When I was in my twenties, I was obsessed with Gwyneth Paltrow. I was 25 and feeling lost career-wise when she had her first real star turn in Emma. I saw the movie opening weekend and read any profile of her that I could get my hands on. Every time I finished a story, I felt like I was in 6th grade all over again — eyeing the popular girl from afar consumed by an envy I couldn’t completely understand. If only I could find a career as creative and as fulfilling as Gwynnie’s! I still had that before-30 belief that if I just worked a little harder then maybe I’d still have a shot at being a movie star and going to the Oscars in a pink Ralph Lauren frock. (Any professional achievement that happened after 30 in my mind didn’t count. At that point it seemed expected, un-special.) The fact that I could barely give a wedding toast without panicking for weeks leading up to the big day, or that I hadn’t acted since I played Adelaide in my 6th-grade production of Guys & Dolls were small details to be worked out later. (more…)

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pasta with corn and bacon

In my mind, it’s pretty much sacrilegious to suggest doing a single thing to sweet, fresh, summer corn besides enjoy it on the cob, slathered in butter with a little salt and pepper. But when one is sharing a house with a first and second grader whose grins periodically resemble Leon Spinks’, it can be challenging to be a purist on this point. Concessions must be made.

A tooth-fairy-approved fall-back plan (that is, if you want to do more than simply shave the kernels off the cob and hand the kid a spoon) is this simple dish, which also happens to make a star turn in our Time for Dinner cookbook. It calls for 3 to 4 pieces of bacon, but you could go with two and it will still be as delicious. The best part? You don’t need teeth to eat it.

Pasta with Corn and Bacon

Cook 1 pound of spaghetti, fettucini, or angel hair as directed. When drained, toss with a little bit of olive oil to prevent noodles from sticking. Meanwhile, in a deep skillet, fry 3 to 4 pieces of bacon over medium heat. Remove when crisp and chop after they’ve cooled. Wipe up some of the bacon grease in the pan with a paper towel, then add 1/2 large onion (chopped) and the raw scraped-off kernels from 4 ears of fresh corn. Fry in the fat until onions are cooked through and corn is cooked and slightly crispy. Add a hefty dose of shredded Parmesan and stir again. Divide your cooked pasta between four bowls, add corn-onion mixture, bacon crumbles, more Parmesan, freshly ground pepper, and some chopped basil. Depending on the bacon you use, you might have to add some salt at the table.

Related on The Family Kitchen: How to choose corn without offending your neighbors.

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Just want to clear one thing up: My family does not all sit down to the same dish every single night. We do most nights. But like every house that is inhabited by humans born in the 21st century, there is the constant chorus of requests (an awfully nice way to put it) from the royal diners. I want spaghetti not meatballs, I want meatballs not spaghetti. I want ketchup with my hamburger. I won’t eat my fish without soyaki. I don’t have to go on. I know you know.

There are also nights when it’s just not a realistic proposition for me to forego, say, the pasta with yogurt and caramelized onions that I’ve been craving all week…just because two of the four people at my table will wrinkle their noses in protest when they see it. On those nights, when we all eat together but eat wildly different things, I am not cooking elaborate Plan-B type meals.  I won’t make anything more complicated than peanut butter sandwiches and Annie’s Mac & Cheese if they’re not going along with what’s on the menu. I’ve never felt bad about the PB — it’s a wholesome meal as far as I’m concerned…all-natural peanuts on whole wheat bread. But the Mac & Cheese? Well, it’s organic, but is it nutritious? I stopped feeling guilty about it when my friend Claudia told me a trick she learned from her mother-in-law. Like all brilliant ideas, it’s so simple it’s genius.  She makes Annie’s Mac & Cheese with quinoa. Yes, quinoa, the complete protein that you usually see in the same sentence as the word “superfood.” She mixes an Annie’s cheese pack into a big batch of the stuff and her kids call it Quack and Cheese. My kids still won’t eat quinoa (I feel it, though, they’re getting close) so I thought I’d do a halfway-house version using elbow-shaped quinoa pasta, which you can find at most health and specialty stores. It’s appealingly yellow color made it an easy sell and even though Abby noticed its slightly chewier texture, this didn’t appear to be a deal-breaker.

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Last week, as you may have noticed on my visual market post-mortem, I came home with a pile of cool-looking maitake mushrooms from the farmer’s market. I probably sound like I know what I’m talking about, but in truth, I had never heard of maitakes before I spied them on a vendor’s table next to the Lion’s Manes (another new-to-me variety) seven days ago. Phoebe was with me and asked what they were. I told her I didn’t know but I was going to buy them anyway because they smelled so off-the-charts rich and earthy. She asked, You’re going to eat something you’ve never heard of? I told her yes — Isn’t that what I’ve been asking of you and you sister for the last eight years? I liked being able to impart that lesson to her — that just because I am a grown-up who gets more excited by a clean sink than a Bourne movie  – doesn’t mean I ever have to lose a sense of adventure at the table. I also liked being able to eat this particular adventure tossed with fresh eggy pasta and Parm.

Rigatoni with Maitake Mushrooms
Serves 4

1 pound fresh rigatoni (I used egg, but you can use regular or whole wheat and I’m sure no one will come knocking)
2 tablespoons olive oil (plus a little more for later)
1 or 2 cloves garlic, minced
1/2 medium onion, chopped
dash of red pepper flakes (optional if your kids don’t like heat; but they probably don’t like mushrooms either, so might as well throw it in)
1 to 2 cups maitake mushrooms (or whatever fresh mushrooms you foraged at the market today), cleaned and chopped into bite-size pieces.
zest of 1/2 lemon
salt & pepper to taste
1/3 cup bread crumbs
1/3 cup Parmesan
handful of fresh thyme or parsley

In a medium pot, boil water and prepare pasta as directed. Drain, place in a large bowl (separating out pasta portions for kids who won’t eat mushrooms) and toss with a tiny bit of olive oil to prevent sticking.

Meanwhile, in a large skillet over medium-low heat, add olive oil and saute garlic, onion, and red pepper flakes until onions are soft, about 5 minutes. (Garlic shouldn’t burn since it’s “embedded” in onions.) Turn up heat slightly and add mushrooms, cooking until they release their liquid, about 3-5 minutes and adding more oil if you feel the mixture is too dry. Stir in lemon zest, salt and pepper and transfer to the bowl with pasta.

Turn up the heat to high and add another generous glug of olive oil. Add bread crumbs and cook until toasted and crispy, about 1 minute. Add to pasta bowl along with Parmesan and fresh herbs.

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Now, granted this might be hard because it involves some knowledge of my cookbook shelves pre-June 10, 2010. But the game is this: Can anyone guess what new cookbook has been added to my kitchen library? I’ll give you a hint. It’s wedged in between Ruth Reichl and Marcella Hazan, a few doors down from Martha Stewart and Bugialli and Bittman, underneath Julia Child and Mario Batali and Jim Lahey…? Give up?

It’s Time for Dinner, the cookbook I co-authored with Pilar Guzman and Alanna Stang while we were all still at Cookie. Although the book doesn’t officially publish until September, I received a real-life, I-can-hold-it-in-my-hands advance copy by FedEx this morning and it’s hard not to be Abby-ish and imagine myself (and my cowriters) on the same shelf as my food heroes. But the thing is — there I am. There we are. Next to Marcella Hazan!

I would love nothing more than to show you every single page in the 272-page playbook, but I’m going to restrain myself and just deliver some good news to all those former Cookie readers who have written to me telling me how much they miss the “So You Have A…” column. There is an entire chapter of SYHAs in the cookbook — 20 ingredients, 3 meal options for each, which means 60 total recipes. (Sixty recipes in just one chapter, btw.) For those of you new to SYHA, the column was one of Cookie‘s most popular pages. It charted recipes visually and the choose-your-own-adventure strategy (“head this way if you have pork; that way if you have pasta”)  is tailor-made for parents who come in the door at 6:30, see a big bunch of swiss chard (or sausage or frozen peas or miso paste) in the fridge and need quick inspiration for how they can turn it into dinner.  As addicted as I am to my digital recipe generating these days, seeing the flowcharted recipes spread across two pages reminded me how impossible it is to replicate the feeling of opening a book (see? It lies flat!) and getting inspired by lush photographs (thank you, Marcus Nilsson) and clean design (thank you, Number 17). Ok, I’m done now with the shameless self-promotion. Thanks for listening.

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I know better than to apply logic to the process of feeding kids, but there I was doing exactly that a few weeks ago when I spied the perfect recipe for “peanut butter sauce” (aka satay, tahini, sesame sauce, etc.) by my friend and mother-of-two Melissa Roberts.  The logic went as follows:

If Peanut Butter = Surefire Consumption, and Noodles = Surefire Consumption, therefore Peanut Butter + Noodles = Mom Twice as Sure About Surefire Consumption

Jenny! Jenny! Jenny! How long have I been in this parenting business? Long enough to know that the surer you are about something, the greater the likelihood of failure.

I think my six-year-old, sensing my peanut butter-fueled swagger, figured out that she could really twist the knife if she rejected the sesame noodles (which, by the way, were delicious). And so I never really had a chance. Here’s what really kills me: She orders the dish at Chinese restaurants as a matter of course and this homemade version was infinitely better. Which she would have found out had she deigned to take a bite. My only consolation was that I was able to use the sauce to replicate an appetizer which I used to order at my favorite midtown sushi restaurant (RIP Expense Account)…a steamed spinach with sesame paste, also known as Goma Ae. My other daughter likes both peanut butter and spinach but, well, you can probably guess how that one turned out.

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…And, perhaps even more exciting, we also finally have an amazon link where you can pre-order our Time for Dinner cookbook. OK…how cool is that cover? I can call my own number here because I had absolutely nothing to do with it. Lia Ronnen at Melcher Media and Bonnie Siegler at Number 17 are the creative forces behind the design — as well as the 75 other cover tries that I am convinced, if decoupaged into shelf-liner, could make someone somewhere a million bucks. (Thanks, guys.)

In honor of this milestone, I’m giving you a recipe (tweaked a bit) that comes from one of my favorite chapters of the book. The chapter is a “starter kit” on feeding the baby called “What’s in it for me?”  where we show how to prepare basic fresh baby purees (avocado, sweet potato, bananas, etc.), then give instructions for how to take those purees and use them as the base for grown-up dishes. (So an avocado mash turns into taco topping, a peach puree is stirred into a Harry’s-style Bellini, you get the idea.) When we batted around ideas for grown-up-izing baby’s pureed sweet potato, Alanna, who wrote the section, suggested mixing in a miso butter with scallions. Apparently people knew about this combination? I did not, but let me just tell you, it’s a revelation — a revelation that my kids have come to like more than a plain sweet potato.

Sweet Potatoes with Miso Butter and Scallions (adapted from Time For Dinner)

2 whole sweet potatoes or yams
3 tablespoons butter
2 tablespoons miso (white)
2 tablespoons chives or chopped scallions

Roast whole sweet potatoes at 450°F for 40 minutes. While they are roasting, mix together remaining ingredients. When potatoes are ready, slit them in half lengthwise, scoop out some flesh for the baby and mash with a fork.  Top the rest with miso butter. (For Abby, I scooped the flesh out of the skin and tossed it for her in a special bowl. Seemed to do the trick.)

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Until fairly recently, I had been an absolute slave to the written recipe, i.e.  it was a dealbreaker if the ingredient list called for shallots and all I had was an onion. If Everyday Food told me to serve the sausages with horseradish mustard and I only had grainy, then by God I went out and spent the $4.39 for the horseradish mustard. When I was 16 my neighbor hired me to help prepare and serve hors d’oeuvres at a cocktail party, and not only did I incinerate the cheese puffs, but I stood there and watched them become more and more incinerated because the recipe said 15 minutes in the oven and it had only been 12.

If this sounds like you and you don’t like it, I have two pieces of advice for you. First: Have children. (What is parenting if not one long improv routine?) Second: Force yourself to cook only with what you have at the end of the week. Look in the fridge and the pantry. Then back in the pantry and the fridge…and see if anything comes to you. Pasta plus any vegetables (even those on their last legs) is the ideal default dinner. Last Friday I was fortunate to have a box of spaghetti, some asparagus, peas, and (yes!) even a shallot. And look, I managed to get it right.

Spaghetti with Spring Vegetables

1 pound spaghetti
1 bunch asparagus, trimmed at the bottom, and chopped into 1-inch pieces as shown above.
1 cup peas, preferably fresh organic (but thawed frozen will do just fine)
1 shallot, chopped
olive oil
1-2 teaspoons lemon zest
4-5 basil leaves, slivered
salt & pepper
freshly grated Parmesan

Prepare spaghetti according to package directions (make sure you salt the water). During last 2 minutes of cooking, throw asparagus and peas into the boiling water. Meanwhile, heat a little olive oil in a large skillet over medium-low heat and add shallots.

Before draining pasta, use a slotted spoon to scoop up as many of the vegetables from the pasta water as possible, and chuck them into the skillet to finish cooking.

Drain pasta and add back to pasta pot. Toss with a little more olive oil, vegetables, lemon zest, basil, salt, pepper, and Parm.

Another pasta-veg dinner that ignited a frenzy on DALS: Fettucini with Brussels.

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OK, so remember that dinner I wanted us all to make together this week? This is it above: Orechiette with Sausage and Broccoli. You’ll notice that no plate looks the same. Abby had the pasta and broccoli, Phoebe had the broccoli and sausage. Mom and Dad had it all mixed together. (Cool that broccoli was the common thread, no?) Anyway, when I put the bowls up against each other, it reminded me so much of living, breathing Venn Diagram that I couldn’t resist the urge to sketch up an actual one:

What does this teach us exactly? (Besides the fact that I have serious problems?) Hopefully it reminds us that family dinner is a constantly evolving algorithm of taste and logistics. That the overlapping rings will spin around and reposition based on factors that are beyond our control. All you can do is put the same delicious meal in front of them and assume that somehow everyone will still get exactly what they want.

Click here for more Deconstructible Dinner ideas.

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This recipe used to be our go-to for entertaining vegetarians — back when vegetarians were, you know, a rare breed. Now, thankfully, the dish has moved into our regular dinner rotation. The hardest part about it is securing the sheep’s milk yogurt — but not really, you can find it at Whole Foods or even a slightly-gourmet supermarket — then it’s just a matter of remembering to cook more onions than you think feels right. The contrast between their caramel-ly sweetness and the tangy yogurt……I don’t want to get overly precious here, but: Oh. Boy.  It’s so good that I don’t mind cooking two completely separate meals for the grown-ups and the kids, who, sadly, won’t touch it no matter how many chocolate-covered raisins and Michael Jackson youtube videos I promise them as a reward. They get a TJoe’s frozen pizza.

Can't win 'em all. Our dinner (left); the kids' dinner (right)

Pasta with Yogurt, Spinach and Sweet Onions
3 glugs olive oil
4 yellow onions sliced
salt
1 pound whole wheat fettucini
2 6-ounce containers sheep’s-milk yogurt, drained through a coffee filter set in a strainer for at least 20 minutes
2 cups-ish fresh spinach
1 cup grated Parmesan

Heat the olive oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat and add the onions. Reduce the heat to medium low and cook, stirring frequently, until the onions are golden brown, 20 minutes.

Meanwhile, cook your pasta in a large pot, adding spinach during the last 30 seconds. Strain, reserving 1/2 cup of the pasta water. In the same pot, whisk together the drained yogurt with the pasta water. Toss pasta with the yogurt mixture. Divide the pasta among 4 bowls. Sprinkle generously with cheese and top with onions.

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When I was growing up brussels sprouts were a “punchline” food — like liverwurst and mushrooms, turning up in cartoons and sitcoms as dinner table fare kids classically hated. Things are different now — I literally can’t go a week without eating them and the girls don’t seem to know (or care) about its reputation as grown-up-only food. This recipe is a perfect weeknight dish — it takes only a few minutes. If you have a food processor on the counter, try shredding the sprouts before sauteeing. It makes them cook faster and also gives them a consistency that integrates well with ribbon pasta. (If integration is exactly what turns off the kids, of course, be sure to set aside some plain pasta before combining.)

Of course, my problem is not the brussels but the pasta — Phoebe will eat pounds of the “little lettuce leaves,” but won’t go anywhere near a noodle, so she’s allowed to have a piece of toasted baguette instead. Can’t win.

Fettucini with Brussels Sprouts

2 to 3 large handfuls (2 cups) of Brussels sprouts, trimmed
1 pound fettuccini
2 tablespoons butter
some generous glugs of olive oil
Parmesan to taste
toasted pine nuts (optional)

Slice sprouts in a food processor fitted with slicing disk or chop thinly. Cook pasta according to package directions. Meanwhile, heat butter and oil in a large heavy skillet over medium heat. Add Brussels sprouts, a little salt and a twist of pepper, then sauté over medium-high heat until tender and lightly browned, about 4 minutes. Reserve 1/2 cup pasta water, then drain fettucini. Add pasta and water to brussels and toss to combine. Serve with freshly grated Parmesan and pine nuts if you have them.

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I thought this was pretty clever. My 3-year-old nephew is a fan of pasta but not so much of anything healthy that may accompany that pasta. So my brother gets him to eat chicken and other proteins by stuffing it inside his rigatoni, out of sight.

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