Cookstory: January 6, 2013: Serving Satan ... er, seitan.

Morning

Cream Of Wheat. 
I just made it for myself, only because I needed to erase the memory of yesterday's salty disaster. Today: nailed it!


Evening

Balsamic-Roasted Seitan with Cipollini Onions.
Before the start of 2013, Laura pointed out that we needed to get back on the "health horse" (uh ... my horrible, horrible phrase, not hers) and start eating better again. We really had gotten way off track, partly due to laziness, and partly due to stresses in our lives that, quite frankly, made it difficult for me to devote the time to cooking that healthy eating requires. Tonight's dinner was a clear attempt to fall back in step.

The recipe (as well as the mashed vegetables below) comes from Peter Berley's wonderful book, Fresh Food Fast. I love this book because the menus are divided seasonally, which makes it easier for me to know going into a recipe that I'm going to be able to find all the ingredients. (For all the cooking I do, I'm still not very good at knowing instantly what's in season and what isn't. This fact, along with my fear of ever going "off recipe" and ad-libbing in the kitchen, makes it hard for me to feel like I really know jack about cooking.)

I do question Berley's definition of the word "fast" in the title: the recipes don't take that long—if you don't count all the prep. Not counting prep time before any actual cooking starts seems like a total cheat. For instance, the cipollini onions in this recipe needed to be skinned, and Berley suggests blanching them for 30 seconds before removing the skins. But nowhere does it mention how long it takes to get those damn skins off the onions.

Proof that I need to work on my food
photography: It really tasted better than
this picture indicates!

Luckily it was all worth it. And it was worth keeping the actual recipe a bit of a secret from Laura. You see, she's not a huge fan of seitan in general, and had I pitched the recipe to her ahead of time, she probably would have talked me out of doing it. Hey—I knocked out that chicken noodle soup for her yesterday; she owed me one. And if one believes the ends justifies the means, the fact is that she loved the food. The seitan was so wonderfully marinated in a sauce that included some of the best balsamic vinegar in the world from a local oil and vinegar shop), and the onions were unbelievably sweet, almost like fruit. This is definitely a repeat recipe.

Garlic Mashed Potatoes and Parsnips. 
Parsnips are another vegetable that proves to be a hard sell in this family (including me). But here's the thing: we're past Christmas, and we have a few months of yucky winter ahead of us. We gotta find some love in root vegetables one way or another, and there's only so much I can do with potatoes and carrots. I really want to expand the winter menu. So, parsnips get another visit.

I was a little worried about the entire head of garlic in this recipe, but its presence was surprisingly mild in the final dish. I'm figuring this was due to the cooking method: boiling, rather than sautéing, which would have intensified the garlic. I slipped up when I "undermashed" at the end, for fear of overworking the vegetables and making the texture too tough. I ended up with a couple of chunky pieces of parsnips, and the bites that included those chunks brought on a stronger, uneven taste. Other than that, this side was surprisingly yummy, especially when combined with the sauce from the seitan dish.

Well, the kids wouldn't agree. I gave them a small amount of the mashed veggies (I didn't even try them on the seitan dish), and they immediately spotted the "different" taste. "This isn't like the mashed potatoes you usually make," said Zuzu. "These taste like green beans," said Piper. Well, "green beans" made no sense ... but I finally fessed up to the presence of the parsnips, and ended up having to solemnly promise that I wouldn't make THIS kind of mashed potatoes at Thanksgiving.

(But it was still delicious. Really.)

Cookstory: January 5, 2013. Encroaching on the Mom-In-Law's Territory

Morning 

Cream of Wheat.
I can make one serving of this perfectly. If I'm lucky, I can pull off two bowls and it will still be passable. But when everyone in the family wants cream of wheat, I have to roll the dice and hope I can make four servings in one pot. This sounds like it's a question of simple math, but I always screw up the proportions. Part of the issue is that the Bob's Red Mill "Creamy Wheat" cereal label doesn't give clear instructions for four servings, and it's not as simple as quadrupling the ingredients for one serving. As you increase the milk, the amount of wheat you use lessens. And cream of wheat is one of those things that really needs the right proportions or it goes to hell.

Today, I over-salted. Laura was kind enough to eat it anyway; my kids have no need for such propriety. Overdoing the brown sugar in it helped offset a little. But really, it was not, as dear Alton would say, "good eats."


Afternoon

Sandwiches all around.
For Laura and me, the classic grilled turkey with cheese.

For Zuzu, a simple ham sandwich: bread, mayo, ham, no grilling.

For Piper, her new favorite: a grilled ham and cheese. Her kiddie taste buds, lacking the proper sophistication, prefer American cheese over cheddar. She'll come 'round.

Patent pending, so don't even think about
laying claim to my genius.

I've always been bugged by the fact that sandwiches with meat and cheese have all the meat on one level and all the cheese on the other. It's a strange thing to care about, because once you've taken a bite and begin to chew, everything is mashed together in your mouth anyway. Maybe it's the "Virgo" in me to obsess about such things. So I put together Piper's sandwich a specific way: on one slice of bread, I lay one slice of cheese, off to one side. Next, the deli-style slice of ham, folded in half so that it fits perfectly across the entire surface of the bread; last, more cheese, on the opposite side of the bread surface from the first cheese slice. The second slice of bread tops it. This allows the cheese to be spread across the entire sandwich, ensuring cheesification in every bite, while the ham is, in some way, in the true center of the sandwich. I'm oddly proud of this.


Evening 

Hearty Chicken Soup.
Let me make this perfectly clear: my mother-in-law makes the best chicken soup in this family. No one touches it. It's the best. So why would I chance my standing in Sowatsky-Bailey-World by trying my own version? At first, the decision made sense: it was planned as the first dish for Laura after her shoulder surgery in December, before Grace had returned with the girls from St. Louis. Laura needed comfort food ... chicken soup is the ultimate comfort food ... ergo, I would conquer it. But Laura opted instead for white bean and tiny pasta soup, and this recipe was postponed. Which meant that now I had to cook this with Grace a mere seven blocks away! Did she sense it? Even smell it? Did she somehow feel virtue flow out of her at the moment Laura took her first bite of a chicken soup not made by her own mother's hands?

I'll let you know when I have the guts to tell her what I did.

The recipe came from America's Test Kitchen, and had a couple of twists: the stock was made with ground chicken, the theory being that all that extra surface area allows for additional chickeny goodness in a much more efficient manner than the more traditional boiling of a whole bird. Then, to add to the heartiness, several leaves of Swiss chard are added at the end of cooking.

Mum(-in-law)'s the word.

This one was a complete success. The soup had a great deal of flavor, and the chard really knocked it out of the park. Piper and Zuzu liked it, though of course any "green stuff" in their bowls was deftly side-stepped. We'll definitely be doing this again, but not before enjoying the leftover soup over the next few days.

Now to the true challenge: do I offer Laura's mom a bowl next time she visits? At least I can tell her—in all honesty—that as yummy as this soup was, it still doesn't match the taste of her superior soup.