Denise’s Kitchen

Yum! Scallops! I love scallops when they’re fresh and cooked well. I think a lot of people just “think” they don’t like scallops because they’ve ordered them in a restaurant that has left them sitting around in the fridge for a few days so they lose the fresh taste of the ocean (and a good scallop should always taste of the open sea). Another problem with serving scallops is that they’re easy to overcook, which makes them rubbery, so people think they don’t like the texture. Fresh scallops cooked perfectly are a tasty treat and I hope that even if you’ve been burned by bad scallops in the past, you’ll give cooking them a try. If you’re at the stove, you have control over the quality and how long they’re cooked, so you can cook them to perfection.

Okay — back to MY meal. I saw some delicious-looking large white scallops yesterday and decided I had to have them. The great thing about cooking scallops is that they cook quickly, so making them means I can make dinner in a flash. The only problem with making scallops is that I love them with a little crushed red pepper, which my kids will definitely not eat. I therefore have to cook them in two batches. It adds about five minutes to the overall cooking time, but as my girls end up happy and I end up with some spice in my meal, we’re all satisfied.

The cooking method I use for my daughters’ scallops is inspired by Mark Bittman’s recipe for scallops with heavy cream (at New York Times Online), although I don’t use white wine and I don’t clean out the pan and I also don’t do a lot of other stuff. It’s a kids meal, so I make it tasty and fast and as easy as possible. I sometimes make my husband’s and my scallops using his recipe as well, but as he uses heavy cream, I tend to only do so about once a year. My recipe uses a little butter, but also some olive oil and lemon, so it’s not as caloric or fatty and has a nice accent of citrus to complement the parsley and crushed red pepper, which I like.

I paired the scallops with risotto made with shallots and peas (a recipe I’ll share tomorrow). I like to serve things like shrimp and scallops with pasta or rice as the seafood doesn’t usually fill my kids up, so we need a little starch.

Scallops for the Kids

4 large scallops

1 Tbsp butter

1 Tbsp olive oil

1 small shallot

1/4 cup heavy cream

A couple of Tbsp milk (preferably whole)

A squeeze of lemon

1 Tbsp chopped parsley or basil

Salt to taste

Place olive oil and butter in a heavy skillet, such as a cast-iron pan. Heat pan on medium high. Salt the scallops and then cut them into medium-sized pieces. When butter is melted and pan seems hot (but before butter browns) place scallops in the pan and sear until the sides are golden brown.

Add parsley and shallots, lower pan to medium heat, and cover for about a minute. Remove scallops from pan, turn off the burner, and then add heavy cream and milk. Stir cream to pick up any crispy bits of scallops in the pan, which will give your sauce a deep rich color. Add scallops with parsley and shallots back to the pan and turn heat back on to medium-low. Cover for another minute. Taste to see if you need any more salt. Add a squeeze of lemon and serve with rice or pasta.

Scallops for the Parents

1 Tbsp butter

1 Tbsp olive oil

7-8 large scallops

1 handful chopped fresh parsley or basil

1 large shallot finely chopped

1 pinch of crushed red pepper

A squeeze of lemon

Rinse out your pan and pat it dry. Heat olive oil and butter on medium-high heat until pan is hot and butter is melted, but not browned. Salt scallops and add them to the pan. Sear, cooking each side 1-2 minutes or until they are nicely browned.

Remove scallops from pan and add shallots, crushed red pepper and parsley. Stir and cook until shallots are wilted. Add scallops and their juices back into the pan and squeeze lemon on top. Stir sauce in pan. Cover for about another minute if scallops need to be cooked a little longer or serve if scallops seem cooked.

Hint: Scallops should be removed when they are barely cooked through. You don’t want ot overcook them.

Plate scallops and spoon sauce from the pan on top of each. Serve with lemon slices.

On Saturday, my friend Kim came over for dinner. She had a hankering for homemade burgers, and how could we refuse when we love them too! So, with the platonic ideal of the perfect burger in my mind, I headed over to the Grand Lake farmer’s market with my daughter for burger fixings. After a quick ride in the jump house for my daughter, and then a nice snack of home-baked salty pretzels from the bread vendor, we journeyed over to the Prather Ranch stall.

For anyone unfamiliar with Prather Ranch, they are, as far as I’m concerned, the premier local grass-fed beef ranch around. I love them for many reasons (not necessarily in this order).

1. They are located in Northern California and I’ve been trying to buy food raised and grown locally (or as close as possible).
   
2. The cows on their ranch are raised humanely and get to roam around and eat grass (I call this good Karma meat, although my vegetarian friends would point out that they’re still slaughtered).
   
3. From what I hear, grass-fed beef has a lower risk of E-coli than corn-fed beef, which eases my mother’s mind. This also means you don’t have to cook your burgers until they’re well-done and hard as hockey pucks. (This isn’t to say you should give your kids rare burgers. It just means that I personally feel I can give my girls medium burgers instead of well-done ones.)
4. Their beef just tastes better than any other beef I buy. It’s fresher and the flavor is just hands down yummier than other ground-beef choices.

So, with all this in mind, I bought two pounds of ground beef at the Prather Ranch stall. I knew the beef would make great burgers as soon as I looked at it because I could see it was permeated with delicious flecks of fat. Although making burgers out of lean beef may make you feel like you’re being healthy, lean-beef burgers are never worth eating, and therefore not worth the calories, as they always end up dry and tough. A good burger needs some fat to be juicy and flavorful. So when buying beef, try to resist the lean stuff. A little fat in moderation is fine. Just be sure not to eat burgers every day (although once you make the perfect burger it will be hard not to).

Anyway, that night, we set out on our mission to make the best burgers possible. We didn’t want extra trimmings (such as stuffing the burgers with cheese or poblanos). We wanted that great meat to be the star and to simply highlight its natural flavors. Kim finely chopped a quarter of a red onion and added it to the meat along with some salt, pepper and Worcestershire sauce while I made some homemade French fries (I mean, you HAVE to have homemade fries with homemade burgers). She then shaped the meat into burgers about 1/3 pound a piece. Tony, my husband, then fired up the grill.

He heated the grill to about 500-600 degrees and then placed the burgers directly above the flame, which dropped the heat to about 350 -450. He then shut the grill cover and cooked them for about 4-5 minutes on each side. This got them to about medium-rare. He then placed a slice of colby cheese on them (although Kim, the purist, resisted the cheese), and covered them for about another 30 seconds until the cheese melted. Tony kept our daughters burgers on for about a minute longer to make sure their meat was about medium. He then toasted the buns on the grill while the burgers rested (note: always let your burgers rest for a couple of minutes before devouring them. Resting allows the juices in the meat to settle throughout the burger so the entire burger is juicy without being too drippy).

After that, we all happily settled down to what, I feel, were the best burgers we’d ever made and maybe ever had. They were pink on the inside without being too rare, which is just the way we like them. The minimal seasonings let that wonderful grass-fed Prather Ranch meat shine, and our toppings of ketchup, mayonnaise, bread and butter pickles were a perfect match. The fries were also great, but that’s another post.

My only regret is that I’m not having burgers again tonight.

When I was a kid, my mother would make pizza and calzones each Christmas Eve along with a dish she called Spinach Pie. I always loved this dish. I would look forward to it each year as one of the many holiday treats my mother would prepare for our family and mourn a little when it was gone. When I got older, and moved out of the house, it never occurred to me that I could make this great dish in my own home until it was my turn to prepare Christmas Eve dinner a few years ago. So there I was, in my kitchen with my mom and other family members, making my pie. As we chatted, drank wine, and cooked, I soon realized that this is really one of the easiest things a home cook can make. I asked my mom why she didn’t make it more often when I was a kid. She shrugged and said simply that she thought of it as a holiday dish. Well, after I served it to my daughters, who devoured their first slice and then asked for more, I was determined to make it an “all-year” dish.

Spinach Pie uses pizza dough (so the “pie” in the title has more to do with pizza pie than coconut cream pie or quiche). Although I sometimes make my own pizza dough, I often just buy pre-made dough at Arizmendi (a bakery in Oakland down the street from my house, with sister branches in Emeryville and SF’s Richmond District), or Trader Joe’s. Homemade dough is great if you have the time, but as a working mom who doesn’t often plan out meals ahead of time, it makes more sense to buy the dough the day I make the dish.

The rest of the ingredients are things I usually have on hand anyway (such a frozen spinach, garlic, olive oil, Parmesan, and some sort of soft cheese), so I usually need to only make a quick run down the street for dough and I’m in business.

I really hope you give this dish a try. The spinach and cheese merge together to form a savory inside that is also creamy, while the yeast dough, drizzled with olive oil, gets a wonderful crispy crust. Also, it’s a new way to get your kids (or adult family and friends) eating spinach, which is full of vitamins and minerals and is a great source for iron.

Spinach Pie

1 lb pizza dough (homemade or bought)

1 bag of frozen spinach

2 Tbsp olive oil

3 garlic cloves chopped

1/2 cup ricotta or plain chevre (or a mixture of both). If you don’t have either, you can substitute cottage cheese.

Parmesan cheese

Salt and pepper to taste

Let dough sit out at room temperature for at least a half hour, but preferably an hour, as chilled dough doesn’t stretch well. Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

Heat oil in a large pan on medium heat. Add garlic and brown for a few seconds, stirring to make sure it doesn’t burn. Add frozen spinach and stir well. Lower heat to medium-low cook until the spinach is warmed. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Add more olive oil if the spinach seems dry or if you’d like more of an olive-oil taste.

Cool spinach on a plate for a few minutes. Meanwhile, drizzle a pie plate with olive oil so it’s evenly coated. Get your dough ready (i.e., put the bowl of homemade dough or the package of store-bought dough near the pie plate) and then cover your hands with a little bit of flour so it doesn’t stick to you during handling. Cut the dough in half. Take one half and, with your hands shaped like fists, stretch the dough into a circle about the size of the pie plate. This is sometimes difficult, and, if the dough doesn’t stretch well, you may need to let it rest at room temperature a bit longer. I shape my hands like fists so my fingers don’t rip through the dough, making holes. But, if you do make some holes, it’s not a big deal. Just try to pinch them together and move on.

After you line the pie dish with the dough, fill it with the spinach and then top with whatever soft cheese you’re using (I prefer a mixture of ricotta and chevre, although my mother uses only ricotta. In a pinch, I’ve used cottage cheese, which works as long as it’s 4% milkfat). I then sprinkle on a little salt to season the cheese, and then enough Parmesan to evenly coat the top.

Now take the other half of the dough and stretch it out so it fits nicely over the spinach and cheese. Drizzle some olive oil on top and then evenly smooth the oil with your finger tips.

Place the pie in the oven for about 30 minutes. Each oven cooks differently, so just be sure that the top is golden brown and you’ll be fine.

As long as we’re talking about scrambled eggs, I’d like to share my recipe for kid-friendly linguine alla carbonara. I love anything carbonara (which is essentially anything with bacon in it), but for years didn’t make carbonara pasta dishes because a) the recipes call for raw eggs (and I have a salmonella phobia, particularly in any food that my children will eat), and b) it’s pretty fatty and caloric. I therefore came up with my own recipe. My kids think of it as a macaroni and cheese with bacon and they love it, while I find many of the wonderful flavors you get in a traditional carbonara but without the salmonella risk and without as much of the fat. Yes, it’s still fattier than some dishes, but not really any fattier than a home-made macaroni and cheese. Also, I add frozen peas at the end, so there’s technically a vegetable in there!

Kid-Friendly Linguine alla Carbonara

1 Tsp olive oil

6-8 slices of bacon sliced into 1-inch pieces

1 lb linguine

1 cup whole milk

1 cup non-fat milk (or you can just use two cups of 2% milk if you have it)

2 eggs

1/4 cup chopped fresh Italian parsley

1/4 cup pecorino or sharp provolone cheese

1/4 cup Parmesan cheese

1/2 cup frozen peas

Salt and pepper to taste

In a large pan, cook the bacon in the olive oil. Don’t crowd the pan, however, as the bacon will steam instead of getting crispy if there’s not enough room. Remove bacon from the pan and set aside. When pan cools a little, drain out the oil, but keep the crispy goodness on the bottom of the pan for later. Meanwhile, cook a pot of linguine in some salted water until al dente.

When the pasta is almost cooked, heat the milk in a pot over medium heat. Meanwhile, scramble some eggs in a heat-proof bowl. When the milks starts to slightly bubble around the edges, remove a ladel-full and add it to the scrambled eggs, being sure to stir the eggs while doing so. You are now essentially tempering the eggs so you can add them to the hot milk without scrambling them. Add the eggs to the hot milk, lowering the temperature to medium-low. Wisk to mix thoroughly. Cook for about 30 seconds and then turn the heat off. If the mixture starts to separate, it’s not a big deal. Your sauce will still be creamy and great. Add some salt and pepper to the egg/milk mixture to taste. Add the pasta to the bacon pan along with the egg mixture. Stir while scraping the bottom so you incorporate the bacon flavor from the pan into the pasta. Add the parsley, peas, and cheese and mix thoroughly. Finally, mix in the bacon bits and serve.

Special Ann Vegetarian Amendment: My friend Ann and I were pondering how to make this dish vegetarian. I think you could easily do this my substituting facon (is that how you spell it?) for bacon, although think that you should also saute some shallots (about 2 medium or 3 small ones) in olive oil to add extra flavor. You can then add the pasta to the facon/shallot pan and then proceed as normal with the remainder of the recipe.
l

I was recently asked to talk about how I cooked for my twin daughters when they were toddlers. Although it was a long time ago (they’re 7 now), I vividly recall feeling that I wanted my children to eat the same things my husband and I were eating for dinner. This isn’t to say I placed a plate a pork chops in front of their hungry little faces. Instead, I took whatever ingredients I was using that evening and modified how I cooked them for my girls. So, if we were having some sort of meat dish, I would finely chop the meat (often in a small cuisinart) and cook it with whatever side dishes we were having. I would then often top whatever they were having with a dollop of cottage cheese, which made the entire dish creamy for them, while also immediately cooling it off so they could eat without waiting. The cottage cheese also provided another way for me to add more calcium into their diets.

Here is one of my girls’ favorite toddler recipes with a companion parent recipe. It’s easy and fun to introduce your children to new foods and to make dinners that they love. The hard part comes when you have to wipe half of it off the floor!

Turkey meatballs with rice and peas

Kids dish

1 tsp olive oil

¼ cup ground turkey

¼ cup frozen peas

¼ cup cooked white or brown rice (or couscous or pasta or any other grain)

Salt to taste

1 Tbsp cottage cheese

In a small sauté pan, cook ground turkey in olive oil on medium heat until heated thoroughly. Add peas and salt to taste. If the mixture seems dry, add a tablespoon or two of water. Cook until peas are thoroughly cooked. Mix in rice. Place a serving on your child’s plate and then mix in the cottage cheese. Serve.

Note: Although I would sometimes serve the parent portion of this dish with mashed potatoes, I always served it to my daughters with rice as they for some reason hated mashed potatoes. Actually, they still hate them. Go figure. Anyway, if your child likes mashed potatoes, feel free to use those instead.

Parents’ dish

Olive oil

1 lb ground turkey

½ cup plain or Italian bread crumbs

1 egg

1 Tbsp fresh chopped parsley

2 shallots chopped or a ½ small onion chopped

1 tsp salt

½ tsp black pepper

1 tsp Worcestershire sauce

1 cup sliced mushrooms

½ cup chicken broth

½ cup frozen peas

1 ½ tsp flour

Mix all ingredients except the oil (I do this in my kitchen aid). Shape small- to medium-sized meatballs out of the mixture. Heat a large skillet (on medium high) with enough olive oil to cover the bottom of the pan. When oil is hot, cook meatballs in batches, browning each side. When all meatballs are browned, sauté the mushrooms in the now empty pan, adding more oil if necessary. When mushrooms are soft, mix in the flour. Add the chicken broth. Stir well, being sure to scrape the bottom of the pan to deglaze all the wonderful crispy turkey and mushroom bits. Add the meatballs back into the pan along with the peas and cover. Simmer until meatballs are thoroughly cooked through. Serve on top of mashed potatoes or rice.

This weekend we had a friend and her daughter over for dinner. I wanted to make something that was nice enough for an adult dinner party, but also kid friendly for the three 7-year olds in attendance. My girls love chicken legs, so I decided to make a quick and easy coq au vin. It turned out to be a great choice. The wine sauce made the dish seem rich and elegant for the parents, while the chicken legs remained crispy on all but one small side and therefore acceptable for the younger girls. Served with potato squares baked in olive oil with herbs and quickly sautéed greens in olive oil with garlic, it turned out to be a tasty and nutritious meal for all.

Quick and Easy Coq Au Vin

1 whole chicken cut up (or more – I used two chicken breasts, three legs, and three thighs)

3 Tbl flour

½ tsp salt

½ tsp black pepper

½ tsp dried oregano

1 Tbsp olive oil

1 Tbsp butter

1 cup red or white wine

7 or 8 whole garlic cloves

Water if needed

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Skin chicken thighs and breasts. Cut each breast in half. I also de-bone the breasts, but this isn’t necessary. Combine the flour, salt, pepper and oregano in a flat dish. Lightly coat each piece of chicken in the flour mixture. Heat olive oil and butter in a large skillet that is also oven proof*. Brown each piece of chicken. If your skillet isn’t large enough to hold all the chicken at once without crowding the pan, do this in two batches.

Once each piece of chicken is browned, place all of it in your pan and then add the garlic cloves and wine. Place the pan in the oven and bake for about 30 minutes, or until the chicken is thoroughly cooked. Do not turn the chicken while baking if you want it to remain crispy. Check the dish in the oven periodically to make sure you have enough liquid in the pan. If the wine reduces too much, just add a little water or chicken broth.

When the chicken is finished, each piece should be golden brown on top and the wine sauce should be rich and creamy underneath. Serve either with the gravy (for the adults) and without (for the kids).

Cooking tip: The flour that was used to coat the chicken, along with the olive oil and butter used at the beginning, provide enough starch to turn the liquids into a glossy gravy. Also, baking meat with whole garlic is great if you’d like to be able to spread it on the meat or any accompanying bread.

* If you do not have an oven-proof skillet large enough to hold all the chicken, you can substitute a baking dish. I like to use a large cast iron pan that I bought at Ace Hardware for $30. It’s probably one of the cheapest pans I have, and also the best.