Why is it that if you put anything into slider form, it tastes better. I put a tray of these BLT sliders on the table for lunch at my sister’s beach house and they disappeared fast. Too fast. The person I actually invited for lunch at the beach only got one.

BLT Sliders (Like you really need a recipe?)

Assemble bacon (the best quality you can find), lettuce, and tomato on slider rolls. If you have a child like Abby in the house, be sure to assemble at least one BBB.) Spread Hellmann’s mayo on one bun. (Make at least two per person.) Serve with potato chips and,  if you are feeling ambitious, chilled avocado-cucmber soup.

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My friend Sara is a genius for a lot of reasons (the iPad birthday cake she baked for her eight-year-old comes to mind immediately), but I think her idea to repurpose pizza dough as naan has got to be my favorite. You just roll out a ball of storebought dough, then fry it in about a tablespoon of oil over medium heat for roughly three minutes a side. I split the ball of dough into two pieces so they cook more thoroughly and aren’t as doughy inside. Last week we served them alongside curried chicken with apples and the girls couldn’t believe their luck.

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I’ve gone on record saying that there is no such thing ever as a gimme meal when it comes to cooking for kids. But I’m just going to come right out and say this: If ever there was a gimme meal, these ribs are it.* Not only because they are so melty and gooey and quintessentially summer, but because they demand the complete abandonment of whatever table manners you have attempted to hammer into your children thus far. I think it’s the only time all year I encourage my girls to eat with their hands and get as messy as they want to. (It’s not like they’re ever more than 10 minutes away from washing up via pool/sprinkler/hose anyway.) (more…)

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I have no problem cranking the oven to 425° in June if the dinner I’m cooking for the kids elicits a cheer. A cheer. Literally.

Twice-Baked Potatoes

Bake Idaho potatoes in a 425°F oven for an hour. (We estimate 1 1/2 potatoes per grown-up; 1 per kid) Meanwhile, chop scallions and fry bacon. (We estimate about 2 slices bacon per person or about 4 per Abby.) When potatoes are finished, slice in half horizontally, scoop out the insides into a mixing bowl being careful not to tear skins. Mix potatoes with a whisk, adding salt, black or white pepper, warmed milk or cream (or anything in between) until you reach desired mashed-potato-like consistency. Restuff potato skins with mash-up and top with slices of sharp cheddar. Place restuffed potatoes on a cookie sheet and broil for another minute or two until cheese has melted. Top with scallions, bacon, sour cream.

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Every time I make this roasted chicken with barbecue sauce I say to myself: Why don’t I do this meal on those nights I reach for the box mac & cheese or frozen pizza? It’s fresher and healthier than most things you’ll pull out of a box (Don’t worry, I still love you Trader Joe), but more to the point, it’s just as easy. In fact, I kind of can’t believe I didn’t include it in the six-week Dinner Doula plan I wrote up for parents who are paralyzed by the idea of cooking homemade food for their kids. If I had a do-over, this recipe would be Dinner Number One. Look how simple it is:

1) Preheat oven to 425°F. Remove drumsticks (or thighs) from package and place in a foil-lined roasting pan.
2)  Add a little salt and pepper and brush a thin layer of barbecue sauce on each. (If you are a beginner, I realize the likelihood of having a stash of homemade sauce lying around is slim; don’t worry, just use your favorite bottled kind.)
3) Every 10 minutes or so, flip and brush on another thin layer of sauce. After 30 minutes, they are done. That’s it.

I haven’t tuned in to the 2011 season of Food Revolution, but last year I remember Jamie Oliver served a chicken like this along with a shredded salad to tempt the West Virginia school kids away from the nuggets and fries. Sadly, hardly any of the kids were convinced, but I sure was. For a year I’ve wanted to make a salad that looked like that one. I guess technically you might call it a slaw. Whatever you call it, it rocked. (more…)

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Abby: Mom, what’s for dinner?
Me: Grilled cheese!
Abby: For dinner????
Me: Yes! On the grill!
Abby: What? The grill?
Me: Yes! And without bread!
Abby: What the…let me get this straight. Grilled cheese made outside on the grill with no bread? For…dinner?
Me: You got it. And we’ll have some chicken and vegetables on the side. (more…)

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Have you ever stopped to think about how lucky we all are to be parents in 2011? Not just because DVD players are built into back seats or that iTunes offers a staggering selection of white-noise-for-baby songs (including vacuum!), but because cooking for our children is overlapping with the here-to-stay movement of cooking simple, fresh, food. I don’t know about you, but when I first decided I was going to teach myself to cook, I was picturing fancy and dreaming big. The recipes I gravitated towards involved lots of steps and artery-clogging ingredients. (I’m talking to you Silver Palate Tortellini with Gorgonzola Cream Sauce!*) Those were the meals that professional cooks made, right? I realize that Chez Panisse had been open for a full 20 years by that point in my life, but if you asked me who Alice Waters was when I was 22, there’s a 100% chance I would have told you she was the author of The Color Purple. The point is, we are so lucky that simple food equals good food, and that you can brush a little smoked paprika butter* on a piece of just-off-the-boat super-mild tilefish and have a sophisticated dinner that doesn’t necessarily alienate the kids. And that’s just what we did last weekend.

**Yes, I debuted it for Andy on July 16, 1993 and took notes.

*I loved every page of Blood, Bones, and Butter, but I think every page I dogeared mentioned smoked-paprika butter.

You can find smoked paprika in the spice section of most ethnic markets or at Penzeys.com.

To make the smoked paprika butter: Beat together 1/4 cup unsalted butter (1/2 stick) with 1 tablespoon smoked paprika and a large pinch of kosher or sea salt until it’s blended together.

In a small saucepan over low heat, melt your smoked paprika butter and pour into a heatproof bowl.

Grilled Fish with Smoked Paprika Butter
This is the second Sunday in a row that we’ve started off on a healthy note and I’m hoping to keep it up through summer. The formula is pretty simple: grilled seafood +  healthy grain + anything with kale.

Prepare Your Grill. Marinate a 1-pound piece of firm white fish (such as tilefish, swordfish, mahi mahi) in a little olive oil, salt, pepper, and a squeeze of lemon. (Add the lemon only about five minutes before you grill.) Once grill is hot, grill filet about 4-5 minutes a side depending on thickness brushing smoked paprika butter as you go. (Fish is done when it’s firm to the touch with out being rock hard.) Remove fish from grill and brush one more time with butter. Serve with braised kale salad and herby barley salad (simple!) below.

Simple Barley Salad

Bring 1 cup pearl barley, (rinsed and picked over), a teaspoon salt, and 3 cups of water to a boil in a medium pot. Cover and simmer for 50 minutes until barley is firm but cooked through. Toss with a few tablespoons chopped herbs (I used parsely, thyme), olive oil, salt, pepper, chopped scallions, and a squeeze of lemon (or tablespoon of white balsamic vinegar).

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It’s Mother’s Day morning, and Jenny is standing over me with her iPhone, timing me as I type this. The goal is to write this post in seven and a half minutes or less, which is exactly how long it took us to get this dinner going the other night. So: have you had ramps before? We hadn’t either, as of three or four years ago. Were they the same thing as garlic scapes? Were they spring onions? Did you have to cook them first? All we knew was, they were one of those slightly mysterious things we’d heard serious food types talk about rapturously every spring, but we’d never willingly eaten one, let alone cooked one in the comfort of our own home. Thanks to some generous friends upstate, who happen to have them growing all over their yard, all that has now changed, and we’re here to say: ramps freakin’ rule. They’re a fleeting, fragrant, oniony-garlicky vegetable, also known as the wild leek, that pop ups every spring for a few weeks (if you’re lucky) and then disappears. They look kind of delicate, like green feathers, but don’t be fooled; these things announce themselves, flavor-wise. We’re now among the geeks who look forward to their arrival, spend time tracking them down, and then eat as much of them as humanly possible over their limited engagement in our lives. (Jenny just announced that I am about to pass the five-minute mark. “Hurry,” she says.) Anyway, ramps: They’re embarrassingly (more…)

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A few weeks ago our friends Kate and Joel and their three girls came over for dinner. We were all vacationing on the same island together so the menu was as simple and fresh and kid-friendly as we could manage: asparagus salad (without eggs for the kids), campfire potatoes, and grilled chicken sandwiches with homemade slaw. Kate took one bite of her sandwich and, because she is a good guest, immediately started oohing and ahhing and inquiring about how we put the whole thing together. “This is perfect,” she said. “Just what I am in the mood for. Man!! And the slaw!  Mmmm! How did you make it?”

I told her slaw is one of those things I don’t really have a recipe for. I just start whisking things together and keep adding more shredded cabbage and carrots until it looks about right.

“OK, fine, but what exactly are you whisking together?”

“It’s like I’m making any salad dressing. I’ll add a dollop of mayo to the bottom of a large bowl, then add some celery seed, some cider vinegar—-”

She crossed her arms in front of her face and looked away as though I had shined a bright light in her eyes. “OK, stop right there,” she said. “Page turner!”

“What…?” I was confused. (Were we talking about the can’t-put-it-down book Blood, Bones, and Butter again??)

“Cider vinegar?!?” She said. “I don’t know from cider vinegar. As soon as I see it in a recipe I’m turning the page.” Kate is a psychologist, but she has also has a side career as a Second City comedian, so sometimes it can be hard to tell when she’s kidding.

“That’s ridiculous,” I told her. “It’s cider vinegar. It’s right next to the balsamic vinegar in any supermarket.”

“I don’t care. The whole idea of it scares me. The whole idea of someone who knows how to use cider vinegar scares me. It’s like cream of tartar. I mean, what is that? What do you use it for? What kind of people buy cream of tartar?” (more…)

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I often look at my daughters and ask myself “Whose children are these? How did they get here?” Sometimes this happens when I’m overwhelmed by the sheer enormity of parenting and the fact that I’ve brought two actual live human beings into this world. But most of the time it happens when I show up at the kitchen table with an egg and they recoil in disgust, as though I’ve just served up the family pet. Who are these children? How can they be mine and not like eggs? (Occasionally they will contest this fact and say they like eggs as long as they are baked in to a cake.) I think I could eat an egg every day for the rest of my life and not get sick of them. The day I first tried an organic one – a real, golden-yolked, eggy tasting egg – would be on the timeline of my life along with the day I got into college, the day I got married, and the day I became a mother.

The kids’ whole Heisman routine gets particularly annoying around this time of year when we have a dozen or so pastel-dyed hard-boiled Easter eggs lying around begging to be repurposed for dinner. But it doesn’t stop me. Last year I introduced you to our post-Easter cobb salad. This year, it’s a killer side — chilled asparagus salad with chopped up eggs and drizzled with mustardy vinaigrette. It’s the kind of side dish that elevates any old boring chicken dish. Remember the Gap Clothes, Prada Accessories Theory? Add this one to the list.

Asparagus with Chopped Egg and Onion

Add 1 bunch asparagus (trimmed) to boiling water and cook three minutes. Drain and immediately plunge spears in ice water to stop cooking and preserve their bright green color. Meanwhile, chop 2 hard-boiled eggs into small pieces as shown and sprinkle over chilled asparagus (or over half the asparagus if you have egg haters in the house) along with 1 tablespoon finely minced red onion (I used scallions in the photo above) and drizzle with a mustardy vinaigrette. Serve with creamy baked chicken or buttermilk oven-fried chicken.

I’m taking my spring break a little late this year, so see you guys in about a week!

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Two things happen to me when the weather starts getting nice: First, I don’t have the primal urge to cook up a bolognese for the freezer in the middle of a sunny day. Second, I want my dinner cold. This shrimp and avocado salad is a riff on a ceviche I had at Los Gemelos (website is somewhat bizarre, but attn: Westchester bretheren, food is real-deal amazing) that was so fresh and flavorful I had to attempt replication for dinner. You can of course make it when you walk in the door after work, but if you make it ahead of time, the flavors have some time to mingle together and you get the satisfaction of going to work on Monday knowing that family dinner is chilling in the fridge waiting for you at home. Is there a better way to start the week than that?

Sunday morning
When you go shopping pick up the following ingredients: 1 1/4 pounds shelled shrimp, 1 avocado, 1 jalapeno pepper, 2 limes, 1 small container grape tomatoes, 1 small red onion, 1 bag corn tortillas or tostadas.

Sunday afternoon
Boil your shrimp for three minutes. Drain and let cool. Chop your tomatoes, mince 1/3 onion and 1/2 the jalapeno (remove pith and seeds if you don’t want the heat). Mix with the shrimp and squeeze juice from the two limes over everything. Add a little olive oil, salt, pepper. Chill and let flavors mingle.

Monday night
Walk in door, heat tostadas as directed, chop your avocado and mix into the shrimp salad. Pile your salad on top of the tostada and serve with a squeeze of lime. Summon the troops for dinner.

Note: If you can’t find tostadas, fry corn tortillas in a healthy glug of vegetable oil over medium-high for about 2 minutes a side until crispy. Drain on paper towels.

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We usually do our food shopping once a week, on Sunday afternoons, bolting to Trader Joe’s as soon as the final whistle on the final soccer event of the weekend finally blows. It’s our secular pilgrimage. We genuflect at the altar of dried fruits and granola bars, we load up the cart, we drive home, the kids go upstairs to animate some plastic stuff, and Jenny and I begin the never-gets-less-brutal process of unpacking the groceries… at which point, we realize, as we put the fresh crop of vegetables into the refrigerator, that we haven’t made use of half of what we bought last week. There’s a sad fennel bulb, once crisp and fresh, now yellowish and funky. (A pity, too: I had big plans for that. Look for a roasted fennel recipe one of these days.) There’s a quart of now-slimy mushrooms, and an exhausted hunk of red cabbage. There’s an ominous cluster of tupperware containers, each holding part of an onion, lemon, or red pepper, all of uncertain vintage, all well past their prime. And way in the back, by the sour cream, there’s always a tub of grape tomatoes, now a week old and only 1/3 eaten, and we really want to make use of them, but they’re just this side of too-far-gone to put on our salad.

We’re not proud to admit this, but we often end up throwing too much of this stuff away. It’s a lot of food, and a lot of money, to go to waste.

Last weekend, though, we may have solved the grape tomato problem. Since they were already starting to turn, we embraced the shrivel. We doubled down on the decay. We slow-roasted them, until they were all wrinkly and intense and sweet, and then we tossed them into a quinoa salad. Roasted tomatoes are so easy, very hard to mess up, and versatile as they wanna be: you can put these over pasta with olive oil and cheese, on bruschetta with garlic and basil, on top of fish or chicken. Or, as we ended up doing, you can use them to add a whole new hearty dimension to a salad. Tomato problem: solved. I don’t know why it took us so long.* – Andy

* Very important note: I highly recommend listening to this while you cook. And maybe follow it up with this. Or this. Or just buy the whole album. It’s in heavy DALS rotation. (more…)

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I know. Bummer. An entire post devoted to salad. Not a BLT salad or a wedge of iceberg with thousand island dripping in and around the crevices. But a yawn-inducing, omega-3-rich, good-for-you, raw bowl of nutrients that falls into the “leafy green” category. Thanks, Jenny! Thanks for the big bowl of homework!

Go ahead, leave the page. Go lose yourself in some duck confit fried in lard. Cause then the secret of the salad’s hidden superpowers is still somewhat secure. You see, this concoction above may look like a dutiful mound of kale with grated ricotta salata and thinly shaved red onions, but it’s actually more than that. A lot more. I’m telling you, if you can get your kids to eat it, all kinds of amazingly freaky things start to happen. Like for starters, I think I can actually see Abby growing before my eyes, her shirt bursting at the buttons, Lou Ferrigno-style, right at the dinner table. And about three minutes after Phoebe inhaled her salty ribboned kale last Sunday, she had a sudden impulse to recite the quadratic formula, even though, as far as I know, trigonometry is not part of New York State’s third grade curriculum. (Yet.)

But the real magic is a little more subtle. When you — as in you mom and dad! — get up from the table you’ll suddenly notice that the guilt you have been carrying around with you all day about missing “parent observation day” at tennis has been replaced by a rush of happiness endorphins. And you know how you’ve been beating yourself up over the fact that your eight-year-old still can’t tell time? For at least a few days after you have served your children this salad, that hardly seems to register on the guilt-o-meter either. The remorse over the fried-in-butter beef-veal-pork double hot dog with spicy curly fries from Walter’s*? Gone. Completely cancelled out.

I’m telling you, this stuff is powerful. And, sadly, its applications of guilt-erasing possibilities: endless.

*Whattup MHS Tigers?!

Kale Salad with Ricotta Salata
The credit for this salad goes to my superhero friend Naria, who first made it for me for lunch last summer, then again last week at a delicious dinner party.

Wash and trim the stems off two large handfuls of kale. Chop into confetti-like strands as shown. Shred a boatload of ricotta salata on top, add about 1 tablespoon of red onion that has been sliced to the point of transparency. Add a few glugs of olive oil, a squeeze of lemon, and freshly ground pepper.

To feel really virtuous, serve with fish presents.

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Before kids we were mushroom-stuffers and tomato-scoopers. Before kids we weren’t afraid of the adjective “hot” before the word “appetizer.” I think when we lived in Brooklyn — when the girls were as distant on the horizon as the suburbs were — we might have even served a chilled avocado and cucumber soup as an amuse bouche for our friends Jeni and Ben. We don’t do the amuse bouche anymore when we are entertaining. In fact, we don’t use the word “entertain” anymore. These days, it’s more like we have friends over or we have what you might just call “giant family playdates.” All of which is to say that the cheese plate has never been more vital a move in the married-with-children culinary repertoire. Cause when you’re at the point that we’re at, you just want to buy a bunch of crowdpleasers — cheeses that are somewhere between Kraft twisted bi-color sticks and aged Stilton, things you don’t have to cook or carve or stick toothpicks into — and then be done with it.

Crowdpleaser Cheese Plate
You can find most of these at Murrays, Dean & DeLuca, or Whole Foods.

La Tur (pictured, above) This is an airy, mild cow-milk-goat blend — probably too mild for hardcore cheese afficionados, but kids will eat it like it’s cream cheese.
Point Reyes Blue – Award-winning blue from the family-run northern California dairy farm. For the kids, it’s a good introduction to stinky. For the grown-ups, it’s just plain good.
Humboldt Fog – The bougie staple. It’s a tangy, but not too tangy goat that’s chalky in the middle and creamy around the rind.  I don’t think I’ve been to a party in the last decade where this wasn’t on the cheese board. The kids love it because little layer of ash down the middle makes it look like a piece of cake.
Trader Joe’s Cheese Twists (not pictured, sorry!) Not the actual sticks made of cheese, but the sharp cheddar baked twists, which I usually shove in a jam jar to give the plate some height.
Aged Manchego Aged is operative word. You want something with some bite. My friend Joyce was the first one to tell me to go ahead and pair it with fig or quince paste on a baguette slice. PER.FECT.
Quince or Fig Jam Such an easy way to elevate the spread. And did I mention so delicious with aged Manchego or Parm?
Baguette, preferably fresh, preferably skinny, cut into thin slices. No need to toast.
Halved pomegranate Purely decorative unless my 7-year-old attends your party — she will decimate it in about 3 seconds.

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One of the perks of writing a food blog — besides the not-getting-paid part – is that, when friends visit us now, they tend to really bring it, and I mean that literally. In the past month, we’ve had guests show up with: brownies baked in a crazy-ass, s-shaped, all-edges pan; a bottle of dark, rich homemade red wine vinegar; extra virgin olive oil carted all the way back from Buenos Aires; purple basil-infused simple syrup (forreal!); and a still-warm batch of gluten-free, dairy-free, lemon-iced blueberry scones. All were amazing, and all were totally appreciated, but if I’m being honest here, I’m not sure any can compete with what my friend and work bro, Kendra H., brought a couple of weeks ago. Kendra, you should know: you have firmly established yourself as the early front-runner for this year’s Most Valuable Dinner Guest award. Two weeks ago — on a frigid weeknight, no less — Kendra came over for dinner, and she brought goodies. Specifically, she brought a nice bottle of red for the grown-ups, a couple dozen beautifully wrapped and presented (she’s crafty like that) cookies for the family, and, for the kids… a recipe for making garlic and dill pickles, along with a pair of jar tongs. She set up shop in our kitchen, with Abby and Phoebe, and spent an hour (more…)

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Have you seen Black Swan? I haven’t. True Grit? Nope. And, god, wasn’t Colin Firth mind-blowingly good in The King’s Speech? Actually, I wouldn’t know, because I haven’t seen a second of it. Not even a preview. The sad truth is, we haven’t seen a single one of the movies nominated for an Oscar this year. It pains me to admit this, but in the nine years that have hurtled by since Phoebe was born, Jenny and I have been inside of a movie theater fewer than five times — once, in our first month of parenthood, when I went to Jackass and Jenny went to Sweet Home Alabama, and once when we both went to Avatar, which I’m not really counting, since it felt more like an endless video game than a movie to me, and Jenny slept through half of it, and we both came away wondering why we’d wasted a rare and beautiful movie date watching stuff blow up. We never thought we’d be these people, the kind with passports that hadn’t been stamped in a decade and who puttered around in bathrobes and still quoted George Costanza. (Seinfeld! Such a great show!) I remember back in the days before we had kids, when Jenny was pregnant with Phoebe, and other parents would tell us, knowingly — almost gleefully — to enjoy our remaining days of childless independence, since having kids meant The End of Restaurants, Movies, Grooming, Sleep, Privacy, Exercise, Vacations to Anywhere Other Than Orlando, and Sunday Mornings Spent Drinking Coffee and Reading the New York Times. (Hell, even reading Bob Herbert!) They’d tell us to enjoy that 9:45 showing of Gosford Park, because once kids arrived, we’d never ever find a babysitter willing to stay after midnight. They’d tell us to savor every last bite of that pistachio semi-freddo at Gramercy Tavern, because man, they really hated to break it to us, but once we had kids and discovered how brutal it was paying for a fancy restaurant meal and a babysitter, we’d never go out again. (Going rate for babysitting, in 2002: ten bucks an hour!) (more…)

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It’s a good weekend when the worst thing you can say about it is that you sliced your blood oranges on the same cutting board as your onions, potentially ruining all prospects for turning out a perfect version of Melissa Clark’s blood orange olive oil cake. But since I had gone through all the trouble of supreme-ing the things (Do you guys know this verb? To “supreme” an orange? To remove the fruit from the peel and pith?) I wasn’t about to toss them. My only hope of salvation was pairing the Vidalia-tinged fruits with something savory, so I tupperwared them away and waited for inspiration to strike. The opportunity presented itself in the form of this dinner salad — redemption in a bowl after a birthday party at my parents’ house for Phoebe that included two cakes. (What was I supposed to do, try just one of them?) I did the Deconstructed thing (like I did with my cobb salad) plating each salad ingredient (oranges, avocado, blue cheese, sauteed cubed chicken) in its own “stripe” on a platter so the girls could pick what they wanted (See below for Abby’s result) then we tossed the whole thing with greens and a citrusy vinaigrette. (more…)

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Tomato and White Bean Soup

There are some nice things about waking up to the automated phone message: Schools Closed Due to Inclement Weather. Sleeping in, for starters. (Though the novelty of this wears off at 8:01, which is usually about the time I first hear “Mom, I’m borrrrrred.”) Another nice thing: The realization that I was fired last year, so I am no longer required to report to an office, i.e. we are no longer gripped by panic about who is able to stay home with the kids and who absolutely cannot miss the status meeting at 10:00. (The novelty of this has yet to wear off.) And then, of course, there’s the warm-your-bones cooking. When I am snowed in my house with the kids, some primal instinct kicks in and demands that I make buttery cakes, cheesy pastas and fatty braised meats. Which, I think you’ll agree is pretty great, until the sixth time in fourteen days that you wake up to the automated message that School is Closed Due to Inclement Weather (not exaggerating) and realize you have gone through eight sticks of butter and feel like you can live off your fat until spring break. I think that’s why on Snow Day Six — which came exactly one day after Snow Day Five — I woke up determined to fight through my Land o’ Lakes hangover and replicate the tomato white bean soup my dad and I used to order at the Oyster Bar (minus the rock shrimp). The soup seemed to have all the hallmarks of a great snow day dinner (long cooking time, an ingredient list that is easy on the pantry, an aromatic oniony smell that could properly permeate an icicle-rimmed house) and none of the butter. Just a little tiny eensy-weensy piece of bacon. (more…)

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