Cooking with Kids

David Hammond's recent LTH forum piece about taking kids to restaurants got me thinking about kids and cooking. I try and include my son Henry in the cooking process whenever possible. Besides being something I'm actively engaged in for a decent chunk of time each week, it's something for him to get interested in and excited about. Plus, he's learning about food.

The theory is, I guess, that kids who start cooking early with their parents and become a part of the process will begin to embrace a larger awareness of how food arrives at their plate or what things look like before they're packaged into cardboard and plastic wrap in the grocery store. I could probably launch into a whole dissertation about foods and foodways, how today's consumers lack knowledge about the "farm-to-table" process, and, specifically, all the heavy industry and processing that lays between.

But I won't. Because that's not why I cook with my kid. Mainly I do it because it's fun and it's a good opportunity for us to do stuff together, especially in the winter when going outside and doing stuff is more difficult.

And while I don't actively push the whole "slow food" mindset when I cook with Henry, who's pictured above (that's a chef dress up costume--I don't make him dress like that when we cook), it seeps in, I think. This morning we finished up the granola for breakfast, and he said "granola's all gone...I guess we need to make some more."

Get that? Make some more. Not buy. Make. I like that he assumes that the stuff we eat in a bowl with milk in the morning is something we make. That's big, I think.

He's pretty curious about why we put various ingredients into what we're cooking. He knows what sugar's all about by now, and he likes to crack the eggs and mix. Half of any chocolate, nuts, or cheese that we might be using go straight into his mouth, of course, and sometimes it seems like he's not really paying attention. But I'm amazed at how much information creeps in. Today, apropos of nothing, he says "Corn starch. Daddy, we use corn starch to make things thick."

Uh...yeah. We do. You nailed it, kid. And, to be honest, I'm wondering how many adults with basic cooking skills could enunciate the purpose of corn starch as clearly.


There are negatives, of course. It's much slower going with the kid asking questions constantly and wanting to do everything himself. You'll have to deal with the inevitable battle over washing hands before you start. Thomas trains will be required to occupy their rightful place of honor on the counter. Because "Percy wants to see".

But these are very small concessions to make in exchange for having a kid who's engaged and interested in learning about where food comes from and how it's prepared.

And today's a shut-in day for us here in the Chicago area. The forecast calls for "blizzard-like conditions" and the temperature is supposed to drop sharply, with single digit temps and double digit negative windchills. So as I sit and write this entry, I'm trying to figure out how to keep Henry from going stir crazy and what we should cook.

Any suggestions?

Vinaigrettes

I love simple easy things that work. I've written entries in the past about simple, cheap equipment that does what it's supposed to in a world full of complicated gadgets and expensive kitchen machines.

The basic vinaigrette is an example of a cooking technique that works. It's so easy to make a vinaigrette. It literally takes less than three minutes to make a quick salad dressing or sauce. And yet most home cooks do not know how to do it. That's a shame. So they buy bottled salad dressings full of all sorts of emuslfiers, stabilizers, cheap oils, HFCS, MSG, and other garbage. That's an even bigger shame.

Heck, even if you buy a bottled dressing that touts itself as "all natural" or as lacking artificial preservatives, it's still a huge rip off. The cost per ounce of the bottled stuff is probably five times what you'd pay if you made it yourself. Look at the label. You probably have all that stuff in your pantry right this very moment. Except for xanthan gum. But you can leave that out. Trust me, you won't miss it.

Vinaigrettes are among the most basic and easily made sauces in the culinary world. The beauty of a vinaigrette is that it can be made to be emulsified--meaning smooth, the oil and other liquids are in suspension and therefore stay mixed--or broken, where the oil and liquids separate when they sit. Many vinaigrettes are intentionally left unemulsified (or broken), so if yours doesn't work out the way you wanted it to, no problem--just serve it up. Once it's on the salad no one will know anyway. It'll still taste the same. And if you were planning to use it on the plate as a sauce, broken vinaigrettes can look very cool. It also seems to be trendy at the moment to explicitly identify a sauce as a "broken vinaigrette".

See? You didn't screw up! You left it broken on purpose because you're trendy.

Now I'm not a recipe guy so I'm not going to give a recipe for x,y,z vinaigrette. Nope. What I'm going to do is give you the formula--the technique--and then you can simply plug different ingredients into this formula, which will allow you to make literally hundreds of different sauces.

The formula that I use for a vinaigrette is:

Dijon Mustard + Honey + Vinegar + Oil + salt and pepper

That's it. You can get fancy and add lots of other stuff like shallots, herbs, and spices, but I usually don't. The mustard gives you sharpness and acidity, as well as some help with emulsification. The honey gives sweetness, and the vinegar oil, salt and pepper are essential.

As for technique, all you do is put a good blurp of mustard in a mixing bowl and add about the same size blurt of honey. Grind in some pepper, a good pinch of kosher salt, and then add some vinegar and whisk it up to get kind of a watery paste. Quantities aren't really important, because you're going to adjust the flavors later, once you taste it and see what it needs. Add whatever herbs and spices you're using (if any--I often use a bit of dried oregano, thyme, or basil, and a little red chile flake. Fresh herbs are great too, but add them at the end), and then, while whisking, start adding the oil; slowly at first, a few drops...let it get absorbed into the mixture, and then a bit more, drizzling it in a thin stream. You should see the dressing begin to thicken as the oil is emulsified into the other ingredients.



I usually add a few drops of water at this point, which allows me to 'stretch' out the vinaigrette a bit. By that, what I mean is that adding water thins down the mixture so that it doesn't get too thick from the oil before the flavors are balanced. Water also helps with emulsification. You can see the mixture kind of smooth out as you whisk in the water.

You can use a blender or a stick blender to aid with this process, but unless you're making a pretty large quantity, it's kind of hard to get it going. And why would you bother? Doing it with just a whisk is super-easy and then you don't have to clean the blender.

For those who are more visually-inclined here's a you tube video that walks you through it.

Of course, if you're doing a broken vinaigrette, you can just forget about the whole continuous whisking and adding oil in a thin stream thing and just dump all the ingredients into a bowl and mix them up prior to serving.

Besides being better for you and a money-saver, making your own vinaigrette is a very instructive exercise. If you get into the habit of making them regularly, to serve on your salad with dinner, you'll notice some small variances in the emulsification process and you'll begin to be able to make minor adjustments to achieve just the thickness (or viscosity) that you're looking for. But, again, don't sweat it. No pressure. If it breaks--just serve it anyway.

But the most beneficial aspect of making vinaigrettes is that doing them over and over again is a great aid in learning how to taste more effectively. A good dressing incorporates sweetness, acidity, savory flavors, salt, and the unctuous quality of the fats in oil. When all these elements are in balance, you don't taste any of them individually, you just get a zippy palate-tickling accent for your salad.

Working on getting these elements of taste in balance is a wonderful exercise in training yourself how to taste and how to adjust flavors in order to arrive at what you're looking for.

Keep it simple, so as to allow yourself to more easily taste, adjust, and re-taste. Stop when the dressing has some sweetness, but also gives you that pinch at the back of your cheek that you get from a good burst of bright acidity. If the dressing tastes bland or flabby, you've got too much oil to vinegar. Add a bit more vinegar and keep tasting. If it's too sharp (too acidic) add more oil, whisking and streaming it in, again continuing to taste as you go. If it's balanced but flat, add salt. If the flavors are where you want them to be, but it's too thick, add a bit of water. And so on. The best (and only) way to learn is to commit to doing it every time you want to dress a salad and playing with the process through trial and error.

And it's infinitely adjustable. Start with a balsamic vinaigrette. This is popular and most people have had it enough that they have a pretty good idea of what it should taste like. Try a few different balsamic vinegars and see what suits your tastes.

Then start swapping out different vinegars. Try a sherry vinegar, apple cider vinegar, or red wine vinegar (Do be wary, though, of cheap vinegars that call themselves "balsamic" or "sherry" but aren't much more than distilled vinegar, sugar, and caramel color). Or make an Asian-flavored salad and use rice wine vinegar and peanut/sesame oil instead of olive oil. You can also use citrus juices instead of vinegar to make a citronette.

Then you can start playing with different oils. A very neutral oil like canola will place more of the focus on the other flavors present. Different extra-virgin olive oils will yield different results, depending on how fruity or peppery the olive oil is. Nut oils like walnut oil or hazelnut oil are also great and really bring a distinctive flavor to a dressing. You can even incorporate bacon fat in place of some of the oil, as in the classic warm bacon vinaigrette served on spinach salad.

I know quite a few people who get that deer-in-headlights look when you talk to them about improvising and really cooking vs. following recipes to the letter, and making a vinaigrette--really getting the process down--is where I always suggest they start. Because it's so easy and so accessible, and because if it doesn't work, you can still eat it without any negative repercussions.

Learning to taste, and learning to make little adjustments to what's going on in the bowl--these are the building blocks of the transition away from being someone who just looks up and follows recipes and towards becoming a cook.

Give it a try! What have you got to lose? Besides all those bottles rattling around in the door compartment of your fridge, I mean. And xantham gum.

Classic Cookbook Review--Honey from a Weed

I'm constantly reading reviews of the latest and the greatest cookbooks on various blogs and foodie sites, but no one seems to be paying much attention to the old classics. That's too bad, because there are just hundreds of great old cookbooks rattling around out there at used book stores (both brick and mortar and online), and you can stock up on wonderful food writing for three, four, and five bucks a shot. Don't wait for re-issues. Go back to the originals. They're great.

Anyway, that's a brief intro and justification for a series of posts I'm going to dedicate to reviewing classic old (call'em vintage, even) cookbooks in my collection. I had a serious used-bookstore addiction during my line cook days and, much to my wife's chagrin, my books got shuttled around in boxes for a while until we had enough shelf space to accommodate them.

Some are classic, in the true old-school French sense, some are funny in the 60's-70's what-were-they-thinking sense, and some are just as on point and topical today as they were when they were written. This review falls into that latter category.


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Honey from a Weed; Fasting and Feasting in Tuscany, Catalonia, The Cyclades, and Apulia, by Patience Gray.

This book was originally published in 1986, and it details twenty years of the author's life that she spent living in various locales while accompanying her sculptor husband as he went to work where he could find certain stones; "It is of course entirely owing to the Sculptor's appetite for marble and stone," she writes, "that this work came into existence in the first place, and that I am held in the mysterious grip of olive, lentisk, fig, and vine".

Gray is British and the book chronicles her experiences eating and cooking while mostly living in very rustic areas during the 60's and 70's, far from any sign of tourism or modernity. She often cooks over open fire, without the benefit of refrigeration, and describes some very challenging situations. The food, therefore, is rustic. It's the everyday fare of the peasants, farmers, fishermen, and others who she encounters, and, for this reason, the book is not only a cookbook, but a reminiscence of the people she meets and gets to know and, even more, for their lifestyle, which, even 30-40 years ago, Gray was insightful enough to recognize was in danger of being forgotten as more and more harbingers of modern, industrial life crept in.

Poverty rather than wealth gives the good things of life their true significance. Home-made bread rubbed with garlic and sprinkled with olive oil, shared--with a flask of wine--between working people, can be more convivial than any feast. My ambition in drawing in the background to what is being cooked is to restore the meaning. I also celebrate the limestone wilderness.
If I stress the rustic source of culinary inspiration, it is not in opposition to the scientific...
In my experience it is the countryman who is the real gourmet and for good reason; it is he who has cultivated, raised, hunted, or fished the raw materials and has made the wine himself. The preoccupation of his wife is to do justice to his labours and bring the outcome triumphantly to table. In this an emotional element is involved. Perhaps this very old approach is beginning to once again inspire those who cook in more urban situations.
In my view it was not necessarily the chefs of prelates and princes who invented dishes. Country people and fishermen created them, great chefs refined them and wrote them down.

This book is way ahead of its time. Gray presages recent trends of nose-to-tail eating, eating seasonally, foraging, all-things-pork, local eating, and canning/preserving. Of course, that's because these "trends" aren't really new or trendy at all, but are simply an indication that within our modern urban enclaves, we've become so removed from these centuries-old building blocks of cuisines, that the re-introduction of them by current chefs within the context of contemporary restaurants appears novel.

It's a painstakingly thorough book as well. There are ten or twelve chapters dedicated to specific dishes or foodstuffs ("Beans, Peas, and Rustic Soups", "Edible Weeds", "La Polenta"), but there are also chapters that focus on equipment ("Pots and Pans") or techniques ("Chopping and Pounding"). There's also a massive bibliography and a great cross-referenced index. There's a ton of information here.

And it's good stuff, but the real lure is Gray's celebratory prose, which really serves to get at the root of these cuisines, to allow the reader to understand terms like cacciatora and marinara in terms of where they came from, and how the dish evolved directly from what the people who prepared it were doing all day. Classic French provincial cuisine, Tuscan cooking, Catalan cuisine--these traditions all came directly from centuries of people living and working in these regions, and Gray lived and worked among them.

The princely life of the Mantuans has been obliterated by time, malaria, and the Austrian occupation, leaving only its shell. Oblivious to this, farmers from the countryside come into town and are found imbibing a dense bean soup at ten in the morning in the trattorie underneath the arcades of the Palazzo della Ragione which towers over the marketplace.
The shops are stuffed with gigantic hams; every kind of smoked and fresh sausage; coppa, smoked loin of pork in the form of a large sausage closely bound with string; bondiola, a smoked boiling sausage round in shape; musetti con lingua, made from pig's snout and tongue; lardo, salted pig's fat cut from its rump; capelli dei preti also called triangoli, small triangles of stitched pork skin stuffed with sausage meat, then smoked, for boiling; and nuggets of smoked pork strung together to be flung into the soup.
In agricultural areas where communications are spasmodic, the pig figures as the winter saviour of mankind. Its products can be kept at hand without deterioration, and, if not of domestic manufacture, can be acquired on weekly trips to town.
The fact that pork is indigestible gives a greater significance here to game in autumn. It also throws vegetables into a relief, the green leafy ones, spinach, spinach beet, cicoria 'Catalogna'; the astringent artichoke and cardoon; and most particularly, those root vegetables whose virtue lies in a certain bitterness--root chicory, salsify, scorzonera, and black radishes. All are ritually prepared to offset the ill effects of the delicious products of the pig. One can cultivate a better acquaintance with these roots by growing them.

At its heart, this book is more a monument to a more simple lifestyle than it is a condemnation of our current-day lives of everything-all-the-time excess. But as someone living in a large city, eating in ever more impressive restaurants, and especially with the advent of the internet broadcasting (and selling) the biggest and best of everything 24/7, it's hard to read about these simple rustic ways and not come to wonder if this sort of excess (and excess to the point that we've become blase about it) isn't detrimental to our physical and mental well-being.

She touches on this phenomenon as well, which, even then had begun to rear it's modern head, alluding to the recent trend of looking at stare bene--the concept of living well--as being more tied to income than quality of life, and noting with wonder the availability of out of season vegetables and "industrially reconstituted protein", relegating them to the stuff of Marie Antoinette-level luxuries.

And, as in much of the book, she manages to distill this idea down to one pithy local saying. In the midst of her "parting salvo" about the current and future state of food, Gray describes an anecdote about what people who come to Spigolizzi in the summer can be heard to exclaim:

'Qui c'e un vero paradiso' (Here is a real paradise) and the locals reply 'Ma l'inferno purtroppo e tanto piu comodo!' (Yes, but Hell is so much more convenient!)

Patience Gray died in 2005, but she left behind an amazing and timeless memoir, cookbook, and treatise on food in the form of Honey from a Weed. Buy it instead of that Rachel Ray book you might impulsively grab the next time you're at the bookstore.

The Bacon List--Cudahy Signature Applewood Smoked

For the second entry in my sweeping odyssey of a project known as The Bacon List, I splurged on that fancy-looking pack of pork seen in the picture above. I purchased a 20 oz. package of Patrick Cudahy Thick Sliced Signature Smoke Bacon, which the package touted to be "naturally smoked with sweet apple wood".

I paid $7.49 for the 20 oz. package. That's pretty expensive for a grocery-store bacon.

Now, granted, part of the expense may have gone towards paying for the container, which the packaging seemed to be trying to tell me was one of the more appealing aspects of this product. On the front of the label, right above the name of the product, was another logo reading "FreshLock Containers" Reusable Container.

Further, on the side of the label there's more about the container:

*Disposable*Reusable*Dishwasher, Microwave, Freezer Safe*
CAUTION: Do not cook bacon in this container (follow cooking instructions). * Wash container before reusing * Vent while microwaving * Container might be hot when used in microwave * Use for microwave reheating only * Do NOT use in conventional ovens, under browning elements or stove tops.

Whoa. That is a lot of information to remember about this friggin' plastic box that my bacon comes in. Honestly, I think I'd be happier if they just wrapped it in plastic like all the other bacons and called it a day. They could've saved the money they spent on the team of lawyers who came up with all those disclaimers too. Sheesh. Can't a guy just get some bacon?

Anyway, enough about the damn wrapper. Let's talk about the bacon.

It sucked.

Ok, well to be honest, it didn't totally suck. It was ok. But for what I paid for it, and all the hype on the box screaming at me about natural sweet applewood and "signature smoke", I was expecting something pretty darn good. And this wasn't it. Not even close.

It was average. Or below average, even. Since this is only entry #2 on the list, it's hard to know what average is going to look like. But I think it's a safe bet that this bacon will occupy a slot in the area below whatever average turns out to be. The bottom line is, the stuff has very little flavor at all. No taste. It's not salty. It's not smoky. It's not porky or meaty. And it's not sweet. It was simply lacking in any prominent flavor whatsoever.

Which, given the fact that it's bacon, is kind of amazing in and of itself, if you think about it.

But not the good kind of amazing. The sucky kind.

Ok, on to the rundown:

Designation--Fancy or Grocery Store? Grocery Store This is clearly a mass-produced wet-cured product, despite the fancied-up packaging. One tip-off is that sodium phosphate and sodium erythorbate are listed among the ingredients. These are indicative of a short-term wet-cure. Fancy or artisanal bacons usually don't have any ingredients besides salt, sugar and sodium nitrate. An even better tip-off is the fact that I bought it in a grocery store. DUH!

Price--How much did I pay per pound for the bacon? $5.99/pound. Sold in a 20 oz. package for $7.49 at my local Jewel.

Uncooked appearance--Color, texture, wet- or dry-ness, mushy or firm, etc... Take a look:

I actually had very high hopes for this stuff when I was taking it out of the package and laying it out to cook. It looks fabulous. Seriously, click on the picture above to view the full size shot. It's gorgeous. It's got a nice color, not too wet, a firm texture, and a great-looking fat-to-meat ratio and distribution. They sourced a really nice pork belly to make this stuff. Too bad they screwed it up.

How it cooks--Tendency to curl, how much it shrinks, tendency to spatter... It cooks fine. Very little shrinkage. It stayed nice and thick after cooking, it curled enough to be appealing, but not so much that it caused any problems with cooking it. I need to remember to oil my rack before I cook bacon on it--the stuff keeps sticking to it. You'd think bacon would never stick to pans, wouldn't you? Considering the fat content? But it does.

Cooked appearance--Color, shape, texture. Nice color... Everything looks good. What can I say? See for yourself.


How does it taste--Sweetness, saltiness, smokiness, texture (melting, chewy, flabby, spongy), "porkiness". Zip. Zilch. Nada. I'm trying to think of funny stuff to say here, but I'm disappointed. It's hard to be funny when you're disappointed. This stuff is nothing that bacon is supposed to be. It's not even fair to call it bacon. It's facon. It makes me sad that I wasted the calories on it, and I'm annoyed that I ate it when I could've eaten actual bacon.

Overall rating--All bacons reviewed will be given an overall rating from 1-10, with 1 being practically inedible (I say "practically" since, you know, it's bacon--how bad can it be?), 5 being a perfectly serviceable bacon for use in cooking or on a sandwich, and 10 being....well, let's be honest; there won't be a 10. Overall Rating: 3.0
I'm not even sure why I'm giving this stuff that high of a rating, other than the fact that it looks so damn good cooked and uncooked (not to mention the impressive high-tech packaging). Um....it has a good chew, maybe? I don't know, whatever. I picked a number.

Let us take a lesson from this. This is a perfect example of the type of product that is being put out by huge agribusiness firms like Smithfield (which owns Cudahy) which utilize industrially-produced, pumped-full-of-hormones hogs, rush through the curing/"smoking" process as quickly and cheaply as possible, and then rely on fancy packaging and labeling hype to try and overcome the fact that their mass-produced product has no flavor.

The real kick of it is that they have the gall to charge six bucks a pound when you can get real, artisanally-produced stuff for almost that same price.

Of course, it won't come in a FreshLock™ container.

Eat Me--The Food and Philosophy of Kenny Shopsin

It's pretty hard to surprise me with a gift of a food-related book that I've never heard of, but my brother managed to do it this past Christmas. Thanks, Tim!

In the pre-Christmas flurry of high-end glossy fifty-dollar chef ego-fests (that's right, I'm looking at you Grant, Thomas, and Gordon), this gem of a cookbook somehow got by me. I admit, I had never heard of Kenny Shopsin and his nine hundred-item menu before receiving this book, despite the fact that he's been featured in a high-profile article in the New York Times Magazine and a full length documentary.

And, unlike the fancy cookbooks listed above, Eat Me is filled with recipes that home cooks can actually replicate in home kitchens that somehow manage to do without kitchen essentials like liquid nitrogen or an immersion circulator.

Shopsin is a gem. The initial draw is the freakishly huge menu, the Soup Nazi-like rules one has to follow in order to be permitted to eat there, and the man's generally cranky, curmudgeonly demeanor within our "customer is always right"-minded industry. And that stuff is interesting and amusing.

Here's a sample:

In most cases the reason I don't do special requests has to do with the customer's reason for making it. Most of the time when a customer makes a special request, it's not about the food but about his own desire to be in control and to establish his own specialness. Making people feel special through this kind of ass kissing is one of the services that a restaurant can provide to people who need it, but it's not a service that I want to provide.
I have been cooking for thirty years and I've got a thousand things on the menu and you're going to take one thing and make it different? Uh-uh. Try it my way for once. (p.19)

...and another good one:

Some people tell me that they're deathly allergic to something that and that I have to make sure it's not in their food. I kick them out, too. I don't want to be responsible for anyone's life-or-death situation. I tell them that they should go eat at a hospital. Often, after I do that, they'll back down and tell me, well, they're not that allergic. And then I really want them to leave because now I know they're assholes. (p. 19)

But as you read deeper and go beyond the in-your-face irreverence, Shopsin actually has a wonderful philosophy--of life, of food, of relationships--that utterly pervades the book and serves as the foundation and explanation for *why* he employs the rules he does, and *why* he kicks people out that he doesn't care to cook for. And it's this part, the underlying philosophy (which is really an approach to living life, not just cooking or eating) which makes the book so wonderful.

It's about fulfillment. Happiness. His own and that of the people he cooks for.

Here's an exerpt which manages to perfectly capture something which I have come to call the "I deserve to live like a princess" phenomenon which is currently rampant in our society:

...One of the sites I visit regularly is Chowhound, where food-obsessed people like to talk about what they ate last night or where they are going to eat or where they can go for a specific food. It seems as if the majority of the entries read something like "I'm going to such-and-such restaurant. What's the best thing on the menu?"
When I read that, I think: Why would you give a shit what the best thing on the menu is? Maybe you don't like the best thing on the menu. Maybe the so-called best thing is deep-fried yak brains, and maybe, just maybe, deep-fried yak brains don't appeal to you. Why don't you just order what sounds good to you? Well, I already know the answer. It is because people are afraid of being mediocre, of being ordinary.
It wasn't that way twenty or thirty years ago; it was easier to be satisfied. People didn't have cell phones. There were no flat-screen televisions. They didn't feel the need to indulge in eighteen-course dinners that some jerk-off restaurant reviewer described as "orgasmic". They didn't have any of the media hype we have now that is supposed to make us happy or even contenders for happiness. People were more content with their ordinary lives and with their mediocre desires. (p.205)

There are some good recipes and tips about cooking. Kenny's dead-on right when he launches into his treatise on The Right Way to Cook Eggs, or describes the finer points of art of griddling. But the book's beauty lies in the way he looks at life. Cooking can, if approached with a certain mindset, be a very contemplative, meditative activity. One must be very focused on, very much in the moment of a mundane physical activity which is repeated dozens or hundreds of times every day/week/month, and that gives the mind time to meander down some pretty out-there, metaphysical, 'meaning of life'-type paths. Shopsin's clearly spent some time exploring this ground and has emerged with a clear idea of what his food, his restaurant, and his life, are all about.

It's a great read. And it'll take you less time to read it cover-to-cover than you'll spend trying to make one recipe from the Alinea cookbook.