CityMama™

The perfect "un-set" of pots and pans

Recently I was emailing with my friend Charlene about pots and pans. She's due for a new set and wanted my advice. I told her that instead of buying an entire set of pots and pans (although they are cheaper to buy this way) I prefered to create my own set by putting together really great and really useful individual pieces.

My own collection of pots and pans is limited to two materials: stainless steel, "clad" cookware for its non-stickiness and ease of cleaning and cast-iron for the even way it conducts heat and ease of cleaning. Both materials are also oven safe and I do a lot of stove-to-oven cooking so this is essential. I avoid non-stick/Teflon coated pans because I just don't trust the off-gases that occur when heating it.

If I could create the perfect CityMama Basic Un-Set of Cookware the set would include:

1. A great sauté pan (too many uses to name from making tomato sauce to curries to sauteeing fish):

All-Clad Saute Pan $99

Martha Stewart Saute Pan $60

New Year's Dinner: CityMama's Slow-Baked Brisket

I just posted a lamb recipe for another New year's dinner idea, but if beef is more your thing, read on!

We always eat black eyed peas for New Year's and this year, since we'll be keeping it mellow and I can cook anything I want, I settled on brisket to go with the creamy peas.  I perused some recipes from around the interwebs and all of them seem to have the same idea in common: bake it slow and low for hours and hours in some kind of marinade, then devour when it's fork-tender.

A lot of recipes also have liquid smoke in common. I am not a fan of the flavor of liquid smoke (and I'm not even sure what it is), I just know that I didn't want those chemicals on my brisket so I opted for a more natural alternative that I hoped would give the same smoky results: alderwood smoked salt. (Hickory smoked salt would also work.)

New Year's Dinner: Butterflied leg of lamb with feta and olives

For Christmas, my sister gifted me a boneless leg of lamb (yes, we're that kind of family) and instead of my usual rosemary-garlic treatment, I decided to Greek it up with olives and feta. If you are looking for an easy and elegant New Year Eve or Day dinner, this is just the thing, and best of all, you don't need a lot of fancy ingredients.

How to: Make Homemade Salad Dressing [NaBloPoMo Day 14]

This is an oldie but a goody. Because it's Friday. I'm hoping that because the economy blows, people are going to stop spending money on bottled dressing (which I find outrageously expensive for what it is) and start making their own.

Don't get me wrong, there are some bottled dressings that I adore (Girard's Champagne and Trader Joe's Cilantro for starters) but I'd much rather eat a salad dressed with a vinaigrette of my own creation.

So this weekend I challenge you to grab a jar and make some dressing, then report back and tell me how it went.

How to: Improvise when you don't have a Crock-Pot [NaBloPoMo Day 12]

Throughout my cooking life, I have had a love/hate relationship with slow cookers. Even with the help of two slow cooker cookbooks, I have never been bowled over by anything that comes out of a slow cooker. It seems to me that they are best used for keeping soups, stews, and chilis hot on a buffet.

I think my biggest problem with Crock-Pots (and I use that term to mean all plug-in slow cookers) is that when cooking meats, to get the best results, you have to brown it in a separate pan first then transfer it to the Crock-Pot and add the remaining ingredients. Those looking for a mess-free short cut to cooking (me) now have to deal with a crusted pan and a splattered stove, and that totally defeats the purpose for me.

Two recipes that I do think work really well in a slow cooker are chicken breasts that are cooked with a little water and then shredded to use in tacos or enchiladas (they do stay moist this way), and chile verde also made with chicken.

I have owned slow-cookers and always ended up giving them away. Here's what I do instead.

How to: Bake an Acorn Squash (and what to do with it!) [NaBloPoMo Day 11]

Acorn squash stuffed with cous cous, garbanzos, raisins, orange zest, thyme and chives.

Now that it's Fall, one of the dishes I love cooking is baked acorn squash. Unlike summer squash, winter squashes aren't as waterlogged and gushy so they stand up to baking and still retain their sturdiness. Once they are baked anything goes.  You can:

• put a pat of butter in each, warm in the oven until melted, then serve.
• drizzle with honey or maple syrup, butter, and a grating of fresh nutmeg.
• sprinkle with gorgonzola, pancetta, and chopped fresh sage and bake until pancetta is crispy.
• slice and serve over a bed of spinach tossed with dried cranberries, walnuts, crumbled chevre, and warm vinaigrette.
• sprinkle with curry powder and drizzle with butter, bake 10 minutes, then serve.
• top with chopped chipotle chile en adobo and minced onion, bake 10 minutes, then serve.
• top with garlic and grated parmesan or pecorino romano cheese
• top with carmelized onions, thyme and prosciutto strips, bake until prosciutto is crisp.
• stuff with any grain (cous cous, quinoa, wild rice etc.) or a combination of cooked ground lamb and cooked rice, bake, serve.

I love it because it's so versatile and when stuffed, as I did it last night, it makes for a pretty and satisfying vegetarian main course.

BAKED ACORN SQUASH (a tutorial)

First, cut the squash in half (I used two to serve four people):

How to: Cook Balsamic-Roasted Brussels Sprouts [NaBloPoMo Day 9]

Howdy, folks. Today we're kicking off "How To" week here on CityMama.  I promised a tutorial every day this week and that's what you're going to get. If there is anything that I've written about that you have questions about and/or you'd like me to "show" you how to do it, please leave me a comment below. I don't pretend to be an expert, but I am pretty darn good at explaining things in an easy-to-understand way. And I promise to take lots of pictures. Which reminds me, my Sony a100  DSLR seems to have crapped out on me which is why recent pictures (taken with my point/shoot) may be even more mediocre than they usually are.

Last week we covered "Kitchen Gadgets Everyone Should Have." Granted, I am not a gadgety kinda girl, preferring to stick to tried-and-true kitchen basics (knives, graters, etc.), but there are some gadgets everyone should have either because they make a cook's job easier or they are just plain fun to use.

We're going to start this week off with a tutorial on how to make sweet and nutty Balsamic-roasted Brussels sprouts. It's perfect for Fall and if you practice now, these could even make an appearance on your Thanksgiving table. My entire family loves these cute little cabbages and this is one of my favorite ways to make them. I know you've heard this a thousand times before, but even if you think you don't like Brussels sprouts (because the only way you've ever eaten them is boiled to death--a truly stinky preparation!), you'll like this. I think you will like this. Okay, even if you don't you should at least try it. Here's how it's done.

BALSAMIC-ROASTED BRUSSELS SPROUTS

Preheat oven to 400 deg. (If you have a convection oven, even better, preheat to 375 and reduce cooking time by about 10 minutes.) Wash and trim a pound of Brussels spouts by slicing off the dry stem and removing tough or dried-looking outer leaves. Cut sprouts in half and place on a baking tray:

Salt

pink Hawaiian alaea salt and grey Celtic mineral salt flakes, my two salts of choice

One of the things I am most annoyed by is under-salted food, especially when that food is presented in a restaurant that charges a pretty penny for its food. There is nothing that ruins a dish more than lack of salt and nothing that improves it more that adding just enough salt to make the flavors pop.

Last week I had dinner with friends in a restaurant that I'd been dying to try because every time I passed by it was packed with diners. Well, I should have read the Yelp reviews first because while most people praised the atmosphere (inviting) and the drinks (delicious), people were uniformly dissatisfied with the food. It wasn't that the food was bad, it just was so under-salted that nothing about the dishes sparkled.  Equally annoying were the lack of salt and pepper shakers on the table which I find utterly pretentious. When the waiter asked how our dinner was, I let him know that the food was lacking salt and he said he would tell the chef. He returned to our table a few minutes later to let us know that the chef said, "That's how we cook the food here." Well if that's the case, then I certainly won't be back. I never ever salt my food at the table (in fact, we don't keep a salt shaker on our own table), but I found myself adding sprinkle after sprinkle of salt to just about every dish. (BTW, Whole Foods deli is also guilty of not salting their prepared items enough. The food always looks good, but tastes horrible. Blech.)

There is no more important ingredient in my cooking arsenal than salt, and as for so many lessons she taught me about cooking, I need to thank my mother for teaching me about the importance of salt and how different salts have different flavors. Yes, flavors.

Meal Planning Monday (now with lunchbox and snack ideas and a budget!)

As our economy heads into a tailspin, I've been thinking a lot about what this means for our family. Ever since I had Bunny in 2002, we've learned to basically live on one income. My work as a freelancer isn't always steady so we view anything above and beyond my husband's salary as icing on the cake. We've been living on a budget for six years now, so as people around me tighten their belts yet again, I thought I'd add a little twist to my weekly meal plans: I'll share how much I spent (roughly) on groceries for the week, and I'll also share some lunchbox and snack ideas. Of course I share these ideas (the weekly meal plans, lunchbox, and snack ideas) hoping that you will do the same since I get so much inspiration from all of you. If it takes a village to raise a child, maybe we can pull together to share some economical tips on how to continue to feed our families healthfully, locally, organically...without breaking the bank.

Lately, I've been doing lots of our grocery shopping at a small, local market in Silicon Valley called Milk Pail Market, pictured above. (For me eating locally also means supporting local grocery stores as much as possible.) It's the kind of market that carries an abundance of local produce including an absolutely dizzying selection of fruit (maybe a little banged up or bruised) and hundreds of different kinds of imported cheeses and a plethora of dairy items. It caters to an ethnic population (lots of items appeal to Asians or the growing Russian population in our area) so prices are reasonable. It also has quite a following among people who love to bake so their freezers are chock-full of bread dough, unbaked croissants and pizza crusts, and bulk items like cream cheese, farmer's cheese, butter, and heavy whipping cream sold by the quart.

Cooking with Kids: Thin Crust Pizza

Bunny was delighted to learn that her new first first grade teacher was known throughout her school as "The Cooking Teacher." Never mind that her school has all sorts of really wonderful fringe benefits (like science classes taught at the science museum; drama, music, and poetry classes taught by resident members of the local community theater; music; afterschool chess, sports, French, and Spanish; a perceptual motor skills class in addition to P.E.taught by a real Ph.D.) that make us bite a huge financial bullet to live where we live. It's a charmed public school with so much to offer students, but nothing compares to the fact Bunny has a teacher that loves to cook.

And sure enough, on Back to School night, her teacher outlined how she uses cooking in her classroom: it not only teaches an important life skill, but requires reading, math, and time-telling knowledge. As I perused her three-page grocery list of ingredients that she hoped parents would donate (15 lbs each of flour and sugar, chocolate chips, every spice, extract, and herb imaginable) I knew Bunny was in for a memorable year. 

My girls, ages 4 and 6 love to help in the kitchen, and I encourage it at every turn. Bunny will be champion chef in her class because she has so much hands-on opportunity at home. One of my girls' favorite meals to make is homemade pizza. This is something even little kids truly can do themselves from start to finish (aside from putting it into/taking it out of the oven).

I was recently sent a couple of tubes of Pillsbury Pizza Crust Thin Crust version to try. It's not unlike the dough we buy from Trader Joe's except that it's much easier to deal with. It rolls out nicely and really does crisp up but remains tender. I would definitely recommend it for times when you don't have time to make your own dough but still want homemade pizza. (Would be nice to see it in a whole wheat version.) We thought the dough was a great success. See for yourself!

Start by stretching the dough to fit a cookie sheet: