Welcome to SeedtoSpoon

13 03 2010

A big hello to readers who saw my flyer at the Just Between Friends (JBF) sale this weekend. I picked up some summer stuff for my kiddos yesterday, and I swear my three-year-old woke up extra early this morning to put on one of her new outfits! The JBF sale is definitely a great resource for parents.

I hope that SeedtoSpoon will be another great resource for you. As I said on the flyer, my goal is helping moms cook healthy. Many of us take extra care while we’re pregnant to eat really well, but it’s all too easy to slip into bad habits over time.

As a working mom myself, I know the challenges of putting food on the table. But no matter how little time you have to put a meal together, no matter how cranky your kids seem to be at that 5 o’clock “witching hour,” no matter how picky their palates…you can still put together healthy food. I’m here to help, with kid-friendly tips and seasonal recipes.

A word about my background. I’m a professional food writer, published in The New York Times, The Denver Post and city magazines, and I went to cooking school in New York. This blog is a passion for me, born out of experiences feeding my own three kids (ages 8, 5 and 3). Unlike many other blogs, which are snarky and self-absorbed in their quest to be entertaining, this blog is about you. I’m trying to share what I’m doing in my own kitchen to help and inspire you in yours.

As part of a regular column I wrote for a city magazine here in Denver, it was my job to work with chefs and test their recipes to make sure they worked in a home kitchen. That’s one thing that distinguishes the recipes you’ll find on my blog with so many others. Everything on my blog is something I’ve made and fed to my own family, so you’ll benefit from my tinkerings to get the recipe just right.

Let me know if you have any questions, and please consider subscribing. To do so, just enter your email address on the lower right-hand corner of the blog where it says “Subscribe”. It’s free, and you’ll get recipes delivered to your inbox. Thanks for reading, and welcome!


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Beet and Goat Cheese Gratin

10 03 2010

Everyday my son notices what he calls “signs of spring.” We’re out for a walk and he hears birds chirping, a sign they’re back from their winter home. Here’s the shoot of a crocus, over there is a glimmer of red peeking out from under the leaves.

Unfortunately, we won’t have signs of spring in the kitchen for a while. At least not here in Colorado, where farmers are busy planting but not yet harvesting. True, there are hoop houses and the like to supply restaurants with herbs and greens, but as I think about fresh, local produce at farmers markets or in bins at Whole Foods, I know my wait isn’t over.

So while my heart (and my son’s) may be in the spring, my head remains in winter. I’m still finding new ways to use the local root vegetables that have been arriving from my farm share every two weeks since last fall. One recent success is a beet gratin. Don’t worry, not all gratins are full of cream and cheese, though I’ve made several of those lately too and will share recipes later (butternut squash and leeks, yum). This recipe is lighter, with just enough cheese on top to cut the beets’ earthy sweetness.

Speaking of which, I have friends who object to these bright red roots because they’re too sweet. But serve them with goat cheese, parsley, salt and pepper and they become a luxurious side dish, especially when paired with steak.

Since beets aren’t much fun to handle, I suggest making twice as many as you need for one night, then freezing the rest. That’s what I did, and when I wanted to make this dish I just pulled the bag out of the freezer, let them thaw, and then jumped into the instructions one step ahead of the game.

My other advice is to scrub beets, leaving on their tails and an inch of their tops, and wrap them individually in foil. Roast them at 400 for 40 minutes to an hour, depending on size, and let them cool in the foil until ready to use. The skins will slip off easily and the mess is nowhere near as great as when beets are boiled or, even worse, grated raw.

Beet and Goat Cheese Gratin
Like many SeedtoSpoon recipes, this is more technique than recipe, designed to get you thinking about your own ingredients and how you like things to taste. Feel free to use more or less cheese, parsley, bread crumbs, etc. And use as many beets as you think you or your guests will eat. I used four for 2 adults and 3 kids.

Take 4 large beets, cut off all but an inch of their tops, and scrub well. Wrap individually in foil and roast at 400 until tender, about 40-60 minutes. Meanwhile, take 1 tablespoon butter and let it melt over medium heat in a small saucepan. Add fine white bread crumbs and stir until the mixture looks like wet sand (if it’s too dry, add more butter; too wet, add more crumbs). Cook, stirring occasionally, until bread crumbs are toasted. Remove from heat.

When beets are cool enough to handle, slip the skins off with a knife, slice off the tails and cut into wedges. Season with kosher salt and pepper, toss with chopped parsley, and put into a small buttered gratin dish. Top with dollops of goat cheese. Put under the broiler just until the cheese melts and gets a tiny bit golden around the edges. Sprinkle with homemade bread crumbs and serve immediately.


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A Lesson in Hospitality

4 03 2010

Apologies to readers outside the Denver metro area for tempting you with this picture! But the story just isn’t as good without the visual…

A few weeks ago, I had the good fortune to meet Michael Bortz, owner of Denver’s City Bakery. Not just me, but my three kids, too. They were out of school and we were looking for an adventure. We all love bread, and I know City Bakery makes some of the best in town, so I called him on a lark and asked if we could come up to buy a baguette. The answer was likely to be no, I thought, since his is mostly a wholesale operation.

But later that morning, he called back and invited us up for a visit. When we arrived, he literally threw open the door, letting my eight-, five- and three-year-olds smell sourdough starter, showing them the ovens, opening the walk-in cooler where bread was proofing, and — the piece de resistance — letting them pipe frosting onto oversized cupcakes (and not minding when piles of red sprinkles ended up on the counter).

He sent them home with their own boxes of cookies and cupcakes, and filled a paper sack with ciabatta, baguettes, sourdough and rolls for me. He even helped us carry everything out to the car. This from a man who’d been up long before the sun, who didn’t know me or my food background, who had plenty more to do than lead a tour for children. And yet he did, going out of his way and then some.

I’ve been thinking of Michael lately, and not just because his goodies keep popping up at all the places I’ve been stopping for coffee, like Ink, Hutch and Spoon, and Perk Hill. No, he’s been coming to mind because he’s so good at hospitality, and some chefs in town could stand to learn a lesson or two.

On Friday, Denver will wrap up a two-week extravaganza known as Restaurant Week, where two people can eat a three-course meal at hundreds of restaurants for $52.80. The price is an inside joke. 5280 is Denver’s altitude, hence the term “mile-high city.”

You would think that restaurateurs would recognize the possibilities and woo diners with an extraordinary meal. After all, many people view the week as a way to preview expensive restaurants so they know which ones are worth full price and merit another trip — and which aren’t. Yet my experience at Restaurant Week is that some chefs get it, and others don’t. Some restaurants design their special prix-fixe menus with just a few options, so diners don’t get a feeling for the breadth of the kitchen. What’s worse, sometimes those options are tilted toward higher-margin fare like salads, pasta and chicken. I know I’m not the only person who’s had such a poor dining experience during Restaurant Week (at one of the city’s finest restaurants, to boot) that I’ll never go back. Bravo to all the chefs and owners who shun this approach, realizing that short-term profits aren’t what it’s all about.

Which brings me back to City Bakery. During our impromptu tour, I was reminded of a book by famed New York restaurateur Danny Meyer called Setting the Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business. I don’t know if Bortz has read it; for him, hospitality might be intuitive. My hope is that more chefs give it a look before Restaurant Week 2011 rolls around.

P.S. Does your city have something like Restaurant Week? What’s your experience been?


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Finally, a Healthy Drive-Thru

24 02 2010

Before I had kids, I didn’t understand the drive thru. Yes, I used it occasionally on road trips, but in day-to-day life, there was no appeal. What’s the big deal, I thought? Just park and go in.

Then I had kids and everything changed.

Laziness isn’t the issue. Getting out of the car is. Especially with a child who would rather play hide-and-seek behind the condiment counter than stand in line. Or with a child who, just minutes before, was screaming and arching her back to resist being buckled (in hopes of returning to the swings). No way am I going to unbuckle her! And what about all those times a child has fallen asleep in the car? Until now, I had to make do with an Americano from Starbucks.

Thankfully, now there’s a better option. I just read that Panera is opening a new location in Denver today with a drive-thru window. I did some checking, and it turns out that while this is the first in Colorado, there are 30 nationwide. Hats off to the person (a mom, perhaps?) who came up with this.

So now instead of caffeine with lots of calcium, I can order a bowl of the cumin-spiked black bean soup for me and, for the kiddos, a grilled cheese (with organic cheese, no less) on whole-grain bread and organic squeezable yogurt. Sure, it’s not something I’ll do every day, or even every week. But if I had a dollar for all the times these past eight years when I lamented the lack of healthy drive-thrus, I’d be — as the saying goes — rich.


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Apple and Celery Root Salad

23 02 2010

We all know not to bring up politics or religion at the dinner table. But I had no idea how polarizing vegetables can be. Meat, yes. Milk, too, especially if you’re with a vegetarian or vegan. But vegetables?

I’ve certainly had discussions with folks that raised – shall we say — uncomfortable issues involving produce, such as the environmental costs of shipping a kiwi half-way around the world. But I’m not talking “eat local” here, or even “organic vs. conventional.”

I’m just talking celery root. A friend (and you know who you are!) confided that she even stopped reading my blog for awhile. She just couldn’t make it past my recent story on celery root. That’s a stronger reaction than I would’ve predicted for an ugly but mild-mannered root vegetable.

Which is why I was delighted to go to a friend’s house last week and find an Apple-and-Celery-Root Salad on the table. I wish I had a picture to show you how lovely this hairy vegetable can be when well prepared, but I don’t. While a food blogger can certainly take surreptitious pictures of dishes served at restaurants, it’s not exactly polite to pull out the iPhone while your friend pours the drinks! All I can say is that the salad looked better than many I’ve had off a menu, a tower of thick granny smith discs, green skin on for color, layered with pale celery root matchsticks.

Despite all the jokes about celery root (we even had a few at dinner that night), the vegetable is very gentle in flavor. What really made this dish was the dressing. With a drizzle of buttermilk, blue cheese and chives, the salad becomes an ode to that lovable pairing of apples and blue cheese, with celery root thrown in for good measure.


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Blackened Green Beans

19 02 2010


Brussels sprouts are everywhere. In recent weeks I've had them roasted, boiled with butter, even tossed in a compound butter with anchovies. I love them but not everyone does, making them perfect for a restaurant (where you can choose your own side) but a bit risky to serve for company. This is especially true if some of your guests are kids, who are known to be even more sprout-averse than the average adult.

A much safer choice is green beans. Whether served cold and crisp in vinaigrette or tossed warm with blue cheese and walnuts, they can play up or down, casual or fancy. Unfortunately, frozen green beans are much less lovable than fresh. I learned this the hard way, when I pulled from the freezer one of the bags I'd blanched and frozen last summer. They were waterlogged and flabby, and my heart sank when I thought of the eight other bags remaining in the freezer from last year's CSA.

I couldn't just reheat and serve these floppy things. Crossing my fingers, I threw them in a very hot skillet with a few teaspoons of oil and seared them until blackened in places. As soon as they were done I sprinkled them with kosher salt and served them immediately. No one but me would've guessed their miraculous transformation.

Blackened Green Beans
Wash and trim 6-8 ounces of green beans. Blanch in boiling salted water until crisp-tender, then put in an ice bath to stop the cooking. Drain and dry well. Heat a large saute pan over high heat for a few minutes, then add 2-3 teaspoons of olive oil. When the oil is hot, carefully add the beans (if they’re wet, they’ll spatter) and cook, stirring, until blackened in spots. Toss with salt and serve immediately.


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Roasted Almonds, Local Cheese & Wine

16 02 2010

If you like to eat locally and seasonally, you’re probably going a little stir crazy at this point in the winter. Unless, of course, you live in Florida, California or Texas and have access to fresh greens and other non-storage crops. In that case, count yourself lucky — and don’t rub it in!

The rest of us envy you, and are making due with things like leeks, carrots, potatoes, onions and squash, all of which were grown last season and put in storage for the winter. I’m part of a winter CSA and thankful to get these vegetables from a local farmer, but still, I’m looking forward to spring.

In the meantime, I’m eating locally in other ways. Like last week, when we put together the kind of picnic we would take to an outdoor concert, only we were at the kitchen table instead. Some of the ingredients came from far away, like the Maille cornichons from France and the Sauvignon Blanc from New Zealand. But others were local, like the seeded baguette from Udi’s, which we topped with MouCo ColoRouge cheese and ultra-thin granny smith apple slices drizzled with Colorado honey. While you may not be able to enjoy this exact cheese, chances are good you can find another delicious local cheese in your area. Not sure where to find one? Try a local specialty market, cheese shop or even Whole Foods.

The beauty of a picnic is you nibble on what you like, while your friends nibble on what they like. For me, that means mixed olives, good cheeses and nuts. Which is why the only dish I cooked — not even a “dish” really — was Roasted Almonds with Rosemary Fleur de Sel from Bon Appetit (December 2003). I started the almonds first, and by the time I’d washed the grapes, arranged the cheeses, spooned out the olives and mounded the shaved Black Forest ham, the nuts were done. If you decide to try this recipe, I suggest reducing the cooking time from 40 to 25 minutes. Also feel free to substitute the more readily available kosher salt for the fleur de sel, but use less than the recipe calls for. I started out with just 1/2 tsp, down from the 1 1/2 tsp stated in the recipe, and they did not seem undersalted.

Click here for the recipe for Roasted Almonds with Rosemary Fleur de Sel .


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Today’s Tips: Kitchen Safety

13 02 2010

Several months ago, a SeedtoSpoon reader wondered if she should rinse raw chicken prior to cooking. I was taught to do so, and so was she. But we both wondered if we weren’t, in fact, spreading around possible contamination. I didn’t have a definitive answer for her, until now.

In characteristically exhaustive form, Cook’s Illustrated tackles this issue and many others in “Keeping a Cleaner, Safer Kitchen” in the February issue. Their advice? Don’t wash raw meat or poultry. The exception is when the meat has been brined, in which case it does need a bath. If you rinse, make sure to clean the sink and counter with hot soapy water. I use a paper towel to do this, so I can throw it away and prevent cross-contamination.

In addition, at least twice a month I disinfect my sponge — whether or not I’ve used it to clean up raw meat — by boiling it for 10 minutes. Cook’s Illustrated says 5 minutes is fine, but in Denver water boils at a lower temperature due to the altitude, so I add the extra minutes for good measure.

If you’re curious about the science behind this, here are two good links: the USDA’s sheet on High Altitude Cooking and Food Safety and High Altitude Cooking, with a helpful chart listing the boiling point of water at various altitudes.


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Instant Banana Pudding

9 02 2010

What I’m writing about today is something for folks too young to diagram a sentence, drive a car, or cook over a double-boiler. It’s also for the grown-ups who hang out with them.

Last week I shared a recipe for blancmange, an eggless pudding thickened with cornstarch instead of the who-knows-what in boxed instant puddings. Here’s a pudding recipe that my kids like just as much, mostly because they make it all by themselves. Note that this is not something I would ever make for me. I think my kids know this, and that’s part of the appeal.

To start, grab a banana. Sorry that it requires a banana, since bananas don’t grow anyplace local and I’m usually an avid proponent of local food. This is one area where I make an exception, especially in winter when the fresh fruit isn’t local anyway. Let your little one peel it, then mash it in a bowl with a fork or a masher. Then give them a tablespoon and let them measure and stir in 3-4 tablespoons of applesauce (preferably unsweetened organic) and 1 or 2 tablespoons of organic vanilla yogurt. Plain works well, too; you can always add a drop of vanilla extract. I know a friend who makes a similar dessert with her kids, only she adds crushed graham crackers.

Remember this recipe/project A) on snow days when you don’t know how you’re going to get through the next few hours until dinner; B) you have extra bananas, but not enough for banana bread; or C) you want to see your children grin proudly as they devour their oh-so-healthy dessert.


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Celery Root Gratin

6 02 2010

Celery root is one of those vegetables you can avoid your whole life without even trying. Its ugly exterior — all those brownish tendrils sticking out of the odd-shaped bulb — all but guarantees its placement in the back of the produce section. That is, if it’s there at all. I cooked happily for years before I brought celery root into my own kitchen, and then only because it was from my CSA and I didn’t want to waste it.

What we call celery root (or celeriac) is the root of a special variety of celery, so it’s not like farmers grow celery and then at the end of the season dig up the root. In taste, celery root is usually described as a cross between strong celery and parsley, but I’ve found our farm-share celeriac to be milder than regular celery, and thus a better choice for picky eaters. The texture is more like a flabby potato, so if you like celery but don’t like the strings, celery root might be a good vegetable for you to meet.

The first time I cooked it, I pureed it and added it to mashed potatoes. The celery root perked up the starch, but my kids objected to the intrusion, both in texture and flavor. I’ve also gently sauteed it with butter as a side dish, and the result was good but not worth repeating.

So I’ve continued to look for new preparations, and last week experimented with a Celery Root-Wild Rice Gratin. Normally, gratins have breadcrumbs on top but this one doesn’t. However, it does have a delicious white sauce to bind the ingredients together. Definitely a step up from the other recipes. A friend who came over for lunch the day after I made it liked the leftovers so much she’s already requested the recipe. My version is adapted from Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, by Deborah Madison.

Celery Root-Wild Rice Gratin

3 cups cooked wild rice, or brown and wild rice mix
1 small leek, washed well and sliced into very thin rings
4 T butter, divided
2 T white flour
1 1/2 cups whole or 2 % milk, heated in the microwave or over the stove until hot
1/4 tsp nutmeg
1-2 cloves garlic, minced
1 celery root, washed, peeled and grated
1 lemon, juiced
3 T chopped parsley
3/4 cup grated Swiss cheese
1/4 cup parmesan

First, cook the rice according to package directions and set aside. (I like to make extra so I have leftovers for fried rice or salads later in the week.)

Next, make the white sauce. Melt 3 T butter and cook leeks for a few minutes over low heat, then add flour and cook, stirring, for two minutes. Add the hot milk and whisk out any lumps. Keep stirring and cook over low heat until thick, about 20 minutes. Add nutmeg, and salt and pepper to taste.

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Butter a round or oval baking dish. Melt 1 T butter over medium and add garlic. Cook for 30 seconds, then add grated celery root, half the lemon juice and parsley. Continue cooking until tender, about 7-10 minutes. In a large bowl, mix celery root, rice, white sauce, Swiss cheese and parmesan. Taste and add remaining lemon juice if desired, plus salt and pepper and additional nutmeg if necessary. Spoon into prepared dish and bake about 25 minutes.


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