Clam Fritters

For me, clam fritters are a classic summer food.  They make me think of beach trips, sunshine and the willingness to try something new when you're visiting someplace new.  Kids usually like the corn and pancake-like shape of these fritters.  If you want more clams, use two cans.  You can also add other veggies to the batter, such as shredded zucchini or carrots. 

This is a super-simple recipe to mix up that kids can prepare but probably not yet cook because of the hot oil. 

One caution (learned the hard way): do not put the lid on the pan while you fry the fritters!  It's tempting when the oil splatters while they cook, but condensation will accumulate on the lid and roll back into the oil, causing canola-geysers - or worse.  Oil and water don't mix.  Better to clean off the stove....or even use a splatter guard!

The ingredients are pretty simple:

2 cups of flour
1.5 cups buttermilk
1 egg
1 can of corn kernals
1 can chopped clams
1 scallion, trimmed and sliced
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp paprika (or cayenne if you like it hot!)

Mix and you're ready to go.  I use canola oil, enough to fill a large, heavy pan about 1-1.5 inches deep.

I test the oil with a small bit of batter.  Wen you can drop it in and it starts to sizzle right away, the oil is hot enough.  They're like pancakes, cooking until they're dark brown on each side, about 4 minutes.  If the batter is very thick, or if you make them too big, they have a tough time cooking in the middle before they get really done.  I'd suggest making more, smaller ones. 

These make a great summer dinner, especially with a salad on the side.  The recipe makes about 14-16 fritters, depending on the size, which is usually enough for two meals or one meal and many snacks!

Meat and Potatoes

My great-aunt was elegant. From her hot-pink lipstick to her blue and white china, she embodied ladylike manners for me for a long time.


She was a traditional Midwestern cook, nothing too labor intensive, substantial food, eaten in the dining room. One of the meals I remember her serving us was steak and twice-baked potatoes. I was entranced by the swirls on top of those potatoes, like icing on a vegetable. It wasn’t until many years later that I realized those were frozen, prefilled and heated in the oven. Even that discovery failed to take away the charm of those memories.

A friend of mine taught me how to make twice-baked potatoes from scratch and although they lack the piped whirls of the frozen variety, they’re just as yummy. We prepared them with a tea-smoked steak (inspired by Fine Cooking Magazine’s latest issue) and had a great meat-and-potatoes dinner.

The potatoes begin with baked russets and a white sauce.

White sauce, the basis for soufflé, isn’t hard, but I find it easiest to have all the ingredients measured out ahead of time.

1TB butter
1 TB flour
1 cup hot milk (microwaved is easiest)

Heat the butter until it’s melted, add the flour and cook for about 1 minute until the mixture is bubbling, add the hot milk in a stream and continue stirring for another 3 minutes until it’s thick and bubbling. Remove from heat. Stir in 2 TB of shredded cheese.

This is the fun part: scoop out the insides of the baked potatoes without breaking the skins, mix the insides into the white sauce then refill the skins.

When you’re ready, they go into the oven to bake, with a little cheese sprinkled on top if you like.

The steak was marinated and grilled in the usual manner, but we put a foil packet of equal parts raw rice, brown sugar, loose tea and 2 TB chai seasonings on the grate below the meat.

When it started to smoke, we added the meat and voila: tea smoked steaks.

They were fantastic. We’ll be experimenting with that technique again.

Classic, occasional, and delicious.

Snacks

A friend asked me about snacks the other day - specifically if there are ways to encourage kids to not beg for cookies but to ask for healthful snacks instead.  I had to give this some thought. 

My kids are old enough to talk with, they've spent years (practically their whole lives, as they would tell you!) hearing about the benefits of eating well and not eating too much junk.  But I'm not the sweets-and-snacks police either. We have cookies, ice-cream and other treats.  What I strive for is some balance. 

I want them to learn to make good choices in what they eat.  I do believe that by participating in the preparation, they're more likely to eat whatever it is you've put together.  

Even little kids can help put peanut butter or cream cheese in celery sticks and push rasins in (Ants on a Log).  They can dip carrot sticks and apple slices into yogurt or peanutbutter.  Playing with your food is an acceptable way to encourage kids to try new things.

I do have a one-bite rule, they have to try one bite of everything.  I believe the fastest way to create a stubborn, picky eater is to force them to eat things they don't like.  Every parent knows that kids' tastes change more rapidly than the latest findings in food research, so trying to keep up with them will drive you crazy.

I also believe that hungry kids will eat what's available, within reason.  So not keeping your pantry stocked with foods you don't want them to eat is a good strategy.  There have been many times I've said "all I have is cheese, yogurt, cereal, or fruit, you choose."  No cookies, no whining.  The only thing that's gotten us to this point is consistency.

So what's our deep, dark secret?  The snack jar.

I keep this jar filled with foods from the borderlands.  The pre-packaged items that go into lunches, camp bags and occasionally hungry-afternoon-kids.  They know these are mostly for taking other places, not for eating at home, and I don't fill it with things they can't resist.  But they're available in a pinch.

In an ideal world, I'd always have enough frozen muffins, banana bread and fruit around the house and lunches would be packed only with fresh foods and homemade goods.  In my real world, it's a combination of our best effort, and the snack jar.

Comfort Food

One of the kid-chefs was sick this week.  After several missed meals, he thought he could hold down some cinnamon-sugar toast.  This was what my mother made me when I was sick, and I bet every one of us has some preferred comfort food for when we are sick.

I keep some cans of chicken-noodle-soup and a shaker of cinnamon-sugar on hand for when we're not feeling well.  I've also developed a personal yen for spicy foods when I feel a cold coming on. 

What do you long for?

Musings on White Dishes and Dinner Time

We've been getting a lot of use out of our white dishes lately.  My mother sent an assortment with some of the ramkins, oval platters, a casserole and a tart pan I remember from her kitchen.  I love their clean white shapes all piled up in the open cupboard and the way they dress up some of our simple meals. 

For a while, we were lighting candles at dinner most evenings too, but with the longer days it hasn't seemed necessary.

A few small things like that help make dinner more of an event, even when it only lasts for a portion of the time it took to make the food!  One thing I've come to discover about preparing the meal together is that it's easier to eat, talk and move on with the evening.  When I used to do it all myself, I felt like we needed to sit at the table for enough time to make the cooking "worth it."  Now, the cooking is always worth it.

I wonder how long the average dinner lasts.

Birthday Cake

My chocolate-adverse chef requested a vanilla cake with strawberries and white icing for her birthday dinner this year.  Since she offered to help, I obliged.

I used an adapted lemon cake recipe to make a tender white cake.  Like several others I've tried this year, it called for a thick batter that you lighten with whipped egg whites just before baking.

Missing a little off the top?

No problem: we made some strawberry coulis,

Covered the bare spot and layered on some strawberries,

Added a top and some icing,

And had ourselves a party!

I think we'll try to adapt this one to about half it's size for next year!

Endless Summer

Summertime always stretches out in my mind as a long opportunity to catch up on all those things I've been putting off.  And of coures, it always sneaks up quickly, throwing my routines off, bringing just as many   new ideas and as new minutes of sunlight.  Ah, summertime, whoever said your living was easy?

A month into it, the routine is a little more settled, and we've had time to tackle a few of the chores, making room for some fun.

We spent the holiday weekend with friends, riding horses and exploring a new place.  Our assignment was simple: dessert.  In an effort to keep refining the strawberry tart, we tried a new version and, apologies to our hosts, it wasn't quite as good.

You can see here that the dough was a little too thick around the edges, but instead of sacrificing some, we crammed it in.  That wasn't a good idea because the corner of the crust came out underbaked.  I also used this white quiche pan, instead of my metal one with the removable edge, so the crust didn't crisp as much as usual.  This recipe was a very basic sweet crust, with a little sugar and no eggs.  The last one we made was more like a cookie dough, with more sugar and eggs - it was more tender and made a better crust for these cool summer tarts.

Of course, we hadn't yet tried the crust, so the kid-chef filled it with our pastry cream and made a great whirl of strawberries on the top.  We all took turns critiqueing the results and I think we've got the right combination down now.

Phew!

On to the next summertime task!