A short leap

Our friend Ben is in town for a visit, and this past Friday, while we waited in line for lunch at Il Corvo - always worth the wait, in case you ever walked by and wondered - I told him about some lamb meatballs that I wanted to write up, but that I had a problem: the only photo I have is of the raw meat and seasonings in a bowl. Ooh, Ben said sharply, sucking air between his teeth, which I took to mean, That’s going to hurt.

And yet.  AND YET.

Maybe it will ease the blow to know that the reason why I have no meatball photo is that, by the time they’re done cooking, they smell so irritatingly good, and I’m so irritable and hungry, that my claws come out and I throw myself on the pan. Anyway, I think my mother will love this recipe, and if I hold off on posting until I have a proper photo, it’ll be almost like I’m depriving my mother, my very own mother, of happiness.

I am not the first person in the world to own The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook, by the brilliant Deb Perelman, and I am also not the first person to be tempted by her recipe for Sesame-Spiced Turkey Meatballs.  Deb mentions in the sidebar that the recipe can be made with ground lamb instead of turkey, and what I am, in fact, is here to report that, yes, absolutely, it can!  I’ve done it myself five or six times now. There is probably no meat that doesn’t go well with toasted sesame seeds, garlic, cumin, coriander, and chile, but in most such cases, lamb would be my intuitive choice. The meatball that we’re talking about here has the basic flavor profile of falafel, right, and since lamb shows up in cooking across the Middle East, falafel to lamb is a short leap.  I don’t know, but I sort of want to call these Falafel-Spiced Lamb Meatballs.  Deb, I’m screwing up everything.

In any case, it’s nothing more complicated than mixing up ground meat and seasonings in a bowl and rolling them into balls. It’s the kind of cooking that can be accomplished with only minimal attention, while the rest of your brain is lulled to sleep by the sound of the waves crashing on the white noise machine in your kid’s room on the other side of the wall.  (Or, you could listen to Spilled Milk. Did you know that we’re going weekly? And that you can donate to the show, which helps us buy ingredients and pay for hosting and wins our devotion to the grave and beyond?) The resulting meatballs are juicy, fragrant with cumin and coriander and garlic, and when you chew, there’s a faint, wonderful crackle of toasted sesame seeds between your teeth. The crackle might be the best part.

Deb serves hers with a smashed-chickpea salad that’s bright with sumac and lemon, and the combination is delicious. I like them with anything, though most often a pile of roasted vegetables. They would be perfect with couscous, or stuffed in a pita with shredded cabbage and chopped cucumber and some yogurt or tahini sauce, or even just heaped on plain rice with a cucumber salad on the side.  The main thing to know is, they would be perfect.


Falafel-Spiced Lamb Meatballs
Adapted slightly from The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook, by Deb Perelman

Deb’s recipe calls for browning these meatballs in a pan and then finishing them in the oven, and while that certainly yields a stunner of a meatball, both in flavor and beauty, I regularly take a lazier route: I only bake them. Then I can basically walk away, and ta da, the meatballs cook themselves. Cleanup is also very easy, thanks to the parchment on the sheet pan.  Do what you will.

2 tablespoons (15 grams) sesame seeds
1 pound (455 grams) ground lamb
2/3 cup (40 grams) fresh breadcrumbs
¼ cup (60 ml) water
1 teaspoon table salt
1 large egg
2 garlic cloves, minced or pressed
½ teaspoon ground cumin
½ teaspoon ground coriander
½ teaspoon Aleppo pepper
Pinch of cayenne or red pepper flakes
Olive oil, for cooking

Preheat the oven to 425°F. If you plan to skip the stovetop browning and only bake these, line a rimmed sheet pan with parchment.

Put the sesame seeds in a small skillet, and place the skillet over medium heat.  Cook, stirring occasionally, until the seeds smell toasty and are beginning to turn golden.  I never pay attention to exactly how long this takes, but it’s not terribly long.

While the sesame seeds toast, put the lamb through cayenne in a medium bowl.  When they’re ready, add the toasted sesame seeds.  Mix with a fork (or with your hand, my preference) until evenly mixed. Form the meat mixture into 1½-inch, or golf-ball-sized, balls.  (This is easiest to do if your hands are wet; that will help to keep the meat from sticking to you.) If you plan to brown the meatballs on the stovetop, arrange them on a tray or large plate; if you plan to only bake them, arrange them on the prepared sheet pan.

At this point, if you’re lazy like me, put the sheet pan in the oven and walk away. After about 10 minutes, pull out your thermometer (all hail the Thermapen! Possibly my single favorite kitchen tool!) and poke one or two of the meatballs: when they’re ready, the internal temperature will be between 160 and 165 degrees.  If they’re not hot enough, slide them back in, and check again shortly. Again, I never seem to keep track of how long they take to cook. Somewhere between 12 and 15 minutes, I think?

If you’re a better person and plan to brown your meatballs as Deb directs, heat a generous slick of oil in a large ovenproof skillet or sauté pan. Brown the meatballs in batches, taking care not to crowd the pan or nudge them before they’re good and brown. Be gentle as you turn them: they’re soft! Transfer the meatballs to a paper-towel-lined tray or plate, and continue cooking in more batches until they’re all browned. Then discard the oil, wipe all but a little of it from the pan, and return all of the meatballs to the pan. Slide into the oven, and bake until a thermometer reads an internal temperature of 160 to 165 degrees, or about 10 to 15 minutes.

Yield: about 4 servings, or roughly 25 meatballs

Note: These meatballs freeze beautifully.  I like to cook about half of them right away and then freeze the remaining half on a sheet pan lined with parchment.  When they’re frozen solid, I transfer them from the pan to a plastic storage bag. They thaw quickly - and actually, I’ve even baked them while they were still slightly frozen. It took a bit longer, but no harm done.

Felt like it

HELLOOOOOOOO

I’m just off the plane from a week in Oklahoma City with June and my mother, clearing out my teenage bedroom. Fun-wise, it was right up there with surgery in the pre-anesthesia era, especially my senior prom Party Pics. On the upside, Mom and I made a wonderful pea soup (only with half the amount of ham hock, and with dried herbs instead of fresh) and worked our way through approximately four bars of chocolate and an undisclosed amount of wine, and I determined (take note!!!) that the only way to handle letters from exes and otherwise is to shove them dutifully in a box and then pray it gets lost in the mail. We woke up too early every day, and I stayed up too late every night (reading We Are Called to Rise, the best novel I’ve read in a long time, and I would say that even if my editor hadn’t send it to me, though she did), and today, after my usual Wednesday admin at Essex, I was so tired that I had to stop for a three o’clock espresso, and I still yawned afterward.

But I wanted to say hi. Just felt like it.

Always to acclaim

Happy Two Days After Valentine’s Day! I hope you celebrated in style, which is more than we did. I typed most of this post on Valentine’s night, while Brandon worked at Delancey, slinging pizzas for all the lovers.  I did, however, rally to bake a banana bread.  Nothing says, I love you (or, You married your grandmother), like a banana bread on Valentine’s Day.

This is not a post about banana bread, just to clarify.
 

This is a post about lime curd.  Not lemon curd, but lime: "the superlative citrus," as our friend Niah, who is also the bar manager of Essex, likes to say. And if it seems like I only post sweets and baked goods anymore, I know, I know, you’re right. I’m sure it’ll pass.

This particular lime curd comes from a cookbook of my mother’s, Gourmet’s America, published in 1994 - a year that, I should admit, just for the sake of completeness, I spent mostly driving mopily around Oklahoma City, newly won driver’s license in my wallet, listening to Nine Inch Nails’s The Downward Spiral and having a lot of feelings for Trent Reznor.  Meanwhile, back at home, my mother was doing something of more lasting import, which is to say: while combing the bookshelf in the kitchen, pulling together ideas for a party, she found this recipe for lime curd. The idea was to serve the curd next to a pile of sugar cookies, and then your guests could "frost" their own cookies. She tried it. I remember ducking through the living room at some point during the party, noticing the stack of cookies and beside it a bowl of curd, creamy yellow with shards of green zest. I grabbed a cookie on the way up to my room, smeared it with as much lime curd as I could fit onto the edge of a knife, and wished, for the rest of the night, that I had taken two.

My mother has repeated the lime curd / sugar cookie trick several times since, always to acclaim. And when I became interested in a few things that were not Trent Reznor*, it was the first curd I ever made. I was intimidated at first, but fruit curd is easy alchemy: a stovetop custard, sort of, but with fruit juice instead of milk. This one isn’t a purely lime curd - it uses both lemon and lime juices, plus lime zest - but it nails it. It’s undoubtedly lime, fruity and fragrant, but the lemon helps to perk it up, to cut the sugar, eggs, and butter with added acidity. It’s an ideal texture for frosting a cookie, or for filling a cake, or folding into whipped cream to make a mousse.

That said, I don’t make it as often as I should, but that’s only because of my own biases: when I think of sweets, I think of chocolate first and citrus later. But it came to mind recently, when Matthew and I were brainstorming a forthcoming Spilled Milk episode on limes, so I made a batch. And when it tasted as good as I remembered, I took it to a book club meeting - some of us Delancey ladies have banded together to read books and, apparently, eat lime curd - along with a box of Walker’s Pure Butter Shortbread Scottie Dogs, and I am pleased to report that we enjoyed it more than Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin.

* For the record, I still have a thing for "The Perfect Drug." And, as I learned in a New Yorker profile, Reznor is a better dog owner than I am, because he actually remembers to brush his dog’s teeth.


Lime Curd
Adapted from Gourmet’s America

2 large eggs, beaten
1 stick (113 grams) unsalted butter, diced
½ cup (100 grams) sugar
2 Tbsp. lime zest
3 Tbsp. freshly squeezed lemon juice
1 Tbsp. freshly squeezed lime juice
A pinch of salt

Combine all ingredients in a saucepan – I used a 2-quart – and set it over medium-low heat. Whisk until the butter is melted, and then continue to whisk constantly (or almost constantly; you don’t want to let it curdle or scorch) until the mixture is thickened, like jelly. As it thickens, you’re looking for it to hold the mark of the whisk, and if you lift the whisk, the mixture should hold its shape when it plops back into the pot. This will probably take about 10 to 12 minutes. When it’s ready, remove the curd from the heat, and press through a mesh strainer into a storage container.  Chill well before serving.

Note: If you want your finished lime curd to still be flecked with bits of green lime zest, you could skip the straining step. But I always worry about finding bits of cooked egg in my fruit curd, so I like to strain mine - and then I lose the zest, but oh well.

Book update, housekeeping, la la la

It is with pleasure, great relief, and even greater trepidation that I can FINALLY say that Delancey, my second book, will be published in three months and one day.

Right! Three months and one day sounds like an eternity. An age. But we’re closer than we were a month ago! Look at it that way. That’s the way I look at it in my better moments, the ones when I’m not staring at the clock.

In the meantime, I get to present to you the book trailer, or video, or whatever you call it, for Delancey. My publisher and the video team did a beautiful job! Granted, I am not exactly what one would call at ease in front of a camera, but aside from the fact that I blinked so much that one might think my eyeball was about to fall out, I’m very happy with it. I should also tell you, while we’re on the subject, that Delancey is available for pre-order. And when it comes out, I’ll be doing readings and signings across the country. Planning is underway! More to come!

I am also tickled - and turning into my grandmother, as evidenced by my use of the word "tickled" - to learn that my first book, A Homemade Life, was chosen as a Kindle Monthly 100 Pick for February.  That means that the Kindle edition is crazily cheap - $1.99 - throughout the month of February. And because they were feeling nice, my publisher updated it to include a sample chapter of Delancey, too, at the very end. I love that they did that. I don’t have a Kindle, and believe me, I am quite familiar with A Homemade Life, but still, I bought it tonight and had it sent to our iPad, just so I could check it out. I’m living large.

It also recently occurred to me that some of you may not know that Brandon and I have been writing a column on craft cocktails for Food52?  Or, I don’t know, maybe you know? In any case, we post there every other Thursday, which adds up to a lot of cocktails already. The next post will go up tomorrow. I try not to play favorites, but what the hell: my favorite is the unlikely-seeming Negroni Flip. And in moments when that feels like too much work, I find it hard to beat a Campari Shandy.

Somewhat, or maybe mostly, off-topic: I watched the documentary Pearl Jam Twenty for the second time last week, and I have to insist that if you haven’t seen it, and if you have even vaguely fond memories of the hard rock bands of the early '90s, or even if you don’t, you should watch it.  I streamed it on Netflix, but it also seems to be available as a 12-part series on YouTube. It’s directed by Cameron Crowe, and it’s wonderful, and I say that as someone who has always, actually, leaned more Nirvana than Pearl Jam. PJ20 is as much about Seattle, my adopted city, as it is about Pearl Jam, and one thing I particularly love about the film is its exploration of the unusual tradition of collaboration, rather than competition, between Seattle bands.  Brandon and I have experienced the same phenomenon in the restaurant business here - and I write a bit about it in Delancey - and I don’t know, but the whole film is just very inspiring. Brandon is going to kill me for publicly admitting what losers we are, but both he and I choked up the first time we watched it.

Last, but not least, I was invited to deliver the keynote speech at Food Blog South in Birmingham, Alabama, at the end of January, and yesterday, the esteemed Dianne Jacob posted an excerpt from my talk. Being asked to give the speech forced me to think through my gut feelings about writing and creativity - so many ideas and decisions that I don’t usually take the time to articulate, even to myself - and now that the anxiety of the actual talk is behind me, I’m happy to have those thoughts on paper, and grateful to Dianne for her interest in sharing them.

Happy Thursday, all.

The right buttons

Before we get started: thank you for your comments on my previous post, and for sharing so many good tips and ideas about feeding families. May I say that you all seem like great parents? You seem so sane. (Sanity! Sometimes I think it’s the highest goal.) I’m going to get unbecomingly sappy for a minute and say, yet again, how happy I am to have this space, this community of sorts. I know I’ve said it before, but I think about it even more often than I say it.

I also think about leftover oatmeal muffins. I think about leftover oatmeal muffins even more often than I think about oatmeal, which is inconvenient, because you obviously have to have oatmeal before you can have leftover oatmeal muffins.  Annnnd now you know why I make oatmeal. I’ve been keeping it from you all this time.

Of course, good oatmeal, like Megan’s oatmeal in the link up there, reheats so well that there’s no reason not to eat it on the second day. By all means, eat your leftover oatmeal.  But should you ever find yourself with not-as-good-as-Megan’s oatmeal, or should you be bored with eating oatmeal as oatmeal, or should you be only human in that you would rather have a muffin (which some people like to remind us, wanh wanh WAAAH, is basically cake) than hot cereal, you should laminate this recipe and stick it to the fridge. I first heard about it from Lisa, who (I think) heard about it from Amanda Soule, who quietly slipped her recipe into the end of a blog post a couple of years ago. And now I am here to shout about it.

I’ve made these muffins many times, many different ways.  At some point, I discovered that there’s also a recipe for leftover oatmeal muffins in The Fannie Farmer Cookbook, and the way I make mine is a hybrid of that one and Amanda’s.  I use more butter than Amanda does - though there’s still not much; you could certainly try more - and I use less baking powder.  As muffins go, these are not sweet, not heavy, and they’re also not especially cake-like. They’re just cake-like enough to push the right buttons, but not to set off any alarms.  They have a wonderful chew, the way most baked goods involving oats do, and if you use steel-cut oatmeal, it’s especially nice. The steel-cut oats almost seem to crackle - don’t know how that could be, but they do - in your mouth. And it’s a handy recipe, too, because in addition to taking care of your leftover oatmeal, it will also absorb any flavorings you want to add: nuts (ding ding!), seeds, dried fruit, fresh fruit, chunks of chocolate (ding ding!), spices, whatnot. I call this recipe a keeper.

The one thing I should say: because these muffins don’t have a great abundance of butter, they really are best on the first day.  I know a lot of recipes say that, and I don’t always agree, but here I do.  That said, the recipe does make a good number of muffins, and if you have some left over, all is not lost. I’ve eaten them after two or three days on the counter, and not unhappily.  Just throw them in a toaster oven (or regular oven) to warm them and recrisp the edges.


Leftover Oatmeal Muffins
Adapted from Amanda Soule and The Fannie Farmer Cookbook

These muffins come together quickly, especially if you mix up the dry ingredients the night before. I once managed to make them at 7:30 am while wearing a wiggly 14-month-old in a sling. FIST BUMP! (Or, TERRORIST FIST JAB!  Uggghhhhh.)

Also, for the record, I like these best with walnuts and bittersweet chocolate as my add-ins.  I used a ¼ cup of each: that’s about 30 grams of walnuts, chopped, and 45 grams of Valrhona 64% Manjari chocolate discs, chopped.

1 ½ cups (210 grams) all-purpose flour
¼ cup (50 grams) sugar
4 teaspoons baking powder
½ teaspoon fine sea salt
½ cup add-ins (such as nuts, chopped chocolate, coconut flakes, fruit, etc.)
1 large egg
1 cup (185 grams) cooked oatmeal, preferably steel-cut
½ cup (120 ml) whole milk
2 tablespoons (28 grams) unsalted butter, melted and cooled slightly

Preheat the oven to 400°F, and grease a 12-cup muffin tin.

In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, sugar, baking powder, salt, and add-ins.

In another bowl, lightly beat the egg. Add the oatmeal to the egg, and mash with a fork to break up clumps. Add the milk and the butter, and stir or whisk to combine.

Pour the wet mixture into the dry mixture, and stir briefly to just combine. Divide the batter evenly between the wells of the prepared muffin tin. Bake for 15 to 20 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the center of one of the muffins comes out clean. The muffins won’t brown much on top and might even look a little anemic, but that’s okay. Serve warm, ideally.

Note: These muffins are best when they’re fresh from the oven, or on the day that they’re made.

Yield: 12 smallish muffins

In it together

First things first: if you don’t want to read about kid stuff, you should skip this post. I won’t mind.  A few years ago, I totally would have skipped it. You have my permission, and my sympathy.

But if you, on the other hand, spent part of yesterday as I did, sitting on the floor with a sparkly child-size tulle skirt on your head, singing "Your Personal Penguin" to a small person while she sucked on a hank of her own hair, you might be at least somewhat interested in this post.

A few of you have written to ask if I would share my perspective on and approach to feeding kids. I’ve hemmed and hawed, mostly because the topic is fraught with mines and quicksand and very, very strong opinions. I am a new parent with a child who has only been eating solids for about six months. I am not an expert.  No noooo NOOOOOOO.  I am also keenly aware that my perspective would be different if my child or I had a food allergy or intolerance, or if my child were very picky. What I’m trying to say is: my perspective doesn’t mean much.

That said, I know that I really enjoy reading about other parents’ approaches to feeding their kids. I find it helpful. Sometimes stressful, but often helpful, insightful, and even galvanizing. Maybe you find it helpful, too?  So, maybe, if I do write a bit about my approach to feeding June, we can all agree to stay cool about it and understand that I do not claim to know anything about any child but my own?

To be honest, I try not to think too hard.  I assume that if June is getting some fruits, some vegetables, some fat, and some protein most days, she’s going to be all right. Ever since she was born, I’ve had this sense - I can’t explain it without sounding all new-age-y and annoying; get out your crystals, folks! - that June is going to be okay. That goes generally, across the board. I hope I never have to second-guess it. When it comes to feeding her, I try to avoid any guidelines or quantities, because they keep me up at night.  The way I see it, my job is to offer a reasonable variety of foods, the kind of stuff that Brandon and I eat, and June’s job is to choose which parts to eat and how much. I don’t cajole when she doesn’t want to eat, and I don’t praise her when she does. Sometimes she eats like a pack of wild dogs, and sometimes, like tonight, she eats only a few bites. I’m sure that there are many picky moments to come, and maybe even picky weeks, months, or years. If there is one thing that I am trying to remember in my young career as a parent, it’s that whatever is true today may not be true tomorrow. And I want food to be something fun that we can share, not a source of strife.  I have to lay the foundations for that.

My approach to feeding June has been shaped in large part by two people: my friend Matthew Amster-Burton, author of Hungry Monkey, and Nina Planck, author of Real Food for Mother and Baby. (I read the latter while I was pregnant, and it also had a big impact on how I decided to eat during pregnancy, and how I eat now.)  For me, the big take-away from Matthew’s book is this: there is no such thing as baby food. And that dovetails nicely, I think, with Nina Planck’s viewpoint, which is roughly this: Whole foods are best. Cereals are not great first foods, because babies’ bodies aren’t able to break down complex starches. Babies need fat and protein. And mostly, babies - and mothers - need good, simple food.

June tasted her first solid food around five months, when I let her suck on some raw apple that I had sliced for myself. I also gave her tastes of my favorite whole-milk plain yogurt, parsnip soup, split pea soup, avocado, pizza crust, chana masala, and a bunch of other foods from our plates. Neither Brandon nor I have food allergies, and our doctor was pretty laid-back on the topic of first foods. He suggested that we be careful with citrus and strawberries, which apparently can cause reactions, but otherwise, he explained that the guidelines for first foods change so often that it’s hard for him to get strongly behind any of them. As it happened, June wasn’t really interested in solids until she was about 10 months old, at which point she had teeth and could handle a decent variety of textures. Over a couple of months, she started eating more "real" meals and nursing less. I introduced her to whole cow’s milk when she was just under a year old, and I weaned her from the breast completely about a month ago, at 15 months.

I salt June’s food as we salt our own.  I try not to give her a lot of sweet things - not because I think I can mold her into a non-sweets-craving person (haa haaaa, RIIIIIIIIIGHT), but mostly because I know she will want to eat the living crap out of them, and I want her to save room for other things. I would like her to grow up understanding that there is no such thing as bad food: that some foods are better for our bodies, yes, and some food isn’t food at all (like Nerds and sour gummies, both of which I would currently kill for), but that there is time enough for all of it. I want her to know that food is about pleasure and connection and sustenance.

Sometimes she eats everything we give her. Other times, she won’t touch something that she loved only the day before. Sometimes she throws her food on the floor. Sometimes she feeds it to Alice. Sometimes she feeds it to us. Sometimes she spits it out and plays with it and then puts it back in her mouth and eats it. In any case, I try not to respond. I don’t try to make her eat. If she can feed herself, I let her.  She’s in charge of how much she eats. She knows a few signs - food, water, milk, more, please - and she can tell me when she is hungry or thirsty. I try not to hover or push or freak out. I try. I really try.

So far, June’s favorite foods are milk, fruit, and meat.  She would probably drink milk and eat bananas and brisket all day, if I let her.  But she also loves Hugo’s pastina, any meat that’s fall-apart tender, scrambled eggs, cold pepperoni, Brandon’s pizza, pasta with our friend Francis Lam’s eggplant sauce, Cafe Lago meatballs, ham bone soup, pasta with Bolognese, French fries, prosciutto, a cannellini bean and lamb soup that Lecia made, and Ed Fretwell Soup from my first book. I try to always keep peas in the freezer and a roasted sweet potato in the fridge, and when I can, I make a big batch of homemade applesauce. At the end of summer, she was way into berries, and somewhat into roasted zucchini. Lately, she’s into roasted Brussels sprouts, slightly mushy steamed broccoli, and oranges.  She likes rice and beans, and pho. Most mornings, she eats whole-milk plain yogurt and fruit, or some oatmeal. Yesterday, we had oatmeal pancakes - which, when cold, also make a good midday snack with a slice of cheddar cheese. For dessert, she’s a big fan of graham crackers, or half a banana and some peanut butter. We offer her water with every meal - from a cup, a cup with a straw, or a bottle; whatever is around - and we save milk for first thing in the morning, naptime, and bedtime, or else she fills up. I think June would want me to add, just for the sake of completeness, that she is not a fan of avocado, fish, or seafood. And she refuses to swallow any kind of winter squash. She likes bread, but so far only as a toy. And that is the truth according to June on this day, January 15, 2014.

I hope this is helpful?  Or, at least, I hope this didn’t make you feel like I feel, which is to say, totally preoccupied with getting your hands on some sour gummies?  Either way, I guess we’re in it together. xx

A good person to know

I first met Megan at a conference, I think? I’m a real loser when it comes to conferences - crowds make me feel like hiding under furniture, and my brain is a wide-mesh sieve for faces and names - but I think that’s how it happened. We met at a conference, and at some point down the line, she happened to hire our friend Sam to do the website for her granola company Marge, and at some point further down the line, Megan and Sam started dating, and at some point down the line from there, she became Our Friend Megan. I hope she will still be Our Friend Megan after I post this picture of her and Sam being pummeled by wind on Puget Sound.

If you like to eat, she’s a good person to know, especially if you like to eat breakfast, and particularly if you like to eat things involving oats. When I run out of homemade granola, hers is the only one I buy. In recent years, she’s done a lot of playing around with other grains, too, grains that tend to intimidate me but luckily not Megan, and about ten days ago, her first cookbook, Whole-Grain Mornings, was published by Ten Speed Press. You might have already heard of it - Heidi, for one, just mentioned Megan’s California Barley Bowl - but as soon as I tried her method for making steel-cut oatmeal, I knew I had to write about it.

I’ve been making oatmeal the same way forever: boiling three cups of water and half a teaspoon of kosher salt, stirring in a cup of steel cut oats, lowering the heat so that the pot just simmers, and letting it go like that until the cereal has thickened. It gets the job done, and it also has the benefit of being easy to make with one hand while I have a 25-pound person wrapped around my hip like a monkey. My oatmeal is good - I originally typed "my oatmeal is food," and that’s also true - but Megan’s oatmeal is better.

It starts with an ingenious (ingenious!) idea: you toast the oats in butter. (!) This is, admittedly, somewhat difficult to do with one hand while you have a 25-pound person wrapped around your hip like a monkey, and if you saw me on my first time attempting it, you would also have heard a lot of cussing (me) and whining (me and June). But if you have two hands, it’s no big deal. It’s no more difficult than boiling water - about three parts water and one part milk, to be specific - which is what you do while the oats are toasting. You’ll know the oats are ready when the kitchen smells like you’re baking shortbread, and then you scrape the toasted oats into the pot of simmering water and milk and let the mixture roll slowly along for about half an hour, until the oats are plump and you’ve got soft, creamy porridge. I recommend that you top it with maple syrup.

I don’t know whether it’s the oat-toasting or the ratio of water to milk, or both, but Megan’s is a very special oatmeal.  It’s velvety, velvet punched up with chewy oats. It’s perfectly salted and perfectly not-sweet. The entire recipe, which feeds four, has only a tablespoon of butter and a cup of milk, which I consider very reasonable, but it feels rich, satisfying. I might even call it luxurious, a word that was never intended for oatmeal. As soon as we’d finished our first batch, I made a second - this time at night, after June was in bed, so that I had full use of my limbs - and I can report that it reheats very well. It’s even good at room temperature, which probably sounds revolting, but I like it, so be nice.  I made my third batch last night, and June and I took down half of it this morning.  June likes hers with applesauce and plain yogurt, eats a full adult-size portion, and then mooches from my bowl when hers is gone.

Megan, it’s a keeper. xx


Megan’s Steel-Cut Oatmeal
Adapted from Whole-Grain Mornings, by Megan Gordon

The original version of this recipe includes vanilla extract and raisins, but I’m a plain-oatmeal person, so what follows is the basic portion of the recipe.  I hope Megan will forgive me for being boring.

I should note that both Megan and I use Diamond Crystal brand kosher salt, which tastes less salty than Morton brand. And as far as natural cane sugar goes, I use unbleached and unrefined cane sugar - bought in bulk at my local supermarket - but you could also use demerara, turbinado, or muscovado.

1 tablespoon (14 grams) unsalted butter
1 cup (175 grams) steel-cut oats
3 ¼ cups (780 ml) water
1 cup (240 ml) whole milk
1 tablespoon (12 grams) natural cane sugar
½ teaspoon kosher salt
Maple syrup, brown sugar, or honey for serving

In a heavy skillet, melt the butter over medium heat. Add the oats, and cook, stirring occasionally, until quite fragrant, about 5 minutes. Set aside.

In a 2 ½- to 3-quart saucepan, bring the water, milk, sugar, and salt to a simmer. (Be careful: I find that this mixture goes quickly from zero to boiling and has a tendency to boil over.) Stir in the toasted oats. Adjust the heat to maintain a slow simmer, and partially cover the saucepan.  Cook, stirring occasionally to prevent clumping and scorching, until the mixture has thickened and the oats are soft, 25 to 30 minutes. The cereal will still be quite loose at this point, but don’t worry; it will continue to thicken. Remove the pan from the heat, allow it to rest for a few minutes (still partially covered), and then serve hot, with maple syrup, brown sugar, or honey.

Yield: 4 servings