kitchenmage

Quick question for the vegetarians, vegans and the like...

I am in the middle of writing a cookbook and would like to include some tips for parents of children who have declared they will no longer eat food with faces. Whether it's nutrition, the meatless recipe that you cooked 3-4 times a week at first, or the delicate handling a child who seems to be rejecting your lovingly prepared meal, parents need help with this. So, two simple questions:

• If you could some advice to the parents of a newly vegetarian/vegan child, what would it be?
• What is the worst thing you can do if your child decides to eat a meatless diet? (Personal experiences from hell are welcome.)

Thanks for your contributions, everyone.

Quick tips to make you a better cook

A new cook has so many things to remember. All those terms (in French, no less); which tool to use for which task; how to take a whole, raw ingredient like a pineapple and turn it into pineapple slices; the difference between coarsely diced, finely diced and minced.

Lately, I have been recognizing how lucky I was to learn my way around a kitchen surrounded by a largish family of people offering tips along the way. I always had someone to ask leading questions ("The rice will be ready in half an hour, do you think the chicken should go in the oven?"), whisper reminders and correct bad technique. I have been saved from a large number of disasters, and the related discouragement, over the years by a well-placed bit of advice.

English muffins and crumpets: an (almost) shared recipe

Many questions have plagued humankind for eons:

• Are we alone in the universe?
• Does god exist?
• What is the meaning of life?
• What is the difference between English muffins and crumpets?

Well folks, after a day of research and experimentation, I have the answer to one of those. No, not the first three - I took the tough one: English muffins v. crumpets.

One might wonder how dull my day was to spend it hunting down the answer to such a  question, and one might be right. In my defense, however, that's not what I started out to do...

Berry Marshmallows with Chocolate recipe

The first week of January is the time of year for lofty goals and noble aspirations and the food world is no exception. Food-related resolutions seem to fall into two categories: Proscriptive and prescriptive. There are far more of the former and they mostly take the form of "I will change my diet by not eating sugar, fat, HFCS, bread, chocolate, and so on." There are, to be fair, some positive "I will eat..." resolutions out there (mine is to grow some vegetables along with the herbs in my garden) but most of them are framed in the negative. What a way to start the year, with a list of things you are going to deny yourself!

Far more fun are the prescriptive resolutions. I particularly like "I will make ____ for the first time." and the ones that start "I will learn to..." If I was forced to make New Year's resolutions - and thankfully, I am not - I would fall into this camp so I have a soft spot for them.

Plastic knife pot roast (with recipe)

Tonight I bring you the tale of the plastic knife and the pot roast, in which we will attempt to answer the question: Will the little red plastic knife be able to cut up vegetables for a pot roast or will it have to call on the reinforcement knife lurking in the background?

The bright red beauty is a Zyliss salad knife - theory being that if you cut your salad with plastic/nylon instead of metal the lettuce won't oxidize and turn icky brown. I tear lettuce for salad by hand so that purpose was of little interest to me, but I have been looking for kid-safe tools and wondered if it would work to cut veggies but not fingers. 

Setting my expectations at some reasonable level, I decided that I would try something soft to start with. Handing the knife and a tomato to someoneElse, I watched, ready to admit defeat when the knife mangled the tomato.

Except it didn't. 

Simple, flaky biscuit recipe

Scattered.

If I had to pick one word for my life the last while, it would have to be scattered. Just as one crazy thing is brought under control, the next careens into view. Like garlic butter in your cake pan. Or a teetering stack of biscuits.

One of my surest cures for scattered is bread. As I gather the bits of ragged dough and knead them together into a cohesive whole, I am, likewise, remade just a bit, my loose edges reintegrated and all that. It's one of my favorite meditative states.

awesomeGrrl bakes Pie Cookies with Aunt Marcella

Contrary to what the corporate media would have you think, not all kids grow up without a clue about cooking, some even get lots of hands-on time early on. I was one of those lucky ones, as is the monstrrr in these pictures. Let's call her awesomeGrrl, because she is awesome (the kid speaks three languages already...oh, and American Sign Language...geez!) and she's learning all about being an awesome cook and baker from a very young age. She makes a mean salad, is learning how to bake and has even had "Baker Ben" visit from England to teach her about bread baking. And she's not even three yet!

(Did I mention that one of those languages is Mandarin Chinese? I suppose that's not so intimidating to some of you, but I am amazed by her language skills. One day recently, when she was not quite 2.5 years old, I asked her to count to ten in Mandarin. She hopped from foot to foot while saying words in Chinese in a sing-song voice. I sat in rapt attention, hoping to catch a single word well enough to repeat it back — and not liking my chances —  as she pranced around the room counting. After a minute, her mom burst into laughter and said, "Those aren't numbers, she's just messing with you!" Oh my, such sarcasm at two and a half, awesomeGrrl's going to be fun as she grows up. )

awesomeGrrl's Aunt Marcella came to visit recently and they baked Marcella's Pie Cookies. These cookies are the cupcake of pies: tender sour cream pastry and a rich date filling shaped into tiny little puffed flowers. In the family since the turn of the last century, the recipe for these cookies was passed to Marcella when she was about nine years old, which would have been quite a few years ago, since Marcella celebrated her 80th birthday a while back by throwing herself out of a perfectly good airplane, but that's another story. As you might guess, Marcella is a bit of an awesomeGrrl herself; more than a few of women in the family point to her as who they want to be like when they are 80.

Neither marsh nor mallow, discuss...

The recipe for this is here: Berry Marshmallows with chocolate

First I have to admit something--I am not the hugest fan of marshmallows. Okay, so a campfire somehow just isn't complete without some to toast, and they are great as an (occasional) ingredient...but marshmallows for their own sake? Marshmallows to be eaten like candy just didn't grab my attention.

Until I ran across an eGullet thread discussing making marshmallows. Making them? You can make them? Oh gee, why didn't anyone tell me? This might be a different story entirely.