Solid food

Yes, I know, I'm way way behind on writing blogs. Teething issues not withstanding, Max has been pretty well behaved and has mostly slept through the night. We've celebrated by spacing out a lot and sleeping constantly. He's also getting twice a day helpings of solid foods. Here's Max enjoying one of our meals.

Max enjoying an old family recipe: Baby food mixed with rice cereal and water, and heated. We call it "rocket fuel."


All-Righty, then. Even though I'm behind, I'm going to take a major detour and talk about cooking, if only because it's a big side effect of us having a baby. The audience for the blog, actually, is people who don't know how to cook or don't cook much, because, well, I'm with you, man. Those who can cook are free to snicker at my cooking attempts.

It's never been a big deal to me to cook when I have to - every 4 months or so, I'd cook a chicken spaghetti. I got to the point where I could make way too much of it in 45 minutes, including cleanup. Despite my talent, however, and despite the fact that chicken spaghetti is a very nutritionally complete meal that one could repeat every day for years with little adverse health effects, Delia always found someone else to cook our meals during Max's first few months.

With the departure of Adriana, however, I was forced to expand my cooking repertoire. This caused major problems. We have our share of fancy cookbooks with scintillating pictures, but my experience with them (once every 2 years or so) consists of me searching in frustration for Chanterelle mushrooms at Raley's, spending $50 on 15 ingredients or so that will go bad because I didn't use them all, and finally ruining the dish because I, well, had no idea what I was doing, and perhaps used 5 cans of anchovies instead of 5 anchovies. The recipe wasn't specific! On the other side of the spectrum, we have an easy cookbook with recipes like "raisins in Jell-O", which hasn't inspired me either - in fact, it left me wondering, who would want to ruin Jello? Millions of dollars were probably spent creating the perfect combination of food additives in Jello. Why mess around with perfection?

Now, there are some good recipes online (in epicurious.com, for example) but I honestly am not organized enough to take the time to search out a meal out the night before, sort through all the recipes for an easy, healthy and tasty one, print the recipe out, gather the ingredients the next day and somehow know what to do with the leftover ingredients once I finish cooking. If you can, God bless you.

But, I remembered, some of the fitness magazines at the gym had pretty decent-looking recipes in them. So I looked for these magazines online and soon found "Guy Meals Made Easy." You click on a protein (like salmon) and one style (Italian Style) and it gives you a recipe with an easy Italian sauce, and similar stuff for a carbohydrate side dish and vegetable. What becomes apparent pretty quickly, however, is that the recipes repeat - it's exactly the same for "salmon" or "chicken" except for the word "salmon" or "chicken". The cooking didn't matter either - it just tells you to put the meat in a broiler or grill or on a skillet. What a ripoff.

Then I changed my mind. I now think it's brilliant. All you have to do is learn how to grill, for example, and with 5 sauces and 5 different meats, you magically have 25 different meals. And, there's not a slavish devotion to a particular food combination - some of the sauces work fine with any meat or any vegetable, or, for that matter, rice, or potatoes, or bread. Granted, some combos were better than others, but if one is willing to experiment with different combinations (and potentially mess up the meal) you can get some very interesting food. I tried a spicy sesame oil on a yam (sesame oil, peanut oil, green onions), which was fantastic, but even an Italian-style yam (garlic, parsley, olive oil) I made later was surprisingly good, as long as we didn't overdo the sauce. And, the recipes were simple enough that I could begin to understand the effect of different ingredients on the food.

That website kept us going for a while, but I started researching the recipe's author, Mark Bittman. As many of you know already, he's a home cook and food writer for the New York Times, whose passion is basically making good meals as simply and quickly as possible. He also has a book, "How to Cook Everything". Which I bought.

The book is 1046 pages long. It makes a terrifying thump when dropped. And It's "Guy Meals Made Easy" on steroids. It has a recipe for everything, including a boiled egg and for toast. It tells you how to chop an onion, while saying you can be a good cook even if you don't use the accepted chef's techniquie for onion chopping. It tells you what cooking tools you need to buy. Apparently a roasting pan helps when you put stuff in an oven, for example. And it's got zillions of recipes, lots of them pretty quick, with tons of variations. It's organized in a way to make it easy to mix and match different items. Pretty much all our family recipes (and Delia's) are either listed in the book or have a pretty close cousin in there. And the ingredients are generally pretty simple and repeat a lot - if I have some garlic, lemon, olive oil and a couple other spices at home, I can pretty much buy whatever I want at the store and find a recipe I can make with it. So I've been cooking for over a month from it now, almost never repeating a recipe, and the results have ranged from pretty good (even those I screwed up) to fantastic. I have a feeling one could open a pretty good restaurant from some of the better recipes in there. So if you suck at cooking but are forced to do so, try the book. And the website.

OK, I got that off my chest. Max will show up more prominently in the next blogs.