Amanda and Addie, photographed by Sarah Shatz.

Parents Who Cook is a Q&A series in which I ask my guests about cooking with little ones underfoot. If you think of people you’d like to see interviewed as part of this series — especially fathers! — your suggestions are welcome.

I have long admired Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs for founding the Food52 website, and developing it with such savvy over the past three years. Originally created as a way to crowd-source a cookbook, it is now a remarkably rich website with lots of smart features, and a vibrant community of cooks.

The first Food52 cookbook came out last year, and the second volume, also crowd-sourced and edited with great care, has just been released.

Amanda and Merrill are both mothers, and I am delighted to welcome them as my first guests on the Parents Who Cook series.

Can you tell us a few words about your kids? Ages, names, temperaments?

M: Our daughter Clara is almost eleven months old. She has seven teeth and is determined to start walking. We think she’s learned her first word (hi), although it could just be a random sound she’s making. Clara is a really good-tempered baby and very social, but on the rare occasion that she’s unhappy or tired, she lets us know it!

A: We have twins, Walker and Addie, and they’re six. They’re losing their baby teeth, which they’re very excited about. Walker is methodical, competitive, and snuggly. Addie is social, a daydreamer, and willing to be amused.

Clara, photographed by James Ransom.

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Illustration by MelinArt.

This is part of a series on French idiomatic expressions that relate to food. Browse the list of idioms featured so far.

This week’s expression is, “Cœur d’artichaut.”

Literally translated as, “artichoke heart,” it is used to describe someone who falls in love easily and frequently, possibly with several people at the same time — or at least in rapid succession. It can be used either as avoir un cœur d’artichaut (having an artichoke heart) or être un cœur d’artichaut (being an artichoke heart).

Example: “Elle était très amoureuse de lui, mais elle s’est vite rendu compte que c’était un cœur d’artichaut.” “She was very much in love with him, but she soon realized he was an artichoke heart.”

Listen to the idiom and example read aloud:

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Surprise, surprise, it turns out that having a baby gets in the way of one’s cooking ambitions a little bit.

On weeknights, the time that I used to devote to making dinner is now all about my son — the playing, the feeding, the pyjama-ing, the cuddling, the singing — and the few moments that I do spend in the kitchen I make the absolute most of, with quick recipes that require the bare minimum in the way of prep.

Let’s say we’ve been eating a lot of roasted root vegetables with tahini sauce: ten minutes’ active work while the kid chews on the lemon juicer, forty-five minutes’ oven time while we do the above routine.

Impossibly moist and fluffy, this cake is made with ingredients you most likely have on hand, including the overripe bananas I’m sure you stash in your freezer too.

I am actually working on a series of posts titled Parents Who Cook, asking various guests how they’ve adapted their cooking after their children were born. The idea for the series came about because I am dying to pick other people’s brains about the subject, and I hope you will find it of interest, too.

As my boy grows older and has more patience puttering about on his own in the evening — even better, can help out and earn his keep! — I imagine it will get easier, but in the meantime I am still figuring things out, and collecting ideas for meals that sort of cook themselves*.

Banana coconut bread may or may not count as a meal, but this recipe by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid, which I read about on my friend Luisa’s blog in the wake of her own son’s birth, does qualify as a treat that practically bakes itself.

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For this new installment of our Draw Me A Fridge series (read about it here), we spoke with Dan Barber.

Dan Barber is the chef behind one of my all-time favorite restaurants, Blue Hill, in NYC’s Greenwich Village, and a farm-restaurant upstate, Blue Hill at Stone Barns, to which I’ve been longing to go for years. He is one of the most prominent chefs in the US, he’s an active participant in the discussion on ethics and sustainability, and he works with food and ideas with equal talent.

I recently had the opportunity to meet him in Paris, where he had been invited by Alain Ducasse to cook a special lunch at the Plaza Athénée hotel. Alexia Colson-Duparchy, who runs the Draw Me A Fridge series on Chocolate & Zucchini, joined me, and we talked about breeding, spoons, and fried eggs, among other things.

Tell us a few words about this lunch that you’re cooking at the Plaza Athénée.

Lately I’ve been devoting a lot of my time to breeding. It’s not genetic engineering, it’s natural selection done with modern technology to make it go very fast, so that you get to where you want to go in two years as opposed to a hundred years.

Many chefs and people who love food want to go back to old seeds, the so-called heirlooms. But what’s interesting to me is how we can use some of the genetics from the past and help move it to the future. Heirlooms mean you stop at a particular moment in time: somebody says, that’s a great tomato, okay, we stop, and we’re going to pass down the seeds. It may be a fantastic tomato, but I think we can do better. I know we can do better. You have to use these genetics and those breeders who help us concentrate on flavor and disease resistance. It’s very important for farmers.

Tomorrow’s lunch is about that idea. We brought ingredients for each course. Wheat is a big one for me, because I’m working with a wheat breeder very closely. There will also be celtuse, a type of lettuce. We worked with a breeder on it and we planted it in dust from hazelnuts. The celtuse took some of the flavors from the hazelnut. It’s great.

Usually I use local ingredients, but I feel the theme of this lunch is more important.

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