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From Recipes
Posted by Robin Bellinger, May 13, 2008 at 12:30 PM
Has your baby reached the "papaya" stage? Image from The Nest
Earlier in my pregnancy I kept coming across books and websites that would inform me of baby’s current size by comparing her to a fruit or vegetable. This struck me as very funny, and I kept hoping to find or create a website that laid all those yummy baby sizes out in a week-by-week parade of fruit.
Sure enough, someone had already done it: I discovered this baby/fruit chart at The Nest while conducting my ceaseless research about what infant paraphernalia we actually need and what we can skip. Apparently our baby is now the size of a papaya, soon to move into eggplant territory. Yes, I’m trying to ignore that alarming watermelon looming in the future. Meantime, here is a recipe for papaya sorbet in honor of baby Bellinger.
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From Recipes
Posted by Robin Bellinger, May 12, 2008 at 1:00 PM
Lately I’ve been wondering if I should add "freezing food in individual portions" to my list of interests on Facebook. For one long, dark year I lived in a Park Slope studio with no freezer, unable to save leftovers and frequently forced to eat entire pints of ice cream in a single sitting. Ever since I have appreciated my freezer and used it as much as possible, although the serving size of ice cream that satisfies me now remains tragically huge.
Since I don’t always have the time or ingredients to pack even a sandwich, my frozen stash of soup, stew, and other leftovers has often been the only thing standing between me and a mediocre but depressingly expensive business-district lunch. Although some things (especially potato-based soups, in my experience) suffer for having been frozen, most come out just fine and are given additional relish by the thrill (okay, for me) of enjoying the fruits of my earlier labor.
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From Recipes
Posted by Robin Bellinger, May 11, 2008 at 4:00 PM
For the last year or two I’ve been obsessed with the idea of floating island even though I had never tasted it. It’s an old-fashioned dessert that sounded to me like pure delight: chunks of caramel-drizzled meringue in a puddle of crème anglaise. I’m neutral when it comes to meringue but figured that any dish involving a sea of crème anglaise had to be right for me.
Afraid that my dark-chocolate-loving husband would turn up his nose at the combination of vanilla custard, caramel, and fluff, last week I made it for my family in Houston. Reader, this involved a lot of time standing at the stove patiently stirring and vigilantly watching the candy thermometer. And then the meringues didn’t really succeed. My mother and I dished it up anyway. And?
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From Recipes
Posted by Robin Bellinger, May 7, 2008 at 2:00 PM
The first time I really sat down and read Entertaining was when I was planning my wedding. I opened it looking for ideas and closed it thinking, “Yes, I could make all the food for our wedding, wouldn’t that be personal and fun?” Everyone talked some sense into me, thank goodness, and my self-catering ambitions were quietly dropped.
Don’t let this story deter you. Among the delusion-inspiring accounts of “Desserts for Forty: Soirée Dansante” and “Cocktails for Two Hundred: Country Fare,” one can find in this book ideas for relatively simple dinners at home. Last week I made tomato soup and French bread. I was too tired to make the green salad I had planned, but with a piece of Gruyère the soup and bread made a very pleasing meal indeed.
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From Recipes
Posted by Robin Bellinger, May 6, 2008 at 12:45 PM
Baby is kicking every day now and already has a couple of toys and some astonishingly pretty clothes, which for some reason makes her seem much more real. I’m dying to know what she’ll be like and what her tastes will be. Will she be interested when I try to share all the books I loved as a little girl? Will she be a happy and adventurous eater, or is there a lot of coaxing in my future?
Two years ago a friend’s four-year-old daughter won my heart with her spontaneous request that I read to her from Little House in the Big Woods. Then she charmed me by showing me around her father’s beautiful vegetable garden, capping the tour with the eager exclamation, “Let’s eat some chard!” Andrew thinks involving children in gardening gives them an investment in eating their vegetables, and we hope someday to live near a patch of soil that will allow us to test that theory. In the meantime, chard-eating children remain an obsession of mine, although I’m pretty sure we’ll think baby is brilliant and perfect even if she eventually begs for Bratz dolls and Kraft singles instead of books and leafy greens. I hear that’s what it’s like to be a parent.
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From Recipes
Posted by Robin Bellinger, May 5, 2008 at 3:45 PM
For a month or two now I have been searching for an Asian or Asian-y noodle dish that would make a nice lunch. A few candidates didn't pan out, and the one that did was a soup, which I know some people don't care to bother packing up for work. Finally, though, Deborah Madison came through with her refreshing salad of chilled mung bean noodles with dulse and crushed peanuts from Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone.
I'm afraid it looks as if this week is going to be rainy in New York, but for those of you with happier weather, this is just the thing to eat outside on a warm day: cool, full of bright flavors, satisfying without being heavy. I liked the generous dose of raw ginger, but people who find that kind of thing overwhelming might want to start with 1 teaspoon and work their way up. I also added a few dashes of soy sauce and would not have minded a little more spice; maybe I'll leave the jalapeño seeds in next time. This noodle salad keeps in the refrigerator for four or five days, in my experience, and travels quite well: last week I enjoyed it on an airplane while everyone else made do with a doll-sized bag of pretzels.
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From Recipes
Posted by Robin Bellinger, May 2, 2008 at 1:30 PM
Since I was raised on wonderfully lardy, cheesy Tex-Mex, it took me a while to come around to the ungloppy goodness that is a fish taco. In the early 1990s fish tacos became something of a craze in Houston, if I remember correctly, but I was not on board. In my wisdom and maturity today, however, I embrace all foods Mexican or Mexican-ish, including tortillas (corn or flour) full of fish (fried or grilled) and slaw (or salsa, or avocados, or whatever feels right).
This is the sort of thing a competent and intuitive cook can put together with no recipe. I have made brilliant fish tacos off the top of my head, but I have also made some less satisfying ones, with poorly cooked fish or unbalanced flavors. When I can get it right every time, I will know that I have arrived as a home cook. Until then, I rely on recipes to reorient me when I get off track. This is my current favorite. It's fast and fairly healthy but always feels somehow celebratory to me.
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From Required Eating
Posted by Robin Bellinger, April 29, 2008 at 2:45 PM
Eat more breakfast and you could have a boy!
Last week news outlets from here to Islamabad announced the release of a study purporting to show that women with higher caloric intake and better nutrition at the time of conception are more likely to have boys than girls. Although it’s the father’s sperm that determines the sex of an embryo, the mother’s body can be more or less well suited to that embryo’s thriving.
Goodness knows I’m no scientist, but I’m fairly skeptical about these conclusions. The amount of extra calories that encouraged male embryos seemed rather small, maybe just a few hundred. Perhaps because my own daily caloric intake can swing a few hundred up or down based on one or two small choices, I find it hard to believe that most people eat with reliable consistency. What’s more, the study was based on the women’s own accounts of their diets, and people are famously bad at this kind of self-reporting. I wonder, though, if women desperate for boys will start loading up on cereal and bananas now, and potential mothers yearning for girls will start skipping breakfast.
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From Recipes
Posted by Robin Bellinger, April 28, 2008 at 1:30 PM
While I’ve been going on and on here about the pleasures of a thoughtfully packed lunch, I have not revealed a shameful truth: at the moment the only lunch I make is my own. My husband is in the home stretch of medical school, which means that he spends long days in hospitals with little time for indulgences such as "lunch." Most days they're given some kind of greasy Chinese food or inferior pizza to wolf down during a midday meeting, and the rest of the time lunch is catch as catch can. My impression is that sitting down and unpacking tasty leftovers or even a good-looking sandwich would be suspect, food being decidedly too frivolous to concern a busy MD (or MD-to-be).
So Andrew asked me to buy him some energy bars, which I have always regarded with distaste and even suspicion. I just don’t think they count as food. I soon discovered that they are rather expensive, and what's more, many of them contain tree nuts, to which Andrew is deathly allergic. Wouldn’t it be more sensible to make something myself, and wouldn’t I feel better about it?
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From Recipes
Posted by Robin Bellinger, April 25, 2008 at 12:45 PM
Since the thought of another pile of paper to manage makes me cringe, I don’t keep a file of recipe clippings for the future. I can’t remember, then, what prompted me to pull this recipe from Mark Bittman’s column in the New York Times a few years ago, but some part of me must have known that his baked ziti would become my most popular dish.
Unsophisticated and absurdly easy to whip up, baked ziti presents difficulty only to those of us who have trouble managing our greed. Since the measurements are so round, I don’t even have to check the recipe before I go to the store: 1 pound sausage, 1 pound pasta, 1 pound cheese, 1 can tomatoes. It freezes beautifully, which makes it the nicest of emergency dinners for nights when you’re too busy to cook but want something nicer than a tangle of sad pad thai.
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The Ten Most Recent Comments By Robin Bellinger
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Website: http://robinheather.typepad.com/go
Location: New York City
About: I spend most of my time daydreaming about what I'm going to make for dinner and wondering whether it's about time to bake some cookies.
Favorite foods: steak, apples, bread and butter, gruyere, potatoes, Tex-Mex in Houston, hamburgers, milkshakes, sauteed leafy greens, salty caramels, grilled cheese, diner food in general, homemade strawberry shortcake, pound cake, vanilla ice cream
Last bite on earth: still-warm bread with really good butter...or maybe a caramel, because I'd get to chew it a while before I went!