Two Winners

I haven't been cooking anything very exciting of late. Lots of the same old standbys which are seen again and again in effort to nourish picky kids: pasta with red sauce, burrritos, scrambled eggs, potatoes and the ever-popular boxed cereal with milk. Yikes. Where did I go wrong?

Fridays have become schlepping hell for me as my kids need to be all over the city throughout the day. It's been nearly impossible to make a proper Shabbat dinner when kids need to be picked up after 4 pm. Last week, however, a friend offered to pick the boy up before joining us for dinner which actually gave me time to cook. Hooray! We had homemade challah, a green salad with pears, toasted hazelnuts, and crumbled feta cheese, a fruit salad, Elizabeth's vegetarian pastitsio and peanut butter brownies from Smitten Kitchen.

Both of the borrowed recipes were splendid. The Spouse and I actually argued over who deserved the leftover serving of pastitsio more. It was a second try on the brownies which I now know need to come out of the oven when they look slightly undercooked. And better chocolate for the ganache made all the difference. Normally I wouldn't bother frosting brownies, but it's crucial here. Just make sure you use something dark and not too sweet--Trader Joe's bittersweet pound plus made magic here.

Macaroni and Cheese

Passover is rapidly approaching and I find that my cupboards are still brimming with chametz, the various grain products that Jews are prohibited from eating or possessing during the eight day holiday. Forbidden foods include oats, barley, corn, and the vast number of wheat related products that we rely so heavily on: bread, pasta, tortillas, crackers, and so on. While I rather enjoy having a week that's so very distinct from the rest of the year, getting ready is rather tiresome.

A dish of delicious homemade macaroni and cheese could serve two purposes: using up pasta and reviving my spirit for there's little in this world I love more than a good homemade macaroni and cheese. It's taken me years to settle on just the right formula. Many pounds of perfectly good cheese have been wasted in the search for the perfect mac. I settled on Jack Bishop's recipe (with a few alterations) sometime last year and haven't looked back. His preference is for more bread crumbs and I prefer somewhat fewer and with a garlicky kick. He's adamant about specific cheeeses and I am far more flexible with good old Tillamook cheddar often providing the bulk of the cheesy goodness. My take on Mr Bishop's fine recipe is here.

The pickiest of The Picky Ones won't touch homemade macaroni and cheese with a ten foot pole. Announcing my dinner plans, he began to work himself up into a frenzy of indignant kvetching about how I never make anything he can eat. I regularly offer to teach him to make anything he thinks he could choke down but his general response to that is a rather loud refusal. Oddly enough he decided he'd try this time so while I made our macaroni and cheese, he made a simple red sauce and we were able to use up two pounds of pasta in one meal. The yummy macaroni was served with leftovers of what we now refer to as Orangette carrot salad followed by slices of leftover orange cake. All in all, a perfect little meal.

A Dinner

It must have been this morning's 4 mile walk that caused me to be ravenous enough at midday to plot out a relatively complex meal for dinner. It wasn't really a complex meal in the least, but since I've been spending so little time in the kitchen lately, it felt like a big deal.

I started some bread and then went to Jack Bishop's A Year in a Vegetarian Kitchen for inspiration. The recipes are simple, use relatively few ingredients, and make the most of seasonal produce. I ended up making a salad of tiny lentils with dill and feta and served a pecan and arugula pesto over fresh linguine. I wasn't thrilled by either dish but I think the lentils will improve overnight. The pesto was just a bit odd, I guess. I love the flavor of arugula with mixed greens in a salad or tucked into a sandwich, but the heat of the pasta caused that distinctive flavor to dissipate and the final dish just tasted....green. Not a bad thing, but not what I was hoping for.

The surprise was dessert. While I am in no hurry for Passover to be here, I am mindful that the holiday is approaching and there's quite a bit of flour around here needing to be used up so I spent some time with King Arthur Flour Whole Grain Baking which I'd recently checked out from the library. It's a huge book full of all kinds of things, but the whole grain orange cake caught my eye. Made mostly with whole wheat pastry flour, it was delightful: moist, light, and with a heavenly orange aroma. It had tasty glaze which surely would have made a white flour cake cloying but took this more substantial cake from sturdy to special. The resident teen was only to happy to gobble it down, as were the rest of us (in a slightly more restrained fashion). The recipe is here.