Matthew and Iris outside Kawajiro, an eel-skewer restaurant in Tokyo.

Note: I am delighted that this column was recently featured on Food52: On Green Pancakes and Cooking With Kids.

Please welcome Matthew Amster-Burton, the newest guest in my Parents Who Cook interview series!

Matthew has a nine-year-old daughter, and as you’ll see, his approach to feeding her is playful, relaxed, and full of inventive tricks. I hope you enjoy his answers as much as I do.

Can you tell us a few words about your daughter? Age, name, temperament?

Iris is nine and a very easy kid. She likes to go to school and we get along well. I’m enjoying this while it lasts.

Did having a child change the way you cook?

Yes, for better and for worse. I got a lot more reliable about cooking dinner at home and serving it at a reasonable hour. I’m much less likely to cook a complicated all-day dish than before Iris was born: I was too exhausted to do it for years, and then once I had the energy back, I found I didn’t miss it, so I’ve gone on cooking mostly simple food. A lot of parents seem to make this transition.

On the downside, I’m probably a little too accommodating of Iris’s tastes. There are certain dishes I would enjoy serving as a main course that I know Iris would hate, though these are fewer and fewer as she gets older. Recently, for example, she decided she likes spicy foods again after abandoning them at age two. Thai curry is back on the dinner roster. Finally!

Do you remember what it was like to cook with a newborn? Any tips or saving grace for new parents going through that phase?

Nearly everything about having a newborn was awful. My advice: if people offer to bring you food, take them up on it. Nobody should ever feel guilty for any shortcuts they take to survive the first three months of parenthood.

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Beehive honey squares by Lucy Kuhn.

A few of my favorite finds and reads for July:

~ Intrigued by this zucchini hummus and this lentil granola.

~ “If we lived in 1913” is a series broadcast daily (in French) on France Inter radio, in which historian Antoine Prost talks about daily life in France one hundred years ago. I was particularly interested in this one: “If we lived in 1913, we would eat mostly bread.”

~ Finally all is revealed, and I am tickled to know that long-time fellow blogger Josh Friedland was behind Ruth Bourdain all this time.

~ Fun to play with: 60 Years of French First Names.

~ Who could resist buying these honey squares?

~ An incredible edible Rubik’s Cube by Cédric Grolet, the new pastry chef at Le Meurice.

~ New online addiction: The Geoguessr.

~ Want to know the truth behind the friendly-faced producers displayed on French supermarket products (in French)?

~ The BBC’s Food Programme, one of my favorite food podcasts (see full list here), had this fascinating episode on tree-to-bar chocolatier Mott Green (who died tragically a few weeks ago).

~ In the mood for some ice cream?

~ Depressing: a new EU regulation bans the sale of heritage seeds.

~ How French chefs are glamorizing tofu (in French).

~ Fool Magazine asks chefs and food writers, Who’s the world’s most underrated chef?

~ 35 beautiful recipe book designs.

We seem to have skipped spring altogether to jump directly into the thick of summer. And with the near-canicule* temperatures we’ve been experiencing, our menus have been all about cold foods and crudités.

I’ve long been a fan of grated carrot salads — when I was a child, this was the only way I would eat carrots at all — and I’ve recently become interested in the different ways one can grate the carrots for it.

I seldom use the grating attachment on my food processor; for small quantities, I find it too bothersome to take out, clean and put away.

For a while, I used the large holes of a box grater (such as this one), and was fairly pleased with the results, though the larger, tougher carrots were a bit of a workout, and any carrot that had become limp from too much time in the fridge was a pain to handle**.

Carrots grated with a box grater.

Then one day, I tired of the box grater and moved on to the brute force approach of simply chopping raw carrots in my mini food processor. It’s noisy, but it takes about a minute, and you get a couscous-like texture — coarse or fine, as you prefer — that is quite lovely.

Carrots chopped in the food processor.

But lately, I’ve switched to what is now my preferred method: I use my mandoline slicer with the comb-like blade attachment. This produces super neat little flecks of carrot with a perfect square section, which is not only attractive, but also optimally crunchy.

Carrots cut with a mandoline slicer.

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A few days after I published the post about my magic sauce, I realized I had all the ingredients to try and reproduce the dish that inspired it in the first place: Haan Palcu-Chang‘s* roasted cauliflower served cool with cilantro, toasted hazelnuts, and a dressing similar to said magic sauce, a small plate I had at the fabulous Paris raw bar Le Mary Celeste, which, if you’re curious, is named after a mysterious ghost ship.

It was so toe-curlingly good that I thought it merited a post all its own, to make certain nobody missed this game-changing way of serving and eating cauliflower. Back at Mary Celeste, I’d had to break the consensus rule to order it from the day’s menu because Maxence isn’t a cauliflower fan, yet even he had to admit it was stellar.

The moment when you think “Uh oh, I’ve left the cauliflower in for too long” is, in fact, the perfect moment to take it out.

One quick note about roasted cauliflower. After quite a number of recent batches — what can I say, I’ve been obsessed with roasted cauliflower — I have found the trick is to push it to the point where the edges of the florets start to turn quite dark (see photo below).

The moment when you think “Uh oh, I think I’ve left it in for too long” is, in fact, the perfect moment to take it out. That’s when the full range of flavors reveals itself, and when you get that satisfying mix of tender and crisp.

And while we’re tuned in to the cauliflower advice channel, I recommend that you judge your head of cauliflower by the vitality of its outer ribs and leaves: not only is this an unmistakeable sign of freshness, but you can also chop those ribs and leaves finely to use in a stir-fry, and get an additional portion of vegetables for the exact! same! price!

I wrote “Serves 2 to 4” in the recipe because it’s a fantastic picnic item and it would seem unreasonable for me to suggest you’ll eat the entire batch for lunch, but you may want to taste it before you decide whether or not you want to share.

* Read a little more about the chef in this recent profile.

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