And on Saturday, we returned from our week at sea, our week of no work, of sunshine and someone else making dinner and lo, what a bummer. But we had a great time, from stunning views as we sailed out of New York Harbor on a freak 75 degree day in March:
On an epically proportioned boat
I could never get into kale. Heck, I’ve long been timid about greens in general — the delicate ones like baby spinach and arugula were easy but as soon as things got a little heavier, I got nervous. When I finally found a respectable green I found palatable — Swiss chard, which I think of as the green for spinach people — I went to town with it: a tart, a spaghetti dish and then gratin. But I still couldn’t warm to kale. Because I didn’t like the way it tasted. And I don’t care if something is chock-full of vitamin A, C and calcium, I don’t care if it makes you live longer or feel stronger or fixes the budget deficit, I’ve got this hang-up wherein I won’t eat food if it doesn’t taste good to me. (My offspring is a little less particular, it seems.) And kale just didn’t.
But in February, I began seeing a recipe for baked kale chips flitting about the internet. I’m not sure where it started (or re-started, as I see folks have actually been making this for years), but I’m guessing with a Dan Barber recipe in Bon Appetit that month. His version used whole leaves and arranged them daintily in a pitcher; the more rustic version I’d seen on blogs (and hooray for that) was simple to de-stem the kale, cut or tear it up, toss it with a bit of oil and bake it until crisp.
I made us some cookies.
It started as a quest for a Passover dessert that could be made in advance, if, say, you were the type of person who may or may not have (I admit nothing) invited eight people over for a Passover seder 48 hours after returning from a week-long sojourn on the open sea and wanted to get a head start on cooking.
Meet my new favorite potato dish. Oh, those mustard-roasted potatoes were wonderful, weren’t they? And who doesn’t love baked pommes frites? And latkes, they were a force to be reckoned with. But they’re dead to me, or they would be, if in some cruel parallel universe I was to choose only one way to eat potatoes from this day forth.
I should have made this years ago, when my friend Luisa got all adorably shouty over them — “Roasted and raw garlic! Toasted nuts! Fried bread! Mellow thyme! Hot chiles! Creamy potatoes!” I have the cookbook, and I’ve yet to make a recipe from it that did not blow my already Goin-obsessed mind. But it took me until that aforementioned tapas party to put those chile peppers, hazelnuts, almonds, fried bread and herbs together in a blender.
I confessed some wanderlust a few weeks ago, though “some” is a bit of an understatement. See, parents get paralyzed a bit in the beginning — in the early days, just getting a cup of coffee in the morning is kind of a triumph — thus even when the kid hits a half year old (which once-Wee Jacob did this week, sniffle) and you’ve got a good routine down, you still know you’re not ready to pack everything the three of you will need for one week into suitcases and then willingly relocate to a 180 square foot stateroom for a so-called vacation.
But we’re doing it anyway and I cannot wait. The prospect of “whee! vacation!” is officially less terrifying than the number of diapers, burp cloths, types of infant first aid, teething rings and onesies we are packing into suitcases, thus, it is now or never: we’re getting on a boat. And guess who is coming with us?
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