I don't know what I did right, and I certainly don't want to ask too many questions for fear of jinxing it, but the truth is... shhh... my family LOVES beans. And that has made refried beans (or, as the people who invented them call them, frijoles refritos ) one of our go-to favourites for after-school eating, especially in chilly weather, that both warms them up and tides them over until suppertime. The truth is that refritos are sometimes good enough to make converts even of devout non bean lovers.  Try it and see, even if other bean recipes haven’t gone over as well.  The long cooking time gives the beans a magical “powdery” texture that isn’t really beany at all (at least, in our opinion here!). These refried beans are basically a one-ingredient, one-pan recipe.   I strongly recommend a

  If you’ve ever heard the “Lime in the Coconut” song – don’t worry.  There’s no “bellyaching” here, just a whole fluffy heap of summer-Shabbos deliciousness. On a hot day, it feels like there is no taste more perfect than lime and coconut mixed together. Happily, I discovered a couple of years ago that you can WHIP the cream that rises to the top of coconut milk.  Is there anything more perfect, you ask?  No, there is not. Well, okay... it does get a little more perfect, when you stir in just a small handful of tiny chocolate chips.  Mini chocolate chips work best, because they're awesomely subtle, but really, who's going to complain that their chocolate chips are too big? Here is the basic premise of this, the easiest and perhaps most perfect of all whipped desserts: This isn't exactly a recipe, more like a method.  You'll need well-chilled coconut milk or coconut cream, so stick it in the fridge overnight before you open the tin.  ...

Are you sick of kugels but aren’t sure what else you can make to serve on the side of a Shabbos or Yom Tov meal?  Here’s something that’s just as EASY as a kugel, only in tasty, crunchy, bite-sized morsels.   Last week, I wanted something like the Alexa brand sweet potato “tater tots,” which by all accounts are absolutely delicious.  We can’t buy them here, so I knew I had to make something from scratch.  My puffs came out totally different, but utterly delightful in their own right.  They’re a great way to sneak even more of that sweet potato goodness onto your family’s menu. Plus, they’re terrifically simple: Bake or boil the sweepoes (I boiled mine), puree them with egg yolks, cornstarch and seasoning, and then coat the mixture with panko before baking.  I added a little melted coconut oil to the sweet potatoes; you could probably leave it out OR substitute canola if you wanted something subtler (there wasn’t a strong coconut taste, however)....

Do you have a problem with ice cubes? Come on, hands up.  I know I do.  Working in one of the World’s Tiniest Kitchens, I appreciate any solution that saves space, time, money, and hassle.  And living in Israel, I need – desperately! – to stay cool all summer long.  Oh, yeah, and if I can spend less than ten bucks, all the better. Last summer, I bought these silicone freezer pop molds for my husband.  Back in Toronto, he had a brand of storebought freezable juice pops that were 100% juice that he loved as a refreshing summertime treat.  Here, everything is made with a ton of sugar, so I thought he could use these to make his own. Aren’t they pretty? (If you click the pics, you’ll be taken to the best-rated freezer pop molds I could find on Amazon – I bought mine locally.) Weirdly, and to my great sadness, my husband didn’t take to them.  So they’ve mostly sat empty and unused for the last year.  But when the weather here start...

My fellow Israelis are ridiculously huge fans of desserts involving what are basically soggy cookies.  This may have something to do with the fact that the horrendously misnamed “petit beurre” cookies are absolutely everywhere. These cookies are analagous to the Social Tea biscuits we used to buy back in Canada.  They’re misnamed (in Hebrew, “פתיבר” – all one word) because, being pareve, they don’t contain a single drop of butter.  I’m sure they’d be a great base for desserts of all kinds, but actually, the pareve ones aren’t a bad substitute. Perhaps the best-known and most-loved of these treats is Kadurei Shokolad (כדורי שוקולד), literally Chocolate Balls.  When I told my kids we were having them, they literally jumped and shouted “yay!”  GZ (age 7) was not too thrilled when I told him he’d be making them himself , but he got into it quickly. These are super-easy to make, and tons of fun to do with kids.  I recommend having a variety of spri...

It’s sort of like alchemy, really… you take oats, which is essentially horse food, and you turn it into pure, hearty breakfast yumminess. If you’re thinking of starting to make your own granola, this is one of those “old favourite” recipes you’ll want to keep handy. This picture here of the ingredients highlights the truly “no-frills” alchemy of this recipe:  crafting a premium product out of all these yellow-label groceries.  (the brown sugar and a couple of other things that aren’t packed in yellow were left out of the photo) I’ve made this granola many, many times now.  I’m still searching for a source of milk powder (skim or otherwise) in Israel, because now I miss it… a lot.  Plus, storebought granola is pretty expensive here, while oats are relatively cheap. I was surprised the first few times that I liked it so much; I’m not a huge granola fan.  Before I made this, I tried the Artisan Bread in Five Granola (the granola is meant to be used to...

I know I’ve been doing a lot of soups lately.  Forgive me… it’s winter and I could not be happier.  Before we moved to Israel, we got used to inaugurating Soup Season at Sukkos and finishing sometime after Pesach.  Here, Soup Season is way shorter – more like December to February than October to April.  So little time, and so many soups to cram in while we’re still shivering. This Zucchini-Potato Soup is pareve because it gets its creaminess from pureeing potatoes.  It is super-fast, mainly because you make it in a small batch.  It can easily be doubled, tripled, etc., to serve a crowd.  Did I mention that my daughter is nine?  She found this herself in the cookbook and has actually made it entirely by herself, except for the pureeing part at the end. If you are just starting out on the soup-making journey, this is the perfect soup for you to start with.  It can be anything you want it to be.  You don’t taste the zucchini, whi...

What do you feed your kids when they walk through the door? (Or do you feed them at all?) I admit, this is one of my weaknesses as a parent.  One of the things I’m really not so good at. Maybe you’re better than me at this (if so, I want to hear from you in the comments!), but perhaps the thing I’m worst at, as a parent, is feeding starving kids – my own. When they walk in the door after school, they’re famished.  Not literally starving, as I’ve told them many times.  But they are very, very hungry. Worse still is that they usually don’t realize it yet.  They don’t feel hungry – but they are.

I had such high hopes… but it turned out so, so badly.  Well, tasty enough.  But UGLY as sin. It all started with a video that showed a beautiful, trim Israeli lady making the most gorgeous braids with the kind of ease that you only acquire after having made thousands of them. I watched it.  Naomi Rivka watched it.  We were inspired – hooray! As soon as I started to pull of this complicated six-braid, everything began to go horribly wrong, starting with the ginormous octopus contraption you see at the top of this post. From there, I created a not-too-shabby looking braided thingy…   And then tucked it together to resemble – um, a mummified dog?   Yuck, says Naomi Rivka. Meanwhile, she herself was inspired by another technique she’d seen in the video to create a round challah, wrapped with a band to make it more regal.  Beautiful!   Just to make the situation even more ridiculous, it turned out there wasn’t room on my (...

So the one thing that apparently never changes is – I forgot to take pictures of the finished matzah.  Some years, I do; others, I just get so distracted and carried away by that point in the festivities that… well, I don’t. (previous years’ Matzah Bake posts:  5773 , 5772 , 5771 , 5770 (just us, no friends)) Like everything this year, it was both weird and bittersweet.  I’ll be honest:  I don’t like kids that much.  I mean, before you slam the browser shut, you should know up front:  I LOVE baking with kids.  But I don’t like kids that aren’t mine, even the nicest ones, and all my closest friends know it. So when I invite “kids” over for matzah baking… yeah, there is the element of having fun and playing with dough.  But you can be sure it’s also my main “social thing” for the day / week and perhaps year.  Here, apparently nobody gets that.  Instead, we got two kids we kind of know, bigger boys than I’ve baked with before (but th...

Decorating challahs with kids makes me feel "normal," like we're at home, no matter where we happen to be living... We are starting to get into a bit of a routine, but things are still difficult.  I don’t know; the ingredients are all the same, for the most part, but a lot of what I bake just doesn’t turn out “normal.”  I had a few weeks of making lemon bars that were just awful, like practically inedible.  Part of the problem is the pan size – you can’t get 8 x 8 or pie pans here, so you have to adapt recipes or they will turn out wrong.  The lemon bars, for instance – I was making them in a bigger pan and it just didn’t work.  They were too thin and overbaked.  Last week, I hauled out my one 8x8 pan, which is dairy, and made the whole lemon bars dairy just so I could use the pan.  (Well, they were pareve, but used dairy things for cutting and squeezing and grating and mixing the lemons.) Other things just taste weird, or disappointi...

In all the years I have been playing with yeast and homeschooling , I have never, ever thought to mix the two!  Luckily, Ms Frizzle did, and last month’s Magic School Bus science kit was all about bacteria and fungi.  Oooey gooey fun! For all the exciting details, please see the full post over at my regular blog!   How many any other cool ways are there to use baking to teach science???

Once again, we had some friends over for what’s become an annual pre-Pesach ritual:  home matzah baking!   Not kosher-le-Pesach, of course, but still… fun. Recalling pitfalls from previous years, I vowed to: have enough rolling pins this year (everybody wants to roll!)* mix the dough by hand (no mixer – too sticky and, surprisingly, slower) no pasta roller – it produces more professional results but also, surprisingly, slower (previous years’ posts:  5772 , 5771 , 5770 (just us, no friends)) I also pre-measured the flour and water, so each bowl had 1 cup of flour, with 1/3 of a cup of water standing by to pour in. *NOTE:  To make sure I had enough rolling pins, I went to Home Depot yesterday and bought a 4-foot dowel (maybe 1.25” diameter?) and had them slice it into 4.  With a bit of sandpaper, a good washing, and a final oiling step, I had four perfectly useable kid-size rolling pins, for maybe $7-8.  (I did try Dollarama first...

I bragged here over the summer about Elisheva’s challah-baking efforts while away from home.   Well, over the last few years, it seems like she’s become the official birthday-cake baker for her circle of friends.  Usually, she does something simple, but last night, inspiration struck and she made this Hobbit-themed cake, presumably from a friend who is kind of into The Hobbit. She baked the half-round cake (this one was a cake mix, but usually she does them from scratch) in a metal mixing bowl, lined with tinfoil and sprayed very well, then hollowed out a little opening for the door.  I think it looks great!  (said the proud mama)      Later, she melted chocolate, cooled it on a piece of parchment, and added this cute little “doormat.” Now if only she’d learn to wash up her mixing bowls when she’s through…