A simple google search for kid-friendly recipes is scary. What shows up, in fact, is a harrowing slew of butter-saturated, sugar-filled recipes written with a complete disregard for health. I discovered this last week because I was looking for just that - simple recipes that I can make with kids.

My friend Beth invited me to cook in front of a class of kindergarten students. Her son is in the class and they were looking for someone to do a cooking demo for the kids’ end of the year party - I was flattered that they thought of me and happily accepted.

I took this as my tiny opportunity to make a difference in the way these kids looked at food. While this was not the time to introduce them to the delicate flavors of perfectly-seared scallops or steak tartare, I wanted to cook with them something they’re familiar with, but probably never had before. I decided to let them make their own pizzas. Instead of just mozzarella and pepperoni though, I brought with me a ton of different vegetables and all sorts of sauces for them to experiment with. Well-aware of the fact that the kids will have a short attention span that rivals mine, I also brought with me my pizza paddle and pizza stone so they could take turns sliding their pizzas into the oven.

This is my first article for The Daily Tiffin, and it couldn’t have come at a better time. If you have haven’t heard of the Daily Tiffin, shame on you, but it’s a wonderful blog geared towards healthy, active and fun family life, that was started by the beautiful Meeta from What’s for Lunch, Honey? Inspired by my pizza event last week and the smoldering heat of the summer, I decided to make a lemon-infused, goat ricotta, white pizza topped with thinly sliced zucchini. The flavors are light, refreshing, clean - perfect for the hot summer days ahead.

Count them - four ingredients; five if you include the extra virgin olive oil. This means no skimping on ingredients! I tried this same pizza with regular ricotta and it doesn’t work. The wow factor just wasn’t there. If you absolutely cannot find goat-milk ricotta, however, not to worry. Mix a semi-firm chevre (like Spanish Capricho de Cabra) with some good quality, fresh ricotta and you’ll get a similar result. Like I said, it won’t be spot-on, but you’ll get pretty darn close.

The lemon zest in the ricotta serves two purposes. Not only does it heighten the flavors of the goat cheese, but it also gives the pizza a clean, crisp flavor. If you can get organic lemons, I recommend them because their zest tends to be more flavorful than their non-organic buddies.

Zucchini in general has lots of moisture and moisture is the kryptonite, so to speak, of pizza. To remove some of this excess moisture you’ll want to thinly slice the zucchini (preferably with a mandoline) and fan the slices out on a plate so they’re not on top of each other. Then season the slices with salt and pepper and the salt will start to break down the cell walls of the zucchini, and thus allowing it to give up some of that moisture. Soak it up with a paper towel and your ready to roll.

The kids were shocked when I hinted to the idea of a pizza without red sauce. Their facial expressions were absolutely priceless. And although not many ventured down this path, I feel like those that did may have a bright culinary future ahead of them.

This is why everyone should invest in a pizza stone:

Yesterday, my Friday started out like a dreadful Monday in disguise. It was pouring, I was running late for work and I had a flat tire. In retrospect, this wasn’t too bad. I called in late, pulled up my sleeves and youtubed: how to change a tire. I was mildly amused by the number of videos there were for this topic. After watching a few I thought I was fully-trained, if not an expert, on how to put on those silly-looking donut wheels. To make a long, miserable story short - my spare also turned out to be flat, the tow truck took 3 hours to pick me up, and it took 2 hours to get my wheel changed  - never in my life had I felt so much relief in returning home and closing the door behind me.

Before going to bed last night, I finished Molly’s book: A Homemade Life. If you haven’t already bought it, you need to go and pick up a copy. In her book she has a chapter appropriately titled and dedicated to happiness, which apparently is achieved by slow-roasting tomatoes for six hours. I was convinced. After my miserable chain of events, I set out to make this recipe on Saturday morning, and run errands while the tomatoes did their thing in the oven.

Molly’s recipe calls for coriander, which I didn’t have, but I sprinkled some dried thyme instead, and added couple cloves of minced garlic for good measure. I cook under the illusion that anything roasted should have garlic in it. Ultimately though, I was happy that I found a recipe for the large bowl of tomatoes idly resting on the dining room table, just waiting to be used.

The dish couldn’t have been easier to put together. I sneaked a taste of a couple the quartered tomatoes, put the rest in the oven at 200 degrees F, and went on with my errands. *I knew I wasn’t going to take long, but if you’re going to do this, I recommend using the cook-time feature in your oven so that it could turn itself off automatically.

After six hours, your entire house will take on the wonderful scent of the roasted tomatoes and lemony thyme. In order to make it a meal, I toasted a few slices of a day-old baguette, topped them with a healthy smear of fresh goat cheese, and a couple pieces of the slow-roasted tomatoes. Molly was right, this is happiness.

As she describes in her book, the possibilities for flavoring or using these tomatoes are virtually endless. Tomorrow, for instance, I can’t wait to wake up and throw a couple of these in with my scrambled eggs. I can then layer a few more pieces inside my sandwich for lunch, or toss them in with my salad - you get the idea.

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According to the atmospheric noise generated by this random-number generator, these three commenters will be receiving a pack of mahlab in the mail.

Congratulations to Hélène, Katie and Hannah, respectively, and thank you to everyone who commented and e-mailed me with their support. 

I’m not a liar, I promise. I know that in my croquetas post I mentioned that I hated frying, and I do, but I couldn’t pass this up. Last week I made about 200 gnocchi for A Taste of the Mediterranean; after photographing them, I boiled a quick batch for dinner with some leftover pesto and stashed the remaining 180 in my freezer, in individual servings. 

The idea for this snack came to me last Thursday at around midnight while studying for my Arabic exam the following day. If you follow me on Twitter, you’ll know this is not my first craving this week. For some reason, probably having to do with the endless hours I spend studying Arabic grammar, I’ve been craving everything from oatmeal raisin cookies, dates (the edible kinds), to tatter tots. I stopped conjugating irregular verbs for a second and thought about frying up some of the gnocchi I had in my freezer, but I didn’t. Instead I continued conjugating and waited until right after my test Friday afternoon to fulfill my craving. As you could tell from the mise en place photo though, I knew that one bag wasn’t going to be enough that afternoon.

Once you start to plop the gnocchi into the hot oil they immediately begin to puff up like pillows. Fight the urge to nudge them around and you’ll be rewarded with beautiful, golden-brown nuggets of Italian deliciousness. As is my advice with all fried foods, also resist the urge to bite into the ones fresh out of the oil. I, of course, didn’t follow my own advice (again) and am typing this post with a slight tingly pain at the tip of my tongue.

I was in no mood to go shopping or do extra cooking after my exam, so I opted for store-bought tomato sauce my roommate (who recently found out she is allergic to tomatoes) had in the fridge. Another sauce that would probably go well with these is the saffron aioli I made back in the day.

I was able to wear a short sleeve shirt today without turning blue. It was bittersweet, however, because it made me realize that I’ve been remiss in blogging lately. Time does fly, but the truth is I started taking grad classes this semester and have literally been surviving off of cereal and my frozen batches of pastitsio that were supposedly reserved for “emergencies”. The pastitsio entries for A Taste of the Mediterranean were always a treat to read and an excuse for me to take a break from studying. So, to those who partook in lowering my gpa preserving my sanity, thank you. I’m happy to announce that the winner for February’s ATOM challenge is Joie de Vivre with her Lamb Pastitsio post! Make sure to check out all the creative pastitsio entries that were submitted, here.

This month we’re featuring Italy with Francesco from The Food Traveller. When I e-mailed Francesco to ask him what he wanted to prepare for ATOM, his heart was set on gnocchi (neo-ki). Last Sunday to prepare for the contest, I set aside some time in the afternoon, put on my nonna apron and cranked out a few hundred of these soft cloud-like Italian dumplings. It was beautiful.

Before I start raving about this Italian pasta/dumpling, I need to make a confession. Although I’m not proud of it, a few years ago I fell into the temptation of cooking store-bought “gnocchi”, if you could even call them that. The stuff that’s sold in the vacuum-sealed packages is often a dense, starchy imitation of the traditional, billowy pieces of Italian heaven. Nothing more than an impostor.

As you can tell from the mise en place, the ingredients for this dish couldn’t be simpler. Ingredients that I’ll venture to say a good 80% of people (85% of foodies) already have on hand.

If you try googling for a gnocchi recipe, you’ll find that everyone pretty much has their own version. You’ll find some that boil the potatoes, a few that bake, some will call for eggs, others will use ricotta - it all depends on who taught them to make their recipe. You’ll often notice this trend in Italian recipes depending on what was available in the different regions.

The recipe that I use is one that I developed after trying different approaches to making gnocchi. This one boils the potatoes in the beginning, finishes them off in the oven and binds everything using an egg, and no ricotta. The reason why I boil and bake is because boiling the potatoes ensures that they do not dry out in the oven. I then finish them off in the oven for the opposite reason - to make sure that any excess moister gets evaporated. Once they come out of the oven, I peel and mash them to make something similar in texture to potato crumbles. If you have a food mill or a ricer you could use that to make sure you don’t over-mash the potatoes. Of course Italian grandmothers never needed these fancy gadgets to prepare their gnocchi; for them a fork and some old fashioned care was all they needed. Once you get the potatoes mashed you’ll want to combine them gently with the egg and the flour to form the dough, making sure to never over-knead the mix.  

The good thing about these dumplings is that they freeze extremely well and still taste infinitely better than any of the stuff you’ll pull from off the shelf. I doubled my recipe and froze individual-sized portions to last me the entire month, experimenting with different sauce ideas. The sauce is why it is important to create the ridges on the gnocchi - not only will the gnocchi look more authentic/prettier, but they will also have more surface area to hold on to the sauce. 

I can’t wait to see all the variations of gnocchi for A Taste of the Mediterranean - experiment with different doughs, sauces, presentations and submit your entry by March 31st for a chance to win a $50 gift certificate to igourmet!

Hi. I’ll have 8 oz of the free-range-no-antibiotics-natural-no-artificial-growth-hormone-happy-cow steak. No; not that one, the one behind it and to the right, please. Sound familiar?

It’s sad that the barriers between industrialization and gastronomy have been breached, but it’s the truth. After reading Michael Pollen’s Omnivore’s Dilema, I’m scared, or rather disgusted, to buy any other meat. I’ll usually pass on the massaged cattle lavished with all-they-can-drink sake, unless the parents are paying, and simply go for the healthy, happy cow instead. Slightly more expensive than the hormone-injected alternative, but I make it stretch to fit the occasion. If it’s dinner for two, I’ll break open a bottle of wine and enjoy a nice steak perhaps alongside some pureed parsnips or celery root. If it’s for a party, I’ll serve it as an appetizer and share it with my guests.

Steak crostini with parsley pesto and goat cheese is an appetizer I came up with while in college. I was invited to a dinner party and was expected to bring something grand - usually what happens when friends find out you like to cook. I had to strike a balance though: too fancy and I would’ve been thought of as showing off; too simple and I would’ve risked disappointment.

A good quality steak can do wonders if executed properly. Once your meat leaves the butcher, it becomes your responsibility. Season it well, let it sit at room temperature before cooking, don’t over cook it, and allow it to rest before slicing. These four points along with some good judgement can go a long way when preparing meat.

I originally made this dish with regular pesto because that was one of the things I had in my fridge before the party. In retrospect it was passable, but a bit too overpowering for the steak. I tried it again by pulsing parsley into my pesto and it was wonderful. You get a slight herbal note from the basil, but at the same time you’re greeted with a clean, crisp flavor from the parsley.

I used a whole wheat baguette when I made the appetizer last night and thought it was fantastic. This was also not part of the original dish, but I felt that it added an appealing nutty component to the crostini. On a side note, we’ve really come a long way in terms of whole wheat products - they don’t taste like cardboard anymore.

The reason why I added two thin slices of steak to each appetizer as opposed to one thicker slice is because it makes the crostini easier to eat. If you’re serving this at a party, you definitely don’t want your guests struggling with a big hunk of meat while they’re mingling and sipping on cocktails.