For the Dogs

It's pumpkin pie season, and my dog couldn't be happier.

I am the kind of food geek that roasts her own pumpkins to make pie. Okay, look, I KNOW that it tastes the same if you buy it in the can. You can all stop telling me that. If I don't have time and I need to make a pie, I'll buy the damn cans, alright? But I LIKE roasting the pumpkins. It feeds my pioneer-lady fantasies, okay? It's me, the prairie and a few potatoes I dug up by hand from the freezing ground, right before the blizzard hit. I've just got to make it till Pa comes back with provisions. So leave me and my roasted pumpkins alone.

Anyway, my dog and I share this mindset, so when I roast pumpkins, she pretends she doesn't have a 40-lb bag of IAMs Mini Chunks and ten pounds of meaty marrow bones in the freezer, the likes of which Ma and Pa Ingalls would have served for Christmas dinner. No, it's just her, the back alley and a few strips of roasted pumpkin skins. Lucky she's so scrappy or the Tramp would never go for her.

Okay, whatever about my dog's and my pioneer fantasies.

The truth is, my dog actually likes pumpkin and squash skins. I learned this from my mom, who feed them to her dogs, and was the first person to talk me back into feeding dogs table scraps.



Back in the 70's and 80's we all got too fancy to feed our dogs scraps. It made them beg while you were eating. It made them fat. So they said.

I bought all this hook line and sinker, and when I got my first dog I never fed him scraps. He was a deaf pit bull who was really headstrong, so it made sense on a lot of levels to be strict with him in every way possible

(I used to let him chew on apple cores, until the day I was driving through downtown Philly with him in the passenger seat: I was halfway through an apple when he climbed on to my lap, trying to get at it. I had my arm extended out the window, skidding through traffic, with an 80-lb pit bull on my lap, sticking his head out the window to get the apple, before I realized that he couldn't even have apple cores.)

But my sweet girl Cleo, who is only part pit bull, is a little more malleable. (Look how gently she takes the pumpkin skins! She is always like that about treats.) I give her scraps. She doesn't beg; if she does, I make her leave the kitchen and lie down on her bed. It makes sense to give dogs table scraps. This is what dogs have eaten for thousands of years. It is why we have dogs, because they can survive on our table scraps.

Plus, what is all that crap in dog food? Thousands of unpronounceable ingredients and by-products, that's what. Are they healthier for all this nutritionally formulated food? I don't know. The fish guy at Fairway told me his dog lived to be 17, eating nothing but table scraps. That's spectacularly old, for a dog.


It makes sense to me to give dogs wholesome healthy food, not packaged processed food. It makes sense not to throw away scraps and then go buy a packaged food. It's wasteful not to give dogs your scraps, and it's probably healthier.

Cleo still gets dog food. But as often as possible I give her scraps. She gets the remains of soup stocks, and the livers and necks (uh, and feet) of the chickens that are about to be roasted. And she gets pumpkins skins. Look how cute she is!

Magic Garlic Soup

I'm not feeling so good. I have the first bad cold of the season.

Sore throat, big head, runny nose, swollen sinuses. Ehhhhh.

I got through a wigwam-building field trip and a double playdate, but when it was time for dinner I wanted some relief. There would be no fish tacos (the original plan), no spaghetti, no macaroni and cheese. I needed a spicy salty broth, the kind you can't get in restaurant unless you go into Chinatown, which I'm not doing on a sick night like this.

I was lucky on many counts:

1- I had chicken stock in the fridge.

2 - I planted lemongrass in my backyard last spring, which is still going strong.

3 - I had rice noodles and fish sauce on hand, permanent dry goods which should always be in the cabinet for nights like this.

4 - Limes could be had from up at the bodega around the corner.

5 - Finally -- and this is where I hit pay dirt -- I just spent a weekend with a family in which the mom is from Thailand. After a dinner party, we came back to our rented cabin, and she made a midnight soup. It was her homemade broth, noodles, cilantro and the magic ingredient: crunchy garlic. It was like discovering salt. I cannot believe this ingredient. Its MAKES the soup.

She chops up lots of garlic and sautees it in oil and salt until it is golden brown: sticky, crunchy, salty deliciousness. She likes it so much she puts it on everything, so she makes giant batches and always has a jar on hand. This is an incredibly wise thing to do. I thought I was doing it tonight, but we ended up using it all in one shot.



This soup is so good, after two huge bowls, I still can't stop thinking about it. Sorry the measurements aren't exact, but if you are drunk or hungover or sick, you won't care about measurements anyway. Just do it to taste. It's simpler than it might seem.

Its most basic incarnation would be broth with fish sauce, sugar and limes, then noodles, then crunchy garlic.

And then why not add limes and cilantro and hot sauce?

Or spinach or fish? Or whatever?

Drunk, Hungover, or Just Plain Sick Soup

a few cups of chicken stock
3 or so tablespoons fish sauce
generous pinch of raw sugar
Stalk of lemon grass

3 scallions, sliced
1/2 fennel bulb, thinly sliced, or spinach, or whatever you have on hand (optional)

Thin rice noodles

4 or more cloves of garlic, minced and sauteed slowly in a few tablespoons of oil and a generous pinch of salt

Limes
Hot chili sauce such as Sriracha
Cilantro, chopped

1. Heat the broth with the lemon grass, fish sauce and sugar.

2. Add the sliced scallions and fennel or spinach or whatever else you want to put in.

3. Add the rice noodles.

4. Divide into serving bowls. Add crunchy salty fried garlic. Squeeze limes, and add chili sauce and cilantro. Feel better. I did.

Apple Deluge

We went. We picked. We came home with a motherlode of apples.

Back in Brooklyn, that $25 bag of apples -- $25! for apples!! -- we handpicked reveals itself to be, not so much a means of ripping off New York City tourists who are so desperate for some real food experiences that they will pay extravagantly for the privilege of doing the work usually reserved for underpaid migrant laborers, but rather, a far larger apple harvest than we could possibly know what to do with. They have taken over our kitchen table.

We picked them. Now we just have to use them.

Apple crisp, apple pie and baked apples are the obvious ones. But one of my favorite apple recipes comes from Viana La Place's terrific cookbook, Desserts and Sweet Snacks. She is one of my favorite cookbook writers. Years ago, during a book purge, I threw away her book Unplugged, which is out of print, which I had found in a thrift shop. What a bad move. My thoughts as I held the book in one hand, standing over the Out Box, were, "Well, I only ever really cook her lemon parsley pasta..." Deep down I think I was offended by the part where she talks about being in some Italian hotel and having an upset stomach and ordering just a side of spinach. Who does that? Not me. I am of the "feed a cold, feed a fever, feed an upset stomach' camp. I have regretted ever since throwing away Unplugged, which is almost more of a manifesto than a cookbook.

But I still have Desserts and Sweet Snacks, which has recipes for beautifully simple desserts like Peaches in Red Wine, Pink Honeydew Ice Cream, and a Date Shake, which recalls her childhood in California: she writes, "During my childhood in southern California, my family and i would sometimes go for a drive to Indio, a small desert town near Palm Springs.

"Date Palms flourished there in the midst of miles and miles of sand. We would always stop at a stand that sold date shakes -- a rich, creamy blend of ice cream and dates. I can still see the little stand, bathed in the clear desert light -- the straggly rose garden in front with the most fragrant red roses imaginable, the scent of parched grass, and high above our heads, huge clusters of rusty-orange dates dangling from the tops of fringed dusty palms..."

Okay I'm totally off topic, and quoting a book without permission. Dude, it's the age of blogging, they'll have to come after me.

Try this: Warm Apple Panino.
Basically you take a fresh bread roll or slice of fresh good bread. If it's a roll you hollow it out. You butter one side, and spread apricot preserves on the other. Toast them under the broiler. Meanwhile, you peel, core and thinly slice a half of an apple. Saute the slices in a 1/2 tablespoon of butter, adding a teaspoon of sugar and a few drops of lemon juice. The apple slices should be tender but still hold their shape. Pile the slices into the panino. flatten slightly and eat while still warm. Delicious! Onward, apple soldiers. We can do this.

Bread at Home

Mom?
Yes?
That bread that Jamie made?
Yes?
The braided one?
Yes?
And that stew she made?
Yes?
With the juices from the beef?
Yes?
When you soaked the bread in the juices?
Yes?
It was so good.

That's my picky nine-year-old son talking, the one who's never agreed to stew before, and certainly not to the concept of dipping bread in stew juice. I totally agreed with him, but my amazement is reserved for the fact that this woman finds the time to bake -- and braid -- bread. Anyone with three kids under the age of ten who can get through two risings, never mind braiding the dough, has my eternal admiration.

As my brother said, when he was 13 or so, holding up a loaf of homemade bread in my mom's face: "Hello! Mom! it's the 1980's. They sell bread in the stores..." I mean, it's not like she doesn't have choices.

Thanks for educating my son, Jamie! The bread was delicious, and we all love beef stew now (even me!).

Any other bread bakers out there?

Food Science

If there's any doubt lurking in your mind about how those soy crisps or corn nuts landed their way into your shopping cart, check out this US News article about the Food Industry. It's a dirty dirty business, filled with scientific studies that are closer to advertising, false health claims, and lots of the old "switcheroo" (like when the schools agreed to take soda machines out of schools, only to replace them with vitamin waters and sports drinks and Snapple.

Chickened Out?

When I lived in Italy I got used to the grisly appearance of the animals in the butcher stalls at the market. Rabbits with the heads on, whole pigs' heads, feathered birds hanging by their feet. Even the chickens in the grocery store, wrapped up in a styrofoam tray and plastic wrap, had their feet and sometimes even their heads on.

I found out then that I'm not particularly squeamish about these things. I would just cut off the feet and the head, discard them, and then go about trying to figure out where the joints were so I could cut the whole chicken into pieces.

But it's been a while since those days.

I was totally taken aback when I unwrapped this Murray's chicken last night and found the feet still attached. Okay, I was kind of grossed out. It was the little toe nails that did me in. Also how it sort reminded me of E.T.

But I was fascinated, too. It made the chicken look so much more like a bird, like a pale, plucked version of a formerly living breathing animal. Without the feet it's just a cartoon image of a chicken, like a food icon. No toenails.

As I got ready to roast the chicken, I decided to leave the feet on. Why? I don't know! Maybe I just didn't want to deal with cutting those formerly alive feet off.

But I was also interested in how squeamish I felt. I liked being reminded that my food was once an animal, and that our food preferences are so culturally mandated. In China chicken feet are a delicious snack. You can buy a whole plate of them in a restaurant. It seemed lame to cut them off just to protect my prissy American sensibilities. Also, what would my kids say? Would they think it was gross? Grosser than kidney beans or eggs or asparagus or any of the other mild foods that make them, uh, squeam?

I also thought the whole thing was sort of freakishly cool-looking.

"Look guys, they left the feet on!" They glanced up from playing, uttered monosyllabic responses and went back to what they were doing.

An hour later: "Who wants the chicken feet?" I called out cheerfully when I set the roast chicken on the table.

Unbelievably: "I do!" "I do!" "I said it first!" "That's not fair!"

This was amazing. Would they really eat them, just because I was acting all nonchalant? "There are two," I said. "You can each have one." I used my kitchen shears to cut the feet off at the joint, and set a caramel-colored, roasted, slightly shriveled foot onto each of their plates.

"Uh..." My son had just arrived at the table. He stood for a moment, staring at his plate. "Actually, I don't want one. She can have mine."

I moved his chicken foot over to her plate just as she arrived. "I don't want them either," she said, without a missing beat.

And neither did the grownups, even thought they think they are so worldly and such good eaters. And thus the feet were reunited in the soup-stock bag in the freezer and our cultural lesson came to a close.

Ivanka to the Rescue

And just in time.

Are your tired, stale brown bag lunches boring you to death? Wouldn't some industrially prepared, microwaved Southwestern Chicken or Sczchewuan Beef, at your desk, really liven things up?

Well, suffer your homemade lunch no longer. As the NY Times reported today, Ivanka Trump is going to revolutionize the office lunch. As she says on her blog, it is so boring eating the same foods day after day, and the deli sandwiches are so stale.

Apparently the recent economic downturn has caused workers to bring their own lunches to save money. It's been, what, 2 weeks? But these brownbaggers are B-O-R-E-D.

So, Ivanka, in a breathy, semi-soft-porn kind of voice, promises to make you feeeeel better about your lunch choices.


I'm saved from wanting to hurl myself off a cliff of cultural despair by the fact that the hundreds of comments on her blog are mostly from sensible creative people who consider their homemade lunches a healthy choice filled with possibilities. I'm also heartened to see the blogsphere reacting with the same scorn that I feel.

Because... where's the drudgery? (Making lunch for your kids, that's where, but that's another story...) Finding lids kind of sucks. But all you do is pack your dinner leftovers in your cute little lunch tiffin, and you're good to go. And that's the most basic level.

I've been swapping lunches with a co-worker. I only work two days a week, so on Mondays I bring lunch, on Tuesdays he does.

Today I brought sausage-kale soup with parsnips and lentils, and homemade dinner rolls, and concord grapes. Last week we had turkey and avocado sandwiches on one day, with chocolate chip cookies and also with concord grapes (we both happen to be addicted). We had curried zucchini soup with salad and couscous, and pear tarts, on another. We've had roasted vegetables with duck sausage and apple crisp. We have agreed there will be PB&J days, but so far they haven't happened. Of course, sushi lunch special is our backdoor option, but that hasn't happened either, since we started the swap in September.

What do you all bring for lunch?

Who Doesn't Like Kiwi?

It just shows how neurotic and weird kids are when they turn down a kiwi. I've tried kiwi on mine before and it didn't work. They didn't want to try it, and when I forced them to try a taste, they did, and then shook their heads frantically. Too... what? Sweet and delicious? Too much of a cross between two of your favorite fruits, strawberries and bananas? Too beautifully green and patterned with soft gorgeous black seeds?

Whatever. I let it go; I mean, it's from New Zealand, right? Not exactly local. I was thoroughly annoyed, but it just wasn't high on my list of priorities, getting my kids to eat kiwi.

But the other day I noticed the kiwi bin. I remembered that you can send kiwi in a lunchbox with the top cut off and a little spoon, so kids can scoop out the fruit. How cute. And, as I've mentioned, I'm looking for more snack ideas.

So I bought a couple kiwi (kiwis?) and came home with a new determination. They will try it and they will like it. This was my battle cry.

But I needed a strategy.

I remembered learning at a schoolfood conference about the three-prong approach. I wish I remembered the researchers who presented this evidence, because it is important. To get kids to try new foods in the cafeteria, they learned, it is not enough to serve fantastic food.

This was their three-part strategy to get kids to accept new foods in the cafeteria:

1. Serve beautiful fresh delicious food. Duh. That's the easy part.
2. Incorporate the new foods into the curriculum. The kids should basically study the new food beforehand.
3. Have the kids help either prepare or grow the food, before the first time they try it.

If this works in the schools, why not at home? And of course, it makes so much sense! If I'm traveling in Thailand, and suddenly I'm presented with a food I've never seen before, that looks weird and smells differently from anything I've ever tasted before, I'm far more likely to dig in if I know about the fruit, have read about it, have seen other people like me eating it, and have seen it either picked or in the market or prepared, or whatever. It just ups my confidence level about this strange thing I'm going to put into my mouth.

So I started talking up the kiwi. "Hey, kid, so I got this fruit, it's called a kiwi. It's sort of a cross between a strawberry and a banana, and it's a beautiful green, like a jewel, inside. They're from New Zealand!"

They were totally interested (My son: "How come everybody wants to move to New Zealand?"), so I showed them a picture of kiwi on the internet, and a map of New Zealand (Me: "That's just if the Republicans win.". I read them about two sentences from Wikipedia before they zoned me out and were on to something else.

But that was okay. I'd planted the seeds; now I'd leave them to germinate... Come snacktime they'd be crying for kiwi.

It's so ridiculous. What's next, prepping them for a new flavor of popsicle? But I was really excited to remember this strategy that they are using in the schools. It makes perfect sense to bring it into the home. Who doesn't like knowing a little before they embark on a new flavor sensation?

So how did it go? Quite well, it turns out. My son devoured his portion -- including the skin! -- and begged for more and has asked several times since then. It would seem like a wasted exercise in the obvious -- if not for my daughter's response. Five years old, adventurous, sturdy, and a huge eater, but in the throes of her picky years. She didn't want to try it, and only when gently pressed was willing to taste a small slice. She did eat the slice, but refused more and was unenthusiastic about the whole process.

I don't have a control group of foods to compare -- wait, what I am saying? I have hundreds of examples of foods I've presented to my kids without prepping, which they flatly refused.

Still, kiwi is a gimme. Next up: miso stew, which I'm trying to reintroduce into my life. It used to be a weekly staple, until I had non-tofu-eating, non-sweet-potato-eating, non-shitake-eating, non-seaweed-eating kids. They do like miso broth. It's a start. I'll keep you all posted. Let me know if you have luck using this method!

Lost in the Supermarket

I can no longer shop happily.

Seriously, I can't. I trying to cut back on sugar as my kids' main source of caloric intake, especially for snacks, and it's making shopping hard, and scary.

I am inspired by my mother's comments about all the foods in our house being good foods, so that it was okay for us kids to snack between school and dinner. (This isn't entirely true. I do remember Stew Leonard's cookies and the occasional hard-won box of brownie mix or pop-tarts. )

But for the most part, it's true; we had very few snack foods or premade sweets. My brother and sister and I regularly made whatever we wanted for afterschool snacks, but it was usually real food.

(Of course I loved going to friends' houses, where the cupboards overflowed with Chips Ahoys and Snackwells and Yoo-Hoo's. )

But I'm not going to raise my kids that way, and I'm already freaked out by how dependent we are on Stonyfield Farms Yogurt Squeezers, juice boxes, and weird things like fruit ropes. It's all organic, so it must be good, right? If you're okay with ice cream-level portions of sugar in every snack and meal, sure. I guess so.

So the other day, as I cruised the aisles, I held on to the rudder, hard. I looked over our usual suspects, all those junky things that get my kids through lunch with at least a few calories in their bellies, and appease them afterschool when they are bearishly hungry and eager for a sugary snack. I picked them up, looked at them, and put them down.

I put down the Squeezers and walked away quickly. Because: what if we just didn't buy them? Will my daughter starve? Or will she discover that nuts are good?

I looked at the fruit leather ropes. Is there any nutritional purpose to those things? Or do they just take up precious lunch-eating minutes? The info box confirmed my suspicions that there is virtually nothing in there but sugar. I walked away. Without these will they go back to peanut butter and jelly as a sweet snack?

I walked away from the organic multigrain granola bars that in any other era or culture would be considered candy. Will they turn to cheese and crackers? Will I remember to throw cheese and crackers into my purse as we run out the door?

I loaded up on nuts, cheese and crackers, honeycrisp apples and ... and ... that's kind of it. What else do you give hungry kids? My mind drew a blank. That's our current snack list, and I was unable to go further.

Already I have been meeting my kids at afterschool pickup with a honeycrisp apple, our current favorite. (Them: "Is that a honeycrisp? Yay! Can I have it?"). Hungry and thirsty, they devour them. amd no longer beg to visit the ice cream truck.

Afterschool there are cheese and crackers, more apples, frozen blueberries and sometimes leftovers from the night before, or a whole turkey sandwich if the situatin is drastic. Is it the change in seasons? They are famished lately. And I am running short on ideas.

What do you all feed your kids afterschool? I need snack ideas!

Don't Like Corn Syrup? You Snobby Racist!

Uh... why don't I high fructose corn syrup again? Oh, right, because it's a crappy industrial product produced through weird enzymic processes, because it gets digested by the liver instead of the stomach, because it is part of our natioanl corn-addiction, because it is so cheap that it is responsible for Big Gulps and the ever-sweetening of things like soup and ketchup, because it is the end product in our increasingly industrialized unsustainable food system and because it is at least in part responsible for the obesity epidemic... I could go on.

I'm sure you've all seen this commercial:


This week the commercial made it on to New York Magazine's weekly Approval Matrix, on the lowbrow, despicable corner of the matrix. They wrote: "A bizarre ad paints people who don't like corn syrup as snobby racists".

Thank you, New York Magazine!