Cooking Inspiration (And A Shameful Secret...)

I’m about to admit something I’m not proud of.

When I was in college (and clearly not very smart) and would watch a movie in which the characters smoked a lot (say Next Stop Wonderland), I would then promptly smoke. Usually Parliaments.

Now just forget I admitted that….but there was a point in sharing this shameful secret. The same thing happens to the girlies (minus the gross cigarettes, of course) when they watch shows/movies heavy in cooking. A screening of Ratatouille always sends Audrey tearing through the kitchen drawers for various implements, whipping up a potion, the ingredients too gross to repeat here.

Recently we’ve been on a bit Little Bear kick (my girlies are addicted to that show), and as such, the girls are inspired to recreate all of Mother and Little Bear's various creations – the flying flapjacks, the cupcakes, and most recently, the homemade lemonade (there's an entire episode dedicated to making lemonade.)



We happened to get a dozen lemons in our co-op box last week, which came in handy when, after a Saturday afternoon viewing of said lemonade episode, they declared they wanted to whip up a big batch.

Out came the little juicer we received as a wedding gift a decade ago (and have used approximately three times.) Squeezing the lemons was infinitely thrilling to little Millie... We then added some cold water and sugar in the raw to the lemon juice. Again inspired by Little Bear, Audrey wanted to instead use mint and honey, which as tempting and lovely as it seemed, I nixed, as I couldn’t bear to waste all those lovely lemons if she didn’t like it (and there was a very high probability that she wouldn't...)

It was incredibly tasty and will be a perfect base for homemade popsicles once the weather gets a smidge warmer.

So, What inspires your kiddos to cook?

On Broccoli and Books...

In matters of food I often underestimate the girls.

I often immediately assume I'll have to cajole, beg or bribe them to eat something healthy when, more often than not, it's what they really want. A recent example occurred just last night when Bryan and Audrey were outside grilling steaks, and I was in the kitchen tossing some steamed broccoli with a little butter and sea salt. Millie was hungry, or in her words, staaarrrvvving (my kids are nothing if not dramatic, no idea where they get that from), and we were still a good 15 minutes from sitting down at the table.

My first instinct was to offer up a few pretzels, but out of desperation (and proximity) I instead handed her a broccoli spear. She happily popped it into her mouth...and then another, and another, until she had eaten half the bowl.

I need to give those girlies more credit, no?

In other exciting news (yes, I'm the type of person that thinks a kid devouring broccoli is exciting...), my friend Lisa Greene just released her fantastic book, Processed Kids, A Real Mom’s Guide to Raising Natural Kids in a Processed World.

Prompted by her son's food allergies, specifically to High Fructose Corn Syrup, Lisa took a deep dive into food research and the impact of processed foods on health and behavior. She distilled all of her learnings into Processed Kids, which is full of information, guidance and easy recipes.

It is definitely worth a read!

p.s. Lisa is that genius behind the killer goat cheese polenta...I'm just saying.

Big Chocolate Cake (Or Breaking a Rut)

Valentine’s Day was my “D-Day.”

See as of yesterday, (as you’ve probably surmised from all the posts about snacking and frozen yogurt and whatnot) I still hadn’t fully shaken off my cooking “rut”, otherwise known as my food funk, the stalemate with my kitchen, or my completely culinarily uninspired period of time…

So I drew a line in the proverbial sand and vowed, inspiration be damned, to cook something…anything (ideally somewhat elaborate and perhaps even a bit challenging) for Valentine’s Day. Really pulling out of the funk, dusting off the cookbooks and making something fantastic for Bryan and the girlies, seemed like the ultimate expression of love, no?

I decided first on the dessert -- it was Valentine’s Day after all. Specifically, inspired by Ruth Riechls’ ultimate expression of love through insane baking in her excellent memoir, "Comfort Me With Apples", I decided to make “Big Chocolate Cake”… with Audrey of course. And truthfully the cake killed two birds with one stone, allowing me to cross “make a chocolate cake from scratch” of my “list”, where it’s been sitting stagnate for a year and a half. A win/win all around.

From the name alone, I knew this project might be a bit of a bear, and I had a whole dinner to make too (more on that later), so we started working on the cake early in the day. Which turned out to be a good thing, as we were working slowly (+ sneaking in plenty of Olympics viewing, breaking for Bryan’s famous quesadillas + taking in a tivo’d Project Runway)… Let's just say Audrey placed the final raspberry on the cake at approximately 5:00 pm, right before I started dinner.

Friends, let me warn you, this cake isn’t for the faint of heart. There’s nothing especially “healthy” about this bad boy – case in point, it contains three sticks of butter and six eggs in the batter alone, but I view great desserts the same way I do eating meat lately -- we eat it less of it and make the best we can possibly afford. To that end, we used great chocolate and all organic ingredients.

I can honestly say it was a masterpiece.

Ruth Reichl’s Big Chocolate Cake adapted from "Comfort Me With Apples"

A couple of notes…this recipe makes a big cake and we were only feeding four, so rather than tinker with the amounts, I used ½ the batter for a single layer round cake and used the rest for cupcakes. Since my round cake pan was a little deeper than the sheet pans that the cooking times are intended for, I had to cook it closer to 45-50 minutes and I turned the heat down to 325 for the last 15 minutes.

Ingredients:

For Cake Layers:

• 1 ½ cups boiling water
• 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder (not Dutch process)
• ¾ cup whole milk
• 1 ½ teaspoons vanilla
• 3 cups all-purpose flour
• 2 teaspoons baking soda
• ¾ teaspoon salt
• 3 sticks unsalted butter, softened
• 1 ½ cups firmly packed dark brown sugar
• 1 ½ cups granulated sugar
• 6 large eggs

For Frosting:

• 5 ounces unsweetened chocolate, chopped
• 1 ½ sticks unsalted butter, softened
• 1 cup whipped cream cheese
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 1 ½ cups confectioners' sugar
• 1/8 teaspoon salt

Make Cake Layers:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Butter two 13-by-9-by-2-inch baking pans and line bottoms of each with wax paper. Butter paper and dust pans with flour, knocking out excess.

Whisk together the boiling water and the cocoa in a bowl until smooth, then whisk in the milk and vanilla. Sift together the flour, baking soda and salt.

Beat together the butter and sugars in the large bowl of a standing electric mixer until pale and fluffy, then add eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition. On low speed, beat in flour and cocoa mixtures alternately in batches, beginning and ending with the flour mixture (the batter may look curdled).

Divide batter between pans, smoothing tops. Bake in the middle of the oven until a tester comes out clean and layers begin to pull away from the sides of pans, 25 to 35 minutes. Invert cakes on racks, remove wax paper, and cool completely.

Make Frosting:

Melt the chocolate in a double boiler or a metal bowl set over a saucepan of simmering water, stirring until melted. Cool to room temperature.

Beat together the butter and cream cheese until light and fluffy.

Add remaining ingredients and beat until well combined.

Assemble Cake:

Put one cake layer, rounded side up, on a cake plate and spread with 11/4 cups frosting. Top with another cake layer, rounded side up, and spread top and sides with remaining frosting.

So What I Said About Snacking...

a photo of my current snack of choice taken with my blackberry...

Well, I might have to take it back.

Pinkberry has landed in Dallas...and it's close to our house.

Too close.

Now I know it's not especially novel to blog about Pinkberry (it's right up there with cupcakes and Anthropologie in oft-blogged topics), but friends, I can't help it. This stuff is good. In fact, it's so good (or I should say the coconut with toasted almonds and raspberries is so good) that it's forcing me to take back all of my "I don't really snack...only on nuts and cheese...but I don't really seek snacks out..." blah, blah, blah, because I sought out this very snack two days in a row last week.

So I might now be a snacker. I'm just saying.

But I also might be OK with that after reading all your insightful comments re: snacking. So thanks for that. Thanks for weighing in and forcing me to rethink some of my issues with how the girlies are approaching food rather than just blindly forcing my own (apparently former) eating habits on them.

+ it seems every time I start to obsess over some bad food habit the girls seem to be adopting, they surprise me with an altogether unexpected food moment. Take Audrey's Pinkberry experience: she ordered a small cup of chocolate (of course) with raspberries. When we got back to the car, Bryan and I asked how she liked it, and she said, "it was great, but next time I want to order just a cup of raspberries." "Is that cool?"

Cool with me...