"Sometimes Spaghetti Likes to Be Alone…”

Image from The Big Night via npr (Kobal Collection)

The title of this post bears what is perhaps one of the great cinematic food lines... It's from the excellent, lovely and hilarious movie, The Big Night.

Similar to my obsession with gastro-lit, I love food movies -- love Eat Drink Man Woman, (which I haven't seen in years but my cousin Lauri recently reminded me of in an e-mail), love Chocolate, love Like Water for Chocolate and Ratouille and even the food scenes in Spanglish... and I can't wait to see Julie and Julia.

A couple of nights ago Bob Mondello did a great piece on NPR about food on the big screen. It's a must listen!

When the girlies get a bit older, I'd like to watch a great food movie every Friday night and then cook dishes inspired by the flick for the rest of the weekend. I'm thinking a weekend of French Food following Babette's Feast -- you get the idea.

What's your favorite food movie?

Collaborative Cooking, More Leftovers Love and Some Recipes

I love collaborative cooking -- cramming into the kitchen with friends (especially if their cooking skills surpass mine, which is definitely the case with two of my dearest friends, Julie and Tim) drinking wine, bumping into each other and chatting while everyone works toward the shared goal of enjoying a lovely meal together... of creating a memory.

Our Saturday evening birthday dinner for my friend Achlee was one of these nights. Bryan made his famous fried shrimp and homemade chips and salsa; I whipped up some yummy sides (the guacamole, mango salsa, beautiful rice + spicy black beans and a cabbage/jicama slaw) and threw together a simple marinade of canola oil, cilantro, lime, Ancho chili powder and a jalapeno for the tilapia, which our friends Julie and Tim then expertly cooked.

We set up a little build your own taco bar on the island, drank lots of homemade margaritas and then finished everything off with Julie’s perfect chocolate cake.

If it had ended there, it would have been more than enough food happiness, but it turned out to be the meal that kept on giving. Sunday morning, leftover tortillas and queso fresco were scrambled up with a few eggs and served alongside the black beans – quick migas. The beans surfaced again the following day combined with the remainder of the beautiful rice and topped with the cabbage slaw and Bryan’s salsa for easy veggie tacos. And each of those meals was just as yummy as the first one.

Here are a couple of the recipes should you want to mimic this at home!

Bryan’s Homemade Salsa
This is a sweeter cilantro based salsa…one of our favorites!

• 1 bunch cilantro (tops plus 1/2 of the stems)
• ¾ large sweet onion (preferably a Vidalia)
• 1 poblano roasted on the grill and peeled
• 5-7 medium jalapenos de-seeded
• 28 oz can Muir Glen organic fire roasted whole tomatoes
• ½ Lime squeezed
• 1 ½ tsp salt

This makes A LOT of salsa… A. Lot. So you could easily half the recipe. We like the texture best if you blend in a food processor, as the blender tends to make the salsa too “mushy”.


Cabbage and Jicama Slaw

• ½ head of green cabbage -- shredded
• 1 medium jicama – peeled and cut into matchsticks
• ¼ cup cilantro -- finely chopped
• 1 cup plain yogurt
• ½ teaspoon hot pepper sauce
• Juice of one small lime
• Kosher salt and pepper to taste

Combine the above ingredients in a bowl and refrigerate for 30 minutes before serving. I added a bit more hot sauce, as I like this with a bite…it was just as good the next day!

How Much Are You Willing to Pay for Food?

This passage from Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is the straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back for me:

“Grocery money is an odd sticking point for U.S. citizens, who on average spend a lower proportion of our income of food than people in any other country, or any heretofore in history. In our daily fare, even in school lunches, we broadly justify consumption of tallow-fried animal pulp on the grounds that it’s cheaper than whole grains, fresh vegetables, hormone-free dairy, and such. Whether on school boards or in families budget keepers may be aware of the health tradeoff but still feel compelled to economize on food – in a manner that would be utterly unacceptable if the health risk involved an unsafe family vehicle or a plume of benzene running through a school basement.”

So I (like almost everyone else who has read this insightful, compelling book) am officially starting our family’s mini food “revolution”. In fact, you can read all about it here.

I’m starting slow, as I want to get this right. I’m trying to balance organic and local, making sure nobody feels "deprived" and re-working our household budget to accommodate any food cost increases (although I believe they’ll be minimal when we move away from frequent eating out and processed foods…albeit organic ones, but still) and move to making more items from scratch. I think the additional “cost” will come more in the currency of time than money, but responsible eating is time well spent -- I firmly believe that.

I’m curious about what others are doing. (I love this account from our green nest on how their family of three affords to eat 100% organic on $100 a week!) What percentage of your food budget is spent on organic food, local food? Do you have a garden? How often do you go to the farmer’s market? What do you always buy conventional?

Eat Well Guide

My friend Sharon turned me on to this BRILLIANT site. Just type in your zip code and find all the sustainable food options within a particular radius.

I discovered a new organic restaurant that we're going to try out with the girlies this week and a farmer's market that's open through December, so it'll be easier to procure local food well into fall. + It would be especially helpful in avoiding the fast food wasteland on your next road trip.

I'm addicted. Check it out!

A Slight Delay and Food Confessions

I promised I'd post an update on our online cooking club, and after discovering that many of you have vacations planned before the school year starts, I thought it would be best to officially kick-off our little culinary adventure on September 1st.

I'll continue working out the details and will post a full list of participants and "rules" the week before. Then we'll post our first recipe on the 1st. Sound ok?

Now onto the confessions. I was reading our latest book club pick, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, last night, and while tucked into the chapter about our massive consumption of corn and corn-based processed foods and big agribusiness, I was mindlessly munching on a bag of microwave popcorn and sipping (wait for it...) a Diet Coke.

Yes, I know, shameful. But admitting a problem is the first step, no?

So spill it. What are your shameful "food" vices?

Mango Salsa

Amidst all the hoopla of the weekend, we did manage to eke out one home cooked meal. Tired from our little road trip, I didn't want to try to make anything too extravagant for Sunday dinner, so I had Bryan throw some chicken from Whole Foods on the grill (maybe it's psychological, but I think organic, free range, hormone free chicken tastes so. much. better. than conventional chicken... I'm just saying.)

While he was grilling, I made a quick pot of beautiful rice, this time adding slivered almonds, and threw together my mom's famous mango salsa, since I had all of the ingredients on hand. This is incredibly easy and is good with chicken, pork, fish tacos, or on its on as a little summer salad.

Mango "Salsa"
Serves 4

Mix together the following in a medium size bowl and let sit in the refrigerator for one hour before serving.

• 1 large ripe Mango -- diced
• 1 pint grape or cherry tomatoes -- quartered
• 1/4 cup finely chopped cilantro
• juice from one small lime
• sea salt + pepper to taste

I also like to top with a little crumbled feta, goat or queso fresco, depending on what I'm serving. Alongside last night's chicken and rice, I went with goat cheese.

Audrey totally dug the chicken, but sadly refused the beautiful rice and mango salsa, and instead had a piece of corn on the cob and some orechiette with parmesan... Oh well.

Weekend Food

Sadly, there won't be a lot of cooking around our place this weekend. We're headed to a block party at the museum tonight and to an all-day birthday/house cooling party tomorrow + we have a fridge full of leftovers to plow through.

Funny, a few months ago a couple of days out of the kitchen would have been a relief, but now I'm a bit sad...I always look forward to weekend cooking.

So let me live vicariously through you. What are you whipping up this weekend?

In other news, my Friday post is up on Renegade Bus. Go pick some berries this weekend and then put them on top of Alice Water's 1234 cake!

Alice Water’s 1234 Cake with Lemon Curd and Blueberries

Adapted from “The Art of Simple Food” by Alice Waters

Yield One nine-inch, two-layer cake

Ingredients

• 4 eggs, separated
• 1 cup milk
• 3 cups cake flour (sift and then measure)
• 4 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 cup (2 sticks) unsweetened butter, softened
• 2 cups sugar
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
  

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Butter two 9-inch baking pans and line the bottom of each with parchment paper. Butter the paper and dust the pans with flour, tapping out the excess.

Stir baking powder and salt into cake flour.
In another bowl, beat butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Beat in the four egg yolks one at a time. Add the vanilla to the mixture.

Add the flour mixture and milk alternately, starting and ending with one third of the flour. Stir just until the flour is incorporated.

In another bowl, whisk egg whites to soft peaks. Stir one third of the egg whites into the batter, then gently fold in the rest. Pour the batter into the prepared pans and bake until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean, 30 to 40 minutes.

Let cake cool and then spread lemon curd between the two layers. Serve with slightly crushed fresh, local blueberries and loosely whipped cream.

Sitting at The Table

We make every possible attempt to eat dinner as a family around our little breakfast room table five nights a week. Sometimes we fail. There are nights that the girls are so hungry and so ornery after school that we serve them dinner immediately at the little island in our kitchen. They sit on barstools and eat while Bryan and I finish making our dinner. But the intent is still the same; we're all in the same room together, sharing a meal and mitigating melt-downs while vainly attempting dinnertime conversation (i.e. how was your day, what was the most interesting thing that happened to you at school) with a two and five year old.

It's usually pretty comical.

Monday through Thursday, things are pretty casual. We don't really formally set the table, rather it's more about balancing speed with some semblance of civility. On Fridays and Saturdays, it's wheel's off -- we let them have picnics on the floor, or (gasp) eat in the den around their little wooden table while watching tivo'd episodes of Olivia. I know, I know, BAD mom.

Sundays are formal (or as formal as you can get with my girls). We typically have Sunday dinner with lovely cousin Erin and eat in the dining room complete with a fully set table and candlelight. Audrey always kicks off a toast and ask all sorts of mature dinner time questions. As the girls get older, I'd like to work this set up into one or two additional week nights, as it's really nice.

SO, what's dinner-time like at your house?

p.s. I'm thrilled about all your enthusiasm for the online cooking club. I'll leave it open to folks that want to sign on and get back to you guys next Tuesday with a full list of participants and how will work things...

Want To Cook Together?

Recently Kristine of the excellent blog Waiting for Kids asked if I wanted to start an online cooking group for moms. I was immediately intrigued by the idea, and after a few e-mails back and forth sharing ideas, we came up with the following approach.

We’d form a group of like-minded folks that want to cook new, interesting things and test them out on their kids (or if they don’t yet have kids, someone’s kids…i.e. nieces, nephews, godchildren, the neighbor's kids -- really any willing tot will do), honestly sharing the results with the rest of the group. It's key that we’re totally candid about how the dish went off with the kiddos…I know it’s tempting (trust me) to only blog out our culinary “hits”, but understanding the misses and why they didn’t work is key.

The group would cook around a specific, pre-determined ingredient or type of dish each week and can use a new recipe, something of our own creation, something from a magazine…no restrictions there, except that it has to be something you haven't made before.

Each member of the group would post their recipe and results on Monday, (that way folks can work the good ones into their weekly meal planning) and (this one is especially important to me) try to use as many local, organic ingredients as possible in the recipe. Also I’d like to try and focus half of the recipes on vegetarian options since there are so many good reasons, especially environmental, to keep our meat consumption limited.

Now granted every kid has different tastes, so there are no "one size fits all" recipes, but my hope is that a few recipes will surface each week that feel like sure fire winners, and at the end of the experiment, we can create a compilation of the “kid-approved” ones. My dream is to cobble together a little cookbook that we could sell online and donate any profits to the groups trying to fix the abysmal school lunch program in America!

I’d like to start on Monday, August 3rd and go for 10 weeks. I’ll link to everyone’s blog who is participating.

Right now, I’m thinking the weekly “plan” could go something like this:

Week one – Vegetarian
Week two – Poultry
Week three – Pork
Week four – Vegetarian
Week five – Dessert
Week six – Seafood
Week seven – Vegetarian
Week eight – Red Meat
Week nine -- Casserole (no ingredient requirement)
Week ten – Vegetarian

So what do you think? Who’s in?

Beautiful Rice

We had a great dinner Saturday with our new friends Lucia and Peter and their adorable girlies Eva and Felicity.

There was guacamole with feta + Bryan's "homemade" tortilla chips (he cuts up corn tortillas and fries them in our little backyard fryer -- not so healthy but so yummy.) He also turned out a mighty fine green chili chicken casserole. A few of you have asked for this recipe, but he literally does it different every single time, so he's promised to work up an actual recipe to share soon!

I had a particular weakness for the homemade margaritas and the beautiful rice though...It was my first time to make this rice; it's my dear friend Kristie's recipe, and friends, it's easy and incredibly, incredibly good.

The rice is a perfect (and obvious) accompaniment for Mexican food, but I think you could replace some (not all) of the cilantro with more spinach and serve it along side any number of things. I'll be adding this to our regular repertoire for sure!

Beautiful Rice (or Arroz Verde)

• 1/2 cup packed fresh cilantro
• 1 cup packed fresh spinach
• 1 1/4 cups homemade or organic chicken broth ( my favorite is pacific organic free range)
• 1 1/4 cups organic skim milk
• 1 teaspoon kosher or sea salt
• 2 TBS unsalted butter
• 1 TBS olive oil
• 1 1/2 cups organic long grain rice
• 1/4 minced onion
• 1 clove minced garlic

Put the cilantro, spinach, and broth in a blender and puree, add milk and salt and blend until combined.

Heat the butter and olive oil in a heavy medium-sized pan, when butter is melted, add the rice and saute 3-4 minutes, stirring constantly. Add the onion and garlic and saute 1 minute longer.

Add the blender mix, stir well, bring to a boil. Turn to very low heat, cover and cook for 20 min
Stir carefully and cook for another 5 minutes.

Remove from heat and let stand for 10 minutes until ready to serve.

Weekend Food

Scenes from last month's White Rock Local Market

We’ve got a few fun foodie activities planned this weekend...

Tonight we're having neighbors over to splash in the baby pool and throw some organic, grass fed burgers on the grill + make an orzo salad with tomato, feta cheese and basil.

Tomorrow we’re having some new friends (fun!) over for dinner and are thinking of making Bryan’s green chili chicken enchilada casserole + Mexican beans and my friend Kristie’s famous “beautiful rice”… It’s so good! I’ll share the recipe on Monday.

But we’re especially excited to hit up the monthly White Rock Local Market tomorrow morning. Check out my piece on Renegade Bus* about the market and be sure to stop by if you live in Dallas!

So, what are you cooking this weekend??

* I'm going to be writing about local food each Friday on Renegade Bus!

Sugar, Sugar

Full disclosure, I’m eating a mini York Peppermint Patty as I’m writing this… I’m just saying.

So, I’m curious, what’s your take on sweets. How often do you eat them? How often do you let your kiddos eat them? What are your favorites? (I'm a dark chocolate girl...the darker the better.)

In my dreams I’m channeling MeMe Roth* -- a sugar tyrant (Roth might be a little abrasive and over the top but as harsh as she seems, she’s pretty spot on in her thinking…), only allowing treats on absolute special occasions. But it’s not my reality. I like, no, I LOVE dessert. I love to bake, I love chocolate, I love making cupcakes and setting up a candy “buffet” for all our birthday parties. I can’t help it; it’s festive.

But while I have some modicum of self control (peppermint patties notwithstanding) my girlies don’t. They’d eat candy for breakfast, lunch and dinner if I let them. They can’t get enough. So I have to set some guidelines. Generally I don’t buy sweets to keep around the house. (I do make an exception for good ice cream.) And I’ve tried to institute a rule that we only eat sweets if we make them from scratch (no boxed cake mix). That helps curb sugar mayhem a bit.

So spill it… What’s the sweets low-down at your house?

Ode to Leftovers

a particularly good meal made primarily of leftovers

With each passing week, I’m becoming more comfortable with the amount of money we seem to be spending on local, sustainable, organic food. It’s been an adjustment for sure, but I believe strongly it’s all about choices. In the recent 60 Minutes piece featuring Alice Waters, Waters notes, “we make decisions every day about what we’re going to eat. Some people want to buy Nike shoes…two pairs (This part was a bit humbling given my current shoe purchases…), and other people want to eat Brochs grapes and nourish themselves.”

That said, now that I’m regularly spending five dollars for a bunch of organic, local asparagus, I'm loathe to throw a single spear away.

Actually this isn’t so much a new thing for me. I’ve always been pretty adamant about not wasting food and a huge fan of leftovers -- almost everything tastes better the second day, no? But the "old me" would only save something if there was critical mass…enough for an actual second-day meal. Now if there’s half of an organic sweet Italian sausage and two asparagus spears leftover from Monday night’s dinner, into a little storage container they go. And as I don’t want this new found obsession to turn into an exercise in cluttering up the fridge before inevitably shoving leftovers down the garbage disposable, I’m fanatic about actually doing something with the leftovers.

I've had a few solid successes. My favorite by far had me thinly slicing the aforementioned sausage and asparagus and tossing it with some whole wheat fettuccine, a 1/2 cup or so of organic chicken broth and a handful of cherry tomatoes. I added a few leafs of basil from our little herb garden and then at the last minute folded in a heaping tablespoon of goat cheese, which made the whole dish a touch creamy and gave it a nice zing. It was the perfect amount for a solo lunch and was so good that it reappeared (but this time sans leftovers) as a Sunday dinner.

Other re-purposing wins include some leftover skirt steak + magic sauce that I tucked into a whole-wheat tortilla, adding a few leafs of arugula and a smear of sour cream. So good. Then there was the little bag of handmade pumpkin seed toffee that got incredibly hard before I could eat it all (that’s what lack of preservatives will do, fyi…) I was determined not to let it go to waste, so I smashed it into little shards with a mallet and added it to my cookie dough. It’s an almost indiscernible addition but adds a perfect caramel kick, and I’ve gotten more compliments on those cookies than ever as a result.

So…I'm curious, how are you using your leftovers these days?

One Of Our Favorite Things -- Green Tea Ice Cream

I have been on a quest for the best, most perfect green tea ice cream for the better part of a decade. It started in college; I'd go to Boulder a few times a year to visit my best friend Kirsten, and as soon as my plane touched down, we'd head to our favorite sushi restaurant and tuck into some rolls and sake. But the best part of the meal was always the little scoop of green tea ice cream they served for dessert. It was perfection. After much cajoling, we got the restaurant to tell us it was actually Dryer's green tea ice cream, but it was only available to restaurants.

We were bummed but certain we could find an acceptable substitute...which lead to tasting every. single. brand. of green tea ice cream we came across and a string of disappointments.

Until now. Last year, my sweet hubby spotted a carton of Maeda-en at our local Central Market and picked it up for me hoping it would be "the one". And friends, it was. It is literally the best ice cream I've ever had...green tea or not.

I highly recommend you find some stat and eat a nice big bowl. It will make you incredibly happy. I promise.

Progress!

I finally got Audrey to eat warm fruit in the form of peach cobbler... Read about it over here at the Small magazine blog Smaller