Author Archives: mamster

Bulking up

What is the most wicked section of the supermarket? It’s definitely the spices. Those little jars are full of the exotic scents of far-off lands, enticing the unwary shopper to all manner of intemperate, hot-blooded…er, actually, they’re just ludicrously overpriced.

The other day I was shopping at QFC, and I had mustard seeds and crystallized ginger on my shopping list. The mustard seeds were destined for Babbo Salmon, the ginger for a biscuit recipe from The Family Kitchen. A quarter-cup jar of mustard seeds (1.4 ounces) was selling for $4.69. A half-cup jar of crystallized ginger (2 ounces) was going for about $11.50.

In marketing parlance, I am a price-sensitive consumer, which means that I will freak out rather than pay $4.69 for mustard seeds, which are among the cheapest of all spices. [Penzeys](http://www.penzeys.com/) sells a pound of mustard seeds for $3.80, which means QFC is charging 14 times as much. Penzeys also charges $3.29 for 3 ounces of crystallized ginger.

Anyway, I wasn’t going to make a special order from Penzeys for two items, and I wanted the stuff now. So Laurie went to Madison Market, the local natural foods store, and got me 1/4 cup of mustard seeds from the bulk section, for less than 50 cents, and a half-pound bag of crystallized ginger for $3.

Jars of evil, I tell you.

Henchforth

This one requires some setup.

Iris has five vital bedtime toys. One is a wooden teething ring with a lemon. This is known as Lemo. One is a stuffed duck. This is known as Ducky.

The other three, however, are these wide-eyed space-babies known as Sweeties. The actual product name is Manhattan Baby Cozy Cradles. I think they’re discontinued, however, which could prove problematic if we ever need to replace one. There are two Blue Sweeties and one Purple Sweetie. Purple Sweetie is the most important stuffed animal of all. Here’s what Blue Sweetie looks like:

Blue Sweetie

A few weeks ago, when the sun first came out, we bought some sidewalk chalk. Iris requested a drawing of various Sweeties, so I drew some. Then she got bored with the regular sweeties and requested Yellow Sweetie and Green Sweetie and the like. Then I got bored and drew a Sweetie with sharp teeth, angry eyebrows, and a tail, and called it Evil Sweetie. Naturally, this was Iris’s favorite. Then I drew two tiny Sweeties next to Evil Sweetie and called them Henchsweeties.

Later, Iris noted that the Henchsweeties looked hungry, so we drew them some snacks.

Then it rained for a week and the sidewalk chalk was put away. Yesterday, however, the sun came back, and we went out and drew some new sweeties.

Evil Sweetie

(That green thing coming out of the right side of Evil Sweetie’s neck is its tail, drawn by Iris.)

This morning when I heard Iris wake up, I went into her room and she was lying blearily in her crib as usual. Suddenly her eyes shot open and she said, “WE DIDN’T GIVE THOSE HENCHSWEETIES ANY MUFFINS!”

Loose morels

Last week at the market, morels had suddenly come down in price. “They were scarce the first couple of weeks and then they just popped up all over,” lamented the woman at the mushroom stand. Her loss was my woodsy gain, although “down in price” means they had dropped from $34 to $18. I bought half a pound and dithered about what to do with them. Every time I see morels I want to put them on my fingers and pose as Morel-Man, a wild and musky superhero. That’s not what I did, though. I made little frittatas.

We currently have from the library a great new cookbook by Debra Ponzek called The Family Kitchen. The reason Ponzek’s book is so good, I think, is that she is a former top New York chef who retired to Connecticut over ten years ago to run a small chain of gourmet shops and raise some kids. So she’s neither a home economist nor a chef guessing at what real families eat. Her book is also refreshingly free of nutritional dogma; it presents a wide varieties of foods cooked with appropriate amounts of fat and salt, and it assumes you can tinker with the recipes if that’s your thing.

Reducing fat and salt isn’t my thing, but tinkering with recipes certainly is. One of the most appealing recipes in the book is for mini-frittatas with zucchini and cheddar. You can find the recipe in a recent post on the fun blog known as [But My Kids Won’t Eat It…](http://www.kymmco.com/).

Instead of zucchini, I minced the morels and sauteed them up with some shallots, in butter instead of olive oil, thereby making a morel duxelles. (This is the kind of wordplay that has won me countless freestyle battles. I have also declared my opponent’s rhymes so low in acidity that you just know he extra-virgin.) I spooned this into the muffin cups and poured the egg mixture on top. It was great. Iris ate two.

Morels are definitely my favorite of the wild mushrooms, at least until chanterelle season rolls around. And I ain’t playin’.

Roastery

**So, did you make the Coke Roast?**

Yes.

**How did it come out?**

Kind of dry.

**Did you overcook it or something?**

Yes.

**How is that possible, since you threatened to poke it with a Thermapen every six minutes?**

I got cocky.

**Was it good anyway?**

The crusty exterior part was awesome.

**Did it taste like Coke, despite the fact that Cook’s Illustrated promised it wouldn’t?**

Totally. But in a good way.

**Did you keep going back to the kitchen and pulling off crunchy bits?**

Yes.

**Will this experience turn you into a fool who can’t stop roasting?**

Only if I can figure out how to make a roast that is 100 percent crust.

Pizza hacks

There’s no real trick to homemade pizza. Turn the oven up all the way and hope for the best. But I can offer a few tips.

1. If you’re making homemade dough, the recipe makes less difference than how long you let it ferment. Stick it in the fridge overnight and you’ll have better dough. But there’s no shame in buying dough at a pizzeria or Trader Joe’s.

2. Use low-moisture whole milk mozzarella, and mix it with a little grated Parmigiano-Reggiano for flavor.

3. Iris loves putting pepperoni on the pizza, but she has trouble biting a whole slice. So I cut the pepperoni slices into four wedges, and she has just as much fun putting them on but more fun eating the pizza.

4. Most vegetable ingredients (mushrooms, peppers, onions) benefit from precooking. Otherwise not only will they end up undercooked, but they’ll leak water onto your pizza.

5. Hunts Traditional canned tomato sauce makes great pizza sauce, and it’s really cheap.

6. When you go out for pizza with kids, bring scissors.

7. One of the best reasons to make pizza at home is to mess around with toppings that you can’t get elsewhere. We love bacon with pickled jalapeños. Ask your kids what they’d like to try on pizza.

8. Yes, you do need a pizza stone, but you can leave it on the bottom oven rack and forget about it. It will improve the performance of your oven even when you’re not making pizza.

9. Roll the dough thin enough that the pizza is done in six to seven minutes. More than this and the crust will start to try out, and Iris will get impatient.

9. Insufficient pizza consumption is associated with irritability and slack-jawedness. Don’t let this happen to you.