Gary on the other hand counts scallops amongst his very favorite foods, so I am not going to axe them from the list of menu items, though I try to be respectful of Charlie’s extreme aversion.  It’s the only food I can think of that causes such a reaction, so I am willing to play along, though I hope he changes his mind at some point.

And the good news is that this glaze is lovely on chicken, cod, salmon, and pork as well.  The tanginess of the balsamic vinegar plays very well against the sharpness of the mustard and the sweetness of the brown sugar.  Little slivers of pancetta interspersed between the scallops add such a sly little salty hit (and regular bacon can certainly be substituted.   Serve with Pasta with Ramps, Edamame, and Sugar Snap Peas in a Light Parmesan Cream Sauce for a very beautiful and sophisticated dinner.

1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil

1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar

1 teaspoon Dijon mustard

1 clove garlic, finely minced

2 teaspoons brown sugar, light or dark

Kosher salt and finely ground pepper to taste

1 pound sea scallops

2 ounces pancetta, thickly sliced, then sliced crosswise into ½ inch pieces

1. Soak about 10 8 to 12-inch wooden skewers in water to cover for at least 30 minutes.
2. In a large bowl or plastic container, mix together the olive oil, balsamic vinegar, Dijon mustard, garlic, brown sugar, and salt and pepper until well blended. Add scallops and gently toss in the mixture to coat.  Let sit at room temperature for 15 minutes, or refrigerate for 1 to 2 hours.
3. Preheat the broiler or grill.  Skewer the scallops, and pancetta pieces, dividing them evenly between the skewers, and using two skewers for every two or three scallops (using two skewers keeps the scallops skewered more securely).  Discard any remaining marinade.  Broil or grill for about 3 minutes on each side, until they are just cooked throughout.

In a perfect world you would not have to read this blog post, and I would not have to write it. In a perfect world I also wouldn’t be writing this at the orthodontist’s office waiting for my kid to have his palate expander fixed for the seventeenth time.

Mother’s Day is Sunday May 12. If you already know that your significant other and offspring are planning a celebratory extravaganza for you, not only do you not have to keep reading, I would appreciate it if you kept that information to yourself. For the rest of us, a bit of gentle nudging along with a few explicit instructions and a recipe suggestion or two may be in order.

You’re going to want to copy the following message into your own document and then print it out:

Dear Family:

It’s me, Mommy! I know how busy you all are, and I just wanted to take some of the stress off planning for Mother’s Day. I know you want it to be perfect, and I am worried that you are all putting too much pressure on yourselves.
Here are some things you can do the night before:

• Locate a tray for bringing me breakfast in bed.
• Pick up some flowers, and find a vase.
• Make sure there is coffee.
• Decide which recipes you are going to make.
• Set your alarm in some fashion that will not wake me up.

And here are a few recipes you might want to consider for that big breakfast:

• Lazy Oven French Toast
• Vegetable Frittata
• Aaron and Jack’s Popovers
• Crunchy Chewy Granola
• Mushroom, Caramelized Onion* and Feta Frittata

You guys really are too much—thank you in advance for what I know will be the best Mother’s Day ever. I love you.

If you want to attach a photo of a gift you’re lusting after, or an ad for a play you want to see, go right ahead. This is merely a springboard to get us all on the road to a delightful Mother’s Day. I’ll be thinking of you—cross your fingers for me!

*“Caramelized” is more fun to say than “browned.”

So much easier than individual slices of French toast.

1. Grease a 13 by 9–inch baking dish with butter or spray it with cooking spray.
2. Place the milk, eggs, sugar, maple syrup, vanilla, cinnamon, and salt in a medium-size bowl and whisk to mix well. Set the milk mixture aside.
3. Arrange half of the slices of bread in the prepared baking dish, cutting the bread so that it fits in a solid layer. Pour half of the milk mixture over the bread, then evenly distribute about half of any dried fruit or nuts, if using, on top.
4. Repeat, creating a second layer of bread and then pouring the rest of the milk mixture on top and distributing the rest of the fruit or nuts over the bread. Lightly press the bread down into the liquid.
5. Cover the baking dish with plastic wrap and refrigerate it overnight. The bread will have absorbed almost all of the milk mixture. Uncover the baking dish and if there are dryer looking pieces on top, take them off and carefully tuck them underneath the bread on the bottom so that the more milk-soaked pieces are now on top (this is messy but it all works out in the baking). Note that any dried fruit sitting on the top of the French toast will get pretty chewy when baked and nuts on top will get toasty; the fruit and nuts that are tucked into the French toast will be softer, so disperse the fruit and nuts as you see fit.
6. Preheat the oven to 425°F.
7. Bake the French toast, uncovered, until it is puffed and golden, 30 to 35 minutes.
8. Let the French toast sit for 5 minutes to firm up a bit, then cut it into squares and serve it hot with your choice of maple syrup, fresh fruit, and/or confectioners’ sugar.

Note: This is luxurious made with whole milk, but 2 percent or 1 percent milk works fine. Conversely, for an even more decadent dish you can replace one of the cups of milk with a cup of cream or half-and-half if you like.

If you saw this on a menu, you’d order it, right?  Well, if you hurry and grab some ramps  from your local farmers’ market (or if you’re lucky, find a place to forage them yourself), you can make it in very short order, and for far less that you’d pay at the type of restaurant that would serve such a dish.  Whew, that was a long sentence.

This is a new version of a rampy pasta recipe I came up with last spring, but it’s a bit more substantial , crammed with a heap of green vegetables.  And if you want to know more about what this whole ramp thing is all about, here’s a bit more info.  But I will pre-emptively state that while I love ramps, and get a zen-like pleasure from picking them every spring du9ring their short life span, I don’t think that any vegetable should be put on a pedestal.  Pedestals are for other things.

This vegetarian dish is so, so pretty.  I served it with teriyaki salmon (here’s the teriyaki sauce), and a plate with more spring in its step would be hard to find (sorry, it slipped out and I couldn’t stop it).  The pasta in the photo is mostaccioli, a short, chunky tubular pasta, which translates to “moustache” in Italian.  I am a sucker for a good pasta name translation.

1. Slice the ramps, separating the slices of the bulb into one pile, and the ribbon-ey slices of the leaves and any thin stems into a different pile (discard any yellowed leaves).
2. Heat the olive oil in a large skillet over medium heat. Add the sliced bulbs and stems of the ramps, and sauté for about 8 minutes, until tender.
3. Meanwhile, bring a large pot of water to a boil. When it comes to a boil, add a generous amount of salt. Add the pasta and stir. Allow to return to a simmer.  When the pasta has about 5 minutes left until it’s done, according to package directions, add the edamame, and continue to cook until the pasta and the edamame are cooked to your liking.
4. While the pasta is cooking, when the ramp bulbs are tender, add the butter to the ramps, along with the sliced ramp leaves, sugar snap peas, and red pepper flakes.  Season with salt and pepper, and sauté for another 4 or 5 minutes until everything is wilted and tender.  Add a couple of ladles of the pasta cooking water to the ramp mixture (this will help create a sauce which will bind nicely to the pasta), and the cream . Bring to a simmer, stirring occasionally, tasting and seasoning with salt and pepper as needed.
5. When the pasta and edamame are tender, drain them, and return to the pot.  Add the ramp sauce to the pasta, along with ¼ cup of the Parmesan, and toss to combine.  Turn into a serving bowl and serve hot, with lots of grated Parmesan passed at the table.

1. Bring a large pot of water to a boil over high heat.  Salt the water generously, and let it return to a boil.  Add the pasta, and cook accordingly to package directions, stirring occasionally.
2. While the pasta is cooking, heat the olive oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat.  Add the shallots and sauté for 2 minutes until they start to soften.  Add the sausage and sauté, breaking up the sausage with a spoon as it cooks, until it is browned and crumbly, about 5 minutes.  Add the kale and cook, stirring occasionally until the kale wilts, about 5 minutes more.  Add the olives, chicken broth, season with salt and pepper to taste and bring to a simmer.
3. Drain the cooked pasta and return it to the pot.  Add the sausage and kale mixture to the pot and stir to combine.  Serve hot.

Bake Your Teachers a Thank You!: A Blueprint

We all know how hard our teachers work, right?   When people say that being a parent is the toughest job in the world, I think they may not have given teaching a hard and close enough look.  Let’s show these teachers some love!

Baking Your Teachers a Thank You is simple (I promise), and with a bunch of parents pitching in, it’s a heartfelt way to show the school staff how much you value all they do for your kids (and if the baking is spread out over a bunch of families, it’s an easy way to spread a lot of gratitude!).

Here’s what you do:

1. Choose a recipe, either Chocolate Chip Cookies, Gingersnaps, or Sugar Cookies from The Mom 100 Cookbook, or pick one of your own favorite recipes.
2. Choose a day during National Teacher Appreciation Week (May 6-10), or any other day to designate as “Bake Your Teacher a Thank You” Day.
3. If you are looking for extra help: two weeks before the date, send an email blast out to the parent body of your school, and asking for volunteer bakers.  You may want to let people know how many volunteers you are looking for, based on the number of cookies you want to bring in. For a sample email, click here.
4. 7-10 days before the designated date, send the selected recipe to the volunteer parents, along with instructions for dropping off the cookies at a determined spot the morning of Bake Your Teacher a Thank You Day.
5. 1-2 days before the date, make sure you have a large cookie jar or two or three (depending on the size of your school).  Print the cookie label for the selected cookie(s), with a list of ingredients.  Attach the label(s) to the jar(s) with tape.
6. The morning of Cookie Day, have a volunteer or two available to collect the cookies as they are dropped off in the designated spot, fill the jars with the cookies, and place them in the chosen spots where the teachers and staff can help themselves!
7. Repeat as needed!  This has been such a hit in our school that we quickly turned it into “Cookie of the Month Day”, and every month families from a different grade do the baking, so each grade is only asked to bake once a year.

Pretty easy, right?  And a lot of bang for your appreciation buck, I can tell you that.  You can post your cookie photos to The Mom 100 wall on Facebook, comment at TheMom100.com, or post to Instagram, Twitter, or Pinterest using the #BakeAThankYou hashtag. Even email me the photos! I’m quite chatty so you’ll likely hear back.

Cookie recipes:
Big Fat Chocolate Chip Cookies
Chewy Sugar Cookies
Gingersnaps

These are the two well-used, much-loved cookie jars at my kids’ school

My dad, Peter Workman

My dad died Sunday.  The words don’t look right sitting on the page, they don’t feel like they belong to me, they must have been written by someone else, someone with a dead father.

He was sick for 6 months.  A long time.  No, a short time.  Kind of a lifetime.  It was brain cancer, and the kind where from the beginning you know what the end of the story will be, you just don’t know how many pages the book has or what happens in the chapters leading up to the end.

My dad was an amazing man.  I can say it, and mean it, but he was actually the kind of amazing man where a lot of other people are saying it, too.

Dad was an eater.  Boy, did he love food.  And like all great eaters, he was just as eye-rollingly happy with a fantastic tuna salad and a box of Triscuits as he was with a multi-course meal at Le Bernardin.   He was probably happiest if there were ribs involved.  We are a full on food family; my mother, my sister and I all cook, we entertain, we are the type of family that talks about lunch with our mouths full of breakfast.

Dad talked about really good food with reverence and huge joy, as he talked about a stirring symphony or a wonderful piece of art.  There were italics in the way he spoke of something he loved. ”That cheese is marvelous!” “She made a chocolate tart that was in fact, very possibly the best chocolate tart in the world.”  “The meal was just simply extraordinary.  No really, it was extraordinary.” He really wanted you to understand Just.  How.  Good. This. Was.  Though often from the look on his face you weren’t quite getting how extraordinary this meal had been.

He ate very slowly.  Like, very slowly.  As in, on any typical Thanksgiving people were starting in on the pies and he was reaching for another wing.

It took a little while for his appetite to change, and there were a bunch of ebbs and flows.  Early on, there were still requests for pastrami sandwiches, turkey platters with all the trimmings.  At the end a sip of apple juice was a chore.

Right after his surgery in late September, which was right after his diagnosis, he was in the hospital and a specialist came in and cheerfully announced, “Hi, I’m Cindy from Swallowing!”  It wasn’t a joke; she was there to evaluate his ability to chew and swallow.  She spooned a little canned pear into his mouth, then let him nibble a Lorna Doone.  “I think we can put you onto a mechanical soft diet!” she announced, explaining that that meant small bites of pre-cut soft foods.  She left.  Dad looked at me, and opened a bag of pretzels someone had left lying around and ate them.  Bite that, Cindy from Swallowing.

We all made him food.  Sometimes he wanted to eat it, sometimes he didn’t.  Sometimes he would take a bite, sometimes he would eat a real meal, sometimes he would just smile and shrug.

The night before Christmas he was back in the hospital and I told him I would bring dinner the next night, and asked him what he wanted.  He didn’t know.  I suggested chicken soup, noodle pudding — unchallenging, gentle foods.  “How about prime rib?” suggested a visiting friend.  “Oh, yes, and Yorkshire pudding!” he said.  And the next night he ate it, our family sitting in a shitty windowless conference/supply room with hideously bright fluorescent lights  and the occasional nurse popping into the room for a fresh bandage or catheter.

Towards the end when he wasn’t eating much at all, I cut a paper thin sliver of pear and handed it to him.  He ate it very slowly.  His nurse and I looked at each other with raised eyebrows, a silent tiny triumph.  I handed him another transparent slice.  Then another.  One hour later, the pear was eaten.  It was the most beautiful core of fruit I have ever seen.

If food is love, and someone won’t or can’t eat, it feels terrible.

So, my dad died on Sunday.  We are all doing kinda sorta ok, for now, and because it’s my way of coping you will shortly see this blog ramped up again with recipes, and food-and-family reflections and the like.  But today I feel like talking about my dad.

I recently wrote an article about 5-ingredient pastas, which was so much fun, and got me to re-appreciate how if you have packages of dried pasta on hand you always have dinner waiting to happen.  I love cooking concepts that could be their own little reality show.  This one would be titled something like: “Grab A Box of Pasta and Five Ingredients That You Have on Hand and Make Dinner in About 20 Minutes.” Sounds appealing, doesn’t it?  It’s kind of a fun way to come up with creative recipes.  Don’t count the olive oil, salt and pepper.  I didn’t.

At once elegant and peasant-ish, this is a dish that has but a few flavors that add up to complexity.  Try baking your bacon to reduce splattering and have the oven do the work for you.

Kosher salt to taste

1 pound thin spaghetti or other long skinny pasta

2 tablespoons olive oil

3 large leeks, white and green parts, cleaned and thinly sliced

3 cups chopped fennel (about 2 medium bulbs)

1 cup chicken broth

½ cup grated Parmesan cheese plus more for serving

6 slices cooked bacon, crumbled

1. Bring a large pot of water to a boil over high heat.  Salt the water generously, and let it return to a boil.  Add the pasta, and cook accordingly to package directions, stirring occasionally.

2. While the pasta is cooking, heat the olive oil in a large skillet over medium high heat.  Add the leeks and fennel and sauté for 8 to 10 minutes until the vegetables soften.  Add the chicken broth and bring to a simmer.

3. Drain the pasta and return it to the pot.  Turn the fennel mixture into the pot with pasta and toss to combine.  Add the Parmesan and the bacon and toss to combine.  Serve hot and pass additional Parmesan at the table.

I went for a very well-priced boneless beef eye round roast to explore the notion of a economical roast beef.  This simple roast has a 4-ingredient rub (not counting the salt and pepper) that creates a crusty glaze with hearty flavors which permeate the meat, and also fill your kitchen with the smell of a fabulous meal in the making.  Roasted potatoes are great with this, or a baked potato, or mashed potatoes, or some buttered noodles or spaetzle.  Then maybe some roasted carrots or butternut squash to round out the meal.  Pass the Horseradish Sauce on the side, and let everyone take some or not as they please.  Slice the meat very thinly.

1. Preheat oven to 475°F.
2. Season the roast well with salt and pepper. Heat 1 tablespoon olive oil in a large ovenproof (preferably cast iron) sauté pan over medium-high heat, and add 1 tablespoon of the oil. When hot, sear the beef on all sides, until nicely browned, about 8 minutes in total.  Transfer the beef to a plate for a few minutes, and pour off most of the remaining fat in the pan.
3. Meanwhile, in a small bowl, whisk together the remaining 2 tablespoons olive oil, the minced garlic, Dijon mustard, balsamic vinegar, ½ teaspoon kosher salt, and pepper to taste.
4. Brush or smear the mixture all over the roast, and return the beef to the skillet fat side down.  Roast in the oven until an instant read thermometer registers 125°F for medium-rare (25 to 30 minutes),  or 130°F for medium (30 to 35 minutes; the temperature will continue to climb for a bit after it is removed from the oven.)
5. Let the roast rest on a cutting board for 10 minutes for it to finish cooking and for the juices to reabsorb into the meat before slicing thinly. While the beef is cooking, make the Horseradish Sauce: in a small bowl blend together the sour cream, horseradish, lemon juice and salt.

My family loves a classic beef stew made with red wine and tomatoes, but after an overzealous shopping expedition at a farm stand I found myself with a lot of apple cider in the fridge.  (What is it about cider at a farm stand?  Is it possible to NOT buy a couple of jugs?  Especially if they are smart enough to give away little samples.)

Success.  A nice change of pace, according to the gang, and next time I might even put some cubes of firm apple into the stew towards the end.

1. Heat 2 tablespoons of oil in a large pot, or Dutch oven, over medium heat and sauté the onions, leeks and thyme until they are very soft and lightly browned, about 10 minutes.  Remove the leek mixture to a plate.
2. Season the beef with salt and pepper and sprinkle it with the flour.  Place the same pot over medium-high heat, add the remaining tablespoon of oil, and add the meat in a single layer; don’t crowd the meat, you may have to brown it in two batches.  When it is browned on the bottom, after about 2 minutes, turn it and brown the other side for about 2 minutes (you do not need to brown all sides of the pieces of meat).  Add the browned meat to the plate with the leek mixture.
3. Return the pan to medium high heat and add the brandy, if using.  Scrape the bottom of the pan to loosen the browned bits.  Add the cider and continue to stir, scraping up the flavorful bits on the bottom of the pan.   Stir in the cider vinegar and tomato paste, then return the meat and leek mixture to the pot.  Lower the heat to medium low, and cook the stew at a gentle simmer for, partially covered, 2 hours, until the meat starts to become tender.
4. After 2 hours, add the potatoes and carrots, and cook for another 30 to 40 minutes until the vegetables are tender.  You may need to add a bit of cider towards the end if the stew looks like it needs more liquid.