Cooking for Baby: June 2004 Archives

I was going to skip writing about this because, although it was quite good, it's not really "cooking." Then I got an issue of Real Simple in the mail with the coverline "The Easiest Dinner Ever," a story all about sandwiches for dinner. I've been redeemed!

Although the recipes they include are for substantial sandwiches, and mine was of the lunchbox variety: almond butter and apple slices on whole-wheat bread. It was just so good, though, you don't understand. I love the crunch of the apples in the sandwich (although I'm a fan of nut butter and banana sandwiches, too). Very schooldays.

I cannot get this right! The focaccia I made this weekend was bland, flat, chewy, gross. I can't bring myself to throw it out, but I'm going to have Todd do it.

I think the flavor is easy to remedy: add more salt. And I was pretty optimistic about the texture, too. The dough was really sticky, but it had this nice, bubbly look to it. I think the problem might have been that the recipe called for a lot of sauteed vegetables scattered over the top, which didn't let the bread rise in the oven at all (and may have flattened it a bit). The edges were nice, though kind of hard (I think I cooked it too long to try to get the top that was under vegetables to be more brown and less pasty-white).

Should I try this recipe again? Or give a different one a try? Does sticky dough sound right?

We're attending a big picnic this weekend, one of the few events that I have an old standard recipe to bring. I started making this long, long ago, before I really cooked at all, so by today's standards it's pretty simple, kind of a dump recipe (dump in this, this and this). But it's still quintessential picnic food to me, coming from Colorado. One of my former supervisors used to make something similar, white beans, tuna and red onion, as her picnic staple.

Mine's a corn and black bean salsa. It involves opening, draining and rinsing a can of black beans and a can of corn (dump, dump). Then you add chopped red onion, scallion, tomato and cilantro, cumin and lime juice. It tastes better afer it sits for a bit. I bet fresh corn would be nice, but that's another one of those things I don't get my hands on very often. I serve it with tortilla chips, but I've seen people eat it like a salad, with a fork, too.

My other picnic standard is the fudgy brownies I wrote about awhile back.