Scrumptious Sunday*: A Recipe of One's Own

For the last few weeks, I've been trying weekly meal planning. It's a topic for another post, but it's been going a long way in saving both grocery shopping money and sanity.

This week, I thumbed through a cookbook I got from the library, trying to find a good cold-weather recipe...and found a whole damn bunch of them! The Food52 Cookbook is organized seasonally, and so I had no shortage of options**. But since I'm super-into squash right now, I went for their "best couscous dish," Fregola Sarda with Caramelized Squash and Charmoula.

Before a couple of weeks ago, I had never cut a squash open before. I had, you know, carved Jack o' Lanterns, but an actual squash intimidated the hell out of me. I didn't know how to peel one, how to cut one, how to make sure all of the seeds were done away with, without getting my hands all goopy. But I loved the warm taste, the smell in the kitchen while one was cooking...a squash is late autumn and winter to me. And if all one has to do is cut one up, throw it in the oven with some oil and salt, and let it be for a while to make a super-tasty meal? OK, I decided, if I'm working on getting comfortable in the kitchen, this was something I needed to learn how to do. (Thanks to The Kitchn for a great squash tutorial!)

And so after my first try with butternut squash two weeks ago, and making Pumpkin Butter with The Kid last week (also Food52), this recipe sounded like an absolute winner. It's getting cold and dreary here in MI, and some squash was just what my kitchen needed.

But I also had a couple of changes I needed to make for various reasons: grocery availability, family dietary needs, and so on. And so, since I'm trying to work on being zen in the kitchen, I did what I needed to do and came out with a damn good dinner that made everyone around the table happy. Seriously, The Kid gobbled it down, even though the one part of the dish he helped me make was the one thing that didn't wind up on his plate.

It's no Fregola Sarda, but it was awesome. Recipe after the jump. (Don't be intimidated by the list of ingredients. There's a lot of stuff, but not a whole lot of work involved at all.)

Food Friday: Food Everyday

I've been posting a lot about food on Facebook. I admit it. Though I try to keep the majority of the pictures to Instagram, as I scroll through my feed, it's a lot of what I've noticed.

But to be honest, it's one of the things I'm learning to adjust to in my transition to being a stay-at-home-mom. Back in Maryland, Jake was the cook in the house. I cooked once a week (sometimes), but he really wore the apron in the family. He had the subscription to Cook's Illustrated, he could make up recipes off the top of his head, he had it together enough in the morning to do more than just pour cereal into a bowl and drip milk over it for breakfast. I could do none of those things.

I wanted to, I really did, though I never felt like I had time to. (And I really like eating Jake's food. He's very good.) And I made steps by learning to bake along with The Kid. It became one of the Things We Did Together. We have a few spare minutes on a weekend? Let's make cookies! A few more minutes? Marshmallows! But it wasn't a priority for me unless we were working together, or I was DIY-ing something. (Although I had an awesome time doing it.)

Fast forward to now.

With me in the apartment full-time and Jake going to work five mornings a week, I've been taking the reins in the kitchen. I'm pretty damned proud of it. As comes with the territory of, you know, being me, I've been doing research into recipes, reading about food, talking about food, learning about cooking techniques. I'm not, like, great at it yet, but I'm learning and I'm trying. The Kid and cooking are kind of my jobs now, and though I am picking up some awesome freelance work, I know where my full-time gig is.

And so where I used to post about funny things that happen in classes I'm teaching, right now, I'm posting about funny things The Kid has said, or some recipe I've made. It's my job right now. And while that was a pretty jarring thing to realize, I'm having more fun doing it than I would have thought. Though it is occasionally, as all things parenting, kind of frustrating.

We like things Mini around here. (This is a tiny raspberry cheesecake.)

I do try to include The Kid in as much of the cooking as I can, so now we're not only making cookies and marshmallows, we're making savory things too. (Thank goodness from my waistline!) In addition to sweets, we've now made quesadillas, pesto, fresh pasta, and cauliflower "rice."

A few weeks ago, a friend asked me what cookbooks I like to use with The Kid. I put off answering her (sorry, Lauren!), because I was trying to think of an answer besides, "If the recipe uses the KitchenAid, the food processor, or a whisk, The Kid is all over it."

I still haven't thought of a much more satisfying answer (honestly, those are his favorite things to do in the kitchen, and so that's how I gauge what recipes we can do together, and what he can do to contribute to those recipes), and someday soon I'll write a post about how we cook together without making a huge mess of things. 'Cause while cooking naturally makes a big mess of things, it doesn't have to be huge. And we're working on figuring that out.

The Kid makes pesto, using a recipe from Pretend Soup.

The one cookbook we've really used a lot, which we've renewed from the library three times now, is Pretend Soup by Mollie Katzen. The recipes are written out for adults, and also pictorially for pre-reader kids. So, The Kid can tell me what to do when we're making, say, blueberry pancakes. There have been other cookbooks--and we're really looking forward to using a vegetarian one a friend sent us recently--but this one has treated us incredibly well.

To be honest, there's a lot of time in the day when one is getting used to making her own schedule, let alone her own schedule when she also needs to come up with activities with a three-year-old. And cooking helps fill our day, along with art projects, building train sets, and pretending to be the trucks from Mighty Machines. It's something comforting, that we know will take time and help us work together. And, like any convert, it's something about which I have become fervent and evangelical. It's something sequential with a qualitative outcome: either the hard work pays off or it doesn't, and often it's tasty.

I like tasty: I like reading about it, talking about it, and eating it. And while I still LOVE eating when Jake cooks (man, he's so good), I'm really proud of what I've been learning, and of being able to spend this time with The Kid making tasty things.

In conclusion: frittata. (I suck at ending blog posts.)

The First Great Move

Well, cats and kittens, Phase One of The Great Move is officially done. Jake and I are living in our new apartment in Ann Arbor, waiting for our stuff and our son to come join us.

The movers loaded up their truck on Monday--three and a half hours later than expected, but they moved very efficiently after they did show up--leaving Jake and I with a mostly-bare apartment, an indifferent turtle, and a very confused cat. (He was more than content with the boxes, though.)

Box Cat

We were busy the rest of Monday with errands: returning the modem and cable boxes, buying necessary toiletries, packing up stuff to take in our car, cleaning, and hanging out with friends at our favorite soon-to-not-be-local-any-more place.

We woke up bright and early on Tuesday morning, set to packing the car and cleaning out the kitchen (seven bags of garbage from our tiny little kitchen! How???), and turned in our keys. I suppose it always feels this way during a move, but I felt like I was in a sitcom, say the last episode of Friends, or The Cosby Show, where there's a poignancy to turning off the lights and closing the door for the last time.

I guess that's why it's a trope, right? That feeling of closure, of not being able to look behind yourself any more, and the necessity in moving forward? (Sorry to get morose on you; it still hasn't 100% hit me yet, but I did spend a good five minutes sitting on the floor in The Kid's room on Tuesday, thinking about how he'd never see that view again. The feelings are starting to creep in.)

Iggy was super good on the 8.5-hour drive to Ann Arbor. Jake and I had been worried; on every drive he's taken in the past, he's yowled so much that we've had to let him out of his carrier and hold him in a vise grip on our laps. This time, though, he hardly made a peep, even when his water spilled on him during a rest stop and he had to air dry. What a trooper! I think the change this time might have been putting his bed in the carrier with him, rather than the towel we usually put in.

Side note: Iggy got into catnip for the very first time on Monday. Apparently, he's one of the cats who just blisses out rather than getting hyper. Who knew? Good to store for future reference.

The drive wasn't too bad at all, and it was great to get the keys and walk around our new place.

Due to administrative silliness, we actually had no idea what floor plan we'd be walking into. I think we had built one up in our heads, and of course, that wasn't the one we ended up getting. The luxury of a long-distance move where your furniture doesn't arrive for days and days, though, is that you get to take the time to really figure out where everything is going to go.

We're getting used to the floor plan, and so while for the last two days, we've been living like this:

Living Room (with a new area rug!)

Breakfast Bar, with a peek into the kitchen. 

Dining Room

...we have a good sense of where things are going to go when we get them. (When we're going to get them is another story! We're crossing our fingers for tomorrow.) Yesterday, we went to the Habitat for Humanity Re-Store to pick up a new dining room table and comfy chair to replace the ones we left behind--that place is amazing, by the way, and I think there will be many visits in the future, for furniture and knick-knacks.

We've also, of course, been exploring local food. Yesterday, we visited the Zingerman's empire in a weird industrial park, and spent way too much time sampling cheeses and desserts.

Zingerman's Creamery

Our apartment is within a five-minute walk of a grocery store, pet supply store, and a couple of restaurants, which was really key when we were looking for places to live. We're really excited about the Halal restaurant we walked to for dinner last night and the Great Harvest Bakery in the same plaza, and we know The Kid will flip his lid for the frozen yogurt place that's all tricked out in his favorite color.

It's a lot of getting used to, and the learning curve is going to be steep. But I've been enjoying coffee on our balcony and the luxury of having laundry in-unit. Updates as they come!

Food Friday*: A Week of Cooking Jewishly

Passover started on Monday night (with a lovely Seder led by my dad), and as always, I've decided it's a good opportunity to diversify my diet and eat more fruits and veggies. Not-as-always, I've also decided to try new KFP (Kosher for Passover) recipes, as is my wont nowadays.

So, this week, our house has seen:

Matzah going from drab to fab with Matzah Crack...um...I mean...candy. (From this recipe on The Kitchn.) I topped some of ours with chopped walnuts, some with sea salt, and some with my latest obsession crystallized ginger. It went fast.)

Macaroons. (From this recipe, also on The Kitchn.) I dipped a few of them in melted chocolate after I took this picture, and they're the best. Even Jake likes them, and he's not the world's biggest fan of coconut. I'm pretty sure we'll be eating them well after Passover ends, since I have 25 of them, and the holiday is over on Tuesday.

And for actual meals...

A breakfast of Matzah Brei, and

a dinner of cod "en papillote" with veggies. (That's much, much easier than it sounds. To prove it, both recipes are after the jump! Both recipes serve three. They're also both easily adjustable if your family is bigger or smaller.)

Food Friday: Blueberry Surprise

Here's the thing. I knew The Kid was going to want to have a hand in the cupcakes we were going to bring to school for his birthday. Which was awesome! And I was all set to use one of my favorite recipes for the cupcakes I thought he was going to want to make.

"Hey, buddy," I asked, "what kind of cupcakes do you want to make for your birthday?

I fully expected him to say "Chocolate!" He has this way of saying it in a deep voice, where it takes a full thirty seconds to get every consonant out, as though he were already licking the beater from the KitchenAid. Nope. The Kid looked me in the eye, beamed, and said,

"Blueberry."

Blueberry?

I'd never had a blueberry cupcake. I'd never seen a recipe for a blueberry cupcake! Blueberry muffins, sure. Jake made a huge batch with the last of our berries this summer--we had so many, we had to put some in the freezer, and we enjoyed them for a long time. Blueberry cupcakes threw me for a loop.

But Mr. Google is a wonderful helper, and soon I had my choice of recipes. I went, of course, with Martha--has she ever steered anyone wrong recipe-wise? Martha's recipe was for 12 full-sized cupcakes, and I wanted to take mini-cupcakes to The Kid's school. I finally had an excuse to buy the mini-muffin tin I've been wanting! And I figured, batter for 12 full-sized cupcakes had to equal, what, 24 mini-cupcakes? I could handle that; it's exactly what the mini-pan holds. Perfect.

Nope. Forty-eight. Forty-eight tiny cupcakes, and only ten kids in his class. My colleagues really benefitted from this one! And we had plenty left over to share with my family after dinner. I'm not confident in halving a baking recipe yet--cooking recipes, sure, but baking ratios are such science, it makes me nervous that I'll mess something up. I'm setting my mind to learn, but in the meanwhile, it's not so bad to have 48 mini-cupcakes to share.

Recipe for blueberry cupcakes with cream cheese frosting after the jump.

Food Friday: Baking With the Kid

Almost exactly a year ago, my life changed when Jake bought me the America's Test Kitchen DIY Cookbook for my birthday. Before then, I kinda-sorta-liked-to-be-in-the-kitchen-I-guess-I-mean-I'll-cook-if-it's-my-night-but-don't-expect-anything-fancy. I liked to cook, I did, but it was never something I would have volunteered to do, not when I had an awesome cook right in my house with me. (I mourned the fact that "Honey, you love to cook so much and I just don't want to take that time away from you" only lasted me about three years in our relationship.)

But then, I got The Book. And all of a sudden, the world opened up to me. Wait a minute, I realized, I can make butter? Ricotta cheese? Peanut butter? Graham crackers? Jam?!?! That last one in particular kept me busy quite a bit, and since The Kid came berry-picking with us several times last summer, it only seemed natural to teach him a little bit about where his food came from.

TOTAL DISCLAIMER HERE.

I'm completely learning along with him. I did pick berries once or twice when I was a kid, but I grew up in the idyllic suburban 1980s, believing (but not really really) that my chicken came from styrofoam packages, that my carrots came pre-peeled. My mom is a good cook, but she was scarred at a young age when her cousin took her to see chickens get...um...prepared to be food. And so it was never something that I was really exposed to at all.

While I'm disclaiming, I'd like to point out that my search for vintage pictures of moms with their sons in the kitchen turned up practically nothing. Plenty of drawings of women teaching their daughters to cook, and serving their sons food, but nothing with moms teaching their sons to cook. Pouring milk while at child height was the best I could get. Gender roles! (OK, I'm done.)

END DISCLAIMER

And so, since Jake is in the kitchen a lot, I was starting to spend a lot of time there, and he was picking some of his own food, The Kid started asking toddler-type questions about what he was eating and how it was made.

And we started involving him in the cooking. By now, he makes up his own recipes in his play kitchen (the other day, he taught me how to make "Rice Cheese," which involves more flour than I would have imagined), consistently wears his chef costume which we originally got for Halloween, and is a fantastic egg-cracker, with help, of course. Two-years-ago-me would never have believed you if you told her, but one of my Very Favorite Things to Do is to cook with my boy. And we do it nearly every weekend.

My goal is to branch out from sweets, but man sweets are fun to make! I've been reading a bit about the benefits--beyond having fun and bonding--to cooking with your kid, and I especially like the article here. The Kids Cook Monday has some great resources too, and I'm excited to look into more of them.

For now, we're relying on the devils we know, and churning out cookies like fiends. And since Jake bought an insane amount of carrots this week, we made Carrot Cake Cookies, adapted from the recipe in one of our favorite books, Sesame Street's Yummy Cookies: Baking with Kids. Those Sesame Street folks know a thing or two about childhood education. They're soft, cake-like, totally delicious, and you can pretend they're healthy. (They're not totally unhealthy...) The recipe is after the jump!

Ann Arbor Epiphanies

Jake and I made our way to Ann Arbor last week to explore our for-the-next-two-years hometown, find a place to live, and check out nursery schools. I had the whole trip outlined on an Excel spreadsheet (what, you don't carry your schedule, apartment office phone numbers, and comparative rent prices on your person?), but I was thrilled to have experiences I couldn't quantify. Like:

1.

Zingerman's lives up to the hype. (That above is a Sherman's Sure Choice from the Deli, but we also visited the Roadhouse twice and had amazing dinner and breakfast foods. Zingerman's Roadhouse also offers refills on mashed potatoes and sweet potato fries. So.)

2. You can get from anywhere to anywhere in 4-10 minutes. The no-traffic thing is pretty great, though the roads are utter crap right now after their terrible winter.

3.

Midcentury modern advertising is alive and well and living in Michigan.

4. "It's hard to park in downtown" means something different to people who haven't lived in the DC area for 15 years. We had no problem finding parking in downtown Ann Arbor.

5.

Grocery stores sell wine and beer! And the one just around the corner from our apartment (by the way, we have an apartment!) has a "Build a Six-Pack" program, with a fantastic display of local beers! Also, both Flying Dog and Dogfish Head distribute in Michigan, which means we get two more years before moving to The Land of No MD/DE Beers, aka Missouri.

6. Ethnic foods abound in college towns! We ate sushi in a restaurant full of Japanese people, so you know it was good.

7.

Fairy Doors really are a Thing! I found two of them on our brief trip: we randomly passed by the one set in the front door of The Ark (pictured on the left), and I sought out the one at Sweetwaters Coffee and Tea (pictured on the right) while we were waiting to be seated at a brewpub across the street. They're awesome. Two down, five to go!

8. Marriage Equality passed while we were there! We immediately saw a car with tin cans attached to the bumper. In real life!

9.

There is no shortage of fantastic places to get fantastic drinks in Ann Arbor. Besides the three (?) brewpubs within spitting distance of each other, there are also great wine and cocktail lists. The above is an Ill Fashioned at The Ravens Club.

10. There are bookstores. Honest to god bookstores with books made out of paper. While walking up Main Street, Jake and I counted three used bookstores within two blocks of each other, as well as two stores for new books. I can.not.wait. to go to there.

While making these epiphanies, we also had time to find an apartment in an awesome location, and toured three nursery schools...which we've narrowed down to two. It's a hard decision, but I'm sure whichever choice we make will be the right one. I'm crazy-nervous to move, but also crazy-excited. This was a good visit.