When my friend Ursula moved to Portugal for a year and said she had room for us all to come stay, I started looking into airfares. When she started posting pictures of Portuguese pastry on her website, I booked the tickets. She wrote me about her favorite pastry shop in Lisbon, and said we could stop in on our way home from the airport.

Now I happen to think that all food is stories, but the story behind Pasteis de Belem is a particularly good one, involving nuns and a secret recipe over two hundred years old.

There was no way I was missing a trip to this bakery. But our flight arrived too late in the afternoon to go out for what’s really a morning pastry snack, and besides, there was a medieval fair to attend. We kept the pastry shop high on the to-do list and went to bed.

Not many hours later, Ben appeared at the side of my bed. Before I could even think to curse the jet lag which I assumed had woken him, his face startled me wide awake. He was grimacing in pain, sweaty, crying. He clutched his left side and moaned as he crawled in next to me. I thought at first that he’d gotten sick from his candy apple dinner the night before, but he insisted it wasn’t his stomach, but a spot lower down, on the left. I flashed to countless readings of Madeleine and Tony googled “appendicitis,” which confirmed everything we were witnessing. I woke Ursula, and her husband drove us into Lisbon, quiet in the pre-dawn hours, to visit the pediatric ER.

And this is where the story suddenly improves. Not just because the walls of the ER were painted with a space theme that delighted my child, and not because the wonderful doctor addressed herself, in perfect English, directly to Ben as she examined him carefully, but because somehow his symptoms all disappeared. Two hours later, instead of sitting by a hospital bed while Ben recovered from an appendectomy, we were sitting in the just-opened, nearly empty Pasteis de Belem, enjoying a sleepy but amazingly delicious breakfast:

The pastry is like a cross between phyllo and pie crust, incredibly light, buttery and flakey, while the egg custard filling is light and not very sweet; the pasteis are served with shakers of cinnamon and powdered sugar (if you get the pastry to go, you’re given perfect little packets of the toppings). They look a little burned on top from being run under a broiler, which just caramelizes the sugar in the filling and gives the pastry topping an unexpected extra crunch. We ate plates full at the bakery, took more home to the rest of the family, and then resumed our vacation, just so grateful that we could.

after the ER

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.

There’s nothing like a road trip to create some powerful family food memories. It’s been about forty years, but everyone in my family still remembers our road trip from Tokyo to the mountain village of Nojiri and our stop at a roadside stand for snacks. My oldest brother picked out what he thought was a fudgsicle; he innocently unwrapped the package, eagerly took a bite, and quickly discovered it was, in fact, frozen bean paste. None of us has ever looked at a fudgsicle with quite the same pure anticipation again.

Happily, my family’s recent road trip didn’t create any such searing memories. The place we stay in Yosemite doesn’t have great food, but we know that and know how to deal with it: we pack a lot of snacks. We pack everything we need for 3 days of breakfasts and lunches and we pick our way carefully through the over-priced and mediocre dinner menu, knowing that the experience of sledding and skating and swimming twice a day among some of the world’s most beautiful mountains can almost make up for the lack of a nice dinner (a decent glass of wine helps the adults; coloring pages and more dessert than usual help the kids, who were served, at our low point, an astonishing bowl of spaghetti that was somehow both burned and mushy).

In the past, we made our Yosemite trip with another family. The first year, without any advance food planning, we discovered we’d brought terrifically complimentary groceries: we had crackers, they had cheese; we had dried fruit, they had nuts; we had carrots, they had hummus. Last year, we coordinated to take full advantage of the small hotel fridges; I think they even brought a toaster oven. This year, with our friends now living in India, we went on our own and I had to be more strategic than usual, but you can see how I managed to get the fridge stuffed (that’s a banana bread wrapped in the foil, and a big lentil/Israeli couscous salad in the plastic tub underneath it). I kept the freezer full of powerballs and frozen berries.

When it was time to leave the mountains for the second half of our road trip, we still had plenty of sandwich fixings, salad, dried fruit and crackers to get us through the miles, but still, it’s a road trip! We stopped for fries at In n’ Out and waved hello to the beach.

Over labor day weekend, I flew to Los Angeles to visit my friend, Melissa Clark,  the novelist (not the food writer). You can read her book about a girl impregnated by a lazy sperm or catch up with her on her blog.  Melissa is one of those friends you thank the world for every day.  She has kept me sane over many years, and as her blog attests, she is apparently connected to everything in the best way.  Every time I see her, no matter in what city or state, she’s always finding fun things to do, great places to eat, and amazing people to hang out with.  She’s also the one who connected me to my husband.   And on this, long-awaited, much-needed  trip, she not only re-connected me to myself, but connected me to picadillo, a classic Cuban dish of highly spiced, savory-sweet ground beef, with which I fell immediately, irrevocably in love.

Now, this is a little strange, because Melissa is a vegetarian. But she lives on the beach, in Marina del Rey (please don’t stalk her) and we walked to Venice for breakfast at a Cuban inspired restaurant, where I had Huevos con Picadillo.  Aside from the fact that we had a lingering, adult breakfast (imagine…), in the sun, on the Saturday of a long weekend, the picadillo was like nothing I had ever tasted before. It doesn’t look like much on the plate, but the flavors are rich and complex.

When I came home, I scoured the internet for recipes, emailed my friend Richard Fleming who wrote an amazing book about walking across Cuba. If anyone had an authentic picadillo recipe, it would be him. But alas, he did not (which is not, I promise you, a reason not to read his book, you should.)

Rich did write to me that regarding Cuban black beans, in the “Oriente, in the Santiago region, they are made “more flavorful” by the addition of a tablespoon or so of sugar near the end of cooking…”  I used this bit of information to adapt one of the many recipes I  found to come up with one that approximated what I had eaten in Los Angeles.  Almost all recipes call for raisins, but my husband hates raisins, so to add some sweetness, I used ketchup.  This also seemed in line with Rich’s advice to add sugar, and answered the complaint aimed at several recipes that called for the apparently inauthentic tomato paste.

The first night I served the picadillo, the kids stared at it with a ho-hum sort of chagrin.  Then they tasted it. Now, picadillo is one of those dinners that commands universal adoration.  I love it because it has introduced new flavors to our table.  I love it because it is fast, fast, fast to make.  I’ve had trouble getting through the week without making it…

If you prechop the ingredients, you can get from stove to table in under 15 minutes. (Especially if you have your kids set that table for you. )  Also, because we treat the meat more like a delicious side dish/accompaniment and less like the center of the meal (even though it really is the reason to sit down at the table) we can get at least a meal and a half out of a pound of meat.  We eat it with tortillas, rice, black beans, or under fried eggs…

I don’t know how authentic my version is, nor what part of Cuba it might represent, but I can vouch that it will not disappoint.

Picadillo

Ingredients:

• Olive oil
• 1 lb ground beef
• 1 medium onion
• 6-8 garlic cloves
• 1 small tomato
• 1/2 cup pimento stuffed olives
• 1 tablespoon capers, drained
• 1/4 cup ketchup
• 2 bay leaves
• 1/4 cup white wine
• 1 teaspoon cumin
• freshly ground pepper, to taste

In a mini-food processor, finely chop the onions and garlic. Set aside.  Then finely chop the olives, capers, and tomato.

You can do this ahead of time and refrigerate until you’re ready to cook. While many recipes will leave the olives whole, the dish I first had was of uniform texture...

In a saucepan cook onion, garlic, and bay leaves over medium heat until the onion is soft and translucent.  Add the ground beef and stir, breaking up clumps with a fork.

Okay, there are 3 bay leaves here….experiment

When the meat is cooked through, add the white wine and let simmer down, then add the olives, capers, ketchup, cumin and pepper and simmer until the picadillo thickens.

Discard the bay leaves and serve warm.

I cannot seem to do justice to the food styling on this one…a pile of ground beef looks like, well…so you will just have to take my word. Just try it.  If you eat meat, you will count the ways, too.

]]> http://www.learningtoeatbook.com/2009/11/picadillo-let-me-count-the-ways/feed/ 3 http://www.learningtoeatbook.com/2009/10/shaking-beef/ http://www.learningtoeatbook.com/2009/10/shaking-beef/#comments Wed, 07 Oct 2009 18:02:20 +0000 lisa http://www.learningtoeatbook.com/?p=1291 By Lisa

Before I was married, before San Francisco’s  Mission district became gentrified and way too hip for me, The Slanted Door on Valencia was someplace I went for lunch.  Lunch was affordable back then–even for a grad student of modest means, and you could get in without a reservation.  I absolutely knew how good I had it.

It was there that I fell in love with Shaking Beef, which my husband & I have since eaten in several restaurants, including one in Paris on our honeymoon. So I was thrilled a few years ago to find this adaptation of Charles Phan’s recipe in the New York Times.  It’s become a family favorite and I’ve made it for family dinners as well as for company. Everyone loves it. The kids beg for it if I haven’t made it in a while.  There’s something about the family-style platter and big bowls of rice and greens that accompany it that make the meal always feel festive.

We haven’t taken the kids to the restaurant yet, but we tempt them often with stories about how good it is, and one day, we’ll go together. Until then, we have a little bit of Vietnam in our own home.

**I should note, that I rarely use filet to make this. It’s just too expensive. But I have had terrific results with skirt steak.  Just don’t over cook it. If I don’t have red leaf lettuce, I’ve successfully substituted Romaine. And I portion equal amounts of salt and pepper into little dipping bowls, and pass lime wedges at the table so each diner can mix his own dipping sauce. This is a lot more fun for the kids. It also looks pretty.**

SHAKING BEEF

Adapted from Charles Phan

Time: 20 minutes, plus 2 hours’ marinating

• 1 1/2 to 2 pounds beef tenderloin (filet mignon), trimmed of excess fat and cut into 1-inch cubes
• 2 tablespoons chopped garlic
• 2 tablespoons sugar
• Salt and pepper
• 5 tablespoons neutral oil, like corn or canola
• 1/4 cup rice-wine vinegar
• 1/4 cup rice or white wine
• 3 tablespoons soy sauce
• 1 tablespoon fish sauce
• 1 red onion, peeled and sliced thin
• 3 scallions, trimmed and cut in 1-inch lengths
• 2 tablespoons butter
• 2 bunches watercress, washed and dried, or 1 head red leaf lettuce, washed, dried and separated into leaves
• 2 limes, cut into wedges.

1. Marinate meat with garlic, half the sugar, 1 teaspoon salt, 1/4 teaspoon pepper and 1 tablespoon oil for about 2 hours. (Refrigerate if your kitchen is very warm.) Meanwhile, combine vinegar, remaining sugar, wine, soy sauce and fish sauce. Taste, and add salt and pepper if necessary. Mix about 1 tablespoon salt and 1 teaspoon pepper in a small bowl.

2. Divide the meat into 2 portions, and do the same with the onion and scallions. Put a wok or a large skillet over maximum heat, and add about 2 tablespoons oil. When the oil smokes, add the meat in one layer. Let it sit until a brown crust forms, and turn to brown the other side. Browning should take less than 5 minutes. Add half the onion and half the scallions, and cook, stirring, about 30 seconds. Add about half the vinegar mixture, and shake pan to release the beef, stirring if necessary. Add half the butter, and shake pan until butter melts. Remove meat, and repeat.

3. Serve beef over watercress or lettuce leaves, passing salt and pepper mixture and lime wedges at the table.

The Red Rooster is a small white place with a red and white striped façade, its steep roof topped by a giant sculpture of a soft serve vanilla ice cream cone. These days it has acquired some retro appeal; Jane and Michael Stern have reviewed it, and hip New Yorkers make pilgrimages for the Rooster’s fresh burgers and real milk shakes. But when I was a kid, before Route 22 was dotted with MacDonalds and Burger Kings, the Rooster was just a typical burger shack, the only place to stop for miles. There are two or three small tables inside, but they’re always taken up with people perched waiting for their orders; everyone eats at the picnic tables outside, or, in rougher weather, their cars. Friday afternoons would find my dad (my mom would join us later, after work) driving my brother Larry and me from our house in Westchester to my grandparents for the weekend. The Rooster was the halfway point, so we would stop to stretch our legs, use the bathroom and then, if the timing was right, buy hamburgers and root beer floats.

Now, the Rooster marks the halfway point between JFK Airport and the house my parents built for their retirement, a little north of where my grandparents lived. And so just as when I was little, a trip to Grandma and Granddad’s house involves, for my kids, a stop for ice cream. We have to leave home early to make our flight, so Tony and I scoop the kids up out of bed while they’re sleeping, and somehow the chance to eat ice cream in pj’s after 11 hours of travel makes it all the sweeter. They should be eating a proper meal, but sometimes nostalgia and sentiment are stronger than nutritional values.

We decided to drive to San Diego so my husband could attend ComicCon, and once we figured out that it was too late to reserve a camping spot halfway down, we decided to stop in Solvang.  For us, if it’s a toss up between a tent and a great deal on a hotel with an excellent restaurant and spa, we’ll take the hotel any day.

We left at 5 AM. That’s right, before dawn, because 1) we wanted to be in Solvang for breakfast and 2) Ella gets carsick, so we figured the more hours asleep in the car, the better.  I had a bag packed with boxed milk, strawberries, and bagels to tide us over until breakfast.  Of course, the kids were so excited that once we were in the car there was No Chance in H— of Sleep.   To combat Ella’s carsickness, I gave her Seabands, which proved miraculous. Unfortunately, we didn’t have a pair for Finn, and about halfway into the trip he moaned, and turned green, and threw up.  So that was the end of the food on that leg of the journey.  He eventually slept, and we did, in fact, arrive in Solvang in time for breakfast at Paula’s Pancakes. I was basically underwhelmed by the restuarant, but the kids quickly got over the sleep deprivation and Finn bounced back from the queasiness, and they loved this place. They both ate impossibly huge stacks (adult servings, actually) of pancakes and blueberries…

which kept them fueled for the rest of a really fun day visiting the Hans Christian Anderson Museum (ok, not their most favorite part of the trip):

riding a bicycle surrey with  fringe on top(really!):

and taking funny pictures of windmills and other such Germanic-Scandanavian things:

We tried to think about eating ebelskiver, and fudge, and ice cream, which everyone around us seemed to be enjoying, but we had no appetite for anything after all those pancakes, not a single one of us.

That evening, we had a really lovely meal at the Hadsten House, which I enjoyed all the more after a terrific massage/body treatment, and then it was on to San Diego.  The kids ate breakfast at the hotel, which made me quite nervous, naturally, but we got Finn a pair of Seabands at the local CVS, and they worked miraculously for him, too. No carsickness for either child for the rest of the trip, which left them free to munch on the granola bars, plums, and piles of pistachios I had packed.  Yes, the car was a mess, but they were happy & not too junk filled.  On the way home, we ate lunch at In ‘N Out burger, the one fast food we allow ourselves, and for which we all, admittedly,  have great weakness.

The trip was not supposed to be about food, but it was about me not having to cook for nearly a week (which was an excellent vacation in itself, mind you).  I was wary of theme park food (which was only truly horrible on one occasion), and I had brought cereal, milk, juice, fruit, bread, peanut butter and jelly, and snack crackers for our hotel room, which proved a really efficient and economical way to deal with breakfast and the occasional lunch.   The food at San Diego Zoo was more than tolerable, at SeaWorld was abysmal (and you can’t bring a lunch in), and we avoided the crowds and junk at Disneyland by making reservations for 2 sit down meals (Blue Bayou and Big Thunder Ranch BBQ, both of which were pricey, but we found worth it for the decent quality food and the down time both places afforded us).

For most of the rest of the trip we visited with beluga whales & dolphins:

where the kids (& I) were truly smitten at the Shamu show:

enjoyed very cute pandas who really did eat bamboo:

met various Superheros & other denizens of the 2 & 3-D world:

consorted with fairies in Pixie Hollow:

rode rides with abandon (including every roller coaster at Disney & Space Mountain (twice), with both kids, and no, for some inexplicable reason, Seabands were not necessary…):

and just generally enjoyed watching Finn vanquish Darth Vader (which video I can only link to for size restrictions, but below is a preview…):

But we did have a few absolutely memorable family food experiences, which will be chronicled here in the coming days, including two excellent local San Diego spots, the kids’ first exposure to truly fine dining, and then the antidote to fine dining:  room service.

Eating with kids is often all about expediency, and so although it was difficult, in Oxford, to set aside my romantic, Evelyn Waugh-inspired visions of country picnics, I have been at this long enough to know that when the kids are hungry, they need to eat. Now.

So we make or purchase nice sandwiches, collect cold drinks, perhaps add a bag of crisps and some carrots or an apple. Sometimes, I pack the picnic while they are eating breakfast, and they start asking for it shortly after we leave the house. (I have learned to pack enough food for six.) Or we collect the provisions on the road, in which case the kids see no reason not to sit right down and eat it. They plop down in a grubby doorway, hardly waiting for me to kick the cigarette butts out of the way; they enjoy a pretty view, but they don’t need it. So while I keep expecting to picnic in a place like this:

Inevitably, we wind up in a place like this:

And I’ll keep reminding myself that while a nice setting might improve the meal, it’s the food and the company who make the meal.

I’m surprised to find I haven’t written about dessert yet in this forum, since I have a lot to say about the subject. And despite how healthy I try to keep my family, we certainly don’t avoid dessert. We’re just as likely to make an afternoon project of making cookies as making paintings, and if we have a bowl of apples, I’m just as likely to bake them into a crisp than to slice them up to feed the kids.

Today, after a late-afternoon romp in Golden Gate Park with frisbee and soccer ball, we walked up to one of our favorite local restaurants, a casual place where they bring the kids mason jars full of crayons and the silverware waits for use in repurposed cans of Hershey’s chocolate syrup. We eat there often (despite some memorably bad evenings there, no fault of the restaurant). After a simple supper (a roasted artichoke to share, pasta of various sorts all around, a nice salad of roasted beets, arugula, endive and manchego), Tony slipped in a quiet dessert order. The ginger cake here is so good we don’t even order the excellent chocolate cake anymore, which might be all you need to know about it. The cake is spicy and moist, a little crispy round the edges, and sits next to a generous scoop of homemade pumpkin ice cream, all surrounded by a pool of rich dark caramel sauce. It might be my favorite restaurant dessert in a city that’s rich in excellent desserts.

Tonight when the waiter put the dessert down, the boys fell on it. Eli practically snarled at me when I used my spoon to force his back down onto the plate and reduce his giant bite by half. Ben, with longer arms, snuck in for bites from the side while Eli stood up to get better access. “Eli!” I cried, appalled at his manners; “Do you even know what the cake tastes like?” He didn’t even pause to answer; didn’t, in fact, even swallow, but answered by shaking his head no. When it was gone, he took a deep breath and sat back, satisfied.

The subtlety of texture and flavor was lost on him; it was sweet and good and for now that’s all he needs. But in the interest of refining his palate, we’ll keep ordering this cake. In fact,  I think next time we’ll order two.

Caroline’s gorgeous post about berries highlighted one fundamental way that our families are different.  We write about the very many ways that our family food cultures overlap in our introduction and some of the ways that we don’t.  We thought a lot about cooking and meat and picky eaters.  But we didn’t think about berries.

Every Sunday, when I go to market, I wish (oh, how I wish) that I had some of Caroline’s restraint. But, here, we’re sort of profligate with the berries.

It doesn’t matter the kind: blackberries, red raspberries golden raspberries, ollalieberries, strawberries.  Whatever Ella Bella Farm or Swanton Berry Farm has in season, we buy.

At the height of berry season we go home with six baskets. At $3 a basket you can do the math.  Every spring, I brace myself for the summer market bill as the season ramps up.  It gets very, very expensive. I get anxious. But we get by. Berries have not yet bankrupt us, and they’ve given us a lot of pleasure.

Ella and Finn eat them at a fierce rate.  This began when they were in strollers, and we would buy an extra basket for them to munch on while we shopped. But the problem was always that they didn’t just pick at one or two berries–they ate the whole basket. This was an expensive snack.  But we indulged. As explanation, I can offer the fact that I descend from a long line of Irish Catholics on my mother’s side. My father was a Presbyterian with Roman Catholic sensibilities, who converted in the early 1980s.

So a berry basket gets ported to the table daily and generally devoured. Sometimes, they don’t even make it to the sink for the prerequisite rinse (I know, I know).  In fact, Kory and I? We steal the berries  when we can.  There are very, very rarely leftovers, but when there are, I make ice cream. Last week, I had a very rare 2 pints of blackberries and some basil leftover, and with 1/3 cup of sugar, 2 cups cream, 1 cup milk I made blackberry basil soft serve ice cream.  I think it was the best ice cream I ever made.

But I draw the line with blueberries, which was Caroline’s post was so compelling for me. I just can’t bring myself to buy them, ever.  At $4 for 1/2 pint, they are just too expensive. Even for me.

But my husband’s Grandmother lives in Oregon, and she picks all her own berries, pounds and pounds and pounds of them.  All varieties, every summer, which she freezes and jams and shares with friends. Enough to feed herself all year, and to give pound to us and several of her children.  For the last two years she’s developed a system where she picks, packs, and mails fresh Oregon blueberries to us, so a box of midnight blue goodness, probably five or six pounds arrives on our doorstep ready to freeze.

These are so coveted, I can usually bring myself to ration them. But Ella and Finn had two bowls each that first day. Maybe 3. I made a small pie. We had blueberry pancakes three weeks straight. They ate them frozen, right out of the bag.   We got them In late July. It’s late September. The berries are gone. Kerplink, Kerplank, Kerplunk…