The Naptime Chef

This is the 10th 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 my friend Gina is sharing her New Year’s Resolution and how it has affected her cooking style in the New Year. Gina and I immediately connected over the point that she never, ever sacrifices cooking delicious food just because she has such a busy family life. There is always a way to fit it in, and this is how she does it!

In the spirit of full disclosure, I have something to confess: I am to cookbooks what Imelda Marcos is to shoes.  I own WAY too many.  It’s true: I have rarely met a cookbook I didn’t like, and my rather vast collection is threatening to take over my house and force my family to find alternative living arrangements.   And while I cook and bake constantly, it seemed that I owned an awful lot of books with great recipes that had never seen the light of day.  In order to justify owning so many cookbooks, I made a New Year’s resolution this year to get them off the bookshelves and start using them on a weekly basis.  While the blog, book and movie “Julie and Julia” has inspired a growing number of food blogs devoted to cooking from one book from start to finish, I chose instead to select recipes from a wide variety of books and hopefully remind myself why I bought the book in the first place.

Here I’m sharing a new favorite recipe for braised short ribs from “Urban Italian” by Andrew Carmellini, a fantastic book with wonderful stories and recipes by one of New York’s most talented chefs.  Braises are great for this time of year and perfect for starting early in the day as they usually require a few hours of advance cooking before they’re ready to serve.  And while my two children are admittedly a few years beyond the napping stage, I still use the afternoon hours to get a head start on dinner since my side job as family chauffeur usually interferes with any last minute dinner preparations.

What’s Going on Today: Shoveling, sledding, laundry, more shoveling.

Naptime Goals: Peel garlic cloves, cut up the chicken, write Babble columns.

Tonight’s Menu: Mistral’s Chicken, creamy polenta, arugula salad.

Parenting Lesson of the Day: Pulling them in the sled can be quite a workout!

There is something about snowstorms that sends me running for my dutch oven. It is like the cold weather triggers some deep seeded need for rich, homey food that is piping hot and packed with flavor. Luckily, when this happened during the snowstorm in Connecticut last weekend I had a roaster chicken and my camera at the ready. As the flakes fell on Friday night visions of tender roast chicken and porridge-like polenta danced in my head. A meal that was hearty, but not heavy; flavorful, but not overwhelmingly so.

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: The quick and easy cookies I like to serve at the JMcLaughlin Cafe

I’ve been catering the JMcLaughlin Westport Cafe for almost two months now and I want to share one of the cookie recipes I’m making this month. They are just SO good that it would be a crime to not mention them. You all know how much I love Mexican Chocolate Cake and Mexican Hot Chocolate so you can just imagine how I swoon over these cookies. Sweet, spicy and very chocolaty, they hit all the right notes for a rich winter cookie. I’ve often make the dough during naptime and bake them after my daughter goes to bed or before she wakes up in the morning. Then I deliver them to the store by 9am. Be sure to swing by if you want a taste. Or, just print the recipe and enjoy them at home! 🙂

This is the 9th 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 my friend Lily is sharing a recipe for a favorite meal she and her husband share after their daughter goes to bed. Lily and I have known each other since high school and these days she is busy mother, wife and doctoral student in New York.

I have the great fortune of having a husband who loves to cook.  Most nights he makes dinner after we put our 17 month-old daughter to bed.  However, as our daughter gets older, I’m realizing that at some point we will have to start eating dinner as a family.  That’s the way I was raised and I have so many fond and funny memories of family dinners from my childhood.  Because my husband usually doesn’t get home from work until 7:00, I am now, for the first time, facing the prospect of making dinner for the whole family by myself.  Over the last few months, I’ve given it a try a few times just to see what works, and one night I almost accidentally came up with what turned out to be an amazingly simple and really delicious pasta sauce, inspired by puttanesca sauce.  It was invented out of necessity and the ingredients I had on hand, but has become a favorite.  It can be made in less than 30 minutes, and stored in the fridge (or freezer) until dinner time.  It’s made with fresh tomatoes but involves no peeling or seeding.  I love that because it’s all fresh ingredients, you can use as many organic ingredients as you can get your hands on.  And my foodie husband can’t get enough of it.  I hope you enjoy it.

What’s Going on Today: Gearing up to get back in the swing of things with school, work and life!

Naptime Goals: Finish putting away Christmas decorations, make slow-cooker lasagna, test some book recipes.

Tonight’s Menu: Spicy Sausage Lasagna, Arugula salad

Parenting Lesson of the Day: Children need their routines, too.

My friend Sam is the manager of the JMcLaughlin Westport store. She is also the mom of two girls under the age of four and is a total foodie. Sam and I spent a lot of time meeting last fall about the exciting things for the JMcLaughlin Westport launch and every conversation we had led to cooking. Sam’s mom is an excellent home cook and Sam wants to replicate those meals in her own home. The only problem is that she lacks the time to cook a lot given her very full-time job. In hopes of cooking more Sam treated herself to a slow-cooker this winter. It is a great solution for working parents and she is excited to start using it. Once I heard about this I, naturally, jumped in with a few recipe ideas and Project Sam was born. This winter I’ll be testing new slow-cooker recipes for Sam (I put everything together while my daughter is at school) and then sending them off to her. It will be fun to revisit some of my favorites and develop new ones as well. Sam and I are both excited for the project to begin.

Welcome to the Powernap Express, a new weekly column that focuses on the quick off the cuff cooking experiments, side dishes and small plates I make each and every week. Powernaps are short and sweet, and so are these recipes. Want to read about the homemade snacks I whip up on a moment’s notice, or about my latest variation for a fast, yummy scallion dipping sauce? This column is where you will find those recipes, and more.

I’ve been wanting a place to focus on these smaller everyday recipes for a while now. I talk a lot about family dinners, big desserts and involved condiments, but often skip over the smaller stuff that occurs in my kitchen daily. Like the quick side dish I make to compliment herbed-citrus roast chicken, or the delicious lunch panini I invent on a whim using found items from my crisper. This column will include everything from my new favorite quick breakfasts, to riffs on homemade pasta sauce and my latest idea for salad dressing using my frozen summer herbs. Many times the recipes I share will originate when I experiment with whatever is in my pantry or my farmer’s market haul that particular day. Those sorts of cooking experiments (for better or worse) take place in my kitchen regularly. They are always off the cuff, tasty and quick, and you should know about them. After all, a lot of them end up becoming more permanent fixtures in my Naptime Chef repertoire and hopefully will in yours, too.

To kick things off I’m going to share the recipe for the most awesome breakfast sandwich in the world. I just tasted it for the first time last weekend when our friend Chris whipped them up while we were at a house party with 10 adults and 12 kids for New Year’s. Everything about the weekend was amazing, except for the fact that our children were far too young to understand the concept of sleeping in. Shortly after our New Year’s Eve celebration ended, theirs began. On Saturday morning the toddler set was up and at ’em while the 30-something parent set begged for mercy. Enter Chris with a generous slab of bacon, several dozens eggs and a hefty block of cheese. While the kids were treated to cereal and Scooby-Doo, we quietly devoured our quivering towers of grease down to every last meaty bite. What stood this sandwich apart from the ordinary McMuffin variety was not only the topping of two (yes, 2) fried eggs, but the technique Chris used to make it. I’ve included the visual below. I don’t plan to make these part of our daily, or even weekly, menu, but I’m sure I’ll be eating them again at some point soon.