Last week, I happened to spot this item in our Israeli kids’ magazine. Don’t worry, I’ll translate it down below.   Wallah? Amazing fact of the week In all kinds of places all over the world, they sell a food called “Israeli couscous,” which actually has no connection with couscous. It’s actually just פתיתים / petitim, which are indeed an Israeli invention from the 1950s. And we say to the world: Wait ‘till you discover the amazing thing we call Bissli Grill (BBQ flavour)! Of course, it’s not quite true that there’s NO connection with couscous. Both couscous and Israeli couscous (petitim, which just means “flakes”) are made from semolina flour and water. It’s just a matter of what you do with it from that point. The production process for “real” couscous involves adding water to the semolina flour, rolling it around (traditionally with your fingers, but these days, by machine), then run it through a sieve to get pieces of the right size. It ends...

Cabbage rolls… I admit it, they used to be a big YUCK from me, but they’ve really grown on me over the years. Think of them as Jewish sushi… heated up… in tomato sauce…? Okay, maybe not.   But I hope these quick tricks will have you thinking twice about maybe throwing some cabbage rolls into your family’s mix.   This post is exactly what it says: two tips that will save you a ton of time. Cabbage rolls are so totally forgiving, I'm not even going to give you a recipe. To make them, just mix up a bunch of meat with some parsley, salt, pepper, eggs, maybe rice if you like that sort of thing, and roll it into balls. (Omit the meat and just roll up rice for a veg/vegan version, as I do for NR!). Wrap balls in cabbage leaves, place on a bed of cabbage leaves in the pan (these don't get served or eaten, they're just there for flavour / moisture), and bake with your choice of tomato sauce / ketchup / brown sugar / ginger ale / garlic / sweet & savoury combo in ...

Here’s something you don’t see all the time on today’s ultra-slick cooking blogs.  A confession:  sometimes, things don’t work out as planned. For Yom Yerushalayim (Jerusalem Day) this year, I decided to make one of those fabulous checkerboard cakes I’ve seen all over the Internet.  Sure, they sell special cake pans to make them, but that’s just kitsch, right? Special pans:  Who needs ‘em, amIright? Anyway, all the pans do is let you mix and match the bits and pieces a little more easily.  Surely, I can do that on my own, at home, with nothing more than my own ingenuity? Nope. You can’t really see from this picture how wonky and falling-aparty these cakes really were.  But don’t take my word for it… you can see the whole thing coming together (and/or falling apart) in this delightful real-life video

If you’re like me and cook by intuition, it can be hard to know when a kugel is just right to go into the oven.  How do you know you’ve added enough salt and other seasonings?  You don’t want to accidentally go overboard, but how much is enough?  And you certainly don’t want to invest all that effort and bake the thing for an hour or whatever only to discover that it tastes bland as paste. Of course, you could just take a taste of the raw mixture, but somehow, that option has never seemed appealing to me. So what can you do? This isn’t a fancy tip, but it’s one has helped me so much over the years.  I think it will come in handy for you in all sorts of ways – not just with kugels, but also with gefilte fish, cakes, cookies, breads; anything you don’t want to sample raw for whatever reason. (Lots of real bakers eat raw bread dough, even sourdough, and claim to love it… I am not one of them, and the thought of eating raw flour products seems just icky to me....

Around here, it’s not truly Pesach cooking season until the soup lokshen are ready.  Each year, this is how I inaugurate my brand-new, shiny-clean Pesach kitchen. (What?  Yes, I’m still going on about Pesach… when do you want me to blog about Pesach, DURING Pesach?  Before Pesach??  Oy.  This was the first chance I’ve had to breathe, and post this, in nearly a month.) This year, I mentioned to a friend that I was getting ready to make the lokshen, and she said, “what?” It turns out that not everybody makes Pesach lokshen… go figure. It’s exactly like making blintzes during the year, except you leave out the flour.  And because blintz leaves are mainly flour, you have to add a LOT more egg.  This bowl has maybe ten eggs in it. What’s the exact recipe?  You’ll have to forgive me, but I’ve never written it down.  Here are all the components: 10 eggs (Large) Several Tbsp of oil About 1/4 cup of potato starch Salt a...

Life really does get cooking at this time of year… kind of literally.  I’m usually pulling out of my winter hibernation just in time for yom tov cooking/baking, first in a fun Purim way and then in a dead-serious Pesach way. This carnival is about all things kosher and cooking.  If your blog is, too, or if you’ve blogged about kosher food on another blog, then you’re welcome to join us!  Last month’s KCC was hosted by Batya at me-ander Next month’s KCC will be hosted… well, that’s TBD.  (If you blog about food, why not step up?) For more information and an upcoming schedule, visit our facebook page So what’s doing in kosher food? What we’re eating First of all, with Pesach on the way, you should be inventorying your food and trying to use up what you’ve got.  If you haven’t already, there’s still time to start, as Batya does at her blog me-ander in Pre-Passover Inventory Time .  She says, “Sometimes I'm totally amazed at what h...

Know what the most popular post on this site is, right at this very moment?  By far? It’s a post called “ Mmm… kichelicious .” I adore kichel, the dry unsweetened European cookie that has been a staple of Jewish life since… well, probably since someone’s Bubby needed to make cookies and discovered that she was out of sugar.  Apparently, thousands of people out there on the Internet love kichel and want to know how to make it well at home. But celebrity kosher baker Paula Shoyer does not.  Which is too bad, because in every other way, she’s absolutely perfect.  I enjoyed a baking demo she did yesterday at the home of the U.S. ambassador to Israel Daniel Shapiro.  She did a really great job of preparing a couple of basic recipes that I hope to share with you very soon. But the real reason for her crusade to bring simple, delicious pareve baking recipes to home cooks is because, as she said yesterday, “in the U.S., pareve desserts… are absolutely horr...

And no, they’re not both cheesecakes… although one is; a special all-Israeli cheesecake for which you can find the recipe a bit further down.  And okay, both are dairy-based; sorry to anyone who can’t have dairy at this very milky time of year… (In fact, since I started to write this, my husband decided to make a classic North American lemony cheesecake, deapite my predictions of doom that it wouldn’t work with Israeli cheese… so we may end up with three cakes.) With all of my dooming and glooming about baking in Israel, I was happy to receive a recipe from my ulpan teacher on Sunday night which she guaranteed would work with Israeli ingredients – given that she’s never baked it anywhere else.  I figure as an old dog making aliyah, it’s time for a new trick… with cheesecake. Except, except, except… her cheesecake doesn’t have a crust.  Heresy!  I couldn’t bake a crustless cheesecake.  Honestly, I was about to pour it into the pan (#26, according to her ...

Okay, I will spoil the surprise with a great shot of the finished challahs and the message that there is NO such thing (short of cake batter) as a too-wet dough.  Are you cut out for no-knead challah baking?  Maybe!  Read on to find out. When people find out I bake challah, their first question is usually, “do you use a mixer?”  The assumption here is that making bread is onerous; so onerous that we need heavy-duty motorized tools to accomplish it.  Um, hello?  For thousands of years people baked bread without mixers.  Okay, they also did laundry without washing machines… so maybe that isn’t as good a point as I thought. But here’s my point:  making bread dough is easy, and you don’t need a mixer.  Heck, you don’t even need to mix the dough at all.  And if you play your cards right, your bread will be even moister and more delicious for the experience. Aside:  You do, however, need one important tool:  a dough scra...

Looking for pictures to go with a blog post about Israel’s Independence Day, coming up this Tuesday, I discovered a beautiful “new” (to me) challah tradition:  the Yom HaAtzmaut Challah. (photo credit:  רותי רוטשטיין, via wikimedia ) According to the note that came with the picture, there are a few explanations for the unique design of the challah: “The center of the special holiday meal is a challah made ​​of twelve parts, which reminds us of the 12 tribes, symbolizing the unification of all parts of the nation and in memory of ancient days.” The shape of the challah is also reminiscent of a crown… intentionally so.  And, of course, there are charming little flags poked into every single segment to top it off. The photographer says: “We have adopted the custom of baking a special Independence Day challah from the Pri-Chen family who lived in the village. We've passed this practice to the next generation and it’s been accepted as part of our regular I...

What are kichel, you ask?  Whether you know them as “bow-ties” or “nothings” or “eyer-kichel” (my Bubby’s version) or “keekle,” they are cookies, but they are so much more than cookies.  Actually, they are both more and less than cookies.  They are puffed-up egg and air trapped in a gluteny web of flour.  They are not themselves sweet, but coated in sugar so eaters think they are.  Good kichel are addictive:  like popcorn, you can’t eat just one.  Though heavy and Jewish and rich and filling, they are also just that little bit zen. And now I have learned the secret to making good ones! Growing up, I was fascinated by everything about my mother’s new mixer.  Yes, even ten years later, it was still her new mixer.  It was special:  it was a Kenwood Chef.  She had to special-order it from England, and after she did, spent the next ten years correcting people who thought it was a Ken more .  Ken more was a cheap Sears brand ...

There are only two kinds of hamentaschen for those who don’t mess around:  moon and prune. This is a truth I learned as a small child, growing up in a home where, for whatever reason, the Two Kinds (let’s capitalize them for convenience) were the Only Kinds. Moon = poppy seed.  Prune = dried plums. (the word moon = my father’s variation on the Yiddish/german mohn ) A few years back, my sister, who’s a baker, offered for sale a pastry she’d made with “dried plums” because it sounded way classier than saying “prunes.”  It sure does.  In Hebrew, there’s no distinction.  “Dried plums” is the only thing you can call them. But they do mess around a LOT, with all kinds of flavours, from chocolate (okay) to halva (kind of okay) and many others… but they also don’t call them hamentashen – they’re called oznei haman; haman’s ears.  For those who don’t mess around, they’re hamentaschen – haman’s pockets . My way or the highway.  A lesson I learned ...

Last Shabbos, Ted made brownies from a mix… and Sara came over and decorated it, all professional-like:   Happy happy chometz, nestled in its parchment… little suspecting Pesach is on its way!

Coming back from Israel just yesterday, I wanted hamentaschen that reflected all that we’d enjoyed there, culinarily.  I didn’t quite hit the mark, but I did come up with two cute variations… I used my usual dough recipe from Second Helpings, Please (image below), though I don’t love it because it tends to misbehave in unpredictable ways.  It has never come out the same way twice in twenty years (sigh, I feel so old saying that, but it’s true – the cookbook was a wedding present at my first wedding, and the children of that marriage are now far closer to 20 than to zero). This time, I did it in the food processor, where, of course, it totally jammed and made a sticky mess.  Ultimately, I added a lot more flour than usual and they came out okay.  It doesn’t taste like it usually does, but it worked. I always do one batch with a classic prune filling – or, as my baker sister likes to say, dried plums.  It just sounds so much swankier that way. For th...