I Think We Should All Have A Chair Like This

This past week we got a taste of family life. Ours friends The Vegetarian and The Botanist visited us in NYC along with their Munchkin, which provided not only a much-needed excuse to cook with vegetables, but a fascinating window into the habits and customs of those small people that we call babies.

The Munchkin likes: The Big Red Barn and other board books, puppies, fries, bananas, Swedish children's music, farm animals of all sorts, stuffed animals > she is.

The Munchkin does not like: Having her face and hands cleaned, socks, bedtime, strange men.




On to the vegetables. First up on Tuesday night was this vegetarian tagine. It was not dissimilar to the tagines that we ate throughout the mountains in Morocco, which didn't have much in the way of meat in them either. This one featured turnips, carrots, chickpeas, and lots of sweet potatoes. The tagine itself was wonderfully flavorful, likely due to the fact that all of the spices were toasted whole and then ground immediately before use (finally, a reason to break into the spices I bought in Marrakesh!). I was distracted by the limp texture and dull flavor of the couscous that I served along with it, but nobody else seemed to mind.



On Thursday I cut up root vegetables (beats, turnips, radishes, cool purple carrots, regular carrots) and roasted them with sea salt, black pepper, and olive oil. I also made an herb and Parmesan risotto, and for dessert, apple crisp. For the non-vegetarians, I cooked flounder en papillote (read: in a foil packet) with sun dried tomatoes, olives, and dried thyme and oregano. This remains the easiest and most hassle-free method of cooking fish that I have yet to discover.

Then came the weekend. We headed out to stay with my mother in the Hudson Valley in order to show The Vegetarian, The Botanist, and their Munchkin a proper Northeastern fall. This meant taking in a spectacle of over 4,000 individually hand-carved, illuminated jack o'lanterns, a hike to the top of Monument Mountain famously walked by Hawthorne and Melville (but never, I don't think, by a jet lagged 13 month old), a hayride, many pumpkin foodstuffs (pancakes, pasta sauce, fudge), lunch at an old fashioned burger shack, and much, much more. Somehow I didn't see fit to take pictures of any of these wonderful activities -- I need to get better at that.



When we returned to the city on Sunday night, The Vegetarian and the The Viking were responsible for dinner. This marked the second time The Viking has ever prepared dinner for me, so needless to say, I was excited. The menfolk went out on a hunting/gathering expedition to Wholefoods, and brought back two big bags of groceries including but not limited to soup, bread, an heirloom tomato the size of a kickball, and Icelandic yogurt (because who can resist yogurt from Iceland?). Then we all drank a middling Malbec and ate insalata caprese, vegetable soup, and tortellini with pesto (served in a souffle dish, shown above). It was a fabulous meal, largely due to the excellent company, partly because I didn't lift a finger.

Now The Vegetarian, The Botanist, and The Munchkin are all gone. It's sad and silent in the apartment and once again the cooking has come to a temporary halt.