How to Eat (77 page)

WITH TOMATO

I don’t like tomato purée—I find it invasively metallic; everything to which it’s added tastes instantly, however fresh, however lovingly homemade, as if it had come out of the tinniest of tins. This, Anna del Conte tells me reprovingly, is because I don’t cook the purée long enough; it needs slow, insistent simmering before that front-of-tongue dried-blood taste subsides and the flavor builds to fill the whole mouth with sweet and actual tomatoishness. This makes sense, and I take the point and will act on it from now on, with sauces and stews—but with this kind of cooking for children, which isn’t really meant to be cooking, I am not proposing to tend any pan for devoted hours. You have a choice: you can use canned purée made both more gentle and more liquid by the addition of a little warm milk, or a good-quality tomato sauce, strained or not as you wish. And do not hesitate—consider your constituency here—to add a good squeeze of tomato ketchup. Add grated cheese or mascarpone if you want to provide more fuel or some protein.

WITH PEANUT BUTTER

Peanut butter should be smooth, of course. Yes, I know peanut butter and potato mixed sounds disgusting and, to be frank, even I, the greediest person alive, sitting vulture-like and fork in hand, impatient to snatch the food out of my babies’ mouths, manage not to pick when they’re eating this. The point is that children like it (and some grownups do too, I’ve found) and it gets in extra calories and protein at the same time. I have been known—don’t gag—to stir in a little coconut cream dissolved in warm milk and this went down very well. It’s the sweetness, I suppose, and the fact that we all do seem to have an innate, inbuilt capacity to appreciate fat. Once I’ve gone this far, though, there’s nothing to stop me throwing in a few corn kernels, too.

WITH TAHINI

As long as you don’t use too much, children seem to love pungent, soft-clay tahini, diluted with a little milk or olive oil and stirred into the potato.

WITH GARLIC

Children love garlic. Bake the potato as advised on
page 418
(I like potatoes really cooked: one grain of unyielding crystalline flesh and they’re ruined for me) and, 10 minutes or so in, take a whole head of garlic, lop off the top so the cloves are revealed in cross section, place on a square of foil, pour over a little oil, and wrap up the garlic so that you have a baggy but tightly crimped parcel. Cook for about 50 minutes, then take out and let stand in its foil. When you mash the potato, unwrap the garlic package and squeeze in the sweet, pulpy cloves. Whip with a fork to incorporate smoothly and add butter, milk, or cream to make the sort of purée you want. Heaven.

WITH FISH

You can use tuna or salmon; with the salmon, make sure you’ve removed any lingering bones or slimy strips of oil-immersed skin. Add anything else you think would enhance—tomato sauce, mayonnaise, corn. And, with this, you’re really halfway to fishcakes (see
page 442
).

OTHER EASILY-THROWN-TOGETHER MEALS

If you hate the very idea of cooking, no one’s stopping you from opening packages or buying ready-prepared meals. And if you’re worried about salt and sugar and other additives, you’ll probably be able to find more virtuous though not necessarily more palatable precooked meals at health stores. You don’t want to foist your hysteria at the stove onto your offspring. Nor do you, on the other hand, want to make a cult out of cooking everything yourself, so that your children either become afraid of any alien meal or develop a terrible longing for microwaved junk food. We all know about the thrill of the illicit. Besides, it’s worth keeping a stash of ready-made meals on the grounds alone that it will make your life easier. But low-level cooking needn’t feel too demanding. The following suggestions occupy a culinary territory somewhere between the ideas above and the full-blown recipes below.

RICE

Rice is, in my household, just as popular as pasta and couscous. It’s popular with me, too, as I’ve got an electric rice cooker and it is therefore one of my hands-free options. Naturally I am not presuming your possession of such a machine, but basmati rice, cooked in a pot on the stove, is relatively low-effort. Providing you’re giving the children a moderately balanced diet as it is, you don’t need to add much to rice, though by all means throw in chopped meat or something that makes you feel this is more of a traditionally complete meal, if you want. I have entirely corrupted my children by letting them see how I eat my rice, which is doused in soy, so this is now how they require theirs. There’s a tradeoff: I happen to eat my soy-browned rice with steamed or boiled broccoli and so this is, without fuss, introduced as part of the deal.

ONE-EGG OMELET

FRIED RICE

SHRIMP

My children enjoy rice with diced carrot, peas, and corn, in any combination that can be bought in bags from any supermarket, even if the mixture makes me shiver. If you want, you can make a one-egg omelet in a nonstick pan and then cut it into shreds and stir this into the rice. And while we’re edging toward it, I should mention that any leftover plain cooked rice languishing in the fridge can be turned into fried rice, which always goes down well. Put some vegetable oil in a relatively deep-sided frying pan or a wok and, when it’s hot (with a wok you should heat the pan before pouring in the oil), stir in 2 peeled, sliced, or chopped garlic cloves and 1 finely sliced scallion, if your children’s digestion will take them, and stir-fry for a minute or so. Add some butter to the pan. Now cook some very, very, finely chopped carrot. Then add some sliced button mushrooms and cook—pushing and prodding with your wooden spoon or spatula—for about 5 minutes. Add cold cooked rice and push around the pan for a bit longer. Cook a one-egg omelet in a nonstick pan separately, cut it into shreds, and then stir it into the rice. Turn into bowls. My children like coriander, so I sometimes add that. And throwing in some cooked peeled shrimp is, as far as my children are concerned, always a good move. In fact, just plain rice and shrimp is a good fallback Saturday lunch.

RICE AND TOMATO SOUP

I also make an unfussy rice and tomato soup (for myself, too, sometimes, especially when I’m trying to balance out my characteristic gluttony) by diluting a good, bought tomato sauce with water, adding a handful or so of basmati rice, and cooking until the rice is tender, 8–10 minutes. With children it makes more sense to leave the soup fairly solid, but you can add water from a boiled kettle toward the end of the cooking time if you want a thinner soup rather than liquid tomato-rice stew. Grate Parmesan on top and eat—with bibs.

GYPSY TOAST

This is the same thing as French toast. Bread, preferably stale, is soaked in egg beaten up with a bit of milk and then fried in butter. Even though I don’t generally go in for making smiley faces and funny shapes out of food, as we’re all supposed to do to lure a child to eat, I do cut out shapes of bread before soaking them (I normally use a star-shaped biscuit cutter for this, and I’ve got some otherwise unforgivably dinky aspic cutters, mini-hearts, diamonds, spades, and so forth, with which I stamp out shapes from bought packages of thinly sliced Gruyère). The golden stars do look beautiful—until they’re bloodied by the required shake of tomato ketchup. My children are not particularly keen on ketchup (as I say, they’re still preschool), but here they consider it obligatory. I make gypsy toast for a late weekend breakfast or for supper, after bath and just before bedtime, to keep them sleeping longer in the morning, so that the occasional late breakfast is a possibility.

Mimi Sheraton, in her wonderful memoir-cum-cookbook,
From My Mother’s Kitchen,
says that the best French toast is made from slightly stale challah. She’s right, but away from New York you might have to substitute brioche. But whatever you have at hand is just fine. Egg-soaked, butter-fried bread is marvelous with either maple syrup (and bacon, too, both of which I rather love) or sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon. Cinnamon toast—that’s to say, ordinary toast—made with sliced white bread and spread with a paste made by beating unsalted butter with sugar and cinnamon—is tear-prickingly comforting.

POUSSIN

A poussin is about the right size for two children with leftovers or three children without, and has the advantage of not needing any effort to cook. Just smear with butter or garlic-infused oil and sprinkle with salt or soy (or neither) before putting in a 375°F oven for about 45 minutes. Or throw in whole shallots and cloves of garlic, as on
page 8
.

LAMB CHOPS

Chops seem such old-fashioned food now, but they cook quickly and can be eaten in fingers. If you’ve got time and aren’t sure how tender the lamb is, marinate it for an hour or more in the juice of 1 orange and 1 tablespoon olive oil with 1 teaspoon red currant jelly. Preheat the broiler, line a baking pan with foil, and cook the chops for a few minutes each side. I don’t specify how many minutes because it depends on how well done you want it. In my view, it’s never too soon to get a child used to pink lamb and blue beef. Green beans, also eaten with fingers, are good alongside.

GARLIC MUSHROOMS

Simply cook chopped garlic in oil or butter or a mixture and add finely sliced mushrooms. Or use a package of ready-sliced mixed mushrooms. If I’m in a hurry or have run out of garlic, I just add some of my store-bought garlic-infused oil to butter and cook the sliced mushrooms in it. If I’m rich in dried porcini, I soak and finely chop them and then throw them in, reserving the strained liquid. Even if I’m cooking for children, I like to add a slug of white wine, vermouth, or sherry, too. You can stop there, so that the mushrooms have a sparse, syrupy-buttery juice clinging to them. Serve with some buttered, toasted plastic bread or buttered, toasted English muffin to the side, but you could pile the mushrooms on top of either, or pour the mixture on pasta, plain rice, or mashed potatoes. Alternatively, after adding the whoosh of alcohol, let it bubble away till the alcohol’s cooked off and the liquid reduced, and then stir in a good few tablespoons of crème fraîche or heavy cream and let that bubble away until the mushrooms are submerged in a thick, buff-colored creamy sauce.

QUAILS’ EGGS AND NEW POTATOES

It’s not surprising that children like miniature food. Quails’ eggs are fiddly to peel, but my children fall upon them as if they were sweets. I buy a dozen for the two of them but am going to have to think of increasing rations to keep up with demand. I like to balance the effects certain foods have on the digestive system, as confessed earlier, so serving boiled or steamed new potatoes (little waxy-fleshed pebbles) alongside to form a routine culinary partnership makes me feel better about the egg-bolting.

Put the eggs in a small saucepan, cover with cold water, bring to the boil, and cook for 4 minutes. Immerse in cold water and leave to cool for 1 minute, then peel. The eggs are slightly easier to peel if you roll them, rather heavy-handedly so that the shell cracks, against the sink’s draining board.

If I’ve got time (it does take longer than boiling) I steam the potatoes; it makes peeling them easier and, even if the skin’s meant to be healthy, my children won’t eat it; they either hand the unpeeled potato imperiously to me to peel for them or just spit out the offending skin. I sometimes cook some carrot sticks to go with them, a few straight lines to add to the arrangement and because I feel the presence of extra vegetables is a good thing. I have never told my children they’re not supposed to like vegetables and they haven’t yet worked it out for themselves, so the introduction of carrots is well received.

CORN ON THE COB

And while we’re on the subject, even children who won’t countenance vegetables seem to like corn on the cob with melted butter. You can buy mini-sized ones (that’s to say, normal ones halved) in bags, frozen, which are useful to have around. They cook from frozen.

GARLIC-FRIED POTATOES

I can see that potatoes might not constitute a meal in themselves, but the fat in which they are fried adds enough calories to overrule any hesitation on this score. Chop up garlic and give it a few minutes, stirring, in the hot fat before adding and sautéeing some sliced, cooked, and cooled potatoes. Try cooking them in lard; they taste wonderful and crisp up gloriously. Alternatively, leave out the garlic and just sauté the potatoes in garlic-infused oil. I used to give the children either eggs or a slice of ham with these potatoes, but as it was the potatoes they liked, I gave up on an accompaniment, except for some crunchy green vegetables.

GARLIC ROAST POTATOES

If your children are old enough to understand about skins and will suck the sweet roast garlic flesh from the unpeeled cloves and leave the skins on the side of the plate, I wouldn’t bother to peel them. Unpeeled, the garlic steams inside its skin and grows softer and sweeter; peeled, the taste can be stronger and, if you’re not careful, bitter. But just remember (if peeling) to parboil the garlic. It’s not a big deal, especially as it makes the cloves easy to peel. Preheat the oven to 400°F. If you’re using unpeeled cloves, then just scatter a few cloves (about 6 per child, but then I’m always hovering about for leftovers) in a baking dish. Chop up (don’t bother to peel; when the potatoes are roasted, children don’t seem to mind the skin) some new potatoes into small dice and throw into the pan, too. Pour over some olive oil and mix it all about with your hands to make sure everything’s glistening and covered. Sprinkle with salt if your principles allow and roast for about 45 minutes or until cooked and golden. If you’re going to peel the garlic, put the unpeeled cloves in a saucepan, cover with cold water, bring to the boil, and boil for 5 minutes. Turn into a colander and run the cold tap over it, and them, and then just slip the skins off and proceed as above.