We’ve invited some friends over on Saturday night to celebrate Labor Day with us. We’ve hardly fired up our bonfire this year.

Usually, that’s one of my favorite summer pastimes: we tuck our kids in bed and hope they stay there, while our friends walk down to our home in jeans carrying six packs. Together we drink and laugh, watching the flames flicker and the smoke rise.

Only this year the summer passed with Matt in a courtroom while the kids and I traveled East. So on Saturday night, we’ll enjoy the last of the summer nights before the crisp air of fall sets in and we worry about bedtimes once again.

This week, we’ve got zucchinis and tomatoes from our CSA box to get rid of. We’ll make zucchini salsa, which you can use on top of salmon or brats. We’ll dish it up with chips at our Labor Day party.

Zucchini Salsa, adapted from Taste of Home:

• 5 cups shredded zucchini (about 5 medium)
• 4 medium tomatoes, chopped
• 1 large onion, chopped
• 1 medium green peppers, chopped
• 1 small sweet red pepper, chopped
• 1/2 cup packed brown sugar
• 1 jalapeno pepper, seeded and finely chopped
• 1 cup white vinegar
• 1 jar tomato paste
• 3 garlic cloves, minced
• 3 teaspoons ground mustard
• 2-1/4 teaspoons salt
• 3/4 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
• 1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
• 1/2 teaspoon each ground cumin, nutmeg, cilantro and turmeric
• 1/2 teaspoon pepper

Mix together zucchini, onion, green pepper, red pepper and salt. Let stand for a few hours or overnight. Drain.

Combine zucchini mixture and remaining ingredients in a large saucepan. Bring to a boil and then simmer for 15 minutes.

Let cool.

We’re wrapping up our week at the cabin. Our boys caught sunfish last night, which their cousins cleaned and I dredged in Bisquick then fried. We’re barbecuing by the shore tonight so I’m off to marinate steak. Thanks, Sean, for guest blogging and making us laugh on our last day here.

Turning over a new leaf
by Sean Dilley of Wool Gatherer

I’ve decided to become a tea drinker. (Yes, the title of this post is a terrible, terrible pun. Unforgivable, really.)

I’ve enjoyed coffee since I was a little kid (no doubt I stunted my growth), but for some reason I haven’t really developed a fondness for tea, apart from an occasional glass on ice (or the delectable Long Island variety, which has no real tea in it.). Oh yeah, and I love bubble tea, but that’s more of a dessert than a drink.

Anyway, lately I’ve decided that I should work towards changing my attitude about tea. I have several reasons for this attempted conversion.

• Tea smells really good.
• Tea is pleasing to the eye.
• Making tea and drinking can be a soothing ritual, and I’m all for being soothed.
• Tea involves nifty little accessories and gadgets. Some accessories one can buy, others one can knit. Either way, who can resist? It’s all good.
• Tea is a great way to get a dose of mid-morning or afternoon caffeine with fewer jitters that one can get from coffee.
• Tea offers a good excuse to enjoy a cookie or scone. (Not that I have ever needed much of an excuse.)
• And finally, since my pinky finger is always prissily extended when I drink things anyway, I might as well be sipping tea like a regular lady.

When you get right down to it, I like just about everything about tea.

Now, if I can learn to enjoy how the darn stuff tastes, then we’re all set.

That’s really what it comes down to for me. I don’t think tea tastes bad. I don’t think it tastes very good, either. To me, tea seems like a cup of hot blah. Hello, flavor??

On the rare occasions when I do drink tea (usually to make my partner Darren feel happy that I might finally be growing in my appreciation of the finer things), I’m always reminded of Anne Rice’s novel The Mummy. The mummy, Ramses, upon awaking in nineteenth century London, happily acclimates himself to nearly all the traditions of the new era—except the custom of drinking tea.

“To him it tasted like half of something.”

I’m with the mummy on this one. If I make it weak, the tea tastes like dishwater. If I let the tea steep a long time, I get a bitter brew that is also unpalatable. It’s all rather frustrating.

For the short term, I’ve decided to stop worrying about how tea tastes. Darren buys high quality tea by mail and at a local tea shop, and he has picked up some really good stuff for me to drink at work.

So. My plan is to make several cups of jasmine oolong or green tea each day, enjoy the soothing aroma as I watch the pearls unfurl in the hot water, and I will sip my tea like a good boy.

For now, I’m concentrating on tea’s health benefits, but over time, I hope that my taste buds will start to discern and appreciate subtleties that have escaped me until now. Who knows, I might even grow to really enjoy my daily cuppa, just as I love the satisfying flavor of an espresso.

There is precedent for the transition I’m trying to make. Until I was thirty-five, I detested the taste of beer. One or two swallows were all I could get down before my gag reflex asserted itself. (And I was a German major—imagine my shame!)

But for some reason I kept forcing myself to try different types of beer, and when I was vacationing in Austria in 2002, I finally began to enjoy it. Layers of flavor started to become clear to me, and at long last, my brain made the linkage between beer and bread.

Yeasty, wheaty, carby, mmmmmm.

Did I need to start drinking beer? Certainly not. In fact, my waistline and I were both better off without it.

However, if I can teach myself to enjoy something that’s not good for me, I figure that I should give healthy tea at least as much chance as I gave beer. Only seems fair.

Just one question, though. How many cups of oolong does it take to get tipsy? Because so far, I’m feeling nothin’.

~ Sean Dilley

We’re here at the cabin, doing our best to stay out of touch with the world. Which doesn’t always work when you’re used to being plugged in. But for the rest of the week, I’m turning my blog over to my amazingly talented friend, Sean of Wool Gatherer. He’s hilarious, a David Sedaris in the making. I hope you enjoy his posts as much as I do.

It is, I daresay, an example of my decadence

by Sean Dilley

When Darren and I were in Germany two years ago, I rediscovered the simple pleasure a perfectly soft-boiled egg at breakfast.

I imagine that many of you recoil at the notion of jiggly eggs in the morning or any other time. I’m untroubled by your reaction.

Either you enjoy soft yolks or don’t. I realize that there’s little middle ground on this point. One of my good friends gags at the mention of even an over-easy egg, and I’m sure that the words “soft-boiled” would send her into a light coma.

I, in marked contrast, can barely choke down an egg if the yolk is hard cooked, and scrambled eggs have always sickened me. (I do make the rare exception for a good breakfast burrito, but there has to a lot of guacamole and gooey cheese in there to hide the horrid dryness of the eggs.

But I digress.

In Berlin, each morning our friendly server would offer us an egg to round out our Continental breakfast. We could have it fried or boiled. Darren always declined, but I went for the soft boiled egg every time. It arrived under a little crocheted chicken cozy. (No, I never asked for the pattern.)

In the fifteen years since my previous stay in Berlin, I had lost the knack for cleanly decapitating my egg, but even if I did have to discretely spit out a few bits of shell as I ate, I still loved the combination of the hot, soft egg on top of the fresh crusty German bread, cheese, and pepper bacon. That’s some good eatin’. Mmmmm, köstlich!

As our European trip was nearing its end, I found myself making my usual list of the things I’d miss when we got back home. Somewhere on that list, I won’t say how high, were those morning eggs.

On the last leg of our journey home, while we sat in the Newark airport at trusty old gate 41B (“my” gate for the seven years I flew back and forth between New Jersey and Minnesota during grad school at Princeton), I hopped online and ordered myself a set of egg cups. No big deal, really. Just $5 for four brightly colored plastic cups.

But then I got to dreaming about having a neater way to lop off the top of my eggs, and before I knew it, I had forked out $60 on a “Professional Egg Topper.”

Yes, spending $60 on that gizmo was kind of crazy. I have no problem admitting as much.

But as a lifelong lover of kitchen gadgets, how could I resist this marvel of engineering? Simply place the bell-shaped end over the top of the egg, pull back the spring-loaded black ball as though starting a game of pinball, and let the internal steel peg smack down on the egg. The impact creates a perfect crack around the bottom of the bell that makes it easy to neatly lift off the top of the shell. No muss, no fuss.

In for a penny, in for a pound, I figured. So I quickly purchased another implement that I never knew existed until that day, but I also knew I had to have, an egg pricker.

It, too, is a spring operated affair, with a sharp little steel needle that pricks a tiny hole in the bottom of the egg before it goes in the boiling water. In theory, that little hole lets steam escape from the cooking egg and prevents the shell from cracking. Well hey, sign me up!

Perhaps I didn’t need an egg pricker (yes I bought a German model), but could I really take that chance? And hell, it was only $8, which was dead cheap after the topper.

So now, on some nights when I think I’ll need a special treat to start the next off on the right foot, I’ll set my alarm to wake me ten minutes early so I can pull out my silly egg gadgets and make myself a nice breakfast before work.

Now if only I could find someplace in the ‘burbs that sells those crusty German hard rolls covered in all kinds of toasted seeds to go with my eggs…

[Homer Simpson drool sound.]

So, that’s my story. Strange yet still comfortably mundane.

~ Sean



PS. A shiny Euro to the first commenter who can identify where I got the title for this post.

On Sunday night, our friends Jody and Mark hosted us at their home for a barbecue. It was a welcome break to our hectic week. Matt’s flight home from Philadelphia had just landed that morning, and he had another going out to Tucson that night. We mixed orange mojitos to ease the transition for all of us.

We had planned on bringing a side dish to use up our zucchini. Only we couldn’t quite decide what to make. But then Liz from The Kitchen Pantry Scientist offered up her leftover Phyllo dough from her dinner party the night before. And so we adapted her zucchini tart recipe to make a sort of Spanakopita. Because you can’t go wrong with cheese.

(Apparently I needed the mojito. I accidentally used basil instead of spearmint and leeks instead of onions, neither of which I realized until Catharine and Jilene from Be Put Together pointed it out. Long week.)

Zucchini Spanakopita

• 1 package thawed Phyllo pastry dough
• 3 zucchini (and/or squash)
• 1 small onion
• 1 tablespoon garlic
• 8 ounces feta cheese, crumbled
• 15 ounces Ricotta cheese
• 4 eggs, lightly beaten
• 4 tablespoons dill
• 4 tablespoons chopped calamata olives

Spread (or just use butter)

• 1/2 cup olive oil
• 3 tablespoons parsley
• 2 tablespoons oregano
• 1 tablespoon thyme

Butter a 9×13 baking dish. Layer 4 strips of dough, and brush with butter or spread above.

Mix together onion, garlic, feta, Ricotta, eggs and dill in separate bowl.

Peel zucchini, thinly slice and layer in baking dish. Cover with cheese mixture. Slice olives and set on top.

Cover with 4 more strips of Phyllo dough, brushing top with butter or spread above.

Cook at 350 for 35 – 45 minutes, until dough browns and puffs up. Let sit for 10 minutes. Serve warm.

This post is a part of Real Food Wednesday.

It’s great to be back, but what’s even better is that my friend, Catharine, is finally back from her East Coast trip, too.

Summers in Minnesota are short as it is, so when you’re gone for a month, you return feeling as if you’ve missed an entire season of socializing. Because summer here is the time to connect: you make friends unexpectedly while walking down the sidewalks collecting bugs with your children.

When winter settles in, snow blankets the park and it empties. You have to match up schedules to meet. And there’s more work involved: snow pants, boots, hats and gloves, always one missing.

But enough about winter; it’ll be here soon enough. Tonight we’re walking down to Catharine’s house to barbecue, but first, we’re making homemade chocolate marshmallows to roast. We’ve shied away from corn syrup, although it feels almost sacrilegious to desecrate a Martha recipe.

Homemade Chocolate Marshmallows, adapted from Martha Stewart:

• Vegetable oil
• 4 envelopes unflavored gelatin
• 4 cups granulated sugar
• 1/3 cup cocoa powder
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
• 1 1/2 cups confectioners’ sugar

Oil a 9-by-13 inch baking dish. Line with parchment paper, and then oil that as well.

Pour 3/4 cup cold of water in a mixing bowl. Add gelatin and stir until softened.

In a medium saucepan, mix together sugar, cocoa powder, salt and 1 1/4 cup water. Bring to a boil over high heat. Stir occasionally. When temperature reaches 240 degrees (use a candy thermometer), remove mixture from stove. Add to gelatin.

Beat the mixture for about 12 minutes, increasing speed as it thickens. When stiff, pour in vanilla and beat again.

Pour the mixture into the baking dish and let set for 3 hours.

Dust your work surface with 1 cup of sifted confectioners’ sugar. Remove marshmallow from baking dish and place it on sugar. Take off parchment paper.

Cut into 2-inch squares, and roll marshmallows in remaining confectioners’ sugar.

Store in an airtight container for up to 3 days.

This post is a part of Real Food Wednesday.

Today, Matt’s trial comes to a close. And he returns home from Oakland for good. Then life will slow for us, just a little bit, which I hope will let me catch my breath.

Because I would like to get back to work. Writing. Really writing. But with his hours, I struggle to find a balance between my personal and professional life.

One of my girlfriends, who is also an attorney, came over on Monday night with her son. “Most of the men I work with have wives who stay home,” she said. She jostled her baby on her hip. “The job almost demands it.” Because there are so few hours left at the end of the week to take care of household chores.

It made me think of the women like her who don’t have a spouse who stays home, and what it must be like to work that second shift when you walk through the door. Where do they catch their breath?

Or, when you both work, is parenting shared more equally? Is housework? What do you think?

Without Matt here, I’ve been catering to our kids’ taste buds. Because the joy for me comes from sharing in a meal. Last night, we made Egg Fried Rice to use up the last of this week’s CSA box, spring onions and carrots.

Egg Fried Rice, adapted from my son’s preschool:

• 4 cups cooked rice
• 2 egg
• 1 tablespoon oil
• 2 scallions, chopped
• 1 tablespoon garlic
• 1 carrot, chopped
• 1/2 cup frozen peas, thawed in water
• 4 slices cooked bacon, cut into pieces
• 2 tablespoons soy sauce

Beat eggs. Stir fry the cooked bacon, scallions, garlic, carrots and frozen peas in oil. Then, add rice one cup at a time.

Add eggs and stir continuously until the eggs are done. Add soy sauce before serving.

This post is a part of Real Food Wednesday.

While traveling out East, I couldn’t figure out how to feed our kids. Because restaurants that catered to families offered burgers, hotdogs and fries on their kids’ menu. Which I couldn’t understand. Because we teach our children basic life skills like how to read and how to swim. Why don’t we teach them how to eat?

Healthy snacks like apples, nuts and raisins we label choking hazards. Yet we don’t label hazards like dyes, especially Red 3, a known carcinogen which goes into some fruit roll-ups.

We tried stopping at grocery stores to stock our hotel room mini fridges, but there is only so much pasta salad a person can eat hunched over. And so I gave in and swore once I returned home I’d never feed our kids fried food again.

Yeah. Anyway.

When I got back, I was excited to dig into our CSA box from Hog’s Back Farm: crispy sweet corn we boiled that first night, a ripe tomato, white onions, spearmint for mojitos to celebrate a friend’s 40th this weekend.

And green beans, which we’ve bundled in bacon and placed in an airtight container in our refrigerator to roast tomorrow night.

Green Bean Bundles, adapted from Paula Deen at The Food Network:

• 1 pound fresh green beans
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 1 tablespoon garlic
• 3 tablespoons Parmesan cheese
• Salt and pepper to taste
• Bacon

Mix olive oil, garlic, salt, pepper, and parmesan cheese in a mixing bowl.

Wash green beans and trim tips. Blanch (place in boiling water) for 3 minutes. Then place in cold water for 6 minutes to stop the cooking process.

Toss green beans in mixture. Wrap 5 stalks per piece of bacon.

Bake at 350 for 10 to 15 minutes, until bacon is cooked.

How do you feed your kids on vacation?

This post is a part of Real Food Wednesday. Even though it’s Friday.

My friend Sean is an amazing writer. I don’t see him as much as I would like, but often his voice enters my head because his writing is so powerful. And this story, “The Recipe Box,” comes to me often when I’m cooking in the kitchen with my children. It reminds me of how powerful a memory is, and that what’s important isn’t the bread we bake or the flour spilled on the flour, but the time we spend together. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

The Recipe Box
By Sean Dilley of Wool Gatherer

Browsing through the organized chaos of my mother’s recipe box is a deeply nostalgic experience for me, akin to sorting a pile of cherished family photographs. Each stained, dog-eared recipe card is a culinary snapshot of the people who prepared the food and shared countless meals together. One card elicits memories of my sisters and me scorching our little hands shaping syrupy popcorn balls each Christmas, while another recipe conjures images of my mother mounding our birthday cakes with glossy white peaks of Seven Minute Frosting.

I believe that the evocative power of these recipes stems largely from the familiar handwriting on the jumbled index cards. Each recipe is a unique, hand-crafted artifact representing a point of personal connection across generations of cooks. Flipping through the cards, I encounter the varied and distinct hands of my grandmother, mother, and aunts. In the blocky third-grader scrawl on a recipe for “No Bake Tasty Cookies,” I even catch a glimpse of myself as a kitchen novice, and I recall the contented hours I spent learning to cook under my mother’s patient guidance.

In recent years, I have discovered that the act of cooking can become freighted with unexpected poignancy. My grandmother, who died twelve years ago, left behind scores of recipes that my family still uses and enjoys. My mother sometimes smiled as she studied those frayed cards, adorned in my grandmother’s elegant schoolteacher cursive. I’m sure my mother still mourned at such moments, yet her spirits were also visibly lifted by the sight of the card and the pleasant memories it stirred. While mixing up a batch of cookies one day, she confided to me that she had long ago memorized the recipe, but she had the card out so “Mom can keep me company while I bake.”

In August 2004, at the age of sixty, my mother died after a short battle with cancer. The most desperate grief has dulled to a background ache, but seemingly mundane things can sharply emphasize her absence in our lives.

Take banana bread, for instance. As far back as I can remember, my mother baked delicious, fragrant banana bread. She loaded it with chocolate chips and kept it free of offending walnuts. The recipe was a staple in our household, and the whole family loved it. Even after my sisters and I had homes and families of our own, we could count on our mom to bring us banana bread when she came to visit. The recipe was very basic, yet the bread was distinctively her own; for some reason, she used re-purposed Folgers coffee tins as bread pans. The tall, battered cans gave her loaves a quirky cylindrical shape that I’m convinced made the bread taste even better.

While visiting my dad last fall, I decided to find that banana bread recipe and do some baking. I hoped that cooking something so closely connected to my mom would comfort me, as I had seen her cheered by her own mother’s recipes.

The daisy-covered cardboard recipe box was on its usual shelf above the stove; I doubt that anyone had opened it in months. After some hunting, I pulled the tattered, vanilla-speckled index card from the box.

I was entirely unprepared for the emotional reaction to the sight of my mother’s tidy, round handwriting. The moment I saw the card, grief struck me like a physical blow. The words swam, obscured by stinging tears. I quickly slipped the card back into the box and closed the lid. It was too soon to find comfort there.

A year passed before I delved into the recipe box again. Determined to bake my family’s traditional Christmas cookies, I hauled out the box and started rummaging. To my relief, the sorrow of my last attempt was replaced by excitement. Not only did I find the recipes I wanted, but I also stumbled across several forgotten gems that would surprise and delight my family. Without question, the heartache of loss remained, but it no longer dominated as it once had. I baked my cookies, and as I measured, stirred, and rolled, I welcomed the memories that flooded back to me. My mother is gone, but even so, she can still keep me company in the kitchen.

Thanks to all the Blog Pantry ladies who came out to Local D’Lish to try their hand at Aunt Else’s Aebleskivers last night. We poured batter into aebleskiver pans and chose among ingredients like cheese, chocolate, bacon, chives, pepper jams, and sausage for the filling. We were delighted by the result: A Danish pastry made of soft dough, with a savory sweet filling, smothered in maple syrup.

Have you ever made an Aebleskiver? Have you ever heard of it? And most importantly, can you spell it?

(The sound quality on my video isn’t great; we tried a new sitter last night, and in my effort to provide a contingency plan for anything that could possibly happen, like what to do if the baby doesn’t like the flow on the nipple, or her brothers won’t stop sitting on her, I forgot my microphones.)

Crystal of Cafe Cyan took home the grand prize for her recipe. No surprise there; she’s a professional foodie.

Also thanks to Kim Moldofsky of Mom Impact and Chad Gillard of Aunt Else for organizing the event.

Appearing in video: The Kitchen Pantry Scientist, Finding Borneo, Little Bean Photography, LoveFeast Table, The Snyder 5

On Saturday, some of the Blog Pantry ladies + I were invited to Macy’s to meet Cat Cora, who was in town promoting her new book, Cat Cora’s Classics with a Twist. We watched her cook a flank steak, and then she whipped up a Grapefruit and Cherry Ambrosia with Honey Cream for dessert.

She spoke about her part in the Chefs Move to Schools campaign, designed to pair chefs with schools to help educate kids on nutrition. On how to cook.

We live in a culture of constant snacking: crackers and pretzels tucked beneath our strollers; juice boxes and goldfish distributed after sporting events; lollipops dished out at grocery stores for good behavior. But what we’re not teaching our children is how to eat. A meal gives shape, like a story: it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. A bag of crackers? Its story ain’t over until you eat the last one.

As Jennifer Steinhauer wrote in The New York Times:

Apparently, we have collectively decided as a culture that it is impossible for children to take part in any activity without simultaneously shoving something into their pie holes.

To which cues are we teaching our children to listen? Should they eat when they feel hungry, or as an award for exercising? Or to stave off boredom, or tantrums? Today our kids consume 168 more calories per day, just during snack time, than we did in 1977.

But at least crackers aren’t as messy as s’mores.

I got hungry as a child. My mom left a basket of fresh fruit out. Her rule was, “If you’re hungry enough, you’ll eat an apple.” And she was right. The thing with apples is you eat just one. The fiber fills you up and naturally surpresses your appetite, whereas goldfish beget goldfish. At least for me.

How do you handle snack time in your home?