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1. Creole seasoning is your friend. Not a lot, but just a bit can start kids on their way to appreciating spicy food. Try baked/broiled chicken where you sprinkle just a bit of creole seasoning on the pieces before putting them in the oven. They'll come out with a bit of a crust, and cooking with a bit of salt helps cut back on a diner's craving to put more on at the table.
2. Cook easily-assembled foods. Bagel pizzas and quesadillas are great possibilities. Even if you make tacos with one of those everything-in-a-box kits, the kids can help. Individual pizzas using bagels or english muffins as a "crust" can be tailored to each member of the household. Same for quesadillas or fajitas. There are no rules for toppings and content, everyone gets what they want!
3. Use wine when cooking for kids. Try this--slice boneless, skinless chicken breasts into tender-size pieces. Sprinkle both sides of tenders with creole seasoning and saute in a bit of olive oil until brown, just a couple of minutes per side. Put them in a glass baking dish. De-glaze the saute pan with a bit of white wine and pour the wine/drippings back onto the tenders. Bake for 20 minutes at 350F. You get chicken tenders with a much more complex flavor. The alcohol in the wine evaporates while in the saute pan, leaving the flavor and enabling you to cut back on the salt you use.
4. Make it fast! There are a lot of easy alternatives to cooking from scratch that don't involve a lot of work. Buy some pre-cooked chicken tenders. Warm them in a pan and add a bit of white wine, heavy cream, and white seedless grapes. Serve over pasta. Don't put the sauce on the kids' plates. Instead of microwaved chicken, you now have a creative meal!
5. Serve your food to the kids. Take a look at my Chicken Bonne Femme. OK, kids aren't going to get into the sauce, with the onions, mushrooms, diced ham and wine, but they will get into fried potatoes, chicken, and bacon! Go ahead and cook for YOUR palate and dumb down the meal a bit for the kids. Creole cooking is great for this, because the recipes add complex sauces to otherwise simple dishes. Cook crawfish in a cream sauce for you, but pull some of the mudbug tails out before adding them to the sauce. Dust them in a bit of flour, saute, and you get popcorn crawfish!
If you follow the principle of refusing to eat what YOU like, you can let your imagination run wild with ways to accomodate the kids.
And it'll be fun!
One of New Orleans food critic Tom Fitzmorris' cardinal rules is that diners should "eat it where it lives." Eat Maine lobstah in Maine, for example, gulf shrimp on the gulf coast, you get the idea. Sure, we can flash-freeze and overnight ship just about anything these days, but it's just not the same as eating whatever it is locally. The influx of Asian seafood on the market, even here in New Orleans, is a good example of this. We've discussed the bland lack-of-flavor to flash-frozen Asian shrimp or crawfish previously. Once shellfish are cooked, you can put flavor on them, but you can't put it in them. Crab boil is concentrated to the point of borderline toxic so that all those spices and flavors seep through the shells while shrimp are boiling. No way mass-market producers are going to use the stuff.
Location and atmosphere often go a long way in terms of making mediocre food seem like the best meals we've ever had in our lives. Let's face it, classic English fish and chips is a boring meal. Eat it in a pub near Hyde Park and it becomes a memory. That's one of the reasons I never argue with visitors to New Orleans when they told me they had such a fantastic meal at a place where I'd never spend my own money. There's just no value in trying to shoot down the memory.
If you think meals can create memories, booze is makes the memory even fonder. A common theme among travelers who go to France or Italy is that they will remember a fantastic red table wine in a bistro in Paris, Florence, or Naples. It was part of a fantastic al fresco meal, one of the most wonderful evenings of their lives. They come back to New Orleans and go to Martin Wine Cellar in search of the wine that made them feel so good. They find it, get it home, grill up some steaks, open the bottle, and take a sip. Unfortunately, a bottle of mid-tier house wine doesn't engage a Star Trek-style holodeck, and they're not transported to their bistro. The wine is what it is, a mid-tier table wine. It gave them a great buzz at the time, though, and that's what the memory is all about. Now, have a martini or three before those steaks, and odds are that the wine will taste just as good to the dulled senses.
So, yeah, Guinness does taste better in Ireland. Or so they say, I've never been. But I can attest that Bavaria tastes so much better sitting outside at a pub in Utrecht. Jug-quality Riesling is fantastic with lunch at small restaurants in Koblenz.
Feel free to share your own "tastes better" memories in comments!
I'm teaching in Berkeley Heights, NJ this week. The hotel where I'm staying is in Basking Ridge, NJ, and there's an interesting Italian place down the street called "Ciao." It's an upscale-but-casual place. I grabbed a seat at the bar rather than a table for one.
I started with a glass of Pinot Noir that was suggested by the bartender, Meredith. After I decided on tuna for dinner, she suggested a white made from Malbec. The Malbec grape usually makes a full-bodied red, but this was wine was made from "skinless" Malbec grapes (her description). I think what she meant was the wine is pressed and the skins are immediately discarded. With red grapes, the skins are usually left in contact with the juice, so the tannin in the skin enriches the wine. It was a good choice, full and fruity.
Apologies for the quality of these photos; they're from my phone and lighting was poor
My first course was cream of asparagus soup:
It was subtle, with thin slices of asparagus throughout.
Next was the main course, seared tuna with a ginger-soy sauce:
That's an arugla and onion salad on either side, grilled asparagus on top, and the tuna was sitting on top of a scoop of wasabi mashed potatoes. The tuna was perfect, the salad and asparagus wonderful. The wasabi mashed potatoes were just a bit odd to my taste. They weren't bad, I just didn't quite know how to process the taste at the same time as the tuna. I didn't eat all that much of the potatoes, which was my rationalization for dessert. I don't totally subscribe to Sajini's theory that dessert is most important, but I don't want to be a glutton, either.
I asked Meredith to pick between a brownie cheesecake, tiramisu, and orange mousse, and she suggested the Orange Mousse:
My guess is that the mousse was the only one of the three made in-house. It was a winner, a tasty combination of orange with blackberries.
I capped off dinner with a cappucino.
Overall, this was a good meal. Given the overall dearth of places to eat near here, I may go back and try Ciao's pizza later this week.
curbside, take-away from Outback Steakhouse requires good wine to be a successful stay-in-and-watch-TV meal. I ran to a store around the corner from here and picked up two bottles. For dinner, Mia's Playground Zinfandel, 2003. For dessert, Covey Run Late Harvest Riesling, 2004.
The red is OK. Mia's Playground is an adequate Zin, but the earth didn't move.
The Riesling, on the other hand, was very tasty. Sweet and fruity, peaches and apples with a crisp finish.
