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I’m so excited! Ratatouille is coming out on DVD next week (November 6). The nice people at Click Communications sent me a preview copy. It was wonderful timing as my mother, who’s French, was in town. She hadn’t seen it, so it was a perfect movie to share with her grandkids.

We loved watching Ratatouille again even though we had seen it in the theater when it was first released. We enjoyed the short features, too. The foodie in me loved “Fine Food and Film: A Conversation with Brad Bird and Thomas Keller,” a behind the scenes look at how master chef and restaurateur Thomas Keller brought his real life expertise to the table. And the kids loved the new animated short film “Your Friend the Rat,” starring Remy and Emile from Ratatouille

So, What’s Cooking?

For the occasion, I made dinner using a recipe from the movie’s children’s cookbook, What’s Cooking? A cookbook based on a movie? Yes, and a good one at that. It has very authentic but kid-friendly recipes for classic French dishes like crepes, croque monsieur (a favorite of my nephews in Switzerland), and quiche lorraine. There’s a few fun dishes in What’s Cooking? too, like Easy Faux Escargot (roll ups) and Pizza Rats (cut up English muffin pizzas that look like rats’ faces).

(If you would like some more Ratatouille-based recipes, click here to download a four-page PDF from Disney and Family Fun magazine at AtoZKidsStuff.com. The recipes are based on ones in What’s Cooking?)

And of course there was this recipe for Gusteau’s Ratatouille, which my mother and I enjoyed and tried to pursuade the kids to eat

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I was one of those kids who preferred a Filet-O-Fish sandwich at McDonald’s over a cheeseburger. But my kids? Paul got Nathan to eat fish once, and he promptly threw it up. Always Little Miss Opposite, Lucie likes mahi mahi and grilled tuna but won’t eat lake trout. Both kids love the fish tacos at Del Taco, go figure.

I have a friend who swears her daughter begs her to buy crab legs and fish fillets, so there must be some kids out there who love fish. But I think most kids wouldn’t go near it with a 10-foot fishing pole. So here are a couple of recipes that may entice them.

This Fish-In-a-Sack recipe comes from Cooking Rocks! Rachael Ray’s 30-Minute Meals for Kids (there’s a more grown up version of this recipe at Foodnetwork.com). The draw here for kids is that you’re cooking food in a brown paper sack and can serve it that way, too.

Fish-In-a-Sack
Makes 4 servings

Ingredients:

1. 4 brown paper grocery sacks
2. 2 zucchini
3. 4 scallions, chopped or snipped with kitchen scissors into 1-inch pieces
4. 1 cup shredded carrots
5. 1 pint cherry or grape tomatoes
6. salt and freshly ground pepper, to taste
7. 1/2 c. fresh flat-leaf parsley, chopped or snipped
8. 2 to 2 1/2 pounds fresh cod, cut into 4 portions
9. 1 lemon, very thinly sliced
10. 1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil

Directions:

1. Cut each sack in half across, making shorter paper bags; discard the tops.
2. Open the bags up and place 2 bags on each of 2 cookie sheets or baking sheets.
3. Cut a thin slice off of the length of one side of each zucchini (this makes it more stable for you to cut the zucchini); slice them into 1/4-inch-thick disks.
4. Arrange a layer of about 8 disks in the bottom of each sack, like rows of dominoes that have fallen.
5. Scatter a couple of handfuls of scallions, a few tablespoons of shredded carrots, and some whole tomatoes over the zucchini in each bag. Try to keep the amounts even.
6. Season the veggies with salt and pepper as you are working.
7. Add the parsley to the veggies, about 2 tablespoons per sack.
8. Season the fish with salt and pepper and arrange each portion directly on top of the veggies in each sack.
9. Cover the fish with thin slices of lemon. Drizzle about 1 tablespoon of olive oil down over each portion of fish and veggies.
10. Seal the bags by rolling them tightly - but stop rolling an inch or so above the fish.
11. Bake 20 minutes.
12. Place a whole sack on each plate and serve. Cut sacks open at the dinner table to reveal the cooked fish and veggies.

If you have a reluctant fish eater, try serving some sauces on the side. Teriyaki, barbecue, tartar sauce, and even ketchup are all good choices.

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Why should the kids have all the fun this summer? Instead, how about trying a little reading inspired cooking with my favorite kitchen saint, Julia Child?

Who says you have to cook anything? Some people can read baseball stats and replay games in their head. Do you think you could try to do a little imaginary cooking instead?

First, get a copy of Julie and Julia : 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen by Julie Powell. Julie’s one of the first bloggers to get a book deal to transfer her blog to text. In Julie and Julia, she writes about her blog and the year she cooked every recipe - yes, EVERY single one - in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume One.

She’s been criticized for also writing about her job, friends, drinking, love life, and 9/11. Some people think that she should only write about food and the cooking she did. Heck folks, it’s a blog…in book form. Julie can write about anything she wants. That’s what blogging’s about.

I realized too late that Julie and Julia would have been a much more enjoyable read if I had a copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking to consult while I read. While Julie describes what she’s cooking, she doesn’t give the actual recipes. Since she cooked every recipe, it probably would have been too cumbersome a book. (Plus, I doubt her publisher wanted to get permission to do so.) In the time of 30-minute meals and microwaves, Julia Child’s recipes are pretty out there…and entertaining in their own right.

Since you’ve pulled out your copy of MAFC, let’s take a look at My Life in France. (If you don’t own a copy of MAFC, shame on you! Bet your mom has a copy - my mom does - so borrow hers instead.)

Not only is My Life in France a chronicle of Julia’s love affair with her husband Paul, but it’s a fascinating look at an American in post-WW II Paris. It’s hard to believe now with our access to Mongolian BBQ, sushi, and good curry, that Americans had no clue about international cuisine. Julia Child was a pioneer who brought good cooking, appreciation for quality ingredients, and basic French cuisine to Americans.

But I’m convinced that if Julia had children, this would have never happened. Even though she and Paul wanted children, they were never able to have them. So to occupy herself and pursue a passion for good food, Julia enrolled at the Cordon Bleu. She then started a cooking school with friends Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle, who were already at work on a French cookbook. In 1961, nine years after Julia teamed up with them, MAFC was finally published. After all, it’s hard to work all day long on perfecting a recipe when you have to care for children. If she was only able to work during nap time, MAFC probably wouldn’t have come out until 1980.

As far as family togetherness activities? Well, feel free to go ahead and cook up some recipes while learning about France. Or maybe you can pursue an anatomy lesson while you pick up some organ meats, ha, ha, ha. Well, a visit to the butcher (if there’s still one in your neighborhood) or the meat counter at a local ethnic market is always entertaining for the kids. Nothing more fun than grossing out the kids over tripe and calf’s liver.

So unless you have teens in the house who are interested in becoming professional chefs, Julia Child, like fine wine, is for grownups. Sometimes us moms need to take a break and do a little something for ourselves. Indulge in a little Julia Child today!

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When I do an Usborne home show, I try to show the moms - and it’s always moms - how to use books to get closer to their kids. This is what I tell them:

When our kids are very small, we go through a time of intensive parenting. We worry about everything from, “Is he still breathing?” to “Will I ever get this kid potty trained?” Then they finally enter school, and we breathe a collective sigh of relief. “Whew! The tough part was over. They’re in someone else’s hands now!”

It’s natural that we want (and need) some times to ourselves to reconnect with hobbies, careers and passions we put aside when our kids were small. Now that they can dress, feed and entertain themselves most of the time, we feel we can sit back a little. But in reality, we can’t. Especially when they enter the middle school and high school years, the time when peer pressure is at its worse. It’s important to keep the lines of communication open and active, and one way to do that is through books and shared activities around those books.

As a president of a charter school I see how parental participation slacks off as kids get older. And this is at a school where volunteering 20-50 hours per school year is mandatory! It worries and saddens me to see that many parents stop caring. As long as the kids are getting good grades, they show little interest in their children’s school, friends, hobbies, or passions.

Maybe they think staying in touch with their child takes too much time. But in reality it’s as simple as reading books together! Even with older kids, you can take turns reading out loud. Discuss the stories around the dinner table or in the car. (Magazine and newspaper articles work well, too.) Try planning activities around the stories. Or use books, discussion, and activities to back up what’s being taught at school.

These are all good ways to Break the Communication Logjam. (For more terrific articles on reading, check out Scholastic’s website.) But how do you really do this? Sometimes the books do it for you and all you have to do is follow along and get a little creative.

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