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 ...

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. ...

One of the basic baking ingredients that’s particularly tough to come by in Israel is corn syrup.  And some Fridays, it seems like every single recipe I want to try – whether it’s pecan pie (or the pecan bars I made today!), peanut brittle , or something else – relies on a generous quantity of the stuff.  Corn syrup in a recipe isn’t just for flavour, so as most people have found, you usually can’t just substitute something else, like honey, maple syrup, or straight sugar.  Corn syrup does some kind of magic that I can’t explain and helps things thicken up and set, especially in candy making.  (If you know, feel free to explain it to me in the comments!) But there is one thing you can substitute:  INVERT SUGAR. Invert sugar is a sugar-water syrup that’s been boiled to 236°F (114°C) and then cooled off slightly.  At that temperature, the sugar turns… well, magical.  Again, explain it to me in the comments.  But essentially – it turns into cor...

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 ...

Chilly weather?  Dough refusing to rise?? I feel your pain. It feels absolutely insane to be kvetching about the cold here in Israel, but the fact is, it DOES get cold here.  Not as cold as some places, but because of that, many homes don’t have central heating and you have to rely on patchy warming from air conditioners and inefficient space heaters.  Besides which, houses are built out of concrete, which not only holds onto cold, but it also feels damp—often because it is. So the cold can be very intense here.  And that can make bread very, very grumpy. Over the last few weeks as things chilled, I’ve noticed that breads are not so happy rising with the frigid air, especially when things dip down below 20 (Celsius).  After a few attempts to steam dough (setting it in a covered bowl set into another bowl or basin filled with hottish water), which led to a scare at one point when the water turned out to be too hot, I was ready to try something else....