Two weeks ago I shared my trip to our neighborhood crepe truck as part of my year of exploring street food as a flavor correspondent for Sargento. (If there is a truck you think I should see please let me know!) This program features myself and a few other food bloggers as we spend the year exploring the top 10 food trends of 2013 as identified by Rick Bayless. I was bummed I couldn’t go to the program kick-off at the headquarters in Wisconsin in early February, but I had just had a baby so that was impossible! Instead, I joined the conference via Google + hangout and enjoyed Rick’s talk about food trends remotely.

At that talk each blogger was assigned two specific food trends to explore this year. I was assigned food trucks/street food, as you know, and mushrooms. Two of my favorite things! I felt very lucky. The remaining food trends were also cool and I can’t wait to see what my fellow correspondents write. They include: middle eastern foods, Peruvian foods, habanero peppers, tacos, fermented foods, braising meats, greens, and herbs in desserts.

I kicked off my flavor correspondence with food trucks last week, so today I want to talk about my other assignment: mushrooms. I usually buy basic crimini mushrooms for my everyday mushroom-based dishes. But this year I want to explore lesser known varieties and show everyone how we can use them to add more flavor and flair to our everyday dishes. Since we had just recently visited the food truck, where I enjoyed a savory crepe, I thought it would be fun to make my own savory mushroom crepes at home.

Since I was making our crepes for dinner I wanted to make sure they were substantial enough to hold us for the evening.  I decided to use blue cheese, mushrooms, and walnuts. In keeping with my pledge to stay away from the common cremini, we elected to use shitake mushrooms for their strong smokey flavor and firm texture.

As with any good powernap recipe, the batter for the crepes came together in a snap and they were easy to cook up on the stove top. To fill them I added in the stewed shitake mushrooms, crumbled blue cheese, and chopped toasted walnuts. Then I folded up the crepe like an envelope and dinner was served! The crepe was certainly rich to boot, but we loved the contrast of the earthy mushrooms with the sharp cheese. The walnuts added a nice amount of crunch without overpowering the palate. It was a deliciously fun dinner for an early spring evening. We also all agreed that this easy recipe would be great for lunch, or even for taking to school for lunch wrapped in foil. Looks like there will be many more crepes in our future this spring!

For more flavor correspondents check out:

• Bree from Baked Bree
• Bren Herrara from Flanbouyant Eats
• Cara Eisenpress from Big Girls Small Kitchen
• Cathy Pollack from Noble Pig
• Ann Fulton from The Fountain Avenue Kitche

(This post is sponsored by Sargento. Thank you so much for supporting the sponsors that make The Naptime Chef possible.)

With Easter just around the corner I am wrapping up my Friday fish meals for Lent with Sea Cuisine. I’ll admit, I will not stop eating all the awesome things I’ve been writing about just because Easter has arrived. The Sea Cuisine fish is so good and is such a wonderful way to get a healthy seafood meal on the table any night of the week! For this week’s meal I went back to our favorite Herbed Cod and served it over some fresh Parmesan Polenta topped with roasted tomatoes. It was a simple weeknight meal that was a huge hit with everyone.

While adding roasted tomatoes to our meal may seem a tad labor intensive for a weeknight here is what I did: I roasted them in the same pan as the baking fish. So easy! I simply used a large baker for the Sea Cuisine Cod and scattered the tomatoes tossed with olive oil all around it. As the fish baked the tomatoes roasted and wilted to perfection. While everything was in the oven I stirred together the polenta and had it ready by the time the fish and tomatoes were complete. In the end I only dirtied two pans and dinner was on the table in the snap. Is there any better way to prepare seafood on a weeknight? I can’t think of it! Happy Easter weekend!

For some reason I always equate Easter with lemon flavored desserts. It is something about the bright citrus flavor that seems to signal the return of spring (we hope) and refresh my palate after a long winter of rich chocolate lava cakes. With the holiday coming up this weekend I decided to make a simple lemon treat to serve following our Easter feast. Just recently my son has started getting on a semi-predictable schedule which is enabling me to get back to naptime cooking. His naps aren’t super long, however, so I have to be smart about what I tackle and a simple cookie recipe seemed like the perfect place to start.

The best part about this simple shortbread is that the buttery coconut dough came together in minutes. After that I was able to roll it out and cut the shapes we wanted with our spring shaped cookie cutters – all while he was napping!  He woke up while the cookies were baking so I let them cool on racks for the better part of the afternoon. The cookies, a rich delicate shortbread, were delicious on their own. However, I really wanted something bright and lemony to compliment the sweet coconut flavor. It only took a few minutes to whip up the fluffy buttercream frosting which I flavored with fresh squeezed lemon juice and zest. I immediately spread generous swathes of it on top of each cookie and my daughter added her own personal touch – sprinkles! We set aside half the batch for Easter this weekend. The rest are history!

When I heard about The Perfect 10 Kookie – it is gluten-free, dairy-free and sweetened naturally with agave – I thought it sounded really cool. I am a huge cookie addict and any kind of cookie I can enjoy with a little less guilt is a great idea in my book. I have been a long time fan of Christina Tosi and pretty much anything that Momofuko Milk Bar churns out. In fact,  that is one of the first places I plan to hit when I achieve my baby weight-loss goal. (Those cereal milk treats are beckoning!)

To create this special cookie Christina partnered with her BFF Karlie Kloss to create a delicious way, guilt-free way to scratch the cookie craving itch at 4pm. They even teamed up to donate 30% of all the proceeds to FEED, a charity dedicated to providing school meals to children around the world. They are doing this as part of the American Express Make My Day experience. This program is dedicated to celebrating cardmembers who are on inspiring journeys (like Christina!) and how paying it forward to readers and AmEx followers around the world.

Today Momofuko Milk Bar is generously giving away 10 Tins of Perfect 10 Kookies to 10 (yes, ten) lucky winners! Here is how to enter:

1) Leave a comment sharing your favorite cookie flavor.

2) Subscribe to Kelsey Banfield on Facebook.

3) The contest runs from March 26th at 7:00am through April 1st at 7:00am. Winners will be announced in the April 5th newsletter and on Facebook.

I am doing everything within my power to will spring to arrive. This month we skipped our yearly Charleston sojourn because of the new baby and I miss that first kiss of sunlight and rush of Vitamin D that came with the southern climate. This year I am especially in need of it! To distract myself from the disastrous weather I am starting to cook with any and all of the spring produce I can get my hands on. It is still pretty slim pickin’s at the moment but I’ve managed to find some excellent asparagus and that is a good place to start.

Now that my son is two months old he is beginning to take longer naps that allow me to get back into naptime cooking. Yay! (For a while I thought might need to rename this blog The Sleepless Chef!) This week I used his one hour snooze to assemble this simple asparagus tart and pop it in the oven.

To keep the recipe manageable I used regular frozen puff pastry instead of making a crust for tart pan. I rolled it out, assembled the cooked asparagus, poured the cheese mixture over the top and it was set to be baked! All of this was easily accomplished during his naptime and it was halfway done in the oven by the time we woke up.

This tart is perfect for serving at Easter next week. In fact, we are considering organizing a simple gathering of friends for brunch and this is one of the things that will be on the table for sure. It didn’t exactly bring spring weather with it, but it definitely ushered in the spirit of spring. And that will have to do for now.

One of things I love about Sea Cuisine frozen fish is that is comes in such a wide variety of flavors. There is everything from Tortilla Crusted Tilapia with firey spices and undertones of lime, to crispy Beer Battered Cod, to this, Asian Spiced Tilapia. This week we were in the mood for Asian cuisine so I selected this fish to serve on a simple bed of udon noodles with a side of spinach. The flavors melded beautifully and we felt like we were eating at a fancy Chinese restaurant instead of in our own kitchen.

As with all of these Sea Cuisine meals, this one came together in under thirty minutes. There is nothing better than that, really, since that is exactly what you want on a busy weeknight. We served it on Friday for our Lent meal and were thrilled with the healthy meal featuring sustainable seafood and organic spinach. It was just what we needed to sit down to after a long, busy week. In fact, we liked it so much I’ve filed this away in my meals in regular rotation. Even though Lent ends next week it doesn’t mean we’ll stop enjoying all these wonderful Sea Cuisine meals!

More Sea Cuisine Seafood Meal Ideas for Lent:

Tortilla Crusted Tilapia Fish Tacos

Beer Battered Cod with Sweet Potato Chips

Herbed Cod Sandwich

Mediterranean Salmon Risotto

Coconut Tilapia with Jasmine Rice

(This is a sponsored post. Thank you for supporting the sponsors that make Naptime Chef possible).

This week my friend Casey Barber of good.food.stories is joining me to chat about her new book, Classic Snacks Made from Scratch. I mean, who couldn’t love a book like that?!! If I wasn’t concentrating on losing the baby weight I think I might work my way from beginning to end without a second thought. Everything looks delicious and harkens back to those alluring snacks of my childhood.

1) You did an amazing job rounding up all the classic snacks in this book. Were there a lot of these in your house growing up? How did you compile such a list?
Though my parents did their best to keep my sister and I in the realm of Grape-Nuts and whole wheat bread, my grandparents had no such compunction. Their freezer was always stocked with Pudding Pops, their fridge held treasures like three-layered Jell-O… according to family lore, any time I arrived at their house, I declared, “I would like to have something sweet!”

Putting together the list was fun and fairly easy—I brainstormed all my favorite snacks from my youth, asked my friends what their most requested (or most infamous) snacks would be, and combed the aisles of my local grocery stores with a notepad!

2) What do you think is the biggest difference between these classic snacks when they are made in a home kitchen versus the kinds we find on store shelves? 

The biggest difference—and this isn’t necessarily a bad difference—is that there is a particular chemical aftertaste that I just couldn’t replicate in some snacks. You know how Twinkies would coat the inside of your mouth with a layer of sickly sweetness? Yeah, I couldn’t make that happen. But the best part about these snacks is that you can completely customize them to your liking. I’ve had people doing Milano cookies in orange as well as mint, people making Twinkie cupcakes; it’s really cool to see how everyone interprets the snacks.

3) How was the process of creating and testing each recipe? I imagine it took a lot of work since people expect these to taste just like the real deal they find at the store! No pressure there… 🙂

The process of creating each recipe started the same way: by buying the processed, packaged version of the snack in question, then dismantling and dissecting each component in my kitchen (pulling apart Oatmeal Crème Pies, cutting open Totino’s pizza rolls) to dial down to the essential flavors and textures of each snack. Sometimes it was easy to figure out that, for example, a Nutter Butter is essentially a frosting-filled peanut butter shortbread cookie, but other recipes took a lot of time. Nailing down the particular wheaty sweetness of a Wheat Thin was a big challenge.

4) Which one of these snacks has a Proustian effect on you? (For me it would be Sno-balls. So completely off limits in our house…oh the memories of buying them at the local five and dime and savoring them in my friend’s treehouse on sticky summer days praying we wouldn’t get caught!)

So funny – Sno-Balls were one of my favorites too, though revisiting them as an adult made me realize just how creepy that outer marshmallow layer is in the way it peels away from the cake inside. It’s just so… ALIEN. Funyuns were a big rediscovery; I have such fond memories of crunching into them while wasting time at the local pool, preferably alongside one of the snack bar’s crispy, buttery grilled cheese sandwiches. I probably should have only purchased a snack-size bag when researching them for the book, but I ended up eating the whole full-size bag in a matter of days. Couldn’t stop!

5) Are there any newer classic snacks you didn’t include in this book? When I shop with my daughter I am amazed at the amount of newer snack foods that have come out since we were kids!

You can probably tell just by looking at the table of contents that I’m a child of the ‘80s. I don’t understand these new snacks; like, when and why did they decide to make Fruit Roll-Ups green or blue? They were perfectly fine in regular fruit colors! Actually, I would have liked to include some even weirder snacks like Fun Fruits (remember those?) and sugar wafers, or drinks like Ecto Cooler in the book, but developing and testing 70 snack recipes was more than enough work.

6) What were some of your favorite moments from the writing and production of this book?

Honestly, some of the best moments were getting feedback from my testers, all of whom were home cooks with varying degrees of skill, and hearing how happy, successful, and empowered they were by trying the recipes. I had people deep-frying, boiling sugar and making marshmallows, tempering and enrobing chocolate, shaping and baking pretzels—all of these things that they’d never tried or thought they could do and they all pulled it off!

7) What is next for you? I vote for a Classic Snacks vol 2! 

I don’t think I can put my mind and stomach through the process of recreating any more classic snacks for at least a year—the number of Twinkies I’ve been making for my book events is reinforcing my decision to move away from the snack recipe development for a while! I’m still trying to pin down my next book topic; I love baking as much as I love cooking savory food, so it could be anything.

Images by Judi Swinks. Used with permission.

To Enter to Win A Copy of Classic Snacks Made from Scratch:

1. Leave a comment below sharing your favorite classic snack!

2. Subscribe to Kelsey Banfield on Facebook.

3. Contest runs from March 19th at 7:00am ET through March 26th. Winner will be announced in the March 29th newsletter!

It is hard to believe that my little guy is already two months old. I can now officially say things like “where did the time go?” and “boy, time flies with kids.” I’ll admit, I can hardly remember late January and early February. Many thanks for your patience while I dealt with severe sleep deprivation and adjusting to life with an infant. It was not easy! I know a bunch of my posts were late getting up and there were quite a few typos. Hopefully those days are behind us. You’ve probably also noticed that I have taken on some sponsors this year. They help me keep this site running and I appreciate your support of these posts. I would never agree to a project I didn’t believe in sharing with you!

Luckily, my baby is a great eater and sleeper and spring is shaping up to be more restful. I am glad because I have a book to write (!) I have already started naptime cooking a little bit and will be doing it more and more as our schedule straightens out. In the mean time, here are some of my favorite things from around the web lately. A lot of these I’ve found during my 2am feedings. Turns out that is a good time to surf the internet!

– This week I made these dye baths and dyed Easter eggs with my daughter and her friend.

– Quite possibly the funniest thing on the internet. It is even funnier when you are overtired and watch it at 3am.

– My site is verified on Pinterest. Yay!

– Olive Juice spring dresses are perfection as always.

– I want to take my kids to Ireland.

– I love unique jewelry.

– A new brewery in our nabe!

– Longing to wear my favorite summer staples once my waist comes back.

– I am happy for Jennie.

Here are some of my recent articles on Babble Food this month!

1. Our 25 Best Bar Cookies

2. The Classic Shamrock Shake

3. 12 Yummy Ways to Cook with Cereal

4. Oreo Flower Cupcakes

5. A Basic Recipe for Two Brownies

One of the many things I miss about living in New York City are the food trucks. They always served the most delicious cuisines and were the perfect spot for grabbing a quick lunch or dinner. I lived there during the food truck trend explosion and nearly every week an awesome new truck would burst on the scene. By the time we moved out of the city there were hundreds of trucks serving nearly every kind of food on the planet! I was never at a loss for something new to try. Luckily, it hasn’t taken too long for the food truck trend to spread to the suburbs. Our little town in Connecticut even has one food truck, Christophe’s Crepes. Christophe is a jolly frenchman who parks his truck outside our local library. My daughter and I eat there at least once a month. We usually combine it with a trip to return her library books. Here are some shots of our recent trip over the weekend:

Christophe is always smiling. Every time we visit we chat and tells us what ingredients are freshest that day. This week he recommended the pears!

The menu is so extensive. I always debate forever before deciding which one to get!

I love that he has a Specials board. Doesn’t a Caprese Crepe sound amazing??!! I think I might try and make one this summer.

This time I selected the savory crepe with Gorgonzola, Pear, Walnuts & Honey. It was SO good!

My daughter selected the chocolate crepe sprinkled with confectioners’ sugar. Naturally.

As we walked away we discussed what we will order next time. My daughter plans on strawberry and I am hoping for another savory one.  I also secretly want to order the caramel apple crepe but am afraid it might set me back too much on the baby weight diet. Oh well. Bon Appetit!

I am so excited to be exploring the food truck trend for the rest of the year on behalf of my partnership Sargento. Do you know of a food truck I should visit? Let me know!

(This is a sponsored post by Sargento. Thank you for supporting the sponsors that make The Naptime Chef possible.)

When Sea Cuisine sent me their Beer Battered Cod as a part of our seven week Seafood Cook-a-Long I jumped for joy! Who doesn’t love the chance to enjoy a little fish and chips now and then?!! The good news is that making fish-n-chips at home is generally much healthier than the greasy fish in a newspaper bag you buy curbside in Scotland. To give our Friday night cod a traditional British feel, yet with a healthy twist, I decided to skip the deep fryer and make spicy baked sweet potato chips to go alongside instead.

Today I am thrilled to have my friend Phoebe of Feed Me Phoebe sharing her awesome recipe for Chicken Tikka Masala. This is not the first time Phoebe has been hanging around Naptime Chef. You may remember that last year she made her television debut on Chef Race UK vs US, and has also shared her fabulous recipe for homemade granola bars for lunchboxes. Today’s recipe would be ideal for a weeknight family dinner. It is also a great recipe for people new to cooking Indian cuisine!

Though I don’t yet have kids of my own, through my private chef business, I’ve spent the last 6 months learning how to navigate the evolving palates of a 7 and 10-year old.

One of my weekly clients is perpetually letting her kids dictate what I make every Tuesday. And what they want isn’t Mac and Cheese or Chicken Pot Pie, it’s Pad Thai and Chicken Tikka Masala. There are times when I feel like I’m providing the most expensive takeout in the world, even if I’m using organic meat and far less oil than the local Thai joint.

Now, these are New York City kids, mind you. But I was still surprised by their enthusiasm for complex spices. My conclusion is this: if you’re going to introduce anyone to new flavors, you might as well do so within the context of a creamy tomato-based stew containing knobs of white meat chicken, and plenty of carrots and onions hidden within.

If you’re venturing down the road of take-out-at-home it’s my feeling that you can have some wiggle room with flavor authenticity if it means putting something inherently healthier in your body. I always wondered why my stomach hurt so much after Indian food. I thought it might be the spices – but I’ve never had a problem with heat. It wasn’t until I started researching Chicken Tikka Masala recipes that I realized, duh, it’s the cream!

Needless to say, my version of this recipe uses much less cream than the one you’re used to eating at your local curry joint. I add in some of the reserved yogurt-based marinade to give the sauce that light, smooth body, and then add just a splash of cream to finish it off. If you’re not into dairy at all, you can keep adding yogurt until the sauce reaches that creamy, light red color that you love.

The number of ingredients and steps in this dish may not make it seem instinctively easy, but I promise you, it is. Everything can be made in advance, and it’s a fairly simple one-pot dish, other than the broiling of the chicken. It’s not as easy as picking up the phone to order take-out, of course. But your stomach will see the reward in DIY-ing this one. And if your kids are anything like my pseudo ones, they’ll love the homespun version even more because it was made by you.

Chicken Tikka Masala