November 1, 2009
Posted by Matthew Amster-Burton, March 5, 2009 at 10:00 AM
My daughter and I eat a lot of scrambled eggs for breakfast, and I make them over medium-high heat and get them in and out of the pan as fast as possible. But according to Food Network host Tyler Florence, whose son Hayden (19 months) is also an egg aficionado, I’m doing it wrong.
“My son, he loves scrambled eggs,” said Florence when I spoke to him on the phone recently. “Farm-fresh organic eggs, a little bit of whole milk, two tablespoons of butter and a nonstick pan. Cook eggs at a low temperature, because the temperature reacts with the protein in eggs and makes them very rubbery. Light, fluffy, billowy eggs, that is achieved with a low, slow cooking process.”
This is how they make scrambled eggs in France, often to showcase luxurious ingredients like truffles or lobster, and exactly the opposite of how I make them at home. So I gave it a try. The eggs were more flavorful and buttery, but they took ten minutes to make and my daughter and I both, no surprise, preferred the chunky texture of the eggs we’re used to.
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Posted by Matthew Amster-Burton, February 23, 2009 at 3:40 PM
©iStockphoto.com/YinYang
Did you know you can commission custom fortune cookies for a gag gift or fundraiser? My friend’s son’s elementary school did it. Who do you think can write better fortunes, professional cookie scribes or a bunch of kids?
If you guessed “a bunch of kids,” you’re right. Here are some actual fortunes they wrote.
A big whale falls from the sky and squashed you until you’re pretty much dead. Not completely dead, but pretty much.
I hate it when that happens, but it’s nothing compared to this debacle:
In five minutes, you will be attacked by a pear. It will eat you because you were going to eat it.
In the immortal words of Shakespeare: Exit, pursued by a pear.
But nothing prepared me for my own personal fortune, which was written by a first-grade girl who has probably already gone on to write a bestselling series of horror novels.
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Posted by Matthew Amster-Burton, December 31, 2008 at 11:30 AM
Sadly, I noticed this too late to put it on a Christmas list, but it’s not too early to start next year’s list. Not my daughter’s list. Mine.
It’s a plush doner kebab sandwich. “The fuzzy cloth pita opens up to reveal all the fixings necessary for a traditional gyro, including lamb meat, tomato slices, onion rings, lettuce, and pepperoncini. Don’t like onions in your kebab? Take ‘em out!” If there’s one thing I hate on my sandwich, it’s polyester onions.
Like all toys, this one comes with a warning: “This gyro has such a delicious appearance that they should be kept away from small children, lest they mistake the play food for the real thing.”
I think this is a good idea. My daughter is five, but I don’t want to take any chances. After I get my toy doner kebab, I’m going to play with it all day and refuse to share.
One other advantage of the toy kebab. “There’s nothing like eating an amazing doner kebab and then walking into a room where someone tells you exactly what you just ate from only smelling it on you,” wrote Jenn Sit in her East Village eats roundup last January. “This is the magic of doner kebab.” The toy doesn’t have this problem.
Toy food sure has come along way since the days of plastic french fries, hasn’t it?
Posted by Matthew Amster-Burton, October 27, 2008 at 4:15 PM
What should your 2- to 5-year-old eat, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture? Beats me, because its website seems to have been put together by 2- to 5-year-olds, and when I tried to generate a custom pyramid for my 4-year-old daughter, all I got was “Could not download Redirect.aspx.” Maybe it will work better for you: Food Pyramid for Preschoolers
I’m having a hard time understanding who this material is geared toward, other than fans of Comic Sans. According to the Chicago Tribune, “The new MyPyramid for Preschoolers is intended to help parents make better food choices for preschool children, aged 2 to 5 years—a critical time when food habits and taste preferences are established.”
Really?
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Posted by Matthew Amster-Burton, October 16, 2008 at 9:00 AM
Editor's Note: To continue our Halloween coverage, Matthew Amster-Burton shares this holiday cupcake idea for the kids: black cat cupcakes.
"My corporate overlords at Serious Eats have demanded a Halloween post," I told my daughter, Iris, 4. "What's something we could make together to eat for Halloween?"
"How about an edible cat?" she replied.
"That sounds hard."
"We could use cupcakes." This is her solution to everything.
We wanted them to be black cats, of course, but my wife Laurie reminded me that black food coloring tastes terrible, so we decided on dark chocolate frosting. (Chocolate is my solution to everything.) For tails and whiskers, we'd use black licorice whips. For the ears, wedges of York peppermint patties. And for the eyes, white M&M's. At the party store near our house, they have one of those M&M's displays where you can choose from over a dozen colors. "We should get a few blue, just in case," said Iris.
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