*** UPDATE!  We have a winner – Yosefa of Cooking Outside the Box !!!  Always nice to share with another food blogger… Back in January of 2011 , I first had the good fortune to review Oliver’s Labels products on my main blog. I was very, very pleased.  Thrilled, in fact, because I discovered that they have a line of kosher kitchen labels that actually STICK.  Having wrestled with various brands throughout my kosher-keeping life, I was delighted that not only do these stick strongly to a variety of surfaces (including wooden spoons!), but they are not see-through, meaning you can see them no matter what colour your implement happens to be. Here’s a picture I took back in January 2011 of various utensils with the labels attached – so that was over a year and a half ago.  I was so delighted that these could stick to almost any surface, including round wooden spoons (they’re cheap, but annoying to replace when trayfed due to marker M’s and F’s and P’s rubbin...

(because we just had amazing garlic bread at my mother’s house last night!) … then have bread on TOP of your regular supper!!! In this case, chili, with cornbread on top.  Always a hit, but this could easily be made with this quick n’ easy beer bread instead.  The chili around here is usually pareve, so I used milk in the cornbread; if the chili had meat, you could just use water – if I’m using tinned corn, I’ll save the corn water and use that – or some pareve kind of milk, but I don’t adore pareve milks in baking. Use any chili you want:  homemade, storebought, whatever – just make sure it’s very moist, or you’ll be gasping for liquids as you eat it, because the cornbread sucks up some of the liquid, while baking evaporates some.  Lose-lose, so start with a very wet chili. The cornbread on top is adapted from the Joy of Cooking, and I usually double it, because we love it like crazy and one batch just isn’t enough: Ingredients 3/4 cup cornmeal 1 ta...

As a baking Jewish blogger (not regularly enough here, I know!), I’m pleased to announce that I’m going to be featured, along with two of my recipes, in an upcoming “ blogger spotlight ” on Jamie Geller ’s JoyOfKosher.com mega-site. I thought you-all might be fascinated with my responses to their questions, so I’ve posted them here so you can get a sneak preview: Tell us about your blog and how you got started: I've been baking for years, but a couple of years ago, I realized that too much of my regular blog, Adventures in MamaLand ( http://ronypony.blogspot.com ) was being taken up with my latest obsession, which - at the time - was no-knead breads.  So I found a similar Blogger domain name and took it from there!  I don't post there quite as often, but I like to think I have a dedicated core of kosher-bread aficionados who read it regularly. What is your earliest cooking memory? Baking one-pan brownies with my little sister in my mother's kitchen.  I didn't...

So when I open my big mouth, I sometimes end up with a Shabbos like last week where I owed 5 challahs to various people around the neighbourhood, plus 3 for us = 8 challahs. I used a no-knead, bucket-risen dough ( blender challah recipe ) that quickly surpassed the bucket: Plop!  Out on the table!  I had to elevate the bucket so it would fall out.  Here is my hand in its midst, for size comparison: 8 x 4 = 32 “pancakes” 8 x 4 = 32 “slugs,” ready to turn into “snakes” and braid… (the progression as the challah takes shape, by the way, is as follows:  blobs, balls, pancakes, slugs, snakes, challahs) You can’t really tell from the pictures, but the dough was ridiculously soft, pretty much at the limit of what I can work with, though a few weeks ago, I did a batch that was worse: it was ALL BUT unworkable. Even fully-cooked, the challahs were frighteningly bendy in the middle.  They also grew tremendously and bonded with each other in the oven...

I had a weird amount of challah left over, so I was going to do a 3-braid with a little teeny 3-braid on top, but I turned the teeny 3-braid into the letters shin, bais, sav (tav), in honour of Gavriel Zev’s alef-bais siyum / party today. It was beautiful when it started rising… I even used poppy and sesame seeds contrasting – poppy on the letters and sesame on the “body” of the challah. But it quickly turned ugly once the oven heat struck… As you can see, the dot from the bais wandered away onto the other side of a giant rift.  You can barely see it here, but the dot from the shin strayed and is now in the top-right corner.  And the save just kind of unwove itself into a “humph” shape. Oh, well… I haven’t had a challah split this badly in a LONG time.  In fact, the others that I made this week didn’t split at all – just my special fancy “lettering” challah.  Go figger! This was also a weird batch because I used raisins.  I was making Joan Na...