I’m thinking of coming up with a new feature on the site featuring my daughter in the kitchen.  I think it’s important to bring your kids into the kitchen for many reasons.

• Culinary math is great practice – whether you’re doubling or halving a recipe, or just want to play around with cup to ounce to tablespoon to teaspoon to milliliter conversions, it’s good clean (or messy) mathematical fun.
• When kids take part in making the food, they are more likely to eat it.
• The more kids learn about (healthy) food, the better chance they have to follow better eating habits when they’re older.
• When you’re making food with/for your kids, it’s probably going to be way better for them than the average boxed or frozen meal many kids eat every day.

For our first installment of the (tentatively-titled) SEACCDI (So Easy A Child Can Do It), we have egg rolls.  Well, this is just the rolling part, because there are so many different filling recipes out there.  Besides, if you can get your kid to do the rolling, your workload is very small.

The recipe we used is from the Steamy Kitchen Cookbook, which I got as a Christmas present from my sister (and BIL, and niece and nephew).  I’ll be doing a more thorough review of the book soon, but the quick sneak preview is BUY IT.  If you like Asian food, this is a great collection of tasty but easy-enough-to-cook-on-a-weeknight recipes.  Without further ado, here is my six-year-old explaining how to roll up egg rolls.

If you have a better name for the series (please!) or have some ideas of things I can get my daughter to do in the kitchen, please leave a comment or send an email.

I’m sure you’ve already read my recent posts about chocolate, including roasting and winnowing beans, and grinding nibs into chocolate.  In this installment of my chocolate adventure, we’ll go to what is perhaps one of the most important processes chocolate goes through, and one that you can do at home.  Yes, most of us won’t ever buy raw cacao or grind up nibs into chocolate (though they do make a good snack on their own), but if you ever want to mold chocolate into shapes or coat something with it, you’ll have to melt it.  Once you melt chocolate, you need to make sure to keep its temper (or know how to get it back).

Tempering is the process of heating and cooling chocolate in a specific way to form the right kinds of crystals in the cocoa butter.  Wikipedia tells me there are six types of crystals that can be formed, all based on temperature.  The problem is that all crystals take time to form.  If we just melt our chocolate and let it sit, most of the crystals formed will make our chocolate soft, dull, melt easily,and won’t have that pleasing snap when broken.  If we melt all the crystals and then hold the temperature at a certain point where we’re forming the crystals we want, then voila!  We’ll end up with firm chocolate with a glossy finish and a resounding snap when broken.  Dan “the Chocolate Man” Schreiber has written about his tempering experiences on his blog, where you can see what ill- and well-tempered chocolate can look like.

There are a couple traditional ways to temper chocolate.  One is the “tabling” method, where you spread most of your chocolate on a smooth surface, like marble and spread it to cool to a given temperature.  You can watch a video of Dan doing this here, or click through some photos at the bottom of the post.

You can also use the “seed” method, where you melt a bunch of chocolate, then drop in a chunk of well-tempered chocolate.  You can read a full explanation of this method, including some photos at Cooking for Engineers.The idea here is that by dropping in the right crystals, it will encourage the melted chocolate to form the same “good” crystals.

Chicagoan Michael Gebert writes the blog Sky Full of Bacon.  Actually, he does far more than just write–he has one of the best local-focus video podcasts around.  You should take it upon yourself to go back and watch them all.  There are only a dozen or so at this time, but each is like a great documentary showcasing some local gem.  Sometimes, instead of a professional-quality video podast, or a collection of links, he’ll share personal stories about food, like his grandmothers’ piccalilli recipe.  In interviews with local chefs and merchants, some mentions have been made of some of my favorite central Illinois producers.  See if you can figure out my favorite source for lamb.  I’ll give you a hint… it’s in SFoB4: A Head’s Tale.

Today, though, I’d urge you to watch a short video on Mike’s “Rules for Better Dining”.  One that I agree with quite strongly is the last one:

Mike G’s Healthy Eating Advice.

“If you’re going to eat something bad for you, make sure it’s really good”

Mike G’s Rules for Better Dining from Michael Gebert on Vimeo.

Oh yeah, and in the wake of my lunch yesterday with Dan “the Chocolate Man” Schreiber, I’ll be finishing out my chocolate series that I’ve been neglecting for far too long.  I’ll have posts on tempering & molding, churros con chocolate, and another artisan chocolate maker I was lucky enough to sample.