Bad Home Cooking

Artichoke Frittata...er...scramble

Dawn was once a yoga teacher and a Tai Chi chick. Dawn is an artist (every member of the Tilsner clan has a painting or print of hers on their wall) who is now moving into photography. Dawn is smarter than she should be. She reads science books for fun. Dawn also writes annoyingly well, for someone who isn't a "Writer." Dawn knows how to drive big, scary vans. Dawn thinks she is probably Ted Nugent's love child.

Dawn, as you can see, is one kick-ass gal. It's not her fault I can't cook.

Big Bang theory

Fourth of July has come and gone. We grilled hamburgers for the kids, cut up a giant watermelon and steamed some corn on the cob. Although Tony manned the grill, the nits found displeasure in the honey-wheat buns I'd bought, and the unfamiliar flavors of fresh ground beef burgers, and didn't eat more than a few bites of their meal. Apparently, though, it is possible to fill yourself up with half a watermelon.

The fillet mignon we grilled for ourselves fared better. And there was Mexican beer courtesy of my neighbor, and a very good Pinot Grigot.

In a brief moment of inspiration, I considered taking another whack at that blackberry cobbler. In the end, with blackberries costing $4 a basket at Trader Joe's, I thought better of it.

This is your cue, gentle readers, to dazzle me with your Fourth of July fare.

In other news, I've ordered the paella pan online, and I expect it to arrive next week. I promised you paella, or my version thereof. And danmit, you'll eat it, and like it.

Sludge morning

I hyped the heck out the oatmeal breakfast my kids would be eating this morning, since they can't have their normal breakfast cereal due to Pesach. (No bread or grains for seven days, according to tradition.) Brown sugar! Butter! Blueberries! Apples! And they were game for it, indeed. My daughter was particularly excited about getting to consume parentally-sanctioned sugar for breakfast.

Then I woke up a little later than planned, because Julia and I stayed up late making almond and date truffles for our Pesach spread tonight (but more on them later) and drinking wine.

Then I found I didn't have any brown sugar.

And no more apples.

Then I put too much water into the oatmeal...or something...because I am the bad home cook, remember, and I only just redeemed myself by cooking the hell out of it and hoping to boil off some of the excess water. My kids, hungry and irate already, cast me baleful looks, and I knew I would only be keeping them cooperative if I delivered the goods.

Luckily, I had good local honey from the Farmer's Market. (added bonus: In a bear, which is always more fun than a regular jar), and frozen blueberries. And bananas! And in the end, the kids were happy again.

Tonight's the seder. We've got lamb marinating in a hundred spices in the refrigerator as I write this. We have amazing almond and date truffles rolled in coconut that I can't quite believe we actually made. It's gonna be interesting. My only hope is that I get my traditional Passover Cosmo first, to ease me into my long night.

Stay tuned...

Cooking with Memsahib

Five things I love that are from India:
Bollywood
Bindis
Bhangra
Burfi
Basmati rice

Oh yes. And the food, of course. Ah, Indian take-out. Is there anything that a good chana dal over rice won't cure, atcha?  Or milky, chai tea and sinful gulab jaman? I have loved Indian food and the restaurants that serve it from San Francisco to London. But cooking it myself has proved...tricky. Years ago in another life I had the hubris to pick up Madhur Jaffrey's seminal paperback Indian Cooking, and yes, I did go though a phase of trying to perfect a simple dal, to mediocre results. (I'd never attempt a meat dish, although there are few sensations better than a chicken tika that falls off the bone into your fingers and from thence into your waiting mouth). Indeed, the few attempts I've made at Indian home cooking have given me minimal return on investment, so I typically opt to pay professional East Indian cooks to prepare my Indian food so as not to further insult the cuisine.

But then Deb over at Smitten Kitchen had to go and try the potato and cauliflower dish, and she made the raita, of course, and she took pictures of everything, all while waxing poetic about the scent of cumin. The sum total of her blog entry only served to distract me from work and induce me into a temporary madness in which I decided I had no choice but to either A) fob the nits on someone so I could run off to the sublime Udupi Palace in Artesia's Little India that very night, or, B.) make the one recipe I can pull off from Jaffrey's Indian Cooking: Delhi-style lamb cooked with potatoes.

Babysitters are expensive. I opted for choice B.

I wish I could tell you I botched this recipe. I have in the past. But I have also made it enough to feel fairly secure in my ability to pull it off. This is no small thing if you're going to put in the effort to drive across town and spend $15 on lamb kabobs from the fancy-ass organic grocery chain. And I was willing, even though I knew my kids wouldn't touch it (my daughter will sometimes have a bit of lamb, if I wash the sauce off first) and Tony might find it too spicy for his taste. But forget everybody else for once. This one was for me.

Here's the recipe: For my small family I typically halve everything but the spices.

7 tablespoons vegetable oil
2 medium onions, peeled and minced
1/2 -1 fresh green chili, minced (I routinely omit this)
5 cloves garlic, peeled and minced
2 1/4 pounds lamb (I get lamb kabobs already cut into cubes)
3  medium fresh tomatoes, peeled and finely chopped - canned  tomatoes may be substituted (I use one 16-ounce can of diced tomatoes with the juice)
1 tablespoon ground cumin seeds
2 teaspoons ground coriander seeds
1/2 teaspoon ground tumeric
1/4 to 1 teaspoon cayenne pepper (to your taste)
2 teaspoons salt
1 lb medium potatoes, peeled and cut in half
3 2/3 cup water

Heat the oil in a large, heavy pot over a high flame. When hot, put in the onions, green chili, if using, and garlic. Stir and fry until the onions have browned slightly. Put in the meat and stir vigorously for about 5 minutes. Now put in the spices, continue to stir and cook on high heat for 10-15 minutes or until the sauce is thick and the oil seems to separate from it. Add the potatoes and water. Cover, leaving the lid just slightly ajar, and cook on medium-low heat for about 1 hour and 10 minutes or until the meat is tender and the sauce is thick.

I've found that it's prudent to stir once in a while so stuff doesn't stick to the bottom.

Ms. Jaffrey writes that she likes this "everyday dish" with rice, an Indian bread, or Gujerati-style green beans, the recipe for which is in the book. I typically just serve this in a nice bowl with crusty style bread. And nobody seems to complain. Although I haven't made this dish in several years, I am happy to report that it came out beautifully and did not disappoint (although a nice cold Kingfisher beer would have been the ideal accompaniment). Tony finished his entire serving with great gusto. I don't think he believed I actually made it myself.

Rice with chicken crap

It's hard being a creative type. Sometimes I get inspired to write something or dance something or...cook something...and nobody else on the planet gets it. I am shunned. Ostracized. I get funny looks from my peers and puzzled, "we still love you Mommy" glances from my progeny.

I persevere. Yesterday found me at 5 p.m. scratching my head and wondering once again what to feed the nits for dinner. I had a brainstorm. One of my hardy perennials is lentils over rice: A can of Progresso Lentil soup thrown over basmati rice. My kids love it. But I didn't have any Progresso lentil soup. It's gotten hard to find, for some reason. My friend Joey and I exchange hot tips on where to find it around town ("They've got it at Smart N' Final! Get over here!"). Tony lucked into three cans of the stuff on a shopping trip to Von's lately, and cleverly bought them all. Alas, I went through it.

What I did have, however, was a can of Campbell's cream of chicken soup.

What if I made that and threw it over rice? Wouldn't it be sort of a creamy, Lebanese-style chicken and rice sorta thing?

So I open the can, taking great care to ignore the 2003 "best by" date on the bottom of the can. It's canned, right? It's all preservatives. And everyone knows Campbell's soups have enough sodium to pickle a small mammal. It'll be fine.

Indeed, I shake the cylinder-shaped mass of...chickenish stuff into the saucepan, where it lolls horrifically. Thank God the kids are in the other room because this is like making sausage: You really don't want to see what goes into it. I am still operating under the delusion that they will find this dish palatable enough for me to include it on the regular weekday menu, and yet I'm still cogent enough to know that one glimpse of what currently quivers in my saucepan would put them off of anything I make them forever. I use one half cup water and one half cup milk to cook the stuff up and make it really creamy.

Ah! Cream of chicken soup! Nice ocher color. I ladle some over a nice bowl of fragrant Basmatti rice and mix it in.

I try it. It's good! Warm! Filling!

I put two bowls out for the kids, plus a little dish of carrots.

They run into the kitchen. They're starving, they say. Then they stop short when they see what's on the table.

"What's that?" asks the boy.

"Rice with chicken sauce," I say, wishing I could think of a more enticing name. My own working title  for this dish is rice with chicken crap, but I keep that to myself for now. 

He looks at me like I'm Andrea Yates.

"It looks gross," he says.

"It tastes great," I counter.

"I'm not gonna taste it," he says.

"You have to at least taste it before you can tell me you don't like it."

He looks at me. I look at him. I see what's happening. So as the Mother, the custodial parent and number one authority, I play the best card I have.

I bribe him.

"I'll give you a dollar if you take a bite," I say, thinking that surely once he tastes the concoction of starch and chicken sauce, he'll love it, and fill his belly.

"Show me the dollar." Where's a six-year-old getting this kind of mercenary talk? I show him the dollar. He takes a bite. Then puts out his hand. He does not take another bite. He focuses his attention instead on the carrots and his glass of milk.

I'm forced to bribe his older sister, too. She takes three bites before pushing the bowl away. I end up eating the better part of their bowls myself, because I'm starving and I, at least, find rice with chicken crap comforting. I wait all night for them to tell me they're hungry, but they don't.

Maybe they're afraid I'll cook something new for them again.