The Naptime Chef

What’s Going on Today: Manic Monday, pre-school spring social auction meeting, gym, groceries, weekend laundry!

Naptime Goals: Make dumplings, assemble soup in slow-cooker and brainstorm for school fundraiser ideas.

Tonight’s Menu: Sausage & Spinach Soup with Cornmeal Dumplings, cheese toast.

More Great Slow-Cooker Recipes from Project Sam: Spicy Sausage Slow-Cooker Lasagna, Slow-Cooker Short Ribs Pronvencale.

The snowbank at the end of our driveway stands one foot higher than my SUV. I have been known to exaggerate from time to time, but I can assure you that is not the case here. If we get one more flake of snow before this stuff melts I am buying a one-way ticket south, as in Mexico-south, and kissing away shovels forever. You’ll know I’ve made good on this threat when I start writing about the naptime margaritas I make in my beach shack while my daughter naps in a hammock strung up between palm trees! I think after I’m finished writing this I might research affordable plane tickets. However, until my tropical beach dwelling fantasy comes true, you can still find me here, in snowy Connecticut, digging my daughter out of snow piles and slow-cooking up a storm.

This week I decided to work on a hot soup recipe for Project Sam. I was inspired to make it after reading the January Bon Appetit issue about winter greens. Unfortunately, the winter greens required for the recipe managed to elude me at the store, so I used baby spinach instead. The rest of the ingredients were basic and easy to find and the resulting meal was just the balm I needed to soothe my frazzled and frozen nerves.

This is the latest installment of my Powernap column. The series where I share quick, easy food that can be made for all kinds of situations. Powernaps are short and sweet, and so are these recipes. These are the things I make in a jiffy when I need a quick snack, am in the mood for a recipe experiment, or simply need to clean out the pantry.

Today’s Powernap: I needed a cake to showcase the flavor of Meyer lemons for my lemon-loving parents.

My parents came to visit last week and we had a blast together. I loved showing them around our new town and watching them enjoy their granddaughter. You should have seen her face when they surprised her at school pick-up! Cooking-wise I had some fun, too.  During the course of their visit I gave them a preview of a few book recipes and treated them to some flavors they can’t get locally in Cooperstown. For example, my Mom can’t find Meyer lemons in upstate New York so I had baked her this Meyer lemon cake. It was inspired by my friend Merry’s cake recipe, though I tweaked the flavorings and used my favorite Fiori de Sicilia from King Arthur Flour in lieu of several other extracts. It was the perfect treat for snowy winter visit. This spring when they come back I’ll take them to our farmer’s market and we’ll bake with something with fresh strawberries!

This is the latest installment of my Tales from the Trenches Series. An ongoing series where friends and readers share their stories and recipes about the great food they fit into family life. We all have tips and tricks to share with each other: when we cook, what we cook and how we cook the delicious food we love to eat. If you are interested in contributing a story and recipe please feel free to contact me. Today’s Tales from the Trenches is from Amy Roche.  Amy and her husband are originally from Minnesota, and now live in Pasadena, California.  After graduating from college in 1997, Amy went to California with Teach For America.  She still teaches in inner-city Los Angeles.  She is currently working half-time as a reading intervention specialist at an elementary school in East L.A.  They have one daughter, Camilla who is two years old and usually naps!

I hit the mother-in-law jackpot when I married my husband.  Grandma Coco as she’s now called, has all the qualities a daughter-in-law could hope for.  She’s outgoing, interesting to talk with, generous and she is by far the best home cook I’ve ever met.  She is the reason I now consider myself to be a “foodie.”

I married into an Indian family, and I didn’t know it at the time, but Indian culture revolves around two things: food and family.  I remember thinking it odd at first that my husband’s family talked so much about food.  At every family get-together his parents and sisters would go into incredible detail about the delicious meals they had eaten since they last saw each other.  My eyes would glaze over, but it was their way of catching up.  I puzzled at the way they would get menus ahead of time and then discuss them for hours before ever heading out to the restaurant.  Food is not a spur-of-the-moment thing for them, it’s the main event.

My husband and I met in high school, so Grandma Coco had years to introduce me to a wide variety of dishes and accustom my palate to a whole host of South Indian delights.  When things looked to be getting serious between Pat and me, she started instructing me in the basics: daals, chicken tikka masala, rice, chapattis.  As the years went on, she exposed me to a greater variety regional dishes and gave me many helpful kitchen tips.  The best advice she gave me for efficiently organizing my weekly menu was to plan each week thematically.  If you want Indian, plan out an Indian menu for the whole week.  Or if you’re thinking Italian or Mexican, plan out a whole week menu for that cuisine.  That way, leftovers combine nicely and any extra ingredients are more likely to be used up.

What’s Going on Today: Cold, cold, cold. Edit book manuscript, keep the kiddo entertained indoors.

Naptime Goals: Assemble Eggplant Involtini, laundry, house cleaning, emails

Tonight’s Menu: Eggplant Involtini (Deconstructed), Salad

More Great Meatless Entrees: Artichoke-Lemon Pesto with Pasta, Artichoke Lasagna, Eggplant Parmesan, Caprese Pasta Salad, Spanish Garlic Soup, Tomato Soup Florentine, Sweet Potato & Lentil Stew

It is easy to get sucked in to cooking lots of hearty, meaty dishes in the deep of winter. Last week I posted two (2!) recipes for short ribs, twice as many as I published last summer. I think it is some part of my biological make up that I prefer hot heavy food in the winter, and cool light food in the summer. Since I go to the gym regularly I seem to be able to handle this sort of eating pattern. If it ever gets to the point where I can’t zip my jeans you’d better believe I’ll tone it way down, real fast. But, for now, I’ll stick to my warm winter casseroles and slow-cooker recipes in January and love every minute of it.

Today’s recipe was inspired my devotion to the idea of Meatless Mondays. (The movement to eat an entirely vegetarian diet at least one day a week in order to save the planet.) It was also inspired by my fondness for vegetarian food in general, particularly my undying devotion to eggplants. Which, frankly, is a love only outdone by my obsession with artichokes! Luckily, I married a man who joins me in the eggplant eating corner so he is always up for whatever I have in store. In this case, I decided to give my favorite Nigella Eggplant Involtini recipe a twist, or, rather, an untwist, and deconstruct it for a great make-ahead dinner. I grilled up the long strips of eggplant, mixed the delicate bulgur wheat/feta/pistachio stuffing and… stopped there.

It’s been a long while since I wrote a Travel Series. The only reason is because it’s been a long time since I traveled. I’ve been sticking to my regular Cooperstown, Martha’s Vineyard, Sag Harbor, Charleston and Florida travel rotation for the past two years. Not bad, I know, but my husband and I were in the mood for change recently and decided to spend the weekend up in Boston. My daughter spent the weekend being spoiled by her grandparents while we had a blast eating and relaxing around Beantown.

The first meal we ate in Boston was a delicious brunch at the South End Buttery. The South End is without a doubt my favorite emerging neighborhood in Boston. If I were to live in Boston that is the neighborhood I would choose. It reminded me a lot of the Upper West Side, my old stomping grounds in NYC. I’d read about the South End Buttery and we couldn’t wait to give it a try. We ate in the subterranean room of the restaurant, enjoying the cozy club-like atmosphere on such a cold day. My Huevos Rancheros were out of this world, while my husband devoured his decadent Eggs Benedict. On our way out we grabbed some cookies, Peanut Butter Reece’s Pieces for me, Chocolate Walnut Chunk for him, before hitting the town for a long walk to the movie theater for a matinee of The King’s Speech. Those cookies are still haunting me. Don’t be surprised if you see that peanut butter cookie recipe here soon!