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All Grown Up

In The Food You Crave, cookbook author Ellie Krieger offers quick, healthy and practical recipes for busy families.

My college years were wonderful, but the food was not an aspect of that experience I would have chosen to repeat. That’s what happened, though, when I recently took a downtown office job: I plunged back into an absolutely sophomoric (pun intended) relationship with food. 

I suppose I had just taken working at home for granted — little things like spending two seconds halfway through the morning to remove something from the freezer, or conducting a visual inventory of the crisper drawer and letting what I found there simmer in the back of my mind until it was time to simmer something for real.

But these days, working downtown like a normal person, I regularly find myself walking in the door with a half hour — maybe an hour — to deal with whatever crisis my 2-year-old is undergoing and then get our family’s dinner on the table. 

For the first month, our most frequent solution was frozen pizza. “Whoa, college,” my husband and I would say to each other as we used our fancy kitchen shears — meant to disassemble poultry — to cut the cheesy circles.

“Dude,” I’d say ironically. “Dude!” he’d answer. But it wasn’t that funny. 

Then, one fateful day, he called me from the big-box store to inquire about what additional plastic junk was needed to raise our child. “Buy the cheapest rice cooker with a steamer basket they’ve got,” I instructed. “Something’s got to change.”

Something did, and my second month of working downtown was a month of brown rice and steamed vegetables. It turned out we did have the wherewithal to keep “clean convenience” foods like bags of baby carrots, prewashed spinach and presnipped string beans in the house. And, at first, these seemed like successful dinners.

“Now we’re in college, but we’re hippies,” we noted, remarking that our fancy stainless-steel stove was gathering dust while we were vegans living out of a $15 rice cooker. “Dude, get the Grateful Dead tape.” “No, dude, you get it!” 

Then my husband came into the kitchen one night, post-baby-bedtime, to find me eating lychees straight from the can. “What are you doing?” he asked. “I’m starving,” I said. “Yeah, me, too,” he confessed, and we had to face the fact that the brown-rice and steamed-veggie diet left us craving more. 

So how can busy families like ours balance a desire to eat healthy, delicious and satisfying meals with the massive time constraints modern life imposes on them? It turns out Ellie Krieger has made a career out of answering just that question, with a show on the Food Network called Healthy Appetite and a series of books, the latest of which is titled The Food You Crave: Luscious Recipes for a Healthy Life (Taunton Press, 2008). 

I’m always skeptical of mass-appeal “healthy” cookbooks — I’ve seen too many based on what I can only politely call fibs (like the idea that you can make delicious eggplant parmesan using just eggplant, a few bursts of aerosol-can olive-oil spray, a jar of sauce and some fake chemistry-lab cheese; or that any adult in her right mind is going to spend an hour putting together soup and then eat a mere half cup of it). But when I randomly opened Krieger’s book to the recipe Lamb Stew With Orange and saw that she was cooking with real ingredients like orange zest and recommending a portion size of 2 cups, I realized I might have found someone who actually lived life in the real world. 

It turns out that Krieger, in fact, has a young daughter and is a working mom juggling a busy career and family life. She does it, however, with a background as a trained dietitian, which helped her in The Food You Crave to remake foods people actually want to eat, like artichoke dip, weekend-brunch French toast, jambalaya, ketchup-lidded meatloaf and banana cream pie.

I love her Jerk Chicken With Cool Pineapple Salsa [reprinted below] because it has all the flavor of a Caribbean restaurant splurge, but it’s as healthy as a day at the spa. The book is also full of super-quick ideas for weeknight suppers, like how to use whole-grain tortillas as the basis for a veggie-and-goat-cheese pizza.   

Now that we have Krieger’s book at home, only one question remains: Can my husband and I graduate from our college-food purgatory and return to our adult tastes? If this book doesn’t do it, I don’t think anything will.

Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl is a celebrated food and wine critic. Nominated seven times for James Beard Foundation Awards — the Oscars of the food world — she has received four awards for her restaurant and wine columns. Since 2001, her work has been regularly featured in the Best Food Writing anthologies.

For the recipe pictured above, Jerk Chicken With Cool Pineapple Salsa, as well as more recipes from The Food You Crave, see the Web Extras! at the top right of this page.