olive pits and rice: the remains of dinner

My older son, Ben, is 9 and a half. For the first couple years of his food-eating life, he ate whatever we put in front of him: eggplant caviar. Goat cheese. Pickled daikon. Chard lasagne. And then bit by bit, he started dropping foods from his diet. It didn’t happen when he started school, as many predicted, but it happened obviously enough that I began to think of him as a picky eater. An unusual picky eater, to be sure; he ate chard and pickled things and bitter marmalade, but no melted cheese (hardly any cheese at all), no milk except a bit to wet his cereal, no tomatoes. Birthday parties, with their ubiquitous cheese pizzas, became difficult. Eating out wasn’t so easy, either. And at home, despite our best intentions to keep cooking the foods we like and waiting for the kids to come around, we found ourselves subtly adapting our cooking to our kid’s appetite, or making modular meals of something new (a different kind of green, squash cooked a new way) topping something familiar (rice or pasta). We have fallen into ruts, and then needed to climb out of them. We get excited about new foods and then exhausted by the problem of needing to make dinner every single night.

But this week we’re on vacation. Even though you never get a real vacation from parenting, we’re all feeling relaxed, spending longer over meals, being a little more casual about breakfast for dinner or eating out. Plus, we’re getting excited about planning our summer adventure with friends: ten days in Turkey! Eli is poring over the brochure for the rental house; Ben wonders aloud what might be growing in the garden in August. Tony has wisely researched Turkish restaurants in San Francisco and last night we went to one. After studying the menu a while, Ben asked for an order of olives (marinated in herbs and citrus); we rounded out his dinner by ordering up a buffet of mezze: hummus, muhammara, haydari, falafel and zucchini cakes. We ordered extra pita and a rice pilaf, just in case.

The olives and pita were a hit. Ben picked delicately at the falafel and took a proper bite of zucchini cake. He scowled, but then said he liked the after taste. Not enough to eat more right then, but enough to try it again. We’ve all agreed to eat Turkish food once a month until we go on our big trip, and to try something new each time we do. They may still subsist on pita when we travel, but we’ll try to familiarize them a bit with the (fabulous, delicious) range of options. We had a great conversation over the meal, so even though I think my children really only ate olives, pita, and a bit of rice for dinner, the memory of the meal is a happy one, and — I hope — bodes well for our summer travels.

So, I think, does this: Midway through the meal, Ben pulled the bay leaf out of his olives and ate it. I didn’t notice until afterwards, when he said, “That leaf on the olives is really bitter!”

“That’s a bay leaf, Ben,” I answered, “It flavors the food, but you’re not really meant to eat it.”

“Oh, well, maybe it’ll flavor my water.” And with that, he stuck the bay leaf in his water and drank it down.

We were not having a very good food day.

Hotel breakfast (comped because we’d been woken at dawn by construction noise the day before) was a cold buffet of cereals, pastries, and steam table eggs (also fairly cold).

who let my kid choose this terrible breakfast? (he did later add scrambled eggs)

Several hours later, we finally emerged blinking into the light of Central Park. We let the kids fortify themselves from a snack cart — a banana, a hot pretzel — but then even that went sour; Ben liked his lime popsicle shots — basically a cup of popsicle gravel (see: saying yes to things on vacation) but Eli (who lately ignores his own preferences in favor of being just like his older brother) ate a couple spoonfuls and then abandoned his fluorescent snack.

like astronaut ice cream, but popsicles

I wasn’t optimistic — we were in Central Park, planning to head down to Times Square and then west to the pier to take the boys on a Circle Line tour. We were in a part of Manhattan I don’t know at all, going to one I know less. I figured the boat would offer ballpark fare (hot dogs, popcorn and beer) and didn’t have high hopes for Times Square. I was wishing I could fill them up on hot dogs, roasted nuts, and pretzels, but I just couldn’t do it. I didn’t have the energy (or battery life in my phone) to explore mobile food apps. We were like pioneers.

Walking up 8th Avenue, though, we spotted Dean & Deluca in the ground floor of the New York Times building and got excited. But inside, they’d shut down the salad bar already and only had prepared sandwiches available; next door, at Schnippers Quality Kitchen, we found a place reminiscent of our local favorite, Taylor’s Automatic Refresher (aka Gott’s) and a menu listing seven or eight different, interesting tossed salads, hot and cold sandwiches, burgers, even fish tacos and milkshakes. Somehow the boys skipped the milkshakes (it’s not like they can’t read), apparently sensing their own need, after their mediocre lunch, for something healthy and fresh. (Plus, they know we’re going to the Red Rooster soon). Ben ordered the Asian Chop Chop, a crunchy mix of Napa cabbage, edamame, snap peas, tofu, croutons and peanut dressing (he held the scallions and peppers) and Eli had a Caesar.

happy salad eaters

fabulous market salad

I have some fond memories of childhood road trip restaurant breaks. Most often, it was a stop, on the way to my grandparents’ house, at The Red Rooster (cheeseburger deluxe, fries and a root beer float); sometimes, I went with my grandfather when he drove my grandma to a weekend retreat, and we’d stop at Friendly’s along the way (fried clam roll for him, grilled cheese for me, shared fries and a chocolate fribble).

These days we’re keeping up The Red Rooster tradition in my family (happily, it’s about halfway between JFK and my parents’ house now) and our drive to Santa Barbara usually involves a quick stop at The Madonna Inn. The boys love the amazing grotto bathroom, and somehow manage to resist pieces of cake bigger than their heads in favor of a cookie or chocolate from the sweets counter. We get a treat, run around the parking lot for a few minutes, and then continue on our way.

This time, we stopped at the Madonna Inn for lunch. It’s an ornate room — floral carpet, red leather seats, pink cloth napkins, carved wooden walls — and the menu is enormous. The kids, a little overwhelmed, ordered breakfast for lunch and were perfectly happy; I ate an egg salad sandwich which tasted just fine. The service is lovely and the atmosphere — maybe from all that pink? — is really warm and friendly. It’s a kind of kitschy place but it made us all very happy, and we were on our way in under an hour, feeling much more relaxed than if we’d eaten in the car.

On our drive back home, Tony used TripAdvisor to find a restaurant in Paso Robles, Panolivo, which I discovered, later, is a favorite of a local writer friend (always nice to have that confirmation). The boys ate giant salads, Tony had an excellent house-made veggie burger and a glass of wine, I had salad and a delicious hummus plate. We talked and lingered and picked up pastry on the way out the door.

I’m sure we won’t always stop and sit down to eat when we’re making road trips, but, like our gradual move away from kid’s menus, this is a development that’s definitely improving our family food life.

When Lisa told me about her family’s road trip plans, I was envious (the sun! the stars! the Missions! the meals!) and then, instantly, dubious on the one point she was nervous about herself: the meals. Two weeks of restaurant meals. Forty-two restaurant meals. With two kids. At (among other places) several theme parks.

I wished her well and waited to hear the report.

Happily, the family survived well and Lisa’s writing about how to handle two solid weeks of restaurant meals with kids, covering everything from breakfast to theme park meals to the kids’ take on all of it. All of which has made me realize an exciting recent restaurant development in our family: we are saying goodbye to the kid’s menu.

Let me back up. We eat out a fair amount. Tony and I ate out regularly before we married (we both did growing up, too), and it was important to us to cultivate good restaurant habits in our kids. So we were strategic about it. Ben’s first restaurant meal, I have to admit, was at Chevy’s; he was about 7 weeks old and gazed at the balloons while I drank a margarita. Success! His first fancy restaurant meal, months later, was at Lulu, a place we chose partly for its delicious menu but also for its volume: we figured a crying baby wouldn’t be heard over the din. We needn’t have worried; he was old enough to sit in a high chair and gnaw happily on baguette, while we enjoyed several courses.

We continue to be thoughtful about eating out and follow the same practices as Lisa’s family. We eat out at fancy places to celebrate, sometimes, (both kids have eaten at plenty of places that don’t offer high chairs or kid’s menus) but more often we walk to one of the many local spots in the neighborhood where we can afford (both in terms of environment and price) to experiment. So if, as happened once when Ben was a toddler, there’s a meltdown between ordering and the food arriving, it’s no big deal to flag down the waiter and get dinner to go. Luckily, it’s been a long time since such an evening has gone awry; more often, we eat and chat and it feels quite a bit like home, just a little more special. But the kids’ preference, always, is to eat at home: it’s more relaxed, they don’t have to wait for their food, they like our cooking.

This summer, we’ve traveled a bit but managed — by booking hotel rooms with kitchenettes or staying with family — to keep the restaurant meals to a minimum (on our visit to Seattle this June, just the second restaurant night made Eli mournful). Tony researched spots that looked good — Italian and Asian restaurants tend to offer a good variety for our choosy, vegetarian kids — and we’ve been eating well. I’ve been remembering the mom I used to be, who would sweep the fragile glassware into the middle of the table, far from a toddler’s grasping reach, or who would set the high chair far from the tempting tablecloth. I’m grateful for older kids who (mostly) sit politely and use the kid’s menu now (mostly) just for drawing.

Kid’s menus certainly offer a welcome landing spot, a sign — as surely as highchairs and lidded cups — that the restaurant welcomes kids, and we’ve been grateful for them. But honestly, the kid’s menu has never offered a great selection for my kids; of the standard burger-fish sticks-chicken fingers-pizza-pasta quintet, most are either too meaty or too cheesy for my kids. So we have always looked beyond it, and are now really moving away from it. Eli will just eat a big salad (particularly Caesar, the gateway salad) if there’s nothing else on the menu he likes, though still often augments with pasta or grilled cheese. Ben, however, is making some new choices. Recently at our favorite local place, he passed up his beloved pasta “shoulders” (a toddler malapropism of his we have all adopted) in favor of a new dish: soba with grilled tofu and greens. It’s the kind of dish he eats all the time at home but would never order out. He’s also not shy about ordering exactly what he wants. He’ll scan the menu and assemble himself a meal from side dishes, he’ll order a salad without that cheese or with that other salad’s dressing (I know special orders can be a nightmare for a kitchen staff, and we always check that they don’t mind). At our most recent meal out, I noted how the water goblets stood a little unsteadily on thick placemats atop the marble table, turned down the waiter’s offer of plastic, lidded kid’s cups, relaxed and ordered a glass of wine. They are growing up and I am enjoying it.

How do you choose a restaurant in a strange town?

Sometimes we’ve relied on suggestions from friends who have come before. Sometimes we have a destination restaurant we’ve read about in a paper or magazine. Sometimes we just wing it, selecting a restaurant based on location, menu, and my gut. But we’ve also come to rely increasingly on Yelp as one of our tools. I trust my friends who Yelp. The “nearby” feature is helpful when you need food fast or want to walk.  And we’ve found that if we choose a meal based on our gut, our research, and Yelp comments we generally have a hit.  I especially have grown to trust a string of comments praising a particular dish. Things like: “don’t miss the shaking beef” or make sure you try the “li hing mui margarita.”  And if you know a little about local food traditions, you generally know things like burger shacks are a good bet on Kauai; and Mexican is a go-to in San Diego. So, when we travel, we tend to opt for places that have a strong sense of place, are linked to the community, or are known to do something really well. For instance, I’m inclined to avoid Italian unless it’s a place like this that cures there own salumis.

But in Southern California, my husband’s birthplace, we are all about the fish tacos, which I have to admit after all these years, are just better down south than anywhere else on earth. And so based on Yelp and some strategic scouting by me and the kids, we found ourselves at Miguel’s Cocina on Coronado, just a stone’s throw from our hotel.   It’s a spacious place, and generally mobbed. But it’s tucked in an alley off the street, and you can put in your name, take a buzzer, then grab an outstanding margarita from the outdoor bar, and snack on a bottomless bin of chips and salsa on the benches. It’s sort of lovely.

The food is pretty great all around, but what you need to know about Miguel’s is the Jalapeno Cream Sauce. This is the hands down our favorite food thing from vacation. It comes to the table complimentary with your chips and salsa. It ‘s a warm, creamy dipping sauce with a hint of heat. The kids didn’t touch it while Kory and I ate and ate and stared at each other in disbelief. Then, when they finally did try it they both said the same thing: “That is the best. thing. ever.” And it is. Trust me. It’s the ultimate comfort food. The best appetizer for family dinner, and I’m pretty sure will be a huge smash at parties. This is the kind of thing that made all those restaurant meals worth it.  The recipe is crazy. But just make it and believe.

Miguel’s Cocina Jalapeno Cream Sauce

Ingredients

• 2 cups whipping cream
• 1 cup sour cream
• 1 teaspoon chicken broth
• 2 tablespoons clarified butter
• 1 tablespoon flour
• 1 jalapeno pepper, minced
• 1 tablespoon jalapeno juice, from bottled jalapeno
• 1 ounce monterey jack cheese, shredded
• 1 ounce cheddar cheese, shredded

1. Heat whipping cream in a heavy saucepan over high heat. Stir in sour cream when it’s ready to boil. After sour cream dissolves, reduce heat to medium.
2. Stir in chicken broth and jalapeno sauce and simmer.
3. Meanwhile, make a roux by heating butter and flour. Whisk until mixture turns a pale gold.
4. Increase heat on cream mixture until almost boiling and then add roux. Whisk briskly and constantly until roux is incorporated. Continue whisking until sauce has thickened. It should be about the consistency of a cheese sauce. It will take a longish time.
5. Remove from heat, stir in minced jalapeno and the cheeses.
6. Served with tortilla chips.

Try them with a classic margarita, made simply with your best tequila, fresh lime juice & agave nectar.

Last night, as we were eating our 15th tomato sandwich since returning home, this time in the form of a BLT, I asked Ella and Finn about the best part of vacation food.

“DISNEYLAND!” they both screamed.

“Really?” I asked. “You liked the food at Disneyland?”

“Oh. No.”  They both shook their heads.  Aside from a nice meal at Ariel’s Grotto (which is in CA Adventure anyway), the food at Disney was memorable only for its awfulness.

The short of list of things Ella liked about vacation food:

• Choice. Getting to chose what you want every night.
• Kids’ menus: which she says (mostly accurately) include: chicken fingers, burgers, sushi, macaroni and cheese, pizza.

Her affection for kids menus is interesting because I think it has less to do with the offerings and more to do with the fact that they offer a manageable list of food specifically to the child.  I do like the portion size and pricing on kids menus. When you’re eating out every meal, economy of all sorts is important. But I do hate the tyranny of those same five dishes. It’s definitely true that not all burgers (or even mac ‘n cheese) are created equal, and side dishes vary, but like so many other parents, I wish restaurants would think a little more creatively about what to feed to kids.

Another highpoint: the dining room at Hearst Castle, also the inspiration for their beloved Hogwarts.

Now they both want to be billionaires.

What didn’t she like? Eating out every night. By which she meant having to make the effort and “be perfect” at the table.  But so go the trials of childhood.

Finn’s response was more measured. He says he didn’t much like the menus which had “good things, but not always things you feel like eating.” He is a creature of habit. Also the one picking cucumbers out of water by the end of the trip. He likes restaurant booths, because they’re cozy. And I can add that they both love the menus they can color on and take with them. We have several now glued into scrapbooks.

The lesson here is that choice is important, and so is control. Kids like to be spoken to directly. They like to be offered things that are their size and fitted to their taste.  A smaller list of choices, so as not to overwhelm, is a great idea for school age kid who wants to master her own menu.  But maybe it’s not such a great idea to have the same choice at every single restaurant. Because really, fries with a quesadilla are kind of ridiculous.

They did resoundingly agree on one thing: San Diego food. So stay tuned because tomorrow, straight from our favorite place in San Diego: the only new recipe you need for the summer.

The force was with them even though they hadn’t eaten breakfast

Our kids, like many, take breakfast seriously. They eat shortly after waking up and are used to a fair amount of variety: porridge, eggs many ways, waffles, pancakes, cereal, sweet rice, granola….lots of whole, fresh fruit.

Since we were staying in hotels on our trip, eating right away–even coffee right away–was not so possible. I suppose I could have kept breakfast fixings in the room, but we were moving around a lot and I didn’t want one more thing to tote and pack and, probably, waste.    At several hotels we had a breakfast package, and if you’re traveling with kids, I would highly recommend these.  Hotel breakfasts had variety, were easy to get to, and meant we could get on with our day without any effort. On these days, which was maybe a third or half of the time, we had a solid breakfast. Other days, not so much.  As opposed to the breakfast-included package, purchasing breakfast food a la carte at our hotels proved prohibitively expensive. We loved adored our hotel, but $40 for 2 coffees, 3 bagels, 2 waters and 1 fruit cup is absurd.  Breakfast quickly became the least important meal of the day. It was all about the grab & go.  We made sure to find something decent and relatively healthy for the kids, but really, we bought just enough to tide them over to lunch.  We found this place on Coronado, which was a great place to grab & go on our way to wherever we happened to be going for the day. We relied on bagels, smoothies, and one fine day, a totally delicious bacon burrito and french toast.

We learned that California Adventure has far superior coffee and breakfast options in the early AM than does Disneyland.  Our most egregious meal failure was the day we arrived at the Disneyland gate for the 7 am, hotel-guest only hour, without having eaten.  Anything. Not even coffee for the adults, which frankly might be more important than food for the kids. Especially at Disneyland. In our defense, we had assumed we’d be able to grab food at the park (since we had done this the day prior at CA). Also in our defense, we all rode Star Tours and Space Mountain before 8 am, and got FastPasses for both.  We avoided a near meltdown with pizza at 10 AM.

Some days, you gotta do what you gotta do.

The best breakfast of all–food and fun wise, was the character-themed Critter breakfast at our Disney hotel.  This of course, was a surprise to me, but not to my Disney loving family. My husband, who worked many character breakfasts (as Pluto, for instance) in his 6 years employed at the park, was full of fun stories about what was really going on around us, and was able to speak to Chip and Dale and all the rest in some secret language unknown to the rest of us mortals. Our kids don’t give a hoot about princesses, but what’s not to love about enourmous, cuddly stuffed animals come to life and wandering through a pretty swell arts and crafts/mission style restaurant?  There was kots of fresh fruit, grits, bagels, cream cheese, capers, lox, eggs to order, Mickey-shaped waffles. And the husband knew enough to have a mimosa waiting for me. Which was swell.

So the moral here is: it was good to lighten up temporarily about that most important meal.

And if you have a choice, definitely eat with the animals.

Up next: Surviving the theme park food. (Or maybe not so much.)

We’ve just returned from our annual family vacation, which this year involved a long an epic road trip from the Bay Area to San Diego, one of the most southern parts of our state.  Our initial destination was ComicCon in San Diego, which was a blast & included a preview of the upcoming Phineas and Ferb Movie,which is terrfic, if you like that sort of thing, which we do.  But the trip quickly morphed into a week at the Coronado beach, a 3-day visit at Disneyland, an excursion to Hearst Castle, and something Caroline came to call Mission-polooza: a visit to every California mission between our home and our destination.  I will not be writing about that part of the trip here.  (You can check my personal blog for follow-up and fallout on that score.)  But what is of interest to LTE readers is that for the first time ever, we stayed in hotels for the duration of our trip, which was a new experience for us.

For me, this meant a lot things: no cleaning, no sweeping, no making beds, no tidying up at the end of the day. Of course it also meant no marketing and no cooking. No farmers market. No prep. No meal planning.  Honestly, it was a terrific break, but I was nervous about many meal-related things including:

• Cost
• Getting the kids ready and out of the hotel for dinner.  Every night.
• Table manners
• Stamina–the day in, day out energy it takes to dine in restaurants
• Finding enough variety in the food to keep us feeling energetic and healthy
• Theme park food

We were right to worry about some of these things. Variety, for instance: we eat so much seasonal produce that by the end Finn was picking the cucumbers out of his dad’s water in search of fresh vegetables. And I may never again eat another Caesar salad, because at many of the theme parks we visited, this is the closest thing you can get to fresh vegetables.  I also discovered that left to their own devices and an unstoppable tidal wave of kids’ menus, even my accommodating and not-picky eaters will choose chicken tenders or pizza or burgers.  My daughter, who never ate a chicken finger in her life ordered these twice in our last three days.  It’s true she got the side of fruit salad, too, but it just goes to show the deeply subconscious appeal of the kids’ menu–even for a kid who doesn’t really eat like a kid.  And finally, it is costly to eat out all the time, so we were right to budget high for this part of our vacation.

But other things proved not to be problems. In retrospect, it’s not that surprising. In some sense, we’ve been training our kids from the time they were toddlers to eat out in restaurants, so the stamina, the manners, the getting ready, all these things were taken in stride. It surprised us. We stuck to our tried and true rules, and they worked for us through many different kinds of meals: in a car, at a pool, at a taqueria, in a fancy restaurant, in a lodge….Frankly, it was an enormous relief because in the weeks leading up to the trip we were not at all sure that the kids would make it through every meal without incident.  But they did, and at the last meal, a lovely little place in Carmel, we celebrated and we toasted them. While they ate pizza and a burger.

Up next: managing breakfast on the road.

This past year, my 6 year-old got out of school an hour earlier than my 9 year-old, and we spent that hour in the school library or, on sunny days, in the park across the street. Once spring came, an ice cream truck parked at the entrance and as we crossed the street into the park every day, Eli would ask, automatically, “Can I have an ice cream?” And I’d say, just as automatically, “Nope,” and list the snacks I’d brought in my purse. It was a routine that caused no particular stress or bother; we didn’t need any legislation to ban the ice cream trucks, we just went on our way.

I don’t have a single good reason for my school year, week day ice cream ban (which is really too strong a word for this routine), and probably if Eli had lobbied harder I would have caved. But he didn’t, so I didn’t. We would play in the park for an hour, he would munch on an apple and a muffin and maybe some peanut butter crackers or a MoJo bar, and then we would pick up Ben and snack some more. I don’t think either of them feels at all deprived of sweets, and if you have read this blog any length of time, you also know they are not — it’s just that most of the time, I like to make them at home.

But when summer vacation comes, I feel like celebrating. Even though the weather in San Francisco isn’t so summery, I embrace the season with sandals and bright pink nail polish and home made ice cream and field trips with the kids to the latest ice cream and donut shops:

the menu at Dynamo Donuts

My friends tease me about my summer food enthusiasms, but my family is certainly not complaining. And when we travel, as we have been this last week (and as Lisa has written along the same lines) I am just a little sweeter, and even more inclined to say yes to treats. They are morale and energy boosters, they are a way to sample the local food culture, they are a break in a busy day of walking from one science museum to the next. On the ferry to San Juan Island last week, which seemed in some ways so foreign, the boys were delighted to find their favorite ballpark treat:

And after a surprisingly good lunch from the snack bar at one of Vancouver’s amazing public pools today, Eli chose from the standard ice cream menu:

While Ben bypassed that for a less typical post-swim snack:

This afternoon, flagging after a long walk from the planetarium to the Granville Public Market, we stopped for donuts, and we’re already looking forward to fudge tomorrow at the Capilano Suspension bridge, because apparently fudge is one of the things one buys to survive a walk across a sky-high suspension bridge, and because we are on vacation, and because it is fun to say yes.

Another year, in a Thanksgiving beach rental, I wound up making a chocolate pecan pie with my extra pie crust. I hadn’t needed the pumpkin pie back-up crust I’d made, my friend had extra pecans from her stuffing and I, of course, had plenty of chocolate. It’s become a Thanksgiving tradition for us now.

But baking did not really figure into my plans for three days in a cabin on San Juan Island last week. I was just looking forward to having a small kitchen to cook some simple summer meals, and I know my boys were, too. On our second night in Seattle, the first stop on our summer vacation, my 6 year-old, Eli, asked mournfully, “Mama, when will we eat home food again?” But baking, well, baking just takes a lot more kitchen overhead than fixing a quick pasta with market vegetables. I’m certainly able to use 5 pounds of flour in three days, but that’s not what this time was about. So, while the boys were excited to see that our cabin came equipped with scone and muffin mixes, I was skeptical about them. I confess I haven’t used a baking mix since I was in elementary school, and my brother and I would make (and eat) an entire Stir n’ Frost cake after school before my mom came home from work. These mixes, like those fabulous Stir n’ Frosts, required nothing, nothing but water, just like the original Betty Crocker mixes, before the company realized that people were more likely to buy them if they had to beat an egg and measure in some oil, so they’d feel like they were baking. But who am I to reject a nicely labeled bag of muffin mix, especially after a long day of orca-spotting? I have pretty high standards, but I’m not too fancy to turn down a free mix.

The package didn’t list any ingredients, just instructions to add a certain amount of water and bake at a certain temperature for a certain amount of time. Eli did every step, hoping against hope that the little dark bits in the mix were chocolate chips. Sadly for him, they turned out to be dehydrated blueberries. But the muffins were delicious — fragrant with vanilla, moist and not too sweet. They’re never to be repeated, just like those Outer Banks cinnamon rolls, but we may remember them just as fondly.