Hoping parents dinner will look like this

It’s time for the semi-annual parents dinner at the elementary school where I teach my food appreciation classes and I’ve settled on a Moroccan theme. Without a bevy of North African chefs in my kitchen, I’ve been left to ponder how I go about making a vegetable couscous that’s normally prepared in a special Moroccan steaming apparatus.

The seven-vegetable couscous we made earlier this year was delicious, and of course we didn’t use a couscousiere then, either. What I decided to do was peel and dice the vegetables individually–three pounds each of onion, carrot, celery, turnip, butternut squash, cauliflower, plus canned tomatoes, chickpeas and raisins–then make large, individual bathes of the stew, which is flavored with an exotic mix of saffron, turmeric and cinnamon. For the cooking liquid, I used a vegetable stock I’d had sitting in the pantry looking for a job to do.

The stew turned out even better than I’d hoped. I simply combined it all in a doubled large aluminum pan in which I’ll reheat the vegetables at the school. It then acts a serving vessel on the buffet line as well. I’ll probably cook three pounds of dry, whole wheat couscous to go with it. I just add boiling water to couscous in a covered bowl.

The rest of the menu consists of the Moroccan carrot salad we made in October. I’m a sucker for carrot salad, and this one is flavored with cinnamon, cumin, paprika and garlic. We’ll add pine nuts to make it smile on the plate.

There’s also this intriguing salad of romaine lettuce and orange sections, dressed with an intoxicating and oil-less concoction of lemon, cinnamon and orange blossom water. (Note how cinnamon appears in just about everything Moroccan.)

I usually place something interesting to nibble on on the family-style dining tables. I couldn’t think what it might be this semester, but then it dawn on me: I have a huge container of savory green tomato pickles curing on the kitchen island. These were the tomatoes I picked shortly before Thanksgiving and pickled in a Mediterranean fashion with vinegar, honey and cinnamon. (See, cinnamon again. It’s a theme.) I’ll scatter bowls of those.

Finally, for a dessert, we’ll also place bowls of the ginger cookies we’re making in class this week. We’ve switched our cooking lessons to baking and these cookies fit the season. And since they’re also flavored with cinnamon (among other things) they work with my Moroccan menu as well.

Am I missing cinnamon anywhere?

Salt cod from China? A tradition lives on....

Before refrigeration, fisherman plying the rich Atlantic waters off Canada dried and salted their harvest of cod. The cod are mostly gone, but the tradition lives on, nowhere more so than in Portugal, where there are said to exist at least 1,000 recipes for preparing salt cod.

Salt cod isn’t exactly a convenience food. You have to soak it at least 24 hours in several changes of water to remove the salt and rehydrate the flesh. But I couldn’t very well take my food appreciation classes to Portugal on our virtual world culinary tour without sampling at least one salt cod dish, and this casserole–simple as it is–remains a classic.

The first order of business is finding the salt cod. I purchased mine at our neighborhood Harris Teeter where it comes pre-boned in this nifty wooden box. I’d never heard of salt cod from China before. But perhaps that’s where they’re sending the fish these days to be processed. You can also find it in ethnic groceries, any catering to Latin, African or southern European clientele are a good bet. Normally I wouldn’t think of eating Atlantic cod. It’s been so overfished, the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch program advises consumers to stay away from it. But you can’t very well make a traditional Portuguese salt cod dish without it.

To make enough to feed a family of four, soak 8 ounces salt cod in a covered container, refrigerated, for 24 hours, changing the water every three times. Remove the cod and place it in a heavy pot, cover it with boiling water and cook over moderately low heat for about 10 minutes, or until the fish flakes apart with a fork. Drain the fish and when it is cool enough to handle, break it into small pieces with your fingers, removing any bones and skin. Set aside.

Meanwhile, peel 1 pound boiling potatoes, such as Yukon gold. Cut the potatoes into quarters lengthwise, then cut these pieces into 1/4-inch slices. Cook the potato slices in plenty of salted, boiling water until just tender. Drain well in a colander.

While the potatoes are draining, brown one yellow onion, cut in half and sliced thinly, in extra-virgin olive oil at the bottom of a heavy, oven-proof skillet. When the onions have caramelized and smell quite delicious, remove them from the skillet and brown the potatoes in the same fashion, adding more olive oil as needed.

Remove potatoes from the heat. Add the browned onions back to the skillet along with the flaked fish and a small handful of chopped fresh parsley leaves. Toss everything together and place in a 350-degree oven for about 20 minutes, or until the fish has lightly browned and the casserole is sizzling hot. Garnish with pitted, oil-marinated black olives, chopped hard-boiled egg and a little more chopped parsley.

This makes a simple supper, but oh so good. And there’s plenty of handwork–slicing onions and potatoes, flaking fish, pulling parsley leaves–for the kids to do. Just be sure to have extra olives on hand. The kids really go for those.

Potatoes and onions in food mill

The simplest soup is also the best.

Our food appreciation classes this week left Africa and landed in Portugal where we set to work making a classic potato and kale soup called caldo verde. Kids love this soup, so add it to your list of recipes that encourage kids to eat vegetables, in this case very healthy and seasonal kale.

In Portugal, market vendors use a machine to chop the kale into a very fine julienne. Otherwise, this soup is incredibly simple with just five ingredients: potatoes, onion, kale, water and salt. A slice of fried linguica sausage is recommended to garnish the soup. We used kielbasa.

To make the soup, peal five medium-sized boiling potatoes such as Yukon Gold and cut into 1-inch pieces. Finely chop 1 onion. Place the potatoes and onion in a heavy pot with six cups of water and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and cook until potatoes are tender.

Making kale julienne

Meanwhile, trim the stems and tough ribs from 8 ounces of fresh kale, then slice the leaves into fine julienne about two inches long.

When the potatoes are done, there are two ways you can proceed. The original recipe we used called for pureeing the contents of the soup pot, then adding it back to the pot along with the julienned kale and cooking about five minutes until the kale is tender. Since we do not use electric gadgets in our classes, we strained the potatoes and onion from the pot and ran them through a food mill. We cooked the kale in the potato cooking water, then stirred the potato mixture back into the pot. Yet another alternative is to use an electric food processor instead of the food mill, which will result in an even creamier soup.

Season the soup with salt to taste and distribute into warm bowls. Add a 1/4-inch slice of fried sausage to each bowl for garnish. Kids will ask for seconds on the sausage, but we only give it to them when they’ve finished the soup–including the kale.

Doesn't get any fresher than this

My food appreciation classes resumed their virtual culinary world tour this week with a final stop in Africa: Morocco. We’ve spent months touring around this giant of a continent and sampled so much variety. But one thing struck us throughout, and that was the simplicity of recipes using fresh, whole ingredients and vibrant seasonings.

North Africa has its own distinct cuisine with an Arabic tilt. This simple carrot salad incorporates many of the typical flavors–cinnamon, cumin, paprika, garlic. We’ve also added raisins and pine nuts to the original recipe.

This is a great dish for kids because they get to peel and then grate the carrots. If you’re looking for a way to get kids involved with food, hand them a kitchen tool and put them to work. They’ll peel and grate vegetables all day. But remind them to be careful. Peelers and graters are sharp, too. It’s easy to slip and skin a knuckle if you aren’t being careful and that would violate Rule #1 in our classes: No blood in the food!

Peel and grate 1 pound carrots and place them in a mixing bowl. Stir in 1 clove garlic, finely chopped, 1/2 teaspoon ground cumin, 1/2 teaspoon paprika, 1/4 teaspoon cinnamon, 1/4 teaspoon granulated sugar, pinch cayenne, a fistful of chopped parsley, juice from 1 lemon, and enough extra virgin olive oil to lightly coat the carrots. Add a handful (about 1/4 cup) raisins and a similar amount of pine nuts. Season with salt to taste.

This carrot salad makes a great healthy snack. Or serve next to a roast chicken or lamb.

Cubanos on challah bread

Every year we cook a birthday dinner for our friend Tomeika with her choice of entree. This year she chose Cubanos, the famous Cuban sandwich made with pork loin, ham, Swiss cheese and pickles. We had no idea she was a Cubanos fan.

The one missing ingredient in a Cubano made outside Miami typically is the Cuban bread. My wife substituted eggy challah bread. Otherwise, these sandwiches were made according to the traditional recipe. If you don’t already have cooked pork loin, season a loin with salt and pepper and cook it in a 350-degree oven to an internal temperature of 135-140 degrees.

When the loin is cool enough to handle, slice it thinly and place slices on one half of a sandwich roll, along with slices of Black Forest ham. On the other half of the roll, spread yellow mustard. Top the mustard with sliced Swiss cheese and sliced dill pickles. We use cornichons, sliced lengthwise.

Now for the fun part: squashing the sandwich under heat. Brush the outside of the sandwich with butter, then put it in a panini press or in a waffle iron. Press down. Alternatively, you can use two heavy skillets that fit inside each other, like this:

Squashing your Cubano is important

Maintain pressure on the sandwiches until the cheese is melted and the bread is golden brown.

The garden turns out a genius dip

When you’ve got lemons–so the saying goes–make lemonade. The same applies to eggplant. We’ve got plenty of it in the garden right now. In fact the plants themselves have long given up trying to stand upright, they are so weighted down with fruit. They just spread themselves on the ground. (Note to self: stake the eggplants next year.)

Thus, we are in the hunt lately for great dishes to make with eggplant. We’ve been perfecting our okra and eggplant stew. This week, it’s the classic Middle Eastern treatment–baba ganouj.

I did not have a particularly strong memory of liking baba ganouj so much. I love hummus, but can’t eat it any more because it’s so starchy. Eggplant has the advantage of being not only low-cal, but relatively low-carb (only 28 grams of carbohydrates in a pound of fresh eggplant). Of course, by the time you add the tahini (ground sesame), the finished baba ganouj has plenty of calories, but still is low on the carb scale. I’m happy to count it as one of my new most favorite kitchen garden friends.

I didn’t remember, exactly, how to construct the baba ganouj and so pulled out my tattered copy of the Moosewood Cookbook. My wife thought that was silly: Why didn’t I just look it up in one of my Paula Wolfert cookbooks? In fact, I have a shelf full of Paula Wolfert cookbooks. She’s covered everything Middle Eastern, North African and Mediterranean. But you know what? Her recipe for baba ganouj is almost exactly the same as the one in Moosewood, except that she recommends wrapping the eggplant in foil and cooking them over a gas flame instead of in the oven for smokier flavor. (Why not on the grill?)

To make the Moosewood version, place two medium eggplants in a 400-degree oven (either on a sheet pan, or place them directly on a rack with a pan underneath to catch the drippings). Bake until the eggplants begin to collapse and are completely soft inside. Remove them from the oven and when they are cool enough to handle, slice them open and scoop out the insides into a bowl.

To the eggplant, add 1/2 cup tahini, two or three cloves of garlic finely chopped, the juice of one lemon and a fistful of parsley leaves, roughly chopped. Mash everything into a puree with a potato masher. Season with salt to taste. Garnish with more parsley and serve with wedges of pita bread or baked pita. Or, if you are off carbs as we are, put out a spread of fresh vegetables for dipping, such as thinly-sliced zucchini, strips of bell pepper, baby carrots.

Lamb with artichokes and spices

We are winding up our fourth year of food appreciation classes yet I think this was our first time ever cooking with lamb. After spending the entire year on the continent of Africa (who knew?), we recently landed in Morocco on our virtual culinary world tour, and in North Africa lamb is a favorite meat, often exotically prepared with spices such as cinnamon and ginger.

Out of all the possible lamb recipes available I chose this one because it also employs artichokes, a spring ingredient in my book. In Morocco, stews like this one, where the lamb is browned with onions, then cooked with tomatoes and seasonings, is called a tagine. We call it simply delicious. The older kids were especially crazy for it, as was the rest of the after school staff. It’s simple and doesn’t take long to cook.

Often you can find lamb stew meat already cut into cubes in the meat aisle of the supermarket. For my classes, I chose a whole butterflied leg of lamb weighing nearly five pounds and had the kids in each class cut portions of it into small chunks. In my classes, the kids do all of the work, except the actual cooking.

Cut 1 1/2 pounds lamb into bite-size dice (about 3/4-inch). Season aggressively with salt and pepper and brown on all sides in a heavy skillet greased with extra-virgin olive oil over moderately high heat. Meanwhile, chop 1 medium onion into medium dice and add these to the skillet. Continue cooking until the onions are lightly browned.

Add to the skillet four large tomatoes, peeled and chopped, or 1 28-ounce can diced tomatoes, 1/4 teaspoon turmeric, 1/4 teaspoon cinnamon, 1 teaspoon grated fresh ginger (or 1/4 teaspoon ground ginger), 1 14-ounce can baby artichokes roughly chopped, a handful of fresh parsley leaves roughly chopped, and 1/2 cup water.

I imagine you could use fresh baby artichokes for this if they were cooked ahead separately. After adding all of the ingredients, cook another 15 minutes. If it looks a little dry, add more water. Adjust seasonings and serve warm with plenty of couscous to soak up the juices.

For more great stories about how we are taking back our food system, read Fight Back Friday.

Vegetables kids will eat

Here’s another easy Ethiopian dish that the kids in my food appreciation classes really loved: potato stew, or Dinich Wat.

This stew is loaded with great vegetables: cabbage, carrots, onion. It was a great thrill to see the kids eating this so willingly, even asking for second and third helpings. There’s something about Ethiopian food kids really like. Maybe its the combination of garlic, ginger and curry spices.

Serve this stew with injera bread and some of the other Ethiopian dishes we’ve been making, like Doro Wat, or stewed chicken, and yellow split-pea stew.

First, chop 1/4 head cabbage, cored, into tiny pieces (you can use a food processor for this, but we did it by hand) and place in a heavy saucepan over moderate heat with about 1/2 cup water. Season with salt. Add two carrots, peeled and cut into tiny pieces, then 1 large onion, diced small, 1 pound boiling potatoes, such as Yukon Gold, cut into 1/2-inch dice, and 2 cloves garlic, minced. There’s no need to peel the potatoes, just wash them well.

After adding all the vegetbles, season with 1/2 teaspoon ground ginger, 1/2 teaspoon turmeric, 1/2 teaspoon curry powder, and salt to taste. Add more water if the stew seems dry. Continue cooking until the vegetables are tender. Serve warm.

Transforming split peas

I wouldn’t have guessed that kids could go crazy for split peas. But they did for this dish of Ethiopian yellow split pea stew, called Kik Alicha, that we made in our food appreciation classes this week as we continue our world culinary tour in Africa.

This preparation is so ridiculously simple, it begs the question why we go to so much trouble making more elaborate food. The key ingredient is the split peas themselves, which I purchased at a local Ethiopian grocery here in the District of Columbia where we have a large Ethiopean population. (Well, is a small shop and carry-out attached to a larger Ethiopian restaurant, and they have all the injera break you could possibly need).

My experience with split peas is they turn to mush when cooked. Think of split pea soup. But these split peas is very sturdy and stand up to cooking well. The final stew should have some still-recognizable peas in it and a good amount of texture. We’re not trying to make gruel here.

The other ingredients are very simple: olive oil, onion, garlic ginger and turmeric. We substituted curry powder for the turmeric after the salewoman at the Ethiopian grocery recommended it. Turmeric’s great for color, but it doesn’t have that much recognizable flavor. You could add some turmeric as well there if you wanted to boost the flavor. Turmeric also is a potent anti-inflammatory.

Split peas are not on my normal, low carb diet. They’re pretty starchy. But they’re an excellent source of fiber and provide protein as well.

In a saucepan, bring 1 cup yellow split peas to a boil in three cups of water. Reduce the heat and simmer until almost tender. Meanwhile, in a heavy saucepan over moderate heat, saute 1 medium onion cut into small dice with 2 tablespoons olive oil. Season the onions with salt. When the onions begin to soften, add 2 or 3 cloves garlic, minced, and 1 1-inch-long piece ginger root, peeled and minced. Stir in 1 teaspoon curry powder (or substitute turmeric). Continue cooking until the garlic and ginger are soft.

Scrape the onion mixture into the pan with the peas and continue cooking, covered, until the peas are very soft and have begun to break apart into a stew-like consistency, about 30 minutes. Total cooking time for the peas should be about an hour, or a little less.

Serve Kik Alicha with plenty of injera bread. You don’t need eating utensils with this. Use the bread instead of a fork.

For more great stories about how we are taking back our food system, read Fight Back Friday.

Calling all vegetables

Teaching kids about food and cooking I’ve come to learn that an appreciation for vegetables is largely a function of age. The younger ones–Kindergartners–walked away from this dish of freshly cooked vegetables tossed with aromatic butter. All they wanted was the bread. The older children–nine- and 10-year-olds–weren’t so crazy for the spongy Ethiopian injera bread, but begged for seconds on the vegetables.

Getting kids to like healthier food is a process, not an event. Making food like this–giving kids an opportunity to handle and prepare different vegetables in a group setting–prepares children to appreciate a variety of foods, including vegetables. Repeated exposure smooths the way for actually liking  things that kids will automatically reject if you just slap it on their plate. Even if the kids don’t eat the vegetables on the first go-’round, they have great fun peeling and chopping. And having fun around food–rather than battling over it–is a major victory in my book.

(One of my students told me this week that her family is now making beet salad all the time because of the beet salad we made in one of our classes. How about that?)

To make this dish, you will need some of the spiced butter, or niter kebbeh, that is traditional in Ethiopian cooking. I’m in luck. There are Ethiopian groceries within walking distance of my home here in the District of Columbia. If you aren’t so lucky, you can make the butter as follows:

To make 2 cups, melt 1 pound butter slowly in a saucepan, then bring it to a boil. When the top is covered with foam, add 4 tablespoons chopped onion, 1 1/2 tablespoons finely chopped garlic, 2 teasoons grated fresh ginger, 1/2 teaspoon turmeric, 2-4 crushed cardamom seeds, 1-inch piece cinnamon, 2-3 whole cloves, 1/8 teaspoon ground nutmeg. Simmer uncovered on lowest heat until the surface is transparent and the butter solids have settled on the bottom (up to 60 minutes). Pour off the clear liquid and strain through a double layer of damp cheesecloth, discarding the spices and solids. Refrigerate.

For the vegetables, cut into bite-size pieces 1 1/2 pounds new potatoes, 4 large carrots, 1/2 cauliflower, 1 head broccoli. Place all of the vegetables except the broccoli in a steamer to cook. Meanwhile, saute 1 medium onion, cut into small dice, with 1/4 cup spiced butter in a heavy skillet until onions are transparent, about 10 minutes. Remove from heat.

When the vegetables in the steamer are almost cooked through, add the broccoli and continue cooking until the broccoli is tender. Transfer vegetables to the skillet with the onions, toss well and cook over moderate heat, stirring frequently, for another five minutes. Add more butter if vegetables seem dry. Serve warm with injera.

For more great stories about how we are taking back our food system, check Fight Back Friday.