Must-Have Kitchen Tools

By Andrew Hunter

My “must have kitchen gadgets” are centered on citrus, which is my favorite ingredient. I love lemons, limes and oranges, and all their variations like Meyer lemons, key limes and blood oranges. The nuances in both the zest and the juice are delicious. The flavor of the zest is floral, while the juice is acidic. As most of us are trying to watch or reduce our weight, citrus is an ideal way to enhance flavor without added calories, fat or sodium.

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Nicky’s Velvet Potatoes

By Andrew Hunter

Nicky was eating mashed potatoes before he cut his first tooth. He loved potatoes so much that we relied on them as a vehicle for his balanced nutrition.

We called him Picky Nicky in those days, which meant we needed to work really hard just to get him to open his mouth at the dinner table. Once we discovered potatoes, we began mixing in other goodies…mashed peas, carrots, broccoli, almost anything we ate got mixed into his. I’m sure he would have been mad if he knew, but what he didn’t know helped him.

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Pumpkin-Orange Smoothies

By Andrew Hunter

Halloween is the symbolic start of the holiday season in the Hunter household. For Marilyn and me, it’s a transitional time at the table too. Steaks and chops are on the grill less often with more roasts braised for hours on Sundays to eat the rest of the week; and our shopping trips yield fewer summer fruits and veggies and more squashes, roots and gourds.

Pumpkins this year will get carved, roasted, grilled and puréed. We like to buy small orange pumpkin, cut off the stem end, then cut in quarters, clean away the stringy and seedy insides, rub with oil, salt and pepper, and roast until soft and tender. With these chunks of soft pumpkin, we can do a bunch of things from dicing for pasta, to puréeing for soups and mashing into potatoes for an autumnal side.

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Chinese Noodles

By Andrew Hunter

There’s a Chinese noodle house east of L.A. called Din Tai Fung. Their specialty is dumplings and boy, are they special – glutinous rice shaomai, green melon and shrimp bundles, and tiny soup dumplings bobbing in clear chicken broth, to name a few of our favorites. Din Tai, as we call it, is a regular and possibly favorite stop on our weekend rotation of dim sum houses.

The place is sleek, clean and crowded with a large tinted kitchen window that gives a shady peek at cooks working shoulder to shoulder rolling noodles, stuffing discs of dough and crimping them into round, crescent and purse-shaped dumplings.

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Autumn Sweet Potato Soup

By Andrew Hunter

Sweet potatoes have gone from obscurity to celebrity in the last few years. They now grace plates in every menu category, especially side dishes, of restaurants from fast food to fine dining. I’m not a nutritionist, but a simple review of their nutritional label shows some real benefits to these orange-fleshed tubers. They weigh in with fewer calories and carbs than russets and they contain more than 700% of your Vitamin A for the day…no kidding.

As a parent, sweet potatoes are the kind of veggie you hope your kids will like. Heck, I’ll even let the boys eat sweet potato fries if it makes them happy. But as summer fades into fall, and I start thinking about the chilly weather, turning leaves and woolen sweaters of my Michigan childhood, I automatically think of soup.

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