Iris has a little cold, which is very cute and pathetic. Yesterday I convinced her to go for a walk to Trader Joe’s. The whole way, she kept weakly pointing out patches of snow in a squeaky voice. Being sick has made her uninterested in food in the same way I am when I’m sick. If she’s really like me, when she starts feeling better she’ll suddenly get a craving for peperonata.

Once we got to TJ’s, two things perked Iris up. First, she got to ride in the cart. Second, they had a free sample of corn cakes with pumpkin butter. Iris liked them so much that I got the ingredients (a box of cornbread mix and a jar of pumpkin butter) and made them for the whole family for afternoon snack.

There’s nothing to it. Get a box of cornbread mix–Joe’s has corn kernels in it and is pretty tasty, but I’m sure Jiffy would work fine too. Mix it up according to the directions on the box, with a little extra milk. Heat a nonstick skillet and brush it with a little vegetable oil. Pour out small cakes, cook them like regular pancakes (they’re more fragile, so flip carefully), and spread them with pumpkin butter, apple butter, regular butter, or whatever you like.

Oh, we were at Joe’s buying a bottle of Barolo for making *brasato al barolo* (beef braised in Barolo), which will be dinner tomorrow. I’ll let you know how it turns out. On the way out of the store we were entertained by a woman at the customer service desk complaining interminably about the fact that she left her wallet at home and the store wouldn’t let her just punch her credit card number in manually. The way she was telling it, you would think John Ashcroft got a new job as manager of the Capitol Hill Trader Joe’s.

I’ll be posting about my cookbooks of the year separately, but here are a couple of food-related gift ideas, from cheap to not. Before you ask, yes, this is a transparent attempt to score with Amazon, affiliate-style.

##### Stocking Stuffers

* Exoglass spoons are like wooden spoons but made of some kind of space-age polymer that makes them dishwasher safe, hard to melt, and impervious to discoloration and odors. Plus they come in purty colors. I have a bunch of these and they’re great. About $7.

* Cuisipro measuring spoons. These are the best of all possible measuring spoons. They sit on the counter without tipping. They’re oval shaped to fit in a spice jar. And the top of the bowl is flush with the handle, so you can level them off easily. Other measuring spoon MCs should just retire.

##### Cookware

* All-Clad MC2 saute pan. This is just about the most versatile piece of equipment you can have in your kitchen. It also costs almost $200, and even though I’m giving you the Amazon link, I think you’re better off buying it in person, because this pan often has a distinct hump in the bottom which makes oil pool around the edge. To avoid this, take the pan out of the box and hold the bottom against a flat surface, like the edge of a shelf, and look for a gap. I use my saute pan for making French toast, chicken marsala, braised dishes, and pretty much everything else. It’s dishwasher- and oven-safe.

The reason it’s worth dropping a buttload of money on this pan is that when All-Clad talks about a lifetime warranty, they are serious. I also have an All-Clad 12-inch nonstick skillet, and by the time it was nine years old, the nonstick coating had gotten feathery and ineffective. This will happen to any nonstick pan, usually in less than nine years. I called All-Clad and spoke to a nice sales rep who gave me an RMA number, no questions asked. I shipped the pan back and swiftly received a brand-new pan. I expect to do this again in 2014, although presumably by then I’ll be able to just teleport the pan to them over the Internets or something.

* Emile Henry Le Potier 1-Quart Oval Baker. We have four of these (in blue) and they’re perfect for baking and serving baked pasta, apple crisp, and other one- or two-serving gratins. They’re not cheap, but I can break anything, and I haven’t even been able to chip these over the course of two moves and six years.

##### For kids

* Wooden Play Food Cuts. This is a stupid name for an awesome toy: wooden fruits and vegetables with a wooden knife and cutting board. The fruits and vegetables are held together with velcro, which you can sever with the knife, making a satisfying crunch. In fact, forget the kids–I could have hours of fun with this thing.

* Mini Kitchen. There are lots of enormous plastic toy kitchens. This one is wooden, and it’s the only one we’ve seen that will fit well in a small apartment. That’s why we’re getting it for Iris’s birthday.

Hillel Cooperman of [Tastingmenu](http://www.tastingmenu.com/) has posted an amazing treatise on taking kids to restaurants. Everything he says is a shining nugget of truth, especially this:

> The moment you walk into a restaurant with your children an invisible timer starts ticking. You can’t see this timer so you have no idea how much time you have left until it rings. But trust me, it will go off. And when it does, your child will become unmanageable and you will have to leave the restaurant.

In our experience, at least, certain ages are much better for restaurant outings than others. We took newborn Iris out for Thai food many times, and she slept in the Baby Bjorn. At five months, we wouldn’t have taken Iris to McDonald’s, even if we liked McDonald’s: she only napped well at home, couldn’t eat a fry, and couldn’t claw her way out of a ball crawl for money.

Depending on the temperament of your baby, you may find, like we did, that just under a year old is an awesome time to take a baby to a restaurant. They’re interested in everything, haven’t really developed any food dislikes, and there’s plenty of time between naps. Around this time, we first took Iris for sushi, and she ate tempura, spicy tuna roll, eel, mackerel, and everything else we ordered. All this with two teeth.

That was the high point. Things are a little trickier now. On Tuesday we all went to a rather swanky Vietnamese restaurant, Tamarind Tree. We got a table near a crackling fireplace and ordered a bunch of dishes, like duck noodle soup, braised clay-pot fish, stir-fried green beans and tofu, crispy rice cakes with shrimp, salad rolls with pork meatballs, and *bo la lot,* which is ground beef wrapped in a fragrant leaf and fried.

Iris did okay. She ate a bunch of the rice cake (which was pretty damn good) and the tofu. (“Iris eating a tofu and a big tofu!”) She rejected the fish, even though it was sweet and tender and I’m sure she would have loved it a few months ago. In her defense, she was on the verge of a bad cold. Mostly she wanted to check out the fire, the christmas tree (which now that I think about it was rather alarmingly close to the fire) and other decorations.

The only advice I can think to add to Hillel’s recommendations is: become regulars at a Chinese restaurant. I’ll tell you about ours in a future post.

Oh, I thought the food at Tamarind Tree was pretty good, albeit greasy. But nobody’s interested in what *I* think anymore; the only food critic of any renown in this family is easy for restaurateurs to spot, because she’s 2'6".

Iris’s favorite meal from about age nine to fifteen months was canned black beans and canned sweet potatoes. I’d put a little butter and cumin on the beans and just cut the sweet potatoes into chunks. Beans are pretty much the perfect baby food: they’re full of fiber and protein, bite-sized, and easy to chew. (Just like babies themselves!) Plus, everyone expects babies to be gassy anyway.

Probably Iris would be delighted to have canned black beans for lunch anytime, but I wouldn’t, and now that she’s a little person rather than just a baby, I feel weird serving her something I wouldn’t eat myself. So I needed to find a bean dish that the whole family could enjoy.

Trouble is, I’ve never been a big bean fan. Now I’m coming around. It will not surprise you to learn that this involves copious amounts of pork.

The first step in my bean education was discovering fresh cranberry beans at the farmers market a couple of years ago. Fresh beans, which are fairly expensive and good only in the summer and early fall, are to dried beans what fresh pasta is to dried pasta. Dried beans are always going to be the old reliable, but prepared certain ways, fresh beans are a remarkable change of pace. They’re easy and fun to shell (Iris helps), and the beans themselves are speckled and cute like little dinosaur eggs. You can throw them into a braise (they’re pretty much impossible to overcook) or boil them for twenty minutes and season them with olive oil, salt, and pepper for a more Tuscan approach. The best thing I’ve done with them is throw some into corn chowder.

Shelling bean season is over now, though, so we have a go-to dried bean recipe. I’ve had plenty of bad luck cooking dried beans in the past, ending up with a pot full of beans cooked to random doneness, one bean collapsing into much and the next tooth-crackingly hard. Now I know how to avoid that, for the most part: don’t buy old beans.

Dried beans seem like they’ll last forever, but actually they get weird after sitting around for years and don’t cook right. So buy the freshest dried beans you can. How can you tell “fresh” dried beans from old skanky ones? You can’t, so buy your beans in one of two places: at a farmers market (a vendor at mine sells dried cranberry beans from this summer, and they are awesome) or in a bulk food bin as seen at creepy natural foods stores and many supermarkets. Never buy dried beans in a plastic bag; they could be fine, but it’s not worth the risk.

Also, dried beans take longer to cook than I thought. The bean recipe I’m about to share with you cooks for about two and a half hours. I would have expected the beans to dissolve into soup by that time, but they don’t. In fact, I’ve cooked canned beans for a couple of hours and they didn’t fall apart. I’m not sure how this rumor got started. Maybe beans fall apart if you boil the hell out of them or something.

So, without further ado, here’s a Rick Bayless bean recipe.

**Drunken Pintos**
Adapted from Rick Bayless’s Mexican Kitchen
Serves 4 to 6

1 pound dried pintos or cranberry beans
10 cups water
4 ounces pork shoulder, cut into 1/2 inch dice (buy a small pack of country-style ribs or a shoulder steak)
4 slices thick-cut bacon, cut crosswise into 1/2 inch strips
1 medium yellow onion, diced
2 large jalapeños, sliced
1-1/2 teaspoons salt
3 tablespoons tequila
1/2 cup chopped fresh cilantro

1. Rinse the beans and place in a large pot with water and pork shoulder. Bring to a boil, reduce to a simmer, and cook, partially covered, two hours or until the beans are evenly tender. Add more water as necessary to keep the beans below the water line.

2. While the beans are cooking, fry the bacon until crisp. Remove the bacon to a paper towel-lined plate. Pour off some of the drippings. Cook the jalapeño and onion in the remaining bacon fat over medium heat for about ten minutes, until nicely browned.

3. When the beans are tender, stir the salt and the cooked bacon, jalapeño, and onion into the bean pot. The finished dish should be quite soupy, so add more water if necessary. Continue simmering for 20 minutes to blend the flavors. Stir in the tequila and cilantro and serve with warm corn tortillas.

We’re planning to have family over for Christmas dinner this year, so we’ve been trying out some recipe ideas. The failed roast duck from last week was one idea. Tonight we tried, with much more success, the Mock Porchetta from the Zuni Cafe Cookbook. Iris liked it, especially the pan sauce. Several times, Iris has convinced me to put broth into a glass so she can drink it. Tonight she was willing to eat it with a spoon. Also, when the roast was coming out of the oven:

> **Laurie:** Iris, do you think the roast will be hot and crusty?

> **Iris:** Yes. Hot and snuggly.

All parts of our Christmas dinner are subject to a rigorous interview process in addition to the tryout:

**Q:** What is mock porchetta, exactly?

**A:** It’s boneless pork shoulder stuffed with an herb mixture featuring rosemary, sage, fennel, garlic, capers, and crushed peppercorns, then surrounded by winter vegetables and roasted for hours until tender.

**Q:** Sounds good. But why is it “mock”?

**A:** Because the seasonings are modeled on the Italian dish *porchetta,* which involves a whole pig.

**Q:** You wimp. Why aren’t you making the whole pig?

**A:** My family is Jewish, and whole pigs aren’t kosher.

**Q:** What else are you going to serve for Christmas dinner?

**A:** We’re thinking of starting with small servings of baked pasta and finishing with a pear-cranberry tart from the November 2005 Fine Cooking. To drink, there will undoubtedly be the new cranberry Ephemere beer from Unibroue.

**Q:** Is this supposed to be Matthew interviewing the roast or someone interviewing
Matthew or what?

**A:** Interviewing a roast, now that’s just silly.

**Q:** While we’re on the subject of mock foods, what’s mock turtle soup, anyway?

**A:** I have no idea.