Eating with a Fork

Jasmine has made considerable progress from when she was slurping mush to now, where she can “feed herself.” I use the phrase feeding herself rather loosely of course because if you or I fed ourselves like she does herself, then we’d get kicked out of every restaurant in America.

In the video below, we were in a patient mood and decided this particular Saturday was as good as any to start letting her try to use utensils — and she LOVED it. Now two months later,
we have worked into the pattern of feeding her, helping her feed herself, letting her feed herself, and then letting her stir her food around in circles. It makes meal time a fun mess.

Jasmine’s Food Adventures

If you follow our blog, you might have seen the video of Jasmine eating solids for the first time. Well this is the follow-up to that with Jasmine’s first ever feature “in the kitchen”.

We started Jasmine on solids when she turned 5 1/2 months. Her first teeth started coming in around that time and she started to look at us longingly while we ate dinner. We felt so bad for her just sitting there watching us eat that we had to let her in on the fun.

Touchy subject disclaimer: All families are different; this is just what Jason and I decided to do and it works for us. There are so many opinions out there that I actually suggest piecing them together and forming your own.

We decided early on that given our love of food and cooking, it would make the most sense for us to make all of Jasmine’s foods for her. Besides the fact that it’s super easy and convenient (more on this later), our main motivation for home-cooking her meals is so she won’t think that all food comes from a jar or a can. This is especially true since I don’t breastfeed and she is on formula. We’ve been lucky with the vegetable supply because it’s summer and there’s an abundance of fresh foods at the market for her to try. So far, I’ve made a good variety of foods with different flavors and there hasn’t been anything she’s disliked. Hopefully it will stay that way!

The food prep part is easy since most of her food stuff has to be steamed or roasted until very soft and then pureed. I will usually take an hour in the afternoon on Sunday to cook a batch of food and then portion it out to last until Thursday. Then on Thursday night, I’ll throw some extra vegetables of whatever I’m preparing for our dinner into a steam basket or into the oven to cook while we eat. I’ll then finish making her food after we eat and portion it out to last until the next batch of food on Sunday. This is what I portion and store her food in but now she’s eating much more than can fit in one of the containers. I will probably switch to something like this since the containers are larger and use the smaller containers for freezing her summer favorites to be used later on.

To date she’s eaten, in the following order:

Brown rice cereal - I toasted up raw brown rice in a pan and ground up the grains in a spice grinder to a powder. Then I whisked the powder with water (about 1:9 ratio) over a low flame until it looked like grits. It was still a bit thick for her first food so I mixed it with some formula to thin it out and to also make it a familiar taste for her.

Avocado - Avocados don’t need to be cooked since they are already a mushy food, so we just mashed this up with water/formula to make it like an avocado cream.

Barley cereal - Same methodology as the brown rice cereal.

Prunes - I steeped some dried prunes in hot water and then pureed it with some water to thin it out.

Jook (aka; congee, white rice cereal) - Jasmine had some stomach issues after all of the fiber we gave her - as you can probably deduce from the prunes we gave her - with the brown rice and barley, so we decided to give her plain congee that I made with some fresh chicken stock.

Zucchini - I steamed these and then pureed them.

String beans - I steamed these also and then pureed them with some zucchini to thin it out.

Sweet potato - As you can see from the list of foods before this, I was reluctant to give her anything sweet aside from the prunes, which were more out of necessity than anything else. I don’t want her to develop a sweet tooth for life so was planning on holding off on a lot of the orange vegetables. However, my grandmother (Jasmine’s great-grandmother) came and rescued Jasmine from green/white food purgatory and suggested that we mix sweet potato with congee to bland it down a bit. I immediately bought some sweet potatoes (to Jason’s delight) and roasted them in the oven. A quick mix with some congee at about a 1:2 (potato:rice) ratio and Jasmine was happy. Brilliant!

Peaches - I have been giving her fresh cut-up peaches while they’re available at the market through a baby safe feeder. She loves the peaches and has a great, albeit messy, time feeding herself.

Kohlrabi - This was steamed and pureed and also mixed with some congee. She absolutely loved this.

We’re feeding her carrots now and she’s absolutely loving those too

Here are some pictures of her food adventures. We’ve gotten much better about not getting food all over her face

And in non-food related news, she’s now sitting up on her own!

Jasmine’s First Meal

As you can expect from a set of food loving parents whose main concern on their wedding day was the quality of the fare, the event you’re about to witness was one of the most anticipated by us: the introduction of solid foods.

In this case, Jasmine was fed ground up toasted brown rice cooked with water and then mixed with some formula to provide an easy transition from a purely liquid diet. And it was fed to her in a manner that shows she is clearly our first child (i.e. we had no idea what we were doing). By the end of the meal the three of us were on the same page and worked pretty well as a gastro-team. Enjoy the footage; she’s now officially part of the “food at home” tag

Music by The Kinks, “Maximum Consumption”

Shrimp Malbec Jason Style

I have no idea how to cook seafood; all I know is red and white meat. Well that’s not totally true — it’s just that for seafood, I don’t have an internal recipe repertoire like I do for other meats. That’s why I had to pull out Molto Italiano a few weeks ago when Jacquie tasked me with cooking shrimp for dinner. After thumbing through Batali’s book, I thought his “Jumbo Shrimp Marsala Housewife Style” sounded great.

Just one slight problem. I was missing many of the recipe ingredients: capers, pine nuts, currants, fennel seeds, plum tomatoes, and marsala wine. Yeah, pretty much everything. However, I knew the flavor profile of those things and knew I could substitute for the stuff I didn’t have. That’s how in our version of the dish, capers became dill pickles, pine nuts became walnuts, currants became Pom juice, fennel seeds became fennel pollen from Marx Foods, plum tomatoes became vine ripened tomatoes, and marsala became malbec. Lastly, this dish is meant to be served like an appetizer but being as it was our dinner, we served it over pasta. This forced me to throw in some tomato paste to thicken it up a bit.

Despite all of the substitutions, we loved it and though the pics might not be great, I assure you that dish itself was tasty and beautiful.

Shrimp Malbec (Jason Style)
adapted from Molto Italiano

5 ounces of dried spaghetti

1 celery rib, diced
1/2 medium red onion, diced
2 vine ripened tomatoes, diced
2 tbsp chopped walnuts
2 tbsp chopped dill pickles
1 tsp fennel pollen
1 tbsp red pepper flakes (less if you aren’t a fan of spicy)
1 tbsp Pom juice
1/2 cup malbec wine
2 tbsp tomato paste
10 large shrimp, peeled and deveined
salt/pepper to taste

1. Bring a pot of heavily salted water to a boil for spaghetti.

2. Heat oil in a large saute pan over medium-high heat. Add the onions and celery. Salt and cook until translucent.  

3. Add the rest of the ingredients up to the shrimp and bring to a boil. Reduce heat to low and simmer for 4-6 minutes until the sauce thickens slightly.

4. While this is simmering, start the pasta.

5. Add the shrimp and cover, cooking for 6-8 minutes or until the shrimp turns pink. Salt and pepper the sauce to taste.

6. Transfer the pasta - which should at this point be just al dente - into the sauce and toss.

7. Serve immediately.

Taking the cake

A couple of months ago Marx Foods sent out an email saying they were giving away free samples of spices for people to use and then blog about. I jumped on the opportunity and two days later I had a package of spices delivered to my door step. In the box were samples of:

1. Tahitian vanilla beans
2. Lavender buds
3. Fennel pollen
4. Dried hibiscus flowers
5. Tellicherry peppercorns
6. Grains of paradise

This post features the vanilla bean but there will be future posts (Jason’s soon to be posted shrimp dish) about the spices he generously gave to us. Thanks Justin!

To be honest, I’ve used Tahitian vanilla beans in my cooking before. I was lucky enough to be able to pick some up on our honeymoon in Tahiti two years ago. I loved using them because they seemed to make ordinary desserts extra special. Unfortunately, I ran out before I had the chance to use them in all the applications that I had planned. More specifically, I didn’t get to try my hand at homemade vanilla extract, even though I told Jason I would so many times that he was sick of hearing it. You can imagine my anticipation in using the one I got from Marx Foods.

I got my chance last Sunday when we went over to L and C’s apartment in Long Island City for a birthday brunch held in L’s honor. When C sent me the menu for the shindig one thing was glaringly missing: a cake. What’s a birthday celebration without a dessert!? No, fruit salad does not count.

I asked C if I could bring a dessert as my present and before he could modestly decline, I started doing research into what L would like that incorporated the vanilla bean. I was going to do a strawberry trifle with a vanilla scented custard until C burst my bubble and told me L couldn’t eat whipped cream. How she finds the will to live is beyond me.

I finally decided on a cheesecake recipe that recently made the food blog rounds after it was the Daring Bakers challenge for April. I’ve made plenty of cheesecakes in my day but I always come away less than satisfied and wind up hunting for a different recipe the next time I make one.

Well that stops here and now.* This recipe turned out a fantastic cheesecake that managed to be fluffy and light yet rich and flavorful at the same time. It was a wonderful cross between an Italian style and New York style cheesecake. It was also incredibly smooth thanks to the water bath it baked in. The best part of this recipe is that it is vanilla (pun intended!) and lends itself to “customizing” very well.

In this instance, I stuck with the original recipe but topped the finished cake with a chocolate ganache and fresh strawberries. I already have tons of ideas on how I can change the crust and also incorporate fruits that will be coming out at the farmer’s market soon.

Vanilla Bean Cheesecake
adapted from Abbey’s Infamous Cheesecake

Crust

• 2 cups / 180 grams graham crackers or the crumbs
• 1 stick / 4 oz butter, melted
• 2 tbsp / 24 g sugar
• 1 tsp vanilla extract

Cheesecake Filling

• 24 oz cream cheese, at room temperature (very important to create a smooth mixture)
• 1 cup / 120 g sugar
• 3 large eggs
• 1 cup / 8 oz heavy cream (I figured it’d be okay for L since it would be heated through thoroughly in the baking process)
• 1 tbsp lemon juice
• innards of 1 vanilla bean (could substitute 1 tbsp vanilla extract)
• 1 tbsp liqueur that suits your cheesecake, optional (I omitted this)

Chocolate ganache

• 5 oz bittersweet chocolate, chopped
• 1/4 cup heavy cream

Strawberry Topping

• 8-10 strawberries, hulled and thiny sliced

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees and bring a large pot of water to a boil for the water bath.

2. If starting with whole graham crackers, place in a food processor and grind to get crumbs. Add in melted butter and sugar and pulse to combine until it looks like wet sand. If you’re starting out with crumbs, you can just manually mix it all together.

3. Press the crust into the bottom and/or up the sides of your pan, depending on your preference. I use the bottom of a measuring cup for this to get the crust really dense and solid. I also wrap the bottom of my springform pan with foil to prevent water from leaking in while it bakes in the water bath. Set crust aside. Next time, I will blind bake the crust for 10 minutes in the oven to see if that creates a crunchier crust.

4. Combine softened cream cheese and sugar in the bowl of a stand-mixer (or a large bowl if using hand-mixer) and cream together until very smooth. Add one egg at time, being sure that each egg is fully incorporated before adding the next one. It’s also a good idea to scrape down the bowl between eggs. Add heavy cream, vanilla (innards or extract), lemon juice, and alcohol. Blend until smooth and creamy.

5. Pour batter into the prepared crust and tap the entire pan on the counter to bring the air bubbles to the surface. Place the pan into a large pan and pour boiling water into the larger pan until quarter way up the side of the cheesecake pan.

6. Bake for 45-55 minutes. At the point of shutting the oven off, the cheesecake should still look VERY jiggly in the middle but held together at the edges. Do not bake it until it’s completely firm. Close the oven door, turn the heat off, and let it rest in the oven for an hour as the oven cools. By doing this the cake won’t cool too quickly, which is what causes cracks.

7. After one hour, remove the cake from the oven and take it out of the water bath. Let it cool on the counter for one hour.

8. While the cake is cooling, get started on the ganache topping. A lot of recipes for ganache say to heat the cream and pour it over the chopped chocolate. For frosting/spreading purposes, I like to do it the other way around and melt the chocolate over a double boiler. Then I pour room temperature cream over the melted chocolate while whisking. I suppose this opens up the possibility of having the chocolate seize but since I use room temperature cream and not cold, I’ve never had that problem. I find that by using this method, the ganache gets thicker much quicker and I can use it right away.

9. Spread the ganache over the top of the cooled cake with an offset spatula being sure not to let the chocolate pool over the sides.

10. Decorate with sliced strawberries.

* I don’t know who you are Abbey, but a special thanks to you!

Smoked Honey Chipotle Ribs

For my birthday last year my parents bought me Emeril’s stove top smoker but it just gathered dust above my washer/dryer stack. It was a combination of laziness (not wanting to learn something new) and trepidation (not sure if stove top smoking was a pain in the pork butt) that kept me away from it originally. Once I got past those barriers and used it for the first time, though, I was in love. For the past few months we’ve probably smoked about 10 racks of ribs, portioned for two.

The smoky flavor imparted on the ribs is amazing and the dry rub permeates into the meat. We had made ribs in the ovens (on a roasting rack) numerous times but we never got the smoky flavor - obviously - and the dry rub was more of a dry crust than a deep flavor, if that makes sense. It wasn’t bad but it definitely wasn’t the effect we were trying to create.

Also, because we are using the smoker, the ribs come out tender and moist that peel off the bone, but not so soft that the ribs are more braised/stewed than smoked. I never thought it would be this way, but the stove top smoker has now elevated to “kitchen essential” status and until our doctor tells us we’ve consumed an unsafe and inhumane yearly quantity of ribs, I don’t see an end to rib smoking in sight.

Process-wise, smoking ribs is very simple. You get the wood chips smoking on the stovetop, throw the seasoned meat on the rack, close it up, toss the entire contraption in the oven for a while, baste it, then broil it. The end.

With that said, I’ve probably done a different style of rib each time (from spicy to sweet) because I don’t really write down the rubs or the bastes. I decided to write this one down in hopes it would be good enough to share with you. Thankfully, that was the case.

The directions on how to work the slow cooker is specific to the smoker we have. Please consult the directions of your own smoker to ensure proper usage. Side note: I just noticed that usage looks like sausage. I’m going to use that word more often.

Smoked Pork Ribs

Dry Rub - Expressed in “parts” instead of actual measurements so you can scale this for as much or as little as you want**

• 2 parts chili powder (homemade or store bought)
• 2 parts cumin
• 1 part smoked paprika
• 1 part coriander seeds, cracked
• 1 part dry mustard
• salt & pepper

Baste - Usually I make a BBQ sauce but I was feeling lazy so this was the alternative. It’s a modified Bobby Flay recipe.

• ¾ cup honey (I actually did ½ cup honey and ¼ cup pomegranate molasses that Jacquie made)
• 1 chipotle from chipotle in adobo sauce
• 1-2 tbsp of the adobo sauce depending on how spicy you like it
• 1-2 tbsp mustard (I used Dijon, yellow probably would have been good too)

1. Preheat your oven to 375 degrees

2. Mix the dry rub ingredients together and coat both sides of the ribs. This can be done the night before and refrigerated to let the rub marinate longer but we don’t find it’s necessary.

3. Place about ¼ - ½ cup of your favorite wood chips (I used mesquite bought from Sur la Table) in your smoker and cook over a high heat on the stove. Set the rack on the rack (hah!), then immediately put the entire thing over the chips in the smoker. Cover it and it will start to smoke pretty soon. (I usually give it about 10-15 minutes this way so there is a good amount of smoke going.)

 
Then put the whole shebang in the oven. NOTE: DO NOT OPEN THE SMOKER OR YOU WILL LOSE ALL YOUR SMOKE!

4. While you let that smoke in the oven for about 60-90 minutes, toss all of the baste ingredients together in a blender and blend until fairly smooth.

5. After about 75 minutes (it’s really hard to over cook the ribs in the smoker) pull out the ribs and turn the broiler on. Flip the top of the smoker over so it’s a grill pan and lay the ribs on foil placed over the pan. This will mean easier clean up later on. If the top of your smoker does not convert to a grill pan, you can just up the ribs on a regular broiling rack at this point.

6. Baste the ribs with an even coat of sauce and place directly under the flame, maybe 2 inches below the fire. Broil for 3 minutes then remove and baste again. Put it back in for another 3-4 minutes until the sauce is slightly charred and bubbly. We usually leave the oven door ajar while broiling so we can easily keep an eye on it since the sauce is mainly sugar-based and can burn easily.

7. Remove, let rest for a few minutes, carve next to each bone and enjoy.

Cheese Dip

I can’t take credit for this recipe, though I wish I could. Two of the coolest people we know, T&D, introduced us to this one Still, it is one of the best go-to dips for a party (especially one that involves football and beer).

Cheese Dip
Mandatory:
1 lb of hamburger
1 lb of sausage
2 lbs of velveeta cheese
1 can cream of mushroom soup
15.5 ozs of hot salsa
Salt & pepper to taste

What I like to add in:
1 diced onion
1 diced green pepper
1 diced red pepper
1 diced yellow pepper
1 diced head of garlic

Very Simple — all you have to do is sautee all the diced veggies until they are soft, seasoning with salt and pepper. Then add in the hamburger and sausage and cook until brown. Finally add the cream of mushroom soup, salsa and velveeta. Let it simmer until the cheese melts and everything combines.

Sure you could gormet this up, but why? This is friggin delicious. Maybe I’ll share their buffalo dip recipe after I make it for the next party…

Our Tomato Sauce

This is a very quick and delicious sauce that we use as the base for a variety of dishes (chicken, shrimp, meat sauce, over pasta, homemade pizzas/calzones, etc). 98% of the time we have all these ingredients on hand in our pantry so it’s a great weeknight go-to. Without further ado…

The JLH Tomato Sauce

1 28-ounce can of whole San Marzano tomatoes, with sauce
1/2 onion, diced (red or white, whatever you have on hand; even a few shallots would suffice)
4-6 garlic cloves, diced
2 large carrots, shredded and then chopped (this is Jason’s method for getting the carrots to almost melt into the sauce)
Zest from 1 lemon
Red pepper chili flakes to taste, about 2 tsps for extra spicy
Olive oil, to coat bottom of pan
Salt and pepper

Warm olive oil in a dutch oven or a deep pot over medium heat. Add in chopped onions, salt, and saute until translucent, about 2-3 minutes. Add garlic and red pepper flakes and cook for 2 minutes to soften and infuse the olive oil. Be careful not to burn the garlic! There’s no going back after garlic burns, the entire dish has to be started over.

Add the carrots and then salt all the veggies again to help everything sweat. Add the entire can of tomatoes with sauce. Then use a potato masher to crush the tomatoes. You can skip this step though if you don’t mind waiting for the tomatoes to soften on their own.

Let the sauce simmer, partially covered, anywhere from 10-40 minutes to the consistency you prefer. Add the lemon zest at the end and then salt and pepper to taste.

**Notes**
(1) If you have fresh basil, cut some over the dish before you serve. Heavenly.
(2) If you need it a bit sweeter you can add granulated sugar a tsp at a time but the carrots should really be the only sweetener needed.
(3) If you want it thicker, add tomato paste a tablespoon at a time.
(4) If you want it smoother, use a stick blender.
(5) If you want it thinner, add some water.

Burgers au Natural

Disclaimer: I want to apologize for the yellowness of the pics. I was making burgers with one hand and snapping photos with the other, trying desperately to avoid cross contamination.

I consider myself to be purist when it comes to burgers. If you must have something other than quality ground meat between two slices of a potato roll, I’ll agree that fresh vegetable toppings and condiments are good eats too. Maybe even cheese, but that’s it. You may be thinking “what else could there be?” but trust me, there’s some crazy stuff out there (foie gras topping anyone?). I don’t agree with adding in chopped garlic or onion or Worcestershire sauce or other stuff into the patty itself either.

For the record, the pics at the end show what my burger looks like 90% of the time.

Despite being a purist with the patty, I still love to play with the combinations of toppings and condiments. Sure there is the lettuce/tomato/ketchup/mustard/onion classic, and who can resist a slice of bacon on there? I also enjoy a burger with pepperjack cheese, guacamole, salsa and jalapenos. Or how about a burger with cheddar cheese, barbecue sauce, and coleslaw? I could go on and on…

One thing that can’t be compromised is the quality of meat. Personally I prefer about a 80% sirloin to 20% brisket mix (of course that isn’t exact, 70/30 is fine too, but I wouldn’t go much more than that). The brisket toughens up the patty a bit and adds a the beefy flavor, whereas the sirloin keeps the patty soft and moist with great texture.

I’m no butcher, but from what I gather there are different cuts of sirloin (as evidenced above). Since I can never find just “sirloin” I usually look for top sirloin or a combo of top sirloin and tenderloin (a combo which I think, on the bone, make up sirloin. No promises there).

As for my burger recipe, it’s very simple. The 80/20 mix above of above cut off the bone…

(I would recommend saving the bones to be roasted later and then boiled for a beef stock)

And for the record, marbling is essential for a good burger. You don’t want huge chunks of fat, you want thin strips all the way throughout. You can see that in this cut there are good sections (towards the top) and not-so-good areas that are too fatty. Hey, it’s the best I could find.

Anyway, the next step is to just cut it into chunks…

and then push them through the grinder to make ground meat…

then season with salt and pepper and that’s it. All you have to do is make them into balls and then patties.

Once grilled to a perfect internal temp of 140 degrees Fahrenheit, this is what you get:

Yum

Blueberry Lemonade

Due to an inordinate amount of traveling we’ve done, Jason and I haven’t made it to the farmer’s market since the beginning of June. You can imagine our delight when we went today and found a wide variety of the summer’s bounty. We picked up a smorgasbord of fresh fruit: tree-ripened peaches, an assortment of plums, apples, heirloom tomatoes, cherries, and the star of this post, blueberries.

After a great bánh mì brunch with L & C, a craving for some fresh lemonade kicked in and after thinking about it the whole way home, I thought it would be that much better with the addition of some blueberry. Jason and I came up with this when we got home and I can sum up the blueberry lemonade in one hyphenated word: kick-ass.

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Blueberry Lemonade
makes roughly 6-8 highball glasses worth

1½ cups fresh squeezed lemon juice (about 8-10 lemons)
3 cups water, more to taste
2 cups of ice
1 cup of hot blueberry syrup (**recipe below)
lemon slices or fresh blueberries, for garnish
ice to fill glasses

Combine first four ingredients in a large pitcher. Taste the lemonade and if it’s too sour, add ½ cup of water at a time to taste. Can be made ahead and stored in the refrigerator overnight.

To serve, fill 6 highball glasses with ice and pour in lemonade. Serve immediately with lemon slices and/or fresh blueberries as garnish.

** Blueberry Syrup

1 cup water
1 cup blueberries
¼ cup honey
¾ cup granulated sugar

Bring the water to a boil in a large saucepan. While you’re waiting for the water to boil, mash the blueberries to help them along once in the water. Add the sugar, honey, and blueberries to the saucepan. Let simmer over low heat (gentle boil) for about 20 minutes but be careful not to let it boil over!

Strain the syrup to get rid of the blueberry pulp.

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Here are some tips we came up with in our journey from turning lemons into lemonade:

• Juice the lemons while the syrup is simmering so you’re not just wasting time waiting on the syrup.
• Before cutting the lemons to juice, press down on them on a countertop firmly and roll back and forth underneath your palm. This makes juicing them much easier, especially when you’re doing so many.
• If you’re patient enough to let the syrup cool, not that we were of course, change the recipe to 4 cups of water and omit the 2 cups of ice. You can even make the syrup a few days ahead of time and store it in the refrigerator.
• You can double the amount of blueberry syrup and then reduce the leftovers for another 30-45 minutes to make a thicker blueberry syrup, which would be great over pancakes, waffles, ice cream, or even stirred into future cups of lemonade or iced tea. Just remember that you’re doubling the amount you make but NOT doubling the amount you add to the lemonade!

Now go ahead and refresh yourself!

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