Short Order Kitchen (and Baked Penne with Farmhouse Cheddar & Leeks)

I said I would never do it. I said I would never cook multiple meals for the family at dinner time.

In fact, I said, "I cook one meal and we all eat it. If you don't like it, that's fine, there's cottage cheese, pistachios, cheddar, fruit, in the lower cupboards and fridge...help yourself."

I said it with my "laying down the law" voice. I have one of those.


I didn't want to start this habit where I'm cooking three different meals every night. The only exception to this rule is breakfast, where everyone can get their meal a la carte. One has cereal, one has a banana and croissant, another has a poached egg. Fine. That's all good. Breakfast doesn't count. It's not, like, a real meal around here.

But dinner? No way, Jose. I was adamant. Unmoveable. Fierce in my convictions. Everyone eats one meal or fend for themselves. And for the longest time, it held. The mandate was written in steel. People shuddered and quacked in their boots at the very thought of going up against my iron-clad edict.

Which is funny, because last night, it all fell apart. My edict is as strong as a wet noodle. Even though I made "Baked Penne with Farmhouse Cheddar and Leeks" from Gourmet, for us and the neighbors, which is like a fancy mac and cheese, and I thought everyone would be right there with me, all happy I cooked the mac and cheese. You know how kids love the mac and cheese. Like robots they are to the stuff. But not my kid apparently - Lucy pushed the plate away and asked for two fried eggs, with chives, no yolks.

The night before I made her the same order at 8 o'clock when, as she was getting into bed for stories, she said she had a "craving". I caved to the craving. I mean, a craving means her little body needs that egg to fortify itself. What kind of a mother would I be to deprive my child of something as silly and easy to make as an egg. So, there I was at 8 o'clock. Cooking. David thinks she is in some kind of massive Lou Ferrigno/Incredible Hulk type growth spurt because she's tossing back 3 or 4 eggs a day.

And just like that, my kitchen went from disciplined temple of food creation to short order diner and I'm the big stocky Greek named Mel with the "I love Mom" tattoo on his arm, frying up multiple orders and calling out, "Two eggs up, ready to go out, Alice".

So, I'm going to gather myself and get back to having an edict and being all mean about it, unless someone is actually growing and then, I will cave like the wuss that I am. Just know, if you come here for dinner, I won't cave for you. I tell you this up front. Like, if turn up your nose at my pot roast and quietly whisper in my ear that you'd rather I whip you up a cherry tomato omelette with carmelized leeks and goat cheese, well, then, I'll have to use my scary voice and pummel you into submission. Just expect it. I won't like it, but unless you're having a growth spurt, I'll show you no mercy.

There's grapes and a nice Manchego just waiting for you in the fridge. Please enjoy.

xxoo YM

And speaking of enjoying...here's the very nice "Baked Penne with Farmhouse Cheddar & Leeks" from Gourmet. As you might remember, I have a terrible hatred for box mac and cheese and this is a nice alternative. All the kids, except Lucy (who never put it to her egg-loving lips) really loved this mac and cheese.

I liked it very much, although don't skimp on the liquid and butter, because it could stand to be a little creamier. Also, I sprinkled bread crumbs over the top for a little crunch. The leeks make it much more complex than regular mac and cheese.



Gourmet's Baked Penne with Farmhouse Cheddar & Leeks


Ingredients

* 1/4 cup (1/2 stick) butter
* 5 cups chopped leeks (white and pale green parts only; about 5 large)
* 1/4 cup all purpose flour
* 3 1/2 cups whole milk
* 1 pound extra-sharp cheddar cheese, coarsely grated (about 4 cups packed)
* 1 tablespoon Dijon mustard
* 1 teaspoon hot pepper sauce
* 2 large eggs
* 1 pound penne pasta

Preparation

Lightly butter 15x10x2-inch baking dish. Melt 1/4 cup butter in heavy large saucepan over medium heat. Add leeks; stir to coat. Cover saucepan and cook until leeks are tender, stirring occasionally, about 12 minutes (do not brown). Uncover saucepan; add flour. Stir 2 minutes. Add milk; bring to simmer, stirring often. Add cheese, mustard, and pepper sauce. Stir until cheese melts. Remove from heat. Season cheese sauce to taste with salt.

Whisk eggs in medium bowl. Gradually whisk in 1 cup cheese sauce. Stir egg mixture into cheese sauce in saucepan.

Meanwhile, cook pasta in large pot of boiling salted water until just tender but still firm to bite, stirring occasionally. Drain. Return to pot.

Stir cheese sauce into pasta in pot. Transfer to prepared baking dish. do ahead Can be made 2 hours ahead. Let stand at room temperature.

Preheat oven to 400°F. Bake pasta until cheese sauce is bubbling around edges and some ends of pasta are golden brown, 25 to 30 minutes.

Let stand 15 minutes. Serve hot.

Test-kitchen: Unlike classic mac and cheese, which is thickened by a roux (a flour and butter mixture), this one uses eggs to make a rich, gooey custard. But be careful when adding the hot cheese sauce to the eggs; you’ll need to whisk the sauce in slowly so that the eggs don’t curdle.

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What I Learned About 4 year Olds at Lucy's Birthday Party

1. 4 year olds like non-competitive musical chairs. They do not like losing. Or the chance that they might lose. They want to win every time or it just isn’t worth playing. They like you to put out the same number of chairs as kids and then they enjoy going around and around in circles until the music stops and they all rush into a chair and then, they look at each other all pleased and beg to do it again. Just walking in circles to music. That’s what they like.


2. Some parents of 4 year olds say they are going to come to your kid's party, but they don’t really mean it. These people tell you they are coming on the phone the day before, and you give them 15 minutes of directions, and you get your kid all psyched up to see their kid and then they don’t come or call and you are left answering all kinds of questions about where the kid is and your kid tells you that we can’t start the party until the no-show kid gets there. That’s when you start hating the no-show parents and vow to shun them on the playground.


3. 1 year olds who have cake and the equivalent of a pint of ice cream for the first time EVER at your party will stumble around like miniature, glassy-eyed drunks, all stoned and zoned out. A toddler's first sugar-high is good fun to watch. You can’t buy that kind of entertainment.


4. 4 year olds like TV. A lot. They will get dressed up, carry a gift across two boroughs after having a meltdown on a subway platform and not two minutes after their arrival, they are begging you to watch “Pink Panther”. If they could, they would all forgo the party and friends and any human contact and just sit there comatose and stare at the TV screen in one big catatonic clump of bodies.


5. It is completely possible to get up at 5:30 in the morning, make sure all the food, games and goody bags are prepped and ready to go, only to realize half way through the party, the one thing you forgot to do is brush your teeth. Completely possible.


6. If a single child comes to the party dressed in a princess or ballerina costume, every child at the party will storm the dress-up box en masse and demand to be made up with crowns, princess shoes and tutus. Parents will have to be dispatched to their respective nearby houses to get more princess dresses, shoes and crowns. The environment will feel foul and ugly until every last child is dressed in a costume and not just any costume, but one that absolutely meets their approval. Anything else will result in tears and pleas to go home.

7. After the cake, everyone is going to freak out. You must accept this. Embrace it. There will be tears. And pain. And all the good sharing and loving hugs and “she’s my best friend!” and smiles will deteriorate into a pile of sugar and bad will and you will have to take them outside and run them around until they are normal again. You will do this even if it is below freezing outside. Why? Because otherwise sweet kids will turn to ugly, growling, , teeth-bearing hateful wolves right before your very eyes. There is nothing you can do about this. The air will turn putrid with children on a bad sugar high. Just drink, wear ear plugs and wait it out.


8. You will hurt someone’s feelings. If you live in a NYC apartment, you cannot invite a herd of people, lest the event turn into a frat party with people drinking in the closets and eating on the toilet, and me doing nothing but cooking in the kitchen and ignoring my children, so you have to keep the number at a manageable limit and the work load light and since it is your kid’s party, not yours, they get to say who comes. So when Lucy said “No penises in the room,” or however she phrased it, I went with it. No boys. (Dads okay.) I mean, you can’t have a garden party with pink napkins and tables covered in rose petals and invite a bunch of boys who will use the rose stems as warrior swords and impale your favorite bunny. I get that. So, we left out all our good friends who have boys. But since I didn’t call all our friends who have boys and tell them they were officially dis-invited, some people just thought we left them out. This sucks, because I do care about my friends feelings, but everyone will just have to suck it up. Because this party was about my kid, no one else, and in case you haven’t noticed, I’m not perfect.


9. The “garden” birthday party, topped off with a next day trip to the butterfly exhibit at the Natural History Museum, will rock your child’s world. They will love everything you do, even if there were 10 things you wanted to do, but didn’t quite get done. 4 year olds don’t care. They will be thrilled that they packed the apartment with all their friends. They will laugh, smile, run, jump, hide, sing, dance and you will be completely happy that you got up at 5:30 in the morning to put this whole thing together. And people malign goody bags - costly, stupid toys, part of the whole competitive birthday neurotic mom NYC thing – but just wait until your kid, who picked out every toy in the bag and filled each one carefully and made sure each had exactly the same things inside (”so no one fights”) brings them out of the bedroom and hands each one to each child, beaming with accomplishment and pride as she does it. All hail the goody bag!


10. 4 year olds are proud to be big. They will tell you to leave them alone because they can get their pants on themselves and every time you try to grab their hand, they’ll remind you they are 4. 4 means no more pull ups at night. Sleeping by yourself in the bunk bed. Staying up a little later. Getting a couple more responsibilities around the house. 4 is getting to go to the neighbors house by yourself, sans grown up escort. 4 means you can be trusted to do things. You can make decisions that effect everyone else in the family. 4 is having some control over your own life, good or bad, and having a say in the order of the world. 4 is a force to be reckoned with.

4 is big. 4 rocks.

xxoo YM

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The Dinner Party: Malted Milk Ice Cream

I can honestly tell you that I had screamin' good fun at our dinner party Tuesday night. Our guests were just lovely, talkative, warm-hearted, accomplished, fascinating souls who were good sports and good eaters. It was a pleasure to cook for such a fun crew.

But I love the cartoon above because it shows how anxiety-provoking these affairs can be for guests and hosts. It's funny to think about all these hidden thoughts and feelings going on as we socialize and eat together. Anyway, I did learn a few things from this experience and of course, I want to share:

1. Doing 10 to 12 "small plates" is still making 10 to 12 dishes no matter how itsy bitsy the plate is. Duh. You think a girl as crafty as me would've figured this out ahead of time.

But no, it was a shocker a day into the cooking. Moral of the story: a banquet of tapas is still a ten course meal anyway you cut it. I'm so happy I did it and it really helped me stretch my cooking, but it could have been a complete train wreck.

Like when I was whipping the butter into the cognac-soaked chicken livers with a whisk and the whisk went flying across the kitchen and liver stuck to the wall for like three seconds before falling to the ground behind the trash can (Guess I should look for that..) and a huge piece of liver flung out of the bowl and slapped me across the eyes and then, kind of stuck to my nose and dripped slowly down my face and I nearly hurled into the bowl of softened pate.

"The Chicken Liver Parfait" (what a crazy name. Isn't "parfait" an ice cream dish?) from NTSC at Art of the Pig, a man truly in love with offal, actually tasted great and I'm going to give you the recipe, which was pretty easy even for me, but I had a lot of liver mishaps along that way that made me do that ugly dry heave thing where your mouth keeps opening and shutting like a sea bass, but no sound comes out.

Yeah, like that.

2. I am now prepared to be on "The Next Food Network Star" (not that I want to be or anything since being in front of a camera is my idea of bathing in cognac-soaked chicken livers) but only because my cooking life is such a freak show. And frankly, this makes for exciting TV.

I realized this as I was driving all over Manhattan with my friend, chef, resident saint and fellow blogger Kian over at Red Cook in my husband's pick up truck going from fish market to butcher shop trying to buy two things I thought I would find easily: fresh sardines and pork belly.

At about 10 O'clock am the day of the dinner party when I hadn't cooked a thing all day and I thought I would have to kill and replace two dishes - - the Sardines Escabeche and the Red Cooked Pork Belly. And I actually thought, "Oh the producers must have gone around and bought up all the sardines and pork belly to make this challenge harder...Until I remembered I wasn't actually on TV.

3. If you have ingenious and curious small kids who can do things like set their own hair on fire using nothing but two chopsticks and a hunk of pink Playdoh or ones whose innocent, impressionable heads might explode if faced with the prospect of watching 15 straight hours of Diego, you will need help to get this menu on the table.

I had a team. Because it takes a village to raise a dinner party.

I had a paid babysitter, a house cleaner, my incredible, amazing friend and neighbor Rachel who stopped working on her doctoral dissertation for two days so she could host dance parties and princess dress up games to keep my kids from missing their mother.

And I had, God bless him, Kian over at Red Cook who, when it became clear I was not going to find fresh sardines or pork belly, stopped working and went to Chinatown for me and bought both of those ingredients, delivered them to my door and also gutted the sardines when I looked at him like, "Um, yeah, what the hell am I going to do with these? I need fillets!"

I am a bitch. But feel comforted knowing I have the most awesome, patient friends on the planet.

4. Not to hurl a stereotype at you, but if you're having a dinner party, invite a lot of gay men. They will just love you up for all the work you did in the kitchen. It was like I was Gloria Gaynor (and I was thin. And not black. And not old) and the boys had hoisted me up on their shoulders and carried me around the dance floor, as the glitter ball illuminated my glistening face and I dove into my third resounding chorus of "I Will Survive". Not to work a stereotype too hard or anything.

I do love cooking for a room full of appreciative eaters. And they were appreciative and loud about it. Who wouldn't love that? Thanks guys for being so amazingly kind and supportive.

5. Note to self: "Food & Wine Magazine" is not a legitimate cooking magazine. It is a glossy, pretty promotional vehicle for American Express that masquerades as a cooking magazine and so even though they may have some good ideas for meals (like some of the tapas I made the other night) the seasoning and ingredients were so far off that I had to re-assess all the flavor profiles and re-season and re-jigger mid- cooking after I realized my dinner was going to be comprised of some good-looking dishes that tasted like communion wafer.

Lesson learned. Moral of the story: Read your "Food & Wine" in bed where it can't hurt anyone with it's blandness. Keep it out of the kitchen.


So, I'm going to give you the recipes for the tapas I think are worth repeating in my next post, but first I start with something so utterly delectable and amazing that David has actually banned the use of the ice cream machine in our house. Malted Milk Ice Cream with Crushed Malted Milk Ball Crust.

This morning, David actually said, "I'm throwing the ice cream maker in the trash so you can't make anymore of this stuff." He is soooooo off his "diet/lifestyle".

I got this recipe from Michael Ruhlman's blog who got it from David Lebovitz. It is ridiculously good and I think is one of the best flavors of ice cream I have eaten. Ever. It's also pretty easy to do if you have an ice cream maker and a great finish for folks who can't/don't/won't bake. Like me.

Make it. I dare you not to eat the whole freakin' thing.

xxoo YM
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Malted Milk Ice Cream

Makes about 1 1/2 quarts (1 1/2 liters)

Ingredients

1 cup (250 ml) half-and-half
3/4 cup (150 g) sugar
2 cups (500 ml) heavy cream
1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract
2/3 cup (90 g) malt powder (see note below)
6 large egg yolks
2 cups (350 g) malted milk balls, coarsely chopped

Note: Malted milk powder can be found in the ice cream aisle of your supermarket. But sometimes it’s stocked alongside chocolate drink mixes like Ovaltine, which isn’t the same thing. But this is exactly where I found it. Most common brands of malt powder are Carnation and Horlicks.

Warm the half-and-half with the sugar in a medium saucepan. In a large bowl, whisk together the heavy cream, vanilla, and malt powder. Set a mesh strainer on top.
In a separate bowl, whisk together the egg yolks. Slowly pour the warm mixture into the egg yolks, whisking constantly, then scrape the warmed egg yolks back into the saucepan.

Stir the mixture constantly over medium heat with a wooden or heatproof plastic spatula, scraping the bottom as you stir, until the mixture thickens and coats the spatula. Pour the custard through the strainer and whisk it into the malted milk mixture. Stir until cool over an ice bath.

Chill mixture thoroughly in the refrigerator, then freeze in your ice cream maker according to the manufacturer’s instructions. As you remove the ice cream from the machine, fold in the chopped malted milk balls. Be generous with the balls, they float to the top and make this decadent crunchy topping. Continue Reading...