Last summer, I emailed my mother-in-law in Calgary a copy of my most basic, Reliable Challah Recipe (incidentally, the same one I made this week) so she could make it while the big kids were there for their annual visit. She didn’t.  But this year, yesterday, Elisheva decided to make challah for their Shabbos together… I haven’t gotten a report on the flavour, but honestly, and objectively, I think they look BEAUTIFUL!   What a beautiful thing.

I know pizza sounds like a terrible choice for a hot summer day, but somehow, I find short bursts of oven use, however hot, more tolerable than long hours of baking. So – pizza takes a 500 degree oven, but only for about 12 minutes and then it’s DONE and you can switch it off.  And in terms of prep time, it’s perfect hot summer food because it’s very, very easy. I didn’t even start the dough for this one at 5:00, and by 6:30, okay, maybe 7:00, it was piping hot on the table. Now, I do wonder why it is that when I am absolutely SLAVING over pizza, like last time, when I actually had to deliver it to another family, it turned out absolutely awful… and then, when it’s just you and there’s nobody to impress, it turns into the best pizza you’ve ever had??? Well, I will say this – I love tasty bread and all, but this pizza used a quick-rise dough and I don’t feel at all guilty or ashamed because under tasty toppings, it’s REALLY hard to tell.  In future, for pizza, I’ll probably go f

If you’re here from Jamie Geller’s Joy of Kosher blog spotlight (and managed to find my URL hidden there at the very bottom) – welcome!  Take a second to click LIKE up above and join my blog empire! Does this happen to you???  You start with a perfectly lovely kosher kitchen label… like this one: And then you use it for years and years and after a while, it starts to look more like THIS one:   As the kids say…or said, a couple of years ago… FAIL. Now, this is an actual unretouched photo.  I have done nothing to this label except wash it with a cloth in soapy water every time the bench scraper it happens to be attached to gets washed.  Notice that the label a) is cracked and peeling, and b) is illegible (there are a few flecks of green left on the label, but that’s all). Well, in case you weren’t here to read my post earlier this week , I’ve finally found kosher labels, from Oliver’s Labels , that actually WORK (click the link to enter to win a set of them and MORE!) – an