Review: In the Kitchen, by Dona Schwartz
May 27th, 2010by Caroline
Lisa lives in a modernist Eichler house, with glass doors opening from its bright, efficient kitchen to a sunny back yard with citrus trees and a generous picnic bench. I live in a renovated San Francisco Edwardian, with a cork-floored kitchen, a maple island and deep red tile fired in a local pottery studio. My kitchen, with its adjoining family room, is the heart of my home, the center of all our many gatherings, and I expect Lisa feels the same way about hers. So when the opportunity arose to review the new photography collection by Dona Schwartz, In the Kitchen, I jumped at the chance. After all, cookbooks overflow my kitchen bookshelves and spill into the living room; why not add a kitchen coffee table book to the mix?
But In the Kitchen, while gorgeous, doesn’t quite fit with the glossy art books. Turning the pages of its color portraits, interspersed with poems by Marion Winik, is like stepping into a documentary film; these are not posed family pictures, nor do they focus exclusively on significant moments in the life of her blended family of eight, which includes her partner, Ken, and their respective three children, ranging in age here from 10 to 21. Instead, Schwartz learned “to create photographs with one hand while wielding a spatula with the other,” and the result is a beautifully intimate portrayal of family life.
Inspector, 2005
The project began on Schwartz’ birthday in 2002, when, with the kids giving her the night off to make a celebration dinner and cake, she found herself at loose ends; her normal role in the kitchen having been happily supplanted by her kids, she decided to get the camera out so that she could still be a part of the action. Schwartz’ professional role as a photographic artist was already firmly established; her earlier books, Waucoma Twilight: Generations of the Farm (Smithsonian Institution Press,1992) and Contesting the Superbowl (Routledge, 1997) are fascinating photographic ethnographies. But turning the camera onto her own family that evening piqued her interest and although, as she says in her introduction, “doing mom work and photographic work at the same time made my life in the kitchen more harried,” she discovers an interesting story unfolding before her eyes: her widowed mother moves close by and becomes a regular fixture in the kitchen (and a reluctant subject in the photos); Schwartz and her boyfriend Ken move in together and blend their families, a move that suspends the photography project for months. “When I next looked through the viewfinder, I confronted a new family,” writes Schwartz, and so “changing my lens to allow for a wider angle of view, the project came to encompass the process of becoming a family, or, more accurately, blending two to become…to become what? (One big happy family? Ken and I were hopeful.)”
Grilled Chicken, 2004
She and Ken devise a “blueprint” for their approach to parenting this new family, and family dinner is a key part of bringing the disparate personalities together; they vow to eat dinner together every night, at least during the school week, and then face a new challenge:
“One was a vegetarian, while one cared little for food in general. All took turns as contrarians. One week some of them like red meat, the next week it was anathema to a new subset. Let’s all make pizza! Everyone likes pizza, right? We’d try again. Tastes changed week by week, and forgetting who like what could be unforgivable: ‘You don’t even know what your own kid likes?!’ Trying to find something that everyone would eat was nearly impossible, and even finding a customizable menu was a challenge.”
Fried Egg, 2004
But they eat. They cook! This book is gorgeous evidence of their cooking. What’s depicted in these pages is not necessarily fancy: eggs are fried, onions sautéed, cookie dough dropped onto sheets. It’s family cooking. One of my favorite pictures shows two brothers, side by side at the stove, holding upended containers — one tin of olive oil, one a bottle of ketchup – over their respective frying pans. On the facing page, the youngest child, Lara, arranges a bright yellow plate with a simple sliced tomato and mozzarella salad while her step-sister, Chelsea, leans against the counter eating a green bean. Another wonderful picture shows two at the stove with spatulas in hand, one sautéing green beans, the other with a tomatoe-y pan of onions, with Eric standing in the background, munching cereal from a box. The image is framed to concentrate our attention entirely on the active elbows and wrists as they stir and snack, the satisfying parallel composition of forearms, skillet handles and spatulas offering a coherent respite in the midst of chaotic family life.
Cinnamon Life, 2004
Blending a family can’t be easy — Schwartz admits, “Try as [the kids] might to remove dinner from the list of obligatory rites, Ken and I held fast, and medicated the indigestion our decision often produced”– but there’s a lovely unity in these photographs, a comfortable feeling of togetherness.
Cherry Coke, 2004
Sometimes I wish I could be a fly on the wall and watch my family when I’m not around. I know my presence – even when I’m not directly involved in their activities – affects them, and I’d love that impossible glimpse of them on their own. Looking at Dona Schwartz’ family photos makes me think anew of this problem; she’s not in the images, and so it might be easy to think of the pictures simply as the result of her camera, but they are equally the result of a mother’s sensitive observation. As Alison Nordstrom writes in her preface to the book, “This family is what it is because she is part of it; it may even be what it is because she has photographed it.”
The family — like all families, always in a bit of flux — changed again while the pictures were being taken. Her mother suddenly died (a gathering after her funeral is depicted in these pages, though the only sign of the event is the family’s uncharacteristically dark and formal clothes; captions at the back of book make the occasions clear), and two more kids moved out, joining the two already off at college as occasional visitors home. After two years of pictures, Schwartz writes, “When I looked through the viewfinder there were fewer teenagers and I saw them less often.. . . I came to realize our kitchen moment was passing.”
In the Kitchen offers such a beautiful look at her family’s “kitchen moment,” it makes me grateful that I can expect many more years of my family home and gathered in the kitchen, but also optimistic that even after this intense period of our own kitchen moment has passed, it will occasionally, if temporarily, recur again. As for Schwartz, she writes, “I no longer actively scrutinize or assess, no longer search for clues to emergent identity. I rarely experience the pleasure of framing a telling kitchen-moment I have discovered and rendered visible in a photograph. I now seek these picture pleasures elsewhere. Instead I can often kick back, go with the flow, and watch our family cook.”
all images copyright Dona Schwartz
A Celebration
May 25th, 2010by Caroline
My father-in-law, James Grant, would have been 86 today. He was a husband and father, an engineer and artist, a backyard wine maker and meat smoker. He is remembered, by his friends and family, for his generosity, his straight talk, his gorgeous paintings and sculpture, and his great cooking. I regret that I never knew him, but we remember to mark his birthday each year with his pasta puttanesca, a good salad and garlic bread, and a bottle of his wine — this year, a 1982 Amador Valley Cabernet. Cheers!
Fish & Chips
May 19th, 2010by Lisa
In keeping with the fast and easy snack theme, here’s quick little recipe I found in last month’s Sunset Magazine, though I can’t seem to find it online.
These are great with drinks for a pre-dinner snack, or a party appetizer, or side dish for a substantial salad, or just because. The kids liked them, but we saved them for ourselves.
Salt & Pepper potato chips, topped with smoked salmon, greek-style yogurt, snipped chives
Farm Morning
May 18th, 2010by Caroline
Henry James famously wrote that “summer afternoon” were the two most beautiful words in the English language, but to me, the words “farm breakfast” are equally sweet and evocative. They make me remember childhood Saturday mornings spent rereading Farmer Boy’s descriptions of maple sugar pancake stacks, or my mom’s stories of summer mornings on her uncle’s dairy farm, where breakfast often included leftover peach or strawberry pie with soft whipped cream. “Farm breakfast” means fresh, abundant, filling.
When we were in Illinois last month, friends mentioned that a local farm puts on a regular Saturday breakfast; maybe we would be interested in going? Yes, we would! And so we made our way to Prairie Fruits Farm, where they raise goats and fruit, for a lovely breakfast of goat milk and goat cheese goodies: strata with chard, caramelized onions and goat cheese; walnut spice coffee cake; lemon cake; Mexican hot chocolate made with goat milk.
Somehow I failed to get any pictures of the food (or even the menu), but trust me when I say it was delicious, and afterwards we spent plenty of time outside thanking the goats:
Sometimes Dinner Looks Like This
May 16th, 2010by Caroline
My family’s vegetarian, so our meals never fall into the classic “meat and two veg” pattern many of us grew up with, but most of our suppers still do offer something recognizable as a main dish and some other things that are clearly the sides. But not always.
I’ve written in the past about a dinner the boys and I make together sometimes when Tony is out, a sort of vegetable buffet, and recently we did a springtime version: pickled carrots, beets, and cauliflower, roasted new potatoes, snap peas, steamed broccoli with lemon, spinach with pine nuts and raisins, fava bean puree, and hummus. A little bread and cheese might have rounded it out nicely, but we happened not to have any, and the kids were happy to dip vegetables into the purees (or even, in Eli’s case, just eat hummus by the spoonful). It felt like a picnic, and on a foggy night in San Francisco, the bright colors and distinct flavors brought a little splash of sunshine into the room.
Pickles!
May 13th, 2010by Caroline
We joke around here sometimes about how I don’t cook dinner, that I only cook the accessory foods (ie, granola, desserts), and thanks to my dinner-cooking husband there’s more than a kernel of truth in that. I like baking, and also it appeals to my sense of economy (there may be a greater discrepancy between cost of ingredients and cost of final product in baked goods than any other food you can buy at a market).
But this spring, there hasn’t been time for much baking because I’ve been going a little crazy with the vegetables. I signed up for a CSA to pick up at my son’s school (because, vegetables + kid in one stop? I couldn’t resist!), without dropping either our other weekly produce pick-up (which tends to supply more fruit), the bi-weekly mystery box, or even my farmer’s market habit. It’s just hard to resist all this great spring produce, and we’re going to be out of town most of June, so I’m stocking up while I can. And then, trying to find new ways to use all the bounty.
Inspiration came, as it often does, from the farmer’s market, but from a different source than usual: not a produce vendor, but the pickle people! The Pick-a-Peck stand is a regular fixture at our farmer’s market, and the pickles are great: spicy, crispy, delicious. One night before dinner, a friend and I ate an entire jar of the pickled green beans. But I started (sorry, pickle people) to think about how much I was spending on vegetables, vinegar, and spices and decided to cook up some of my own. So far, the pickled cauliflower is my new favorite — it’s fabulously crunchy with great flavor — but the pickled carrots are delicious, too, and the beets are a mainstay for me, summer and winter. I don’t recall any longer where I found the beet recipe, which exists on a scribbled piece of steno paper in my recipe binder; if you recognize it, please let me know so I can give credit:
2 lbs beets
2 c white vinegar
1 c granulated sugar
2 T kosher salt
1 t allspice berries
1/4 t whole cloves
1/2 cinnamon stick
Simmer the beets in boiling water until tender, 30-60 minutes, depending on their size. Let cool and then peel and slice.
Bring remaining ingredients to a boil, add the sliced beets and cook for one minute. Cool and refrigerate.
These all keep for about two weeks in the fridge, though they never last that long in my house.
Snacks, disguised
May 12th, 2010You know the moment: dinner is not quite ready but the kids are starving. You don’t want to give them a snack because that would ruin everything. What do you do?
First, I enlist them. Even Finn, at 5, is old enough to set the table. And if they know that I’ll get dinner on the table more quickly, they’re glad to help out. And I, of course, am glad for the help.
Then, I find something fast and healthy and good-looking to give them that won’t ruin dinner. I make them sit down at the place they just set and enjoy it, their precursor to dinner. In other words, they get a kid’s appetizer. These days, it’s often a tomato surprise, but what I serve depends on the season (what’s fresh and ready-to-go?) and the dinner plan. Pulling a side dish from your menu and serving it first can sate your kids’ hunger and also create that sense of ceremony and specialness that comes with eating in courses. They have to slow down to eat, they eat one thing at a time, they feel like they’re getting a treat, or something special, and most important your meal isn’t hijacked by little ravenous appetites, (and theirs) isn’t ruined.
I think it’s important that it look good, so it feels like the beginning of dinner, not something you threw to the zoo animals. Also, it should be very, very simple. For instance, last week, they got a cute dish of sugar snaps, and a small slice of bread with fresh mozzarella drizzled with olive oil and a little salt.
For an added treat, I put a splash of homemade (by Ella) lemonade in their bubbly water and added a garnish of lime. They have a thing about limes.
Snacks, On Foraging
May 5th, 2010by Lisa
Basically, I find snacks overrated. When Ella, especially, was really young, I rarely gave her those mid-morning and mid-afternoon snacks, mostly because then she wouldn’t eat her meals. Over the years, I’ve found that the best way to ensure my kids eat a healthy lunch (or dinner) is to minimize what I feed them in between meals. Of course, since I rarely say “never”, they have certainly eaten snacks at playgroup, and on those few mornings they attended preschool, and I did bring fruit and small things like rice crackers to parks, etc., but “snack time” was not a regular part of our routine. Now, they rarely snack on a regular basis, although we did have the cake + milk routine for a while, Sometimes, when Ella has a early soccer or softball practice, we make a small, quick smoothie before she heads out the door. But just as often, we don’t snack after school.
This, of course, doesn’t keep Finn from asking for food when he’s home with me, and I still don’t want to feed him things that will kill his appetite for lunch. Nor does it keep him from foraging for whatever he can find to satisfy his sweet tooth. But I want to teach him to eat in moderation, and to eat (mostly) healthy things. So I keep some crackers in the house, but on shelf that the kids can’t reach without climbing, and most of the time, our cookie selection is embarrassingly poor. I often hide the my chocolate bar, so the husband doesn’t eat it all at once–and for the most part, we eat everything, slowly, in small amounts. For instance, the kids’ chocolate Easter Bunnies? Still sitting in a bowl on our hutch. The Halloween candy rarely gets eaten in total, & the same goes for the Valentine’s day candy. Certainly, I have found both of them, high on the shelves in our pantry, pulling down the peanut butter crackers. And I have found a mysterious hole in the marshmallow bag and 1/2 the contents missing. (For which they also must scale the pantry shelves, which was entirely Finn’s doing.) And I did discover both of them, huddled behind the pantry door a year ago, eating raw oats. (Really, I do feed them. ) But mostly, they’re good about asking. I think.
All of this is to say that my philosophy is to keep a good range of mostly healthy stuff within reach of the kids, so when Finn (or Ella) goes foraging, they have a range of things to choose from, but none of them are really going to ruin the next meal. We always have: cheeses, nuts, dried & frozen fruit, lots and lots of fresh fruit and vegetables (carrots and ranch or thousand island dressing is really popular when we have it). Whatever’s in season stays out on the table. (I am waiting impatiently for those cherries….) They take oranges off our tree in the winter, and tomatoes off the plants in the summer. Sometimes we have yogurt. The upshot is that they get the power to make decisions, & I can give them some freedom. So, yesterday, when Finn came out of the pantry with a bag of peanuts and another of almonds, I was happy to supply the remainder of the bag of raisins and dried cranberries and the rest of the pistachios:
I let him mix away.
And he munched happily.
Then we played marbles. And ate more peanuts.
Al Fresco Dinner with Cuban Black Beans
April 29th, 2010by Lisa
We’re having a mini-love affair with all things Cuban in our home, which began with Picadillo and may have reached its peak when I read Pete Wells’ piece about scorching but not ruining a batch of black beans.
These beans take some time, but they are surprisingly easy to make and they are completely, fantastically delicious. Delicious as in you could eat them for your last meal delicious and never regret a thing. They’re great with rice, or a little picadillo, or fresh tortillas and a side of your favorite slaw. In the spontaneous spirit of Wells’ piece, I’ve found they’re still terrific if you leave out the ham hock (but better with it in), and certainly you can adjust the heat of the jalapeno for your family. Certainly, vegetarians can find a work-around for the meat. They’re great for a family dinner, they’re great leftover, and they’re really great for company. However you subtly adapt these for your kitchen, just try these. I promise you: The husband loves them. The kids adore them. They’re a revelation all around.
We ate them first on a warm spring night, for a really casual al fresco dinner on the lovely bench the husband built. Finn set the bench.
Ella personalized the place cards.
Here’s the recipe as it originally appeared in the New York Times:
Cuban Black Beans
- 11/2 green peppers, stemmed and seeded
- 10 garlic cloves
- 1 pound dried black beans, rinsed and picked over to remove any stones
- 1 smoked ham hock
- 2 bay leaves
- 5 teaspoons salt, or to taste
- 1/4 cup olive oil
- 4 slices thick bacon, cut into 1/2-inch pieces
- 1 Spanish onion, diced
- 1 jalapeño, stemmed and finely chopped
- 1 teaspoon dried oregano
- 1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
- 1/2 teaspoon freshly ground
- black pepper
- 3 tablespoons distilled white vinegar
- 1 tablespoon turbinado or other brown sugar.
1. Cut 1 green pepper into 1-inch squares. Smash and peel 4 of the garlic cloves. Put the green pepper and garlic into a large pot with the beans, ham hock, bay leaves and 1 tablespoon salt. Add 2 quarts water and bring to a boil. Cover the pot and simmer until the beans are tender, an hour or more.
2. Meanwhile, make a sofrito. Cut the remaining ½ green pepper into ¼-inch dice. Peel and finely chop the remaining garlic. Heat the olive oil in a very large skillet over medium-high heat. Add the bacon and cook, stirring occasionally, until it starts to brown, about 5 minutes. Add the green pepper and onion and cook, stirring, until slightly softened, about 3 minutes. Add the garlic, jalapeño (leave out the seeds if you don’t want it too spicy), oregano, cumin, black pepper and 2 teaspoons salt and stir for another minute. Pour in the vinegar and scrape any browned bits from bottom of pan with a wooden spoon. This is your sofrito.
3. When the beans are cooked, discard the bay leaf. Remove and set aside the ham hock and let it cool. Transfer 1 cup of beans to small bowl, mash them into a paste with the back of a fork and return to the pot. Add the sofrito, then the sugar. Pull the meat from the ham hock, leaving behind any white sinew or gristle. Chop the ham into ½-inch pieces and return it to the bean pot.
4. Stir the beans well and bring to a boil over medium heat, then lower to a simmer and cook, uncovered, for 20 minutes or so, skimming any foam from the top. Taste for salt and serve with white rice. Serves 8 to 10. Adapted from “Tastes Like Cuba,” by Eduardo Machado and Michael Domitrovich.
Lunch with Finn
April 28th, 2010by Lisa
I’m in my last year of having a little one at home (though little is a relative term for my son, who has never been small). Finn attends preschool only 3 mornings a week, I have a sitter for about 5 or 6 more hours, and the rest of the time, we do important 5-year-old things, like Lego, and Indiana Jones, and playing in the park, or taking short day trips, or reading, or napping, or building, or planting, or cooking. We have a lot of unstructured play time. We talk a lot. He plays alone a lot. Some days, we stay in our pajamas until 10 am. It’s been a terrific time, with just the two of us, and while he is endlessly excited about starting kindergarten at the big school, and I am looking forward to to more time for my work, I’m also sad to see these lovely years end.
One of the most tangible things we do, on occasion, is go out to lunch, just the two of us, some place local and casual. I’ll pick him up from school, we’ll run an errand, we’ll find a place to eat. He usually has a say in what we eat and where. Sometimes we go to a terrific little breakfast/lunch spot in town because they give the kids wikistiks. (Also the food is good.)
Another time, we found a hot pretzel on an SF trip, before we spontaneously decided to wander into Chinatown. We came home with some great almond cookies.
And last week, he was dead set on grilled cheese, which we found in a little lunch shop, where we were able to eat outside in the middle of a street art fair.
Surprisingly, the Lays chips he chose were a lot healthier (less fat, less salt, more vitamins) then mine, a fact which still makes him laugh.
He got his grilled cheese. I got a terrific turkey club. We both had Italian sodas. He was sweet and grateful. We sat in the sun and ate and chatted about things, like whether or not we liked the paintings lining the street, why his dad is famous for his kidtinis, whether or not that plane flying overhead was a jet plane or not, the plans in his head for his new Lego construction. It was an easy, joyful meal. My son is growing up. Fast. But that also means that we can enjoy being together in surprising new ways. I love his company more than ever, and most of the time, he still enjoys mine. A little pause for lunch together, alone, in the middle of the day, with a little bit of good, easy food, is a simple way to enjoy each other’s company on our own terms. An easy, affordable meal out with your child lets you be together without distraction, without the burden of preparation or clean up, without interruption. It makes you pay attention.
