Half Changed World

I return from my blog hiatus with a burning question… pretty much literally.  It’s about spatulas — the kind with the flat blade that you use for turning pancakes and moving the onions you’re sauteeing around, as opposed to the kind you use for scraping bowls or icing cakes.  In packing up our kitchen, I discovered that we have three of these, and on all of them either the handle or the blade has been melted. 

So, I’m thinking that when our new kitchen is done, I might splurge on a new, unmelted spatula.  But I’d like it to stay that way for a while.  And I want it not to destroy nonstick pans.  So, any recommendations?  We do have a couple of silicone spatulas, but they seem to be more in the cake icing and batter scraping families.  Do they make them with the offset handles, and rigid enough to use for pancakes?

For Christmas, my in-laws gave me The Sneaky Chef, by Missy Chase Lapine.  This is one of the two cookbooks that came out last fall with recipes for how to hide vegetable purees in a variety of foods to get a little more nutrition into kids.  (The other one was Deceptively Delicious, by Jessica Seinfeld, and there was some discussion over whether she stole the other person’s idea, and got a lot more attention because of who she’s married to.)

I’m not morally opposed to sneaking vegetables into my kids’ food — I’ve been known to put pureed black beans into brownies when I was desperate to get some fiber into D’s diet — but I haven’t actually used the cookbook very much.  The main problem is that both cookbooks (I took the Seinfeld one out of the library at some point to compare) assume that all kids will eat things like macaroni and cheese and tomato sauce, and D won’t.  When you’re talking about a kid who eats his peanut butter without jelly and doesn’t like ketchup, there’s not a whole lot of opportunities to disguise food.  A few weeks ago, I did make sweet potato puree when I was making sweet potatoes for myself, but then I never got around to using it before it got all yucky and moldy in the fridge.

So, this morning, since the boys had off from school and I decided to work from home rather than hazard the ice, D asked if I’d make pancakes.  So I decided to try the chocolate chip pancake recipe, which involves a mixture of white and whole wheat flour, wheat germ, and ground almonds.  I made some with chocolate chips, some plain, and some with blueberries.

Both boys loved the chocolate chip ones. Neither would eat the blueberry ones — and N usually adores blueberry pancakes.  They said the plain ones were ok, but not as good as my usual ones.  So, is it worth it to add the chips as a bribe to get them to eat some extra whole grains and protein?  Maybe occasionally, and especially if the alternative is bisquick, which is pretty low in nutritional content.  But Julia’s Oatmeal Buttermilk pancakes have just as much whole grains, and taste a heck of a lot better.

Oh, and having a book called "The Sneaky Chef" isn’t so sneaky once you have a kid who is old enough to read the title and ask what’s the ingredient he’s not supposed to notice.

One of the tastes that has always meant fall for me is Marian Burros’ plum torte.  You can make it with regular plums, but it’s really meant to be made with the little Italian prune-plums, which are one of the few fruits that still seems to be seasonal — they’re only available in late August and September.  (And they seem to be much harder to find in the DC area than in New York — maybe because there’s not much of an Italian population here?)

The recipe appeared almost every year in the NY Times when I was growing up, until one year Burros finally wrote that this was the last time, and if you wanted it, you should cut it out for cripessake.  (The Times reprinted it again a year or two ago.)  It’s one of the few cakes I can remember my mother baking (she’s an excellent cook, but has never been particularly into baking) and one that I’ve made dozens of times.  It’s delicious, incredibly easy to make, and travels well, so it’s perfect for a potluck.

This summer, Cook’s Illustrated ran a recipe for a Rustic Plum Cake that is based on Burros’ recipe.  But they didn’t like the cake base, so added ground almonds (and reduced the butter slightly) and they poached the plums in a bit of jam.  Sounded interesting.  So when I saw a 5 pound box of Italian prune-plums at Costco last week, I knew what I was baking.

The Cook’s Illustrated version is good.  But I like the old version too.  I found the almond taste a bit overpowering — I think I might use the ground almonds, but pass on the almond extract.  And I don’t think the extra flavor of the cooked plums was enough to justify the extra effort, and additional dirty pot.

Either way, I don’t think you can go wrong.

I had started to hear good things about Wegman’s even before they opened their two Northern Virginia stores, and last week I finally got a chance to go over and check one out.  Some reactions:

• Their prepared food looks beautiful, but I just can’t justify the cost.
• If I ate more organic foods, or shopped at Whole Foods now, they’d seem cheap by comparison.  But I don’t.
• I like the way all the fruit is labeled "ripe today" or "ripe in a few days."  T. has admitted that he hates it when I just put "fruit" on the shopping list, because he’s not good at judging what looks good.  Wegman’s might make it easy even for him.
• I did manage to bring home some sort of melon other than the honeydew I thought I had chosen.  It looked like a honeydew on the outside, but was orange like a cantaloupe on the inside, and the taste was also somewhere between the two.
• The fig "cake" with dark chocolate is really yummy.  It would be a heck of a Passover dessert if you don’t require the hecksher.
• Their big advantage over Trader Joe’s or Grand Mart is that they also carry a good range of "regular" supermarket items, so you wouldn’t need to make another stop to get the 2 or 3 things on your list that they don’t carry.
• The one thing I bought there that I can’t seem to find elsewhere in the area is bagels that actually chew like bagels.

Will I go back?  Probably not unless I’m heading out that way for something else or am hosting a party.  (Although I suspect it’s not as hard to get to if you know where you’re going — I succeeded in flummoxing the GPS system in the car I was borrowing, as the address wasn’t in its database.)  But the preschool where N will be going is about half way between Wegmans and our house, so I might ask T to get me some bagels.

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On another note, via US Food Policy, I found these amazing pictures of families and their food.  I was struck by the ubiquity of Coca-Cola in all but the poorest countries.

Did anyone else try the cold-brewed ice coffee recipe from the Times?  I thought it was incredibly weak, even when I diluted it less than the 1:1 that they suggested.  Bleah.

All of my parenting email lists and many blogs are abuzz with news of the recall of a bunch of Thomas trains for lead in the paint.  I think it’s drawing a lot of attention for several reasons:

• These trains are awfully popular.  Pretty much every kid I know has some.
• They’re expensive, and they’re made of wood, so they have an old-fashioned aura.  People aren’t surprised that the cheap plastic crap from the dollar store is made in China or Mexico, but they don’t expect the stuff that’s $15 for a little train to come off the same assembly line.
• It’s coming right after there’s been a lot of attention to the impossibility of protecting the food supply from contaminants.

Realistically, I don’t think there’s a need to panic, unless your kid has been walking around sucking on James all day.  While it’s clearly a bad thing, all of us who grew up when leaded gasoline was in common use got exposed to much higher levels of lead.   

(Don’t worry, I will check our train bins to see if we have any that are affected — I think all of ours are older than 2005, though.)

But it does highlight how interconnected — and how vulnerable — we all are in this global economy.  There’s really no way to avoid it.  The part of that NPR story on the food supply that struck me the most is that China produces 80 percent of the world’s Vitamin C.  Unless you’re going to go try to play Robinson Crusoe somewhere, you can’t avoid it.

Today I’m reviewing two books that were sent to me by their publishers.  Both are about health and disease prevention, and have a forward or introduction (what’s the difference?) by the authors of YOU: The Owner’s Manual.  One focuses on kids, while the other is organized decade by decade, from pre-natal to "the eighth decade and beyond."  Both of them basically tell you to exercise regularly, eat your veggies, and wear sunscreen.

First up is the book about kids: Good Kids, Bad Habits: The RealAge Guide to Raising Healthy Children, by Jennifer Trachtenberg, MD.  The email I got offering me the book showed the cover, which has the title spelled out in refrigerator magnets, with a carrot and some broccoli magnets thrown in for good luck, so I knew it was likely to push some buttons for me.  As long-term readers of this blog know, I have some issues around nutritional advice for parents — I know darned well what a healthy diet looks like, and that my older son’s diet isn’t quite making it to Planet Power but have more or less accepted that we can only control what we offer him, not what he eats.

So, when I got the book, I was predictably irritated by the blithe assumptions that involving children in food prep and cutting food into fun shapes would be enough to win over a picky eater.  But I was somewhat surprised (and pleased) to see that the book covers far more than nutrition, covering topics from good hygiene (wash your hands, floss your teeth) to safety (buckle your seatbelt, wear a bike helmet) and emotional well-being (spend one on one time with kids, develop relationships with extended family).  Overall, the book offers pretty solid, standard advice. 

My fundamental concern about the book is who is the audience for it.  It seems to me like the sort of well-educated middle-class parents who are likely to buy this book will generally know almost everything that’s in it already.  Certainly, that seems to be the conclusion of the parentbloggers who have reviewed it.  Anxious new parents might buy it, but relatively little of the book is about babies. Maybe it could be a text for a parenting class?  Or you could give it to grandparents who might listen to a doctor about seat belts more than to their children?  I don’t know.  I find it pretty hard to imagine anyone reading the book cover to cover.

The second book is The Checklist: What you and your family need to know to prevent disease and live a long and healthy life, by "Dr. Manny" Alvarez.  I focused on the chapters for 0-9 (the age of my children) and 30-39 (that would be me). 

The chapter on young children suffers from the problem that they’ve only got 38 pages to cover a huge developmental range.  So Alvarez makes no attempt to discuss the full range of health issues, but rather goes through a checklist of topics that you might have heard about in the news — cord blood, circumcision, vaccines, autism, ADD.

The chapter on 30-something adults has a different problem, that there are very few health problems that are unique to this age group.  So instead you get a bland discussion of nutrition, skin care, and urinary tract infections, and then a laundry list of ailments that (fortunately) relatively few people in this age group are actually likely to experience, from cervical cancer to MS.

Fundamentally, I think the decade by decade organization just doesn’t work.  Good preventative habits don’t really change that much from decade to decade, and the litany of diseases would have worked better in simple alphabetical order.   The only people I could imagine reading this book cover to cover are hypochondriacs looking for new diseases to obsess about.

Also, the writing/editing was sloppy.  For example, from the circumcision discussion: "The AAP also found that the risk of penile cancer in an uncircumcised man is three times more likely than in a circumcised man, though penile cancer is rare in the United States, just one in one hundred thousand males has it."  Someone get this man a semicolon.

Feeling frazzled, so you get some bullets tonight:

• The blog world is buzzing over the story of the family who got kicked off of an AirTran flight because the little girl wouldn’t sit in her seat and so the flight couldn’t take off.  Assuming that the story is being reported more or less accurately, I basically agree with Mir.  I can’t promise you that my kids won’t make noise, but I can get them in their seats.  And most of the parents commenting at On Balance seemed to agree as well.  But a few seemed to take it as an opportunity to vent their spleen about crying kids, which is a different story entirely.  Yeah, I’d rather not be trapped in an airplane with a crying kid too, but you don’t always get what you want.  Trust me, the parents are even less happy about it than you are.
• As it happens, we’re flying AirTran this weekend to attend a family event.  My boys are both quite excited about flying, and I’m hopeful that they’ll be reasonably well behaved.  D’s been on a 16 hour flight, so an hour and a half shouldn’t be a problem.  But of the 4 times that N has flown in his life, he’s thrown up on two of them.  We’re bringing a big box of wipes and extra clothes, but is there anything else we should be doing?  Is there a nonprescription anti-airsickness drug that is safe for kids and actually works?
• I’ve learned about a local farm that sells grass-fed beef and lamb and makes deliveries nearby.  After reading The Omnivore’s Dilemna, I want to give this a try.  But I have no idea what to get that a) won’t bankrupt us and b) will give us a sense of why it’s worth the extra money and hassle.  Here’s the price list — what should I get and how should I cook it?
• I’ve mostly stopped worrying about my stats, but I happened to take a look at them this afternoon and discovered that I got over 2,000 hits on Monday, which is about 4 times what I usually get and more than 2 times my previous high.  I think it’s because of this article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.  This is far more than the increase in hits I got last year when quoted in the NY Times.  I think the difference is that the Post-Intelligencer used a hotlink to the post it referred to, which the Times never does.

We had our big almost-annual Hanukah party yesterday. (Almost annual because there have been a few years when we haven’t had the energy to make it happen.)  We wound up with a nice mix of people, none of whom knew each other — which I think actually makes for a better party than ones where some people know each other and others don’t know anyone but us.   At one point when the RSVPs were trickling in, I thought that no one Jewish but us was going to attend, but Jews wound up being about 1/3 of the attendees.

As always, I wound up wishing that I had more time to talk with everyone.  That’s true about throwing parties in general, but is even more true for our Hanukah parties, where one of us is pretty much always in the kitchen working on the latkes.  I just don’t think they taste as good made in advance and kept warm in the oven.

We made both standard latkes and the curried sweet potato ones from Jewish Cooking in America.  For my standard latkes, I grate both potatoes and onions in the food processor, and don’t even bother peeling the potatoes.  Instead of adding matzoh meal, I use instant mashed potatoes to soak up the extra liquid.  I tried making a batch on the griddle, but the insides weren’t getting as cooked as I think they should be, so we then reverted to the high-greese method.  (I may try Elswhere’s idea of parboiling the potatoes some time, which might make the griddle work better. (via Crunchy Granola) The sweet potato ones are really good, and also have the advantage that they’re not competing with the platonic ideal of latkes that you grew up with.

Tonight we went to our congregation’s Hanukah party, and had some amazing latkes.  The cooks said that their tricks are to a) squeeze out all the excess liquid through cheesecloth and b) separate the eggs and beat the whites until stiff before adding them back to the mixture.  My mother always squeezed out the liquid, which makes for lovely crispy latkes.  But it’s an awful lot of work for a crowd.

My boys are not the paragons of restraint that Phantom’s kids are, but they’re doing reasonably well.  When D started to pout over not getting to open ALL his presents on Friday night, we told him that he was making it hard for us to have a happy Hanukah, and he did a pretty impressive job of controlling his attitude.  And when N opened his present from my folks tonight, he told me that he’s always wanted a blue robe with clouds and moons.  (Yes, we’ve been reading A Pocket for Corduroy; how did you guess?)

I seem to have relaxed a good bit about the whole Christmas thing this year.  I’ve decided that I’m not allowed to complain about the public school teaching "Santa Claus is coming to town" in music class when I’ve shown the boys Miracle on 34th Street (the original, of course).  I’m more disturbed that the celebration of holidays around the world scheduled for this week includes "America, Israel, Mexico and Africa" as countries.  D got a reprimand for talking too much in class on Friday; he was trying to explain to his classmates that Santa Claus wasn’t going to come to our house for Hanukah.

My office’s holiday party is Wednesday.  There’s a dessert competition.  We had to sign up last week with what we were going to make.  Of course, I forgot to look in my cookbooks to figure out what I wanted to make, so I signed up for the cake that I look at every time I open The Cake Bible, but never have made — the golden cage.

When I got home and looked at the recipe, I remembered why I’ve never made it.  It’s a golden genoise, frosted with apricot icing, and then covered with a caramel cage:

Nothing in making it was all that difficult (although it would be hard to make without a cooking thermometer), but it’s a lot of steps.  For the icing alone, you have to make the apricot puree, a creme anglais, and an italian merengue, and then blend it all together with a pound of butter.  The cage — which looks so impressive — is actually quite easy and fun.

Now for the real challenge — getting it into my office in one piece.