by John Donohue
I took Lily’s growing list of food dislikes as a personal challenge. Every parent wants his or her child to eat happily. When you are a food writer and a cook, this is doubly true. I treated every shopping trip as a game of chess, thinking five steps ahead to the finished meal. Relying mostly on hope and my recollections of Lily’s preferences, I could force a culinary checkmate—a plateful of things that she would have no choice but to polish off gratefully and with gusto. I knew she liked potatoes, so even though I have always been indifferent to them, I often bought a few as a way to soften her up. Then it was on to the main ingredient. For example, I once brought home some beautiful lamb chops. A no-brainer, I thought, because I recalled that on July 11, 1994, she wolfed down the rack of lamb at the first dinner ever served at Gramercy Tavern (the week that my eight-thousand-word making-of-the-restaurant story was the cover piece for New York magazine). I made the lamb, with a side of the aforementioned potatoes. Lily pushed it aside. “I’ll have scrambled eggs,” she advised.
“But Lily, you loved lamb at Gramercy Tavern,” I said.
“Yeah, but I don’t like it anymore. You know I haven’t liked it for six months,” she accused.
Then there was the Salmon Saga, Parts 1 and 2 (which bookended the I Won’t Eat Meat Because the Fat Makes Me Want to Throw Up Saga). It started when I made scrumptious oven-roasted wild salmon fillets, finished with olive oil, flaky salt, ground cardamom, and nutmeg with a chiffonade of basil, mint, and parsley. This was the first recipe in my first cookbook, The Elements of Taste (with Gray Kunz). The dish has never failed to please. Except this once.
“I don’t like salmon anymore,” Lily said, defaulting to, “I’ll scramble some eggs,” which was the one recipe she had mastered by age eight.
Did I mention that chicken was fine? It was, as long as it was crispy. Pan-roasted chicken breasts, finished in the oven and deglazed with vermouth, shallots, and honey passed muster with Lily. So that went into the rotation for a year or two until it began to bore me and I could no longer bring myself to make it ever again. The ability to fulfill an order even when you have lost all enthusiasm is what marks professional chefs from the home cook—even semifamous, cookbook-writing, stay-at-home dads.
Red meat did not become a viable option until we went to Argentina one Easter. At a remote cabin in Patagonia—in fact, the only structure on a lake at the end of a hundred miles of dirt road—the menu was meat, more meat, and the occasional wild brook trout. Lily was twelve, a time of many changes in a girl’s life. Her food rules evolved, and meat was back on the menu.
I could make steaks and smoked pork shoulder and spicy long-cooked spareribs: however, rather than capitulate completely, Lily advised that I hold off on the lamb for a bit. And the delicious pink-fleshed brook trout of Patagonia notwithstanding, Salmo salar was still verboten in Brooklyn. Then, last year, as part of a Bard College program, Lily took a road trip to New Orleans, where she worked as a volunteer at a day camp for inner-city kids. On the way there, she and her Bard posse stopped at Frank Stitt’s restaurant, Bottega, in Birmingham, Alabama. I knew Frank to be just about the most gentlemanly fellow on the face of the earth, and I had called ahead to tell him that my daughter and her schoolmates would be passing through.
As expected, he showered them with hospitality and made the road-weary young women feel special, so special that Lily ordered roast salmon with orzo and fresh herbs. Upon her return from New Orleans, she requested that I make Frank Stitt’s salmon.
Salmon? Lily? I could hardly believe my ears!
I grilled the salmon on our roof deck on the twenty-eighth of July. I would remember the date even if it were not Lily’s birthday: it’s the day she became an eater after my own heart. As the sun descended behind the Statue of Liberty, the reflection of its pale fire shimmered on the waters of the Upper Bay. For me it was surely a moment of warm contentment: Lily, her friends filling the air with the tinkling palaver of teenage girls, Lucy sitting on the lap of her boyfriend, lost in the moment, Melinda and I drinking rosé wine and feeling happily full of summer, sunset, and joy in our daughters.
Lily asked for seconds.
Recipe File
Whole Roast Cow
This is a recipe that we did for Seven Fires: Grilling the Argentine Way, which I wrote with South America’s greatest chef, Francis Mallmann. Every year I try to get Danny Meyer’s Big Apple Barbecue Block Party to let us do it on the streets of Manhattan with all the safety precautions FDNY could want. So far, no luck with the firemen, although Danny, as ever, is game. Please write the mayor and tell him, “We want our cow!” It gave me ineffable joy to write the list of ingredients and recipe as follows.
1 medium cow, about 1,400 pounds, skin removed and butterflied
1 gallon salmuera (salted water)
1 gallon chimichurri (see below)
Equipment and other supplies:
1 heavy-duty block and tackle attached to a steel stanchion, set in concrete
1 2-sided truss made of heavy-duty steel
16 square yards corrugated steel (4 × 4 feet)
1 heavy-duty pliers
2 cords hardwood logs
7:00 p.m.: Start fire, about twenty logs.
8:00 p.m.: With the aid of 8 strong helpers, put the cow in the truss, season with salmuera, and raise to a 45-degree angle with the bone side facing the fire.
Place corrugated steel over the skin side to reflect and contain the heat (just as you would tent a turkey).
Shovel coals from the fire under the cow so that the whole cow receives even, slow heat.
10:00 p.m.: Season the meat with salmuera. Continue to add logs to the bonfire and coals to the cooking fire all through the night.
Drink wine, sip maté, have coffee all night long. Take turns with other members of the crew, some sleeping and one tending the fire. You might roast a lamb to feed your crew all through the night.
10:00 a.m.: Remove the corrugated reflector, season the cow with salmuera, turn the cow and season that side with salmuera, too. Continue to cook, crisping the top of the cow.
2:00 p.m.: Begin to carve (some pieces may require longer cooking). Serve with chimichurri.
Chimichurri
Yield: 2 cups
1 cup water
1 tablespoon coarse salt
1 head of garlic, peeled
1 cup packed flat-leaf parsley
1 cup fresh oregano leaves
2 teaspoons crushed red chili flakes
¼ cup red wine vinegar
½ cup extra-virgin olive oil
Bring the water to a boil in a small saucepan. Add the salt and stir until the salt dissolves. Remove from the heat and allow to cool.
Mince the garlic very fine and place in a bowl. Mince the parsley and oregano and add to the garlic with the chili flakes. Whisk in the red wine vinegar and then the olive oil. Whisk in the salted water and transfer to a jar with a tight lid. Keep in the refrigerator.
Note: Chimichurri is best prepared one or more days in advance so that the flavors have a chance to blend.
On the Shelf
A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway. Or almost anything by Hemingway. When he put food on a page, his words came alive. They jump out at you like your own name.
The Leopard, Giuseppe di Lampedusa. When the Prince cuts into the maccheroni at the Sunday dinner in the beginning of this novel, I can see the steam rise before me and I believe I can even smell the melted cheese.
Between Meals, A. J. Liebling. Liebling never wrote a bad word, and nothing ever made me want to be in Paris more than this book.
The Joy of Cooking, Irma Rombauer. I love the stories, especially the one under “About Lobsters,” in the original Bobbs-Merrill edition:
The uninitiated are sometimes balked by the intractable appearance of a lobster at table. They may take comfort from the little cannibal who, threading his way through the jungle one day at his mother’s side, saw a strange object flying overhead. “Ma, what’s that?” he quave
red. “Don’t worry, sonny,” said Ma. “It’s an airplane. Airplanes are pretty much like lobsters. There’s an awful lot you have to throw away, but the insides are delicious.”
I have also always preferred Rombauer’s action method of recipe writing, but no editor I have ever worked for would go for it.
Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Julia Child. Not mentioning her is like talking about baseball and leaving out Babe Ruth. What Irma Rombauer started in me, Julia pushed across the finish line. The most bulletproof recipes ever written.
Le erbe aromatiche in cucina, Renzo Menesini. I can recite from it, but I’ll be damned if I can find it in the English translation; he once told me that the pomegranate seeds in chicken breast with bechamel looked “like drops of blood on the white belly of an odalisque.” Now that’s what I call a great headnote!
IN THE TRENCHES
Henry Schenck, a professor of mathematics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is the forty-seven-year-old father of three children under the age of ten. His wife, Maureen McMichael, is a veterinary specialist in small-animal emergency medicine and critical care at the university, and a vegetarian. Schenck, a meat eater, does more than 80 percent of the cooking for the family, which does not eat meat.
Once, when I was learning to make pesto, which I make with a mix of spinach and basil, I had trouble with the greens, which were sitting up above the blade of the blender. I hadn’t added the olive oil, and I thought I could tamp them down with a wooden spoon. I tried this, of course turning off the blender first. But then they immediately went back to the top. And then I tamped them down again, and they went back up to the top. I decided to tamp them down while the blender was running. It turns out, it’s rather hard to estimate how close the wooden spoon can get to those swirling blades. The wooden spoon hit the swirling blades, and I learned that pesto can become a projectile. It hit the ceiling, and the chunk of the wooden spoon that surrendered to the blades fragmented. The pesto had a bit of a woody taste. Usually you hear “woody” associated with a red wine, but this was woody pesto. I tried to pass it off as a “chunky, oaky” new version, but my wife soon put together the big green splotch on the ceiling of the kitchen with the woody taste in the pesto. My advice: turn off the blender before putting in the wooden spoon.
My kids are not very excited about cooking right now, which is interesting because usually kids like to be involved in activities that their parents model. This is OK for now because involving kids in anything makes it more time consuming. I’m often in a hurry. I move very, very, very fast. I drink a lot of caffeine. I’m currently working to see if it is possible to inject espresso directly into a vein. More often I just go for a triple espresso instead of a double. At some point, though, it will make sense for me to involve the kids in the cooking, just for their own growth.
Anytime that it’s warm enough to grill, which for us means April to November, I will marinate a whole salmon and grill it. Then I like to make a big garden salad, with a dressing of olive oil, lemon, and salt. I’ll serve it with a bowl of pasta with some sort of sauce, typically something easy like a pesto, and then a side of some kind of vegetables. One of my favorite things to do with the grill is to marinate some zucchini and grill it. If you slice them lengthwise, they grill up very nicely. This is an easy meal. Since I’m grilling, there’s not so much cleanup to do. It’s healthy and really quite good and it’s one of our standard dishes for guests because they always like it quite a bit.
In my youth, I encountered overcooked broccoli with some regularity, and it traumatized me so much that I could not eat broccoli for the next twenty years. I make a great broccoli rabe. You want to start with a nice, bushy green. When rabe is starting to go bad, the leaves start to get trimmed, and it becomes a tighter bunch. A nice, fresh rabe will have a bunch of leaves. As with any green, you should look for something that has good color and a nice appearance. Once you have your rabe, it’s really quite simple to prepare. Rinse it, chop off the bases of the stem, much as you would for regular broccoli. The bottoms tend to be tough. Some people like them, some people don’t. Take the big bunch in your hand and chop it into one-and-a-half-inch segments. One of my general rules is that anything with enough garlic is delicious. Sauté garlic in olive oil and then toss the rabe in. Add just a little bit of water to create a steaming effect. Stir it for maybe five to ten minutes, just like a stir-fry, then pull out a piece and test it. Don’t let it become soggy and mushy. Not many people like broccoli that is overcooked.
One of the best reasons to cook is that if you’re going to go out to dinner and spend a lot of money and a lot of time, and you have high culinary expectations, you’ll almost certainly be disappointed. Either the time or the money or the dish will not be worth it. So it makes a lot more sense to cook for yourself because then you won’t be disappointed. Anyone who enjoys cooking develops a sense of what will work. When there’s time, which oftentimes is not when you have kids, but sometimes, you can create your own fantasy meal. My fantasy meal is not about the ingredients. It’s about the prep and the cleanup. Having the prep and the cleanup done for me, that’s my fantasy.
Recipe File
Spinach-Basil Pesto
1 medium-size head of basil
An equal amount of spinach
½ cup nuts (Pine nuts are popular, although walnuts work equally well. I’ve also used pecans or almonds, which result in a slightly sweeter pesto.)
½ cup olive oil
Rinse and wash the greens well.
Place them in a food processor or blender. (If the stems of the basil are tender, they can be tossed in also; late in the season, stems are often woody and should be discarded.)
Add the nuts and oil and blend for about twenty seconds.
Note: Most recipes call for adding ½ cup of Parmesan, but I think it works fine without it. This is also true for adding a clove of crushed garlic. Add salt to taste. Most important part: after blending, taste and add what you think it needs! For a creamier pesto, add more nuts and/or olive oil and blend longer.
Bruschetta
Crusty bread, sliced
2 large tomatoes, diced
½ cup olive oil
1 to 2 cloves garlic, crushed
Salt to taste
Toast the bread in the oven until slightly browned.
Combine the tomatoes, oil, garlic, and salt.
Drizzle the mixture over the bread once it is toasted.
Broccoli Rabe
Olive oil
2 large heads of broccoli rabe, washed and diced
1 head of garlic, chopped
Lemon juice and salt to taste
Sauté the garlic in a little oil in a large pan.
Add the rabe and cook until the stems are tender (usually about 5 to 10 minutes—pull one out and take a bite to see how they are doing).
Add salt and lemon juice to taste.
Note: This is traditionally served as a side, but it is great over pasta (fettuccine works well). For an added twist, sauté a few diced porto-bello mushrooms and add them to the rabe.
MICHAEL RUHLMAN
How Many Parents Does It Take to Roast a Chicken?
Michael Ruhlman is the author of nine nonfiction books on subjects as diverse as life at a wooden boatyard, the world of pediatric heart surgery, and the work of the professional chef; he is the coauthor of seven cookbooks. His most recent book is Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking. He lives in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, with his wife and two children.
In my prekid days, I lived with my wife in a shaded little bungalow in Palm Beach. The evenings were balmy, and I thought nothing of getting dinner rolling, then coaxing my wife, or trying to, into a little preprandial fling. What better way could there have been to pass the time while the charcoal turned to burger-searing embers? There was no better appetizer, and the meal afterward was remarkably satisfying. The conversation that followed had an uncommon ease.
Now that I’m a parent, the
evenings are filled with something more than warm breezes. Family life can feel like a gale-force event. Forget creatively trying to pass the time. Just sitting down to dinner seems to eat up the clock. But not long ago, on a tear on my blog about the way food companies try to convince us that cooking is too hard to do on our own and that we’re too stupid to succeed, I dashed off a recipe that included a hard-earned suggestion. I had learned by now that to recapture and maintain the excitement of my relationship takes planning. In this case, though, not much. With a little invention, a simple roast chicken—one of the great staples of cooking life—becomes something entirely new.
Roast Chicken for Two
Step 1: Preheat your oven to 425°F or, if you have ventilation, 450°F, and use convection heat if it’s available.
Step 2: Wash and pat dry a 3- to 4-pound chicken. Truss it if you know how, or stuff 2 lemon halves in its cavity. Season it aggressively with kosher or sea salt (it should have a nice crust of salt). Put it in a skillet and slide it into the hot oven.
Step 3: Have sex with your partner. (This can require planning, occasionally some conniving. But as cooks tend to be resourceful and seductive by nature, most find that it’s not the most difficult part of the recipe.)
Step 4: Remove the chicken from the oven after it’s cooked for 1 hour, allow it to rest for 15 minutes, and serve.
Properly executed, such a dish is extraordinary—economical, satisfying, not overly caloric, fun to prepare (in fact, worth making simply to pursue step 3), and potentially a valuable recipe in your weekly cooking routine.