After however-many hundreds of years, it's not often that you come across a NEW way of making challah. So when Seth Brandes shared his "dad hack" for making challah "without messing with braiding the dough," I passed it on earlier this week. (Why isn't anything moms do in the kitchen considered a hack?) I also decided to try it out.  Instead of my usual portioning, balling, rolling, snaking, and braiding steps, I formed the dough into elongated ovals and got ready to go to town.

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...

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...

     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...

If only I had taken a picture.  But Shabbos was early, one of the earliest of the year.  And now, they’re all gone.  I hope that tells you how yummy these are.  Like, “I can’t-believe-these-are-pareve” yummy. Imagine hunks of gooey caramel, topped with lightly toasted pecans and just the right amount of dark chocolate.  You know, sort of like Turtles?  Except these guys are easy to make at home, out of regular coconut milk.  And no, they really truly do NOT taste like coconut.  (Not that I mind the taste of coconut; it’s the texture I can’t stand.) Special tools? I usually hate nonstick, but I happen to have this heavy-duty nonstick muffin top pan .  This also comes in handy before Rosh Hashanah to make honey cake tops , which are absolutely divine.  You could also use a whoopie pie pan, or make these in silicone baking cups .

So you made bread.  Good for you! Now what do you do with those ooky, ooky fingers?  Try one of these three magic tricks to get your hands sparkly again in no time. 1)  Get scraping Grab your trusty bench scraper .  It doesn’t have to be fancy, but I haven’t found any other tool that works as well.  Now, just like you’re stripping paint from the wall, gently SCRAAAAAAAPE the dough together.  Off your palms, the backs of your hands, between your fingers, wherever it’s stuck.  Once you have most of the dough loosened, you can rub that around your hands to get the rest off.  Don’t throw it away.  Just ball it up and toss it in wherever the rest of your dough is rising.  2)  Fight flour with flour

When you love baking as much as I do, you become an evangelist. After we moved to Israel, and our whole lives were topsy-turvy, the only time I felt like things were at all “normal” were when I was making bread.  Those breads were rudimentary at first – hey, we didn’t even have an oven.  But they kept me grounded.  I was so ecstatic when all our possessions arrived, including my gorgeous cast iron loaf pans, plastic dough bucket , and other beloved bakeware, accumulated over the years.  It was time to get my hands floury and really start baking again. I love how centered and grounded baking makes me feel, but can’t help wondering why other people seem to think it’s hard, or complicated, or just not something they have space for in their lives.  We all have time and space to make bread.  Sure, it takes a while, but very little of that is active prep time.  A bread that takes 36 hours from start to finish may have less than ten minutes of actual st...

Every once in a while, I have to ask someone to pass me something in the kitchen… and sometimes, I get stuck.  Consider, for example, the humble spatula. Oh… unless you mean Or – did you mean Yeah, it’s hard to tell.  What?  You call this last one a RUBBER spatula?  Well, good for you, but doesn’t that mean you think it’s a spatula?  “Rubber” is just an adjective, after all… it shouldn’t have the power to make you hand me the totally wrong implement. A few years ago, I started noticing another entrant in the spatula competition.  Happily, the world seems to have acknowledged the confusion and informally dubbed it the SPOONULA.  You could also call it a SCOOPULA, because it’s scoopier than a regular spatula.  But in my head, I admit… it’s always going to be a SPLATULA.  (Why?  It holds more stuff… and stuff goes splat.)   Some people call the first kind of spatula a TURNER, like as in a “pancake turner” or “fish ...

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...

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 ...