not driving, a bar and treat myself to something nice. Last week, the lovely bartender at the Liberty Distillery made me their delicious take on an Old Fashioned -- white whiskey with orange gomme syrup, bitters, lemon, and star anise. It was lovely, and I quite relaxed as I sipped it, while admiring the ruby red strawberries and opalescent black kale spilling out of my bags around me. It was a perfect start to the weekend.

Dinner Plans

After my frustrated post about the slog of figuring out what the put on the dinner table every day, I poked around the intertubes looking for family meal planners. I'd been thinking that I might benefit from a little more structure, at least so I could avoid the daily panic and trips to the grocery store (it's been cold). I've done meal planning before, and I had a hard time sustaining it because it was hard to adapt on the fly to (a) changing plans and (b) picky eaters. Also, I don't like the pressure of feeling I've failed if I have to make a lot of substitutions or skip a few days.

I decided to try something about as minimal as you can get in terms of a planner, and that would allow me to use my own variety of recipes. I took five index cards and labeled each as follows:

MEAT
FISH
CHICKEN/TURKEY
PASTA/RICE
SOUP
PIZZA/TAKEOUT
TEA DINNER

They now reside on the refrigerator, and my plan is to cycle through them each week, so that at least I have a broad category to guide me. On the back, I'm writing down each successful meal so that I have a resource of things that have worked in the past if I am really out of ideas.

So far we have had:

SOUP: Cauliflower Soup with Red Curry and Homemade Pita Bread (half a thumb up on the Lucas Scale)

PASTA/RICE: Stir-Fried Noodles with Fresh and Baked Tofu, a Deborah Madison recipe that to my surprise got a two thumbs up rating from the judging panel. I left out the hot chili, carrots, and red peppers and just made it with plenty of snow peas, broccoli, and mushrooms. Lucas was able to pick out any suspect vegetables, but ate lots of tofu.

CHICKEN/TURKEY: Chicken Thighs and Legs with Maple-Mustard Glaze, Potatoes, and Carrots (see photo), which I based on a Martha Stewart recipe. I love these dishes I can roast in one pan, which makes clean-up a lot more pleasant, and root vegetables cooked underneath chicken automatically taste good. This got only one thumb up (maximum two) because the chicken "had seeds on it."

I'm going to do FISH tomorrow, I think, because my mom arrives late tomorrow night and as she's not a giant fish fan, I will spare her.

SO FAR, SO GOOD.

Dinner is Served

Photo from Food & Wine, my plating isn't halfway as attractive as this.

I'm going to do a massive post at some point about all the joys and frustrations I'm experiencing in cooking dinner more or less daily for a family of five, including three young gentlemen who are, shall we say, not all that diplomatic about expressing their point of view about the offered fare, but I figure if I wait to get it all written, another month will have gone by before I get it all assembled and then I'll have to catch up all over again.

So here is a report on last night's meal, and I hope to update daily-ish. It might get really boring for everyone involved, so I might just start posting highlights and lowlights, but we'll see as it unfolds.

I really wasn't sure what I wanted to make. Some days I feel inspired or have a craving, so those are easy. Some days I am super incredibly uninspired, so we have a Tea Dinner or I fall back on the oh-so-reliant Mother's Little Helper of Annie's Mac & Cheese, some frozen edamame, and some sauteed chunks of boneless chicken breast (a/k/a Daddy Chicken). Or we get pizza.

I knew I wanted to make something but was just out of ideas. I checked out some of the Buzzfeed Food lists, and found some attractive options at a page called "51 Healthy Weeknight Dinners That'll Make You Feel Great." Sold!

I went with a nice simple recipe from Food & Wine for Curried Chicken & Vegetable Pan Roast. It's boneless chicken thighs in a quick curried yogurt marinade (just yogurt, curry powder, garlic, ginger, salt and pepper) roasted over a bed of cubed butternut squash, halved Brussels sprouts, and red onion wedges that have been tossed in canola oil and lightly seasoned with salt and pepper. As suggested, I served it with a little extra yogurt and naan, plus some leftover basmati rice.

I love a one-pan dish, and extra points for the two-stage prep taking place in the same bowl, so fewer dishes to wash.The most time-consuming task was breaking down the squash into cubes, which wasn't really that terrible. If you have access to the precut squash, this is a good use for it, and will help get dinner on the table even faster. Stated cooking time was 60 minutes, and I think I could cut that down, because everything looked good after 40. The extra 15 I gave it made the squash softer than it probably had to be.

Verdict: Mr. Gateau ate two servings of vegetables, which isn't a given, older boys pretty much cleaned their plates without nagging, younger boy ate only starch, which seems to be how things are going lately, and I felt very satisfied with just the chicken and vegetables. I expect this dish (and pan-roast variations) will be in heavy rotation going forward.

Just Like Mama Used to Make

My kitchen mentors, my mother, Amy, and my grandmother, Mary. They're probably two seconds from telling me to get the hair out of my face when this picture was taken.

You could walk into my house today and instantly detect that A Jewish Mother Lives Here. Rafe woke up feeling sick and had to stay home from school, so I knew that homemade chicken soup was called for. I headed to our good local butcher, West Broadway Meat Co., who carries only gorgeous organic and free-range products, and paid a small ransom for a chicken, and picked up the necessary vegetables from Young's up the street, which has amazingly plentiful and inexpensive produce.

While that was bubbling away, I was hit with an urge to really go all the way and make a batch of my grandmother's rightfully celebrated Mandelbrot. I'd published the recipe here right after she died, because it was a signature of hers, and I am often asked by friends and relatives for the recipe. Well, folks, never mind that nobody else seemed to have the genius and foresight to collect it from her, you can get it any time you want.

Here is a confession: I'd never actually made it myself before. It was, as she'd always insisted, supremely easy to do, and now I have a good four dozen delicious cookies on hand. She always told me they freeze well so it's easy to have a cookie on hand when someone shows up for a cup of tea.

With the house redolent with both garlicky chicken soup and cinnamon-dusted cookies, I feel like I did my part today to make something nourishing, warm, and homey.

Tomorrow I'll probably order in.

The sauce with the mojo

We're on vacation at the beach, just relaxing in a rental house and doing a lot of grilling. We brought some pantry essentials with us (olive oil, balsamic vinegar, worcestershire, A-1, red curry paste, maple syrup, dijon mustard) so that we wouldn't have to buy new bottles of things we had in plenty at home, but did hit the supermarket for groceries. We had brought some frozen boneless chicken breasts with us, and at the supermarket I stumbled across the perfect solution to the quick summer meal: Goya brand Mojo marinade. We've tried a number of these, of various brands, and generally despaired that they all seemed to contain a lot of junky ingredients, but the Goya, which ranks among the most ubiquitous and least expensive, actually had the best ingredients list, with minimal additives. It's got a great citrus and cumin flavor, too, and I'm looking forward to using it up so that I can try the bitter orange flavor too. Extra bonus: the kids loved it.

Bittman strikes again

I have been following @bittman on Twitter, who is none other than our beloved Minimalist. Yesterday he posted a link to his Bitten blog, which had a recipe for Roast Chicken with Cumin, Honey and Orange. I immediately began craving this dish, so I went to the supermarket on my way home from work and got a chicken. One nice thing about this dish is that you're likely to have all the ingredients but the chicken already in the house. Anyway, it was beyond easy to make -- I love dishes like this that require you to dirty only one small dish other than the roasting pan (see also Donna Hay's cookbooks). You can't really get away from the kitchen while it's cooking, because it has to be basted every 10 minutes, but I found that was a value-added aspect, because it made me sit at the dining table with a magazine and a glass of wine for an hour.

The chicken came out glossy and crisp, with delicious juicy meat. We had it with some string beans dressed with olive oil, salt, and garlic. Just perfect.

Definitely on the To-Do List

So I am one of those people who enjoys a page-a-day calendar in the office. Usually I get Dilbert or Why Do Men Have Nipples, or something like that, in the hope that I might get a little chuckle as I scrawl phone messages all over it. But this year I got Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything calendar, which is really a collection of recipe cards from the book and a box to store them in. The last two cards look fantastic, and I'm definitely going to make them. The first is Chicken, Provencal-Style, which sounds nice and browned with a sauce including anchovies, garlic, tomato, olives, and thyme. The other is for Fettuccine with Spinach, Butter and Cream, and which sounds basically like the heavenly marriage of pasta with cream sauce and creamed spinach.

Haschich Not Included

In my Cookbook A Week project I was a little frightened to discover that The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook was up this week. If you've never read it, you're probably under the misapprehension that it's all crazy hippie recipes for pot brownies. It's true that Miss Toklas did include a friend's recipe for "Haschich Fudge" in her (terrifying*) section on friends' recipes, but the book is devoted to wonderful stories of life with Gertrude Stein and their circle of artist friends in France during and after war rationing, and amazing, classic French cooking, with Miss Toklas's often brilliant asides.** Recipes are interleaved with stories, and it's just a terrific read.

But I'd never though to try to cook from it, and now I was going to have to brave it. It's not just the rich and sometimes unavailable ingredients that threw me (endless butter, truffles, frogs' legs, hare's blood) but the recipes often call for outdated cuts of meat and kitchen equipment, and measurements are often vague, such as having you add a soupspoon or glassful of something.

It came down to two recipes, really -- one for rolled slices of beef filled with a paste of anchovies, garlic, onion, and parsely, browned in butter, and cooked in veal stock and then cream (to be served with "Gourmet's Potatoes" which called for tons of butter and truffles) or "Godmother's Chicken" which required not just one but two whole sticks of butter. I went with the latter, but did not make "Potatoes Smothered in Butter" to go with it. That was a good call, because even the one stick of butter was over the top. This butter is mashed with chopped tarragon and chicken bouillon, then stuffed in the chicken, which is sewn up and skewered and then simmered in stock. Once removed from the pot and drained of its cavity juices and butter, all of that and the cooking liquid is reduced and then ANOTHER stick of butter is added, plus Madeira, nutmeg, cayenne, and lemon juice. This is a lush, juicy, delicious chicken dish, not that exciting to look at, but easy to make and delicious.

*The friends section is terrifying in that various posh friends submit recipes for things like Aspic Salad, made with a can of Campbell's tomato soup, a package of Philadelphia cream cheese, gelatine, Miracle Whip, and chopped vegetables, all suspended in a ring mould.

**The book contains the second-greatest footnote in literary history (the first being Freud's footnote about men pissing on fires in Civilization and its Discontents). In a recipe entitled "Gigot de la Clinque," a leg of mutton is marinated for days and injected at regular intervals with a mixture of orange juice and cognac, delivered by syringe. For the uninitiated, Miss Toklas drops the following footnote:
Note. A marinade is a bath of wine, herbs, oil, vegetables, vinegars and so on, in which fish or meat destined for particular dishes repose for specified periods of time and acquire virtue.

Real Simple, for real

I made a delicious, relatively quick dinner last night from a recipe I found in the current issue of Real Simple. Unfortunately, the recipe isn't on their website yet, and I don't feel like typing it out, but it involved dredging chicken breasts in a mixture of flour, cumin, lemon zest, and salt and pepper, browning them in olive oil, and then quickly cooking (in the pan you did the chicken in) some shallots, lemon juice, white wine, and green olives, then sticking the chicken back in for a brief while to mix it all together. I made it with some couscous, which takes about 5 minutes to make, and there we had an actual, tasty dinner in about 20 minutes.

Dogs on the Grill

It was another beautiful weeked, and that called for grilling. On Saturday, I put together some really tasty chicken kebabs -- the chicken marinated in lots of lemon juice, olive oil, oregano, rosemary, and basil, and I used small whole tomatoes, zucchini, red onion, yellow pepper, and mushrooms to make the kebabs. It's a one-dish meal, and also gets us to eat more vegetables than certain ones of us otherwise might.

Yesterday we just did up some beef hot dogs with toasted buns, but I also threw some hot Italian sausage on, and it was great. I wasn't sure what to dress it with, so I had it plain, but I think some sauteed onions would have been nice, or even maybe an aioli.

I also concocted a ridiculous girlie cocktail out of vodka, a bit of Hpnotiq blue liqueur, and a tiny splash of pineapple juice, which came out a beautiful sky blue color and was tasty.