It contains a great list of age-appropriate cooking skills that children can do AND it is written by a saint (e.g., she teaches children’s cooking classes).

I have my little chefs in the kitchen with me all the time and try to find ways to allow them to help. Her list is great, and it made me think of some additional tasks that I haven’t included my kids in on - like picking the ingredients so that they can begin developing the ability to put recipes together.

This week my little 3 (almost 4) year old was able to help me cook Beef Stroganoff for daddy’s birthday dinner by slicing the mushrooms using a pastry scraper. For my little chefs - it is ALL about the vegetable slicing.

I need to look into this to see if any one teaches Mommy and me cooking classes in the local West Palm Beach area…or maybe I should start one!!

Hmmm…need a bigger kitchen.

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Mommy and Me Cooking

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I love to cook and take great pleasure in amazing my friends and family with meals that I whip up. I am the oldest child in a pretty large family and grew up with my mom always cooking. My mom was by no means a gourmet cook, but I think that I learned how to make the most of what is in the cubberts from her. Also, being in the restaurant business, she worked most holidays and I would often be the one stuffing and watching over the Turkey - but my passion really started in college and just grew. By some miracle, the cooking love is coded in my DNA and was passed down to my beautiful little girl. Now we cook together religiously.

I am always the hostess

95% of all holiday/birthday/family gathering meals are at my house. I can spend a few hours putting a meal together and then not be hungry at the end. Seeing everyone’s faces when they taste the food is what I am really waiting for. It is sorta like the episode of Friends, The One With Rachel’s Crush, where after 2 days of cleaning and redecorating the apartment, Monica falls asleep as everyone comes over to visit:

(They all go over to her apartment.)

Ross: Oh my God!

Rachel: Wow! Monica!

Phoebe: Great! Ross:

This is beautiful!

(She has cleaned it, completely redecorated it, removed the carpet, and polished the floor.)

Phoebe: Oh did you—what did you—did you work for two days straight?

Monica: Pretty much. (to Joey) So, what do you, what do you think of the floor?

Joey: I don’t know, it looks the same.

Monica: You used to have carpet.

Joey: Oh yeah!

Monica: So I made snacks. Please, just hang out okay? I’m just gonna rest my eyes just a little bit.

Ross: Look, Mon, do you want us to uh, come back later?

Monica: Oh no-no-no, stay, stay, stay, just keep talking. I’m always the hostess.

Hope you enjoy my site. This should be fun - watch and give me pointers as I go.

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I am always the hostess

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Harriet Van Horne

Part of what makes my cooking Seeryously Gude is the emotion that I pour into the food while I am making it. I literally put my heart into the meal. I believe that a meal is more than just the sum of its parts. I can write down a recipe or tell my husband how to make something if I am just too tired or traveling on business, but there is just something more subtle to making an excellent meal, and the nuances can not be conveyed via a recipe.

Maybe it just comes down to energy, but when I cook for my family and friends, the emotion that I feel in providing an amazing meal that I know they are going to love literally gets incorporated into my cooking. It is transcendental. It is something that I have a hard time replicating if I’ve had particularly bad day and my food result is clearly uninspired. But, when I decide that I want to make something amazing, it doesn’t matter how common the ingredients, the meal will come out truly special. I seek to convey my passion through my food and when I’ve gotten it right, it is amazing (even though most end up quite full at the end and the longing for nap replaces any feelings of passion that the meal may have conjured).

Is it just me or is this a common feeling among those that love to cook? I decided to search for “transcendental cooking” and found that and it is somewhat of a THING. Darn it, wouldn’t you know that the URL FoodWitch.com is already taken!

The movie Like Water For Chocolate or Simply Irresistible would be examples of transcendental cooking and conveying emotion through food. In my search, I found a wonderful post, The Transcendental Qualities of Cooking, by a woman named Kit Pollard, that explains another side, an aspirational philosophy of cooking, that is very true for me as well (but she explains it more eloquently).

I feel that my journey into food is just starting. I am compelled to learn as much as I can about food and cooking; this passion of mine is awakening in a way that was not there before. It is almost as if I have spent my time until now learning and preparing for this next phase where I am going to truly dive into the art of food and see where it takes me.

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Transcendental Cooking: more than the sum of their parts

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I think that I have had Fibromyalgia (FM) since I was a young girl. Often, I get terrible pains in my legs, I become overly sensitive to sound, light touch, and fluorescent lighting, and the last way I would ever describe myself is as a morning person, because I never feel truly rested.  Admittedly, I am a baby about pain, but the pains in my legs were often so bad that as a girl that I would cry with heating pads wrapped around my legs.  While I have done a great job of being completely high functioning by most people’s standards, this over-sensitivity and leg/back pain has been happening to me for about as long as I can remember.  In the beginning we wrote it off as growing pains, and I was also a dancer - so having aches and pains from hours of ballet wasn’t exactly unexpected.

When I was about 11, maybe younger, I will have to ask my mom, she took me to see an Orthopaedic Surgeon who performed an exam that included him pushing on certain spots all over my body. I specifically remember him pushing along my lower back, neck, and inside my knees and pain SHOT through my body. His diagnosis - Fibromyalgia. I now know that those spots have the hyper-technical name, tender points.  The doc wrote me a prescription for Naproxen Sodium (aka horse pill versions of Aleve) to help with the pain, and off I went. 

Living with FM is hard on me and my family at times.  I know that I am not the nicest person to be around when I am experiencing the intense frustration of being over-stimulated by normal everyday life expereinces (e.g., listening to music that happens to have a certain repetitive beat, the incessant barking of my jack russells, grocery shopping, or being around my kids when they are jawing non-stop and running around the house, it can be unbearable).  The fluorescent lights of Wal-mart and someone chomping on food next to me are particularly powerful irritants.

I decided to write about dealing with FM for a couple of reasons.  One, because I have never really talked about it and I want to share with anyone that might be having a similar experience (if you’ve got any helpful coping mechanisms or recipes that make it all better - send ‘em over), and two, because the increasing frequency of my irritability and over-sensitivity has become really apparent to me as I started doing my cooking shows with the kids.  Don’t get me wrong, I adore sharing my love of cooking with my little chefs - but making videos of us cooking made it painfully obvious to me just how little patience I seem to have with them these days.  Writing it down is helping me to admit that there is an actual syndrome that I am dealing with, and that fact allows me to be a little less hard on myself.

For as hard as it is for me, I am sure living with a mommy and wife that is often irritated and over-stimulated is not fun for my little family, and that breaks my heart.  I am saying this to myself almost like a mantra as my son sits next to me and happily chomps on popcorn while tapping his toy ninja turtle on my lap desk.  He has no idea that this is making mommy feel like I could jump out of my skin. 

I have never seen another doctor to talk about FM and it is mainly something that I just deal with.  I know from research that the cause is relatively unknown and some still even dispute its existence.  My pain and irritation comes and goes.  Some days are just better than others.  I am interested in some of the newer medications that I keep hearing about on commercials - but concerned about having to live a medicated life.

I love this family and I hope that I am not too hard to deal with.  But at least I’m cute, somewhat successful, and I make them some DAMN GOOD MEALS.  Now that’s what I’m talking about

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Food, Family, and Fibromyalgia

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I come from a VERY blended family, and I actually have my parent’s marriages and resulting step-parents and step-grandparents to thank for my adaptability and many of my positive views on life. None more so than family traditions. What I get to call my family’s traditional crafts and recipes only get richer with multiple marriages.

So despite the fact that I have ZERO Italian blood in these veins, I have an Italian grandmother who makes her “Sauce” every Sunday. Mary Tyminski makes the World’s BEST Meatballs and despite the family feuds, her tomato sauce and meatballs recipe was passed down through her daughter almost-in-law (my mother) to me. My family adores this meal, and so do I because it is actually really easy and really *cheap* to make; yet still leaves everyone looking at me like I am Giada De Laurentiis - ok, maybe I am exaggerating a little.

The Recipe | Seeryously Gude Spaghetti and Meatballs

INGREDIENTS

Not So Traditional Tomato Sauce
6-8 tbs Olive Oil
1 Medium Onion, Chopped
3-5 cloves of garlic, minced
1/4 cup Fresh or 2 tbs dried Basil
1/8 cup Fresh Oregano or 1 tbs dried
1/8 cup Fresh Parsley or 1 tbs dried
Kosher Salt/Fresh Ground Pepper to taste
3-4 tbs sofrito (optional)
1 1/2 cups Red Wine
1 Large can of Crushed Tomatoes (with basil if avail)
1 Jar of your favorite tomato sauce
1 1/2 cups of water
Pasta of your choice

Traditional Grandma’s Meatballs
1 - 1.25 lb ground chuck
2 eggs
3/4 cup Italian bread crumbs
1 cup grated Locatelli Pecorino Romano cheese (this will be in your grocer’s deli section)
1/4 cup fresh parsley or 2 tbs dried
1 tbs Kosher salt
1 tbs Fresh ground pepper

Herb Cream Cheese Stuffed Tomatoes
1 lbs cherry tomatoes
Alouette Garlic & Herbs Spreadable Cheese
Salt/Pepper
Chopped Parsley

DIRECTIONS

Gather all of your ingredients. Heat the olive oil in a sauce pan on medium heat. Add the sofrito, minced garlic and chopped onions and cook until just starting to brown. Add in the Basil, Oregano, Salt and pepper and cook for another minute or two.

Turn the heat up to medium-high and pour in the wine to deglaze the pan. Allow to simmer for 2-3 minutes. Turn the heat back down to medium and our in the crushed tomatoes. Stir and allow to simmer for another 2-3 minutes.

Add in your favorite jar of store bought sauce, then fill that jar with 1 1/2 cups of water - shake and pour into the sauce. If you have already started your pasta, you can use your pasta water instead of from the tap.

Allow the sauce to simmer together on medium-low while you make the meatballs.

MEATBALLS
In a mixing bowl, add the ground beef, bread crumbs, Percorino Romano Cheese, Eggs and Spices. Mix together with your hands until all of the ingredients are combined. Take small handfuls and roll hands together to make the meat mixture into a ball that is just smaller than the size you would like your meatballs to be.

Add the meatballs one by one as you make them to the sauce. Once all of the meat has been added, hold your sauce pan by the handles and gently gyrate to incorporate all of the meatballs into the sauce (without having to use a mixing spoon - this protects the raw and sift meatballs from damage). Cover pan and keep heat on medium-low. Allow to cook for 30 minutes. Put a pasta of your choice on to boil about 20 minutes prior to the meatballs being done. Meatballs will be almost fluffy when ready.

HERB CREAM CHEESE STUFFED TOMATOES
Cut the tops off of all of the tomatoes and use the small end of a melon baller or the teaspoon sized measuring spoon to hallow out the tomatoes. Once all of the tomatoes have their seeds removes, sprinkle salt and pepper over them.

Use a regular spoon to fill the tomatoes with the herb cream cheese by using a downward scraping motion to fill the cavity with the cheese. Once all have been filled, sprinkle with chopped Fresh basil. To present these, you can even put balsamic vinegar on the plate as well. SO EASY BUT SO YUMMY.

PRESENTATION
Place your pasta on a platter and cover with tomatoes sauce. Pile the meatballs on another platter along with extra sauce in a serving bowl. Top with extra Pecorino Romano Cheese and crushed red pepper if you like. Server with crusty Italian Bread.

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Recipe: Seeryously Gude Spaghetti and Meatballs

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Guess the key to not making a pot roast taste like a piece of tire is slowly baking the meat in liquid at a low temp. Good!! I enjoy making meals that need to bake in the oven for long periods of time with me watching over them like a new baby (minus the sleepless nights and screaming) - such meals automatically feel like a holiday to me. This faux-holiday meal was definitely inexpensive, which fit the bill so to speak, but making this during the week e.g., during conference calls and email and finishing a proposal, admittedly took some of the joy out of it - but thankfully none of the flavor! It was YUMMY. Having my sister Kristen over to enjoy it with us made it extra special. You can watch the video that we did take here.

The Recipe | Seeryously Gude Pot Roast

INGREDIENTS

Pot Roast
6-8 tbs Olive Oil
1 1/2 cups Red Wine
1/2 cup White Wine
1 Medium Onion, Quartered
5-7 cloves of garlic, minced
5-7 Carrots, Sliced thick on an angle
2-3 cups, sliced white mushrooms
3 cups Beef Stock
2-3 lbs Shoulder Roast
1/4 cup chopped parsley
3 sprigs, thyme
2 sprigs, Rosemary
Kosher Salt
Cracked Pepper

Yogurt Horseradish Sauce
1 cup, Greek Strained Yogurt or Sour Cream
3 tbs, prepared horseradish
2 tbs, chopped parsley
Salt/Pepper to taste

Potatoes
5-6 Smallish Yukon Gold Potatoes
Chicken Stock
Butter
Salt/Pepper
Parsley

DIRECTIONS

Gather all of your ingredients. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Rub the roast with a liberal amount of salt and pepper.

Heat the olive oil in a skillet on about 5 (medium) and brown the meat on all sides. Browning = flavor. As I learned, the key to tender pot roast is a technique called braising where you cook the meat slowly in liquid. You need to make sure that you have as much flavor on the meat, and anything else going in the pot with it, as possible before it enters the liquid to roast.

On another burner, make a few cups of beef bullion or get a few cups of beef stock ready. Take the meat out of the skillet and add it to the deep pot (with a lid) that you are going to bake it in. Brown the quartered onions in the same skillet where the roast was just browned. Brown and set in the pan with the meat. Put the sliced carrots (peel ‘em if you want, not necessary) in the skillet, brown them as well, and add to the pan with the roast.

Turn up the heat on the skillet a little, (6-7) medium-high, and add your wine to deglaze the pan. Use a fork or a whisk (unless you have a nonstick pan, cause you this will scratch it) to scrape all of the cooked bits off of the bottom. Now add the beef broth or stock.

Once all of the flavor from the bottom of the skillet has been incorporated into the wine and broth, pour it into the pan with the meat and veggies. Add the sprigs of thyme and rosemary (be sure to dunk them under the water for maximum flavor release). Put the top on the pan and place in the oven for 2 1/2 - 3 hours depending on the weight of your meat.

The Yogurt Sauce
You should make this right after the meat so that the sauce has time to sit in the fridge and let the flavors really meld together. Take about 1 cup of the yogurt (you can use sour cream too, but Greek Strained yogurt is yummy, has the consistency of Sour Cream, and is SO much better for you. Mix in the horseradish, salt and chopped parsley. Mix until completely combined and return to fridge. Take out just before serving the meat and put in a serving dish.

Preparing the Potatoes
When the meat has about 35-40 minutes to go, begin making the potatoes. These are as easy as can be. I got these from Rachael Ray who said on her show that she got them from Chef Pepin. Whoever gets the credit - they are awesome. Put your potatoes in a deep frying pan (6 is the most I can get in mine. If you have a bigger pan, cook more)! Salt the potatoes to taste. i actually find that a bit more salt here is really really good. Add some chicken stock into the pan until about halfway. Add in your butter and cover the pan, cooking until just tender, about 10-12 minutes for mine, could be less if you have really wee potatoes. Take off the tops and cook until the stock evaporate and the potatoes can begin to brown on the bottom. The potatoes should be soft now. Take the bottom of a glass and gently “pop” the potatoes careful not to smash them (yes, I smashed one of mine). Turn the potatoes over so that they can brown on the other side and then add more salt, pepper and little parsley if you like.

The Mushrooms
Heat butter or olive oil in a skillet on medium. Add about 3 cloves of minced garlic and let cook about 2 minutes. Wash your mushrooms and then add to the skillet. Season with some salt and pepper and then allow to brown, try not to mess with them too much so that they flavor can caramelize about 5 minutes. Add the white wine and about 1/4 cup of the liquid from the roast. Serve once most of the liquid has evaporated - about 3-5 minutes more.

Check your roast. The meat should be very soft and tender when you pull at it with a fork. Let the roast rest for about 15 minutes before you cut into it. Transfer the veggies to a serving dish and I served the remaining liquid as an au jus. Serve up this feast and enjoy!!

The Outtakes
We could take very little video with the meal until I was finally done with my conference calls (notice I am still wearing my jawbone headset in one of the pictures) - and that wasn’t until well into the cooking. My sister came over for dinner and there was a lot of Vodka and Orange Juice. That really is all that needs to be said

Give this one a try. I am no longer nervous about how to make an inexpensive cut of beef delicious! Have Fun!

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Recipe: Shannon’s Pot Roast with Greek Yogurt Horseradish Sauce and Potatoes

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Video: Spaghetti and Meatballs

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