Lunch on June 6, 2011 - Leftovers for lunch and leftovers for blogging

I've been a bit behind on blogging.  Last week I decided to focus my energies on my actual day job.  If only I got paid to do this blog; it could be really good.

But alas, here is a compendium of things Juju ate for lunch last week and will eat for lunch tomorrow.

Tomorrow I am serving leftovers from tonight's dinner of artichoke (I know, I know, enough with the artichokes.  I'm sorry, they are still in bloom and still delicious!!), semi-homemade pizza, salad, edamame, and strawberries.

 

The pizza is semi-homemade because I did not make the dough.  I used Trader Joe's dough to make two pizzas.  One was cheese and mushroom (obvs) on wheat dough, the other was cheese on herbed dough.  Both were really good.  I will likely have leftovers myself for lunch tomorrow.

Last Thursday (June 2) Juju had strawberries, carrots, leftover chicken, and whole wheat pita sandwiches filled with edamame hummus and thin carrot slices.  It still weirds me out to send chicken for lunch (for some of my formative brown-bagging-it years I went to a Jewish Day School that forbid anything but a dairy lunch) but Juju always eats it so if I have it around, I pack it.

 

On the Tuesday before that (May 31) I was really desperate with not much in the house (we went out of town last week so I didn't do much stocking up at the grocery store).  So, I scraped together a few strawberries, cut some corn off the cob, opened a bag of edamame, and hardboiled some eggs.  You'll notice I used my egg molds here and made one bunny egg and one teddy bear egg.  I really don't like the teddy bear mold.  It's near impossible to get the egg to move into the "ears" of the mold so it doesn't really work.  Juju must agree.  She only picked at the bear one and preferred to eat the bunny instead.  I made use of fake grass from an earlier sushi meal to liven up the egg section of the container and I threw in the giraffe pick to give the whole lunch some more color.

 

I used my Lunchbots Trio for all three meals.  If you are interested in Lunchbots, you might want to check out the Gilt Groupe sale going on right now for the entire line.  The savings are very minimal, so you might prefer to purchase them from elsewhere but it's worth a look, particularly if you have some Gilt credit.  If you are not a member of Gilt Groupe, that link above will allow you to sign up (full disclosure - I get some sort of credit when you make your first purchase on the site.  I promise to use it on something good!).

Getting to the heart of it

This blog is really bad for me.  I have more than 700 emails in my inbox that I must delete, file, or respond to (my personal record pre-blog was only 500) and a bunch of other things calling me but this is just way more fun.

A few of you commented about the artichokes I've written about and asked how I make them so as promised, here is your post.

A warning, I am not a chef or even a proper cook.  I am a foodie by taste, not by training.  I learned to cook by watching my mom and an inordinate amount of Food Network in my early 20s.  This is mostly due to the fact that I could not afford cable and watched the only five channels that came in clearly when I plugged in my TV.  Food Network was one of them (New York 1 was another -- oh how I miss you Pat Kiernan and Roma Torre and the rest of the gang. . .).  I can only imagine what kind of training I would have picked up had the Discovery Channel or the Syfy Network been among the broadcasts that slipped through the cracks of Time Warner Cable's grip on my neighborhood.  All of this is to say that perhaps you should double-check anything you read here with an actual food or cooking blog. . .

Now, onto artichokes.  Until recently, I was doing a whole lot of work to prep my artichokes before cooking them.  This resulted in an artichoke that was very easy to eat and looked pretty when served to guests.  I got my technique from the Joy of Cooking (thank you Marc and Kathryn for what continues to be one of the most useful wedding gifts we got!).  I will explain it more in detail later.

But first, if you want to eat an artichoke and you're not worried about presentation, do it the easy way.  Boil a big pot of water and drop your artichoke/s in when you reach a roaring boil.  Cook for 45 minutes, remove, drain, eat.  You can pull the leaves off individually savoring the small doses of the delicious center.  When you get to the thinner, flimsier leaves in the middle, you are near the heart.  Since your artichoke is cooked, it is very easy to remove the choke that protects the center of the vegetable (its cupola as Pablo Neruda put it).  Pull whatever leaves out of the center you can, and then grab a knife to cut out the actual choke (the small fibers that look like hair). Take care not to cut out the actual heart when you are removing the "hairs," you don't want to lose any deliciousness to the trash can.  Once the extraneous parts are removed, sink your teeth into the soft, flavorful center.  It's like the dessert of the artichoke meal.  This way of eating the artichoke is messy but totally worth it.

Now if you're having dinner guests, you are going to want to go another route to spare everyone the embarrassment of trying to politely remove the heart in public (it simply can't be done).  In this case, you need your artichokes, a cutting board, a knife (I find a bread knife works best) and a lemon cut in half.

Place the artichoke on the cutting board and remove the stem (I am assuming you are buying conventional artichokes in which case the stem is not particulary tasty.  Artichokes sold with an extremely long stem are meant to be cooked with the stem intact and the stem should be eaten whole).  Once you lob off the stem, brush a piece of the lemon over it.  The lemon juice will help protect the bright green color of the artichoke (important if you care about presentation, not at all important if not).  You can also pull off the shorter leaves right around the stem, they generally don't have any tasty "meat" on them and the whole thing will look prettier if they are gone.

Next, lay the artichoke on it's side and cut off the top, about 1-1.5 inches down from the top, depending on the size of your choke.  Remember, all you actually eat in the artichoke is the heart and the small pieces from the heart that extend to the bottom of each leaf.  So, it's not a big deal to chop off half of the "head;" it's garbage whether you cook it or not.  I mentioned above that I like to use a bread knife for this task.  It works much better than the Santoku knife I use for everything else.  If you don't have a bread knife, use another serrated knife.

At this point, if your artichokes are fresh, like from the farmer's market, be on the lookout for one or two bugs that can crawl out at this stage in the process.  They live in the leaves and totally gross me out.  I love fresh food but I absolutely detest bugs.  Go figure.  Make sure to get rid of them lest they climb into anything else in your house.  Swipe the lemon over the top of the leaves that were just cut (again, to preserve their color).

Now comes the hard part.  You are going to have to cut and scoop out the choke.  This is much harder to do before the artichoke is cooked because it's very firm.  I cut a deep circle out of the center and then use a spoon to scoop out the "hairs."  Again, make sure not to cut too deep or scoop too far or you will be cutting away the precious heart.  If I had a grapefruit spoon, I think it would work great here to help scoop and scrape at the same time but alas I do not have one.  When you're done, squirt some of the lemon juice inside.

At this point you can throw the artichokes into boiling water immediately or, if you prefer, steam them.  I prefer steaming to boiling with most things and for the sake of presentation, I like to steam artichokes.  I think they stay together a bit better when steamed and they have a better chance of preserving their color.  To steam, place the artichokes in a steamer basket (I put them face down but I don't think it matters) over boiling water, cover, and let cook over medium to high heat for 45 minutes.  When they're done you'll be able to eat them and get to the heart without any major surgery.  Serve plain or with clarified butter or, if you like that sort of stuff, mayonnaise.

A few more notes about artichokes: when buying, try to buy the artichoke with the tightest leaves; that's how you know they are fresh.  Also, they bloom twice a year so if you fall in love with them now, you get to enjoy again in the fall!

If you do boil the chokes, you will find that when you empty your pot while cleaning up, the water turns a beautiful bright green.  I don't know anything about making vegetable dye but my guess is that it starts with something like this.  Maybe I'll look into what to do with leftover artichoke water. . .

Lunch on May 6, 2011 - devoid of color but not of flavor

Today's lunch isn't very pretty.  Even though it lacks color there is definitely some flavor in all this bland.

I am serving brown rice and chicken (with some soy sauce glaze), watermelon, and the heart of a large and DELICIOUS artichoke.  I simply can't get enough artichokes these days, they keep getting better and better.  Strawberries however have been consistently bad no matter where I get them.  What gives?

Lunch on April 14, 2011 - with love from the farmer's market

I'm writing today's post quickly.  I took the morning off to hang out with Juju and I have a bunch of work to catch up on.  I apologize in advance for any typos.

This morning we headed to Santa Monica to walk around the farmer's market. I haven't been to that one in years and somehow remember it much bigger (maybe it's bigger on the weekend?).  But it was certainly big enough for our needs today.  And although her first choice was to go to the zoo, I think Juju was happy we went because she had her first taste of one of my favorite snacks, peas in the pod (or English peas if you prefer) and she is hooked!

I have fond memories of eating fresh peas as a very young child.  I remember at our old house in NY we had a vegetable garden out back (I think my Grandpa Leo who had a green thumb planted it for us) and we grew peas.  I loved running out there and eating the peas right off the stalk.  This reminds me I want to figure out a way to grow vegetables in our backyard.  We tried once with tomatoes but we live in a canyon and some of our animal neighbors kept harvesting everything for us before we could get to them.  I also want to compost since peas in the pod leave a good amount of waste.  I'll work on both of those ideas when I have some more time.

Juju wasn't interested in the peas at first but once I showed her how to eat them she was obsessed.  She ate the entire bag in about a block and a half so I had to go back and buy some more for tomorrow's lunch.  It was actually a great way to move around the farmer's market.  Her eyes and hands were so focused on not dropping any peas on the ground that she moved slowly and stuck by me stand after stand.  We also bought some beautiful strawberries.  They are finally starting to taste as they should which means summer will be here before I know it.  Time really does fly.

I made lunch ahead of time again; our mornings are just too crazy to make a fresh lunch and I certainly wouldn't have time to blog about lunch if I made it in the morning!  Joining the peas in the pod are clementine segments, strawberries, and cream cheese hearts.  I made the hearts by slathering a bunch of cream cheese on two pieces of whole grain bread and using one of my handy dandy Tokyo Japanese Outlet heart-shaped cookie cutters.  I've never given Juju a cream cheese sandwich before but my guess is she is going to love it.  I am concerned that the lunch might not have enough protein so I might throw something else in the snailbox like yogurt or hummus and carrots. 

 

When I asked Juju today what she wanted for lunch tomorrow she replied "carrots and ice."  Let's hope this is a welcome substitute.

Inspired by reading this piece on artichokes I bought some beauties at the farmer's market today.  I once had a fantastic raw artichoke salad.  Maybe I'll try making it but I'm guessing the taste will be a little too sophisticated for a toddler's lunch.

Lunch on April 12, 2011 - The spa meets the playground

Today is another day where I am forced to prepare lunch ahead of time.  Tonight I am doing a photo shoot for Milkstars (I'm so excited about our new styles coming soon!) and I'll be home way too late to make anything tonight and am hoping to get as much sleep as possible tomorrow morning.

So, today's lunch is a mishmash of things in my refrigerator.  Last night we had friends over for dinner and served salmon and spanikopita (this time we didn't use frozen spinach but we did use the pre-washed bag kind - sorry farmer's market!).  It actually came out better than last time.  We also used a French feta instead of the Greek one we used last week.  We don't normally eat the same thing every week; we just thought it would be a fun dish to serve at a dinner party.  It's really not that difficult to put together and it's an unexpected dish to present to guests.

I cooked some brown rice today (the quick way, in the microwave), let it cool, and cut up some leftover salmon on top.  I have to remember to throw in an extra ice pack tomorrow to make sure the lunch stays really cold.  Lukewarm fish at the lunch table sounds pretty gross.

I didn't intend to make today's lunch look like something you'd find on the menu at a spa or yoga retreat; it just sort of happened that way.  Fingers crossed it passes the kid test.  If all else fails I know she will eat the rice.

We also served large (delicious!) artichokes from the farmer's market for dinner last night and I saved a few baby ones to cook today.  Mini artichokes are really easy to cook up.  In this case I pulled off all the leaves and just sent the hearts to school.  I thought it would be too difficult and time consuming to expect Juju to rip off all the leaves herself.  Plus, when she eats artichokes at home, she insists on dipping each leaf in lots of butter and I would be nervous to send a container of clarified butter to school lest Juju be called out for bringing contraband on the premises.

Finally, I included some grapes and cantaloupe and a clementine.  Cute clementine accessory courtesy of the Tokyo Japanese Outlet I've mentioned in earlier posts.  I was downtown on Thursday and happened to find a parking spot in front of the Japanese Village Plaza.  I took it as a sign that I needed more cute lunch accessories (a treat for Juju and now readers of this blog too) and went in for a few things I didn't pick up last time.