Sabbath Meals

Shabbat meals, 5/20/05 and 5/21/05

For Friday night:
challah
baby artichoke and spinach risotto
cold gingered asparagus (Mollie Katzen Still Life with Menu)
baked tofu with wine
canned pineapple and store-bought baklavah

Saturday lunch:
invited out, brought a challah

Seudah Shlishit (Saturday supper)
deconstructed guacamole (avocado with tomato, sliced on a plate)
cold cereal with raisins and rice milk
leftovers

I barely cooked at all this week because I am determined to get my horrendously messy apartment into some kind of order. My husband is doing a lot of the work with me, plus we have some friends who are joining us in moving around all of our furniture. As you know if you have been reading this blog, my beloved grandmother died in February at the age of 95. She left me a lot of things, including furniture. Our apartment was already crammed with stuff. Books overflow every shelf, and we have some kind of problem with filing our papers. Also there is the whole toddler element, a young enthusiastic household member who likes to put things away but not necessarily where his parents think they go.

With help, we seem to be beating back the chaos. But that left me unenthusiastic about my ordinary routine of leisurely Friday cooking. My son really wanted to help me prepare baby artichokes again. As his vocabulary increases and his articulation improves, I find that "baby artichokes" is a phrase he can say very well! He likes snapping off the leaves. Using the basic formula in Sundays At Moosewood, I made a risotto. Somehow the fresh artichokes did not mess with the wine. My husband, who isn't that into artichokes, ate the risotto but now doesn't want to deal with the leftovers.

The asparagus recipe is really great, but I knew that because I've made it before. If you haven't, do. It has everything: it's sweet and sour, with garlic and ginger flavors and sesame oil and soy sauce. The ginger is like home-pickled ginger. I'm very psyched that Mollie Katzen put it on her website, that was so generous!

On Saturday we were invited to friends. They set up a room where my son could nap. I nursed him to sleep and then we sat down to our meal. My friend made a lot of recipes from Crescent Dragonwagon's book The Passionate Vegetarian. I really like Crescent Dragonwagon's authorial personna, but I had tried some of her recipes that were posted on Epicurious for Thanksgiving, and was not enthusiastic about either the process or the products. My friend's Dragonwagon picks were really good! My friend made the Moroccan carrot dip, an ersatz chicken salad made with tempeh that had poppy seed dressing, pineapple and grapes, a nice salad with cucumber and tomato, and plain steamed asparagus. I brought a challah I made on Friday and everyone tore into it and ate it in the first five minutes of the meal.

As usual, even though I have cookbooks coming out of my ears, my hosts had new cookbooks that I coveted. I was especially excited to see the new Gil Marks book of Jewish vegetarian recipes from around the world. I can't tell you much about it though.

Okay, tell me if you think this is funny: my husband teases me whenever one of us drinks Constant Comment tea by making constant comments about it. No, huh? It really cracks me up. Am I a cheap date?

Challah

I have been making the challah recipe in Peter Reinhart's The Bread Baker's Apprentice for a few months now. I finally feel that I have made enough changes to his recipe to call this my own variation. I made it this past week with both honey and sugar. My husband thinks maybe the one with all honey is better. If you want to try that, add 6 tablespoons honey to the wet ingredients and omit the sugar all together.

dry ingredients:
6 cups organic unbleached white bread flour with germ
3 tablespoons wheat germ
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
2 teaspoons rapid-rise yeast (SAF Instant)
3 tablespoons sugar

wet ingredients:
1 cup water
3 egg yolks (save the whites for the crust)
3 whole eggs  (extra large eggs)
3 tablespoons olive oil
3 tablespoons honey
1 cup organic yellow raisins

Crust:
3 egg whites
sesame seeds

Put the dry ingredients in your mixing bowl. I have been using a Kitchen Aid mixer because it makes it easier to do this with a two-year-old helper! Mix the dry ingredients together briefly, then gradually mix in the wet ingredients. When the two parts are full incorporated, knead the dough. I do this by switching from the mixing to the dough hook attachment of the mixer. I let the Kitchen Aid knead the dough for 6 minutes at medium speed, but then I generally also turn it out onto the tabletop to knead a bit by hand to make sure it's really right. I do the windowpane test--I stretch a piece of dough between my fingers to see if it will make a translucent window--to check that the gluten has developed. I put the dough in a well-oiled bowl and cover the top with purple plastic wrap.

(Why purple? Because that's the stuff left over from making Purim packages.)

Let the dough rise for an hour and then knead it for a couple of minutes. Then put it back in the bowl and let it rise until doubled. I wet my finger and insert it in the dough to see if the indentation fills in. When it does not, I know it's doubled.

Divide the dough into nine balls. Let the balls rest 10 minutes. (This step is part of the special secret baker's knowledge a person gains from Peter Reinhart, who is the man! I have to put the balls on a baking tray and put the tray out of the reach of the baby.) Roll each ball into a snake and then braid three snakes together per loaf. Put the loaves on the pans of your choice on top of some parchment paper. Brush the loaves with egg white and then spray them with oil with your Misto, and cover them with plastic wrap or a linen dishtowel. Let them rise until they are quite big, maybe another hour? Preheat the oven to 375. Then remove the covers, brush them with egg white again and sprinkle with sesame seeds.

Bake 20 minutes and then switch the loaves around in the oven. Then bake another 15 minutes or so, or until the loaves sound hollow when tapped.

My son went through a phase of tapping all baked goods because of seeing me tapping the challah! He still likes to tap the challah. This past week he woke from his nap and said "Loaves! Tap tap!" and tapped them. He knows a lot about baking bread, thanks to helping me bake and to reading the Reinhart book with me and looking at the photos.

question from a reader: Shabbat meals for hire?

A reader from Israel wrote me to ask if I knew where he could pre-pay to eat Shabbat meals in Manhattan. If you know the answer to this question, please comment or email me. Also, I would love to list contacts in other cities where a tourist can pay someone to invite them to Shabbat dinner or lunch. I had some lovely meals with a woman in Amsterdam who does this.

Update: I have two leads, so far, on the Manhattan question.

There is a website, www.oneg_shabbat.org, that sets people up with hospitality. I went to check it and it is down right now. Bummer.

The Carlebach schul, the New York synagogue where the late R. Shlomo Carlebach was spiritual leader,  hosts people. The website for that is here.

I will post more as I learn more, so please feel free to lay it on me!

Cute blog post

My mom never cooked brussel sprouts, even though my dad really likes them. I think there is a theme here, that my mom cooks only vegetables that she likes. Anyway I never pushed myself to learn to make them, because the times I tried they were either mushy or tough. Even with the X on the bottom!

Isachandra says:

Brussel sprouts are my new girlfriend.

Okay, how can you resist that? I might buy some at the store when I'm there with my son later this morning. I'll let you know if I do.

Shabbat meals 5/13/05-5/14/05

Friday night:
Challah
Carrot Rice Pilaf (from Claudia Roden's New Book of Middle Eastern Food)
Spinach with Chickpeas (Claudia Roden)
Baby artichoke pie with crumb crust
Roasted Zucchini with Lemon
Beets in orange sauce
sorbet and Tofutti Cuties

Saturday lunch:
leftovers of all of the above plus
guacamole
green salad
fruit salad (mango, orange, apple, yellow raisins)

Seudah Shlishit:
salad and cold cereal with raisins

My two year old son loves to prepare baby artichokes, we did them together for the first time during Passover. When we were in the store on Wednesday I mentioned that we would buy them and he became quite enthusiastic! I know he is bolder about actually taking off enough leaves than I am. You have to break off so many leaves that the remaining leaves are yellow at the bottom and all the same length, then you slice off the tops of the leaves so that the artichoke looks squared off and yellow. So there I had my nicely trimmed flowers--I like to leave on some of the stem, because it's tasty, and that makes them look even more floral. I thought, how about a quiche? I improvised a crust based on one of the ones in Mollie Katzen's Enchanted Broccoli Forest. (I see that I have linked to the New Enchanted Broccoli Forest, and my tattered copy is the old edition.  I learned a lot of cooking skills from the old book and haven't seen the new one.)

Anyway, my pie. It was just okay, not very special. Plain, unmarinated artichokes discolor the custard in a quiche, at least if you make the custard with rice milk they do. I also included a hard boiled egg at the last minute, and the chemicals in the egg yolk and the artichoke did not like each other and made some weird bright green streaks. Everyone who ate the pie liked it, but it was in my estimation not a successful experiment.

Also, you shouldn't make Persian rice with brown basmati if you have never successfully made it with white basmati rice. Everyone thought the carrot rice was great because it was sweet, but I am not sure that I did that right!  If only I had an Iranian grandmother stashed away somewhere that I could call. I bet one of my readers does. I have an Iraqi-Jewish grandma (a friend's mom) but she can't really cook at all. I went to interview her for a class I was teaching on Jewish food and we wound up talking about the history of Zionism and how she learned to shoot pool in the Zionist youth movement in India in the 1940s. But I digress, big time.

The beets were mind-bogglingly delicious. Try that recipe, it's good. I used raspberry vinegar, too.

Apparently authentic guacamole is made with fruit, at least according to Diana Kennedy. I did not make authentic guacamole. I made midwestern Ashkenazi Jewish guacamole. I finely chopped a shallot because I knew that the last time we had guac, the red onion was way too strong, and I added that to three mashed avocados and the juice of two lemons. Then I finely chopped a very wintery tomato and mixed it in. It was good. I guess tomatoes are fruit. Why am I self-conscious about cultural appropriation with Mexican food and not at all worried about chickpeas and spinach?

We had Friday night guests, two exhausted friends. One is doing finals--in school and also working-- and one is pregnant (and working). I found pregnancy hormones like a 40 week soporific. My son has been increasingly interested in social interaction with adults in his life, and was very happy to have our friends there. For Saturday lunch, we had our very close friend and a new person from schul, but my son napped through the whole meal.

My husband encouraged me to blow off schul on Saturday morning because we got a late start and he was worried that I wouldn't get the baby home on time for his nap. Usually he does the nap but this week wanted to read Torah for the anniversary of his bar-mitzvah. My son and I took a walk around the neighborhood and went to the playground. Does it count if you hear the leyning practiced around the house? My son has decided that he wants to know more about the tikkun (the book from which one practices cantillation of the Torah portion.) There is something very sweet about this. My friends' child has begun to say "Torah! Torah!" when the scroll is removed from the ark. I know at two my son is below the official age of education in Judaism, but I want him to have many strong and positive impressions under his belt.

Shabbat meals 5/6/05 and 5/7/05

Friday evening:
homemade challah (still working with the Peter Reinhart recipe)
red lentil soup
scallion pancakes
cauliflower curry (from Julie Sahni's Classic Indian Vegetarian and Grain Cooking)
ginger-coconut rice

Saturday lunch:
sushi
salad: pre-washed baby arugula, avocado, zucchini, oranges
fruit salad: mango, pineapple
lady fingers, chocolate

Seudah Shlishit:
leftovers of all of above

I had a job interview for a regular part-time grant-writing gig on Friday at 1PM. It's for a grass-roots women's anti-poverty organization, and it sounds like it could be fun! It was not very smart for me to decide on Friday morning to make a brand new recipe right before the interview, however. For some reason, I thought I would have time during Passover to make the Matzo-Scallion Pancakes I made last year during Passover. But since I didn't, I had four bunches of scallions that I needed to use. I have Kenneth Lo's New Chinese Vegetarian Cooking,  but his scallion pancake recipe measured the flour by weight and didn't have that many scallions in it. I picked the Martin Yan recipe because it had all measurements in cups! It was a fun recipe to make, even though I was a bit pressed for time. The dough is just flour and water, you get the flaky pastry effect by layering fat and the scallions in the rolling-out process. I used white bread flour, and I think I might try it again with whole wheat pastry flour. It might come out better with a flour with less gluten, and I'd like us to get the benefit of the whole flour.

I adapted a Julie Sahni recipe for coconut sesame pilaf. We didn't have any coconut milk, but on impulse I had purchased a can of coconut juice for the first time. It is a lot lower in fat and calories than coconut milk anyway. I cooked brown basmati rice in the coconut juice with some ginger. Then I toasted some shredded coconut, some sesame seeds, and some mustards seeds in a dry pan on the stove, and added that to the rice with some salt. It was very tasty rice, even if nothing like Sahni's original recipe.

I made my sushi rice before shabbat and then made some rolls right before lunch. I am not an expert sushi maker, I followed the directions on the nori package and just put in some vegetables and did some with smoked salmon as well. The sushi looked better than my past attempts, maybe because I put in so much rice. I used the sushi rice instructions in Japanese Vegetarian Cooking by Patricia Richfield, though I didn't sweeten my own vinegar, just used the sweetened stuff from the grocery store.

I have to say that this cooking went very well and didn't feel difficult at all, even though I took a break in the middle to get ready for and go to this interview across town. I put on my informal interview outfit from last year and it didn't fit very well. I have put on weight. I am trying not to care. I find that challenging! My husband said, "Well, this plain pink top would go with that skirt." It was a pajama top. It did go. I wore it. I put a jacket over it. I hope they didn't notice. When I got home (it was an absurdly long ride home!) I put on my pajama bottoms to eat dinner.

We didn't have any guests this weekend.  We did go to schul on Saturday, and that was good.  My kitchen is clean, and that is great. I have to admit that I am feeling a bit down about  things, though. It's hard to get motivated. I am feeling--malaise. I could tell that when I was driving home from the interview and wanted to call someone on the cell phone to chat. I felt like, "Oh, it's such a pain for my friends to have to chat with me, they are so busy and I am so boring." Oy.  I've always been a little boring, I think. I just get into a groove and talk about things obsessively, like feminism, going to the gym, or lactation--or novels I loved that no one else has or wants to read.

I am looking forward to yoga tomorrow, I hope I can get my head together--maybe if I put it below my feet.

The Knaidel Quest

I got my current favorite recipe for matzah balls from a very old cookbook put out by the Manischewitz company in 1930. My friend who is the scion of several rabbinical lines had it in her house and gave it to me. It has lost its cover but here is how I would cite it if I were writing a paper:

F.O. Gahr, Tempting Kosher Dishes Prepared from World Famous Manischewitz's Matzo Products. Cinncinati, Ohio: The B. Manischewitz Company, 1930.

(The author's name is kind of buried in the title page--Miss F.O. Gahr, B.S., Domestic Science Expert and Graduate in Institutional Management. If anyone is related to this Miss Gahr, please contact me.)

The book opens in both directions--that is, all the recipes are available both in English and in Yiddish. In 1930, there were still a lot of Jews left in the world who were more comfortable cooking from a Yiddish cookbook. Some items in the English table of contents refer to the Yiddish section only. I have not attempted to translate those recipes yet, but I might. I have not been bold enough to try much of the book besides the matzah ball recipes.

There are some amusing oddities in this book, including Boston Chremsel, which is a sort of pasty with a dough of eggs, matzah meal, chicken shmaltz, water and salt filled with honey-sweetened beets seasoned with ginger and ground nuts. And iced tea, they have you add iced tea. You make a sort of hamantashen out of this. I have not tried to make this, for sooooo many reasons. But if you double dare me, I'll go out and buy some Nyafat and make them for you next year. I know, Nyafat is made of hydrogenated oil. Don't worry, you will be fine.)

There are something like 25 dumpling recipes in this book, though some of them sound horrible. Liver Knoedel, anyone? The one I think most resembles my late great aunt's recipe is Fluffy Knoedel. (Since she never gave her children the recipe, I will never know if this is how she did it. This is a paternal great aunt, not the childless maternal great aunt who carefully wrote all her recipes down for her beloved niece, my mom.)

Fluffy Knoedel
3 eggs
3/4 cup Manischewitz's Matzo Meal
1/2 tsp. salt

Beat whites until stiff, then beat in yolks of eggs. Fold in matzo meal and salt. Let stand 5 minutes, then form balls with a spoon and drop into boiling soup stock or salt water. Cover and cook 45 minutes. Recipe makes 12 large balls.

Obviously, the recipe works quite well with any brand of matzah meal, transliterated any way you like. If you want your eggs to work well, bring them to room temperature by placing the uncracked eggs in a bowl of warm tap water for 15 minutes right before you break and separate them. I also recommend that you add some salt to the egg whites for more successful fluffing.

Now, as you know, there are a lot of theories about how to make matzah balls come out light. Some add seltzer, water, or soup stock. I found that worked pretty well with recipes that call for additional fat (over and above the egg yolks.) Some call for baking powder. Of course, baking powder will help you make fluffier matzah balls, but I have never tried it. It seems crazy to me that Ashkenazi rabbis will allow you to use chemical leavening agents and not put their heksher on something with corn syrup in it. It's very inconsistent. Not that I'm dying to have corn syrup on Pesach, all those folks who like the original coke formula would be quite upset. The most common way to make matzah balls is to make the batter, chill it in the fridge for an hour or more, and then plunge balls of it into a pot of boiling salted water. Everyone agrees, do not lift the lid during cooking. Of course, if you forget and lift the lid because you can't remember what's in the pot, you will still get tasty knaidlach. Especially if your husband, like mine, doesn't care if they are fluffy or not.

Some people really prefer their matzah balls to be dense. I read in some book that South African Jews, who have preserved Litvak culinary traditions, put some hardboiled egg yolk in the center of their knaidlach. Aha, here is a recipe--no, it's not hardboiled egg yolk in this one. Weirder than that, it's half the batter made with yolk and spiced with cinnamon and half made with white, with a ball of the yolk batter inside the egg white batter.

Next year, maybe.

Shabbat dinner 4/29 and the end of Pesach

For Friday night dinner, I made:

Vegetable soup with matzah balls
Braised baby artichokes
Salmon patties
Stuffed zucchini
Cauliflower kugel
organic grape tomatoes (for the baby)
Russian dressing with homemade mayonnaise
Fruit salad (mango, banana, orange and date)

Because it was nearly the end of Pesach and I couldn't get any tomato sauce, because it was nearly the end of Pesach and I accidentally melted our one plastic measuring cup on the stove, because it was nearly the end of Pesach and I didn't have any more patience, I did a lot of improvising.

There is a great stuffed zucchini recipe in Debra Wasserman's No Cholesterol Passover Recipes book, but I didn't have tomato sauce, so I improvised something equally great. I chopped up the last tomato and a half in the house and cooked it with onions in olive oil and added the zucchini innards, sugar, salt and pepper, and I mixed all of that with some matzah meal and some chopped cilantro. I have been using a bottle of whole mixed peppercorns in different colors (it has a grinder on the top) and that gave a great flavor to the zucchini.

This time, I made the soup for the matzah balls by frying onion, shallot and garlic in olive oil until golden, then adding with the water a diced sweet potato, a white potato, some zucchini, and a lot of grated fresh ginger. It came out very well, I think in part because I let the soup simmer for a couple of hours on the stove.

I know I mainly write as a vegetarian here, and I am mostly vegetarian, but sometimes I eat fish. Sort of like a macrobiotic diet, except not really--more like occasional guilty and nostalgic inconsistency. (Some people, my mom for example, consider fish to be legitimately vegetarian, but I do not. I think Jewish culture like many others does not consider fish to be meat, and that is why it is pareve in the kosher laws. But I still feel weird about eating it. Kind of like I feel about the second day of yom tov. This parenthetical comment is turning into a full-blown post so I'd better stop here.) I made salmon patties by mashing up two small cans of salmon with a little lemon juice, salt and peppper, chopped onion, matzah meal and eggs. I fried the whole mashed mess in olive oil. My husband didn't try them I don't think, but our guest and I were transported with nostalgia. She said it was just like her mom used to make. I almost never cook fish at home, for the simple reason that the cat has a little fit until you pay her the fish tax.

I also spontaneously invented the cauliflower kugel. Here is my recipe (I jotted it down before Shabbat so I would have it to give you!)

A Passover Cauliflower Kugel
4 eggs
1 large shallot
1 head cauliflower, boiled for 10 minutes and mashed
approx. 3-4 tablespoons matza meal

Place the whole, unbroken eggs in a bowl of warm tap water to come to room temperature for 15 minutes. Dice the shallot and sautee it in about 2 tablespoons of olive oil until golden. Break and separate the eggs into two vessels. Beat egg whites until stiff with a pinch of salt. (If they are warmed up, you can do this pretty easily with just a wire whisk and your hands!) Mash cauliflower with fried shallot, egg yolks, matzah meal, salt and pepper. Fold beaten egg whites into cauliflower mixture.
Bake for one hour at 350 F.

Unfortunately, I had not purchased any paprika for the holiday. I am sure this kugel would be better with a dusting of paprika on top, or with a very small amount of chopped herbs.Our friend who came to dinner (the one who finds everything delicate) can't abide the taste of dill, so I didn't put dill in the fish, or in the kugel, or in the soup. I did put some in the soup before I froze it for future meals, though.

Junk food on Passover

There are many categories of junk food on Passover. There is prepared food that is kosher for Passover, there are candies and snacks, and there are sweets you make from scratch. Plus the entire phenomenon of making everything out of oil, eggs and matzah meal, it just can't be healthy!

Some would argue that nearly every processed food you can buy for Passover is junk. For one thing, they are almost all made with cottonseed oil. You can taste that this is not the best thing, it often has a slightly off flavor. I totally don't want to get into the dreaded fats and oils discussion, I have read a lot and mainly it seems like people who advocate healthful diets do not agree on which fats and oils are healthful. Saturated fats are bad! No, they are good! Polyunsaturated oils are health promoting! No, they are unstable and rancid! Aargh.

Don't worry, you will be fine. But I am using olive oil anyway.

My number one nomination for disgustingly junky Passover food is the fake wasabi sauce made out of cottonseed oil mayo and regular old horseradish, and dyed green with food coloring. It resembles wasabi in no way whatsoever and is just disappointing.

I did make my own mayonnaise from scratch this year. Why? Because while we were visiting my parents, I made my baby Russian dressing out of Passover mayo (probably made with cottonseed oil) and Passover ketchup. He LOVED it. He began asking for "salad dressing" and dipping everything in it. The Passover ketchup is extra sweet and contains cloves. When we got back home my husband got some of the ketchup but the mayo was unavailable, so I made some with my kosher for Passover mini Cuisinart, organic egg yolk, organic lemon juice, and olive oil. It was splendid with the disgustingly sweet ketchup. Do I normally make concoctions out of raw eggs? I do not. Some eggy madness grips me at this time of year.

This brings me to another point. Many Jewish people who don't buy mayonnaise, or candy, or cookies, or soda pop, or potato chips, during the year, buy them kosher for Passover. Why is that? Or maybe it's only people who live in urban areas with big kosher supermarkets. It's like we lose our minds! I did not do that this year...as much. I did buy a can of chocolate macarooons before the holiday. My husband bought marmalades (the candies also known as fruit slices, or jelly candies).

He also bought potato chips. My mom bought pop (which I did not drink, amazingly--I usually find it difficult to resist) hard candies and fruit taffy. She used to also buy Israeli chewing gum, when we were growing up. It was really weird, we never had pop or gum in our house, and suddenly we had pop, gum, fruit slices, hard candies with soft goo in the middle, homemade cake, homemade brownies, and usually chocolates brought by guests.

Now why do we feel compelled to create so many amazing and strange cakes and candies for Pesach? We make them from scratch when we don't buy them.  You know that now that the holiday is over, Jewish families are looking ruefully at several cans of macaroons, chocolate covered matzah, chocolate lollipops. My husband is sad because he didn't get any Barton's seder mints or his mom's special sponge cake. On Saturday I had the most delicious thing, my friends made it but I am definitely making it next year.

I am not sure why Pesach is so junk-filled. In our house we also eat a lot of vegetables at the same time. Maybe the junk food is just to prove we can?