Fare for the family table
What’s a guy to do when his garden runneth over with beautiful rainbow chard, and his kids are quite determined to never eat another leaf of the stuff as long as they live?
I wish I could tell you that I didn’t just toss some melted cheese on my beautiful bounty, but the fact is, that’s pretty much the story. I know…I know, it sounds like a cowards way out, please don’t hate me.
I don’t think I ate my first falafel until I was in my forties….late thirties at the earliest, and after hearing a great deal of hoo-ha over the years as to the joys of falafel, I must admit that my first experience left me flat. For the life of me, I couldn’t understand what got people so excited about the little things, as mine were dry and as bland as sawdust on the inside, slick and oily on their surface, and presented with day-old chopped veggies and a REALLY bitter tahini sauce….ugh.
Growing up in Vermont as a kid, I never even heard the word falafel, let alone have any knowledge of what they were. I was probably in college when I saw my first one, and I remember thinking that it was some sort of meatball when I first laid eyes on it. Imagine my surprise (and disappointment) when I finally learned that it was basically just a little veggie patty. Remember, I’m of Italian descent, meatballs make so much more sense to me. To my way of thinking, falafel was to a meatball, what a veggie burger was to a juicy, 80% lean ground sirloin grilled hunk of deliciousness….you can keep the former, I’ll take the latter thank you very much.
Having returned from Paris a few pounds heavier than when I left (imagine that), I thought it might be wise to pick up some fresh fruit to keep on-hand to satisfy my daily pangs for something sweet. Now that’s not to say that I didn’t eat any fruit while in France, because I did, its just that the fruit I ate there was almost always nestled in a big pillow of pastry cream, or resting comfortably in a butter-rich pâte sucré shell…..oh dear.
Thinking back to all the fabulous treats I ate while there, I can only think of one thing to say…..
VIVE LA FRANCE!
I can’t think of any other place on Earth where I’d rather pack on a few pounds than in France, can you? Without exception, the pastries we ate there were so dangerously good they should have come with warning labels. Though to be fair, the odds of our actually heeding their warnings would have been about NIL, but I’m just sayin’.
Imagine my surprise when my lovely wife returned home from an appointment last week with a bag full of the most beautiful asparagus I’d ever seen. Upon further inspection, I noticed that the stalks were enormous, nice and thick and long enough to stretch from the crook of my elbow to the tip of my fingers. Interestingly, the cut ends were wrapped in wet paper towels….these were no ordinary spears bought from a store, but rather cut fresh from a friend’s private stash that very morning (insert hallelujah chorus here).
That night, I roasted then briefly and served them with an orange hollandaise sauce, they were sublime.
I must admit that I felt a little like Heidi Swanson the other day when working up this recipe. No, it wasn’t ’cause of how I looked in the stylish skirt I was wearing ;-), but rather this quinoa and veggie treat is exactly the kind of thing that Heidi presents so beautifully on her blog, 101 Cookbooks every week.
Growing up in Vermont, with an Italian mother manning the stove, I didn’t grow up eating anything quite so exotic as middle-eastern cooking. In fact, it wasn’t until I married my wife, who is of Lebanese descent, that I was finally exposed to more than just the very basics of middle-eastern cuisine. Since then, I have come to love not just the ubiquitous hommus, falafel, and baba ghannouj, but also dishes like fatayer, kibbe and tabbouleh.
Until very recently, whenever I’d pass the cauliflower display in my local market, I’d mumble to myself….”what the #$%^ do people do with cauliflower anyway?” I mean, I’m a cook with fairly well rounded tastes, comfortable cooking and eating just about anything, but for some reason, I have avoided, ignored, and dismissed cauliflower for years. It could be that I never remember having it as a kid, it just wasn’t a part of my mom’s cooking routine, and therefore I never developed a taste for it when I was young. It could be that the few times I’ve had it served to me and actually liked it, it was either deep fried, or drowning in a cheese sauce, and as much as I’m a fan of cheese and ANYTHING fried, to me, that whole route seems to defeat the purpose of eating vegetables in the first place.
Alright, let’s just get this over with, shall we?
Here it is, the last Keller recipe in the pipe-line. Not that any of you have been complaining, in fact, over the past few days I’ve received more than a few requests from readers to “Keep Cooking Keller”, but in an effort to offer you all a better balanced and wide ranging selection of recipes to cook with your kids, this will be the last we see of our friend for a while…..I’m all verklempt.
I don’t know about you, but I do find that I’ll roll with a particular chef, a new cookbook, or even a style of cooking for some period of time in order to really pull a lot from the experience. I do think it helps to spend some unhurried time with a chef, or perhaps a “regional” style of cooking to really come to understand him/it, and so I have enjoyed finally cooking some of Keller’s fab food, and I hope you have too. I’m sure we’ll get back to his great food some day in the not too distant future, like maybe if someone buys me his new book “Ad Hoc at Home” for my birthday this year….anyone….anyone?
As a child, there were very few vegetables that I really liked at all. In fact, the list was dismally short, and included just peas and beets….it’s a miracle I lived past the age of ten on such a “vegetables prohibited” diet. What do these two lovelies have in common you might ask? Certainly not their size or color, nor their botanical specifics, the green pea being technically a seed, the beet a root vegetable. What they do have in common is their relatively high concentration of natural sugars that make them among the sweetest “vegetables” around, and a certain hit with almost all kids. Nature’s candy, I like to call them.
This dish is layered with great flavors, none of which are so strong to offend the average kidlet, and yet are sophisticated enough to appeal to the stuffiest gourmand. The whole shebang can quite easily be prepared by most kids all by themselves. Roasting the beets does take a bit of time, so plan accordingly, but the balance of the dish can be prepped in just a few minutes.
To be honest our favorite mashed potatoes are Joel Robuchon’s famous pommes puree, silky smooth and very rich in butter. They are a little slice of heaven on earth, but they are a bit of work, what with having to pass them multiple times through a tamis, and the lengthy process of whisking in the butter and milk. They are also a very refined spud dish, and to me, feel most at home as an accompaniment to an elegant meal like a flaky fish filet, some seared scallops, or as Robuchon often serves them, with tiny, meltingly tender lamb rib chops.
On an evening when you are serving something a little less refined, like a big old rib-eye, or some beef or pork ribs, why not swing way over to the other end of things, and make a smashed potato with a more rustic texture, and maybe even a little crunch. This dish is an amalgam of some of our favorite flavors, and is perfect with roast chicken, a nice thick steak, or even a braised lamb shank. Smash it all together in a big pot just before serving for a dish quite unlike any other mashed potatoes you’ve ever had. This smash was inspired by some fabulously chunky potatoes I had at “Olives” once.
We like the stilton mixed into the potatoes so that it melts a little, spreading its pungent, salty tang throughout the dish. If some in your gang don’t care for blue cheese, feel free to pass it on the side, allowing individuals to sprinkle it over the finished dish if they wish.
For those of you pulling your hair out over the complexity and time required to pull together the recipes of some of our recent posts, like Bouchon’s Quiche Lorraine or my Chicken Pot Pie, here is a delicious and simple side dish that you can put on the table tonight in about 20 minutes.
I have always been enchanted by the promise of couscous, a fine grained pasta that only takes about 5 minutes to cook, but to be honest, I’ve often found the recipes I’ve tried to be bland, dry and altogether forgettable. Couscous really well done can be a delight, when it is not, it can be like eating a bowl of sand. I don’t know about you, but my kids stopped eating sand a couple of years ago, and I’ve no interest in getting them hooked all over again, it was a hard habit for them to break.
My wife inspired the creation of this recipe by asking that I deconstruct a squash and sage ravioli dish that she had recently enjoyed. The resulting course is a deliciously simple, yet richly flavored dish that would be equally at home served with a braised lamb shank, or a simply prepared fish filet. I made the dish with a small grained couscous, but I’m sure it would work as well with the larger, “Israeli” variety.
I hope you enjoy it.
