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...

     What’s your go-to chicken recipe? One you can use for any given weekday or even, in a pinch, for Shabbos? One that just takes a few minutes to throw together? One you feel good about sending to other families in the community - or just keeping it and eating it yourself? Do you even have one? I didn’t used to, but I do now! And I'd love to share it with you. Many years ago, I was given Norene Gilletz's cookbook The Pleasures of Your Food Processor as a wedding present. Like a few cookbooks from this beloved Canadian food writer, it was actually

So my super-smart baker-almost-psychologist sister (aka Vegan Ukelele on YouTube ) has decided to branch out into super-smart musical baking videos.  Since she's vegan, almost everything will work for kosher kitchens as well. Did I mention she went to baking school and everything?  If she tells you something's good, it is . And her first video is all about one of my favourites: cornbread.  Or cornbread muffins.  It’s all in how you bake them up, as I’ll let her explain in the video, which I’m embedding below. Watching this video, so proud of my “sister-from-the-same-mother,” I had quite a few weird separated at birth moments, thinking in my head, "That's exactly what I would have said."  That was especially true because I was watching with NR, who has

Ya know, there's nothing like a sister!  Let's all head out onto our balconies at 6 p.m. tonight and clap for our sisters.  No?  All clapped out? I thought so. (if "clapped out" means something obscene, I don't want to know about it, so just leave me and my naivete in peace) This vegan sweet potato flatbread recipe from Teenuja at Veganlovlie kept popping up in various social-media channels, as recipes do during corona times, when suddenly everybody has time to cook.  And I kept batting it away, ignoring it, vaguely interested but not quite enough to actually try it. (Okay, I confess, maybe both the word "vegan" and the non-word "lovlie" deterred me a little... why pay money for a URL with a misspelling in it?) And then my sister, who happens to be vegan, happened to mention that she'd happened to try it.  Which got those gear-wheels a-turnin', or whatever it is that gear-wheels do... and away I went the very next day. ...

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 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

Need a little something to bring an ordinary weekday over to the sunny side? Here’s a way to elevate rice from a humble side dish to a glorious main course for one person, perfect for weekday lunch or light supper?  I don't usually talk about cooking for one, for the obvious reason that I live with several other people.  But when the kids are off at school all day, sometimes I want to invest a few minutes into making something truly delicious that’s just for me. There aren't many foods as simple and comforting as rice, and though this fried rice dish has a number of steps, it's simple enough to prepare in the background while I’m working, and the end result is flavourful and incredibly comforting.  There are two possible variations -- "Indian" and "Chinese" (I'm using quotation marks because I don't want to pretend that these are authentic flavours...) that are equally simple to prepare. This is why I love working from home – I can’t ...

When I was little, my father went to India for a few weeks with his best friend.  There was some sort of classic Bollywood plot -- an arranged marriage for the friend which needed to be thwarted so he could marry the love of his life back in Toronto, something like that. The actual plot doesn't matter.  What matters is that he came home with a love of all things Indian, from delicate little nose rings to Bollywood cinema to the delicious, flavourful treats he'd eaten all over the country.  We were lucky because Toronto had a nice little Indian village where you could browse in sari shops before or after eating your fill of spicy curries and savoury flatbreads of all kinds, topped off with an unbelievable fudge my brother and I couldn't stop making fun of because of its unfortunate name:  Barfi. Yes, there is an actual dessert with the word "barf" in it.  As tiny tots,

When you’re overwhelmed with yamim tovim and absolutely desperate for flavour and CRUNCH, there’s absolutely nothing like samosas!  I’m making these as part of an India-themed sukkah meal, which I hope to post the entire menu for at some point over the next little while, but you could absolutely serve these delicious crunchy bites all on their own, and fill them up with whatever savoury filling you happen to enjoy. I happen to think Indian flavours go particularly well in the sukkah – whether your sukkah nights are chilly, like ours were in Toronto, or a little on the warm side, as they definitely are here.  If your meal is pareve, there’s lots of opportunity for delicious milk-based Indian sweets for dessert – otherwise, whatever you normally serve is just fine. One reason I love these samosas is that you bake them in the oven, making them slightly healthier than a deep-fried treat, while these wrappers stay super-crispy no matter how you cook them.  It’s the satis...

Have you tried cauliflower lately? I know, it’s been around for a bazillion years, but trust me – today’s cauliflower ain’t, as they say, your bubby’s cauliflower, steamed or boiled, mushy, drenched in cheese sauce.  Not that there’s anything wrong with cheese sauce (slurp!). I admit I'm a latecomer to the cauliflower revolution.  But this versatile veg, which is showing up these days in everything from pizza crusts to vegan tacos , has won me over totally and utterly. I mean, honestly, what's not to love? - You can buy it frozen (no checking for bugs!) and just cook normally - It's colourless so it can look like whatever you want - It happily takes on the flavours of whatever you cook it with - It's low-carb (okay, I don't care about this one much, but some people do!) I mean, basically, cauliflower is the tofu of veggies.  Or, like the midrash says about mann (manna), the food the Jewish people ate in the desert, if you were righteous en...

How do you feel about coleslaw??? I’ll be honest – I’ve always hated it.  I just found it bland and uninspiring.  Of course, I was used to the KFC style of coleslaw, which is essentially pureed or finely chopped-up cabbage with a ton of mayonnaise.  Just not much to get excited about there. This one’s from Popeye’s, not KFC, but I’m sure you get the idea: One more complicating factor in our coleslaw lives was this:  one of our kids hates mayonnaise with a passion.  Cannot stand to be

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...

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....

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,...

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)....

     How hangry do you and your kids get in the morning?  (Or afternoon, depending on how late you've slept in and/or procrastinated.) Around here, the answer is... VERY. These quick, easy, eggy muffins are exactly what you need:  the cure for Hangry.  Shh… don’t tell anybody: they’re basically little mini-quiches, just without a crust. These are sometimes called "scrambled egg muffins."  But on most sites, you'll find them chock-full of some type of meat that just won't work in a kosher kitchen.  Pork, ham and bacon are all super-popular at breakfast time, apparently. Even if you could use some kosher kind of meat, you'd miss out on all the cheesy goodness of these delighful, bite-sized breakfast treats.  So why bother?  Just toss in lots of veggies and you'll never miss the bacon, I promise. Make your life super-easy and prepare these in reusable silicone muffin cups.  I didn’t used to like the idea...

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...

You might have guessed that I haven’t been a college student for some time now. But that doesn’t mean I’m not still addicted to one of the staples of college-student life.  I don’t feed it to my family, but when I’m looking to treat myself, one of my favourite indulgences is… ramen noodles. You can find all sorts of articles online about how ramen is the perfect college food because it’s something like 20 cents a packet.  That’s not quite true if you’re cooking kosher.  Kosher ramen has always been a little more of a luxury; I don’t think we ever found it for less than $1.99 in Toronto.  Here in Israel, it’s about 4nis (about $1), though it’s sometimes on sale for less (like 5 for 10nis).   These aren’t recipes, more like suggestions.  The key is to not try to do too much at any one time.  Too many flavours will only clash with each other; choose two or three distinctive notes that will work well in harmony.  Here are some flavour no...