Man With a Pan (31 page)

My kids are not very excited about cooking right now, which is interesting because usually kids like to be involved in activities that their parents model. This is OK for now because involving kids in anything makes it more time consuming. I’m often in a hurry. I move very, very, very fast. I drink a lot of caffeine. I’m currently working to see if it is possible to inject espresso directly into a vein. More often I just go for a triple espresso instead of a double. At some point, though, it will make sense for me to involve the kids in the cooking, just for their own growth.

Anytime that it’s warm enough to grill, which for us means April to November, I will marinate a whole salmon and grill it. Then I like to make a big garden salad, with a dressing of olive oil, lemon, and salt. I’ll serve it with a bowl of pasta with some sort of sauce, typically something easy like a pesto, and then a side of some kind of vegetables. One of my favorite things to do with the grill is to marinate some zucchini and grill it. If you slice them lengthwise, they grill up very nicely. This is an easy meal. Since I’m grilling, there’s not so much cleanup to do. It’s healthy and really quite good and it’s one of our standard dishes for guests because they always like it quite a bit.

In my youth, I encountered overcooked broccoli with some regularity, and it traumatized me so much that I could not eat broccoli for the next twenty years. I make a great broccoli rabe. You want to start with a nice, bushy green. When rabe is starting to go bad, the leaves start to get trimmed, and it becomes a tighter bunch. A nice, fresh rabe will have a bunch of leaves. As with any green, you should look for something that has good color and a nice appearance. Once you have your rabe, it’s really quite simple to prepare. Rinse it, chop off the bases of the stem, much as you would for regular broccoli. The bottoms tend to be tough. Some people like them, some people don’t. Take the big bunch in your hand and chop it into one-and-a-half-inch segments. One of my general rules is that anything with enough garlic is delicious. Sauté garlic in olive oil and then toss the rabe in. Add just a little bit of water to create a steaming effect. Stir it for maybe five to ten minutes, just like a stir-fry, then pull out a piece and test it. Don’t let it become soggy and mushy. Not many people like broccoli that is overcooked.

One of the best reasons to cook is that if you’re going to go out to dinner and spend a lot of money and a lot of time, and you have high culinary expectations, you’ll almost certainly be disappointed. Either the time or the money or the dish will not be worth it. So it makes a lot more sense to cook for yourself because then you won’t be disappointed. Anyone who enjoys cooking develops a sense of what will work. When there’s time, which oftentimes is not when you have kids, but sometimes, you can create your own fantasy meal. My fantasy meal is not about the ingredients. It’s about the prep and the cleanup. Having the prep and the cleanup done for me, that’s my fantasy.

Recipe File

Spinach-Basil Pesto

1 medium-size head of basil
An equal amount of spinach
½ cup nuts (Pine nuts are popular, although walnuts work equally well. I’ve also used pecans or almonds, which result in a slightly sweeter pesto.)
½ cup olive oil

Rinse and wash the greens well.

Place them in a food processor or blender. (If the stems of the basil are tender, they can be tossed in also; late in the season, stems are often woody and should be discarded.)

Add the nuts and oil and blend for about twenty seconds.

Note: Most recipes call for adding ½ cup of Parmesan, but I think it works fine without it. This is also true for adding a clove of crushed garlic. Add salt to taste. Most important part: after blending, taste and add what you think it needs! For a creamier pesto, add more nuts and/or olive oil and blend longer.

Bruschetta

Crusty bread, sliced
2 large tomatoes, diced
½ cup olive oil
1 to 2 cloves garlic, crushed
Salt to taste

Toast the bread in the oven until slightly browned.

Combine the tomatoes, oil, garlic, and salt.

Drizzle the mixture over the bread once it is toasted.

Broccoli Rabe

Olive oil
2 large heads of broccoli rabe, washed and diced
1 head of garlic, chopped
Lemon juice and salt to taste

Sauté the garlic in a little oil in a large pan.

Add the rabe and cook until the stems are tender (usually about 5 to 10 minutes—pull one out and take a bite to see how they are doing).

Add salt and lemon juice to taste.

Note: This is traditionally served as a side, but it is great over pasta (fettuccine works well). For an added twist, sauté a few diced porto-bello mushrooms and add them to the rabe.

MICHAEL RUHLMAN

How Many Parents Does It Take to Roast a Chicken?

Michael Ruhlman is the author of nine nonfiction books on subjects as diverse as life at a wooden boatyard, the world of pediatric heart surgery, and the work of the professional chef; he is the coauthor of seven cookbooks. His most recent book is
Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking.
He lives in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, with his wife and two children.

In my prekid days, I lived with my wife in a shaded little bungalow in Palm Beach. The evenings were balmy, and I thought nothing of getting dinner rolling, then coaxing my wife, or trying to, into a little preprandial fling. What better way could there have been to pass the time while the charcoal turned to burger-searing embers? There was no better appetizer, and the meal afterward was remarkably satisfying. The conversation that followed had an uncommon ease.

Now that I’m a parent, the evenings are filled with something more than warm breezes. Family life can feel like a gale-force event. Forget creatively trying to pass the time. Just sitting down to dinner seems to eat up the clock. But not long ago, on a tear on my blog about the way food companies try to convince us that cooking is too hard to do on our own and that we’re too stupid to succeed, I dashed off a recipe that included a hard-earned suggestion. I had learned by now that to recapture and maintain the excitement of my relationship takes planning. In this case, though, not much. With a little invention, a simple roast chicken—one of the great staples of cooking life—becomes something entirely new.

Roast Chicken for Two

Step 1: Preheat your oven to 425°F or, if you have ventilation, 450°F, and use convection heat if it’s available.

Step 2: Wash and pat dry a 3- to 4-pound chicken. Truss it if you know how, or stuff 2 lemon halves in its cavity. Season it aggressively with kosher or sea salt (it should have a nice crust of salt). Put it in a skillet and slide it into the hot oven.

Step 3: Have sex with your partner. (This can require planning, occasionally some conniving. But as cooks tend to be resourceful and seductive by nature, most find that it’s not the most difficult part of the recipe.)

Step 4: Remove the chicken from the oven after it’s cooked for 1 hour, allow it to rest for 15 minutes, and serve.

Properly executed, such a dish is extraordinary—economical, satisfying, not overly caloric, fun to prepare (in fact, worth making simply to pursue step 3), and potentially a valuable recipe in your weekly cooking routine.

I’m not speaking with tongue in cheek. I’m actually—strongly and earnestly—recommending you make sex a part of the routine of cooking. My idea proved very popular; it was gleefully retweeted. Perhaps it is a novel idea, though I daresay it received attention only because of our lack of imagination and the general prudery embedded in the American psyche. One commentator, apparently quite enthralled by the notion, has gone so far as to pair specific sexual acts with specific cooking techniques on a blog (a little on the obsessive-compulsive side, but nothing to fault).

Perhaps people have been so quick to embrace this idea because they sense it is both a literal and a figurative expression of important, possibly universal, truths: that the act of cooking and the act of non-reproductive sex share similar traits and have similar results. Cooking, like sex, is good for your marriage.

Humans are the only animals to cook their food, and aside, perhaps, from the bonobos deep in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, we are the only animal that has sex for fun. Virtually every other behavior we engage in can be found in our cousins lower down the food chain. Examples abound in the natural world of primates who express emotions, use language, act aggressively among themselves, show sympathy, and even exhibit what behavioral psychologists call theory of mind—that is, they are aware of another animal’s consciousness and possible motives and actions.

Humans are animals, so it is not a surprise that nothing we do or express isn’t also done or expressed elsewhere in the animal kingdom. Cooking—and having sex for fun–is what makes us human.

To deny ourselves either diminishes the creatures that we are, and to practice both with greater frequency and competency deepens our humanity, which leads to a more fulfilling life. All good things. Roast chicken and sex. They’re good for you!

The editor of this volume has noted studies that suggest that men who participate more actively in the life and work of a house (a large part of which involves cooking, or should, at any rate) have happier and more sexually satisfied marriages. Other studies suggest that stress is countered by the smells of food cooking in a home, which are received by the brain’s limbic system (the ancient part of our mind, which stimulates our parasympathetic nervous system); in other words, the smells of cooking relax us, put us at ease, though we are rarely conscious of it. Did you ever wonder why, at every party, the kitchen is the most crowded room? Why it’s a pleasure to walk into a home when a roast is in the oven or a Bolognese is simmering on the stove? Bills are easier to pay when short ribs are braising. A working kitchen is a natural stress reducer.

This is a book of men’s stories about cooking, by men who clearly like to have sex, which, on occasion, ends up being of the reproductive sort. This results in little feet in the kitchen, little feet that get bigger and can often make cooking more difficult and less frequent and put the kibosh on carnal freedom in the house.

During the early years of raising kids, when kids rise at all hours or join the two of you in bed, lovemaking is erratic and chances must be grabbed when opportunity arises. Cooking is similarly difficult, frustrating, and often less successful when children are underfoot. I can’t help you here. The spoils go to the clever and the resourceful. Most couples, I hope, quickly learn to take advantage of their toddlers’ midday naps. The maxim is, sleep when the baby sleeps. Take that as you will.

As the kids age, though, and develop routines of their own, you can make use of those rare, valuable hours when they are out of the house by cooking for one another, sharing a meal, lingering at the table with some cheese and another glass of wine. Then, if all has gone well, repair to the bedroom to complete the fine occasion you’ve made for yourselves.

Too often, couples with kids, couples who are busy working and busy taking care of those kids, use what little free time they have to go out, to go to a party, to do any number of social activities that further prevent them from connecting. Most evenings, by the time our kids are in bed, Donna and I are too tired to do anything more than watch an hour of unchallenging television. Not the best time for cooking, or for sex.

Which is why I recommend a midweek lunch at home at least twice a month for couples with kids. Once the kids are regularly gone during the day, carve out two hours (more if you can swing it) to rendezvous at home. The home itself will be strangely, wonderfully peaceful. Neither you nor your partner will be exhausted; instead, you’ll still be fairly fresh and energetic—it’s time for lunch, after all. Whichever one of you is the cook, make something simple. My most frequent choice is a salad of arugula or frisée with fat bacon lardons, a poached egg on top, a fresh baguette with butter, and a very good pinot noir or Shiraz (this is the time to have a decent bottle, when you can really appreciate it). Donna will open the wine, set the table, light votives (we always have candles—even in brightest summer, there’s something about live flames dancing). If Donna finishes getting ready before I do, she tosses the salad and we talk while I poach the eggs.