5
Play with Your Food
The suggestion that you and your children play with food may seem a bit subversive, or just plain messy. I certainly grew up being told not to play with mine, especially when I built my peas into a pyramid or pushed around the gristly meat parts to disguise the fact that I wasn’t eating everything on my plate. Later, as a mother myself, I wasn’t amused when my son confessed that he had earned a weeklong detention for his role in a middle school cafeteria food fight. And I used to flee the kitchen when my husband commandeered our sons to help put away the groceries by “playing catch” with cans and bags hurled across the kitchen.
But maybe my husband was on to something. The kitchen is the heart of the home, the place where most of us gravitate. So why not make it a play station for creative projects, as well as a workstation for preparing meals? As we spend more time in virtual realms, the opportunity to make things with our hands becomes more precious.
Food, in its rainbow of colors and its range of textures from slippery oils to squishy pretzel dough, is a medium like paint or clay. Each of the different properties of food—size, shape, taste, smell, color—can become a focus of pleasurable investigation. And the very process of cooking lends itself to the scientific process of experimentation, since you can change one flavor or ingredient at a time, and keep testing the impact. The processes of transformation in cooking, like adding fire or air, bring immediate and dramatic results, empowering the young creator with the feeling of “look what I can make!” The context in which food is eaten is also malleable and open to fooling around with—what music you listen to while you cook and where you eat are all elements at play.
Here are a few play episodes that have transpired in kitchens and dining rooms, summer camps and beaches, in my family, as well as the families of my patients, students, and friends. Perhaps they will inspire you and your children to try new foods, and to linger longer in the kitchen for conversation.
PLAY WITH COLOR
One of my earliest memories is of my mother drawing a face on the shell of a soft-boiled egg resting in an eggcup. With a quick few flourishes of a magic marker, she would make curly hair tumbling out of a sun hat. Then with a serrated knife she’d cut around the top of the egg, so its “hat” could be removed. The rest of the egg might be a mustachioed man with glasses or a girl with a shy smile like mine. She’d present the egg with its “hat” on so that I could remove it and scoop out the insides. I never warmed up to the sliminess of a soft-boiled egg, but I loved to see what my mother would draw for me, so I would take a few bites to make sure she didn’t give up on this activity.
Over the years, I’ve engaged my sons in activities that involve food for collage or painting. As Marcella Hazan, the Italian cookbook writer, put it, “Cooking is an art, but you eat it too.”
It’s fun to take the elements of a salad—sliced red pepper, cucumbers, avocado, carrot sticks, lettuce leaves, cherry tomatoes, bean sprouts, and nuts—and have each person make a face out of these elements on a plate. A cherry tomato placed on top of a cucumber slice makes a compelling eyeball, and an avocado slice curves to make an elegant eyebrow. Lettuce and bean sprouts lend themselves nicely to hair and beards. Once you’ve had enough with faces, you can move on to making animals, cars, boats, planes, and houses. For hygiene purposes, it’s a good idea to have each artist eat his or her own creation. If you need ideas and inspiration, do a Google “images” search for Giuseppe Arcimboldo.
Even more popular than making these collages was decorating cookies. When I ask my twenty-something sons about their favorite childhood memories, baking cookies as a family is near the top of their lists. Over the years, we have collected many recipes for holiday cookies, but this one, from my mother-in-law, is the best. These cookies make excellent holiday gifts or can serve as a centerpiece for a party at any time of the year. Confronted with a platter of these colorful cookies, guests alternate between thinking they look too good to eat and diving right in to bite off a chocolate head.
SUGAR COOKIES
(From my mother-in-law, Mary Daly)
⅔ cup unsalted butter
¾ cup sugar
½ teaspoon vanilla
½ teaspoon grated orange peel
1 large egg
4 teaspoons milk
2 cups all-purpose flour
1½ teaspoons baking powder
¼ teaspoon salt
Glaze (recipe follows)
In a mixer, thoroughly cream the butter, sugar, vanilla, and orange peel. Add the egg and beat until the mixture is light and fluffy. Then stir in the milk.
In a separate bowl sift together the flour, baking powder, and salt. Then stir the dry ingredients into the creamed mixture, blending well.
Divide the dough into two dough balls. Put each ball of dough in a piece of floured wax paper and store in the refrigerator for at least an hour (it can be kept for weeks).
When you’re ready to make cookies, remove one dough ball from the refrigerator, warm it briefly in your hands until it is pliable, and then place it on a floured counter. Roll it out so the dough is about ⅛ inch thick. Cut with cookie cutters. (Some of our favorites are reindeer, dogs that look like our golden retriever, Christmas trees, dreidels, stars, musical notes, moons, dog bones, mother, father, and children shapes.)
Bake the cookies on a lightly greased cookie sheet in a 375-degree oven for about 8 minutes. (Watch them so they don’t burn; oven temperature and the thickness of your dough sometimes vary, which might mean quicker doneness). Cool and decorate with glaze.
Glaze:
Powdered sugar
Milk
Food coloring
Make up several small ramekins with different colors. For each ramekin, combine ½ cup powdered sugar, a drop or two of milk, and a drop of food coloring. Mix very slowly, adding liquid to the sugar until you get a consistency that will spread smoothly on a cookie without running off.
You can also melt chocolate to decorate such things as the base of the tree, the fur of the dog, the horns on the reindeer, or the pants of the father. Some cookies may look like Jackson Pollock stopped by to add a colorful splatter, while others will have the careful, folk-art approach more suggestive of a visit from Grandma Moses.
As long as you have the food coloring out, you might want to try food coloring paintings. When my sons were young, I used to assemble two eyedroppers, several small dishes filled with water, different food colorings, and a pile of paper towels. They folded the paper towels into squares, or kept folding them into a tight pile, and applied drops of different colors. When the towels were unfolded, the patterns surprised and delighted us. We hung them up to dry on clotheslines strung around the kitchen. It was like stepping into a psychedelic Rorschach.
My colleague Dr. Mai Uchida grew up in Japan before coming to Boston for psychiatry training. On top of her demanding call schedule, patients, and supervision, she somehow also managed to take courses in fashion, and indeed she has a color sense to die for. She told me that she began developing this color sense at her grandmother’s dinner table in Tokyo.
When Mai was a young child, her grandmother used to instruct her: “Eat your food as if you are painting a picture in your stomach.” The idea was to picture each food as a paint color. She imagined the reds from a tomato as roses in her stomach, the brown of the rice filling in the soil for those roses, and the yellow from egg yolks getting transformed into butterflies swooping around the roses. In no time, the meal had translated into a painting, and in the process, Mai had been encouraged to eat a healthy rainbow of colors. Once she was old enough, Mai wanted to make the creations in the real world, not just in her stomach. One such creation is a birthday cake made out of sushi ingredients (see Sushi Birthday Cake recipe).
You can try “stomach-painting” at your table: Ask family members to share images of what each color of their food might paint in their stomach. Perhaps, like Mai, your kids will want to draw, sew, or cook the images that were inspired by their dinners.
SUSHI BIRTHDAY CAKE (FOR 6)
Cake:
1½ cups brown rice 1½ cups white rice
3 cups cold water, divided
4 tablespoons rice vinegar
3 tablespoons sugar
1 teaspoon salt
4 tablespoons rice vinegar
3 tablespoons granulated sugar
1 teaspoon salt
Filling:
1 (5-ounce) package dried seaweed, thinly sliced
About 8 ounces of sushi- or sashimi-grade tuna or salmon
Topping:
2 large eggs, scrambled with a splash of soy sauce
½ cup chopped green beans
Pickled thin slices of carrots and bamboo shoots
For the cake, rinse the rices, one type at a time, with cold water. When the water runs mostly clear of starch, drain the rice. Cook each rice type in a medium saucepan with 1½ cups cold water. Cook on high heat until the rice comes to a boil. Reduce the heat to simmer and cover with a lid. Let cook for 15 minutes, turn off the heat, and let the rice steam for 10 more minutes.
While the rice is cooking, combine the rice vinegar, sugar, and salt in a small bowl. Spoon the brown rice into one bowl and the white rice into another. Pour half of the vinegar mixture over each bowl while the rice is hot. Gently combine the rice and vinegar using a side-to-side cutting motion with a wooden spoon. The rice should be fluffy and shiny, warm but not hot. On a large plate spread a layer of brown rice, then seaweed, then white rice, then tuna, continuing the layering until all ingredients are used.
Decorate with the eggs, green beans, carrots, and bamboo shoots.
PLAY WITH SHAPE
Doughs of many kinds can be plied and twisted into recognizable shapes, and it’s fun for kids to get their hands goopy and sticky. While bread usually requires patience to wait for rising, pretzels provide much quicker gratification. As an extra bonus, when eaten hot out of the oven, they evoke the pretzels sold from pushcarts in New York City’s Central Park. In your own kitchen, kids can go wild molding the dough into different shapes.
PRETZELS
1½ cups warm water
1 (¼-ounce) package yeast
1 teaspoon table salt
1 tablespoon sugar
4 cups all-purpose flour
1 large egg, beaten with a little water
Kosher salt for sprinkling
Pour the warm water into a large mixing bowl. Sprinkle on the yeast and stir. Add the table salt, sugar, and flour. Mix and knead the dough.
Give each child a small ball of dough to roll and twist into letters, numbers, animals, or shapes without names. Grease a cookie sheet and place the pretzels on the sheet. Brush the pretzels with the beaten egg and sprinkle with kosher salt. Bake at 425 degrees for 12 to 15 minutes. Cool slightly before you plunge into these hot doughy delights.
PLAY WITH SIZE
I think that children’s awareness of their own smallness creates an affinity for other small things, such as puppies, stuffed animals, and miniature figures. Playing with the size of foods, much as Alice played with her own height in Alice in Wonderland, seems to appeal to many children. Just cutting sandwiches into minis can be a treat, so long as they aren’t the kind of sandwiches that ooze and drip with each cutting. Melted cheese, cream cheese with smoked salmon or sliced cucumber, or peanut butter with banana all lend themselves to bite-size sandwiches. These could be accompanied by mini-pops made by pouring juice into an ice tray and sticking a toothpick into each cube before putting the tray into the freezer. Kids may also be more willing to try a new food in a mini size that they wouldn’t otherwise taste.
Experimenting with giant foods is also fun. You can take a chocolate chip recipe and bake most of it into one giant cookie in a pizza pan.
PLAY WITH TASTE
There are five flavors that our tongues can taste—sweet, sour, salt, bitter, and umami. Sweet, salt, and sour are easily identifiable and make for straightforward pairings of flavor with food: Sweet ice cream, salty pretzels, and sour lemons are some obvious combinations. Bitter is a paradoxical taste because it can serve as a warning that we are about to consume a toxic substance or it can be the signature taste of some very popular foods and drinks. Beer, coffee, olives, and marmalade all rely on bitterness to make their statement.
The least familiar to most eaters will be umami, a Japanese word meaning delicious. It’s the new kid on the block. The two taste receptors for umami were identified as recently as 2000 and proved that the tongue has a special place on it to register the scrumptiousness of foods like steak, mushrooms, soy sauce, meat stocks, and Parmesan cheese.1 Often an umami element unlocks a flavor burst from another food, as when we dip sushi into soy sauce, make risotto with a complex veal stock, or sprinkle Parmesan cheese on tomatoes.
Just as you might urge your kids to eat a wide variety of colors, you might also encourage tasting across the five different flavors, not only because there are obvious health benefits but also to boost experimentation with new foods. One way to do this is to ask your kids to think up a menu that uses all five tastes and then try to make it. For example, you could make pasta with roasted vegetables (salted), adding a sprinkle of Parmesan (umami). As an appetizer, whip up an olive (bitter) tapenade by mixing olive, capers, lemon juice (sour), garlic, and olive oil in a food processor and then spread on crackers. Baking cookies for dessert would give you your fifth taste sensation—sweet.
Another way to play with taste is to combine different foods in unexpected ways and ask your children to guess which taste buds are being activated. Try putting salt on a peach, or sugar on a piece of fish, or a squeeze of lemon on a potato.
Can you think of any dish that combines three flavors on your tongue? Salted coffee ice cream is one. How about four or five flavors? Roasted salted chicken with olives, lemons, and oranges. I’m sure you can think of many more.
But simplest of all is to ask your diners to guess the ingredients in a new dish. Sometimes, I like to throw an offbeat spice or flavor element into a meal to see if I can stump my family—a dash of cinnamon, a splash of lime juice, or a squirt of fish sauce can enhance the flavor of a dish while staying under the radar of taste detection. Don’t be surprised if the children at the table are better at this game than the adults, since we lose half of our taste buds by age twenty.
PLAY WITH SMELL
The pleasures of taste rely on the aroma of food. In fact, the perception of flavor is dominated by smell, not by what our taste buds can detect. Scientists have recently discovered that humans can detect a trillion odors, but each person’s preferences for and sensitivities to certain smells vary widely from individual to individual.2 No wonder that the smell of blue cheese is heavenly to one person and smells like dirty socks to another, or that the smell of roasted coffee can be divine or nauseating. Did you know that only about 22 percent of the population has the genes to smell the rotten egg smell in urine that results from eating asparagus?
When I was growing up, one of my favorite birthday party activities was a smell test. Small jars with cinnamon, mint, toothpaste, bananas, or whatever was lying around would be lined up. The partygoers would wear a blindfold and take turns guessing what they smelled. Whoever got the most correct guesses got a prize. Years later, I used to play a version of this game with my sons, skipping the prize. I’d have them close their eyes and try to guess the smells I’d laid out on the kitchen table. It was a source of consternation when one boy could smell something as clearly as hearing a train whistle and the other boy smelled nothing.
Dr. Robin Schoenthaler, a radiation oncologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, writes about playing another variation of this game with her children as a way to make them more adventurous eaters. Every few months, she took her children to a local spice store, Penzeys, and let them smell as many spices as they wished. Then each child was allowed to buy one spice jar and use it on any dish they wanted until the spice ran out. “This way, their palate expanded just a bit,” she explained.3
PLAY WITH FIRE
Fire, in all its uses, has always captivated the human mind. Perhaps cooking over an open fire evokes fantasies about being Robinson Crusoe stranded on a deserted island, or it rekindles memories of singing songs around a campfire during your first summer away from home. Fire even conjures the evolutionary argument that cooking with fire makes us human, since cooking with heat frees up the tremendous energy required to chew raw food, thus allowing humans to pursue activities other than digestion.4
There is something thrilling about cooking over an open fire at the beach. It’s magical to be there at sunset when everyone else has gone home and the fireflies sparkle in the marshes and the stars begin to twinkle up above. With a little forethought you can take along some sticks, newspaper, and matches to get the whole thing started and then comb the beach for driftwood. Scoop out a shallow hole and form a ring of stones around it—this will make a good resting spot for the wood. Once the fire is under way, you can toast marshmallows on a stick and eat them as special gooey treats, or make s’mores by creating a sandwich of graham crackers with chocolate bars and toasted marshmallows in the middle.
Recently I made banana boats, a variation on the campfire classic. You’ll want to assemble these before going to the beach.
BANANA BOATS (EACH PACKET SERVES 1 PERSON)
1 banana
4 squares chocolate
3 marshmallows
Slice each banana down the middle (keeping the skin on, and keeping the banana whole). Alternate placing pieces of chocolate and marshmallows in the cavity with the banana. Wrap the stuffed banana tightly in aluminum foil.
When ready to enjoy the treats at the beach, toss the packets in the embers for 5 to 10 minutes A bit of heaven will ensue: a hot, luscious confection that must be eaten with a spoon.
PLAY WITH AIR
If you like the idea of creating something out of nothing, then you’ll enjoy these recipes. Breathtaking in its simplicity, but fun for kids and grownups, is to place whipping cream in a tightly covered Tupperware container. (Test the tightness of the lid first, to prevent wardrobe disasters.) Then just shake the daylights out of it. You can put on music and dance with it. Pass it from person to person and do the hokey pokey. After a few minutes, thanks to the addition of air, the cream will thicken to become whipped cream.
When The Family Dinner Project hosts community dinners, kids go off with one team member to shake up some whipped cream, and then put dollops of it on a berry crisp. This activity frees up enough time for the parents to talk and share strategies for overcoming common challenges to making dinner.
While the whipped cream recipe is fun and dramatic, if I had to pick my favorite recipe, it would be my meringue cookies, the recipe that feels like fashioning something delicious out of thin air. As an added bonus, these cookies are so quick to make that it takes less time to bake them than it does to drive to the store and buy a box of cookies. This recipe makes about twenty cookies. They don’t keep that well, but then you probably won’t have any left over. One caveat: You can’t make them on a humid or rainy day. The egg whites just won’t whip into shape.
MERINGUE COOKIES (MAKES ABOUT 20)
2 large egg whites
⅛ teaspoon salt
⅛ teaspoon cream of tartar
1 teaspoon vanilla
¾ cup sugar
6 ounces chocolate chips
⅓ cup toasted and chopped almonds, walnuts, or pecans (optional)
2 sheets of computer paper or parchment paper
Preheat the oven to 300 degrees. Whip the egg whites, salt, cream of tartar, and vanilla in a mixer until soft peaks form. Slowly add the sugar, while the machine is still running. The mixture should form peaks. Fold in the chocolate chips and toasted nuts.
Place the computer or parchment paper on the cookie pan. Using a tablespoon, spoon a rounded mound of the batter onto a cookie pan.
Place the cookies in the oven for about 25 minutes, or until they are lightly golden. If you just can’t wait, you can take the cookies out at this point and they will be delicious, with a marshmallowy consistency. Better still: Turn off the oven after they cook for 25 minutes, and let them sit in the cooling oven for another hour. Then they will form a slightly crisp exterior with a pillowy interior. Because they are so airy, people eat them with abandon.
PLAY WITH LANGUAGE
Have you ever noticed how many foods are introduced in children’s books? There are magical noodles in Strega Nona, the pomegranates that lure Persephone into Hades, and the irresistible Turkish delight in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Then there is the treat created by drizzling maple syrup on snow in Little House in the Big Woods, and the delightful tribute to picky eaters, Green Eggs and Ham. Let’s not forget The Very Hungry Caterpillar, who eats a feast before he turns into a butterfly, or the mouse that is given a cookie and has many adventures before finally getting a glass of milk. This doesn’t even include the myriad of children’s poems and nursery rhymes that involve, to name a few, porridge, blackbird pie, rice pudding, and strawberry jam. There is also the linguistic affinity between words and eating, as evidenced by language that bridges the two—eating your words, devouring a good book, thirst for knowledge, food for thought.
It can be fun to combine the worlds of eating and reading by creating foods or meals from favorite books. What might Harry Potter’s quidditch stew be composed of? What about creating a high tea that is described in Mary Poppins? Or perhaps toast some bread with jam and then read Bread and Jam for Frances aloud at the table?
One of my friends belongs to a book group where, in addition to discussing the book, they also make food to accompany their discussions. The foods are chosen by virtue of having been mentioned in the book, or because they come from the country where the book takes place. This practice could translate to the reading of children’s books as well—kids’ appetites for discussing a book might be whetted by eating a food that plays a role in the book.
Food Poems
For younger kids, I turn to inspiration from my friend Lisa Price, who makes up food poems with her six-year old twins, a son and a daughter, an activity that helps them slow down and pay attention to what is going on in the moment. She discovered the power of poetry one evening when all her other efforts had failed to settle down her giggling, joking, squirming young children. She recalled that she wanted to pull out a bit of magic and drama.
“What if I told them that something amazing was right in front of them?” she wondered. As a bit of performance art, she paused, took a breath, was visibly awed by what she was looking at (a strawberry, as it turned out), and slowly uttered a short haiku-like poem: “Soft pillows, furry on my tongue. Tart. Smiling.” Her children giggled and wanted to participate. She urged them to think about the color, the smell, the taste, the season of a food they were eating. How does it feel on your tongue, in your tummy? What mood are you in after tasting it? She also encouraged her kids to draw connections across time and space. For example, she asked them: “Does the warm potato on your plate remind you of the farm stand where we found it or the toasty blanket around your feet at last night’s fire?” Taking turns, they each offered up a short poem. Her son’s offering: “Kumquats surprise me. Make me have a face.” When it was her daughter’s turn, she said, “Tomatoes taste good when I eat them. Tomatoes spray inside my mouth!”
PLAY WITH MEMORY
Perhaps food is overrepresented in our memory banks because the experience of eating is simultaneously encoded in different parts of the brain—taste, color, texture, sound, and smell receptors all have a chance to build synapses. This multisensory experience of eating creates vivid memories. I think this partly explains why we remember holiday meals so clearly—because the sensory experience is heightened with music, wearing special clothes, and eating particularly aromatic foods. The more the senses are stimulated during an event, the greater the chance that we will remember that experience. We also tend to remember experiences and facts when there is a story connected to them. Since many memorable stories are told at the table, by and about the people who matter the most to us, we tend to hold on to them. The meals that accompany those stories also get stored in our memory banks.
There is a subgenre of literary works devoted to memoirs that revolve around food. Ruth Reichl’s Comfort Me with Apples, Gabrielle Hamilton’s Blood, Bones and Butter, Kate Christenson’s Blue Plate Special, Gus Samuelsson’s Yes Chef, and Laurie Colwin’s Home Cooking are some of my favorite books that also happen to be food memoirs.
But you don’t have to be a memoirist to play with your own childhood food memories. When you think back to your childhood days, are there certain foods that you really loved to eat? Was there a special side dish that showed up just for a holiday dinner? Did your grandparents or other elders make a dish that you remember fondly or that makes you hungry to think about now? Are there any meals you had that have a story that went with them? Perhaps there were kitchen disasters, food poisonings, or plates of delicious cookies that the dog ate and almost died from.
Were there any desserts that still make you salivate? Are there any foods that you closely associate with a beloved family member, so that when you eat that food, you think about him or her and feel moved to tell a story? If so, making that food for your family may be a way to bring that person to the table, if only in spirit.
For me, one such recipe is my mother’s ice-cream cake. My mother was an artist whose favorite medium was clay. She made Hanukkah menorahs that looked like street scenes, lamps that were constructed with multiple coils to be castles, and boxes in the shapes of animals and beds. When it came to cooking, she favored dishes that were quick, but she wasn’t afraid to muck around with food as though it were a piece of clay. I loved to help her make a particular cake that she made for every dinner party she ever hosted. Those parties were elegant affairs, with place cards and tablecloths, a caviar egg pie served as an appetizer, and our best silver trotted out for the night.
Her ice cream cake, made in about 10 minutes, was the capstone for her parties. My sister and I tried to stay up late enough to get a piece after the guests had been served. But, the next day, with the heavy cream hardened on the cake, it was even better.
Years later, my son Gabe always asked for ice cream cake for his midwinter birthday. One year, I decided to make my mother’s ice cream cake, and I even jazzed it up a bit by pouring hot fudge sauce on top. Alas, he told me that although it was delicious, he would prefer that I get him the ice cream cake that he was used to—from the Carvel store.
MY MOTHER’S (EDITH FISHEL) ICE CREAM CAKE
Cake:
About 2 dozen ladyfingers
3 pints ice cream, softened but not melting (my mother usually used mint chocolate chip, black raspberry, and chocolate because she thought these looked beautiful together).
Topping:
½ pint heavy cream
Colored sprinkles (optional)
Directions:
Line the bottom of a springform pan with ladyfingers (soft, yellow spongy cakes that are about 3 inches long and an inch wide). Then prop a ring of ladyfingers around the perimeter of the pan so that they are standing up and so that no part of the pan is showing.
Spoon out the first pint of ice cream and press it down, using a spatula or the palm of your hand. Then do the same with the next flavor of ice cream, and the next. Put the cake into the freezer. Just before serving, and as you let the cake warm up a bit, whip the heavy cream by hand with a beater or in an electric mixer until peaks form; be careful not to let the cream go too far and turn into butter. Spoon this whipped cream over the top of the cake before serving. (My mother used to decorate the cake with edible silver balls, which I think may be a bit toxic, so I skip them. Instead, colored sprinkles look nice on top.)
At the risk of gilding the lily, I like to serve the cake with Hot Chocolate Sauce drizzled over each beautiful slice.
HOT CHOCOLATE SAUCE
8 ounces quality chocolate
½ cup heavy cream
1 tablespoon honey
1 tablespoon freshly made coffee
Melt the chocolate and the cream in the top pan of a double boiler. Remove from heat and stir in the honey and the coffee.
PLAY WITH SPACE
Ask not only “what to have for dinner” but also “where to have dinner.” Changes in context often alter the mood of dinner. Consider how different it feels to eat dinner in a formal dining room compared to propped up in bed or perched on a picnic blanket at the beach. Even the shape and size of a table can affect the ambiance. Eating at a round table, with no one presiding at either end and individuals sitting roughly equidistant from one another, feels more egalitarian than eating at a rectangular table. Proximity or distance of the seats can also alter the dining experience. Sitting at a table that’s a tight squeeze may promote more intimate conversation than one where everyone has plenty of legroom.
In the film Citizen Kane, Orson Welles shows the deterioration of a marriage using the changing size of a dining room table to mirror the increasing emotional distance of a couple. The first scene shows a young couple sitting next to each other at a small table, engaged in romantic banter. In each successive scene, the tabletop becomes more crowded and the couple is seated farther apart. In the ninth and final scene, they are sitting at opposite ends of a long table, reading rival newspapers—the collapse of their marriage is reflected in the spatial features of the table. Our sense of emotional closeness can be keenly felt by the physical space between us at the table. Often, a smaller table feels more conducive to easy conversation.
When I talk with families about their dinners, most tell me the same thing: Each family member sits in the same chair night after night. No one can quite remember how these decisions were made. But in most families, it is considered a subversive act to claim a seat that isn’t customarily yours. In my husband’s family, the girls sat on one side of the table, nearer the stove, so that they could spring up to help with food, while the boys sat on the far side. As with most rectangular tables, his parents sat at either end, connoting higher status as heads of the table.
What would happen if you asked family members to choose a seat that wasn’t their customary one? What if you sit very close or with more than usual distance between seats? What if you dispense with chairs altogether, and try spreading a blanket on the floor or in a different room or outside? What about turning off the lights and lighting candles?
At The Family Dinner Project community dinners, we often kick things off with kids making placemats for themselves and their parents, or by creating centerpieces out of a motley array of random objects—feathers, pipe cleaners, rocks, and flowers. This purposeful setting of the table seems to pave the way for a new experience at the community dinner.
You can do this at home with sheets of computer or easel paper. If you are feeling more ambitious, you can cut pieces of fabric (hemming them so they don’t fray) and use fabric pens. Have everyone draw pictures of the family, or self-portraits, or portraits of someone else at the table (then you have to find the seat that has your picture). Or draw maps of your neighborhood, or pictures of something you really love to do. If there are creations you want to keep, you can get them laminated and reuse them for special occasions, or even for a tired Wednesday night.
PLAY WITH MUSIC
Given that most teenagers will listen to about 6,000 hours of music between the ages of twelve and eighteen,5 there are a lot of stories and language that they will be privy to through listening to songs. I think that parents who want access to their kids’ inner lives may learn a lot by listening to their children’s music. A CD or playlist of your child’s current favorite music, played at dinner, can be a great way to do this, and you have your teen right there to help interpret what you’re listening to.
Another idea is to create a compilation of songs about food that can make for inspiring music during cooking and cleanup time. You might start with some classics such as “Food, Glorious Food” and Cab Calloway’s “Everyone Eats When They Come to My House.” I’d also include The Band’s “Up on Cripple Creek,” which has the memorable line, “dip a donut in my tea,” as well as Van Morrison’s “Tupelo Honey” and Dr. John’s “Jambalaya.”
Lynn Barendsen, the executive director of The Family Dinner Project, shared a music game she plays with her husband and two sons. One person throws out a word, like “car,” and then everyone tries to come up with a song that has the word in the lyrics or the title: Bruce Springsteen’s song, “Fire” with the line, “I’m driving in my car,” and Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” are two examples. Then the family tries to sing a bit of the song.
PLAY FOOD GAMES
My friend Bev is a member of a large Asian-American family in the Boston area. Every summer, for the past thirty years, she and her four siblings have rented a house together for a long “sibling weekend” so that they wouldn’t lose touch with one another as they became busy with careers and families and were spread out across the country. As the decades have unspooled, children and grandparents have been added to the mix. This summer visit is sacrosanct, and everyone manages to show up, which isn’t possible for the big holidays when in-laws compete for family time.
When I asked Bev what they like to do together, she told me that everyone likes to eat and play games. One sister, Patty, is the major games leader, organizing everything from Olympics to word games, and everyone pitches in with the cooking.
One recent summer, in Deering, New Hampshire, when their ranks had swelled to nineteen, cooking and gaming converged for a rousing version of the popular competitive TV cooking show Iron Chef. Bev and another sister were team captains, choosing their teams as though it were a game of pick-up basketball. (For other games, the family divides itself into first-borns and later-borns, but according to Bev, who is the second of five, the later-borns almost always win because they are better at collaborating with one another).
For the family-wide game of Iron Chef, Patty played the role of judge, also picking three ingredients that had to be incorporated into the meal: salmon, potatoes, and peaches. Everyone participated throughout the afternoon, peeling potatoes and peaches, and negotiating about what dishes they should create. Bev recalls that her team found pastel-colored glasses and filled them with peach daiquiris. Then there was a potato soup and baked salmon (decorated with fins and gills made out of roasted potatoes). For dessert they wanted to make Nora Ephron’s “Best Peach Pie,” from Heartburn, but thought it was out of reach since they’d left the book at home. One of the kids easily found it online.
The other team made salmon sashimi (garnished with lemons and herbs from the garden) as an appetizer, salmon with peach salsa as the main dish, and grilled peaches with balsamic vinegar and crème fraiche. When it came to judging the two meals, Patty decided that it was best not to declare a winner but to give out commendations, for best drink, presentation, originality, and so on. Bev agreed that this was a wise move. “We’re a very competitive family,” she said.
PLAY WITH SCIENCE, PART 1
Preschoolers to age eight
Young children love to make concoctions from leftover food, soap bubbles, seltzer water, and spoonfuls of sugar, salt, and other baking items. The unexpected chemical reactions that ensue create bubbling and fizzing, strange aromas, and weird colors—all reactions that need to be closely supervised. (After all, you don’t want your kids to eat or drink these brews.) My kids made these by the hour at the kitchen sink and in our driveway when they got too messy for the kitchen. Joe even bottled them and set up a stand on our street, hawking them as magical elixirs. A kindly neighbor bought one, which only egged Joe on. If you want to guide your children toward more purposeful chemistry projects, here are a few that are fun:
PLAY DOUGH
2 cups flour
1 cup salt
4 teaspoons cream of tartar
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
Food coloring
Mix all of the ingredients together in a bowl, except for the food coloring. Plunk the mixture into a pot, and stir over very low heat until a ball forms. When you remove it from the heat, you can separate the dough into smaller balls, and add different drops of food coloring to each ball. While there is nothing toxic about this dough, it will induce great thirst from its high salt content. Nibbling, while tempting, should probably be kept to a minimum.
SOAP
A few bars of glycerin soap (available online or at a crafts store)
Essential oil (available online or at a bath and body shop). Use any fragrance you like—lavender and mint work nicely.
Food coloring or natural color, such as juice or cinnamon
Molds: paper cups, yogurt cups, or plastic containers
Whimsical objects (optional): a leaf, a flower, and a small plastic trinket
Melt the soaps in the top of a double boiler over boiling water. (I used a beat-up pot, bought at a yard sale.) Add the essential oil. Next add a few drops of color. Pour the mixture into a mold. For extra zip, you can add a whimsical object, which will reveal itself when the soap melts. Once the soap hardens, tear the paper or cut the plastic off the soap. These make very nice holiday gifts.
SUGAR WATER FOR BRIGHTER CHALK
½ cup water
2 tablespoons sugar
Mix together the ingredients in a small bowl. Dip chalk into the mixture. You’ll find that your chalk drawings are brighter and less smudgy when you go to make hopscotch courts and pictures on the sidewalk.
PLAY WITH SCIENCE, PART 2
School-age kids and teenagers
One hot July afternoon, I descended into the basement of an engineering building on the Harvard campus to visit a food and science camp for kids ages nine to twelve. Geoff Lukas, the chef de cuisine at one of my favorite restaurants, Sofra, had invited me to attend his one-hour class within this weeklong camp. Sofra—a friendly restaurant with imaginative dishes from all across the Mediterranean—is situated across the street from the Mount Auburn Cemetery in Watertown, Massachusetts. I had already learned a lot from Geoff when he taught a class there about cooking with flowers. He is also a master of pickling.
At the Harvard Food and Science Camp, Geoff presented each child with an array of pickled foods:
• Amba (a fermented green mango with salt, cumin, coriander, garlic, and onion)
• A pickled green strawberry (a ripe red strawberry will produce too much fizzing from the high sugar content)
• Garlic that had been pickled for more than a year (turned green to blue to brown)
• An acid pickle (white wine vinegar with spices, poured over cucumber until cooked all the way through)
• A fermented pickle (a salt solution that doesn’t involve cooking and results in a mellower flavor than the acid pickle)
• Sauerkraut (shredded cabbage with salt that draws out the water)
While the kids tasted this pickled bounty (with many noses wrinkled in disgust), Geoff explained the scientific processes at work, which involve microbes eating sugar to produce lactic acid. I feared that the sour taste of the pickles combined with the technicality of the teaching might fall flat on this group of about twenty-five kids. Boy, was I wrong.
One hand shot up as soon as Geoff stopped cooking. Peter, a ten-year-old boy from Cambridge, with a Milky Way constellation of freckles across the bridge of his nose, asked how Geoff’s pickles compared to bread-and-butter pickles. (Apparently bread-and-butter pickles are a type of acid pickle with a lot of turmeric and sugar). Soon, hands were popping up across the room. Is there a time limit for pickling? Would nine years be too long? What is the weirdest thing you’ve ever pickled? Can you pickle bread, water, ice cream, or something with a peel? (Yes, to this last list of items.)
Later, I chatted more with Peter, who has been making pickles for years. He’s already tried pickling apples and peaches and couldn’t wait to pickle avocados, which he predicted would taste like salty ice cream. He told me that he keeps a doodle pad, where he records all of his cooking experiments.
“I like to mess things up with baking,” he said. “If I’m making a raspberry cake, I’ll make everything raspberry—the cake, the chocolate filling and the topping—and see how that tastes.” It seemed that in the course of Peter’s food play, he was also a budding scientist. By changing ingredients, he was able to see what difference those variations made to a recipe. Maybe he was more of an artist than a methodical scientist who changes one element at a time in a recipe to see what longer cooking time, more butter, vanilla instead of chocolate, will do to a cake recipe. But still, the process of trial and error, observation and testing, and then recording the results is at the heart of the scientific process. By playing with their food, Peter and the other kids in the camp were getting training as young scientists.
Here are two pickling recipes from Chef Geoff Lukas:
PICKLED SUNGOLD TOMATOES (ORANGE CHERRY TOMATOES)
1 pint Sungold tomatoes
2 (1-inch) sprigs rosemary
½ cup honey (preferably a lighter variety, like a spring blossom)
½ cup champagne vinegar
½ cup water
1 teaspoon salt
Wash the tomatoes and remove any remaining stems. Lay them out on a cloth or paper towel to prevent residual water from diluting the liquid. Prick each tomato with a needle or push pin (this will keep the tomatoes from bursting in the liquid). Place the tomatoes and the rosemary in a heat-proof container. Combine the remaining ingredients in a small pot and bring to a full boil, stirring well. Allow the liquid to cool 5 minutes and pour over the tomatoes. They should sit at least overnight, but the flavors will deepen and mellow over time. Refrigerated, they will keep at least one month.
SOUR CUCUMBERS (BASIC BRINING METHOD)
Spices (1 tablespoon peppercorns, 1 tablespoon mustard seed, ½ tablespoon allspice, ½ tablespoon coriander)
¼ cup torn sprigs dill
5 tablespoons salt (preferably an unrefined salt like gray salt or Maldon salt)
2 quarts water
3 pounds cucumbers, whole and unpeeled
1 bulb garlic (cut at the bottom to expose the cloves)
Toast the spices until they are aromatic. Combine the spices, dill, salt, and water in a bowl, stirring vigorously to combine. The brine will take some extra whisking to ensure that the larger grains of salt are dissolved.
Wash the cucumbers and pat dry. Place the cucumbers and the garlic in a fermentation vessel (described below). Pour the brine over the vegetables.
Ideally, the vegetables will be stored at 65°F to 75°F. Fermentation should start within two to three days. The vegetables will be half-sour in about a week and fully fermented in about two weeks. Properly stored, they will keep almost indefinitely, and the flavors will develop with time. If temperature control is not possible, allow the fermentation to start and, once bubbling is seen, move the cucumbers to the refrigerator and allow to sit at least two weeks.
Key points to know about fermenting
Airtight ceramic, nonreactive metal, or food-grade plastic are the ideal vessels for fermentation. The produce should be fully submerged in brine, held down with either a weight or a screen. Airtight is important because air is the enemy and will cause mold growth and other defects.
The proportion of produce to water to salt is very important. The brine, in the previous recipe, is about 5 percent salt (by weight of the water). Cucumbers are about 95 percent water (whereas carrots, for example, are about 70 percent). This dictates how much the produce itself will dilute the solution through osmosis. The salt can be varied slightly to taste, but 3 percent is a pretty strict minimum, particularly in hotter storage conditions. When varying the recipe, either for personal preference or for other produce, care must be taken to observe safe minimums.
FISH TACOS (FOR 4)
Created by my son Joe, this is a delicious use of pickles in a dish. He ate a version of these from a food truck on the Lower East Side in Manhattan. Re-creating a dish at home that you’ve tasted at a restaurant (or food truck) is another kind of food play.
2 tablespoons white or champagne wine vinegar
1 tablespoon sugar
½ teaspoon salt
½ red onion, thinly sliced
1 pint cherry tomatoes
½ red onion, finely diced
Juice of 2 limes
1 avocado
¼ cup mayonnaise
1 teaspoon lime juice
1 cup all-purpose flour
Cayenne pepper to taste
¼ cup canola oil
1 pound cod fillets or other firm white fish
1 (8-count) small package soft corn tortillas
Mix the vinegar, sugar, and salt in a small bowl. Pour the mixture over the sliced red onions and let sit for at least one hour. This creates a very quick pickling process.
Halve the cherry tomatoes and combine them in a bowl with the finely diced red onions, the juice of two limes, salt, and pepper. (If you’re feeling adventurous, add a small chopped jalapeño pepper, with seeds and ribs removed.)
Scoop out the avocado and mash it with a fork in a small bowl. Add the mayonnaise to the avocado, and mix until creamy. Season with 1 teaspoon lime juice and salt and pepper to taste.
Combine the flour, salt and pepper, and cayenne pepper in a shallow baking dish or high-rimmed plate. Slice the cod into 3-inch-long chunks. Dredge the fish in the flour mixture. Be sure to remove any clumps of flour that adhere to the fish, since these will just burn in the pan.
Heat the canola oil in a frying pan over high heat. (Don’t be afraid of cranking up your stove to the highest flame and watching the oil smoke.) Place the cod into the pan, making sure not to overcrowd it, which will bring down the temperature in the pan. Fry for 2 minutes on each side. Any more will dry out the fish and make it rubbery.
Just before serving, heat the tortillas in a dry saucepan over low heat.
Now it’s time to assemble the tacos. Spread the avocado cream in a thin layer on each tortilla shell. You’ll need two tacos per person. Place a piece of cod on the avocado spread. Top the fish with the cherry tomato salsa and pickled onions.
Making food is a form of play that can engage the whole family and it may be the only experience we still have at home that involves touching, smelling, and manipulating real objects. As our worlds have become more virtual, the creative act of making food takes on special meaning. If we still built chairs, made quilts, chopped down trees, and hauled water from the well, then perhaps cooking wouldn’t be quite so meaningful. But cooking remains that rare activity that still involves our senses and our hands, and it is something that we still can do together.
Its colors and textures create opportunities for artistic expression. Its chemical properties permit scientific experimentation and dramatic transformations. The language around food is ripe with puns and multiple meanings. The context of eating is also available to have fun with as you play with seating and music.
I’m sure that my examples of play represent only a small sampling of the possibilities that exist. I haven’t even touched the potential fun of baking bread, churning ice cream, or making pasta. Whether you come to food with a scientific sensibility or an artistic flair, I hope that playing with your food will lead to many extra hours of fun with your fellow cooks.