We had a new addition to our family last night . . .

Coming in at just over 4lbs and 8oz, neither boy, nor girl, nor bulldog (one is enough for now), we welcomed our first levain into the family. Here's a picture of him peeking out of his swadling.

 With proper care and feeding, he could outlive us all and provide a start to tasty boules, pizzas and flatbreads all along the way. That’s perhaps more than I can say about myself.

A note about gender assignment - levain doesn’t come with one easily discerned. I argued that because the levain doesn’t ambush me with stories of all the minutiae of the day the minute I get home the levain must be male. The three women of the house considered my position and then responded that since it doesn’t seem to do much around the house and is a bit gassy, I must be correct: the levain is male.

As with any new family member, it’s important to introduce the little one early to other family members, especially household companions.

Daisy regards the levain:

Shiny New Objects

I admit it. I, too, dismissed pressure cookers as a risky tool that only my grandmother would have used. It seemed like one of those tools doomed to the heap of history.

Then two things happened. First, Iron Chef. I’ve only watched a handful of those shows, but it seems that about every contender and every iron chef uses a pressure cooker somewhere in their plan of attack. 

The second was Nathan Myhrvold, or rather his work on Modernist Cuisine. Tech guy turns foodie and has the money to back creating some serious work. Props to him. Damn if the pressure cooker doesn’t figure significantly in his kitchen.

OK, I’m in. Less that a week passes before I get my Fissler in the mail and I have a new shiny object to play with.

I’ve just used it to cook faro (parcooked once, and then straight through another time), and then Myrhvold’s basic marinara to see if at the higher temp one really can get a Maillard reaction with wet tomatoes. Seemed to work quite well – and faster than my approach of draining tomatoes, browning them and adding back the liquid. Fed my family and now they are asking what else I can make with it.

I’m sure some of you have been using this tool for years. Any great ideas you’d like to share? My family is getting hungry.

Kids Want Carbs!

Two steps forward, one step back.

From a conversation this week with our kids:

“What’s for dinner?”

“Prime New York Strip Steak and a salad.”

“Ewe, steak? Can’t we have pasta or something,” asks Elizabeth (name changed to protect the princess).

Seems like all they want is Top Ramen. On the one hand, I’m disappointed, but on the other – shit, more steak for me!

I tried the Secret. I sent vibes out to the Universe imaging daughters that would appreciate our cooking, - our focus on ingredients. Zippo. I’m still waiting for the Universe to manifest that for me.

It did get me a bulldog, and that thing’ll eat anything I cook – so I got that going for me, which is nice.

A bulldog and steak. I should shut-up and be happy. But as the French learned, the people cannot live on steak alone (or something like that). They need carbs. And if you can’t wait for the Universe to manifest peace in your household (or like me you just suck at the Secret), you better get busy and make peace yourself. Get the pot of water boiling, ‘cuz kids want carbs.

Sometimes it’s hard to stick to a plan

Maybe I’m still getting settled into the new year, but after ordering food delivery 5 days in a row, waking up to the cost of that and the low quality food consumed, I knew I had to get my game back.

So this week I did. Mostly it’s in the planning. A little work on the weekend and we can put some great food on the table for us, for our girls. Instead of Thai, Chinese and Indian delivery, we’ve got hanger steak, duck breast, standing rack of pork, and Cornish game hen. And all for less coin.

Bought these babies at Golden Gate Meat Co. and left them salted in the fridge overnight to dry out the skin.

Then stuffed them with cooked Linguica sausage from 4505 Meats (thank you, Ryan) and rubbed them with Harissa powder made into a paste with rendered Linguica fat. (Stuffed one with chicken sausage and left off the Harissa for our daughter).

I figured they’re too small to brown in the oven before the meat would over-cook, so I browned them in cast iron with the help of a torch. Seemed to work. Put them into a low temp oven and let them come up to 150.

Can’t complain about the result, and the girls . . . big smiles all around.

Tomorrow night – Muscovy Duck Breast. Render off the fat until the skin crisps up without overcooking the meat – that’s all. Then trade the rendered fat to DC for some contraband!

Tomorrow night – Muscovy Duck Breast. Render off the fat until the skin crisps up without overcooking the meat – that’s all. Then trade the rendered fat to DC for some contraband!

Bequeathing a Broad Palate

After a pretty bland culinary upbringing – tuna on faux wheat bread fermenting in my warm lunch bag was fairly typical, I had a good bit of fortune and was able to travel through college and graduate school. Ok, so my first overseas trip was to England, and back in those days the British were hard at work earning their reputation for even blander food – greasy fish in newspaper from a chippy or a curry house seemed the most common dining options. Man, have times changed there. Anyway, I eventually made my way around a few continents and along with the great scenery came a diversity of food. I didn’t take to it all immediately, but eventually I came to appreciate much more than tacos and burgers and I began to develop something of a palate. A few friends in Law School had a passion for competitive potluck dinner parties, and with their guidance I was off and running in the world of cuisine - primarily as a consumer of it.

Flash-forward a few years and I’ve got a daughter, Paloma, running around. What more does a parent want than to share the beauty in life while helping them avoid the bland? Could I impart upon her a taste for cuisine?

These days this is no easy task. Social norms based on the Precious Child Syndrome dictate that we force nothing on our kids, not even our dinner. No, if little Johnny wants Kraft Mac and Cheese, rather than the Chicken Marsala you’ve prepared, you better get back to the stove. Cuz’ that’s what his friends’ parents do. And you want to be a good parent, right?

If you try to break out of this mold, you’ve got a spouse holding you firmly to the Syndrome, stirring up the pasta and powdered cheese and saying something like “It’s Ok, Johnny, MOMMY loves you and will make it for you.” Perhaps she rolls her eyes at you. You might as well be sending him out into the jungle alone to survive for a year.

At this point, you’ve got two doors to choose from. Door one: stock up on Kraft Mac and Cheese. Door two: ….

Well, I chose door number two.

While door number two can be a bit more lonely, and joint custody sounds terrible, for the 50% of the time that I had Paloma, I had her to myself. There was no one else now to capitulate and make Mac and Cheese for her when she was with me.

Damn if she didn’t eat the Chicken Marsala put in front of her … eventually. And with a smile. Turns out she liked chicken at the age of three. From then on everything was chicken, naturally. Pork was chicken. Beef was chicken. Lamb was “special chicken.” And she ate it all. Sashimi was uncooked fresh chicken, and she loved that. I turned my head once to talk to a stranger and she choked down $30 worth of Maguro within a minute. Expensive chicken.

When she was 6 we grabbed some sandwiches before sailing and after she bit into hers she said:

“Daddy, you know what the best food in the world is?”

“No, sweetie, what’s that?”

“Dijon. It’s the best. You can eat it on a sandwich. You can eat it on a hot dog, Or you can just eat it all by itself.”

I smiled. Mission accomplished. Soon she was taking down oysters and paddlefish roe.

Only problem is . . . eventually love finds you again. Or finds me. And along with her mom, I got attached to the sweetest 5-year old on the planet - Jillian.

At 5 years old she ate apples. Green apples, red apples. Only apples. (And she was already 5 so that “special chicken” trick wouldn’t work). It turns out that the culinary path from apples doesn’t lead directly to Foie Gras. No, it goes directly to (wait for it), Mac and Cheese.

Now under legal contract you have at least some influence over your wife, but your girlfriend doesn’t give a rat’s ass what you think her daughter ought to eat. Within days of moving in, she’s stove-side dumping a box of Kraft into a saucepan and waiting to add the packet of powdered cheese stuff to make a second dinner for the little one. I learned to tread carefully in the kitchen for fear of tripping over the phantom umbilical cord.

I spent about a year rowing up that stream, encouraging, goading, pushing Jilli to try various new foods. I barely made any progress, and my oar was about broke. If anything I was bordering on alienating her and ensuring that years later I would be called out as the cause of some newly named eating disorder. So I backed off.

Then, on no account of my own wits, a solution presented itself. Always looking up to Paloma, her older stepsister, Jilli began to emulate her. Paloma swallowed an oyster. Jilli choked one down. Paloma ate a poached egg, and Jilli ate hers (whites more firm, please).

Her palate began to grow and while she still has boundaries, she’ll try about anything. Recently I hand-cut steak tartare and she gobbled it up. Often she’ll grab her mother’s glass of wine, swirl it, smell it, and talk about fruit. One more American spared from culinary vacuity.

So it seems there are two paths to bequeathing a broad palate – put dinner in front of your kids and wait until they are hungry. Eventually they will eat the liver and onions and all of the other things you feed them. It’s the method of the Greatest Generation. It raised our parents and most of us.

Alternatively, bring in a ringer and let her do the work.

Love in the Kitchen

There are two kinds of love in the kitchen. The euphemistic one that really means steamy hot sex – potentially dangerous if you leave your knives out, and the second, hard won kind.

It’s the second kind I’m thinking about at the moment. The one reflected in kitchen tool ads where a handsome man pours EVOO into a pan while a pretty woman dices carrots at his shoulder. Big smiles, a shoulder exposed. Creating beauty together. Elements of nesting.

Setting aside for a second that oiling a pan with EVOO is a waste, that pouring it from three feet above the pan like an Asturian serving cider is more likely to grease the stovetop than the pan, and the woman chopping the veggie while looking at her guy is about to add thin slices of her epidermis to the carrot dice, it’s all very attractive.

Attractive, but man, not easy. Turns out it’s like any other part of a relationship: egos, sensitivity, varying skill levels, unspoken expectations leading to spoken disappointments. She looks over at you working and instead of feeling the eyes of affection you feel the eyes of judgment. She thinks I’m holding the knife incorrectly, or chopping the onions inefficiently, some shit like that. Or maybe I’m doing that to her. Neither of us have worked in a professional kitchen before, so the only experience we’ve had with others in that small hot space has come at holiday time with family. Based on that history, we are just waiting for a crappy experience.

That’s how we started. Each time we entered the kitchen together it seemed like a great idea – for about 30 minutes. Then someone had to walk away. Later an apology, and always the disappointing sense that we should be much better at this. We are good people, we care about each other, we like to cook. She’s really hot. Damn it, this should work. Each time . . . back to the drawing board.

It’s not like that anymore. Somewhere along the way we learned the dance, the footwork, and we started to flow.

I swear to you, if you stick it out, if you talk about your expectations (this is my station, that is yours, and don’t fuck with my mise), ask each other for help, help when asked, and give it a couple of years, you can get there. Perhaps without a therapist.

And you just might get back to having that first type of love in the kitchen, which is the one I’m thinking about now.