Texas food and smiles

Ahh smiles. Finally! In the near future, I will commit to not posting endless photos of our son on the blog and revert to a truly food-themed site (and he is only still drinking breast milk).

This past week we tried a menu from the Homesick Texan cookbook that we got for Christmas. Had some good favorites as well with grilled sausage, sesame broccoli, fried catfish and others rounding out the week but here was the Texas meal:

Grilled Flank Steak with Fried Okra, Texas Caviar and Homemade Biscuits
Here is my recapitulation of the details:
The grilled flank steak is my own recipe - 1 jalapeno, some cilantro, 3 limes, cumin and garlic all go into the marinade and letting it rest for >2hrs is key. The spice cooks off but the cumin, garlic and lime flavor brings out the meat really well I think.
Texas Caviar is a new favorite - basically named because of the appearance of the main ingredient, black-eyed peas. Mix a couple cans of them with some tomatoes, cilantro, garlic, green onion and some spices (cumin for one).
The fried okra was good but a lot of effort for just an ok outcome. Basic breading process but with a twist at the end that was brilliant - roll them in crushed Saltines just before adding to oil - gives a nice crunch.
The biscuits were a flop - edible for sure, but not the fluffy, delicious melt in your mouth taste I was going for. I beat them with a rolling pin and flipped and flipped the dough... next time. This is definitely something that I would like to perfect...

Dinners week of sometime in January

I sort of lost track of where we were with meals and postings, but we've had some good ones in the last couple of weeks that are worth posting. Atticus is still growing like a mad man and one of my favorite things to do with him is cook with him strapped in, listening to the recipe unfold both in word and in spatter. Sometimes he gets little pieces of food in his hair but that's a hazard of the job!

Here's a photo of him looking quite quizzical or maybe just confused about what is in front of him... 

 and another of him (this is thankfully a much more common expression) of some sort of mix of curiosity and wonder while also thinking about food...

Yellow tail sushi with miso soup
- we got the yellow tail from Fresh Direct; not cheap at all but the first tuna they've had in a long time that's been well rated in terms of being ocean-friendly. Anyway, the rice I think is key to this along with the spicy sauce. Aside from that, making sushi is just a matter of careful prep making sure you slice everything thin enough to be both pretty and easy to eat. I flash cooked the tuna for 15-30 seconds a side since it smelled just a bit of fish and wasn't quite sashimi quality, but the inside was still raw and wonderful.
For sushi rice: 
Make either with sushi rice or arborio rice (want a short rice that's stickier than jasmine etc) and make about 4 cups for 4 people worth of sushi (or Erin and Alex hungry). Make the rice just like you would normally.
- while the rice is cooking, add 4 teaspoons sugar, 2 teaspoons salt and 3 tablespoons of rice vinegar to a small pan and cook until salt and sugar dissolve but not boiling. Add this mixture to the rice after it is cooked and cooled in a bowl for a bit...
We assembled everything together and in the end had:
Philadelphia rolls 
Spicy Tuna rolls
Tuna Sushi and Sashimi
Vegetable Roll with Carrot, Cucumber and Basil

3 tablespoons unseasoned rice vinegar

4 1/2 teaspoons sugar

1 1/2 teaspoons kosher or coarse sea salt

Read More http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Sushi-Rice-351070#ixzz1jxSX92Tq

3 tablespoons unseasoned rice vinegar

4 1/2 teaspoons sugar

1 1/2 teaspoons kosher or coarse sea salt

Read More http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Sushi-Rice-351070#ixzz1jxSX92Tq

Lemon garlic fish skewers with couscous and green beans with fried sage
I haven't done much with fish kabobs in the past, but I will from now on - I grilled the mixed fish (salmon, blue fish, swordfish and snapper) with peppers and onions on the grill first and then finished in the broiler... oh man that was good (good marinade of garlic, cilantro and lemon before hand too). 

Sausage onion and pepper pizza with red leaf walnut salad
- had a good friend over who had made pizza for us at her house so I had to compete. I won. The crust was not quite as thin as I would have liked, but the pizza stone was hot enough to crisp it perfectly in any case. Ah the sweet taste of pizza and victory at the same time!


Fresh pesto penne
- Erin made a fabulous pesto out of some left-over fresh basil we had: used the original recipe from the Silver Spoon plus a bit of garlic... I could eat it by itself by the forkful! 

balmy January

With all of our holiday visitors returned to their homes, it was time this week to get back into a rhythm of cooking again. Back to some sort of normalcy, although this time with a new person in the household.

It's been an unusually warm winter this year- after the freak snowstorm over Halloween weekend- so the usual comfort foods aren't quite as delicious as usual. I was looking for some changes from the usual, so I used different sources for the recipes this week. The recipes were chosen with an eye toward swift preparation, since William Atticus has been fussy at night, Alex has returned to work, and I am sleep-deprived.

-Hamburgers, using the spicy olive oil mix from Mexico that Lily gave us, with baked sweet potato fries from the Barefoot Contessa's Back to Basics cookbook and a salad. The hamburgers were on challah buns, which are my favorites for absorbing the juices.

-Corn and chipotle soup, with a recipe from the Blue Corn Cafe in Santa Fe.
http://bluecorncafe.com/
Hands down, one of my favorite fall/winter soups, although the spice level was a bit hot this time- I cut the recipe in half but still added 2 full chipotle peppers, which was a little bit too much.

-Grilled salmon (Alex marinaded in butter and fresh lime juice- delicious!) with a grilled fennel salad from the new CIA grilling cookbook that Graham gave us for Xmas. Since we don't have an actual grill, we had to revise the recipe a bit. We baked the fennel after marinading it, then put it on the grill, and then combined it with orange slices, red onions and oil-cured olives. I loved the combination of new flavors and the crunch of the fennel. A surprise hit and definitely one to cook again.

We are nostalgic for our big, empty weekends before WA arrived, ready to fill with whatever plans we wanted to make. But the "little devil" or "little monster" or "little angel" or "little piggy" (we are trying to not pigeonhole him :) is pretty cute most of the time. Wonder what he thinks of our varied menu?

End of the Year

Last big dinner of the year we made was Christmas Eve dinner, menu is below. The real hits in my book were the soup and the tenderloin. The salad was a bit of a flop but the broccolini, potatoes and carrots/parsnips were all solid.

Appetizer:

Lemon Ricotta with Squash and Sage on Crostini

Soup:

Spicy Pumpkin Soup with Pepita Streusel and Cinnamon Marshmallows

Salad:

Arugula with Figs, Ricotta, Prosciutto, and Smoked Marzipan

Sides:

Broccolini with Pecan Brown Butter

Honey-Glazed Roasted Carrots and Parsnips

Mustard-roasted Potatoes

Main:

Roast Beef Tenderloin with Port Sauce

Dessert:

Pecan Pie

Pumpkin Cheesecake

A couple of pics of the little fellow - he is a lucky man with all the love that has been lavished on him now in the first month of his life!

Baby food!

We have a son - William Atticus Foster! Erin labored for a relatively short time though it was not easy in any way. He was born December 1st at 6:15am in our bathroom at 38.5 weeks and 8lbs, 40z!

He is perfect in every way. We are just spending lots of time at home with him these days enjoying every moment, every poop, every full-body yawn, each half-smile and his big, curious eyes.

Atticus is now a week old, so I thought I would write a little about what he's been eating... breast milk! And below is the video I compiled of his first week's adventures:




Breast milk:
This is fascinating stuff. Reading about breast milk ties all sorts of things together from geo-political controversy around Nestle marketing formula aggressively in South America to evolutionary biology in how boys who breastfeed get different milk than girls that breastfeed (who knew!!) to the disparity in groups of people who breastfeed to the immunology and the nutritional aspects of the stuff to the anthropological concept of technology=advancement... I'm going to try and stick to the more nutritional aspects here.

Immunologic benefits: Since the 1930's when the first studies were published, we have known that there seems to be a immunologic benefit to breastfeeding with the largest reduction seen in respiratory and gastrointestinal illness. One of the coolest things I read was that the IgA (a type of immunoglobulin) that is in breast milk is produced by B-cells in the woman's breasts that migrated there from her gut! So basically all of the immunologic memory that the mother has from the exposure that she has had in her gut get passively transferred to the infant providing huge amounts of protection against diarrheal disease which is the second most common cause of infant mortality worldwide (used to be the first)!

IQ benefits: This is one of the more poorly understood aspects of breastfeeding in part because at least in the developed world where most of the data comes from, women who breastfeed also tend to be more educated, wealthier etc - so teasing out the effect of breastfeeding on intelligence is fundamentally a statistical problem of dealing with bias and confounding since no one will every be able to randomize breastfeeding vs not. In any case, at this point, there definitely does seem to be a real association between breastfeeding and IQ of probably about 5-10 points, and it is probably NOT solely the result of higher maternal education, better bonding or attachment etc - it is in the milk!

So then the question is why does breast milk and not just breastfeeding give this advantage? There has been a lot of research into the role of omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids - mainly docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) and arachadonic acid (ARA). These compounds are required for efficient neurotransmission and are involved in neurite outgrowth, dendritic arborization, and neuron regeneration after cell injury - all good things and necessary for brain development. Of course the formula companies have jumped on this and market their products as including these compounds now - what is not yet known is whether this attempt to simulate breast milk will translate into outcomes, so far the results have been mixed.

Last thing about this (I promise): while one my least favorite phrases in medicine is that there is a genetic and environmental component to a disease or condition because I think that is basically a meaningless phrase, there is a cool example of gene-environment interaction in this case. A study published in 2007 showed that the beneficial effect of breastfeeding was only seen in a subset of children who had a particular variation in a gene involved in the metabolism and regulation of DHA and ARA in the brain! In the children without the variation, there was no benefit to breast milk, in the children with the mutation, they did see a benefit that largely accounted for the 5 or so points seen in epidemiologic studies - how cool is that??!!

So here's to Atticus on completing his first week of life, to his beautiful and loving mother, to his having the mutation in FADS2 :), and to his own exploration of food - breast milk and beyond!

Brunch and Stews

So Frankie's is one of many places to get a decent brunch in New York. It's a relatively new place, started in Brooklyn about 10 years ago. We went for a 'last date' out in New York day before the baby comes... Erin's getting pretty tired these days with carrying little Will/Atticus but we're living it up as much as we can before he arrives. We went to the West Village location and had a lovely meal - Erin had an omelette and I had an egg and cheese sandwich both of which were quite good - the sandwich was between pizza-dough as bread which turned out to be not only creative but delicious. We walked down to the Hudson and got some sunshine for a bit afterward...

We then went up to see the windows on 5th avenue which are decorated after Thanksgiving in New York. The air is thick with consumerism and we were in the thick of it - from the plastic pomp of Trump Towers with artificially inflated prices to make you feel that much more special to the fur-draped baronesses strutting down 5th avenue... though on the weekend after Thanksgiving, the fur was harder to spot amidst the maddening crowds of tourists.
My favorite windows were the UNHATE one for United Colors of Benetton (seen below), the Hollister window (shows a live shot of Huntington Beach surf), and one that I forgot the name of just south of Central Park with windows that tell a little story and are in 3D using perspective only. Beef Stew
We had a lovely stew this past week that I am going to write down here or it will be lost forever as it was a concoction of 3 different recipes:
Potatoes - about 6 chopped
Carrots - about 6-7 chopped
Beef chuck - 1 inch pieces (about 3 lbs)
Onion - 1 or 2
Garlic - 4-5 cloves
Red wine - 1/2 bottle
Balsamic vinegar - 1/4 cup or so
Thyme (dried or fresh)
Bay leaf - 2
Beef broth - 3 cups
Water - 3 cups
Tomato paste - 3 tablespoons

Basically, it's just a matter of in what order to add things to the pot... I've never just added everything together but I imagine that would also taste just fine. I added the beef first to brown for a couple of minutes, then took the beef out while I added garlic, onion, then carrot and potato waiting a bit between each so that everything gets a shot at browning... finally get the tomato paste in to the bottom of the pan so it cooks a bit and then add the wine, cook it by itself for a few minutes and then add everything else basically and simmer for 1-2hrs (flour if wanted for texture later). Splendid!!

Erin picked the menu this week as I was in the ER for the weekend... she has a lot of energy and still looks beautiful even though she's 11 months pregnant. Here's a couple of samples:

Roasted chicken + couscous + tomato/bean/fried basil salad
Paprika pork with bell peppers, rice, green beans

Dinners for week of Nov 6th and Harlem signage

I've been considering the environment that we're bringing little Atticus into recently. Harlem is a wonderful place to live in many ways - the people are friendlier than much of New York I think, and there is a lot of character just walking down the street.
On a recent morning walk with Erin, I took these two photos: the first is of a sign on one of the many churches in Harlem - this one has various messages basically denouncing President Obama as some sort of loon or with blood on his hands with some strange connections being made (a prior version connected him with Sadaam Hussein).
The second is of a little restaurant called 'No Swine on My Mind!' - there is an odd collection of non-pork restaurants that serve beef and chicken... it's not Halal food and it's not religious from what I can tell, and it's certainly not all that healthy for you otherwise, but these people really don't like pork! (Another is called 'No Pork on My Fork!')


Anyway, here's what we had to eat!

Spaghetti with meatballs
- simple enough in concept, but the key is in the meatballs... used a recipe off epicurious with a few alterations: basically mix 2 eggs, 1 lb ground beef, salt, pepper, parsley, 1 cup bread crumbs (pre-soaked in 1/3 cup milk) and whatever other spice you want - I used a bit of red pepper flakes and then cook in the tomato sauce for 20 mins - they were spectacular!!

Grilled swordfish with brussels and roasted potatoes
- swordfish grilled after marinating with lime and garlic for a bit, brussels in the usual fashion and good Yukon golds... see photo:
Sausage with kale, eggplant and carrot and couscous
- this ended up being much more of a last-minute throw together type thing that turned out pretty well... cooked the carrots with garlic and overcooked them because that's the way Erin likes them... grilled some eggplant and then threw in the kale at the end just because we had some...

Enchiladas with avocado and tortilla salad
- these enchiladas are wonderful; we've made them a few times and every time they are a hit. This time we went with just a veggie filling:
1. sauteed onion, squash, carrot and green chiles along with some cilantro and corn at the end
2. mix the filling with about 1/2-1 cup of sauce
3. sauce made with 4 tbsps butter in pan then add 3 tbsps chili powder, 2 tbsps flour, 1-2 tbsps cumin and mix for about 1 minute... then slowly add 2 and 1/2 cups of milk, bring to simmer and then add 1.5 cups of grated cheese until well mixed...
4. assemble with flour or corn tortillas layering first some sauce on the bottom of the pan and then the rest over the tortillas with some cheese and corn on top...

The avocado salad with boston lettuce and tortilla strips was quite good mainly due to the dressing:
- 1/4 cup lime juice mixed with honey, olive oil, salt, pepper and a little cayenne