Soy-Glazed Tofu

This recipe is still in heavy rotation, although now (2014), Ben is more likely to make it than I am. Because life is good.

Doesn’t “soy-glazed” sound so lovely? It was either that or “pan-roasted tofu” or “butter-browned tofu”—the idea being, of course, to make it sound like it’s halibut at a fancy restaurant, not like it’s a one-pound block of quivering beany blandness. Ah, tofu. We eat a lot of it. It’s inexpensive, it’s incredibly good for you, our kids love it, and you can treat it like a blank canvas. Plus, it fills us with nostalgia for the early days of our great romance. Yes, welcome to another episode of Dalai Mama Dishes up memories of falling in love with her husband in a vegetarian co-op...

Speaking of which, if you’ve ever lived in a vegetarian coop, then you know how easy it is to make tofu taste exactly like, er, tofu. Michael and I have eaten great panfuls of tofu parmesan, for example, that tasted like sauce and cheese that had been dumped on slices of a wet sponge, and I don’t recommend it (we used to call it, not unaffectionately, toe-food). The trick is to use tofu’s mild sponginess to your own advantage, preferably by impelling it to soak up a lot of salt and butter. Hence the following, which is our current go-to recipe, and we eat it at least once a week. Allowed to brown in a pan with soy sauce and lemon juice, the tofu gets crispy-edged and tangily addictive. Just be sure to buy extra-firm tofu, since any other style will fall all to pieces in the pan—especially “silken tofu” which has the texture of jellied library paste. In my supermarket, tofu is in the produce aisle, I’m not sure why. But then again, this is the same supermarket that packages Halvah—which is a kind of gritty candy made from ground sesame seeds—and labels it “cheese alternative,” so what do they know? (Maybe I’ll start thinking of maple fudge as a “cheese alternative” when I’m preparing lunch for myself.)

Back to tofu: If you’ve got babies or toddlers in the house, then thank your lucky stars you’re not a withered old Mama like me with only ginormous galumphers clomping through the house on their way to college. Wait, no. I was going to make a relevant point. Oh right: babies and toddlers might like to eat cubes of raw tofu, which they mistakenly take to be delicious, probably because it feels like getting away with something, such as eating salt-free Play-Doh.

 

Soy-Glazed Tofu

Leftovers make terrific lunchbox fare. These days, now that Ben eats like a vacuum cleaner, I double the recipe to guarantee there will be some extra; I simply wipe the pan out with a paper towel between batches.

Ingredients

2 tablespoons butter

14 ounces extra-firm tofu, cut into 12 skinny slices

Juice of half a large lemon (around 2 tablespoons)

2 tablespoons soy sauce

In a very large non-stick skillet, melt the butter over medium heat. When it is foamy and very hot, lay in the tofu pieces to form a crowded single layer; if the first piece of tofu sizzles only noncommittally or not at all, give the butter another minute to heat up. Now brown the tofu undisturbed for around 5 minutes; when the underside is a deep golden, flip all the pieces and allow the other side to brown for another 3-5 minutes.

Now pour in the lemon juice and soy sauce, and shake the pan to coat the bottom of every piece with the mixture, then flip all the pieces and cook, shaking the pan, until the liquid is all cooked off and the underside of the tofu looks glazed and brown. Serve hot or at room temperature with brown rice and a salad. Leftovers are great cold as is, or sliced into skinny strips and sprinkled over a big green salad.

Dad's Spaghetti Sauce

Oh, fiction writers, you are so lucky. You can turn your dreadful old boyfriend, Dan--the one who hitchhiked to Taos every other minute to play frisbee--into your novel's egomaniacal hacky-sacking "Stan" who train hops to Santa Fe. And all you have to do is add one of those These are fictional characters dredged from the brilliant depths of my own imagination. Nobody is actually based on you, you narcissistic New Mexican hitchhiker.

But you can't really write a fictional recipe column, now, can you? No you cannot. And so, this is not the character “Dad”’s spaghetti sauce, if you understand what I'm saying here. Which means that, as I write the recipe, I am acutely aware to the changes, however miniscule, I have made to the original. In my family, this may be the gustatory equivalent of editing a bit of scripture because it reads better that way. "I just feel like Noah would more likely have brought three of every animal, in case anything happened." I once published a recipe for my mother's shortbread, to which I had added the agnostic flavorings of rosemary and lemon. A plague of locusts, etc.

Anyways, this is the spaghetti sauce I grew up on, and it is rich and delicious, and I have changed it very little. The original recipe is handwritten right here, on a piece of graph paper. I see that you're supposed to add garlic salt to the meat as it's browning, which even my father doesn't bother with any more. There's the slightly mysterious ingredient "1/2 a lemon," which I'm not sure about; I sometimes add a generous splash of red wine or a smaller one of balsamic vinegar, which likely accomplishes the same thing. Oregano I don't use, because I don't like it, even though my dad uses it and I love, love, love his sauce even more than my own because he made it. But oregano always reminds me of the kind of red-saucy or salad-dressingy food that tastes dustily like someone dumped a baggie of stale pot into it. Forgive me. I know this is not a widely shared aversion, oregano.

What else. My dad's recipe calls for 6 8-ounce cans of sauce, and I use 2 29-ounce cans. That's only a 10-ounce difference, though my children have to forego the mechanical pleasure of opening those 6 little cans. Also, I forget to ask them to grind in the black pepper, which was my solemn job as a child. "No, more," my father always said, with his back to me, when I asked, grinding and grinding, if I'd ground in enough. "More." I loved that. Instead, my kids get to break up the tomatoes with their hands, which, as far as cheap thrills go, is pretty excellent.

The sugar is in the original recipe as "6 tablespoons," and if you leave it out? Well. I don't know. Don't come crying to me when your sauce was only good, but not so lipsmackingly excellent that you sat around long after dinner was over, rubbing your finger around the rim of your plate and licking it, in case there was any sauce that didn't already get sponged up by the bread you mopped around. Oh go on. We've all got more to worry about than a bit of sugar, right?

Dad’s Spaghetti Sauce

Makes tons

Active time: 20 minutes; total time 3 hours.

This recipe makes a huge batch that I freeze in 2-cup portions in Ziploc bags. It's one of those money-in-the-bank scenarios that I especially appreciate as the season changes: come a chilly, dark dinnertime, all I have to do is boil a pot of water. I love that. The sauce needs to cook for a long time--the original recipe actually says 4 hours, though I only do 3--which would likely make it a good candidate for the slow cooker. Let me know if you try that.

1 medium onion, finely diced

2 tablespoons olive oil

Kosher salt

3 cloves garlic, smashed, peeled, and finely chopped

A couple pinches of dried thyme (or, shudder, oregano)

2 pounds ground beef (not lean)

1 28-ounce can crushed tomatoes or whole, peeled tomatoes

2 29-ounce cans Hunts tomato sauce (it has to be Hunts)

1 6-ounce can tomato paste

1/2 cup sugar

Freshly ground black pepper

1/4-1/2 cup mellow red wine (optional)

If you're using whole canned tomatoes, pour them into a bowl and break them up with your hands. This is an incredibly fun job for a child (who has no hang nails or paper cuts).

Now, in a large pot or Dutch oven, heat the oil over medium heat and sauté the onion with one teaspoon of salt, stirring frequently, for 5 minutes or so, until it's translucent and just starting to color. Add the garlic and sauté, still stirring frequently, for another minute or two. Now crumble in the meat, add the cayenne and oregano or thyme, turn up the heat to medium-high, and cook the meat, stirring occasionally and breaking it up with a spatula, until it is cooked all over and browning in spots; if it seems like it's steaming more than sizzling, turn the heat up even higher.

Now stir in all the tomato products, as well as the sugar, 1 teaspoon of salt, lots of black pepper, and the optional wine, and bring the mixture to a boil, then reduce the heat to low and cook, covered, with the lid 1/2 inch ajar, for 3 hours (or, at the very least, 2). Stir the sauce occasionally to make sure it’s not sticking to the bottom of the pot. Serve over hot, well-buttered pasta (that you cooked in plenty of well-salted water) with freshly grated parmesan for passing.

Maple Snow Taffy

Despite the title of this post, we actually call it by its early American name. “Why is it called sugar on snow?” Birdy asks, indignant, the entire time I’m making it. “It’s not sugar.” And the entire time I’m making it, I try to explain how the early settlers and later pioneers—like Laura and Mary—didn’t have access to cane sugar, and how maple syrup was sugar for them. And Birdy pauses before saying, “Still. It shouldn’t be called sugar on snow.” I’m just warning you, in case you have any terminological sticklers in your family. So it might be simpler just to call it maple taffy, which is really what you’re making here. That will also help clarify the whole snow-eating issue: you’re not making snow ice cream, where you pour cream and sugar and vanilla on snow and eat the whole bowl with a spoon, although that is also lots of fun and certainly easier—even though it’s altogether maybe 1 gazillionth as good as this, IMHO (as people like to add unhumbly). What you’re doing instead is pouring liquid maple caramel onto snow, which chills the syrup, which then hardens into a chewy lump, which you use to rid yourself of any malingering dental work (kidding, ha ha, it’s actually fairly soft). Eating the leftover snow is certainly an option, but I always think snow tastes the way a jar of pennies smells—I cannot hear its snowy siren song the way, say, Birdy can, who will gobble snow from a car tire or the bottom of someone’s boot like she’s been starving for months. She also favors the seed-and-shell-strewn snow from beneath the bird feeder. Fiber, right?

If you happen to live in Santa Cruz, where you’re much too busy hiking mountains in your bikini and boogie boarding with a frozen margarita in one hand and gathering the Meyer lemons that have fallen all over your patio to scrounge up a bowl of snow, simply spoon the hot caramel into a dish of ice cream, you poor thing.

Maple Snow Taffy

This is my friend Nicole’s recipe, and, like her, it is perfect in every way.

1 cup maple syrup (ours is B-grade amber—cheaper and darker—and we love it)

¼ cup salted butter

Clean snow (or, need be, ice cream)

In a medium-sized pot over medium heat, heat the syrup and butter together until the mixture reaches 230-235 on a candy thermometer, aka somewhere between the thread and soft ball stage, for you candy-making hardcores out there. If you don’t have a candy thermometer, time it for about 5 minutes after it comes to a boil, and then pour a little onto a plate that’s been waiting in the fridge: when the syrup is ready, it should thicken up into a soft taffy on the plate; if it doesn’t, then cook it a minute or two longer. Needless to say, your children should be nowhere near this while it’s on the stove. “There is nothing hotter than hot sugar,” my mother used to say (“Really, Mom? Not even the sun?”), and, because of the crisp English certainty of her pronouncements, I still assume they’re all true.

Let the mixture cool for a couple of minutes, then pour it by the spoonful over bowls of clean snow (or ice cream) where it will harden into a sweet lump of maple insanity. You won’t be sorry—well, until it’s gone, and then you’ll be sorry.

Oven-Roasted Tomato Sauce

I feel like I'm living inside a tenth-grade drosophila experiment. The fruit flies are everywhere: clustered on the bananas, swarming the compost, flying up out of the drain in a way that makes me not want to think about what might be so exciting in the drain. But mostly, they are in love with the tomatoes. They dream about their ooze, read aloud to them from Lord of the Flies, sing them their phenotypical love songs, ogle them with their dominant or recessive red or brown or white eyes, caress them with the genetic mutations of their vestigial wings. It is a very juicy romance. And I really can't stand it. This cardboard box of gorgeous scarlet tomatoes, brought over by our friends still warm from their greenhouse, feels like a ticking time bomb. It feels like the first scene from a Hitchcock movie about a murdering infestation of insects, and creepy music is your only clue that you should be scared. It's just tomatoes, after all. Or is it? 

And so: tomato sauce. Because, come the winter, when we are sighing with nostalgia for the summer's ripeness, I will be so thrilled to pull from my freezer a ruby block of sweet memories. This is an absolutely wonderful recipe for sauce, and I made it up in a fit of frustration after forgetting about a batch of stovetop sauce, which stuck and burned on the bottom of the pot. Here, you simply halve the tomatoes, drape them with some onions, garlic, seasonings, and olive oil, and then ignore them for two hours while the oven reduces them to a caramelized and sauce-ready pan of sweet flesh (sorry, drosophila!). A quick run through a food mill or blender, and the sauce is ready to eat or freeze. Easy peasy. And you can make it at night, if you like, the better to not be oppressed by the heat of the oven.

I usually make this sauce with plum tomatoes, which are meatier and quicker than regular ones, since you don't have to wait for the oceans of juice to cook down, but these worked just fine. And in truth, I've made the sauce with quite mediocre tomatoes, and it has still been good, since the long oven time really coaxes out their shy sweetness. Depending on where you live, this summer may not, in fact, be bringing you an abundance of tomatoes; blight has swept witheringly throughout the Northeast, and this may be all the sauce I put up this year. I like to use verbs like "put up" and "can" because it makes me feel very Laura Ingalls Wilder, as if I have a pantry lined with glistening jars. Which, in fact, I do: bread and butter pickles and peach jam and dilly beans and wild grape jelly. "Look!" I say proudly, to anyone who will look. "Is that money in the bank or what?" But tomatoes? I freeze them. I just can't bear the thought of everyone toppling to the ground and writhing with botulism all because I wanted to play Little House on the Prairie.

And if you freeze the sauce, as I do, in 1-cup portions, you can thaw exactly the right amount to make Mexican rice or tamale pie, to add to bean or lentil soup, or to sauce a half a pound of pasta or a couple of pizzas. And it tastes so incredibly vibrant, this sauce--so rich and essential, as if all the tomatoes in the world have been distilled into one red tablespoon of platonic tomato-ness. Even Ben loves it, despite his loathing of raw tomatoes. The two foods he hates are watermelon and tomatoes, and boy does he hate them. I like to probe the depth of this hatred--to find out, for example, if he would eat one tomato a day for a year for a million dollars (he would) or ten dollars (he wouldn't). What about a hundred dollars? "Hmm," he says, the gears in his brain shifting mathematically. "That's thirty cents a tomato. I don't think so. Unless it was a cherry tomato! Then I totally would." Fair enough.

Oven-Roasted Tomato Sauce

Active time: 15 minutes; total time 2 1/4 hours

This recipe is for one pan, which makes 3-4 cups; I usually double it, and simple rotate the pans halfway through the cooking times so that they roast evenly. If I'm planning to freeze the sauce, I usually omit the herbs so that it can be used in either Italian or Mexican dishes without any conflicting flavors. A side note: try buttering your hot spaghetti before saucing: it adds so much delicious richness.

Ingredients

3-4 pounds ripe tomatoes, ideally plum, stems removed

1 medium onion, halved and sliced

2-3 cloves of garlic, smashed and peeled

A large pinch of dried herb, crumbled (marjoram, thyme, basil or oregano) or 1 teaspoon chopped fresh (optional)

1/4 cup olive oil

1 teaspoon each kosher salt and sugar

Freshly ground black pepper

Heat the oven to 375. Slice the tomatoes in half lengthwise, then arrange them cut-side down, in one layer on a large, rimmed baking sheet (mine is 12- by 17-inches), lined with parchment paper, if you like, for easier clean-up. Arrange the onions, garlic and herbs over the top, then drizzle the whole thing evenly with olive oil and sprinkle with salt, sugar, and pepper. Bake for an hour and a half to two hours (or so), until the tomatoes are browning in spots and have fully collapsed. Around an hour in, the tomatoes will be sitting in a flood of juice in their pans, and then this juice will reduce as they cook further, which is what you want for a the thickest and most flavorful sauce.

Now you have two choices: put the contents of the pan (including all the juices), through a food mill: this will make a smooth, skinless and seedless sauce. Or else blend it all in a blender or food processor, which will make a good but more roughly textured and seedy sauce. Taste it: it will likely need a bit more salt, and more sugar too, if it seems acidic. Use it, or allow it to cool completely, then spoon into labeled freezer bags and freeze, or else spoon it into 1-cup containers and then, when these are frozen solid, turn them out into a large Ziploc freezer bag to store.

Raw Energy Bars

Did we eat as many snacks as our kids do? I can't imagine. Although writing that, I just remembered plopping down in front of Little House on the Prairie with a bag of Fritos and a tub of sour cream. Those were the days; my arteries are probably still recovering. And I suppose if I were willing to send the kids to school with Fritos and sour cream, then life would be fairly simple. But nooooo. I insist on nutrient density!

And so, these whole-foods fruit-and-nut energy bars: perfect portable, junk-free, delicious and wildly wholesome snacking. Minimal packaging, maximum energy, and quick and easy to make. I actually developed this recipe for FamilyFun Magazine, and it's in this month's issue, along with a way better photograph than any of mine here (Does theirs look like a turd? No. No it does not.) But for me, it's kind of like the no-knead bread or the granola: a recipe that could totally revolutionize some aspect of your life. In this case, the snack aspect of your life. They're loosely modeled after Lara Bars, but they're so much cheaper, they're fully customizable, and their sized just right for kids, i.e. they're small. Which is good because they are pure food and so quite filling.

 

As you'll see in the recipe below, you can make them with any combination of raw nuts and dried fruits, tailoring to the tastes of your family. But here's what I recommend: make two batches at a time. That way, you maximize the dirtying of your food processor (this is nearly an obsession of mine--the way I avoid it, you'd think that washing it was rocket science crossed with being on hold with customer service representatives) and also you provide variety and make enough for two school weeks, assuming that you have two children and commit to giving them a different snack one day a week (hello, popcorn!). You'll see, though: they're incredibly easy to make, and I actually kind of like squeezing the mixture to form the bars, though I apologize about this step: believe me, I wanted to be able to tell you that you could press them into a pan and cut them, like a normal person, but I just don't find that this works. I'm thinking, too, that you could avoid wrapping them individually: just shape them, store them in a large container, and then pop them into small containers for transporting. But the wax paper makes my kids feel like they're getting an actual snack bar. I can't explain the psychology, but it works.

 

Raw Energy Bars (basic recipe)

Makes 8 bars

Total time: 15 minutes

Ingredients

1/2 cup of raw nuts (walnuts, almonds, pecans, coconut, cashews) or roasted peanuts

1/2 cup of pitted dates

1/2 cup of another dried fruit (apples, apricots, cherries, pineapple, or more dates)

Shown here:

Pina Colada Bars (5 dates, 5 torn-up pineapple rings, 1/4 cup each almonds and coconut)

Chocolate Cherry Macaroon Bars (5 dates, heaping 1/4 cup cherries, 1/4 cup each walnuts and coconut, 1 tablespoon unsweetened cocoa powder)

In a food processor fitted with the steel blade, grind the nuts fine, then tip them into a bowl. Now grind the fruit until it turns into small clumps, then add the nuts back in and process again until a small handful of the mixture holds together when you squeeze it. (If this never happens, then add in a few more dates; conversely, if the mixture seems too damp, add a few more nuts.)

Tear off four squares of wax paper, then tear them in half to make 8 rectangles. Divide the mixture into 8 parts by picking up handfuls and squeezing. Squeeze and press some more to form each lump into a rough rectangle, then wrap in the wax paper. I do this the way I would make a burrito: I lay the bar near and parallel to a short side of the rectangle, then fold the long sides in, then roll it all up. Store them in air-tight container in the refrigerator.

Follow the basic 2 to 1 ratio of dried fruit to nuts and create your own flavors. But these are some of our favorites:

Cherry Tart: walnuts, almonds, dates, cherries

Peanut Butter Snap: peanuts, dates, dash of vanilla, sprinkle of salt

Apricot Muffin: almonds, dates, apricots

Apple Brown Betty: pecans, dates, apples, pinch of cinnamon

Key Lime Pie: coconut, pecans, dates, apples, finely grated lime zest

Donut Cake

Over at A Subtle Revelry, this cake was brilliantly adapted to look like a giant glazed donut. I love people.

Maybe it's really just frosting I don't like, which is nuts. Even a frosting-shunner like me can see how crazy that is. Frosting! Who doesn't like frosting but a grayly parched crone in a gloomy, turreted house, the one who gives neighbor kids the evil eye while she's outside calling to her dozens of many-toed cats? I know. Believe me. But I tend to think it's desserts altogether I don't like, but then I go completely wild for plain cake. Pound cake, angel food cake, unadorned cakes of just about every persuasion. I am not trying to be quaint or flexing my old-fashionedness, I swear. It's just frosting, which makes me feel like some weird aerosol sweetness is dripping into my lungs and asphyxiating me, if you'll pardon my drama.

So this cake, talk about quaint and old-fashioned, is a riff on the justly famous Busy-Day Cake of cookbook author and local-food pioneer Edna Lewis. Foodie types tend to be a little in love with themselves for being in love with Edna Lewis, and I suffer from that myself. It's partly because she was this fierce little old Southern woman with her hair in a gray bun, a mysteriously hunky young male housemate, and not a pretentious bone in her body; her mystique and forthrightness feel pleasantly infectious. And partly it's because her recipes exalt plainness in a really beautiful way--the simple pleasure of simple, perfect flavors.

But okay, enough--I'm sure you're here to get dinner on the table, not to wade through the confessions of a compulsive cookbook reader. "Busy-Day Cake" really says it all, doesn't it? As if you were having such a busy day that you had time to bake only the world's plainest cake. As opposed to the more obvious no cake at all. While it's baking you will be glad that, busy as you are, you sensibly left five minutes in your day to get this cake into the oven. It fills the house with such a wonderful aroma. "That's a totally classic cake smell," Ben said, sniffing deeply as he bolted inside from somewhere or other, and he's right. It is. Not that the kids wouldn't mind if great mounds of frosting were to spill in fluffy drifts across their cake, mind you. But they do love this unfrosted cake.

We renamed it "Donut Cake" because the combination of nutmeg and vanilla really tastes like donuts. Also so that Homer Simpson might stumble on it via Google. The cake is beautifully moist, with just enough cornmeal to give it a slight sandiness (the cornmeal is not in the original recipe, and you can omit it if you like), and it's the perfect accompaniment to summer fruit, sliced up raw and barely sweetened, with a big dollop of whipped cream. It's the kind of cake you can't stop eating: if you have any left, you will stand in the kitchen in your pajamas eating skinny wedge after skinny wedge, pulling the Saran Wrap optimistically back up over it and then realistically back down again, while you wait for the water to boil for coffee. Ben and Birdy cried, "Oh, Mama! Can we have cake for breakfast too?" And so we finished it. And then I baked another one. Seriously. That same day. Even though I was pretty busy.

Donut Cake

active time: 10 minutes; total time: 45 minutes

In the original "Busy-Day Cake" recipe of Edna Lewis, there is no cornmeal, but I like it here. Also, there is no spelt. There also used to be less of salt, vanilla, and nutmeg, but hey--I am what I am.

1 stick butter, at room temperature

1 1/3 cups granulated sugar

3 large eggs, at room temperature

2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract

2 cups sifted flour (White, spelt, or a combination. I use all spelt and love it so much!)

2 tablespoons cornmeal

1/2 teaspoon kosher salt (or half as much table salt)

2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder

1/2 teaspoon nutmeg, or more, ideally freshly grated

1/2 cup buttermilk, at room temperature

Heat the oven to 375°F. Butter and flour a 9-inch springform pan, and set it aside. As I must always confess, I use my weird Pam baking spray "with real flour!" But if it knocks out one of the barriers between me and baking (my dread of greasing pans), then I figure it's worth it.

Beat the butter and sugar in the bowl of a stand mixer until light and fluffy, about two minutes. Add the eggs, one at a time, beating to incorporate after each addition, and add the vanilla. You may want to periodically scrape down sides of bowl with a rubber spatula.

Meanwhile, whisk together the flour(s), cornmeal, salt, baking powder, and nutmeg. Add the flour mixture to the batter in 3 parts, alternating with the buttermilk, starting and ending with flour. Make sure each addition is incorporated before adding next, but don't over-beat it at the end. Spread the batter in the prepared pan and smooth the top.

Bake until the top is puffed and golden brown and a tester inserted in the center comes out clean, about 35 minutes (Honestly, I just push the top gently with my fingertip and make sure it seems inclined to spring back). Serve warm or at room temperature, with lightly sweetened fruit (I added about a tablespoon of sugar to a pint of sliced strawberries and two sliced nectarines) and whipped cream. And don't be dismayed if the cake sinks significantly upon cooling: it might, and that's fine.

The Soup of 1000 Vegetables

"When it's over, I want to say: all my life

I was a bride married to amazement."

Those are lines from the Mary Oliver poem, "When Death Comes," which is a favorite of mine. I'm thinking of her because my children and mother and I went to hear her read last week, along with 2000 other amazed people, everyone with their souls flung open. Well, make that 1999. Birdy was too busy accidentally dropping her after-dinner mints on the floor and fretting over them to get her soul flung open. "I did not listen to one single word!" she boasted into the glorious night on the way back to the car. But my mum and I? Souls flung open. Ben and his friend Ava? Souls flung open. Ava's mother and I actually had to lean over all the children to hold hands and cry, so filled were we with our love for the world.

These lines, for instance, from the poem "Why I Wake Early":

"Watch, now, how I start the day

in happiness, in kindness."

Or these, from "The Summer Day," another favorite:

"Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?"

And what I plan to do with my one wild and precious life is nag my children over bowls of vegetable soup.

See, the problem with Mary Oliver is that you are expanded by her loveliness and love, her open heart and clarity. And when you contract again, around your own smallness? It is just about the worst thing--more humbling than if you'd just been your usual mix of petty and grateful to begin with. I don't know how to explain it. I guess it's just life, really--how you can boil up a huge pot of vegetable soup and feel, in your bones, your love for your children, your family, your life. You are making them this good and beautiful food! You are nourishing their bodies and souls! You are loving this world that grows this lovely food that you feed your lovely children! The soup cooks and exhales into your kitchen the steam of righteousness.

And then, well, the light is fading, and you are hoping to get some photos taken of the soup. And you don't know how to use your flash without making it look as if the bowl of soup is Brittany Spears climbing out of a limo into the lights of the paparazzi. And you call and call the kids, but they're busy with a game they're playing, cutting pandas out of paper, those bad kids. And then you speak sharply to them and they come to the table with their heads hung low, and they spoon up their soup while you nag them some more from behind the clicking shutter of your own self-importance: "When I call you to the table. . . " And the bucolic love-the-world soup turns into dinner at the gulag.

It takes only the most momentary lapse in kindness, doesn't it? To snuff the glow from your children's eyes? It is devastating, the power we have as parents. I vow, again, kindness only, to let the grace of them illuminate me and dispel the shadows of pettiness.

You know, and a really good bowl of soup (hello, segue!). I really meant to write about the soup itself, which is less of a recipe than a formula. And the formula is this: a beany something + a starchy something + a tomato something + loads of random veggies + broth. You begin sautéing whatever onion/garlic type thing you're going to use, and then you prep the veggies one at a time and add them to the pot and stir them as they're done. This is the method from an old Marcella Hazan minstrone recipe, and it's an economical use of your time, and also a great way to get lots of flavor into the soup, since everything gets to sauté for a nice long time. You can use any veggies here--I had tons of odds and ends leftover from our farm share and various cooking projects, but you could use just 2 or 3 different veggies, or dozens of them. Honestly. If I'd had celery I would have added it; if I had it to over, I would have nixed the sweet potato, which was a bit off-putting in its sweetish orange disintegration.

But the formula is very open to adaptation: the beany thing can be any kind of canned beans or chick peas, or else a large handful of lentils. The starchy thing can be barley or rice or pastina or Israeli couscous (which I used here), so long as you add enough liquid with it that as it cooks it doesn't sponge up every last drop of broth from the soup. And the tomato product could be a few tablespoons of paste or a cup of sauce or some chopped fresh or canned tomatoes; I used the sauce that had been delivered with our buffalo chicken calzone a few nights earlier. Seriously. And the broth is optional, but I always think of that one quart of broth as my gift to the soup; if it needs more liquid after that, it gets only water. You could add herbs if you like (though I usually don't) and you could garnish it with parmesan or croutons in addition to the olive oil. But mostly you just need a drawer full of aimless veggies and an hour and a half and an open heart. You need to start--and end--your soup in happiness, in kindness.

The Soup of 1000 Vegetables

Please note that this is not a real recipe as much as a description of how I happened to make this particular pot of soup. "I'm worried that your readers are going to go to the supermarket like those ingredients are a shopping list," Michael fretted. But you're not, right? Because you get that I just used what I already had. Right?

3 tablespoons olive oil

1 bunch leeks, including their greens, halved, washed well, and sliced thin

1/2 onion, diced

3/4 shallot, diced

Kosher salt

1 clove of garlic, chopped

2 carrots, diced

1 sweet potato, peeled and cubed

2 1/2 zucchini, diced

1/4 of a large green cabbage, slivered

1 handful of green beans, sliced into 1-inch pieces

2 potatoes, unpeeled and diced

1 kohlrabi, peeled and diced

1 beet, peeled and dived

A few leaves of kale, center ribs removed, stacked and rolled up and finely sliced

1 cup tomato sauce

1 quart chicken or vegetable broth 

4 cups water, divided use

1/2 cup Israeli couscous

1 14-ounce can Great Northern beans, with their liquid

1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar

More olive oil

In a very large soup pot or Dutch oven, heat the oil over medium-low heat and sauté the leeks, onion and shallot with 1 teaspoon of the kosher salt, stirring occasionally, while you start preparing the other vegetables. When the leeks and onions are wilted and translucent, around 5 minutes, begin adding the other vegetables as they're prepped, starting with the garlic, then adding them in vaguely the order listed, or else in some other order of your choosing, until they've all had a chance to be sautéed in the pot.

Now add the tomato sauce and the chicken broth, along with 2 cups of the water, raise the heat to high and bring the pot to a boil, then lower the heat to low, cover the pot with the lid just barely ajar, and cook the soup, stirring occasionally, for 1 hour.

Taste the soup, and add salt as needed, then add the remaining 2 cups of water, bring it to a vigorous boil, and stir in the couscous and the beans with their liquid and the vinegar. Cook another 20 minutes or so, until the pasta is tender. Serve, topping each bowlful with an additional spoonful of olive oil.

Tamale Pie

Birdy’s had a fever for four days; we’ve had bad news about work and money; Michael and I have been arguing in that gross hissing way where whenever the kids turn around you stop and smile those big fake smiles that make it look like you have twice your normal number of teeth. I actually love winter—it’s like one big long glittering-blue prelude to spring—but there’s something about these days that makes it feel like it’s always dinnertime and I always just want to lie on the couch with a beer and order a pizza. “Hmm,” I say, with my head in the freezer. “What have we got?” What we’ve got is ground beef frozen in one-pound packages. “This meat is from cows that actually lived happy lives,” I explained to the kids at our local farm’s meat sale a couple months ago. Ben raised his eyebrows. “Is that supposed to make it better? Because really, from the cow’s perspective, it kind of sounds worse, like, oh this cow was so joyful and glad before we sawed it into pieces for you to eat.” Point well taken. Still. We have a freezer full of meat is what I’m saying.

I like to wait until dinnertime to decide that we want to have meat for dinner, and then I like to expend a great deal of energy figuring out how to defrost it instantly. Why put it on the counter in the morning and have it be ready when you want to cook it? Why make life easy when you can Google “thaw meat quickly” and skim everyone’s absurd and Salmonellic strategies? Of course, the point here is that you’re taking advice from the very same people who were too disorganized in the first place to thaw the meat via any of the more traveled-on roads. “Oh just put the frozen block of it in the pan,” someone wrote. “And kind of scrape at it as it starts to cook.” And this, my friends, is what I did. Honestly? It was a little labor intensive, but it worked just fine.

Oh right—I still haven’t even mentioned the tamale pie. This is one of those straight-forward, inexpensive, one-pan meals that everybody loves. I can’t tell if it’s the word “pie” (“Kids, we’re having lint pie for dinner!” “Awesome!”) or if it’s the cornbread or if it’s the actual kernels of corn which, as you know, I take to be the proverbial spoonful of sugar as far as the medicine of dinnertime goes. “Can I have a little more please?” Ben always asks, with his mouth full, “And a little more? If there are leftovers, can I please take it for lunch tomorrow?” (“No, because I will have eaten it for breakfast,” doesn’t sound very maternal.) Tamale pie is just a good, basic dinner—nothing fancy, but well enough seasoned that even the grown-ups will be surprised by its deliciousness. Note: Tamale pie is not to be confused with Frito pie, which I ate once from a truck in Taos, New Mexico: a small bag of Fritos with a scoop of green-chile chili dumped in. You’ve never eaten a more perfect meal in your life. Even writing this now I drooled a little.

I swear, come summer, it will be salads and fresh vegetables around here, grilled this and raw that, all of it floating away on a rainbow of color and crispness. But right now this seems to be the “frozen corn and meat” column. It will also, as per your requests, become the “chicken breast and school lunch” column. But first, a little frozen corn and meat:

Tamale Pie

Serves 6

preparation time: 30 minutes; total time: 50 minutes

Use what you have: ground turkey, if that’s what you like, or crumbled tofu, whatever canned beans you have in the pantry, skipping the corn if you haven’t got any. And you could also season it differently, but try it this way first: it makes a mildly spicy meal that is pleasantly smoky and tangy but not overly complicated. You could of course use cumin or chili powder instead, and then it might taste more familiar to everybody. But try it this way first, with either the chipotle puree or the smoked paprika, both of which I wrote about in the dinner-bean column here. It is so, so good.

3 tablespoons canola oil, divided (Divided by what? You’ll see.)

1 smallish onion, chopped

1 large clove of garlic, finely chopped

1 pound ground beef (or turkey)

½ teaspoon chipotle puree or smoked paprika (or more to taste)

1 1/4 teaspoon kosher salt, divided

1 tablespoon plus1 teaspoon sugar, divided (Again. I know.)

2 teaspoons white vinegar

1 8-ounce can Hunts tomato sauce or a cup of another canned tomato product of your choosing

1 15-ounce can beans (I used pinto here, but black are good too, as are kidney)

2 cups frozen corn, thawed in a sieve under a hot tap

1/3 cup flour (I use spelt)

2/3 cups cornmeal

1 teaspoon baking powder

½ teaspoon salt

1 tablespoon sugar

½ cup buttermilk

1 egg

1 cup grated cheddar cheese

Heat the oven to 400. In a 10- or 12-inch heavy oven-proof pan, heat 1 tablespoon of the oil over medium-low heat and sauté the onions until they are translucent and browning around the edges—maybe 7 or 8 minutes (if your pan can’t go in the oven, simply transfer the cooked filling to a pie plate before spooning on the cornbread batter and baking). Add the garlic and sauté for another minute, then crumble in the ground meat, raise the heat to medium, and cook, stirring and breaking it up until it’s nice and browned and crumbly and does not look all raw-meaty. Stir in the chipotle puree, ¾ teaspoon of the salt, 1 teaspoon of the sugar, the vinegar, the tomato sauce, the beans, and the corn, and simmer all of it together for a few minutes until everybody in the pan gets well acquainted. 

Now whisk together the flour, cornmeal, remaining ½ teaspoon of salt and remaining tablespoon of sugar in one bowl, and whisk together the egg, buttermilk, and remaining 2 tablespoons of oil in another (I actually do this latter whisking right in the cup where I measured the buttermilk). Pour the liquids into the dries and combine with a few decisive strokes of a rubber spatula before stirring in half the cheese and pouring the mixture over the filling in the pan. It will figure itself out—you don’t need to fuss with it too much by way of smoothing etc. Top with the remaining cheese and bake 20 minutes—though you might want to check it at 15. When the cornbread is nicely browned and cooked-looking, it’s done.

Walnut-Orange Cake

It can be hard for families to let their members change. Have you noticed that? You will get an aquarium-themed calendar every year for the rest of your life because you had a neon tetra when you were ten. You will never be served orange juice again because you once threw it up in the car into a beach towel. In my family, I am still the person with a terrible sense of direction because I read a map wrong in Western Canada. 30 years ago. We may have made it eventually to Lake Louise, but I was to be stuck forever in the moment of mistaking a river for a highway. I was also The Walton Reporter for the duration of my childhood, nicknamed after a local paper and because of a brief tendency to pass noisy gas; the nickname long outlasted my switch to the Silent But Deadly style of flatulence.

Change and growth hurts everybody's feelings. "Chopped chicken liver is your favorite," my grandmother insisted with Slavic indignation to her baby, my grown dad, throughout my entire childhood. "I made it because you love it." "But walnuts hurt your mouth!" My mother said, when I described this cake over the phone. And this had, in fact, been true for much of my life. Walnuts made me feel like I'd flossed with concertina wire after glugging down a nice, quenching gulp of hydrochloric acid. I'm not sure why that was, and I'm not sure what changed. But something did. "You're a born-again walnut lover!" Michael says, when I sprinkle them over everybody's salads and pasta; he himself is only born-again walnut tolerater. But what does Michael know? He's a picky eater. Oh wait. No he's not. He was a picky eater when I met him, 20 years ago, back when he wouldn't eat any green vegetables that started with the letter A (asparagus, artichokes, arugula, avocadoes). Now he eats just about anything. But my family still treats him like a picky eater because a) he used to be, and b) he isn't crazy about--brace yourself--lox. What kind of person? Sure, now he eats whitefish salad and eel, calamari and monkfish. But what kind of person doesn't like lox? A picky eater, that's what kind.

All of this is to say that we're trying to practice a certain open-mindedness with our kids and their ways of being in the world. We are trying to let them move fluidly from one feeling to the next. "I'm really starting to understand celery," Ben announced over the weekend, after ten years of hating celery. "I get it--it's crunchy and has that refreshing taste." Good. I myself have, in the past couple of years, come around to eggplant, walnuts and, most recently, raw onions, which used to baffle me completely--as if people were studding perfectly good meals with little shards of sulfurous glass. Ben, an inveterate lettuce-shunner, awoke two years ago with a craving for salad and has been devouring it ever since. Birdy used to like scrambled eggs and now doesn't; Ben used to like poached eggs and now prefers them fried. One day we pick the bell peppers out of our salad because we can't stand to eat them; the next day we pick them out of your salad because we can't get enough. What's that Zen saying? Same river; different water.

Which is not why you should make this cake. You should make this cake because it's amazingly delicious: light and moist, tender and crunchy, orangey and just a little bit pleasantly oily. I made it because my friend Pengyew made it and it was incredible. Also because we had some less-than-stellar olive oil left over from our hair treatments a while back. "I used up the lice oil!" I boasted proudly, as everyone was eating the cake, and nobody even looked at me funny. I can't stop being crazy *now*. It would be too jarring.

Walnut-Orange Cake

Serves 8-10

Active time: 15 minutes; total time: 1 hour

This is a Bon Appetit recipe, and I have changed it only slightly by the addition of vanilla and--wait for it--salt. But seriously: a cake with no salt? What the? I love making the batter because you don't have to cream any butter or anything; you just pour in the oil. Plus, you can get your kids to do most of the work of zesting and juicing the oranges and dealing with the pan. Easy peasy.

1 1/2 cups chopped walnuts

1 cup all purpose flour (I use up to half spelt)

1 tablespoon baking powder

3/4 teaspoon kosher salt (or half as much table salt)

4 large eggs

1 1/2 cups sugar

1/2 cup fresh orange juice

1 tablespoon finely grated orange peel (I used the juice and grated zest of 1 large navel orange)

1/2 cup olive oil (I used fairly cruddy oil, but I bet it would be even better with great oil)

1 teaspoon vanilla

Powdered sugar

Heat the oven to 350. Spray a 9-inch-diameter springform pan with nonstick olive oil spray. Place a parchment paper round in the bottom of the pan and spray the paper. (Birdy traced the bottom of the pan, then cut it out with scissors.)

Grind the walnuts in a food processor (or blender) until finely ground but not powdery. Whisk together the ground walnuts, flour, baking powder, and salt in a medium bowl; set aside.

Using an electric mixer, beat the eggs in large bowl until frothy, about 2 minutes. Gradually add the sugar, and beat until light, thick, and pale yellow, about 4 minutes. Gradually add the walnut-flour mixture, then add the orange juice, orange peel, olive oil, and vanilla, and beat just until blended. Transfer the batter to the prepared pan. Place the pan on a rimmed baking sheet (a weeny bit of oil might leak out), and bake cake until tester inserted into center comes out clean, 50 minutes-1 hour; it will puff up and then sink, which seems to be okay. Cool the cake completely in its pan on rack. Unless you want to pull it all apart into raggedy pieces, in which case you should try to remove the pan while it's still hot. Sift powdered sugar over the cooled cake and serve. 

Buttermilk Pancakes

These are not the cakey kind of pancakes that you would describe as "light" or "fluffy." They're tangy, spongy, and damp--a little like the injera you might get at an Ethiopian restaurant to scoop your stew. Only not made from fermented teff. We looooove them. Everybody does. Try them, even if you have a mix that you like. They will take you, like, 11 seconds longer to measure and stir than a mix would, and they're stunningly delicious. Plus, if you have leftovers, you can seal them up in a Ziploc bag and pop them in the freezer, and then defrost them in your toaster oven for school-morning breakfasts. If we make pancakes on a Sunday, then we usually have enough leftover to get through Tuesday or so of the school week, which is pretty good, right?

Buttermilk Pancakes

Milk will make an okay pancake, but not a fabulously tangy one. Buy a quart of buttermilk and then plan to make cornbread with the leftovers. These pancakes are not sweet and we don't put fruit in them, but we do slather them with jam and syrup.

1 1/2 cups flour (I use, yes, half spelt)

1 1/2 tablespoons sugar

1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder

1/2 teaspoon kosher salt (or half as much table salt)

2 cups buttermilk

3 tablespoons butter, melted

2 large eggs

Butter

Jam and syrup for serving

Whisk together the dry ingredients in one bowl and the wet ingredients in another. If your buttermilk and eggs are cold, then the butter will kind of seize and clump, but you don't need to fret about it. Pour the wets into the dries and whisk it all until it's nice and smooth. If you like your pancakes thinnish, and we do, then the batter should be about the texture of thick paint; whisk in a little more buttermilk if it seems really thick. 

Now pour it into a squeeze bottle, if you like, or else scoop it directly onto the hot griddle. You know, the griddle that's been heating over medium heat until a flick of water bounces and steams on contact. Butter the griddle well and then begin pouring on your batter, using a third of a cup or so for each pancake, but really just kind of eyeballing it. 

When the pancakes are nice and bubbled on top and the undersides are brown, flip them and cook another minute or so to brown the bottoms lightly. Taste one: it should be nice and brown on the outside and nice and moist--but not raw--on the inside; if they're cooking too fast or too slow, adjust the heat accordingly. Rebutter the pan as needed between batches. If you like, you can keep the pancakes in a 200-degree oven until they're all cooked, or else serve them as they're ready, taking turns eating and manning the griddle. 

Adaptable Bean Dip

Black Bean Dip

This dip is really good made with white beans too—although then I usually add a little chopped rosemary and grated lemon peel, and I swap lemon juice in for the vinegar. Sometimes, when making either version, I briefly warm the garlic in the olive oil in a small pan over low heat; it mellows it a bit, which is nice. And sometimes I add a little chipotle puree or smoked paprika—but you probably already figure that out. Cilantro would be a yummy addition to the black bean dip, wouldn’t it? I should try that.

1 (15-ounce) can black beans, drained well

3/4 teaspoon kosher salt, more or less—depending on the saltiness of your beans (or half as much table salt)

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 tablespoon cider vinegar

1 small clove garlic, pressed (remove the green shoot first, if there is one)

Blend all the ingredients in a food processor until very smooth, adding a tablespoon or two of hot water if the beans seem disinclined to become creamy. Serve with tortilla chips, pita chips or whole-grain crackers, and raw veggies. 

Granola Bars

Granola Bars

Makes about 20 bars

Active time: 20 minutes; total time: 50 minutes.

This is my version of an excellent Ina Garten recipe--she's the Barefoot Contessa, and I really love her no-nonsense style of cooking and eating. Of course the flax seed is my own personal addition here (surprise!) as is the large-ish amount of salt (surprise!). Also, I believe she uses cranberries, but I love dried cherries, and continue to swear by buying them at Trader Joe's. Use whatever dried fruit you like. Once the bars are cooled and cut, I wrap them individually in wax or parchment paper. Which makes me sound even more like I need to get a life. (Note: these are less sweet without the sugar, but they don't stick together quite as confidently. You decide.)

2 cups rolled oats (not instant or quick)

1 cup sliced almonds

1 cup shredded coconut, loosely packed

1/2 cup toasted wheat germ

1/4 cup ground flax seed

3 tablespoons butter

2/3 cup honey

1/4 cup brown sugar (optional)

2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract

1 teaspoon kosher salt (or half as much table salt)

1/2 cup chopped pitted dates (we just use those rolled date pieces that look like rabbit turds)

1/2 cup chopped dried apricots (I prefer California apricots to Turkish: they're tangier)

1/2 cup dried cherries

Heat the oven to 350, butter an 8- by 12-inch baking dish, and line it with parchment paper.

Mix the oats, almonds, and coconut together on a sheet pan and bake for 10 to 12 minutes, stirring occasionally, until lightly browned, then transfer the mixture to a large mixing bowl and stir in the wheat germ and flax meal.

Reduce the oven temperature to 300.

Place the butter, honey, brown sugar, vanilla, and salt in a small saucepan and bring to a boil over medium heat. Cook and stir for a minute, then pour over the oat mixture and stir in the dates, apricots, and cherries. Stir well. Pour the mixture into the prepared pan. Even it out and press it flat with a spatula, then wet your fingers press it more firmly and evenly into the pan. Bake for 25 to 30 minutes, until light golden brown. Cool for at least 2 hours before cutting into squares or oblongs. Store airtight.

Simplest Carrot Salad

This nearly-instant recipe is infinitely adaptable: you can substitute lemon juice or vinegar for the lime juice, sugar for the honey, and tamari for the fish sauce, you can omit the peanuts, you can use your favorite green herb (honestly, in the winter I often use celery leaves from the inside of the bunch, because that’s what we have), and you can even add a splash of olive oil if the salad tastes too pickle-y to you.

¾ pound carrots (3 large)

Juice of half a lime plus a few gratings of its peel

A handful of salted, roasted peanuts, coarsely chopped

1 teaspoon honey

½ teaspoon Kosher salt

A handful of fresh mint (or cilantro, parsley, or celery leaves) chopped

Dash of Asian fish sauce or tamari (optional)

Wash or peel the carrots, and then grate them: I do this in my food processor, but you can do it quite easily on the large holes of a box grater. Stir in the remaining ingredients, then taste it: the salad should be tangy, sweet, and salty, and if it’s not, you might want to add more lime, honey, or salt accordingly. 

Pork So Good It Could Make You Cry

My friend Jonathan just lovingly accused me of being a porkophile, and he's right--though it's a bit of the pot calling the kettle a pot, or whatever, given that this man just raised and butchered five enormous pigs. Be that as it may, pork has situated itself in some of the most wildly memorable eating experiences of my life: at this Chinese-Cuban place in New York City, for instance, where the not-overly-inspiringly-named "Fried Pork Chunks" turn out to be crispy, golden, melting cubes of pork fat--like bacon, but with only the vaguest striations of actual meat. Wow. Or Tacos Vallarta in Santa Cruz, where a carnitas taco arrives as a pair of corn tortillas mounded with so celestial a mix of succulently tender shreds and richly crunchy hunks that angels sing the Hallelujah Chorus above your head while you eat, drowning out the reality show that is likely playing loud on TV ("Ay Caramba!" Michael still likes to say, in perfect imitation of the perky voice-over on a clip of a man getting gored to death by a bull). Or this crazy no-name barbeque place that my brother took us to in Atlanta, where the vinegary ribs had been cooked so long and so well that the meat pulled off the bones in chewy, dryish sheets of excellence that were like a cross between barbeque and the jerky that Willy Wonka would make, if Willy Wonka ever dabbled in pork.

If you are still reading, that means that you are addicted to porkographic websites, and should seek help. But it also means that this recipe might be up your alley (Is it just me, wondering about that expression? "I've got something here that might be right up your alley!" Michael likes to say, lewdly.) This is my friend Pengyew's recipe, and given that he's a professional chef, his version is insane: he makes it with tiny spare ribs, and you get served an artful few on a plate with a drizzle of mustard sauce--and then you start to look around to see if there are any crazy-heads at the table you should befriend because they aren't going to finish theirs; they are to Chinese take-out ribs what a diner tuna melt is to. . . a diner tuna melt, because really that's as good as it gets. Bad analogy. They're the Chinese take-out ribs you would get in heaven, where you might stop eating Vallarta carnitas for long enough to try one.

But I don't make this recipe Pengyew's way, partly because I don't have the patience to glaze all those little ribs, and partly because I am cheap, so I make it with country ribs, which are an inexpensive and misleadingly named cut of meat. They're actually nothing like ribs; they're fatty, bony slabs of pork that are inclined to cook down into rich, succulent shreds, which is a quality I really value in a cut a pork. And this recipe is almost weirdly straightforward: you don't even brown the meat, you just dump it all into a pot and simmer the heck out of it, then you pull out all the weird pieces of bone (it's fine if your country ribs are boneless), then you cook it some more until the liquid has reduced to a glaze, and the pork is a mix of chunks and shreds that are now frying in their own fat. Yowza.

Serve it over rice, or use it as a taco or quesadilla filling; your kids will love it because it's perfectly sweet and salty, with an intoxicating hint of that Chinese ginger-scallion seasoning. And once you've made it, you should try making it other ways. My friend Nicole (the other half of the pig couple), just made it, swapping in orange and lime juice, sliced onions and garlic, and a jar of green salsa for the other seasoning ingredients (you still need the water). When we served the tacos made out of it, a hush fell over the table, which is an unusual phenomenon with kids. "The pork is really good," Ben said. The same Ben who gets skinnier by the second despite the fact that he eats like a polite teenaged horse. "Is anyone going to eat that?" he asked, with his mouth full, gesturing at the last taco with the hand that wasn't already holding a taco, and Nicole said, "Go for it, Ben."

Chinese-Style Carnitas

Serves 8

Active time: 15 minutes; total time 3 1/2 hours

Time is the only hard part of this recipe: it simply takes a while to cook. However, we have pressure cooked it, which can turn that first hour and half into something more like a half hour; you still need to simmer it afterwards to reduce the liquid in the pot. Likewise, you could likely accomplish the initial simmer in a Crockpot, but you'd want to reduce the cooking liquid afterwards.

4 pounds country-style pork ribs (with or without bones)

1/2 cup soy sauce or tamari

1/2 cup sherry or rice wine

1/3 cup sugar

6 1-inch pieces of ginger, peeled and smashed with the side of a heavy knife

6 scallions, white and green parts both, cut into 1-inch lengths

6 cups water

Combine all the ingredients in a large pot and bring to a boil, covered, over high heat. Turn the heat down to a simmer and cook, covered, for 1 1/2 hours. Uncover and cook for another 1 1/2 hours, or until the meat is fully tender and falling off the bones, and there is barely any liquid left in the pot. Cool briefly, then pull the meat off the bones with tongs or two forks, discarding any fat or ginger hunks or other unappetizing lumps of anything you might come up. Return the meat to the cooking liquid in the pot, bring it back to a simmer, and simmer, stirring occasionally at first and then frequently as the liquid evaporates (you have to be super-careful that it doesn't burn at this point), until the meat is glazed and frying in its own fat; if you want the meat juicier and saucier, then skip this last step. Drain off any residual fat and serve.

Cherry-Apricot Crumble

"Oh it's just so delicious, it's bursting with fruity yumminess and caramelized brown sugar topping that's just so tasty with the fruity juices mixing with the buttery, crumbly topping. . . mmm." I have asked Michael if he can think of any good crumble stories, and this is what he says. "Honey, that's not really a story," I say, and he says, "Oh. A story. Right. How it's even better than pie?" And they lived happily ever after!

The thing is, crumble is even better than pie. And I say this as a person who really loves pie. But also as a person who sometimes gets called "The Crumble Queen," so there you go. This particular crumble is my very favorite, and this is the exact right time to make it as I'm seeing tons of cherries and apricots everywhere. But when cherry and apricots are gone, you can make it with peaches and blueberries, though you'll want to increase the flour and sugar a bit to compensate for the juiciness and tartness. Oh, but try to make this version if you can: the fruit is so insanely gorgeous--at all turns a mix of bright orange and deep red--and it goes so beautifully with that meltingly crisp, brown-sugary crumb topping. It's based on a recipe from the original Greens cookbook, and I've been making it for, gulp, 15 years now, and it is the very best crumble I ever make, which is saying a lot, given my infatuation with rhubarb. Okay, maybe it is tied with rhubarb.

Of course--and here's the story, but I promise it's short--I cannot make anything with apricots and not fall into fits of nostalgia over Santa Cruz, and the house we lived in with our friend Sam, which has an heirloom apricot tree in the front yard. Come July, apricots started thudding to the ground like hail, these small and comically freckled apricots that looked sort of unripe and homely, only then you'd split them open with your thumbs and they'd be bursting with juice and as flavor, like all the apricots in the world had been distilled into a single piece of deceptively unattractive fruit. If you live somewhere that grows Blenheim apricots? (i.e. California), I recommend gorging on them in great excess until the season ends, even if it requires sneaking into a neighbor's yard. They probably have so many they won't even notice.

And another thing I recommend? Inviting a pregnant woman to live in your home. I simply can't imagine anything more delightful than preparing food for a person who falls into basketball-bellied fits of rapture every time a spoon enters her mouth. I swear Anni stopped eating only to blot at her eyes with a napkin, tears of crumbly happiness leaking onto her face. But then again, Michael himself was literally groaning. "This is the best thing you make," Ben said, and I said, "Really?" and he said, "Probably not, but that's how I'm feeling right now." And I have only one question: Is he my kid or what?

Cherry-Apricot Crumble

Serves 4-8, depending

Active time: 25 minutes; total time: 70 minutes

Filling:

2 pounds of apricots

1 pound of cherries

1/4 cup (scant) flour

1/3 cup sugar

Topping:

3/4 cup flour

1/2 cup brown sugar

1/4 teaspoon salt

1 stick (1/2 cup) cold salted butter, cut into small pieces

Heat the oven to 400. Halve the apricots, pit them, then halve them again into quarters (or, if they're not super-ripe, slice them up a bit more). Pit the cherries. Combine the fruit with 1/4 cup flour and 1/3 cup sugar in a bowl, then tip it into a baking dish. (Don't fret if there's some dry flour and sugar kicking around--it will all dissolve as it cooks.)

Make the topping: Combine the flour, brown sugar, and salt in a mixing bowl, then add the butter and work it in with your fingers: first toss to coat it with the flour mixture, then take off your rings and use your fingertips to rub the butter into the dry ingredients. This is a messy but not unpleasant job: you'll be lifting handfuls of the mixture up out of the bowl, then gently letting it fall through your fingertips as you rub it lightly together. Eventually, you'll have a bowl full of clumpy lumpy crumble topping. (Today when I did this, it was so hot in the kitchen that the butter got really soft, but this didn't seem to cause a problem, except that it all stuck to my fingers.)

Crumble the, er, crumble over the, uh, crumble, then bake it in the oven for 40-45 minutes until it is browned and bubbling. Serve hot, warm, room temperature, or cold with ice cream or whipped cream.