Holiday Butter Tarts

By Andrew Hunter
For The Family Table, a blog for busy families

My Grandmother Love personified her name. My mother’s mother, she married into such a gentle family name. Grandma was of the generation that didn’t work, though she had a nursing degree. In fact, she didn’t even drive. As a child I wondered how she got the most basic things, like grocery shopping, done if she had to wait for Grandpa to come home from work.

Evidently their strategy worked, as there was never a lack of food on the table. The Loves, of Youngstown, Ohio, back in the days when it was a thriving industrial town, had a big grand wooden porch with swings. I remember swinging on the swings at night after dinner. The adults talked and the kids listened.

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Pan-Roasted Winter Fruits

By Andrew Hunter
For The Family Table, a blog for busy families

Yukon Gold potatoes are included in this trio of winter fruits because their flesh is slightly sweeter than other potatoes. The combination of potatoes, apples, pears and chestnuts roasted in butter and olive oil produces a side dish that’s both sweet and savory and a perfect accompaniment to your holiday meal. Marilyn and I have been making it during the holidays for years.

The boys think it’s strange to take perfectly crisp and cool apples and pears and make them soft and warm. I understand their logic but think they’ll grow into the idea as their tastes mature.

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Imagining a Sustainable World

By Andrew Hunter
For The Family Table, a blog for busy families

Teaching children to think and live sustainably is an obligation we have to our children, ourselves and to our planet. Sustainability can be fun and it certainly should be delicious. Children are passionately curious. Digging hands into dirt, planting seeds and harvesting is an experiential way for them to learn about food from its source.

A recent day with Dan and Nanette Bercu at Sunset Ranch showed the fifth grade class from our boys’ school the cycle of life, from planting and harvesting to eating healthy and delicious food while it’s still warm from the sunshine. For city kids in Los Angeles, it’s not every day that they get to pick dry-farmed tomatoes, fetch warm eggs from a chicken coop, carve home-cured prosciutto, pluck squash blossoms, wild basil and pungent red onions, and eat the fruits of their labor on wood-fired pizza on a mountaintop farm in Malibu.

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Autumn Apples

By Andrew Hunter

I remember the old days in Michigan going out to the country orchards to pick apples, drink hot cider and eat cinnamon fry cakes. Well, guess what? The same autumn excursion is available two hours east of Los Angeles.

Instead of woolen sweaters and mittens, the boys wore shorts and flip flops, and instead of diving into piles of golden leaves, they moved a pile of old black bark to discover two shy lizards that darted away as quickly as they appeared.

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Umami Crisps

By Andrew Hunter

All this week, Special Fork bloggers are revealing what’s in their pantry, with tips for using pantry staples. To celebrate Pantry Week, Special Fork has teamed up with Zojirushi, the Japanese maker of top-quality kitchen appliances, to offer a fabulous sweepstakes prize: the 5.5-cup capacity Zojirushi Micom Rice Cooker & Warmer ($192 MSRP), which not only cooks rice flawlessly, but also steams foods and bakes cakes. Menu settings include: white/sushi, mixed, porridge, sweet, brown, cake, steam and quick cooking. Enter to win!

The joke about a chef’s refrigerator is it’s filled with condiments, but nothing normal to eat like fruits, vegetables or meat. This is because condiments make everything taste better and because many of us shop for the immediate meal ahead instead of doing a weekly plan.

This week is “What’s in Your Pantry?” week at Special Fork. All week long, we’re blogging about our go-to pantry staples … the essential items we can’t live without.

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