For the Sauce
1 large onion, chopped
2 garlic cloves, chopped
Shake of red pepper flakes
3 tablespoons olive oil
1 6-ounce can tomato paste
1 tablespoon sugar
2 15-ounce cans tomato puree or diced tomatoes
2 tablespoons dried oregano
Few pinches of fennel seeds
Small handful fresh thyme or basil, chopped
I wanted to do scratch-and-sniff but my publisher wouldn’t let me.
In a Dutch oven, sauté the onion, garlic, and pepper flakes in the oil over medium-low heat until onion is soft and just starting to turn golden, about 5 minutes. Add the tomato paste and sugar and stir, mashing the paste and onion mixture together, 1 to 2 minutes. Fill the empty tomato paste can with water and add to pot, stirring until mixed, another 1 to 2 minutes. Add the tomato puree, oregano, fennel, and thyme or basil, and stir. Simmer lazily over low heat, uncovered, for as long as you want: the longer the better. If the sauce gets too thick, add a little water.
For the Meatballs
2 pounds ground beef (or, I hate to even own up to this, but we have been known, in an effort to be healthy, to use ground turkey)
1 cup Italian bread crumbs
1 cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese, plus extra for garnishing
2 eggs, lightly beaten
1 cup chopped parsley
Few pinches of fennel seeds
Salt and pepper
Olive oil, for frying
In a large bowl, combine the beef, bread crumbs, Parmesan cheese, eggs, parsley, fennel, and salt and pepper. Mash together with your hands until thoroughly combined. Roll into balls (the size of golf balls) and set aside on a plate. In a large skillet over medium-high heat, add a big glug of oil. Begin browning the meatballs in batches, turning every 2 to 3 minutes. Remove when browned on all sides (about 5 minutes) and place right into the simmering sauce. Once all the meatballs have been browned and transferred to the sauce, simmer over low heat for at least 30 minutes. Serve over pasta, piled high with more cheese, or, sliced, inside dinner rolls for meatball sliders.
Swedish Meatballs
When Phoebe turned seven, she decided she wanted to celebrate at a restaurant that served Swedish food. And so it was February 2009, at Smörgås Chef in New York City where she had her first Swedish meatball with jammy lingonberry sauce and creamy whipped potatoes. (Needless to say, she was sold on not just the dish but the entire country.) This recipe was adapted from Smörgås Chef and originally appeared in Bon Appétit alongside our story of her discovery. It’s the real deal. Total time: 1 hour 30 minutes (includes 1 hour chill time)
1 cup bread crumbs
1½ teaspoons sugar
Salt and pepper
1 teaspoon ground allspice
½ teaspoon ground nutmeg
31/3 cups beef broth
4 tablespoons butter
1 cup minced onion
2 thick slices bacon, finely chopped
1 pound ground beef
¾ pound ground pork
3 eggs, lightly beaten
2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
2 tablespoons sour cream
In a medium bowl, whisk together the bread crumbs, sugar, salt, pepper, allspice, and nutmeg. Stir in 1/3 cup of the broth to moisten and set the mixture aside.
Melt 1 tablespoon of the butter in a medium sauté pan over medium heat. Add the onions and sauté until softened and browned, about 3 minutes. Place the onions in a large bowl and set aside to cool. Wipe out the pan and return to medium heat. Add the bacon and cook until the fat is rendered and the bacon is crisp. Remove the bacon from the pan with a slotted spoon and crumble it into the bowl with the onions. Reserve the bacon fat. Using your hands or a wooden spoon, mix the beef, pork, and eggs into the onions and bacon. Once well combined, gently fold in the bread crumb mixture. Refrigerate for 1 hour.
Roll the meat mixture into small balls (about 1 heaping tablespoon of meat per ball). Heat the remaining 3 tablespoons of butter in a large Dutch oven over medium-low heat. Add enough meatballs to form a single layer and brown on all sides. Remove the meatballs from the Dutch oven with a slotted spoon and reserve on a plate. Repeat with remaining meatballs. Once all the meatballs have been browned, whisk together in the Dutch oven 2 tablespoons of reserved bacon fat and the flour until a smooth paste forms. Stir in the remaining 3 cups broth and bring to a simmer, stirring frequently. Add in the meatballs and reduce the heat to low. Simmer gently until the meatballs are fully cooked, about 5 minutes. Remove from heat, stir in the sour cream, and serve with lingonberry preserves (Hello, IKEA!) and mashed potatoes.
October 2006
Mealtime Mind Games
Around this time, with a three- and almost-five-year-old at the table, I started to notice something about the way a lot of parents fed their kids who were the same ages as mine. It seemed there were two strict paths to take for a relatively easy go at family dinner:
Path 1: You cook two meals, one for the parents and a separate one, usually of lesser quality or from the freezer, for the kids.
Path 2: You could all eat the same meal, which means that mom and dad will usually be eating food that is “cooked to the weakest link” (i.e., foods that are stripped of sauce, texture, and flavor).
Both paths seemed to lead in the same direction: a nagging feeling that you were doing everything all wrong.
It didn’t make sense to me—why did everything have to be so cut-and-dried? Why, for instance, should there be shame in your son eating, say, two of the three things you serve him if it means you only have to cook once and what you cook will be something truly enjoyable? And in my experience, getting stuck in the cooking-to-the-weakest-link rut (which usually means pizza, pasta, and burgers) is going to be the quickest route to sucking all the joy out of a sit-down family dinner. So over the years I developed the following key psychological strategies to ensure that my cooking efforts always felt like a success (even though the casual observer might have a totally different take on things).
Strategy 1: Picture Your Dinner Plates as Venn Diagrams
As we were entering this era of legitimate sit-down family dinner, there were very few meals in our repertoire that every person at the table was eating in the same way, but that never stopped me from making them. Take something as basic as spaghetti with meatballs, with a side of sautéed garlicky spinach. Abby would eat the spaghetti and the meatballs but not the spinach. Phoebe would eat the meatballs and spinach but not the spaghetti. (Don’t get me started on having a pasta handicap at the table.) Andy and I, of course, would eat the whole thing like normal people. But, as annoying as all this customizing is, I never consider it deal-breaker annoying. (Plus, both of our Italian grandmothers would posthumously disown us if we pulled spaghetti and meatballs from the rotation.) Everybody likes at least two out of three things on the plate—and that’s a solid dinner that does not need to be served with a side of peanut butter sandwich. Here is the kind of Venn diagram I’ve drawn (mostly in my head, until now) that shows you how I try to convince myself we are all eating the same thing.
Strategy 2: Denial
If you find the Venn diagram strategy too complicated to wrap your head around, there’s another, less mentally arduous route to take. Remember, you are in the hands of a family dinner expert here, so pay close attention to this hard-earned, time-honored piece of advice. I’ve decided that one of the most effective ways to convince yourself that you are making one thing for everyone (even though you are doing nothing of the sort) is to lock yourself into a state of extreme denial and then proceed with artful self-delusion through every step of the cooking process.
Behold my favorite dinner on earth: Whole Wheat Spaghetti with Caramelized Onions, Spinach, and Parmesan. I love everything about this dish: I love its pantry-friendliness (it can almost always be whipped together at the last minute), its hands-on cooking time (takes about 15 minutes), it
s supercool pot-saving trick (you throw the spinach into the pasta pot and drain everything together), and its deliciousness (oh boy, oh boy, oh boy). So you think I am going to let Phoebe’s pasta hating or Abby’s insistence on having it with a little tomato sauce mixed in (“I want it pink!”) ruin this for me? No way. I refuse. And here’s a step-by-step guide to show you how it’s done.
Self-Delusion Moment 1: I set four identical plates in a grid. This immediately creates the promise (illusion?) of uniformity and order.
Self-Delusion Moment 2: I earmark the lower right bowl as Abby’s and spoon in just the right amount of spaghetti sauce— and a couple hunks of butter. This can barely be called “customizing” since it takes under 10 seconds.
Self-delusion Moment 3: I earmark the lower left bowl as Phoebe’s. And while, yes, the baked potato is not exactly the same thing as whole wheat spaghetti, it’s in the “starch” family and hardly takes any extra effort for me to toss the thing in the microwave for 10 minutes.
Self-delusion Moment 4: Time to apply your Venn diagram psychology: Pasta is done and plated in three out of four bowls. Onions and spinach are done and plated in three out of four bowls. Three out of four! Even though the two kids’ bowls are barely related to each other, each can lay claim to having one major component in common with the grown-up version.
See? So easy!
Whole Wheat Spaghetti with Caramelized Onions, Spinach, and Parmesan
(The No-Mind-Game Version)
Total time: 15 minutes
Few glugs of olive oil
3 large onions, sliced
1 pound whole wheat spaghetti
Small handful of thawed frozen spinach or big handful of fresh spinach
1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar
Lots of freshly grated Parmesan cheese
Pour the oil into a skillet set over medium-low heat, and cook the onions, stirring every few minutes, for a minimum of 15 minutes and up to 45 minutes. While the onions cook, prepare the spaghetti according to package directions. During the last minute of pasta cooking, add your spinach to the water. Drain the pasta and spinach together. (If integrating spinach into the pasta is going to cause a revolt with certain diners at your table, then just thaw the spinach separately under warm water or cook fresh spinach in a little oil in the pot after you’ve drained the pasta.) Toss the spaghetti with a little olive oil. Stir the balsamic vinegar into the onions. Serve the pasta in bowls, then heap on the onions, spinach, and Parmesan cheese.
December 2006
The 2.0 Strategy
The first time we gave the girls lamb burgers, they had no idea that what they were eating was any different from the normal turkey or beef burger we usually gave them. This is most likely because we slathered their burgers in ketchup instead of the more traditional mint yogurt sauce that adorned our buns. Did we still mark this down in the Win column? Of course! Because as soon as we were done with the don’t-ask-don’t-tell portion of the dinner, we showered them with hoorays—as much to redeem ourselves for the trickery as to pump them up with praise. You tried something new! Congratulations! Hooray! It was good, right? Right?
Yes, they admitted it was good.
This was a common tactic at the table. We found that once the kids got comfortable with a “kid-friendly” kind of food, it was a logical next step for us to figure out ways to 2.0 that food into grown-up territory. This does not mean I advise leaping immediately from chicken nuggets to chicken cacciatore. It just means you can go from a building-block meal that is as basic as a hamburger and fries to something one small step up. And “one small step” can be defined any way you’d like. For instance, you might think about switching the ingredients (i.e., ground beef to ground lamb) or switching the technique (i.e., roll out the burger California-style instead of just broiling a thick patty), or you can switch the vegetables (French fries to zucchini fries); you can add a slice of cheese or a pickle to the plate; you could even just switch the size of the bun. (Sliders!)
On rare, beautiful nights, the girls’ eyes would widen and there would be some sort of declaration of eternal love for the new dish followed by a request to have it the next night, too. But this was never our expectation. In our house, debuting something new at the table—no matter how subtly new it may be—is always more about trying the dish than it is about loving it. In fact, just not hating something is considered a victory, a moment worthy of celebration and positive reinforcement. (“Good for you! You didn’t spit it out!”) We learned to embrace a lukewarm reaction to a new food. A lukewarm reaction was something we could have fun with—it was something we could build on.
Three 2.0 Burgers
There is no shame in serving any of these burgers slathered in ketchup. If it makes you feel better, you can try calling it “tomato coulis.” Also, if you want to have the 1.0 version as a backup, that’s fine, too—but I find that if you tell your kid there is a backup waiting in the wings for him, then he will only halfheartedly participate in the adventure. Best to hide the old favorite somewhere he won’t sniff it out.
Lamb Sliders
Total time: 30 minutes
For the Yogurt Sauce
½ cup plain nonfat yogurt
1/4 teaspoon garlic salt
1/8 teaspoon cumin
2 teaspoons fresh lemon juice
Pinch of salt
Freshly ground black pepper to taste
For the Burgers
11/4 pounds ground lamb
1/4 cup onion, finely minced
1 tablespoon chopped fresh parsley
1 tablespoon chopped fresh mint
1/4 teaspoon dried oregano
Salt and pepper
8 whole wheat dinner rolls
Ketchup (optional)
Cucumber slices (optional)
Preheat the broiler.
To make the yogurt sauce: Whisk together the yogurt, garlic salt, cumin, and lemon juice in a medium bowl. Season with salt and pepper.
To make the burgers: Mix the lamb, onion, parsley, mint, and oregano in a large bowl. Season generously with salt and pepper. Shape the mixture into 8 small ¾-inch-thick patties. Make a small indent with your thumb in the middle of each patty, which will help them retain a flatter shape.
Place the lamb patties on a broiler pan and broil until cooked through, 12 to 14 minutes, flipping once halfway through.
Place the burgers inside the rolls and top with the yogurt sauce (or ketchup, if preferred). Add the cucumber slices (if using).
California-style Turkey Burgers
About the rolling: It really makes no discernible difference in the way the burger tastes, but it prevents the patties from shriveling up into hard little hockey pucks. And psychologically I love that it feels so In-N-Out! Total time: 25 minutes
1 pound ground turkey meat (preferably dark meat), salted and peppered
1 tablespoon barbecue sauce (any kind)
2 tablespoons olive oil
4 whole wheat hamburger buns
Condiments: mayo, mustard, ketchup, Bibb lettuce, pickles (pickles are particularly crucial)
In a large bowl, combine the turkey meat with the barbecue sauce. Shape the mixture into four patties and place two of them a few inches apart from each other on a large plastic cutting board. Cover the patties with plastic wrap, and using a rolling pin, roll the meat so the patties resemble the kinds you see in fast-food restaurants (only much healthier). Repeat with the remaining patties. Fry in the oil in a large skillet over medium heat for about 4 minutes on each side, until cooked through. Place on buns and top with desired condiments. And when it comes to turkey burgers, it’s all about the condiments.
Pan-fried Fish Sandwiches
If you are going to make these with Zucchini Fries, make the fries first so you can reuse the dredging plates. Total time: 20 minutes
4 whole wheat hamburger buns, toasted
4 pieces Fried Flounder or mild whitefish such as sole, tilapia, or hake
Tartar s
auce or ketchup, for topping
Stuff each bun with flounder and top with tartar sauce.
Three 2.0 French Fries
Of these three recipes, we make the spicy oven fries (aka mega fries) the most often because they are so easy to throw together and also because the kids inhale them. If you don’t think your kids will go for the spice mixture, just focus on getting them to eat the potatoes with the skins still on, and work your way up to the cayenne and paprika. The chickpea and zucchini fries are not the kind of recipes you’d turn to on a busy weeknight, but on a weekend, if you have some time to spare, I promise you won’t regret it. Imagine: French fries with nutritional merit!
Chickpea Fries
Total time: 1 hour (includes 30 minutes for chilling batter)
2 tablespoons olive oil, plus about 1/4 cup more for frying
3 cups water
2 teaspoons salt
1½ cups chickpea flour (aka besan, available at Asian specialty stores)
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1 teaspoon garlic powder
½ teaspoon sweet smoked paprika
Oil a small rimmed baking sheet with 1 tablespoon of the oil and set aside.
In a heavy saucepan, bring the water to a boil. Add 1 teaspoon of the salt and 1 tablespoon of the oil and reduce the heat to medium-low.
Add the flour in a steady stream, whisking constantly for about 5 minutes. The batter will become thick and begin to detach from the sides of the pan (like polenta).
Dinner: A Love Story Page 16