How to Entertain a Three-Year-Old in the Bay Area

1. Take him to the California Academy of Sciences.
I took Noah to the Cal Academy once before when we went back home last October but he was just as excited about it this time around. Unfortunately, so were the hundreds upon hundreds of other children who were there for a Spring Break trip with their families or on class field trips. Fortunately the building is so well-designed that there were very few places where we actually felt crowded and we got to see pretty much everything that we wanted to. Like…

Giant Hissing Cockroaches,

Jackass Penguins (always a favorite with Noah),

Geckos,

and Butterflies at the rainforest exhibit:

And as an added bonus, after a few hours at the Academy you get to ride home in peace and quiet because this is what happens to your family afterward:

2. Take him to an Oakland A’s game on Dollar Wednesdays.
Ok, so actually Dollar Wednesdays is probably not the best day to go. If you take $2 tickets, $1 hot dogs, a beautiful day, add in Spring Break week and the Red Sox as the visiting team…well, you get a lot of waiting in lines and sold out stuff. It took Mark an hour just to get out of the parking lot…just in time for Bay Area rush hour traffic. Wheee! Luckily for me, I bowed out of the game, opting to get a haircut and do a little shopping on Solano Avenue instead (ha ha suckas). Otherwise, nothing better than supporting your local home team:

3. Take him to the East Bay Vivarium in Berkeley.
Actually, the vivarium is really just a store that sells reptiles. But really, really cool reptiles. Like monitor lizards, albino constrictors, geckos, turtles, and some other things I’ve never seen before. It’s a relatively small store but we still spent an hour there just looking at all the animals. Plus it’s located just a block away from all the awesome shopping on Fourth Street in Berkeley, so win-win for everyone.

4. Get an hour’s worth of good behavior out of him by bribing him with an ice cream sundae from Fenton’s Creamery in Oakland.
Ah, Fenton’s. It was a required stop on my Bay Area nostalgia tour. I’ve only been back maybe once or twice since it burned down (arson) and reopened in 2003, and let me tell you, the vibe there is much different when you go during the day with your three-year-old as opposed to going late at night with your college friends after stuffing yourselves silly at Zachary’s. And as luck would have it, I would go when I couldn’t eat any sundaes because of my crappy glucose tolerance. Oh well. But the point in going was to take Noah for a sundae. The fact that Piedmont Avenue is home to some awesome shopping (yes, there seems to be a theme forming here) was just coincidence.

Noah with his child-sized sundae:

5. Take him to Picnic Day at the UC Davis campus.
I guess technically UC Davis is not really part of the Bay Area, but my brother and sister-in-law live in Davis so we just happened to be in the area. When my brother first brought up Picnic Day, I thought it would be a cute, small, laid-back thang…more like one of the awesome farmer’s markets that Davis hosts. When we got there, I discovered it was a Really Big Thing. Like, with parades and petting zoos and bands (oh my!). Not to mention plenty of drunk frat guys running around. We got there towards the end of the event but there were still plenty of things for us to take Noah to. They had a Multicultural Children’s Faire set up for the kiddos so we spent a couple of hours taking him around to the different tables and exhibits.

Noah rolling his own pot…

and adding clover seeds

This is the face of a child who does not like face painting:

After making his own Hawaiian lei:

Sitting down and drinking his first root beer float

6. Take him on a nature walk in Muir Woods.
In all honesty, Noah didn’t really care all that much for Muir Woods. He is, after all, only three and primarily interested in running around, yelling and catching bugs. Not taking a walk through some peaceful woods admiring the beauty and majesty of redwood and sequoia trees and being one with nature. Still, Mark and I had a nice time and this is one of my favorite places in the Bay Area.

Mark teaching Noah the significance of tree rings

Lots of tall trees

And clovers

7. Let him run around on Stinson Beach.
As a reward for being relatively quiet and letting us enjoy our walk in the woods, we took Noah to Stinson Beach afterward. The beach is only 9 miles away but because the road is along the coastline and so twisty and turny, it still took a good 30 minutes to get there. We were on the tail end of a three day heat wave in the Bay Area so it was a perfect day to go. Noah took off immediately for the water as soon as we put him down on the sand and he spent the next hour running in and out of the water, making new friends and making sand castles.

Practicing his Karate Kid moves

A New Blog

Because Jae is such a foodie, she wasn’t content to just have her regular food blog, but she decided to start up a group food blog as well where our little group of internet friends could share some of our favorite recipes.  In her words, “We’re a bunch of young moms of all different backgrounds and circumstances with one thing in common…We don’t know what the hell to cook for dinner.”

It’s still in its beginning stages, but come check it out if you get a chance.  If nothing else, with this group of women if the food isn’t good then at least the journey there will most likely be entertaining:

Feasties

Christina’s Grandma’s Apple Pie…My Way

Jae recently started up a food blog and in her latest post, she posted our friend, Christina’s, grandmother’s apple pie recipe.  Usually Jae will make something and then write about how it turned out, but apple pies need baking and I’m pretty sure she either doesn’t have an oven in her new apartment or else has a really crappy one so she hasn’t made this one yet.  So I figured I would give it a try.  Christina has actually won first place in an apple pie baking contest using this recipe so you know it’s got to be good.  You can find the original recipe (and the story behind it) here.

Normally I’m a stickler for rules.  And I’m definitely not usually the type who would bastardize an award-winning recipe, but bastardize I did.  While I was copying down the recipe in my notebook I noticed one horrifying detail — there’s no butter in the crust.  Scandalous!  Plus I’ve never been a big fan of shortening so I used this pie crust recipe from smitten kitchen instead (which is also the site I got my recipe for red velvet cake from).  I mean, it’s even in the title of the post: all butter, really flaky pie crust.  Does it get much better sounding than that?

My other bastardization was an accidental one.  The filling recipe calls for 1/4 cup of orange juice which I thought I had but I forgot (until the second I needed it) that I had finished off our orange juice earlier.  So I used what I had on hand instead — cranberry blueberry juice.  And as an added acidity measure I squeezed half a lemon over it just in case.

For the apples, Christina suggests using a mix of red and yellow apples which I was eager to try since I’ve only ever used granny smith apples for apple pie.  I ended up using Jonah Golds, Golden Delicious, Pink Ladies, and Granny Smiths in mine.  A friend of ours had given us an apple peeler a few months ago and if you ever need to peel eight apples, it definitely comes in handy:

I accidentally sliced my finger on it toward the end but I didn’t mind too much. A little finger skin was a small price to pay considering I had all those apples peeled and sliced in 10 minutes. Here are the apples mixed in with the sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg and my cranberry-blueberry improvisation (and hopefully sans finger skin):

On a whim I decided that a lattice top might be fun to try (stupid, stupid, time-consuming whim!) and considering I’ve never done a lattice top before I don’t think it came out too bad:

If you’re going to make this, don’t forget to line the bottom of your oven with some foil to catch the juices that spill over. Because, man, is this pie juicy! And believe me, it will spill over.

As for the pie crust, without tooting my horn too loudly, seriously, this was the best pie crust I’ve ever had — all flaky, buttery goodness.  I would’ve probably been happy with just a slab of crust and a glass of milk. And it was a cinch to make. So if you don’t have any shortening around (ahem — Jae) I would definitely suggest giving this one a shot.

Fancy Cold Weather Soup

It’s Chinese New Year’s and because we’re still in the process of  trying to settle into our new apartment, we didn’t bother going all out and celebrating. We had originally tossed around the idea of having dinner along Victoria Harbour to watch the fireworks, but with Mark miserable with a cold and both of us worn out from a weekend of unpacking and organizing, we decided to just stay in for the night. Of course staying in also meant I got the chance to break in the new kitchen — hooray! — and since it’s been cold and overcast I thought it would be perfect weather my crab and crimini bisque.

I first saw this recipe in an old Bon Appetit magazine years and years ago. In fact, I remember the first time I ever made it — Mark was still living in his apartment in the Castro in SF which means we’d been dating for only a few months. Which means I was still trying to wow and impress him. Which should probably tell you this is a fancy soup. Despite the fanciness, it’s pretty easy and does double duty for me as both a standard dish and a special occasion meal for when guests come over. I have to warn anyone who wants to make this though — don’t make this if you’re on a diet. Seriously. Look at all the wonderful, wonderful butter that it calls for:

And that’s just for cooking the mushroom stems in:

This batch:

is for the mushroom caps:

Your mouth is totally watering right now, right? (…unless you happen to be one of my freaky friends who hates mushrooms. Crazies.) Anyway, served up with some toasted garlic bread on a cold day, it’s a perfect meal.

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Crab and Crimini Bisque (from Bon Appetit)
(makes about 4 main-course servings)

Ingredients:
1 lb. crimini mushrooms
6 Tbs. butter
1 c. finely chopped onion
1 garlic clove, minced
2 Tbs. all purpose flour
2 14 1/2-ounce cans low-salt chicken broth
1/3 c. dry Sherry
1/2 c. whipping cream
2 large egg yolks
1 tsp. fresh lemon juice
1/2 lb. fresh lump crabmeat, picked over
3 Tbs. finely chopped fresh Italian parsley

Cut off mushroom stems and chop finely. Slice mushroom caps and set aside. Melt 3 tablespoons butter in heavy medium saucepan over medium heat. Add chopped mushroom stems, onion and garlic; sauté until mushrooms release their liquid and liquid evaporates, about 10 minutes. Add flour and stir 2 minutes. Mix in broth and Sherry and bring to boil. Reduce heat to low. Cover partially and simmer 25 minutes. Strain into heavy large saucepan; discard solids.

Melt remaining 3 tablespoons butter in heavy large skillet over medium-high heat. Add sliced mushroom caps; sauté until golden brown, about 10 minutes. Mix sliced mushroom caps into soup. (Can be made 1 day ahead. Cool slightly, then chill uncovered until cold. Cover; chill.)

Simmer soup 3 minutes. Whisk cream, yolks and lemon juice in small bowl to blend. Stir crab, then cream mixture into soup. Cook over low heat until soup thickens slightly, stirring constantly (do not boil). Season to taste with salt and pepper. Mix in parsley and serve.

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My cooking notes: For the crab, personally I think Dungeness crab is the best kind to use.  One good-sized Dungeness crab will yield enough meat for this recipe plus extra to pick on and eat while you’re cooking.  However, I’ve also made this successfully with snow crab and blue swimmer crabs — just be sure to adjust your seasoning accordingly since certain species are saltier than others.  And if you can’t find criminis, white button mushrooms work fine as well.  Honestly, when you cook something in that much butter, it’s practically guaranteed to taste really good.  Finally, for the step where you add the whipping cream/egg yolk mixture into the soup, because I’m paranoid I usually temper the egg mixture — adding small amounts of the soup to the eggs to bring them up to the same temperature and prevent curdling — but I’ve also just tossed the egg mixture straight into the soup and stirred like crazy and it’s turned out fine.  Tempering is definitely a step you can skip if you just don’t feel like it.

Freud in the Kitchen

I have potty training on the brain lately and I think it’s starting to show.

I get really snacky in the evenings and since I’ve been on something of a healthy eating kick — being pregnant and everything and having just bought several cookbooks on things ranging from quick family meals to cooking for picky eaters to what to eat while your pregnant — snacking late night on Nacho Cheese Doritos or peanut M&Ms is less satisfying these days.  So I broke out my old Petit Appetit cookbook.  It’s full of organic, healthy recipes for babies and toddlers but they have some good cookie recipes in there as well.  I figure, as long as I’m eating cookies, it may as well be healthy(ish).

I gathered all of the necessary ingredients, tossed them in a bowl and just as I was about to start mixing, Noah popped his head into the kitchen and asked me for a diaper.  Which meant he needed to poop.  So I spent the next five minutes trying to convince him to poop in his potty and the ten after that sitting with him while he tried to do his business.  It was a wash — ultimately he couldn’t (or wouldn’t) poop.  So after washing my hands I returned to the kitchen to finish making my cookies and when I shaped the first one (per the cookbook’s directions), I noticed I had made a cookie that distinctly resembled poop.  I’ve made these before so I don’t know how it could’ve slipped my mind, but like I said, I have potty training on the brain.  Feeling just slightly grossed out, I finished forming the rest of the cookies:

The plate on the top is full of wheat germ which the cookies get a nice coating of. Thankfully during baking they spread out and turned out looking more cookie and less poopy:

Ostensibly these cookies are for Noah, but actually it’s likely I’ll eat the vast majority of them. They make a decent, less guilt-trippy treat — the batter is made with whole wheat flour and it’s got wheat germ in it for additional iron and zinc, not to mention the wheat germ gives it a nice crunch — perfect for snacking on late at night while you’re watching American Idol. Here’s the recipe for anyone who’s interested.

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Cereal Batons (from the petit appetit cookbook)

1/2 cup unsalted butter
1 cup raw organic sugar
2 cage-free, organic eggs
1 tsp. vanilla extract
2 1/2 cups organic whole-wheat flour
1/4 tsp. baking soda
1/2 cup toasted organic wheat germ

Heat oven to 400°F/200°C.  Place butter in microwave on high for 20 seconds to soften.  Blend together first six ingredients, plus 1/4 cup of wheat germ.  Work dough with hands to combine.  Roll 2 tablespoons of dough into small balls and then stick/baton shapes.  Spread remaining 1/4 cup wheat germ on waxed paper.  Roll batons in wheat germ to coat.  Place on greased or parchment lined baking sheets and bake for 6 to 8 minutes, or until light brown.

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My baking notes: The recipe says it makes 90 (2 1/2-inch) batons, but rolling two tablespoons of dough for each cookie only yielded me 30.  Also, the point of the cookbook is organic recipes, but obviously you don’t need to only use organic sugar, eggs, flour, etc.  I sure didn’t and they came out fine.  Apparently I’m also the type of person who doesn’t have vanilla extract on hand but does have coconut extract laying around in the kitchen so I used that instead.  Ultimately the extract doesn’t make a big difference and you can’t taste it in the final product, but it did give off a nice coconut smell while it was baking.  The batter does spread some during baking so make sure to leave about 1-inch of space between cookies.

Finally a nutrition note — wheat germ is a great source of iron and iron absorption is greatly enhanced by eating it with foods rich in vitamin C, but inhibited when it’s eaten with dairy products or caffeine.  So, if anyone’s watching their iron intake, eat this with a glass of orange juice instead of coffee or milk.

Christmas With Friends

After spending a full day Nevanless, Noah was a bit of a pain in the butt with his constant “Are we going to see Nevan now?” and “I want to see Nevan!” So I was determined that we would meet up with Jae & Co. at some point during the day. Mark had to work for part of the day so it was already mid-afternoon by the time we got to do a little window shopping along Omotesando street. After that, we headed over to Tokyo Midtown where we had planned on meeting up with Jae, Dave and Nevan and check out their Christmas lights display.

Nevan had a little present for Noah when we finally saw them that evening. In Jae’s infinite wisdom, she had bought the same toy for both Nevan and Noah so (in theory, at least) they wouldn’t fight over who got to play with which toy. After their little reunion, we headed outside to check out the Christmas lights:

Devil’s Food Cupcakes

I’m seriously in love with these cupcakes and I honestly think that you haven’t lived until you’ve had a devil’s food cupcake.  So to that end, I’m posting the recipe here.  So everyone go make it ok?  Ok.

A Very, Merry Un-Birthday to Noah!

This year, Noah’s third birthday falls on Tuesday.  Originally we were planning on taking him to Disneyland that day, but Mark’s so swamped at work he couldn’t take the day off.  Additionally, Noah’s school is holding a Meet The Teachers event that night which I plan on attending.  So, given that Mark is unavailable during the day and I’ll be gone in the evening, we decided instead to celebrate the boy’s birthday early and tell him that his birthday was on Sunday.

On Saturday, Mark and I sent the boy off with Clarita to hang out at the playground while we went to Toys R Us to pick up his present — a new bike.  We could’ve gotten it assembled at Toys R Us but it was going to take two hours and we had a dinner reservation at Bo Innovation to make.  Besides, I told Mark, it would be fun to put our son’s first real bike together ourselves.  Mark, sensing impending calamity and time-wasting, was reluctant but after offering to put the bike together by myself he consented to taking the bike back home in pieces.

That night after dinner, I got to work turning this:

into this:

An Anniversary Food Review

Mark and I celebrated our six year anniversary last night.  Today, Sunday, is actually our anniversary, but since Clarita has the day off (read: we have no babysitting) we went out Saturday night instead.  For dinner we chose to go to Bo Innovation.  Bo Innovation originally started out as a private kitchen in Hong Kong and was so popular that its host/chef, Alvin Leung, set it up as a restaurant.  Private kitchens, or speakeasies, are small, unlicensed, restaurant-like eating establishments.  On the downside, they operate outside of government regulations (like fire, health and hygiene) but on the plus side, they’re intimate, usually serve high quality food (since they rely so heavily on word-of-mouth) and meet a pressing need for aspiring chefs.

Alvin Leung is known around Hong Kong as the “Demon Chef” and has a reputation for using ingredients in unexpected and innovative ways.  I was actually a little nervous about going since I’d heard that Bo was famous for serving things like Chinese sausage ice cream.  Not really my thing, but I was willing to give it a try.

After arriving nearly an hour late due to some heavy duty traffic, we sat down, ordered a bottled of champagne and we each ordered the tasting menu.  The food started coming almost immediately, which was great since we were both hungry after being stuck in a taxi for 45 minutes.  Earlier I made a deal with Mark that I would leave my big camera at home if he promised to take pictures of all of our courses so here’s what our dinner was like.

We were so hungry that we forgot to take a picture of our first starter — a tomato confit with crystal tomato jelly and lam choy sauce.  Rest assured that it was yummy.  Our second dish was a foie gras potsticker:

My friend Jae is nuts and despite never having tried foie gras, has placed it on her list of foods she will never eat (for humanitarian reasons). If she ever comes to Hong Kong though, I will force her to eat the foie gras potsticker and make a convert out of her. This thing was insanely delicious.

Next up was the BO sashimi:

From left to right that’s hamachi with black sesame sauce, sea bream, and amaebi. This was probably our least favorite course — Mark found the black sesame sauce overpowering (although I loved it); the sea bream was good, but just really chewy (I joked to Mark that I wasn’t really chewing but that my teeth were just ricocheting off the fish); and well, neither of us like amaebi. At all. We try to avoid it at all costs whenever we go out for sushi — it’s slimy and chewy and just kind of disgusting. (shudder)

This is me, happy and pre-amaebi:

I didn’t catch the name of this dish:

But BO’s website calls it mui choy kau yuk. According to the waiter, it’s a traditional Hong Kong dish and very popular in Kowloon, but really, that doesn’t tell you much, does it? The white foam on top covered a steamed, gelatinous, chickeny layer. I think I also tasted a hint of liver but it all went together so well I ate the whole thing up.

For my main course, I chose the Wagyu striploin with black truffle cheung fun pasta and truffle sauce which was absolutely delicious — cooked perfectly and the truffle sauce on it was extraordinary:

Mark ordered the 24 hour pork lasagna — a lasagna filled with pork that had been slowly cooked for 24 hours:

We both thought the meat was very similar to pulled pork but if you’re a Texas boy, that’s a good thing. Mark didn’t get a picture of the rice that they served afterwards — a tomatoey friend rice with flying fish roe — but like most everything we’d had to that point, it was also incredible.

I’m happy to report that there was no salmon ice cream or anything of the sort. They started us off with a trio of desserts:

The thing on the left is ice cream. I didn’t hear what kind, so I guess it’s entirely possible that we did end up eating some kind of meat ice cream, but whatever it was it was pretty good. In the middle was a bitter chocolate filled sesame ball (my favorite) and the thing on the right was ginko nut-something. I’m not quite sure what a ginko nut is, but I’m pretty sure it should never be made into a dessert.

Finally there was a steamed apple dumpling:

Overall, the dessert was the most disappointing part of dinner but then again, I don’t really choose restaurants for their desserts (except for El Adobe in San Juan Capistrano, which besides having some pretty good Mexican food, has the best churros I’ve ever had. Mmmmmm…churros…).  Pretty much everything else was excellent though and the manager told us the menu changes every month so that’s enough incentive for me to come back (if I can finagle another dinner out of Mark).

Desperate Measures

Most people who know me know that I have a picky child. I know it’s some kind of karmic payback for the years of demanding food requests I inflicted on my parents as a child (and if I’m being really honest, into my early adult years too) — nothing with ketchup, mustard, mayo, pickles, soy sauce, vinegar, tomatoes, peppers; food neatly segregated and kept from touching each other on my plate (which always prompted the response from my dad, “Everything gets mixed up in your stomach anyway.” Ewww dad. Not the same.) — yeah, I was hard to feed.

And now it’s my turn. Noah’s diet is pretty much vegetable-free so Mark and I have to get a little creative with the way we sneak in veggies. For a while, we pumped him full of Green Goodness Juice — a juice made of stuff like wheat grass, spirulina, broccoli, artichoke, spinach, and blue-green algae cleverly masked with apples, kiwis, mango and bananas. Noah loves the stuff and would literally go through gallon a week. But then he discovered guava juice — green juice’s sweeter and more nutritionally bankrupt second cousin.

I picked up Deceptively Delicious a few months ago. If you don’t know what it is, it’s Jessica Seinfeld’s cookbook on how to sneak veggie purees into food. The recipes were a little hit-and-miss. Some things Noah would eat and others he refused to try. I eventually gave up on it because cooking and pureeing all those veggies was such a pain in the butt for things that only had a 50% chance of getting eaten. After a week of Noah eating nothing but chicken nuggets and rice though, I had a desperate moment and broke the cookbook out again. There was a recipe there that I’d always wanted to try but never really had the guts to make — Brownies with Carrot and Spinach.

Yep. Carrot and spinach puree in chocolate. Yum, right? It’s not an insignificant amount either. There’s 1/2 cup of each kind of puree in the recipe — that’s one large carrot and a bag of baby spinach leaves. So I put on a movie to distract Noah from my machinations in the kitchen and got to work.

Here it is after I plopped the purees in:

I’m sure your mouth is watering, right?

After a little mixing and adding in about 1/3 cup of melted chocolate, it’s undetectable…by sight at least. I’d know that spinach smell anywhere:

An appetizing snack or a science experiment gone bad? Hmmm….

The book recommends waiting until it cools completely so that the spinach flavor disappears. Here’s Noah after his first taste of veggie brownie:

Is that chocolate in his teeth or spinach? Hard to tell, but at least he liked it.

[Note: During a moment of weakness in which I grabbed a brownie because I was hungry, I took a bite forgetting at the time what was in it. The picky part of me wanted to spit it right back out, but then I realized -- just as the book says -- you really can't taste the carrot or spinach in it at all. It still freaks me out just a little bit though.]