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A few small risks with Daveby: Gwen Pawlikowski
At my house, mild cheddar is king, anything weirder than salt is suspect and all meat must be described as chicken. Such are the food preferences of the five- to seven-year-old set. If you’re one of the grownups trying to encourage eating, your cooking tends to fall into these parameters. Consequently, looking at Dave’s Dinners: A Fresh Approach to Home-Cooked Meals felt risky to me. Appealing, but risky. But, as any teenager knows, risk is fun. Dave Lieberman, a Food Network star, offers many of the risks I like. Like Renée Zellweger in Jerry Maguire, Dave had me when I flipped open the first page of the book and saw a stunning closeup photo of a blood orange cross section. Well, to be fair, maybe Dave’s photographer, George Whiteside, had me. The photo is a beautiful, appetizing shot of one of the most naturally vibrant and colorful things on the planet to eat. And it’s one of multiple examples of enticing, intimate food photography. I felt more open to risk after that. One evening, desperate for something to cook with a bag of shrimp I’d pulled out of the freezer earlier in the day, I found Dave’s Creamy Shrimp Fettucine. As with most of the recipes, the pleasing photo accompanied the directions. “Safe enough,” I thought, and got started. Suddenly Dave’s ingredient list stopped me cold: five garlic cloves, he recommended. Five. Five? FIVE! OK, well we’ve never before gone past two in my house, but I was open to experimentation. I sliced up five. As it turned out, five was good. I like lots of garlic more than I realized. Given the healing properties linked to garlic, I could feel quite sanctimonious about adding that much to the pasta dish. Dave is brave with garlic and I appreciate the positive, guiding influence. His book also encouraged me to use more ricotta cheese. I always enjoy that lovely fluffy stuff, but I’m mostly unclear on what to do with it. Thanks to the Drinks and Finger Foods section of the book, I used ricotta cheese in Winey Figs, Prosciuto and Ricotta Crostini. The cheese was a great background for the wine-stewed Calimyrna figs. Actually, I served this at a small dinner party where I discovered my guests didn't care for figs the same way I do. With gentle wrist tosses, my lovely, and I thought tasty, wine-stewed figs were discarded with the same haste most of us would get rid of a drunk, smelly, poor, cheating boyfriend. Sad news for the figs, but anyway, my guests enjoyed the ricotta and prosciuto. They also liked the Roasted Tomato and Goat Cheese Tart. This was my first time to eat a fresh tomato I’d roasted myself, rather than canned tomatoes or tomato sauce, or the tomato slices on top of a vegetarian pizza. The taste of these roasted slices of Roma tomatoes was alarmingly delicious. I may never be able to eat tomatoes any other way again. (Oh, yeah, except that spaghetti and meat sauce is one thing the kids will eat on a weekly basis.) The roasting of the tomatoes was easy and the taste enhanced by lots of garlic and goat cheese. I could make and eat this flavorful treat every weekend. But back to risk. Figs, for instance, are an unusual food item to serve. They don’t appeal to every palate, as evidenced by my aforementioned dinner party experience. Nevertheless, they are fun and adventurous; they take you off that same old food expressway and get you onto a back road curling its way around a river with an orchard across the way. This is how Dave’s Dinners does what a good cookbook should: it gets you out of your comfort zone and onto new ground. Most importantly, Dave does this gently. There’s no shortage of gourmet cookbooks out there, but amateurs, including those of us who buy cookbooks, don’t use them. The instructions are too convoluted; the ingredients too hard to buy. We cooking amateurs who, by the way, cook constantly, day after endless day, are the small cooking voices out there. We don’t have time or patience for difficult kitchen maneuvers. I have a house, kids and a dog; each of those requires more of me than I ever anticipated. I absolutely require simple food preparation instructions. Fortunately, that’s what Dave’s Dinners offers. Recipes are easy and straightforward but still encourage me to push beyond the safety of my boundaries. Despite the recent fun I’ve had with Dave’s Dinners, I find myself still serving a regular diet of mild cheddar and chicken to my kids. At least, however, they see the grown-ups eating ricotta and goat cheese, wine-soaked figs and dates, plus roasted tomatoes with garlic. It’s a small model of healthy risk taking that I can offer, thanks to Dave’s Dinners. Maybe one day soon, my picky eaters will reach out for a fig. |
