Have you ever had a really special cooking class?

It was a Sunday, a week or two ago, and six of us were chopping garlic in Martha Rose Shulman’s home kitchen, while she shared new ideas for leafy greens and her co-instructor, Clifford Wright, Mediterranean food historian and cookbook author, offered insider tips such as the wright way to use a mortar and pestle for extracting maximum flavor. There are people who marvel over a stunning sunset, others are exhilarated by a nail-biting football game (talking to you dad), but I am so very happy to be among food heroes and knife wielders, discussing seasoning options for a butternut squash soup, while stripping chard leaves away from the stems. Crazy?

Martha Rose Shulman is the esteemed writer for the New York TimesRecipes For Health column and author of several best sellingcookbooks. Clifford Wright earned the James Beard Award for Best Food Writing in 2000 for his book, A Mediterranean Feast, he also writes for many top name food magazines. Together, they launched the Venice Cooking School, in Southern California. Yes, our very own NYT treasure, lives in California. Lucky us. read more

A well-stocked cupboard is essential for turning out good meals in a crunch. Although I love to collect exotic dried beans at the farmers market, cooking them is usually a weekend activity. Thank goodness my mother-in-law, Cuban queen of beans, taught me that canned beans are a perfectly acceptable substitute when hungry stomachs roar. Here is exhibit A:

Saute in some olive oil and add tastiness with our favorite staple sausage. For this dish I use Spanish chorizo. Unlike Mexican chorizo, it is fairly firm, but when sliced and sauteed, it leaks out its yummy paprika goodness all over its neighbors.

Add a vitamin packed green and within 20 minutes start to finish you have a delightful, nutritious meal.

Parents have been debating Battle Hymn’s assertion that in order to raise highly achieving kids, like many Chinese-Americans, we need to brow beat them (the kids, not the Chinese-Americans) into working hard and prevent them from participating in anything social or extracurricular unless it’s learning to play piano or violin. And, most harsh, was the author’s claim that American parents are, more or less, wimps. Oh yeah, well may I remind you, that we have Mommy Dearest and Kate Gosselin.

cartoon courtesy of The Atlantic

In honor of Tiger Mother, we offer you an asian favorite that won’t require you to call your kids “garbage” or “pathetic” to make them eat it. This is another one of those meals that is best with family participation for the final assembly. Something magical happens when kids are involved in the cooking process, they eat more good food. And, it’s a measure of food play that we at crunchtime encourage, rather than food fights. Note: we don’t encourage playing with Cheetos, fruit roll ups, or a McGriddle, just real food (just because it’s eaten, doesn’t make it food).

Shrimp lettuce wraps could just as easily be chicken, scallops, pork, fish,squirrel, or tofu wraps. Asian seasonings and a good balance of vegetables make this one pot meal a breeze and cook up fast over higher heat. read more

1. Egg White Tostada

Egg white tostadas are only easy when you’re using ingredients that are readily available in your kitchen, which most likely occurs when you have remaining items from another meal, or if you live in Southwestern states and can’t help yourself at the farmer’s market when you see Latin produce aplenty.

Because I’m shamefully thrifty with time, I pieced together this tostada with corn leftover from corn on the cob (they don’t know), black beans (from the cupboard) and other ingredients from the refrigerator that were meant for a different meal. Other options include tomato, peppers, chorizo, avocado, frozen corn kernels.

2. Poached Egg White Cups

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Polenta in crunchtime might seem implausible. Crispy polenta requires stirring and tending, and is a carbo-naughty starch that means “corn meal mush.” Here’s the deal. I made it earlier in the day, then fried it (light olive oil) at dinnertime and froze the rest (we’ll see about that success at a later date). Nutritionally, polenta is an unprocessed food, yes from corn, but not the Monsanto bad corn – just real corn. Polenta is gluten-free for those in need, and you know who you are, and polenta provides good amounts of iron, thiamin, zinc, phosphorus and magnesium (stuff we need). It’s also a good source of fiber, which makes us feel full.

To top it off, mushrooms. Mushrooms also satiate our appetite because they are hearty and filling. All mushrooms are a rich source of umami, a Japanese term for the fifth basic taste after sweet, salty, bitter and sour.Umami counterbalances saltiness and allows up to a fifty percent salt reduction without compromising flavor. That might explain why I thought mushrooms were a meat when I was a kid, or maybe that’s what the parents told me during the recession (I’ve been through two).

Something else here in our little dish. No, not the cream – we’ll get to that later. It’s the ‘evergreen’ seasoning – from my Christmas tree, which was more than another recession necessity.

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