Every summer, we visit my parents so we can glory in East Coast summer weather, grandparental (and parental) affection, and the abundance of my father’s garden. Depending on when we arrive, we might be gorging on berries or potatoes, and this year my dad promised both, but he also offered kohlrabi, a crop he had tried for the first time. “I hope you will pack your favorite kohlrabi recipes,” he emailed me before we arrived.

Well. Favorite cookie recipes, favorite muffin recipes, sure, but I had to Google kohlrabi to even know what it looks like. I’ll save you that step:

kohlrabi growing

kohlrabi on the way to the kitchen

So, as it turns out, kohlrabi is something like a turnip and something like a radish: crunchy and refreshing, with a slightly sharp tang. It’s delicious, and pretty versatile: you can eat it raw, grated into salad (recipe below), you can cook and eat the leaves (which we did, flavored with a little soy sauce and sesame oil), you can cut it into sticks and roast them (we did that, too) or make it into a gratin (which we might do when it’s cooler). Because yes, our CSA is now bringing us kohlrabi every week, so it’s a good thing we’ve learned how to cook it, because now we’ve really learned to like it!

Raw Kohlrabi Salad

First, make your vinaigrette; I like Deborah Madison’s mustard vinaigrette, from the indispensable Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone:

2 tablespoons red wine vinegar, or fresh lemon juice
2 tablespoons sour cream or yogurt
2 shallots, finely diced
1/3 cup extra virgin olive oil
1 garlic clove, minced
2 tablespoons snipped chives
Salt and freshly milled pepper
1 tablespoon chopped parsley
1 tablespoon Dijon mustard
3 tablespoons capers, rinsed

Combine the vinegar, shallots, garlic and 1/4 t salt in a small bowl. Let stand for 15 minutes, then whisk in the mustard, sour cream or yogurt, and oil until thick and smooth. Grind in a little pepper, then stir in the herbs and capers. Taste and adjust the seasonings if needed.

Then, peel and grate a pound or two of fresh raw kohlrabi, or use a mix of kohlrabi, parsley root, carrots, and beets — whatever vegetables you happen to have on hand. Dress with the vinaigrette and serve.

Even though it has been cold enough all summer in San Francisco to turn on the heat, one recent day we also turned on the ice cream machine. This recipe comes from The Ultimate Ice Cream Book, by Bruce Weinstein, and it is absolutely fabulous.

1/2 cup shredded sweetened coconut
1 c sugar
3 large eggs
1 t cornstarch
1/4 t salt
1 c half-and-half
1 1/2 c unsweetened coconut milk
1 c heavy cream
2 t vanilla extract

Preheat the oven to 400. Spread the coconut on a baking sheet and toast in the hot oven for 7 minutes or until the coconut turns light brown. Set aside to cool.

In a medium mixing bowl, beat the sugar into the eggs until thickened and pale yellow. Beat in the cornstarch and salt. Set aside.

Combine the half-and-half with the coconut milk in a heavy saucepan. Bring to a boil over medium heat. Remove from the heat and slowly beat the hot liquid into the eggs and sugar. Pour the entire mixture back into the saucepan and place over low heat. Stir constantly with a whisk or wooden spoon until the custard thickens slightly. Be careful not to let the mixture boil or the eggs will scramble (yuck!) Remove from the heat and our the hot custard through a strainer into a large, clean bowl. Allow to cool slightly, then stir in the toasted coconut, cream, and vanilla.

Cover and refrigerate until cold, or overnight.

Once the custard is nice and cold, give it a good stir and then freeze in your ice cream machine according to its instructions. Put on a wool sweater and eat.

I usually don’t have much trouble getting my kids into the kitchen; we make sushi together, we make muffins, we make cakes and pancakes — mostly I bake with the kids, because mostly I bake, period. But anything I’m making, they’re welcome to participate, and they’re typically eager to help.

Still, when a link to this article about cooking with kids appeared in my inbox, I couldn’t help clicking on it; how are others getting their kids into the kitchen, I wondered? What are they making?

Well, among other good cooking projects, they are making ice cream! And so on a recent cold and foggy day, we made ice cream, because it is summer and summer means ice cream, and because this recipe (from High Flavor, Low Labor) sounded so delicious to me.

1/2 cup balsamic vinegar
1 tablespoon strawberry jam
10 cream-filled chocolate cookies (such as Oreos or Newman-O’s)
1 pint vanilla ice cream

If you’re starting with store-bought ice cream, take it out of the freezer and let it sit in a big bowl while you start preparing the other ingredients; you want it to be soft so that you can stir them in easily. If you’re starting with homemade, prepare the other ingredients while the ice cream is mixing in your ice cream freezer, and then stir them in at the end.

In a small saucepan over medium-low heat, combine the vinegar and jam. Simmer, stirring often, until reduced by half, about 8 minutes.

Eli says don’t stand too close; the fumes of the simmering vinegar are strong!

Set aside to cool.
Meanwhile, place the cookies in a zip-close plastic bag and gently pound with a meat mallet or rolling pin to break into small chunks.

This is, of course, a great job for kids:

Drizzle the vinegar into the ice cream and mix until blended.

Mix in the cookies.

Stir well, and then stir one more time to make sure the balsamic syrup is well distributed. Dump the ice cream into a container with a tight lid and return to the freezer until firm, 2 to 3 hours.

Eat.

A few years before her first son, Jules, was born, Rehak began to read more about food and food production – she read Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser and Wendell Berry – and the more she read the more she wanted to learn, first hand, about the food she bought and cooked each day. That growing interest , coupled – at the birth of her child – with a growing person for whom she was (with her husband) responsible for feeding, brought her curiosity to a head:

“What really happened…was the unavoidable collision of two worlds of information—parenting and eating. To begin with, there, in the form of my baby son, was an actual person for whom I wanted to leave the planet in decent condition. That goal was no longer just a noble abstraction. Then there was the amazing fact that I had before me in a highchair someone who had literally never tasted anything, whose body had yet to be tainted by MSG in bad Chinese take-out, or clogged by palm oil ‘butter’ on movie theater popcorn, or compromised by pesticide residue. I was unprepared for both the sheer weirdness of this – was it possible that I actually knew a person who had never eaten chocolate?—and the huge responsibility I felt to get it right. . . .Some part of me resented the fact that something that should have been a pure pleasure, teaching a person to eat, was now so complicated. ”

Oh, Melanie, I hear you.

Now, some of us would spend more time at the library or bookstore, reading everything we could get a hold of about food, nutrition, parenting. Others might just throw their hands up in confusion and defeat, and continue feeding their kids the way, for better or worse, they were fed themselves. Some of us join CSAs, buy local, visit farms. But most of us don’t make the decision Rehak did, which was to volunteer to cook at a local restaurant, Brooklyn’s applewood (yes, applewood, “the lower case a,” Rehak writes, “being a choice the owners hoped would convey plenty in contrast to the sharp, aggressive point of the capital A they had foregone.” A small point, but to me, unfortunately, it never looked like a proper name no matter how many times I read it in this book, and always like a typo). She decides the best way to learn about food is to make it herself, in a small, family-run restaurant whose generous and amazingly accommodating owners, David and Laura Shea (the parents of two young children themselves) buy their restaurant’s meat and produce from small local farms. She also visits those food producers –a cheesemaker, a farmer, a fisherman, a food distributor – riding along in their tractors and trucks and seasick-inducing boats, not just taking notes, but hauling and picking and cleaning – to get a better understanding of the exhausting labor behind writing the restaurant’s menu each night. It’s a fascinating behind the scenes tour, and Rehak’s prose brings these individuals vividly to life.

The publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, is offering ten free copies of Eating for Beginners to Learning to Eat readers. Just leave a comment below saying why’d you be interested in reading the book; the first ten to comment get a book!

Edited to add: For any of you on Goodreads, Melanie Rehak is participating in a Q&A there for the next couple weeks, so click on over to contribute!

Our stay in Portugal was planned as a respite, a no-agenda, unscheduled interlude without a lot of sight-seeing. It’s not that Lisbon and Sintra don’t offer a lot to see, but we know that with kids you can only be a tourist for so long before rebellion sets in and you risk finding yourselves stuck in a relatively expensive vacation rental with children who refuse to do anything but lie on the floor and color (or worse). We’ve learned to pace ourselves so that everyone gets to see and do interesting things, everyone gets some down time, and no one gets (too) cranky. It’s not an exact science (nothing in parenting is) but we’re getting better at it every year.

So, we puttered around the house and garden. The kids drew and played with stomp rockets and practiced their headstands. I picked ruffly leaves of kale from under the laundry line and admired the amazing harvest of red peppers:

We didn’t hurry (well, except for the trip to the ER).

And that gave us all the more time to make baccala, which is pretty much the national dish of Portugal. Or I should say, it would have given us more time to make baccala, but in fact the meal arrived on the table without my input or participation at all. So while I would love to be able to share the recipe here, as well as pictures of how it all came together, would have loved to be part of the process, asking questions about how long to soak the dried cod, who taught her the recipe, how many variations she’s made or eaten, Ursula’s mother-in-law soaked the cod, and rinsed it and soaked it again until it was tender, starting a couple days before our dinner. Then she and Ursula pulled it all together, chopping onions, potatoes, parsley and olives.

It all happened in the background while the kids played and we relaxed. It gave me a wonderful sense of being cared for, which of course made the meal especially delicious. So while I can’t tell you how to make baccala, I can tell you that the soft and salty layers of salt cod and potatoes and onions, eaten at a table with family and friends, make for a most unexpected and wonderful comfort food. And I can tell you that it is the perfect meal after an afternoon scrambling over walls of a ruined 9th century Moorish castle — but you shouldn’t wait for an outing like that to eat it.

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 love the mix of familiar and unfamiliar when we travel. We bring food from home, but we shop in new markets. We rent an apartment so we can cook most of our own meals, but we also eat out and learn how to translate menus written in different languages. Our first night in Sintra, we went to a school fair (very familiar) but the theme was medieval Portugal (brand new!). Unlike most fairs, where plastic (or, more recently, cornstarch-based biodegradable) cups are standard, here we were given small clay mugs, which have now made their way safely home and become indispensable for breakfast drinks:

The boys shared a candy apple (familiar):

While I was more interested in the skewers of wine-poached pears:

All of our stay involved this fascinating push-pull of new and different. We ate familiar kinds of snacks (cookies and granola)…

…with amusingly new names.

We set the table for dinner outside:

But our table had a view of a castle:

So this is why we travel, even though it can be so complicated, and the rewards so simple: cereal you address with a honorific; a view of a castle. It’s enough to get me packing again.

For the third summer in a row, people we love were in Europe, offering us a reason to visit and, even better, a place to stay. There is always a moment (sometimes quite a long moment) when, contemplating a trip like this (3 cities and 17 days), paging through guidebooks and counting up the number of restaurant meals, I wonder if we shouldn’t just stay closer to home: rent a beach house with family and friends, do more home cooking, spend less of the summer in museums. But I also know these opportunities aren’t going to come again, and I know we’re lucky that we can take advantage of them now. And we have become pretty adept at traveling in a way that minimizes the upheaval and maximizes family harmony and comfort (that is, we pack food). So for the third summer in a row, we counted our lucky stars, booked plane tickets, and packed our bags.

First stop: Sintra, Portugal, the small city outside Lisbon that Byron described as “glorious Eden,” and where my friend Ursula is living in a beautifully rambling home with her daughter, her Portuguese husband, and her mother-in-law. The house is perched on a hill surrounded by a big yard and lush gardens.

the neighbor's horses, grazing out the kitchen window

The boys quickly got used to the backyard chatter of chickens and geese:

feathered friends

And they learned how to use a familiar tool — the mortar & pestle — in a new way: to crack nuts. In the past, their nut-cracking has been with my dad, whose hickory nuts are so hard-shelled he starts them off with a good whack of the sledge hammer on the garage floor. Portuguese hazelnuts offer a much easier entry:

A familiar snack — yogurt with nuts and honey — was the perfect way to start our time away from home.

We were on Kauai for two glorious weeks and before we went, the kids told me that one of the reasons they love vacation there is because I’m “super-nice” the whole time. Apparently this has a lot to do with the fact that I let them eat shave ice almost every day. This is easily the Hawaiian equivalent of gelato, with a lot less fat.

Jo Jo’s Blue Raspberry

Their flavor picks evolved with the trip, for example:

Day 1= lime and cherry (Ella); mango and guava (Finn)
Day 2=guava & li hing mui/root beer & cotton candy
Day 3=vanilla & coconut / peach & pineapple

After that,  I lost track, but Ella was often seen eating coconut and vanilla to match her toweling shirt.

Finn was the wild card. One day it would be tropical, another day candy-sweet. They liked things that turned their tongue unnatural colors.

Sometimes, we had ice cream on the bottom–vanilla or macadamia nut, which is a real treat.  I dusted mine with li hing mui powder, or tried the haupia (coconut) cream topping.

With Li Hing Mui (salty preserved plum powder)

Not all shave ice is created equal.  There was a decent roadside stand on the way to Koloa, and Jo Jo’s, a shack in Waimea, has terrific syrups (60 in all), and Shave Ice Paradise in Hanalei is open long hours and is good, too.  But the Wishing Well in Hanalei still takes the prize.

Wishing Well’s Local Girl:  Li Hing Mui + Coconut

Grape + Vanilla

Lime + Coconut + Whipped Cream (for Ella’s local girlfriend)

Vanilla + Coconut

Pineapple + Coconut + Guava

It’s in a truck, and it’s almost never open as far as we can tell. Her posted hours are flagrantly wrong (in our limited experience) and she runs out of ice regularly. The owner is ageless, tall and thin and tanned and usually clad in draping island wear.  She is secretive and dictatorial–you have to order in a prescribed way and you can NOT substitute anything in the specials. She will not let you hold the kids up to the tiny screened window so they can see how she works.  But she is amazing and her shave ice is glorious. It’s light and delicate and melts in your mouth. But it does not melt quickly in the cup like some other shave ice does.  I don’t understand how she does it, and when I asked if she had a different machine and she answered cryptically, “No, I just take my time.” She claims her syrups are the same as everyone else’s, save for 4, but I’m not sure I believe her.  There is something mysterious about this truck and magical about just how good the shave ice is.  So if it’s open when you drive by, stop immediately.  While pretty much any shave ice will hit the spot, this is what ice was made to do best.

At Jo Jo’s

I’ve written here before about the food my family takes to travel, the food we’ve eaten on journeys, even the food that has greeted us on our return, but not yet about this particular food/travel issue: cleaning out the fridge before leaving on the trip.

Tonight, on the eve of our 2+-week vacation, and with friends coming to stay in our house ten days from now (and so a week before we get home), I had to think carefully about what we should use up and what could stay put. When the eggs ran out late last week, I didn’t replace them; that half loaf of sandwich bread goes in the freezer, as does that end of baguette, sliced into cubes for croutons and tossed into a bag. We’ll use up the milk in the morning, but the last stick of butter will be fine. It’s the produce that’s trickier, of course. Tonight I found myself adding lots of vegetable sides to our pasta dinner: green salad with shredded carrots; roasted zucchini; roasted potatoes; fresh snap peas. The meal looked a bit like this, the kids ate a ton, and the crisper was nearly empty.

Nearly! I still had a bunch of beets to deal with, so quickly pickled them using the recipe recommended by a reader (my sister!); the recipe was fast, and the pickles will keep until our friends arrive.

Last up: zucchini, which our CSA has been providing at a rate faster than we can handle. I’ve made them into pancakes, fritters, and soup; shredded them into salads or tossed them, roasted, onto pasta with walnuts. Tonight, running out of steam, I grated four cups and stuck it into the freezer for a future soup. Then finally, because I always have time to make muffins, made these lemony zucchini muffins from the fabulous King Arthur Cookbook:

2 c flour (I use a mix of all-purpose and whole wheat flours)
1/2 c granulated sugar
1 scant T baking powder
1 t salt
grated peel of 2-3 lemons (the recipe calls for the peel of just one lemon, which just isn’t enough for me)
1/2 c chopped, toasted walnuts (optional)
1/2 c raisins (optional)
2 large eggs (I’d run out of eggs, but luckily still had egg replacer from when my vegan niece lived with us last year!)
1/2 c milk
1/2 c vegetable oil
1 c shredded, unpeeled zucchini

Preheat the oven to 400.

Combine the flour, sugar, baking powder, salt and lemon peel in a large bowl. Stir in the walnuts and raisins.

In a 2-cup liquid measure, combine the milk, oil, and eggs. Pour into the dry ingredients and stir until just barely combined. Fold in the zucchini.

Spoon batter into a 12-cup muffin tin and bake for 20-25 minutes, until a tester comes out clean. Let cool in the pan for 5 minutes, then turn out of the pan to finish cooling.

Some of the muffins will come to the airport with us tomorrow, and the rest will wait in the freezer for our friends, because if we can’t greet them ourselves, at least we can greet them, in absentia, with muffins.