It’s research, I’d plead. So I know what my readers are responding to!
But it was more than that. For the first time since I had kids—maybe even since I started working—I felt what it was like to be in control of my life. I could reply, “I’ll bring the juice!” to the class mom’s email. I could be at the bus stop whenever I wanted to. I could be at drop-off and pickup for every activity. (It should be noted, however, that the activity schlepping turned out to be the absolute bane of my existence.) And I was in control of something that was exclusively mine. This was a powerful drug, and before I knew it, I had turned into my mother. I considered working every bit as fun as vacation. I didn’t know what all my work on the site was going to lead to or how long it was going to last, but I don’t think I ever stopped working to ask myself either question. All I knew was that the numbers were adding up to something good.
Five Recipes on Dinner:
A Love Story with the Best Numbers
(i.e., Most Popular!)
Best Vegetarian: Peanut Butter Noodles
This peanut butter noodle recipe (known to most of the world as sesame noodles) is from my friend, mother of two, and onetime Gourmet magazine staffer Melissa Roberts, whose kids lived and breathed peanut butter. In the original recipe, she called for peanut butter that is not all natural because it apparently affects the texture. But I find that the dinner still works with the all-natural kind, too. If you have any leftover sauce after tossing with the noodles, try it drizzled over steamed spinach goma-ae-style. Total time: 25 minutes
1 pound udon noodles or spaghetti
1 small garlic clove
1-inch piece peeled fresh ginger
½ cup smooth peanut butter
2/3 cup warm water
2 tablespoons soy sauce
1 tablespoon Asian sesame oil
1 tablespoon red wine or cider vinegar
1 teaspoon sugar
½ to 1 teaspoon red pepper flakes
Any combination of the following toppings: sliced cucumbers, chopped peanuts, sugar snap peas, and shredded chicken if you need to please a meat-eater
Prepare the noodles according to package instructions. Set aside.
With the motor running, drop the garlic and ginger into the bowl of a food processor and process until finely chopped. Add the peanut butter, water, soy sauce, sesame oil, vinegar, sugar, and pepper flakes and process until smooth.
Toss with the noodles and add the desired toppings.
Best Dessert: Apple “Gazette”
Most people of course know this as an apple “galette,” but Abby once called it a gazette by accident, so that’s its official title in our house. My favorite thing about this recipe is that unlike most baked goods, it can be thrown together casually with room for error. (I am not a baker, so I need a lot of room.) You can slice the apples right into the middle of the crust to save on bowl cleanup, too. Cortland, Granny Smith, Jonathan, Northern Spy, and McIntosh are all excellent pie-baking apples. Total time: 1 hour
1 9-inch frozen pie crust, such as Pillsbury or Trader Joe’s (or if you have Martha Stewart’s pâte brisée in the freezer, lucky you!)
3 to 4 apples, peeled and sliced (about 1½ pounds or 4 cups)
¼ cup sugar
½ teaspoon cinnamon
Dash of nutmeg
Juice from ½ lemon
6 to 8 dots of butter
1 egg, beaten
Preheat the oven to 400°F.
Lay the pie crust on top of a cookie sheet. Peel and thinly slice the apples directly into the center of the crust, leaving about a 1-inch border around the perimeter of the dough. Sprinkle the apples with the sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, and lemon juice. Using your hands, toss everything together gently, then pleat the crust around the perimeter of the apples. (Most of the center of the pie will be exposed, like a tart.) Dot the apples with butter and brush the crust with egg wash. (This is an excellent task for kids.)
Bake for 20 minutes. Turn down the heat to 350°F and bake another 20 minutes, until crust is golden and the apples are a little bubbly. If the apples look dry on top, stir them around a bit to coat with juice. If the crust is looking too brown before the apples are bubbly, cover the galette with foil. Once the galette is cool, Abby likes to sprinkle it with powdered sugar, but this step is not required.
Best Grilling: Yogurt-Marinated Grilled Chicken
We never liked grilled chicken—it was always too rubbery or dry—until we discovered the yogurt technique. Now it’s our number one choice for summer dinner. On the blog we called it “Grilled Chicken for People Who Hate Grilled Chicken.” Total time: 3 hours 20 minutes (includes 3 hours marinating time)
½ cup plain yogurt
1 garlic clove, chopped
2 teaspoons salt
Juice from 1½ lemons (about 1/3 cup)
Good squeeze of honey
1 tablespoon olive oil
Very healthy dose of freshly ground black pepper
4 to 5 boneless chicken breasts (about 1½ pounds), pounded (see sidebar),
In a medium bowl, whisk together the yogurt, garlic, salt, lemon juice, honey, oil, and pepper until emulsified. Pour the yogurt marinade into zipper-lock plastic bag. Add the chicken to the bag and mush around until coated. Seal and refrigerate for a minimum of 3 hours. When the grill is ready (and oiled), shake off the excess yogurt from chicken breasts and grill 3 to 4 minutes on each side, until flesh is firm but not rock hard.
Best Beef: Belgian Beef Stew
I grew up eating the traditional tomato-based beef stew—the kind that goes well with a mound of egg noodles. This one is the Belgian brothy version and is topped off with a dollop of mustard. Just the detail to elevate a classic kid dinner into a grown-up one. Total time: 1 hour
1 tablespoon olive oil
2 garlic cloves
1 sirloin steak (about 1½ pounds), patted dry, salted, and cut into 1-inch chunks
1 large onion, chopped
1 12-ounce bottle of good-quality dark beer
1 bay leaf
Leaves from 2 sprigs fresh thyme
1 cup peeled and sliced carrots
Salt and pepper to taste
2 pounds red potatoes, peeled and quartered
Dijon mustard, for serving
In a Dutch oven, heat the oil and 1 garlic clove (halved horizontally) over medium-high heat until the garlic turns golden, 1 to 2 minutes. Remove the garlic and discard. Add the steak to the oil, in batches, and brown on all sides, salting and peppering as you go. Set the steak aside.
Add the onion to the pan, reduce the heat to medium-low, and cook until the onion is soft and sweating, about 8 minutes. Then add the steak and its juices back into pan, with the beer, bay leaf, and thyme. Bring to a boil, scraping the bottom of the pan as you go. Reduce the heat to low and cover. Simmer for 20 minutes. Chop the remaining garlic clove and add to the pan along with the carrots. Meanwhile, boil the potatoes in salted water for about 15 minutes, until a knife meets no resistance slicing through them.
Cook stew for another 25 minutes, until the carrots are tender. Serve over boiled potatoes and top with the dollaps of Dijon mustard.
You’ll need a spoon to drink up the broth.
Best Chicken: Baked Chicken in Creamy Tomato Sauce
I couldn’t believe how popular this recipe was with my readers. I had eaten it at my friend Vanessa’s house—she found some version of it first in Olive magazine—and when I shared it on the blog, people went crazy. I think it has something to do with the mascarpone. Everyone has their worn-out baked chicken dish, but the mascarpone manages to make it a little special without turning off the kids. Total time: 50 minutes
3 to 4 large boneless chicken breasts, rinsed and patted dry
3 tablespoons olive oil
1 small onion, finely chopped
2 garlic cloves, minced
1 15-ounce can chopped tomatoes
3 tablespoons mascarpone
Handful of fresh basil, roughly ch
opped
Preheat the oven to 350°F.
In an ovenproof skillet or Dutch oven, brown the chicken breasts over high heat in the oil, about 2 minutes on each side. Remove the breasts from the pan. (They do not have to be cooked through.) Turn down the heat to medium-low and add the onion and garlic. After about 2 minutes, stir in the tomatoes and simmer for 10 to 15 minutes. Stir in mascarpone and basil. Add chicken breasts back to pan, immersing them in sauce, and bake uncovered for 20 minutes, flipping halfway through.
May 2010
Rising to the Occasion
It’s true that losing my job was both traumatic and clarifying, and that I might describe the time around this event as “before I got canned” and “after I got canned.” But that wasn’t exactly the case. A more accurate summation might be “before yeast” and “after yeast.” Because right after I lost my job, I discovered the book My Bread by Jim Lahey. Lahey is the man behind Sullivan Street Bakery (among other popular New York spots) and his popularity probably peaked the day Mark Bittman ran his no-knead bread recipe in the New York Times Dining section. The recipe was something of a sensation—a whole generation of amateur bakers intimidated by the conventional punching and rolling step (aka kneading) became instant converts. It was one of Bittman’s most-read columns in ten years and spawned an entire cookbook featuring other no-knead recipes that were just as exciting as the now world-famous bread.
Of course, had I not lost my job, I would have never picked up Lahey’s book in the first place. That’s because every single recipe in the book called for an ingredient that was a virtual deal breaker for anyone who had kids and also a job.
Every recipe contained yeast.
There are other instructions and ingredients that intimidate me—phyllo dough, egg poaching, grilling a Porterhouse—but none of these tasks seemed to speak to the condition of my life as profoundly as yeast did. In my mind, there was no overlap on the Venn diagram between people who worked with yeast and people like me, who seemed to spend way too much time in a state of semi-urgency—even when the task at hand was just folding laundry. To me, if you were comfortable working with yeast, it usually meant you were regularly making recipes that required yeast. Which usually meant that you had a reserve of patience as well as the kind of life that regularly allowed for rising time. The only rising that happened regularly in my house was Abby at inhuman hours in the morning.
But when I flipped through Lahey’s book and came across the recipe for his crispy thin pizza crust—the same crispy thin crust that lined the pizzas I had devoured at his restaurants several dozen euphoric times—I had a clarifying moment: I don’t have a job. I no longer walk around exhausted all the time craving sleep. I now have a life—at least for the time being—in which two hours of rising time (which is what the pizza recipe called for) would not upend my day or my sanity.
If the rest of the world was caught up in a no-knead bread revolution, I was caught up in a no-knead pizza crust revolution. At Trader Joe’s I found a sick pleasure in bypassing the perfectly fine store-bought balls of pizza dough, reaching instead for the triple-pack of Fleischmann’s active dry yeast that once taunted me from the baking ingredient shelf. And we would absolutely tear through those yeast packs—making homemade pizza about once a week for the first year of my new life. I’m not talking about the kind of pizza you make by sprinkling shredded cheese over jarred sauce. I’m talking pizza that always made good use of our fresh farmers’ market loot or pizza that may or may not include cheese. We experimented with different toppings all the time—arugula and ricotta, green tomatoes and aged provolone. The kids would occasionally take a bite of these—and in the case of our salad pizza devour them—but for the most part, they stuck with their favorite: marinara and mozzarella, maybe sausage. Which was fine with me because it didn’t involve a whole lot of extra work on our ends. We’d just draw an imaginary line down the center of the pizzas and make one half for them and the other half for us. We call these “split-personality” pizzas, and in our minds it’s the ultimate family dinner—you can have three separate meals on one crust and still feel like you’re all eating the same thing.
Six Pizzas
If you have just read this little ode to yeast and wondered why on earth you picked up this hateful book with stories about people who have time to make homemade pizza crust, please take a big Lamaze breath. Remember, those kids hanging on your apron won’t always be hanging on your apron. And until they grow out of that phase, you are encouraged to replace the homemade dough in the following pizza recipes with the store-bought variety now available just about anywhere.
Pizza Crust
I love Jim Lahey’s crust because it’s thin, crispy, and so very reliable. I can’t ever remember a night where it didn’t work. When we’re feeling healthy, we replace the white flour with whole wheat flour—if you want to be sneaky about it with the kids, you can start by just replacing half with whole wheat flour. We usually use one ball of dough for one dinner and then freeze the extra for another dinner later. To thaw, remove from freezer about two to three hours before using and work it with your hands if it’s still stiff. Makes two 16-ounce balls of dough; each ball of dough makes 1 cookie-sheet-size pizza Total time: 2 hours 5 minutes (includes 2-hour hands-off rise time)
3¾ cups all-purpose flour
2½ teaspoons instant or other active dry yeast
¾ teaspoon salt
¾ teaspoon sugar
11/3 cups water, room temperature
Olive oil, for greasing
In a medium bowl, stir together the flour, yeast, salt, and sugar. Add the water, and using a wooden spoon or your hand, mix until blended, at least 30 seconds.
The dough will be stiff, not wet and sticky. Cover the bowl and let it sit at room temperature until the dough has more than doubled in volume, about 2 hours. Divide the dough in two and shape each section into flattened balls. If you are only making one pizza, freeze the other ball in a freezer storage bag. If you rub a little olive oil on your fingers and on the ball of dough before bagging, it will be less sticky to negotiate.
Pick your desired pizza from the following pages and proceed as directed.
Pizza Sauce
Makes 3 cups of sauce, enough for two 11 x 17-inch pizzas Total time: 30 to 40 minutes
2 garlic cloves, minced
4 to 5 glugs of olive oil
1 small onion, chopped
Salt and pepper to taste
Few shakes of red pepper flakes
1 28-ounce can diced tomatoes (or tomato puree)
6 shakes oregano
4 to 5 basil leaves, chopped (optional)
In a medium saucepan over low heat, sauté the garlic in the oil for 1 to 2 minutes, until fragrant. Add the onion, salt and pepper, and pepper flakes, and turn up the heat slightly. Stir until the onions have softened, about 4 minutes. Add the tomatoes and oregano. Stir, bring to a boil, and then simmer uncovered for 30 minutes. (But 20 minutes is fine, too, if the kids are losing it.) If you have basil, definitely add a few shreds during the last 5 minutes that it simmers.
Pizza 1: Sausage and Ricotta Pizza
You will always see this combo on one side of our split-personality pizzas. (If you are doing the split pizza, remember to halve the ingredients below.) Total time: 35 to 40 minutes
Olive oil, for greasing
1 16-ounce ball homemade pizza dough or your favorite store-bought variety
1½ cups Pizza Sauce or your favorite store-bought variety
1 link sweet or hot Italian sausage, casing removed, crumbled and cooked
1 8-ounce ball fresh mozzarella, thinly sliced
6 to 10 spoonfuls fresh ricotta
¼ cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese
Preheat the oven to 500°F.
Using your fingers or a pastry brush, grease a 17 x 12-inch rimmed baking sheet with the oil. Drop your pizza dough into the center of the baking sheet, and using your fingers, press out and flatten the dough so it spreads as cl
ose as possible to all four corners. This might seem difficult, but persist—the thin crust will be worth it.
Add the sauce to dough, spreading with a spoon. Sprinkle with sausage and top with the mozzarella. Add the ricotta and Parmesan cheese on top. Bake for 15 to 20 minutes, until the cheese is bubbly.
If the crust is browning faster than the toppings are cooking, cover with foil and continue to bake.
Pizza 2: Mushroom and Onion Pizza on Whole Wheat Crust
For this one, try replacing 2 cups of the flour in the pizza crust recipe for whole wheat flour. It adds a nice nutty flavor. Total time: 35 minutes
4 tablespoons olive oil, plus more for brushing
1 16-ounce ball homemade pizza dough or your favorite store-bought variety
1 medium onion, sliced
1½ cups mushrooms (any kind—if you can find maittake, try them; they are my favorite) sliced or chopped
Leaves from 2 sprigs fresh thyme
¼ teaspoon red pepper flakes
Tiniest pinch of nutmeg (barely 1/8 teaspoon)
Salt and pepper to taste
1 8-ounce ball fresh mozzarella, thinly sliced
Freshly grated Parmesan cheese
Chopped fresh parsley (optional)
Preheat the oven to 500°F.
Using your fingers or a pastry brush, grease a 17 x 12-inch rimmed baking sheet with 1 tablespoon of the oil. Drop your pizza dough into the center of the baking sheet, and using your fingers, press out and flatten the dough so it spreads as close as possible to all four corners. This might seem difficult, but persist—the thin crust will be worth it.
Dinner: A Love Story Page 21
