Buttered Swordfish for Finicky Kids — With Plenty of Sauce for the Adults
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Version 0 of 1. I cannot possibly count how many times I have been sought out by some mom with an urgent, hard, particular shine in her eye who wants to know, needs to know, how and what I feed my children. As I am in fact a woman, a restaurant chef and a parent of two, it’s an understandable mistake. Let me disappoint straight away: My priority has never been having kids who eat; it is about having kids who sleep. Nobody wants to get home from a restaurant job at 1:30 in the morning, stir themselves a medicinal, soporific negroni, shower off the greasy stink of a commercial kitchen and finally hit the pillow around 3 a.m., only to hear the cracking thunder of her alert and chipper darlings at 6:30 a.m. I decided I could tolerate all the Cheddar Goldfish and the years of plain buttered pasta as long as they slept till 11 a.m. I was also a little jumpy about making the dinner table some weird proxy outlet for ego trips or power trips. Once, on a summer vacation to Corsica, my mother forced one of my brothers to stay at the dinner table until he finished his plate of oily, slick ratatouille — a texture that made him gag — and in the end, he not only never ate it, but the struggle went on for a full 48 hours, escalating to such heights that the boy went missing the next day, was not found by dark, was not found by midnight and was only returned by the local gendarmes the following evening. I was anxious for him, and also for her. She was not equipped to make five different dinners for five different kids at their varying stages of a developing palate, nor to tolerate it. And I knew a guy who would bring his 3-year-old daughter to my restaurant all the time — dressed exclusively in black punk-rock-band T-shirts and black leggings — and incessantly advertise his suffocating pride at the fact that she “loved” the monkfish liver at Prune and the sea urchin at, as I recall, Le Bernardin. I know I was supposed to be impressed, but it made me squirm. I prefer the family dinner table to be pretty pleasant for everyone at it, including the stressed-out and lonely parents who most often find themselves home solo — either by dint of divorce, single parenting or baton-relaying (one parent stays late at work while the other is tasked with getting home in time to feed the little people) — and who find themselves with only 20 or so urgent minutes to get the job done, not to mention a stubborn kid who won’t eat, well, ratatouille, for example. If you find yourself in the bland, boring, beige phase, when different textures cannot butt up against another on the same plate, or one speck of parsley can contaminate the whole dinner, I encourage you to find all the white foods you can actually love — cauliflower, chicken, fish, rice, apples, bread, eggs, banana — and go at them with deft ambidexterity: a plain piece of swordfish for those who will run away from home otherwise, and a lively piquant pan sauce — in this case lemony, capery piccata — for those who will drink themselves to an early death if they don’t have something adult and interesting at the table to eat. In other words, sauce, but at all times, on the side. Unless we are discussing real food scarcity or a diagnosed medical condition, I wish I had encouraged all those moms who have cornered me over the years to fix themselves a small bowl of something acidic and buttery and lively and herbaceous and drop it on the dinner table and take it a little easier over the plain-fish and plain-rice phases of their otherwise perfectly healthy kids. My kids did not die from too many meals of plain buttered pasta, or plain buttered chicken, or plain buttered swordfish, or plain buttered cauliflower. And they were not harmed by mercury or pesticides or hidden high-fructose corn syrup because I always shopped right. They were not kids to brag about, necessarily, from a culinary perspective, nor were they easy to take to more ambitious friends’ houses or better restaurants for the longest time. I had to disappoint a lot of nerve-racked mothers along the way who thought I had the magic answer. But we’ve lately rounded the corner, as one likes sushi and they both like ramen and broccoli and one asks for hot sauce and creamed spinach while the other has started craving the tart brightness of lemon juice — affording me an experience I thought I had forsaken long ago, that of hearing the second-greatest sound in the whole world: “Mama, I think this is the best swordfish you have ever made.” Which is outranked only by the No. 1 greatest sound of all time: the 13-hour through-the-night-and-into-the-late-morning stretch of silence of my champion sleepers. Recipe: Swordfish Piccata |