Food
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Children and veggies, quiches and pawpaws
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Published: September 17, 2008
I had a fun- and food-filled Saturday, not only sampling some tasty food, but also learning a few things.
It started at 10 a.m. at the first of four cooking demonstrations at the Bookmarks festival in Historic Bethabara Park.
First up were Tracey Seaman and Tanya Wenman Steel, the authors of Real Food for Healthy Kids (William Morrow).
Their book title is a bit misleading, in that the word "healthy" makes people think that it's low-cal, low-fat or otherwise diet food. Instead, the two have tried to offer an assortment of homemade foods, including snacks and desserts, that kids will eat and enjoy -- and that offers relatively large amounts of nutrients.
Sending the right message
Steel set the tone at the beginning of the demonstration by saying that she and Seaman oppose the idea of tricking kids into eating vegetables by hiding them in food.
"You're telling your kids that vegetables are bad, that they're so disgusting that you have to hide them," Steel said. "That's not what we want to teach them."
She told a story about an obese child whose mother hid pureed spinach in brownies. The lesson he learned? It's OK to chow down on brownies because they contain "green stuff."
Even though Seaman and Steel don't hide veggies, they did come up with a neat trick for making broccoli more palatable. Their "tater brocky" combines broccoli with mashed potatoes. I was intrigued by how the starch in the potatoes seems to absorb and tame the pungency of the broccoli.
This might not be the best dish for people who love broccoli, but for a veggie-phobic kid or adult, it's a winner. As Megan Monaghan, a 9-year-old in the audience, said, "It's delicious." And her dad, Mike Monaghan, said that Megan doesn't even like potatoes.
Cooking the French way
The second demonstration was by Kathleen Flinn, the author of The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry (Viking Penguin Group), an account of her experiences at Le Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris.
Flinn entertained the crowd with stories from her book, including how she ended up marrying the man who urged her to spend her life savings on cooking school.
Flinn started her demonstration with a quiche made with caramelized onions and slow-roasted tomatoes. "This is French cooking, and you can't have enough butter," she said, as she plopped a hunk into a saute pan for the onions.
The clincher to this delicious quiche, though, was the tomatoes. This is a stunning way to coax amazing flavor from a tomato.
Here's how Flinn does it:
Heat an oven to 250 degrees and line a baking sheet with parchment paper.
Slice an ‘x' just through the skin on the bottom of each of 6 to 8 tomatoes. Put them in boiling water for a few seconds, then immediately chill them in ice water. Drain the water. Starting at the flaps created by the cuts, peel off the skins. Core the tomatoes, quarter them, and then cut or scrape off the seeds.
Discard the seeds and place the slivers of tomato flesh on the baking sheet. Drizzle with 3 tablespoons of olive oil, 2 minced garlic cloves, a few sprigs of fresh thyme and salt to taste. Bake them in the oven about 1½ hours, at which point they will be tender and full of concentrated tomato flavor.
The roasted-tomatoes can be used in quiche, on pizza or in any dish you want to add a little tomatoey oomph. They are like sun-dried tomatoes -- but even better.
Unfortunately, I did not get to watch the other two cooking demos. I had another commitment in Mocksville.
I got a lot of calls last October when I wrote about a man who had hundreds of wild pawpaw trees growing on some property in southern Forsyth County. One call came from Derek Morris, a horticulture program assistant in the Forsyth County office of the N.C. Cooperative Extension Service.
Morris invited me to a pawpaw tasting Saturday afternoon. About 10 fruit lovers attended the tasting of seven cultivated varieties and a few wild ones at the home of Michael Williams in Mocksville.
The pawpaw is a creamy, tropical-tasting fruit of the custard-apple family that also includes cherimoyas.
This unusual fruit has been out of fashion in this country, but it appears to be making a comeback. Several fruit growers seem interested in the commercial potential of pawpaws, hence our tasting featured some promising cultivars: Davis, prolific, overleese, sunflower, Allegheny, Susquehanna (my favorite) and Shenandoah. Some of these are even sold by mail-order through Heritage Foods USA (www.heritagefoodsusa.com).
Williams is hoping to plant an acre of land with about 180 pawpaw trees and to eventually sell the fruit at farmers markets.
As with the tomato tastings that David Bare, the Winston-Salem Journal's gardening columnist, and I hold each summer, I was struck by how different these different varieties taste. I picked up a whole range of flavors: vanilla, orange, mango, pineapple, brown sugar, banana and lemon. Some were firm, and some were soft. All had varying degrees of a creamy, custardy texture that is addictive.
Anyone interested in pawpaws might want to check out the pawpaw festival that the extension service is sponsoring at the arboretum at Tanglewood Park in Clemmons from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Sept. 27. Admission is free.
Morris, who is helping to organize the festival, said that there may not be any fresh pawpaws to taste because it's a bit late in the season. "If we do this again, we'll have it in August," he said.
Still, he said that the festival will have a few trees and frozen pulp for sale (a good thing, as pawpaws have thick inedible skin and big seeds), as well as information on growing the trees. Best of all will be the free samples of treats made with pawpaws: milkshakes, cookies, cake, bread and ice cream.
For more information on the pawpaw festival, call the extension service at 703-2850.
■ Michael Hastings, the Journal's Food editor, can be contacted by phone at 727-7394, e-mail at mhastings@wsjournal.com, or mail at c/o Winston-Salem Journal, P.O. 3159, Winston-Salem, NC 27102. His most recent columns can be read on our Web site at www.journalnow.com.
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