How to Eat (78 page)

You can give your children these alone, or with roast chicken or poussin, but we often eat them with fried or poached eggs and some thickly buttered white bread, with fruit after.

Perhaps here is the place to note that, as far as children are concerned, you can never have too many seedless white grapes. Fresh pear, ripe, honeyed, juicy, peeled, and cut into chunks, is the everyday favorite in my household; mangoes, similarly dealt with, but with the stone to gnaw on after, are a special treat, with the status of ice cream.

FRITTATA

ZUCCHINI FRITTATA

PEAS, POTATOES, SMOKED SALMON

A frittata is the Italian version of a Spanish omelette, a fat disc of just-cooked egg, with additions, though not too many of them. I use a blini pan (see
page 461
), which makes a one-egg frittata that’s perfect for one child (or indeed one adult). To make a zucchini frittata, heat the broiler before you start. On the stove, melt a tiny knob of butter in the blini pan, sauté ½ small zucchini cut into small dice for 1 minute or so, then pour in an egg beaten with 1 scant tablespoon grated Parmesan and a grinding of pepper. Cook for a few minutes until the bottom is set and then place under the broiler till cooked. Turn out onto a plate. Peas are also a regular filling, as are chopped leftover cooked potatoes. Any tiny, otherwise unusable, leftover piece of smoked salmon can be usefully dispatched here.

COD AND PEAS

TROUT

You don’t need, obviously, to do this as an amalgam; you can simply broil, roast, or fry the cod and serve peas alongside. This recipe, though, requires nothing more complicated than standing shaking a frying pan for a few minutes. Put some butter and a drop of oil in a pan and fry in it 2 peeled cloves of garlic until they’re golden brown. Then chuck them away; you want just a suggestive garlic whiff. Then add some frozen peas, young ones if possible, and if you’ve had time to thaw them earlier, so much the quicker. Turn the peas in the garlicky butter, add 1 tablespoon or so of vermouth or white wine (or water with a squeeze of lemon juice in it if you prefer; any alcohol will, however, burn off), and when they’re soft, taste for seasoning, then add some cod fillet cut into bite-sized pieces. You can dredge the cod in a little seasoned cornmeal first if you prefer, but just as often I leave it as it is. Turn in the pan with the peas and after 2 minutes it should be cooked through. This makes a good sauce—more of a topping, really—for pasta, too. You can use trout in place of cod, wonderful and pink against the vivid Bemelmans green of the peas. This is a good way of trying out various species of fish to see how they go down. Be wary of bones. Safer to stick with fillets, and still look closely to see no bones linger.

CHICKEN STRIPS

YOGURT AND HONEY

This is easy. Get a skinned, boned chicken breast and cut it into strips. Then marinate it in yogurt made liquid with milk (or you could use buttermilk) and 1 tablespoon honey or brown sugar stirred in; 1 teaspoon soy can be added, too, if you want. An hour’s steeping will do, but you can prepare the marinade at breakfast-time for lunch or even the night before if it helps.

LEMON

PEANUT BUTTER

Take the chicken out of the marinade and wipe dry with a paper towel. Fry quickly in olive oil, or butter with a drop of oil, in a hot frying pan. Carrot batons, broccoli, or green beans—whatever you want, but it should have crunch—go well with the chicken. It’s worth bothering with the marinade, as children seem to find a lot of meat too fibrous and difficult to swallow if it hasn’t been tenderized. And you can vary the marinade as you wish, adding or substituting oil, lemon juice, peanut butter, maple syrup, and so on (see the drumsticks recipe on
page 441
, too). It’s useful to keep yogurt or buttermilk, as both make even the driest meats sweetly tender (see
page 315
).

RATHER MORE ORGANIZED COOKING FOR YOUNG CHILDREN

If the above recipe suggestions delineate the upper limits of the amount of cooking you feel comfortable doing for your children, then stop here. Of course, I see that faffing about making pastry for children who are just as happy eating burgers might seem just one effort too far. But to that I’d say three things. First, children really do seem to like food such as pies. Second, part of learning about food is being around its preparation, and often helping with it (and more on that later). And, third, perhaps most importantly, everything that follows is real food, the sort of food you will want to eat with your children, and to invite other adults to eat, too.

Of course, children can eat from any of the other recipes throughout the book, but these lay the foundations and delineate the best—neither fussy nor bland—sort of family food.

MACARONI AND CHEESE

You may wonder why I include, indeed start off with, a totally un-Italian pasta recipe, now that we are wholly won over to the authentic Mediterranean way of doing things. I suppose it is nostalgia that makes me feel the need to preserve this wholly old-fashioned nursery staple; I worry sometimes that food like this will disappear. And it does have a certain period authenticity—if no other sort.

If you’re to make it properly, observe the proprieties. Use macaroni—those little elbow shapes—rather than penne, and don’t substitute any cheese for Cheddar. (If I’ve only got some corner-store horror of fake tasteless Cheddar, I add a pinch of mustard powder or cayenne.) What we are not trying to create here is some baked pasta with taleggio, however delicious it may be. A bit of grated Parmesan, mixed in with the bread crumbs to be sprinkled on top before going under the broiler, could, however, be accommodated.

2 ounces elbow macaroni

1 tablespoon unsalted butter

1 tablespoon Italian 00 or all-purpose flour

pinch English mustard powder or cayenne pepper (optional)

1 cup milk

2 ounces Cheddar, grated

salt and freshly milled black pepper

1–2 tablespoons bread crumbs

As the macaroni will take about 15 minutes to cook, first put on a saucepan of water to boil. Then turn on the broiler to let it get good and hot for the browning later. Butter a gratin dish or couple of little (½-cup capacity) casseroles. When the water boils, salt it and throw in the macaroni.

Meanwhile, put the butter in a saucepan on medium heat and, when it’s melted, stir in the flour and cook, stirring, for a few minutes. Add the mustard powder or cayenne, if you like. Off the heat, pour in the milk, beating constantly. Usually, I warm the milk in the microwave in a plastic measuring cup, but you can use cold milk. Cook the sauce for about 5 minutes, stirring all the while; then, just before the macaroni’s due to come out of the boiling water, take the sauce off the heat and stir in the cheese—keeping 1 tablespoon or so back—and keep stirring. Drain the macaroni thoroughly. Add to the cheese sauce. Taste and season with the salt and pepper. Pour or spoon into the dish or dishes, then sprinkle with 1 tablespoon bread crumbs per dish and the remaining cheese. Brown under the broiler, but remember to let it stand and cool for a bit before giving it to the children, especially if you’ve made them their own little individual ones. You can fill and freeze the pots and then just sprinkle them with cheese and breadcrumbs before reheating in a moderate oven.

HAM OR ALFREDO SAUCE

MINCED ONION

You can add chopped ham to this, and I often do; just as often, for a quick lunch, I cook ordinary short pasta and buy alfredo sauce (stocked in containers in supermarket cold cases) to which I add some chopped ham and perhaps a bit of grated Parmesan. Chopped cooked bacon is delicious in regular macaroni and cheese. But if you are frying a little bacon first, then add 1 tablespoon or so minced onion, too, and stir in both together, and be sure, as you decant, to scrape out the pan well.

COD

PEAS

Sometimes I change direction, but not shape, and leave out the cheese, but add cooked, flaked cod or other white fish instead. And I might toss in some peas, too.

CAULIFLOWER CHEESE

Naturally, cheese sauce can be used to cover a cooked head of small cauliflower for that British nursery classic, cauliflower cheese. I have found, though, that the only way my children will eat cauliflower is coated in egg and bread crumbs when cooked and cooled, and fried, preferably with garlic.

COTTAGE PIE AND SHEPHERD’S PIE

Whenever British people over a certain age talk about shepherd’s pie, which is made with lamb—as opposed to cottage pie, which uses beef—they point out reprovingly that it should contain meat that is already cooked. Of course, they’re right. It’s just that we don’t go in for large roasts and hunks of meat so much now, so we don’t tend to have the leftovers to mince. But do you know what? It’s better with fresh, raw, ground meat. Still, the leftover-meat version is useful and good enough. And the filling by itself makes a wonderful sauce for pasta.

WITH COOKED MEAT

I do sometimes mince leftover lamb or beef if the bits that linger in the fridge are too well cooked to be eaten pleasurably cold, and, as I’ve said, I use the filling often as a pasta sauce. (The recipe below makes enough sauce for about 8 ounces uncooked pasta; figure 1–2 ounces per child portion.) Relatively small amounts of leftovers make enough pie filling for a few children.

First off, let me say none of the quantities is sensitive; use what you have. Remember to give the meat a good strong basis of flavor (with onions or shallots and garlic, plus carrot for sweetness, and herbs such as finely chopped rosemary, marjoram, or thyme), and to cook it in such a way—on a low heat and with liquid—that it mellows rather than drying out even more. I throw in some flour before adding liquid; this is to help thicken the sauce, to blend the dryish fibers of meat with the liquid it’s cooking in. A bit of chopped liver would do much the same trick, as would fresh bread crumbs.

Use whichever fat goes best with the meat; I’d use olive oil for lamb, beef dripping for beef; I sometimes make the dish with leftover duck, for which I use duck fat (which my children particularly love, though what should this be called—pond pie?). But oil or butter, or a combination of both, is always fine. Bacon fat, if you’ve got it, gives real depth, or you could always just add a slice or two of bacon to the food processor as you chop the baseline seasoning of vegetables.

I often use shallots in place of onions, as I like the softer flavoring of shallots but don’t necessarily want the fiddliness of peeling two or three times over. You can mince the meat by hand or use the shredding disc in a food processor, or grind it, as my mother did.

What follows is not so much a recipe as a suggestion, a reminder not to throw away even small amounts of meat that might be languishing, post–dinner party or –weekend lunch, in the back of your untended fridge.

FOR THE TOPPING

1½ pounds potatoes, peeled and cut into chunks

6 tablespoons (¾ stick) unsweetened butter, plus more, if desired, for topping

¼ cup milk, plus more, if needed

FOR THE FILLING

1 tablespoon fat (see headnote), plus more, if needed

few sprigs parsley, minced

1 large shallot or small onion, minced

1 fat garlic clove

½ celery stalk, peeled and minced

1 small to medium carrot, peeled and minced

about ½ cup minced leftover cooked meat

1 scant tablespoon all-purpose flour or 2 tablespoons fresh bread crumbs

1–1¼ cups canned chopped or ground tomatoes in tomato purée, as needed

1/3 cup milk, plus more, if desired

2 tablespoons heavy cream (optional)

salt and freshly milled black pepper

1 tablespoon unsalted butter, plus more, if desired, for topping

2 tablespoons red lentils (optional and if needed)

To make the topping, put the potatoes into a large saucepan of cold, salted water. Bring to a boil and cook till soft enough to mash easily, 25–45 minutes. Drain and put the potatoes back in the pan over the heat to dry off, about a minute. Put the potatoes through a ricer and then beat in the butter and milk, adding more milk, if necessary; remember, you want a stiff mash to top the meat, not a liquified purée. Set aside.

For the filling, put the fat in a medium heavy-bottomed frying pan and, when it’s hot, add the parsley, shallot, garlic, celery, and carrot. Cook on a gentle heat for a good 10–20 minutes until soft but not browned. Remember to check especially that the carrot is cooked; as the meat is already cooked, it won’t need that long in the pan and you don’t want the carrots to be crunchy.

When the vegetables are ready, add the meat. If the mixture looks as if it needs it, add another tablespoon of whatever fat you’re using before putting the meat in. Stir the meat into the sweet, taste-bolstering vegetables and sprinkle over the flour or bread crumbs, making sure to stir that well in, too. Add the tomatoes, just 1 cup at first, adding more if you think the sauce needs more liquid. Pour in the milk, too, stirring as you do so. Cook on a low heat for about 10 more minutes, or fewer if all the flavors, when you taste, are coming together smoothly. If you want a creamier sauce, add the cream or more milk. When the sauce is off the heat, season to taste with the salt and pepper and stir in the butter.