One of my resolutions this year is to do only One Thing At A Time.  This is very, very hard for me.  Somedays, when I have 12 things on my to-do list, including writing, teaching, errands, chores–it’s physically painful not to do that one extra thing.  The commitment has meant, among other things, that I am trying hard not to Get Dinner Ready While Helping With Homework. Or not to Section The Cauliflower While Doing Laundry.  Or not to Peel Carrots In Ten Minutes Before School Pickup.  I’m trying hard to avoid Eating Dinner In The Car On My Way To Work.  It means other things, too, like not asking my kids to Get Ready For Soccer And Eat Your Snack. Or Clean Your Room and Get Ready for Bed.  You can extrapolate.

You can call it my Oxford comma moment.

However, I am still trying to cook with fresh food.

Leaving the fast food to Finn

Doing One Thing At A Time means I have to plan more than ever. It means I have to start early. It means I have been thinking hard about what I can do to minimize my cooking time between the hours of 3 and 6.

In my quest, my new appliance has been life changing. Technically, my slow cooker is not a traditional slow cooker. It also roasts, sautees, browns, and simmers.  I am still learning the best ways to use it: how the high/low settings work; how long to parboil pastas; best cooking times for different sizes of baked potatoes; how much extra liquid  to add to simmer-all-day soups.  But it has been on my countertop nearly every other day since I got I it, and it has helped me slow down and simplify in countless ways. To date, I’ve made delicious Swedish Meatballs and Beef Stew.  But also: macaroni and cheese, red sauce, baked ziti (with leftover red sauce), split pea soup, baked potatoes.  Not all the recipes are perfect. Yet. (Except the pea soup. And the hint to rub the potatoes lightly with olive oil and sprinkle with salt before baking.)  But it has made my life exponentially less stressful.  And that, as some of you know, makes everyone less stressed-out. Funny how that works. Funnier that it has taken me so long to learn the lesson.

So along comes last Sunday, when our local football team played my childhood football team for a spot in the Superbowl.  I have fond memories of dark winter afternoons, a house full of the smells of my mother’s red sauce, or spaghetti and meatballs, or lasagna, endless football games, tv trays, warm garlic bread. And so even though I didn’t need to use it, I pulled out my slow cooker, sauteed the meat, added the tomatoes, herbs, and wine, and set it to Simmer for the next, oh, 4 or 5 hours.

Right before game time I cooked the pasta. Ella made kidtinis. We watched the game.  We ate.  We put in all the stops.

Ella’s 49er Kidtini. It involved club soda, Meyer lemons, grenadine, and a whole lot of cherries. Also red sugar.

Slow Cooker Red Sauce

• 1/2 lb ground beef
• 1/2 lb ground pork
• 1 cup chopped onion
• 4 cloves garlic, finely chopped
• 1 bay leaf
• 2 cans Italian tomatoes
• 4 sprigs thyme
• 1/4-1/2 cup red wine

1. With slow cooker on Sautee/brown, sautee meats with a pinch of salt until cooked through.
2. Add onion, garlic, and bay leaf, and cook, stirring constantly, until onion begins to soften.
3. Add tomatoes, thyme, wine.
4. Simmer for 4-5 hours.

This easily makes enough to dress 2 lbs of pasta. Save 1/2 for a batch of quick baked ziti during the week.

This weekend we went to a holiday party where a friend was mixing a drink he calls The Grinch, which really is anything but (unless maybe you’re around the person who drank them the day after…)

A Grinch is basically a Grasshoppper made with vanilla ice cream  instead of cream and garnished with a peppermint stick and crushed candy cane sugar on the rim.  I actually didn’t drink them, sweet drinks not being my thing, but Kory did, and I can vouch that they’re sort of fun.

We made the Christmas Kidtini version for the kids the next night: a mint chip shake + green food coloring, garnished with candy canes and red sugar on the rim.

We still haven’t made the milk punch, or any cookies, or candy…but we are slowly but surely finding some Christmas spirit.

This is an unlikely and unpractical post for the middle of winter if, like me, you’re cold in any state but Hawaii.  But it’s not wholly inappropriate if you’re like my kids, and are not ever bothered by the cold, even in the middle of blizzard.  In an effort to keep my hungry kids out of trouble while I was cooking dinner on Saturday, I had Finn put together a plate of snacks (cheese, crackers, turkey, olives) and let Ella make the kidtinis. The problem was we had no bubbly water and no juice. She concocted a kind of smoothie with milk, ice, and mango and coconut syrups.

I was a skeptical, but the drink was really pretty, and–because she somehow found just the right proportion of milk and ice and syrup–perfectly light and not too sweet. In fact, it was a lot like shave ice.  It melted in the mouth.

Also, it reminded me of first snow. And the blizzard we experienced over vacation. Which was also a beautiful, serendipitous, icy mess.

Tropical Blizzard Smoothie

1 part low fat milk to about 3 parts ice

Equal parts mango and coconut syrups, about 2 T each

Blend in a blender. Adjust syrups to taste.

If you type the word “cocktails” in the search box up to the right there, you’ll find about a dozen posts and recipes, mostly by Lisa, though my family makes good use of cocktail hour ourselves. This time of year, while most folks are stirring up jugs of eggnog, Lisa and I are happily mixing pitchers of milk punch, spiked for us and plain for the kids.

But much as I love it, milk punch is kind of a dessert (even when, as I often do — though Lisa might think this is heresy — I leave out the cream and even make it with low-fat milk); I can’t drink it before dinner (that is, during cocktail hour). And while I am happy to have a post-kids’ bedtime drink, some days, of course, call for a cocktail before dinner and one after.

Enter the Maple Leaf, which Tony mixed up for me for the first time last week. It is both appropriately wintry and works with the primary ingredient we enjoy here at my parents’ home in Connecticut. So don’t pour all that maple syrup on your pancakes and waffles this week; save some for cocktail hour!

Combine in a cocktail shaker:
3/4 oz. maple syrup
3/4 oz. lemon juice
2 oz. bourbon

Shake well with ice and serve on the rocks.

Part of last week went like this:  party, school, party, no school, faculty meeting, teacher conference, mother/daughter date,  soccer, soccer, soccer, birthday party. We barely had time to breath much less cook something new for dinner. In between all this? Final edits of the page proofs were due for my book. We’ve been eating a lot of leftovers. And tacos.

I know that we’re not the only ones being bombarded with a mad rush of events right now because a friend (who’s son is a just few days younger than Finn)  had exactly the same schedule of family/kid birthday parties and tag team round of soccer games.  We all go through periods like this, where the events of our lives crowd around us like dementors, threatening to suck all the happiness out of the things we’ve actually chosen to do.  And here’s the thing:  all of the things we were doing, they weren’t chores. I love my job. I love going to my kids games & they love playing. What’s more fun than a birthday party? Or seeing your grandparents? Or a day off from school where you can mix purple potions and see how they react to various household baking supplies (and them dump them on the only good carpet in the house…? The steam cleaning I could have done without, but everything else….? Times like this I have to remind myself that most of what we do makes us happy, and we have to make time just to breathe and sleep and come together.

Last weekend we did it this way: On Saturday night, we got home from soccer in the dark & sent the kids directly to showers to wash the grime of sweat and the soccer field off them (& before the any-minute-now meltdown could get worse). They emerged clean and calm in pajamas, and we sat down to quiche (made earlier in the day & ready to go), green beans (cooked while they were showering), fresh bread, and white beans heated gently with garlic and olive oil (a perennial favorite).  I lit candles.

And  they got a kidtini for the first time in a long time.  The only thing new about this recipe was the presentation.

Bubbly water, raspberry Torani syrup, clementine slice in a sugar rimmed glass

Kory and I had prosecco cocktails, my first drink in 3 weeks, a celebration of turning in the final final version of my book. (Sugar cube + Bitters+Prosecco + lemon twist). Things actually slowed down and for forty-five minutes or so, we just relaxed, ate, enjoyed doing nothing.  Outside, it was very dark, but those life sucking dementors? They were nowhere to be found.

]]> http://www.learningtoeatbook.com/2010/11/time-to-slow-down/feed/ 1 http://www.learningtoeatbook.com/2010/11/lemon-honey/ http://www.learningtoeatbook.com/2010/11/lemon-honey/#comments Wed, 10 Nov 2010 16:44:24 +0000 caroline http://www.learningtoeatbook.com/?p=2965 by Caroline

It has been six days now since this cold clamped its vise grip on my head and chest, six days of trying to wash it way with gallons of tea, at first, and then just hot water with lemon and honey. Usually by this point in a cold, I’m tired of the drink and craving a milkshake (even though I know it’ll bring on a coughing fit) but not this time. Yesterday, I even hauled a pile of cookbooks into bed with me to read up on lemons, and found a chapter dedicated to them in the incomparable Laurie Colwin’s More Home Cooking. After detailing the various delicious things that can be made more delicious with the addition of a lemon (roast chicken; any kind of fish; lentils; salads; rice pudding; pound cake; biscuits), she writes:

“And when you have run out of things to cook with lemons, you can use them as medicine. When you or a loved one is sick with the flu, a very good remedy is

Hot Lemonade

For this you need one big water glass. Into the bottom of it put 1 large spoonful of honey and 1 cinnamon stick. Slice half a lemon into thin slices and put those in, too. Now squeeze the remaining lemon half, and 1 more lemon, and put the juice of both into the glass. Fill with hot water, stir, and serve to the sick person with the glass wrapped in a napkin.”

I can’t say it has cured me, but the cinnamon stick is a nice change of pace, and one I’m sticking with as I lie in bed, re-reading the rest of Colwin’s lovely book.

We have a great debate going in our house: which goes in a root beer float first, the ice cream or the soda?

This has been an ongoing experiment all summer long, since we discovered Trader Joe’s has a good bottled root beer (& a caffeine free cola that’s pretty terrific, too.) We don’t drink bottled soda as rule around here (although we do indulge in homemade kidtinis), but I’ve been making an exception lately and I keep a few bottles of this soda on hand for fun and nostalgia.  It’s great for a weekend cocktail and floats make for an easy, fun dessert in the hot weather.  Especially for guests and grandparents.  Lately, about once a week Ella will mix up a cherry coke before dinner or we’ll have root beer floats after dinner.

In our effort to settle the ice cream/soda debate, we stumbled upon Bobby Flay’s adult version, which includes bourbon and is pretty much the perfect end to a barbeque if you’re a grown-up.

To wit, our method is this, and involves floating the ice cream on the soda. But you put the ice cream in first and get a slightly creamier drink.

Fill a large frosty mug with root beer (and a little crushed ice if you like. It’s nice if it’s colder, but it also gets in the way).  Float 1 scoop vanilla ice cream on the soda.  If you’re an adult, add a up to a shot of bourbon over the ice cream. Top the ice cream with fresh whipped cream.

For adults only

One of the magical things about trips to New York as a kid were trips to the whimsical Serendipity 3 after seeing a show or going to a museum.  We went with family, we went with friends, and now, when we’re back east (which is not so often), we take our own kids. It’s not that the food is that great, or that it’s an easy place to take kids.  In fact,the food is sort of average, and the wait can stretch well past an hour. In the cold and dark. On the street. With tired and hungry and cranky kids.  But the place is full of charm and eccentricity and serendipitous gifts on the first floor, and it’s magical if you’re a kid. The foot long hot dogs really are a foot long and they serve something called Frrrozen Hot Chocolate, which is worth the wait in itself. Even for the grown-ups.

Frozen Hot Chocolate is rich and creamy and icy and made with a deep, dark mix of incredible chocolate. It’s served in an enormous goblet with a pillow of whipped cream and chocolate shavings.  It’s legendary.  For years, it was nearly impossible to replicate.  Now the recipe is readily available, and I decided this summer to introduce my kids to it with the recipe provided by the restaurant and available on Epicurious. With a little more searching, you can turn up this recipe that has a more particular list of chocolates. But the generic one is terrific and made with things you most likely already have in your house.  This recipe really makes enough for 4, but if you really want to recreate the Serendipity experience, use if to serve 2–or one enormous goblet to share.

Needless to say, the kids loved it. The husband and best friend were pretty happy after dinner, too.

A few months ago, I had a gin fizz at the Moss Room in San Francisco and fell in love.  You might remember my first unsuccessful search for orange flower water .  I did find it, however, at Whole Foods, and a few weekends ago I whipped (or shook) a couple up for the husband and me.  They were done in the late afternoon on a Saturday, and we promptly banished the kids to their bedrooms for a lovely 25 minutes, and Kory and I sat in the living room and had a quiet cocktail.

The drink is outstanding. It’s a little fizzy from the splash of seltzer, creamy but not rich, and slightly sweet.  It’s my new favorite, and I urge you to try it.

Recipes online abound.  I used this one, originally posted here, and it was perfect.

• 1-1/2 ounces gin (Old Tom gin if you can get it)
• 1/2 ounce lemon juice
• 1/2 ounce lime juice
• 1 ounce simple syrup
• 3-4 drops orange flower water
• 2 drops vanilla extract (very optional; there’s some controversy over whether this was ever really used, but it does add a nice touch)
• 2 ounces cream
• 1 egg white
• Soda water

Shake all ingredients except the soda water WITHOUT ICE very vigorously for at least one minute, preferably longer — the longer the better. Then add ice and shake for 1-2 minutes, as long as you can manage, until extremely cold and frothy. Strain into a tall thin glass, or a very large old fashioned glass, and top with soda water. Stir gently.

When we finally let the kids out, we were refreshed and relaxed (an argument for making an small oasis of time for the adults in the house, even in the middle of the day), and Kory mixed up a version for them, which involved bubbly water, a few drops of orange flower water, a dash of (maybe raspberry?) syrup, and a small scoop of  vanilla ice cream.  Certainly, a better, more authentic kids version would involve lemon and lime syrup, but we didn’t have any in the house. We’re happy to improvise when necessary, and the kids, of course didn’t care.  This was probably their favorite one yet.

I had gone to BevMo to find Orange Flower Water, to recreate the Gin Fizz I had at the Moss Room, but they were out.

Then I saw Blood Orange Bitters, which immediately reminded me of our road trip  and meal at the Hotel Del Coronado last summer.

There, I had a lovely drink of champagne and blood orange bitters, which I had always assumed was really fancy and unobtainable at home. But there it was, in the dead of winter, in my own hometown, the bottle of blood orange bitters, for under $5, so I bought it. At home I read the lable, and there was my drink, which we mixed up that afternoon for company. It’s a lovely bubbly drink with the exotic, not too sweet flavor of blood orange. The sugar cube gives it just a touch of sweetness. I made it with Prosecco, of course, but any bubbly will do, I’m sure.

This is the kind of thing I love:  something that feels very fancy, that you think you can never have at home, because the ingredients are too expensive or exotic. But in fact, a lovely version can be made with a decent bottle of your favorite, inexpensive Prosecco (many are available for $10-12) and a serendipitous find at BevMo, which is not exactly a bastion of exclusive, foody culture. It’s more like the work horse of a home that likes their cocktails on a budget.

It’s a lovely drink, it’s seasonal and delicious, and one of those things that can just make you happy. The color is glorious and the flavor just a bit suprising.  It’s probably what we’ll be toasting each other with this weekend.  And for winter weekends to come.  At least until the bitters run out.

Blood Orange Prosecco Cocktail

• Blood orange bitters
• Chilled Prosecco
• Sugar cube
• Sliced blood oranges for garnish (optional)

For each drink, place a sugar cube in the bottom of the glass and cover with bitters.  Pour chilled prosecco on top. Garnish with blood orange.