Oui, Chef

"My Meal" aka Pork Cutlet Milanese

Each of the kids has a favorite meal that they regularly ask for, but none of the others do so with the frequency, and tenacity of Boris.

HEY DAD, WHAT’S FOR DINNER? 

Not sure, buddy.  Today is market day...I’ll see what looks good.

CAN WE HAVE "MY MEAL"? 

Uh...didn’t we just have your meal?

NO, IT’S BEEN AWHILE SINCE WE’VE HAD MY MEAL.  YOU MUST BE THINKING ABOUT ARTHAS......WE JUST HAD HIS MEAL.

Hmmmm....

REALLY DAD, ITS BEEN LIKE FOREVER SINCE WE’VE HAD MY MEAL.

Forever?  Don’t you think you’re exaggerating just a bit, buddy?

ARTHAS, GRID, PEYTON, AND MUPPET ALWAYS GET THEIR MEALS.  WHEN IS IT GOING TO BE MY TURN? 

Huh?

YOU LOVE THEM MORE THAN ME, DON’T YOU?

Don’t be silly.......hey, are you tracking all these meals on a calendar or something?

DUH....OF COURSE I DO.  IT’S THE ONLY WAY I CAN GUARANTEE THAT I DON’T GET SHAFTED BY YOUR WHOLE MEAL SELECTION PROCESS.  I HAVE TO SAY THAT YOUR CURRENT METHOD SEEMS SERIOUSLY INDIFFERENT TO MY NEEDS!

You're kidding right? 

Don't tell me....you suspect that a vast right-wing conspiracy is at work, plotting to continually deny you your favorite meal.

HEY, I'M JUST CALLING IT LIKE I SEE IT.

You, my young Padawan, are a nut-bag!

And so it was that we came to have Boris’ meal the other night.  The rarely made, most often ignored, and practically forgotten, Pork Cutlet Milanese.

Coconut Pecan Chocolate Chunk Bars

‘Tis the season for neighborhood barbecues, block parties, and picnics.  If you are lucky enough to have a few of these events on your social calendar, and have been called on to bring a dessert to share, then have we got a recipe for you.  Light years better than any boxed brownie mix or slice and bake cookies you can find, and barely more work than either.

On the 4th of July, my family gathered not only to celebrate my sister’s 40th (again) birthday, but also the 70th birthdays of my mom and dad, as they each had hit this milestone earlier in the spring.  Suffice to say that a rather special shindig was in order.  Everyone rolled up their sleeves, and we put on quite a spread for family and friends.  There was grilled chicken, steak, burgers, and dogs.  There was a delicious fruit salad, a fab potato salad, a yummy composed green salad, and my mom’s famous baked beans and pasta fagioli.  We had sublime homemade hommus and crab dip, killer guacamole and chips, and a delicious artichoke dip.  There were even steamed lobsters with drawn butter, and a fabulously rich chocolate birthday cake to commemorate the day.  Ugh....I’m feeling full again just thinking about it all.

If I were a gamblin’ man, I would have guessed that the lobster, or maybe the steaks would have garnered the most praise from the crowd, but as good as they were, they couldn’t compete with the Coconut Pecan Chocolate Chunk Bars that I put out after lunch.....silly me.  They were, without question, the hit of the day.

OMG...WHERE DID YOU GET THESE THINGS?

YOU MADE THEM.....CUT IT OUT.....REALLY?

I DON’T SUPPOSE YOU’D BE WILLING TO SHARE THE RECIPE, WOULD YOU, WOULD YOU, HUH? 

I MEAN THESE ARE REALLY GOOD......ACTUALLY THEY ARE BETTER THAN REALLY GOOD (at this point, the speaker is starting to shake like a crack addict desperate for a fix).

OH SWEET JESUS.....THEY ARE FABULOUSLY, STUPENDOUSLY, AWESOMELY GOOD!  CAN I PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE HAVE THE RECIPE?  PLEEEEEASE!!!

Jeez, Louise.

Alright...already.  I’ll make you a deal.  If you promise to check yourself into rehab on Monday, I’ll post the recipe to my blog.  ;-)

Caesar Salad

Food memories can be very powerful.  For instance, I can remember where I was the first time I ever ate spaghetti carbonara, I can recall the restaurant where I first ordered duck confit (now easily my “Last Supper” choice...more on this later), and I have a vivid memory of the care with which I chose, and prepared, the first meal I ever cooked for my wife. 

So much of who we are, and recollections we have of times spent with family and friends, are intimately connected to our memories of the foods we shared with these people.  As a parent, I’m enjoying watching my kids begin to build their own catalogue of food memories, and wonder where and when they will hit the rewind button, and replay them in later years.  I observed first hand the power of one of my son Boris’ fledgling food memories just the other day.  We were out of town, traveling on our annual “guys getaway” trip the week after school let out, when he started asking me about where we’d be eating on this junket.  We were traveling to a destination that we had visited before, and he was VERY concerned that I had made the appropriate dinner reservations in advance (such his father’s son, in a scary sort of way, I must say).

He informed me that there was one restaurant in particular that we just HAD to dine at again.  When I asked why, he responded (in fact, all three boys did) that the Cafe’ Martinique served the BEST Caesar Salad on the planet, and that in their minds, the success of the whole trip would be at risk if we couldn’t secure a table! 

I’m not kidding, this was a big deal to them. 

It Takes a Plan or Three

For me, the most challenging aspect of cooking with the kids is the planning required to make it happen in a way that allows us to actually enjoy our time together, rather than have our sessions resemble a particularly nasty episode of “Hell’s Kitchen”.  I am comfortable enough in the kitchen that the “teaching” part of our time together is not normally where we’re challenged.  Our struggle rather, is managing the family cooking calendar to allow each of the kids the opportunity to cook every week, while being sensitive to everyone’s increasingly busy personal schedules.  I know I’m not alone in this.  In fact, I was catching up with an old friend last week, and she told me that her biggest challenge in cooking for her family is that she generally doesn’t even think about dinner until 6:00 each evening.  At that point, there is little to do but grab a pre-cooked meal at the market, or call out for delivery.  Advance planning is a big part of being successful as a home cook, and absolutely critical to getting your kids to engage with you in the kitchen.

I am finding that there are really three aspects of planning required to successfully cook with your kids.  The first has to do with just being prepared to cook at home, period.  If you are in the habit of eating out, or ordering take-out frequently, and therefor unaccustomed to planning for home cooked meal prep, then your first challenge will be to set aside a time every few days to look forward in your week, dream up some dinner menus, build a shopping list, and get to the market.  When I lived in France, this was a daily routine for me (as it is for many of the French), and I would do daily grocery shopping for my family each evening when walking home from school.  I would pass a butcher, fishmonger, baker, cheese merchant, a produce stall, and finally, a fab little wine shop, all on my way home each day.  Being a total food nut, this daily commute was a little piece of heaven for me, and is one of the things I miss most about living in France.  Here, I find that planning meals for a three day block of time works best for me.  I never go to the market without buying goods for three evenings worth of dinners.  Anything less and it feels like I’m at the market all the time, anything more and the freshness of my ingredients suffer.  The only thing I’m not comfortable holding for a few days is seafood, which I always use on the day of purchase.

Spaghetti Carbonara

A recent commenter to the blog asked for a really easy meal to make on a weeknight with her kids, so when I reached for this dish myself last week, on a cool and rainy spring night, I decided that this would be a perfect recipe to pass along.  This is hands-down my favorite pasta recipe, and is fast becoming that of my kids’ as well.  It requires only a handful of ingredients, and can literally be tossed together in minutes.  In fact, when we made this meal last week, we were rushing to get to a movie, and were able to prep, cook, eat, and clean-up after dinner in about 45 minutes (and that even included time to shoot the photos for this post).

Spaghetti Carbonara, loosely translated from Italian means “Coal Miner’s Pasta.”  As legend has it, it was a favored dish of said Italian miners because they could easily carry the few ingredients required underground and cook them simply on a camp stove.  I’ve even read that the liberal sprinkling of fresh ground black pepper to finish the dish is meant to evoke the coal dust that inevitably settled on each plate of the miners’ meal.  The dish is rumored to have been imported to the states by GIs returning home from duty in WWII.  It is said to have been a favorite meal prepared for our soldiers by recently liberated, and very grateful Italian families, who cooked with ingredients that they knew the GIs were homesick for, bacon and eggs.

Arthus, my WWII aficionado son, finally got drafted into kitchen slavery for this meal, and was so taken with my explanation of the history of the dish, that he promptly fell into character as a dutiful US serviceman for the duration.

“PRIVATE FIRST CLASS ARTHUS PADFOOT REPORTING FOR MESS DUTY, SIR!

“Ok...you with the weird name, I need you to prep our mise for the evening meal, are you game, soldier?

I’M PREPARED TO DO ANYTHING ASKED OF ME FOR GOD AND MY COUNTRY SIR!

Excellent Padfoot, I need you to dice the pancetta, grate the cheese, whisk the eggs, and chop the garlic and parsley, pronto.”

WHAT, NO GRENADE TO THROW MYSELF ON SIR, YOU’RE KIDDING RIGHT?  I WAS HOPING FOR A MISSION THAT WAS A LITTLE MORE HEROIC AND MANLY, YOU KNOW SOME REAL ACTION, SIR, NOT JUST THIS DICING AND GRATING SILLY STUFF!

We’ll if you really want to come face to face with the mayhem and carnage of war, then you COULD go clean your room, I mean, the place looks like central London after the blitzkrieg.

HA....VERY FUNNY SIR, YOU HAVE SUCH A GIFTED COMIC MIND! 

AHHH...SO, LET’S SEE, THE BACON, EGGS, CHEESE, GARLIC AND GREEN STUFF....SIR, YES SIR!  I’M HAPPY TO DO IT SIR!

Thank you PFC, carry-on.