for what it's worth

I am a pretty unreliable clipping service, since my attention to the newspaper and other periodicals, both real and virtual, even in my topics of choice, is pretty haphazard. But a few of my customarily cursory glances in recent days have yielded a Thread.  I read Elizabeth Kolbert's article in the New Yorker, "Spoiled Rotten," about poorly-brought-up American children, then I happened across two pieces in the New York Times: "Is The Family Dinner Overrated?" and "Are Family Vacations Worth It?," the latter aiming to settle once and for all whether parents should "soldier forth and try to create those irreplaceable family memories...[o]r take a real break by zipping off without the kids."

Certainly the article attempting to debunk the notion that regularly sitting down to dinner together will have a long-lasting positive effect on your children was the one that got my goat most emphatically. That's hitting me right where I live, my friend.   Using hard science and real data, the researchers examined this previously-established "fact" that dining together correlates with long-term happiness, success and other fantasies of the harried parent.  Turns out it's a little more equivocal than we've been told.  We can thank these investigative hard-hitters for unearthing the real deal: it turns out that OTHER STUFF ALSO MATTERS.  I am paraphrasing here, but just to save you the trouble of reading the whole article.  If you never let your children out of the basement or speak kindly to them, but sit down to dinner together every night: NOT SO GOOD.  Don't count on the kiddos avoiding a life of crime. If you sit down to dinner together on a regular basis, probably that is not the only thing going right: THE DINNER ALONE MAY NOT BE THE DETERMINING FACTOR. And there is no guarantee, even when you adjust for all of the other variables, that they will move on from your table to the pinnacle of achievement in all regards later in life.  So, they conclude, if the family dinner eludes you, don't stress out.  Their advice?  "Just find another way to connect to your kids." That is actually the last line of the article.

Sigh.  I won't bother you with a long, snarky summation of the vacation discussion, except to say that it's equally dense (not with meaning.)  You should spend time alone as a couple and you should do nice stuff that is not necessarily in a theme park with your children.  You could, for example, choose a motel with a large pool.  Children like those (they did a study).  Pardon me a moment while I up my subscription so I never miss an issue. Did I say I was going to keep this part brief?  OK, in that case, I will just say how alarming it was to see no mention AT ALL of single parents--not ones that head families alone, nor the individuals that make up couples--in the six experts' testimonies.  Couples vs. children all the way.  Whose Interests Will Prevail? As Elizabeth Kolbert points out, we are kind of coming at this from the wrong angle, with predictably poor outcomes for the children and lots of inane reading for the parents to slog through:

from the 7/2/12 New York Times

Let me just wipe the froth from my lips and the lather from my chin and I'll bring this around to something edible.  Something refreshing.  Pour a glass for yourself, to restore you after the cares of the day are done with.  Pour it for your loved ones, to reconnect if you've been apart.  Just please don't do a study on its effects.  Take my word for it: it's tasty.

apricot-basil cooler

5 or 6 apricots, and if you can get hold of some of the red velvet variety, consider the day well spent

1/2 cup of honey

1/2 cup of sugar

4 c water

a handful of fresh basil (using the leaves is nice, but stems left over from using the leaves for another purpose work just as well)

ice and limes and sparkling water, to serve

Halve the apricots.  Admire them. Now combine them with the honey and sugar in a large saucepan.  (If you can let the apricot mixture sit a few minutes, all to the good.  If not, do not fret.)  Add the water and bring the mixture to a boil; reduce the heat to a simmer and cook until the apricots look spent, about 5 minutes.  

Remove from the heat, toss in the basil and submerge it, and cover the pot.  After 5 minutes or so, pour the mixture through a fine-mesh strainer, and serve this ambrosial juice you've just concocted in less than 15 minutes over lots of ice with plenty of lime and sparkling water.  It's very concentrated and will serve you for days to come.  

I consider the basil-scented apricots in the strainer to be the privilege of the cook, but I have been known to spoil a nearby child rotten by handing them out, as well. We enjoy them together and talk about crimes and tour packages.

free lunch

At this point in lunchbox season, even when I am not coughing like a consumptive poet and consequently enjoying the sleep cycle of a mosquito, my inspired passion for the lunchbox has generally cooled somewhat from its September simmer. Sometimes I think I will be carted off to the nut farm, nattering about sandwiches and rocking back and forth with a thermos.

It’s been a long week, and it's possible that I am still a little delirious. But even before I took a forced week off from lunch preparation, I knew it was time for a little date-night with the concept.

What started me off on the rekindled romance path was these:

Stink Bug Eggs. I used to make them all the time, and then I stopped for no apparent reason, and when I made them before the Great Tumble Into Feeling Unwell, they were greeted with whoops of happiness.

If there is a lover of hard-boiled eggs in your life, and if this person either has an eye for beauty or is a 7-year-old boy, or both, this is a lunchbox trump card.

The recipe comes from one of my favorite cookbooks: Roald Dahl’s Revolting Recipes, a posthumously-assembled collection of recipes for the foods that appear in his books for children. The book relies heavily on the principle that makes a person of a certain age more likely to eat a Stink Bug Egg than a hard-boiled egg, even though they are the same thing. Consequently it includes some pretty sophisticated seasonings and ingredients for a children’s cookbook. “Here, darling, is a disk of cinnamon-toasted brioche with caramelized coconut and lemon zest!” vs. “Anybody want a Crispy Wasp Sting?” Ditto for the Snozzcumbers, and the Mosquitoes’ Toes and Wampfish Roes Most Delicately Fried.

I know we are not supposed to trick little eaters and play games with food. I also know how a grumpy person perks up when you make letters in the pancakes or put ears on their sandwich. Eating is supposed to be a happy thing, after all.

Maybe some of you are saying, but lunch is a sandwich, a drink and a piece of fruit (or whatever the default setting is on your lunch plan). Let dinner be happy, and let lunch just be lunch. I need lunch to be fast. There's merit to this line of reasoning, and rest assured I am not advocating we all join the ranks of the crazed Bento moms who have aspic cutters and the blogs to prove it. But whether you are packing lunch, or making it at home for someone's plate, or even just dishing some up for yourself (it's OK to make yourself happy, too, I've been told), sometimes make it nice. Other than the stinkbug eggs, which do take longer than a hard-boiled egg (though none of that is active time), these ideas add no more than three minutes to the total preparation time. None of them. I made sure. And most of them owe their magic to infrequency; daily appearances would wear out their welcome.

Why bother? I was hoping you would ask that. Here's what I think. When food, and our experience of eating it, is nice, when it makes us think for a minute about being loved, or about what person and what soil grew this nourishing item, or about how fine it is to taste something that makes us pause to appreciate it in our mouths, then we are not just re-fueling. We are connecting. We are knitting back up the raveled sleeve of what has happened to our food. That's MULTI-TASKING! Fueling and thinking at the same time!

Stink bug eggs follow below; here are a few of those very fast, take no time, done in a wink ideas before we move on:

1. break out the cookie cutters, which perhaps have not seen the light of day in some time, and make them earn their keep:

2. have a channel knife? it's one of those gadgets that removes a strip of orange or lemon zest for all those cocktails you are mixing (maybe it is in with the cookie cutters, in the assisted-living drawer):

3. Refuse to get involve with any tool other than the knife you are already using? Get a little jiggy with the open face sandwich:

or make your regular sandwich, but cut it tiny:



4. Steal inspiration from those who impale their lunch on a stick, because everything tastes better on a stick, even fruit salad.


5. Leave the culinary hijinks to the whackjobs, and remember that the pen is mightier (and faster) than the spatula:

stick a little love note in the box

OK then!

stink bug eggs
adapted from Roald Dahl's Revolting Recipes

Eggs (as many as you'd like)
Large handful of onion skins

Hard-boil your desired number of eggs. I was told once that the best method is to put the eggs in cold water, bring the water to a boil and maintain a simmer for 7 minutes, and let them sit in the hot water, heat off, for another 7. I was also told that the best method is to boil the water, turn off the heat, put the eggs in, and let them stay there for 12 minutes. Maybe you were told something else. Do that, but follow this one essential, hard & fast rule: use eggs that are at least a week old, or the peeling will make you weep.

Pull the eggs out of the hot water, reserving it, and plunge the hot eggs into a bowl of ice water. Toss the onion skins into the hot water, and bring that back to a simmer.

When the eggs have cooled, whap them all over lightly against the counter, or with a spoon. You want the shell cracked but still intact. Return them to the pot with the onion skins, and turn off the heat. Let the eggs sit n the onion bath at least a couple hours, or overnight in the fridge, and then peel them. Admire the shells:

The eggs pictured above only took a short soak; photos do not do them much justice, but they are pretty awesome looking. You can use food coloring instead of onion skins, but then you would be using food coloring. Beets, maybe? Could be good. Let me know if you try it. I am going back to bed.