Recipe rot

When Nassau grits appeared in Saveur, I couldn’t remember ever having heard of them before. It turns out I’ve had an essentially identical recipe on my shelf since 2002, in the cookbook A Real American Breakfast.

This illustrates a phenomenon I’ll call recipe rot. Everyone wants to talk about recipes from the new issue of Gourmet. Nobody wants to talk about recipes from last month’s issue. Same goes for cookbooks: _A Real American Breakfast_ has dozens of brilliant recipes in it, all of which I’d forgotten about except for the one waffle recipe I make over and over.

Similarly, there’s a book called The Italian Country Table by Lynne Rossetto Kasper that is one of the most compelling Italian cookbooks ever published. When I first got it, I cooked dinner out of it for weeks, ended up trying at least a quarter of the recipes in the book, and wrote a whole column about one of them. But I haven’t cracked it in ages. It has passed into my mental back catalog. Do you have this problem, too? Is it a problem?

An aside about that potato gatto column. When I made the dish for the photo shoot, in summer 2001, the photographer, Steve Ringman, brought in this large contraption with all sorts of gadgets hanging off it and said, “I think I’m going to try this out.” It was a digital SLR camera. “I wonder if everyone will be using these someday,” I remember thinking.

Gritsydoodles

The 2007 Saveur 100 issue is out, and among the usual roster of markets, restaurants, and weird touchy-feely things like #45 (“relaxing while cooking”) is a recipe I had to try immediately.

It’s #47, it’s called Nassau grits, and it’s a specialty of Pensacola, Florida. If you’re a fan of smoked pork products and stone-ground grits, you’ll want to try these right away. I served them along with fried catfish and a nice pot of greens, but I would have been perfectly happy with just the grits. (Not so Iris, who eyed the Nassau grits warily and declared, “I love catfish. Why is it called catfish?”)

This recipe is so good, it almost makes you want to forgive the Florida Panhandle for the 2000 election.

**NASSAU GRITS**
Adapted from Saveur, February 2007

8 ounces thick-cut bacon, diced
1 medium yellow onion, diced
1 green bell pepper, diced
6 ounces smoked ham, diced (I used a cheap supermarket ham that was not smoky enough)
1 14.5-ounce can diced tomatoes
1 clove garlic, minced
3/4 cup stone-ground white grits
Salt and pepper

1. Start making the grits. Bring 3 cups water to a boil in a medium saucepan. Place the grits in a large bowl and run water over them to cover by at least an inch. Stir well and let sit one minute. Using a small strainer, skim off any hulls and other detritus floating on the surface. Drain. Add the grits to the boiling water and stir well. Return to a boil, then cover and reduce heat to low. I use [Anson Mills](http://www.ansonmills.com/) grits, which take up to two hours to cook.

2. Cook the bacon in a large skillet over medium heat until crisp. Remove to a paper towel-lined plate and pour off all but 3 tablespoons fat. Add the onion and pepper to the pan and cook until the onion is translucent, about 5 minutes. Add the ham and continue cooking until the pepper is soft, about 10 more minutes. Add the tomato and garlic and simmer until the mixture is pretty dry. The original recipe suggests simmering over medium-low and simmering for 30 minutes; I was running late so I boiled it over medium-high for less than 10 minutes. I doubt it makes any difference.

3. Stir the vegetable and ham mixture and most of the bacon into the grits and season with salt and pepper to taste. Garnish with remaining bacon. I found that the grits were a lot better warm than hot, so don’t worry about serving them instantly.

How you like them apples?

Laurie’s parents gave us a bottle of hard cider for Christmas. It’s made on Sauvie Island, near Portland, OR, and it’s the best hard cider I’ve ever tasted: truly dry, complex, loaded with apple flavor. A real adult beverage, unlike the many oversweetened ciders on the market. And the company has a sense of humor: their web site boasts that the cider is made from many varieties of “ugly little apples.” The top of the bottle is dipped in wax. Too cool.

Yes, it’s fair to say I like everything about this cider except the fact that it’s only sold in Oregon–and the name.

A conversation at snacktime

I got one of these pasta drying racks for Christmas. It’s the kind of large, single-use gadget that as a professional food geek I’m supposed to turn up my nose at, but this thing is so cool. You can hang a huge amount of pasta on it instead of having to round up all your chairs and draping the pasta over the chair backs. Iris helped me roll out a small batch of tagliatelle and hang it on the rack. Then when Laurie got home, we boiled some up and gave it a try.

> **Me:** Iris, did you like the noodles?

> **Iris:** Yes. They’re too darn good for me.

> **Me:** Too darn good? Who says that?

> **Iris:** I do.

The second rule of baby food

I posted a while ago about the first rule of baby food.

The first rule of baby food, in short, is “there’s no such thing as baby food.” Babies can, with few exceptions, eat the same food as their parents. This is the easy rule.

The second rule of baby food is ten times harder, even though it basically tells you not to do anything. The second rule of baby food is:

**Once you put the food on the table, your job is done.**

I’m paraphrasing from Ellyn Satter’s book Child of Mine, which is really the last word on the feeding of older babies and children. (The book talks about breastfeeding but in much less detail than a good breastfeeding book like The Nursing Mother’s Companion.)

Satter puts the second rule slightly differently: you and your child have a *division of responsibility*, she says. You decide what and when to eat. Your child decides whether and how much to eat.

That means absolutely no cajoling at the table. No making sure they eat the peas *and* the larb. No getting upset if they want to fill up on bread. And no freaking out if they don’t want to eat a single bite of anything.

Probably no single piece of advice has saved our family more stress, even though it’s a pain in the ass to actually follow it, and probably no one follows it perfectly. Abiding by the second rule is as hard as choosing to ignore some of your spouse’s annoying habits.

Even though toddler feeding patterns have been notorious for as long as there have been toddlers, new parents still seem to be shocked and frustrated by them. There have been many days when Iris has eaten nothing more than half a cup of milk before her afternoon snack at 3:30pm. Other days, she’ll eat a whole piece of buttered toast and a bowl of Greek yogurt for breakfast and then be hungry for snack 90 minutes later.

Especially, I think, if you’re a guy (and more especially a guy who worked for years in tech support, like me), it’s easy to see the world as a series of problems that you might be able to solve. If you knew an adult who regularly skipped breakfast and lunch and then ate the fluffy inside part of the bread for dinner, you’d stage an intervention. But a toddler who eats that way doesn’t have a problem.

For all the parental handwringing, toddler eating is much less neurotic than adult eating, at least in the US. Toddlers eat when they’re hungry and the food tastes good. They won’t eat because the food is good for them or because you want them to.

Or let’s put it this way: If you look across the table, see a 20-pound kid, and think, “Oh, I can totally win this,” you may as well be saying, “Look at that small country in Asia. I could totally win a little war there.”