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 ...

Are you making your chicken soup all wrong??? If you're like me, you've always believed chicken soup has to cook low and slow -- the lower and slower the better.  Who doesn't know that? But after I shared here about my recent experience using the pressure cooker to create a dish that I might ordinarily have used the crockpot for, I went back and read the article by food wizard Kenji Lopez-Alt about why pressure cookers totally knock slow cookers out of the water . And his main example is... chicken soup.  Well, stock, but hey, you say potato, I say po-taaaaa-toe.  Because what is our trusty Shabbos soup if not stock with some veggies and kneidlach tossed in? For about 20 years now, Wednesday has been Soup Day around here.  Bones go in, cooking low and slow.  In Toronto, we did the soup overnight on Wednesday and fridged it Thursday morning (or, in the winter, set it out on the porch to freeze!).  Here in Israel, we do it on Wednesday afternoon after ou...

What kind of flavours are you craving this winter???? Winter is still here in Israel, and if you're like me, you may be desperate for warm, flavourful recipes that are a little out of the ordinary.  That's the case with tonight's super-easy pressure cooker chicken dinner. This recipe is unusual for this site.  Why? Well, first of all, I don't even remember if I've ever posted any meat recipes here.  Certainly, there aren't many.  But winter time is meat time as far as I'm concerned. Second of all, because it calls for a pressure cooker, which is a big and cluttery piece of kitchen equipment, and in general, I prefer to go low-tech and skip the gadgetry. But I like my pressure cooker enough to have brought it with us when we made aliyah and it's growing on me every single year.  A couple of weeks ago, I decided to crowdsource my supper-making decision.  I had a bunch of chicken, I  had enough time, so I asked my foodies group on Facebook whether ...

I wasn’t a big meat cook in Canada.  We ate a lot of chicken, but I was kind of shy about beef.  Still, I managed to make some acceptable roasts from time to time – meat that was tender enough and tasty enough that we could enjoy it together on special occasions. All that changed when we moved to Israel, where all the meat cuts are different from what I was used to and nothing, it seemed, was tender and tasty except the most expensive bits, like steak (which always seems to turn out tough when we make it at home, but we don’t mind because it’s delicious). But some of the English speakers here were chatting on our WhatsApp group last week about roasting beef, and it made me really want to try it again –even after having been burned numerous times.  So on Thursday evening, we bought a nice little #6 roast, which according to this indispensible meat chart is called Fillet Medumeh (פילה מדומה), petit tender, or foreshank.  The page's owner, Marc Gottlieb, says i...

I keep forgetting to write about this and I SHOULDN'T, because this is a very cool product that I’m excited to tell you about. I actually bought this on impulse and didn't expect to like it so much, but I really believe it offers an interesting solution for some people (not everybody). Do you adore getting your hands into a fresh, powdery batch of dough?  If so, maybe this post isn't for you.  This post is for people who LOVE fresh bread, but HATE getting flour on their hands.  You know – like this: (if that picture, with all those floury fingers, makes you uncomfortable, you NEED to read on!) Powdery textures usually make me nuts (sand!!!), although for some reason, I'm okay with flour and bread-making.  But I have known a few people who are totally NOT okay with it, and for them, this product might be ideal. So… what is it? It's a silicone dough bag !  I saw these a while ago, first on Amazon and then on AliExpress, my preferred get-things-ch...

Has this ever happened to you?  You’ve been cooking up a storm, roasting a chicken, which fills up the house with all kinds of delicious fragrances while it's cooking, and then you bite into the chicken and... AAAAAACK!!!!  Dry!  Dry!  Dry! There are some things that taste as good as they smell.  But chicken is often not one of them.  Dry chicken is like the eleventh plague of Pesach.  (Just tying this in here to keep it seasonal!) And whole roast chicken is the WORST, hands-down.  The breast (my grandmother used to call it the "keel" to be polite, but I don't know if this ever caught on) is up there, proud and tall (we've bred our chickens to be built like this), while the lesser thighs (lots of kosher stores call them “backs” to be polite) bask in all the juices and generally turn out okay.  (This is the bit I usually eat.) Another problem with roasting a whole chicken?  By the time the thighs (way down at the botto...

It's taken over the gourmet world.  You pretty much wouldn't write a recipe that includes salt without it.  It's also an annoying fact of life for those of us googling "kosher" recipes - that yummy salt bumps up almost every recipe to the top of the list even if it's a recipe for bacon double cheeseburgers. First of all, you may already know that "kosher" salt is no more or less kosher than any other salt.  That is, it's kosher, but so is table salt, coarse salt, sea salt, Himalayan pink mountain salt , and every other form of pure salt. So if you eat kosher and cook kosher, you CAN use kosher salt.  But you don’t have to. So why is it called kosher ? That’s actually just a mistake.  This flattish crystalline form of salt is actually kosher-ING salt - the kind of salt used to "kasher" meat to make it kosher. Most kosher salt has air between relatively flat crystals.  So when you're using or substituting kosher salt,...

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...

When you want a chicken pot pie but are a) you only have one frozen pie crust (or don’t want to fuss with a top crust), and can’t even think of a b), why not make this EASY sweet-potato-dumpling topped version instead?  (if you are enthused by this idea, see also this post about putting cornbread on top of chili) You don’t even have to use meat!  Putting a quick bread on TOP of a moist, savoury dish (whether it’s meat or dairy or even vegan, as I have been known to do with roasted root vegetables and tofu) compensates for all the downsides of quick breads – namely that they tend to dry out quickly and be less full-bodied in flavour, while lacking the exquisite texture of true breads.  Baked on top of a yummy filling – whether you have a bottom crust or not – the quick bread (dumplings, cornbread , beer bread or any quick bread you like) stay moist, absorb flavour, and add texture and substance to round out a meal. (Technicality:  FYI, “quick bread” is the t...