Garlicky Crumb-Coated Broccoli (French Fridays with Dorie)

I'm going to admit it up front.  I don't really like broccoli.  In fact, I remember including this fact in a letter to our first president Bush - my best friend and I were lacking on world policy specifics to discuss with him, but we'd heard he didn't care for the green veggie much either.  It's one of those things any decent adult is supposed to like, right?  Sunshine, ironic political comments, doing your taxes early, getting regular exercise and.....broccoli.  They're good for you, a sign of sophistication, satisfying and wholesome.  So now you know, I'll eat it, but you can't make me like it.

Apparently though, this is a recessive gene and everyone else likes it in my house.  So, we made the Garlicky Crumb-Coated Broccoli and you know what?  I still wasn't crazy about it.  (you thought I was going to say I liked it after all, didn't you??)

But it was okay.  And the kids loved it, so it's a keeper. 

The recipe in Around My French Table says to steam the broccoli first, then toss it with butter, garlic, breadcrumbs, salt and pepper.  Our first alternation was to microwave the broccoli, instead of steaming it.  I don't get it - if you have access to a microwave, I say go for it!  There's no waiting for water to boil (and we all know how long that can take!) - no steamer basket to clean, plus pot and pan., and the nutrient loss is less than steaming.

So we microwaved.

The second alteration was the butter.  I simply cannot bring myself to use 1/2 stick of butter for two stalks of broccoli.  French women might not get fat, but I sure can!  So I used a pat of butter (less than a TB) and olive oil. 

Mixing oil and butter is a tried and true french approach to cooking (and Italian, for that matter) - it stretches the butter flavor without stretching your pants, and it raises the smoke point of the butter - so it doesn't burn as easily.  No brainer.

Once the butter/oil mixture was warmed, we added minced garlic, breadcrumbs and seasoning (including lemon zest), toasted the bread crumbs and added the broccoli. 

It looked great and, as I said, everyone else thought it was fantastique!

Monkey Gets the Beets

My daughter was insistent on peeling the beets.  A little too insistent...and that's when I realized she didn't have a burning desire to spend quality time with her mother in the kitchen - she wanted to use her monkey peeler!

Oh yes, this is one of those "just for kids!" items you see tucked onto the ends of the aisles in kitchen stores, where they keep all those cute impulse buys.  Egg separator?  Pot holder that looks like a cow?  Kid tools?  That's where you'll find them!

The thing about this peeler though, is that it works.  It's easier for her to hold than the usual ones, and she loves it, even after the Ouch! episode.  She peeled those beets in no time, holding them close against her shirt.  One of those "maybe you'd better get your apron (because I want this to be fun, not an occasion for me to fret over the cost of replacing your beet-gold wardrobe!!)"  Smile.

We roasted them in the oven with the chicken, taking about 20 minutes for 3 large beets in 1/2 inch chunks.

I believe I'm overcoming my aversion to beets, and enjoying the fact that everyone else seems to gobble them up.  The sweet, simple beets were a delicious counterpoint to the spicy chicken (coming soon!) that we ate alongside it.

Roasted Golden Beets

3 yellow beets, tops removed, peeled and chopped into 1/2 inch chunks
Toss with 2-4 TB olive oil, season lightly with kosher salt.
Line a baking dish with tinfoil for an easier clean-up and spread the beets on the foil.
Roast at 400* F for about 20 minutes until they begin to turn golden brown.

Stir once midway through the cooking.

The tender, mild flavor is a nice accompaniment to spicy foods, and they can stand in for a starchy side dish.

Simple Soup

Last week was a busy week.  There was a leftover pizza night and a soup and grilled cheese night, each preceeded by a 'what am I going to serve for dinner' moment.  It was one of those weeks.  The only bright spot was that I didn't run out of milk, but only because I'd bought way more than the sleep-over boys could drink.  (Because really, mom, why would they drink milk when you had cans of root-beer and ginger ale on hand?  sigh.  Yes, a better mother would have had only milk and sliced fruit to go with the pizza, but I was just winging it.)

There was one small, shining moment of decent eating in the middle of this work-life-unbalance.  Pasta soup.  This was winging it to the max - no recipe, no plan, just making the most of two frozen italian sausages, some slightly dehydrated carrots rattling around in the bottom of the crisper, dried pasta, boxed broth and some frozen duxelles. The sausages were sliced and browned, deglazed the pan and added the carrots and broth, brought to a boil, added duxelles and pasta and cooked for 8 minutes.  Done.

I put it on the table and, glad it wasn't pizza, dished it up.  Nothing fancy, but it was hot and satisfying.  It felt good, in the middle of all the chaos, to remember that sometimes simple is the better balance to busy.

No recipe tonight, since this was mostly about making a little bit of peace from the chaos.

Breakfast, anyone?

What do you serve a pack of 10-year-olds for breakfast after a sleepover?

Pancakes, Bacon and Sausage, of course!

Last week was an exceptionally busy week, with several tossed-together dinners and last-minute lunches - of course it was also the week that culminated with my son's first "big" sleepover party.  Making the cake was the hard part (more about that tomorrow!)  So breakfast had to be predicable.  And good.

I'd recently read a handy method for cooking up lots of bacon at once (I can't remember where, now).  You take a cooling rack (the kind with squares that looks like graph paper, not just rods in one direction) and put it on top of a rimmed baking sheet or jelly-roll pan.  Lay the bacon strips close together on top and bake in the oven at about 425 until they're browned on both sides - about 20 minutes in my oven.  I did notice two things - having the baking sheet lined with foil is a good idea and the back of my oven heats much faster than the front!  (Turn the sheet, if you're willing to brave the splatters!)

The sausage tossed up okay in a skillet and the pancakes were from a mix, with apples, cinnamon and diced apples (unpeeled).

This breakfast fueled some serious basketball, hide-and-go-seek and general rough-housing, so it must have been good!

CakeWalk

When I asked my son what kind of cake he wanted for his birthday, he said "vanilla.  with chocolate icing."  I should have stopped right there, but oh no...when it came up again, I couldn't help myself, "what about a chocolate and vanilla cake?" 

"Yeah!"  he liked that.

"And we could do it in an alternating pattern!"  (and yes, that's the sound of me, beginning to get carried away)

"Uh, okay." 

"And it could look like a checker board!"  (yes, officially carried away)

"YEAH!"  (he really likes this)

"Uh, okay.  okay!"  (that's me, realizing that I have managed to turn his simple request into a major saturday-filling task for myself.  I may never learn.  sigh.)

Saturday morning finds me in the kitchen, breaking out the chocolate, mixing up cake number one.  As I poured the batter into the pan, I thought to myself this is not going to release when it's baked.  Sure enough, it stuck to the pan in a major way.  So cake number one landed here:

Cakes number two (vanilla) and three (chocolate) were both baked in pans that were greased, lined with parchment and re-greased.  They released.

I didn't do a very good job trimming the tops or measuring the pieces (but I did a great job of keeping my panic in check as the hours flew by faster and faster....)  The structure was looking a little lop-sided, but some extra icing helped hold it together.  Luckily, both cakes were pretty structurally strong, somewhere between a layer cake and a pound cake, so they did hold their shape when stacked.  I once tried to make a "red barn" built-up cake using cake-mix cakes - might as well have been using marshmellows!  I think the candles got blown out before the roof came off that one!

Turned on it's side, iced and full of candles, it met the test of being a pretty tasty birthday cake.  For now, I've decided to postpone auditioning for any of those fancy-cake reality TV shows.



Fish Packets on the Grill

We had a good time making this dinner, the kids love eating anything that comes in their very own packet, and nothing's easier than packet-clean-up!

We set up the food processor and grated carrots and parsnips using the shredding disk.  Then we switched to the slicer for the zucchini and yellow squash (since they cook faster, they needed some extra heft!).

The veggies made a colorful bed for some fish filets (we used cod, but any firm fish would work), and we wrapped them in aluminum and parchment paper packets, folded over and well sealed on the top and sides.  The only seasonings were salt, pepper, olive oil (on the parchment paper and drizzled over the fish), and some thyme.

The packets sat directly on the grill over a medium heat for about 12 minutes.

The carrots and parsnips got sweet and everything stayed really moist and flavorful.  Salmon also works well this way.  With the food processor rinsed while we waited for the fish to cook, clean up was a snap.

The only real secret is to get the veggies sized so they'll cook as quickly as the fish - julienne, grated, thinly siced etc.  From there, it's all about experimentation with flavor combinations and seasonings. 

Can you freeze leftover spaghetti?

The world is full of unanswered questions.  Why?  Why me?  Why do cats do that?  Will it burn?

The kitchen, microcosm of the world, is also full of unanswered questions, such as "can I freeze this?"

Not nearly as deep, but when you're worn out, staring at the kitchen and thinking "I really don't want to cook tonight," you're not after deep, you're after fast and easy.

I had this giant bag of frozen spaghetti and sauce from a week or two ago that I'd tossed in the freezer when it was apparent that I'd made way too much (it was a crock-pot recipe) and we weren't going to eat it before it spoiled.

I wasn't sure the spaghetti would hold up, but since there are lots of frozen noodle dishes in the instant-dinner aisle of the grocery store, I figured we'd give it a try.  What could we lose, right?

I had put the freezer bag in the fridge that morning.  Around 5:30, I turned the block of frozen leftovers into my pan. 

Needless to say, that would have taken a l...o...n...g... time to thaw.  So I pulled it out of the pan and put it in the microwave to defrost (we used the meat defrost setting).  About 9 minutes later, I put it back in the pan, brought everything to a simmer for a few minutes and served it with a salad.

It actually held up pretty well!  Of course, we were hungry, and the pasta had lost any claim to al dente but the sauce was good and the noodles were softer than usual, but not mushy.  We had used the multi-grain spaghetti, and I suspect that helped it hold up.

So, can you freeze leftover spaghetti?  Yes.

Orange-Strawberry Quiche

Have you ever had a dessert quiche?  I hadn't until Talia invented one.  We were talking about healthful options for her class project and she suggested this one - entirely her own invention.  I was pretty impressed with the creativity, and entirely unsure how we would go about making such a thing, but serendipity showed up and voila:

It's a pretty basic little quiche, with strawberries as the filling.  Just after she'd first suggested this combination, we were at the grocery store and saw a tart recipe with an orange custard filling.  Borrowing from that idea, we added orange zest to the cream, heated it a bit and added it to the filling.

The recipe, as with most first tries, is not yet ready for prime-time, but there was quite a deal of pride in preparing this dessert for her grandparents.  Confession?  I was not really sure this would be good.  But it was.  We'll probably try it again soon, with a slightly sweeter crust and see what comes of it.

Here's to invention: the necessary ingredient.

Ca-Zukes!

Hats off to Cohn's Crew - 22 second-graders and two fearless leaders who managed to put together four dozen ca-zukes as part of their nutrition unit!

First of all, those kids were much better behaved than I remember being in the second grade!  They measured flour and wheat germ as if their lives depended on getting exactly the right number of flakes in the scoop, and they were all about mixing, mixing, mixing, mixing.  Those were some of the best-mixed muffins ever! 

If you want me to run a meeting or do something work related for you, no problem.  But figuring out how to orchestrate this event so each kid would get some of the action without creating major chaos?  Well, that was a new challenge!  I'm happy to report that there were no significant disasters or oversights.  Except one, but we'll get to that.

We set up an ingredients station in the back and the kids carried up their bowls to read, measure, scoop and crack....

I lean slightly toward the over-compusive side when it comes to planning through something new like this, so we'd tested a batch at home, I'd figured out how many measuring cups and spoons of which size to have, stashed extra bowls and spoons in my bags and had sticky notes for the morning-of, so we wouldn't forget anything.  Of course, I forgot something.  Baking soda.  Not exactly an optional ingredient when it comes to baking, right?  So, supressing panic, I hurried down to the cafeteria.  The first lady said "no, we don't have any."  But she went to look while I tried to figure out if my mom could dash back to the house and grab mine before we got to that step....  But, lucky for us, the art of cooking at school lives on - I have never been happier to see a box of baking soda before! 

The kids measured and scooped, mostly neatly, but there was bound to be a little variety in the final products....and some flour in my wheat germ, but hey, that's just like home.  I had anticipated cracking the eggs into their bowls, to limit hand washing mid-recipe.  Can you tell me, what was I thinking??  They all wanted to crack their own eggs, of course.  Duh.  And I have never seen kids wash their hands so eagerly!

And with several adults around (thanks, mom and dad, for spending some of your vacation at school!), the kids mixed and scooped and got their gloppy muffin batter into the cups for baking.  We entrusted them to those wonderful cafeteria ladies,

Enjoyed some heated debate about whether something that contained such significant quantities of vegetables and 'eewwey' things like eggs and oil could possibly be good, but my daughter reported back that they turned out better than the test batch we'd made at home.  Must have been all that extra stirring!

The last question of the day was asked by one of the girls who looked up at me very seriously and said "but what IS a ca-zuke?"

Here's how you can find out:

Ca-Zukes! (Carrot-Zucchini Muffins)


3/4 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 cup whole wheat flour
2/3 cup dark brown sugar
2 tablespoons wheat germ
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon fine salt
2 large eggs
1/3 cup vegetable oil
1 tablespoon pure vanilla extract
4 medium carrots, grated (about 2 cups)
1/2 cup grated zucchini (about half a small zucchini)

Note: This recipe requires 12 muffin liners and a muffin tin (or 12 stand-along muffin cups)

Directions

Preheat the oven to 350* degrees F. Line twelve 1/2-cup muffin cups with paper muffin liners.

Peel and grate the carrots in a food processor. The zucchini can be grated with the peel on. Set the vegetables aside.

In a large mixing bowl, mix the flours, the brown sugar, wheat germ, cinnamon, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. In a medium bowl or large measuring cup, lightly mix the egg with a fork, then mix in the vegetable oil and vanilla extract.

Fold the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients with a rubber spatula or large spoon. Stir in the carrots and zucchini until everything is mixed. The batter will be very thick with lots of visible vegetables. Using a large tablespoon, scoop the batter into the muffin cups. Bake until golden and a toothpick inserted in the centers comes out clean, about 25 minutes. Turn muffins out of the tins and cool on a rack. Serve warm.

Makes 12 muffins.

Wish us Luck!

Tomorrow, we're taking on a new challenge - 21 of them, actually!  Talia and I are going to don our aprons and attempt to bake Ca-Zukes! with her second grade class.

It should be interesting...we've been trying to find the right recipe and figure out how to give everyone a piece of the action without a) turning the classroom into a certified disaster zone or b) being asked to consider relocating to a new district!  Lucky for us, the grandparent tech-team is visiting and they've offered to photograph this event.

Check back tomorrow for photos (or not, if it proves to be an utter disaster!)

Here's to Sunday planning!