FEBRUARY

At BJ’s last week, I browsed through cookbooks and found that Gwyneth Paltrow’s brisket recipe isn’t all that different from mine. She and her family put their various brisket recipes side by side—from the Lipton onion soup version to the Sephardic in the process of creating one for her book.

What her recipe has in common with mine is the slow braising, a liquid that blends a bouquet garni with the natural juices of the pot roast, and the taste of home cooking. Hers uses wine and chicken broth, and mine uses a concentrated vegetable browning sauce, onions, carrots, and paprika.  Here’s the method, whichever recipe you use:

A 3-pound brisket

Two medium or one large onion, peeled and sliced in rounds

Two carrots (organic juice carrots if your supermarket carries them), in large slices

Two baking potatoes, peeled and sliced in 1-inch rounds

Boiling water

2 tbsp. Kitchen Bouquet browning sauce

2 tbsp. canola oil

Salt, pepper, paprika

In a Dutch oven or 5-quart pot, heat the oil and sauté the onion slices until transparent but not browned. Sprinkle salt and pepper onto both sides of the brisket, place it in the pot with the onions, and brown it over medium high heat on each side.

Remove from the heat and add boiling water until the water is about half-way up the side of the brisket. Add the Kitchen Bouquet and the carrots. Return the pot to the heat, cover it, and lower the heat so that the cooking liquid is at a low simmer. Check every 20 minutes or so to make sure the liquid doesn’t boil away, adding ¼ cup boiling water as necessary.

Simmer for about 1 ½ hours, until the meat is fork-tender (try a piece to check). Then place the potatoes around the brisket and sprinkle them with salt and paprika. Using baking potatoes thickens the juices slightly, and the paprika will make its way into the juices and give them additional color and flavor.

Serve with additional potatoes or broad noodles. The leftovers are even better than the first day.

Linda Chalmer Zemel, Buffalo Alternative Medicine Examiner and Buffalo Books Examiner. Originally published on Examiner.com

As a former cookie-baking, station wagon-driving soccer mom, sure, I get it when columnist John Rosemond wonders about the ratio of family time to kids’ activities. But his statement that activities that school kids need parents to take them to and watch them doing cause stress doesn’t provide an “aha moment.” In his column, Rosemond said:

“How about spending a disproportionate amount of family time taking children to and watching them in activities that will be completely irrelevant to anything they will be doing as adults?”

Parents on the sidelines laughingly compete with each other over the fact that they have already been to twenty-four soccer games and there is still most of the season left. But family life isn’t diminished by spending warm summer days on the sideline. Instead, time on the sidelines is part of family life and enhances it.

Relationships and reaching out to others are part of what kids should learn in their family life. Carpool moms and dads have opportunities to become long term friends attending each other’s life events with joy, compassion, or sorrow as needed. Parents don’t have to go looking for a manufactured way to teach their kids empathy and compassion when it is sitting right in the back seat.

In my family’s experience, soccer became an extension of our own neighborhood into the larger neighborhoods of our kids’ teams. Some of the moms and dads were chaperones when the teams went to Europe or Canada to play in travel-team tournaments. When a soccer mom died in an automobile accident when our sons were freshmen in college, virtually the entire high school team came home for the weekend from their various colleges to support their old teammate.

Not just for learning how a particular game is played, taking kids to and watching them in their activities provides models and experience for a family life of creative thinking, positive relationships with others, and fun as well as perseverance and cooperation. If family life if disproportionately insular, kids miss out on opportunities to see how other people live, think, and act in the world, essential to developing an internal compass for right and wrong. And they benefit from finding out on larger fields than their own families whether they shine at defense or are better placed as a striker.

Of course when kids are young, they need the generosity of others to get to their activities and someone they love and admire to enjoy their successes. But those are the templates for the feelings of happiness and success that all parents wish for their children. And the activities themselves help kids develop their ability to create their own game plans for decades to come.

Linda Chalmer Zemel, Buffalo Alternative Medicine Examiner and Buffalo Books Examiner. Originally published on Examiner.com