Oh, don’t be fooled. It’s the worst kind of dinner there is. No matter how much you slaved over that dinner, no matter how delicious it is, it will never hold your attention as much as this night’s episode of “modern family”. I’m not making this up. It’s a fact.

You see, it started out so good. We never used to eat in front of the TV. We always ate at our table, facing each other and our food, perhaps with some music playing. The only entertainment there was, was the food, and your dinner partner. It was a date, every night, sitting together, catching up on the day, sipping a cheap Trader Joe’s wine, enjoying the fruits of your labor (salmon tonight!). We were aware of every bite we filled our mouths with: the acidity of the salads vinaigrette (too much lemon again…), the fluffiness of the rice (can you please pass the soy sauce), the cool of the yogurt against the spice of the salmon tikka. Not only did we discuss our day, we discussed our food, as the slow bites melted away the frown and worry lines, and the wine made us melt unto our chairs.

But those days are gone. And it’s painful to break a nasty habit. Now we shovel my carefully prepared food into our big mouths, paying no attention to what it is we are eating, while enjoying another episode of “Tru Blood”, which, more often than not makes you loose your appetite anyway (kill a vamp today?). Is the idea of a sit down dinner so antiquated that we don’t know how to fit into our lives anymore?

My most memorable meals growing up always took place around a table, filled with my family, as bowls were passed around and wine was being poured. Even those that were uncomfortable, with people yelling and fighting, angrily abandoning the rest of their meal to head straight for the desert. Whether good or bad, the meal was eaten before anyone left the table. I remember some dinners where I was literally in tears over something my dad had just admonished me for, yet I continued to sit, eating my dinner, albeit halfheartedly.

Now I’m here to Norman Rockwellise you!

I double dare all of you to sit down and eat your dinner at a table, one that’s not in front of a TV. Put on some music. Pour some wine. Maybe light a candle, even if it is only Thursday night and all your having is Ramen. Give yourself that time to eat and just be with yourself or with someone. I triple dare you! And if you do it, I might just do it too.

Easy Salmon in a Bag
for 2

2 Salmon fillets
salt
pepper
Lemon
olive oil

Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Place fillets on individual aluminum foil squares. Season with salt and pepper. Drizzle with some olive oil. Slice lemon and lay 2-3 slices on top of salmon. Bundle up the foil like a candy. Lay both salmon parcels on a tray and put into oven for approximately 15 minutes, though time depends on thickness and size of fillets. Serve in their individual parcels and all its lovely juices!

I have noticed that small children of the American persuasion, don’t want to eat any meals at all, but call it a “snack” and they’re all over it. Breakfast? Blegh! Ritz crackers? YAY! Lunch? NO! Cookie? Sure! And don’t even try to get them to eat dinner. From an early age we hand our children ziplocks of goldfish and cheez-its, encouraging the eating of such foods, simply because you buy them and have them in the house. It’s no wonder they don’t want to eat proper food, knowing that a snack is just waiting at the car door.

When my hubby and I got married, I started paying more attention to food budgeting, and choices were made between food we needed, and food we wanted. More often than not snacks were left out of the list altogether. I didn’t plan for them when making my meal plan for the week, and so they didn’t make it on the list. (For further reference, when I say snack, I am not referring to fuits and veg you might consume throughout the day, but prepackaged items like crackers, chips, cookies etc.) And guess what? We survived!

Growing up, my mom never really bought any snacks, and when she did, once in a blue moon, we didn’t call it a snack. No, it was a treat. Which is what I’m proposing is to be done about this snack epidemic, which I’m sure contributes to the astronomical calorie intake of the average American. Take snacks out of your everyday life. Replace with fruits, veg, nuts. If you want a cookie, you can have one, but make it special, make it a treat. Can you imagine how much better a cookie or a potato chip tastes if you don’t have them everyday?

It’s what we tell our kids, and we don’t act upon it: Treats are special. You don’t get them everyday. And yet we give them treats all the time. All we do is trick ourselves into thinking that it’s a snack, and we poison ourselves day in and day out.

So, in any case, Sunday came, and thankfully I had remembered to take out the whole chicken from the freezer the night before, since it takes frozen whole chicken about 24 hours to thaw. It was 3:30 pm and I was ready. It was at this point that I became overwhelmed with a sense of melancholy, as I looked at my faithful stove. You see, its one of those gas stoves from the 50′s that you still had to light everytime you needed to use it.

When we first moved into our apartment I was very dissapointed with the stove. I mean, having to light it everytime you needed to use it? Many can vouch for the fact that me and fire are not a good thing. The first time I “lit” the oven, I actually didn’t and we almost died of gas-poisoning. I just hated everything about this stove, including how long it took for the oven to warm up. If it was summer-time and I wanted to bake, it took me turning the AC on high plus three fans on high speed to keep the apartment from becoming hot as Hades.

I’m not quite sure when Hate turned into Love, but there I was, 2 weeks from moving, and feeling horribly sad about leaving my stove. Stove had become the friend I could rely on, the kind of friend that has a few quirks you had to navigate around, but nevertheless. Prepping the apartment for baking had become part of cooking, another step in a recipe, not a chore. The lighting of stove had become a religious ritual, like an offering you made to the food-gods, ensuring the success of dinner. “The Lighting of Stove”, it even sounded like some sort of religious holiday: God came down and lighted stove, and then there was food.

Our new apartment had an electric stove…Sigh! There’s something about making food with fire that really permeates the meal, and sadly, electricity just doesn’t have that zing. And so I positioned the fans, and stuck my butter-smeared chicken into the oven, a tiny tear forming in the corner of my eye, of course, I had just been chopping onions.

Roast Chicken

1 whole chicken, preferably organic
salt
pepper
3 tbl butter
1 lemon

1. Preheat your oven to 400 degrees F.
2. Thouroughly clean chicken with water inside and out, removing insides.
3. Pat chicken dry with paper towels. If you do not you will not get a crispy skin.
4. Grab the butter and start massaging it all over the chicken, including under the breast skin, under wings and drumsticks.
5. Generously salt and pepper.
6. Slice lemon in half and drizzle juice over chicken. The stick lemon halves into the cavity.
7. Place chicken in baking dish and put in oven.
8. After 20 minutes reduce heat to 350, and baste chicken with melted butter and fat.
9. Continue roasting for circa 45 minutes, or until golden and thighmeat runs clear when pierced with knife. Baste every 15-20 minutes.

Voila, the simplest and best Roast Chicken!

Yesterday I was driving through some awful construction zone, at 7:30 in the morning with two kids in the back seat (not mine, I’m nanny by day and superwoman by night) screaming at each other because they both wanted to be Ladybug Girl. I had my iPod on shuffle and Edith Piaf had just stopped singing. I wasn’t expecting it, I never do, Dmitri Hvorostovsky’s deep baritone singing mournfully over the loss of his Tatyana in Eugene Onegin. When I hear his voice, the world melts away, and I’m 16 and I’m his Tayana and the story ends happily… Oh, never mind, who are we kidding,  his voice just turns me on, period. Tatyana shmatyana. And do you know what you need with Dmitri? Mac ‘n’ cheese and vodka. Oh yes, you heard me. Mac ‘n’ cheese…

Its creamy, its gooey, its something food snobs do not endorse, and its exactly what you need with Dmitri. Follow these steps to your own Dmitri Fantasy:

Mac ‘n’ cheese:

1 shot vodka

4 tbl butter

2 tbl flour

2 cups milk

1 1/2 cup cheddar cheese, grated

1/2 tsp nutmeg

salt and pepper to taste

1 cauliflower head (optional)

1 lb elbow macaroni

1. Take the shot prior to anything else. This will aid greatly in your Dmitri Fantasy.

2. Turn on your iPod to your favorite Dmitri Hvorostovsky Aria.

3. Melt butter and whisk in flour once it bubbles, cooking away the rawness of the flour for a few seconds, then carefully and slowly whisk in the milk. Turn down the heat and keep whisking until thick and smooth. 

4. Season and take off the heat. Whisk in the cheese until fully incorporated, smooth, gooey and, well, cheesy.

5. In the meantime, cook your pasta. If you’re using cauliflower, cut into small chunks and cook with the pasta.

6. Add the pasta to the cheese, voila!

7. Sit down, eat mac ‘n’ cheese, and let your mind run wild as Dmitri serenades you.

Maltagliati with 5-Minute Tomato Sauce

1/2-1lb lasagna noodles, broken into pieces

1 can chopped or plum tomatoes

2 cloves or garlic, chopped or thinly sliced

salt

pepper

pinch of chili flakes

olive oil

Freshly grated Parmesan

Basil, optional

1. Cook lasagna noodles according to packet instructions.

2. Heat two glugs of olive oil over medium heat. Add the chopped  garlic just until fragrant, not colored. Add the tomatoes, salt, pepper and chili flakes. You don’t want to cook this for a long time. the point is to have the fresh acidity of the tomatoes, not the regular cooked down taste.

3. Take sauce of the heat and add the cooked pasta. Add Parmesan, and basil if using. 

Voila! Buon Appetito!

I love grocery day. Its secretly the reason Sunday is my favorite day of the week. Its a clean slate: whatever damage you might have done during the week, its over now, and you get to start anew. For example, last week I made a pasta dish with broccoli, pesto and potatoes. The recipe called for all ingredients to be cooked together in the pasta water. The outcome was overcooked, gooey pasta and crunchy, almost raw potatoes….yuck.

But Sunday makes it all alright! A new menu, a new list, and dreams of wonderful dinners that all come out perfectly and make my husband say: “Honey, you’ve really outdone yourself this time. This is definitely better than my mother’s.” Which, by the way, he’s never said.

So I grab my stuff and we head to the grocery store, well, three or sometimes four stores to be honest. I’m quite picky about some of my food, and so for some reason only like milk from Trader Joe’s, and will only eat radishes from Sunflower Market. This drives Nick, my husband crazy, and he will roll his eyes every Sunday, though I think he really loves this about me. The eye rolling continues as I casually and slowly walk through the aisles, knowing exactly what I need but scanning every item anyway, just in case I feel like it. This is where Nick wants to hunt, and begs me to send him to get some things from the list. I however, prefer to gather, slowly and leisurely.

Why? Because its Sunday, and in my wacky mind, grocery shopping is meditation, its my yoga, my zen center, my place of worship. The ingredients are un-spoilt, clean, and virgin, waiting for me to create them into something worth eating, and hopefully talking about. Even though sometimes, who are we kidding, it turns into muck.

Todays Song to shop by: The Show, by Lenka

Grocery List:

Lasagna Noodles

2 can plum tomatoes

garlic

chilli flakes

3 assorted lettuce mixes

4 country style pork-chops

2 red onion

2 yellow onion

1 package mushrooms

Rice

3 tomatoes

4 Salmon fillets

Patak’s Tandoori paste

naan bread

cucumber

plain yogurt

1 cauliflower

elbow macaroni

milk

flour

cheddar cheese

eggs

lemons

olive oil

whole chicken

carrots

potatoes

1 can white kidney beans

bread

american cheese

Tuesday: Pork Kebabs, Rice and Tomato-Onion Salad

Wednesday: Salmon Tikka with Cucumber Yogurt and Naan Bread

Thursday: Cauliflower Mac and Cheese 

Friday: Oh-Omelettes with Simple Salad

Saturday: Roast Chicken with Veg, Gravy and Yorkshire puddings

Sunday: Tomato Soup and Grilled Cheese