What a Two-Year-Old Has Taught Me About Food

My son Jack is a font of information. Just when I think I know everything there is to know about something, he brings some new twist to the subject. Take food, for example. I have learned the following by observing Jack at the dinner table:

• Sugar snap peas are meant to be shelled, the peas thrown on the floor, and the shells discarded in various piles around one's dinner plate.
• Food is better when served with a dip. It can be conventional, such as salad dressing served with cut-up vegetables, or esoteric, such as toast dipped into breakfast cereal. It helps if you accompany your meal by saying "Dip, dip, dip" while dipping the food.
• Keep your mother hopping by devouring a particular food one evening, then declaring it "Nucky! Nucky! Nucky!" with a smile the next.
• Enjoy your food more by eating with your hands. Utensils are for uptight squares.

Cream of Yuck Soup, Part Two

Why, oh why, do I never learn from past experiences? I know my husband Mike doesn't like celery. I know that he has the supertaster-like ability to detect even a single molecule of celery in anything I cook. So why did I add celery leaves to my black bean soup? Because Mario Batali told me to.

Last year I read Heat, Bill Buford's memoir of working at Babbo, one of Mario Batali's restaurants. He describes Mario railing against the kitchen staff when they discard the leafy trimmings from the celery. He'd bellow something like "These make excellent stock!" as he plucked them from the garbage and threw them back onto the cutting boards. So I figured if celery leaves were good enough for Mario Batali, they'd be good enough for the Foley family.

You know how if you you chop celery up and add it to a stock it'll impart a subtle celery flavor? Well, the leaves lend an intense celery flavor. Even though I removed the leaves before I puréed the soup, it was like being smacked across the mouth with a bunch of celery. The soup just reeked of celery.

Mike didn't even get the spoon to his mouth. "Did you put celery in this?" he asked. "Ummm," I mumbled, wondering if I could get away with telling him some white lie about aromatics. Then the steam drifted from the top of my bowl and found its way into my nostrils. "A little," I confessed. That was the first time I ever saw Mike shove a bowl across the table. "I can't eat this."

As ever, I enjoyed my own cooking and drank every drop of that soup. Now all I have to do is eat two more quarts of it.

The Old Switcheroo—Volcano Roast Beef

OK, since Volcano Chicken was such a megahit, I figured the concept could be expanded to different types of leftover meats. Thus was Volcano Roast Beef born.

All I did was to cut some leftover roast beef up into pieces about 1/4" wide and 1" long, bump up the leftover gravy with a can of chicken stock (since we ate most of the gravy with our roast beef dinner), and add about a cup of frozen peas. Dump that over some baking-powder biscuits in a lavalike manner and Voila!

If you don't know how to make gravy from a roast, here's a primer. Remember, you must make the gravy right after the roast comes out of the oven. You can't wait until you're about to make this recipe!

Gravy from a Roast
Juices at bottom of roasting pan
2T butter
2T flour
1 1/2 c. chicken or turkey stock (homemade or canned)
Salt and pepper

After the meat has been roasted, remove it to a grooved cutting board and cover it with aluminum foil to rest. Pour the pan juice into a fat separator or skim excess fat off the top of the liquid with a spoon.

Melt the butter in a sauce pan, then let it get a little brown. Not too much or it'll burn. Add the flour and cook this roux for a minute or two to get rid of the raw-flour flavor.

Add the juices to the pan, mixing steadily to avoid lumps. Then add the chicken or turkey stock and stir to blend. Keep stirring every once in a while until the gravy thickens.

Pour any accumulated liquids from the cutting board into the gravy. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Kids are Full of Surprises

I'm a member of my town's chapter of the MOMS Club and we just had our kiddie Christmas (oops, I mean "holiday") party. I brought finger sandwiches to munch on, mainly because I didn't want to have to feed Jack a big lunch when we came home; I wanted him to eat at the party.

I made two plates of sandwiches. I figured I couldn't go wrong with PBJ, but I also wanted to have an adult-friendly choice. So I made turkey salad sandwiches, using a chicken salad recipe I learned about 17 years ago from a really cool jeweler in Jamaica Plain, a Boston neighborhood. Since the recipe incorporates ginger and scallions I figured the little ankle-biters would avoid them like the plague.

Guess what? Everybody gobbled up the turkey sandwiches (geddit?) and I had half a platter of PBJs to take home. So my advice to anybody preparing a meal for a kid—make what you'd like to eat. If you set the bar high then people will strive to meet it.

At least that's how it worked out this time.

JP Chicken (or Turkey) Salad
2 c. cooked chicken or turkey, diced
2 scallions, chopped
1" piece of fresh ginger*, peeled and grated
3/4 c. mayonnaise
salt and pepper to taste

Combine all ingredients in a bowl. Ta-da!

*The fresh ginger adds an indefinable *yum* to this dish; don't substitute powdered ginger.

It Was a Passing Fancy...

On Thursday and Friday Henry, my five-year-old, had big bowls of homemade granola. This morning, after I had gotten up super-early to make some more granola, he ate a couple of bites before confessing that he didn't like granola because of the nuts.

Last night he informed me that he didn't like asparagus anymore. Later, he asked for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, after telling me on numerous occasions that he didn't like those anymore, either.

And today I gave Jack, my two-year-old, some steamed carrot sticks and chicken bits for lunch. After consuming all of the chicken, he shoved the plate across the table, leaving the carrots untouched. He used to love carrots!

What is it about the immature palate that causes these sea changes? I wish I knew before I made my shopping list, because it would make mealtime a heck of a lot less frustrating. I liked it much better when they were both learning how to eat. I could lay a steaming bowl of tripe before them and they would have chowed down gratefully. Well...maybe not tripe. But they were willing to try a bigger variety of foods.

Oh well. I guess I'll just keep on trying. Who knows? Maybe one day they'll surprise me by asking for zucchini fritters or moussaka.

Yeah, right.

Bringing My Marketing Experience to Bear on Dinner

Following a series of disappointing setbacks at the dinner table, I decided to approach the dinner-rejection problem from a different tack. I realized that there wasn't any excitement, any sizzle at the dinnertime. "Lunchables" aren't called "Highly Processed Food Conveniently Packaged in a Single Serving" for a very good reason: "Lunchables" is catchier--it's cool, it's hip, it's, as Henry puts it, sick. What I needed to do was to disguise the nutritious meals I've been flogging as a fun mealtime experience. Taking a cue from marketing, I transformed "blah" into "Bravo!" in a single stroke.

Everyone knows what chicken pot pie is. But do you know what "Volcano Chicken" is? It's chicken pot pie served in a puff pastry shell. And it was a shovel-it-in unqualified hit at my house the other night. Why Volcano Chicken? Because when it spills out over the sides of the puff pastry shell it resembles an erupting volcano. Well, not really, but the kiddos bought it hook, line, and sinker.

The following recipe is highly adaptable depending on your kids' tastes. Frozen vegetables are perfect for this recipe, since they thaw/cook at the same time. Badda-bing!

Volcano Chicken (or Turkey)
1 package of puff pastry shells
3 T unsalted butter
2 T flour
4 c. chicken or turkey broth
Salt and pepper to taste
1-2 T soy sauce
2 c. chopped cooked chicken or turkey
1 c. frozen peas

Optional Add-ins:
Mushrooms, sliced and sautéed until all liquid has been released
Diced carrots, steamed
Diced potatoes, boiled (or frozen hash browns)
Chopped onion, sautéed until golden
Chopped parsley

Cook the puff pastry shells according to package directions. While they're in the oven, prepare the "lava."

Make a roux by melting the butter in a saucepan, then adding the flour. Cook the roux for a couple of minutes to eliminate the taste of raw flour, then add the broth (slowly at first so you don't end up with lumps). When the gravy thickens, season it with salt, pepper, and soy sauce (go easy on the soy sauce--you're going for umami, a savory flavor, not salty).

Add the chicken or turkey, frozen peas, and any other add-ins you think your kids will eat. After the meat and vegetables are heated through, spoon it into the puff pastry shells.

This meal is good with rice and a steamed vegetable. Chow down!

Cream of Yuck Soup

I should know better than to serve vegan dishes to my family and expect them to like it. But, ever the optimist, I'll keep trying until I find something they like.

Today I made a vegan vegetable soup, starting with the basic aromatics (celery, carrots, and onions). My husband came over and asked, "Is there any meat in this?" and I said, "No, ha-ha!" Then he saw all the celery and said that he wouldn't eat it. I told him that he'd eaten lots of dishes I'd cooked using celery and he'd never even known it. He retorted that he was just being polite. Touché.

After the aromatics were cooked, I added other vegetables and a broth that came from boiling some lentils a while back. After it was done, I puréed it with an immersion blender.

To counter the whole vegan thing I made toasted ham sandwiches on a focaccia I had made two days earlier. Something for everyone, right?

Wrong. While Mike, my husband, ate his sandwich, the boys, Henry and Jack, both hardly touched their food.

Once again, I thought my cooking was dynamite. I'll keep trying to bring my family around.

Cream of Yuck Soup
2 T olive oil
2 stalks celery, diced
1 carrot, diced
1 medium onion, diced
2 cloves garlic, diced
1 red bell pepper, diced
4 c. broth (I used water left over after boiling some lentils)
1 can cannellini, drained and rinsed
1 can diced tomatoes and liquid
1 tomato can water
1 T. dried basil
salt and pepper

Heat olive oil in a large soup pot or Dutch oven. When it is hot, add the celery, carrot, onion, and garlic. After the onions become translucent, add the bell pepper. Let that cook for a couple of minutes until the pepper softens. Then add the broth, cannellini, tomatoes and liquid, water, basil, salt, and pepper. Turn off the heat when it comes to a boil, then use an immersion blender to purée the soup. If you don't have an immersion blender, then you can purée it in batches in a regular blender. Serve with a smile and let those compliments roll in!