So what! Who cares!
03/18/11

I learned this week that you really should follow the recipe rule.  What’s the recipe rule, you say?  Well, there’s this old adage that you should follow a recipe exactly as it is written the first time you make it.  Don’t haphazardly add things.  Don’t get too creative.  You want to see if you can make the recipe correctly.  You want to make what they’re trying to get you to make.  I didn’t do that.  The results weren’t terrible.  They weren’t even bad, but I didn’t make what I was supposed to be making.

I love soups, stews and chilli.  I can’t get enough of ’em.  I enjoy the way you basically throw a bunch of things into a pot and then eat them a few minutes later.  It’s fun, messy and delicious.  I found a Minestrone recipe that I wanted to try.  I’ll give you the recipe and then tell you how NOT to make it.

WHAT?

1.5 lbs of lean stew beef, cut into bite-size cubes

2 tbsp olive oil

1 medium onion, chopped

1 large carrot, chopped

2 celery ribs, chopped

2 quarts beef stock

1 cup spaghetti sauce

4 cloves garlic, minced

1 14 oz can beans, drained, rinsed

1 28 oz can tomatoes, undrained

1 tbsp dried mixed Italian herbs

1 bay leaf

2 cups frozen mixed vegetables, thawed

1 cup elbow macaroni

Tabasco, salt, and pepper to taste

HOW?

In an 8 quart or larger Dutch oven, sear the meat in oil over high heat until very brown.  Remove beef from pan; pour iff excess fat and oil.  Add onions, carrots and celery and cook until tender, stirring around the bottom and edges of the pan.  Add the stock, browned meat, spaghetti sauce, garlic, beans, tomatoes, herbs, and a few grinds of fresh pepper.  Bring to a boil then cover and reduce heat to a simmer for about two hours.  Stir occasionally.  Add more water if needed during cooking.  Add the vegetables and the macaroni and cook another half hour.  Check the seasonings, salt, pepper and spice it up to your liking.

Now…this is a really simple recipe.  There’s not a lot of work involved here, right?  Right!  What did I do?  For starters I’m not in love with red meat.  I try to avoid it when I can.  I fried some ground turkey and used that instead.  I also substituted chicken broth for beef.  These things didn’t hurt the recipe.  I mean, I guess it’s weird that I used two different birds but I that didn’t bother me as much as the idea of using turkey meat in beef broth.  There should be a Kosher law about that.  Maybe there is and I’m being a huge jackass.  Whatever.  It sounds gross.  Through…it’s probably delicious.  The broth is where it all began.  The recipe calls for 2 quarts of broth.  I couldn’t figure out from the broth available to me at the store how much 2 quarts would be.  I know.  I’m ridiculous.  I just got the biggest size I could find after doing math in my head and said to hell with it.  It’d be close enough.  I was 2 cups short.  This didn’t bother me at the time.  Ha!  Then?  Then I looked at my bag of macaroni noodles.  When was I ever going to use all this pasta?  Never.  So?  Instead of the ONE CUP of pasta?  I threw in the whole bag.  It’s like 10 cups of pasta.  Two seconds later?  Almost all of the liquid was gone.  Why?  the pasta had soaked it all up.  I was staring at a bowl of what I’ll now call Italian Chilli.  It’s delicious.  We’ve been eating it all week, but it could have been better.

Always follow a recipe as written the first time you’re making it.  Well, I kinda believe that.  At least I learned something.  Do whatever you want.  So what!  Who cares!

Shabbat Shalom!

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It’s Cookie Time, It’s Cookie Time, It’s Cookie Ti-iiiime
03/14/11

$1 to the person who can name the AWESOME 80s movie this post’s title derives from.  We’ll give you a hint—it’s actually a song in the glorious movie.

Filling Planning

Ok, moving on–we’re less than a week from Purim so clearly, Jewhungry spent some time baking hamantaschen on Sunday.  Now, for those who don’t know, hamantaschen are a triangle-shaped cookies with delicious fillings (usually jelly-filled but can be anything from poppy-seed to prunes).  The name hamantaschen comes from the hat worn by the villan Haman as found in the Book of Esther (one of five megillot).   Purim is a fun holiday yes–one is supposed to drink until he/she cannot tell the difference between the good guys and the bad guys–however, it also has a really great story to it that folks can relate to and some of this jewhungry writer’s fondest memories from Israel come from dancing in the streets of Nachla’ot at Purim time.  But I digress–hamantaschen are good y’all, real real good.  It seems that most Jewish cooks don’t have one set hamantaschen recipe unless they inherited one from their mother that just sticks with them.  I’ve got an adorable mother-in-law who changes hanukah cookie recipes every year so I have to assume it’s the same for the hamantaschen. Now, the challenge with hamantaschen is keeping those bad boys sealed at the triangle points.  Our advice is to use water.  Water on raw cookie dough is like Elmer’s glue–it sticks.  Just keep a little dish of water by your side while forming the cookies and you’ll be all good.  Oh, and remember, a little goes a long way with the filling.  It’s a natural inclination to want to shove that delicious cookie pocket with as much jelly-love as possible but you got to SLOW YOUR ROLL.  That cookie will explode and become pizzataschen if you don’t tread lightly with your fillings.  Trust us, we know.

 

 

This year’s hamantaschen recipe is brought to you by Smitten Kitchen.  Now, most folks like to enjoy a parve hamantaschen but Smitten Kitchen had a recipe involving cream cheese so that was DEFINITELY going to happen.**

Ingredients:

Yield: About 22 2-inch cookies

8 tablespoons unsalted butter, softened
3 ounces cream cheese at room temperature
3 tablespoons sugar
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 teaspoon orange zest
1 1/3 cups plus 4 teaspoons flour
1/4 teaspoon salt

Various jams or preserves (we used strawberry and raspberry to which we added white chocolate chips for a nice raspberry/white chocolate mix) or prepared fillings (such as poppy seed or prune pastry or, if you’re SUPER healthy, you can go with Heath bar crunch filling like we did).

How??

Cream butter and cream cheese together until smooth. Add sugar and mix for one minute longer, then egg, vanilla extract, orange zest and salt, mixing until combined. Finally, add the flour. The mixture should come together and be a tad sticky. If it feels too wet, add an additional tablespoon of flour.

Form dough into a disc, wrap in plastic and refrigerate for at least an hour.

Preheat oven to 350°F.

To form the hamantaschen, roll out the dough on a well-floured surface until it is about 1/4-inch thick. Using a round cookie cutter (3 inches is traditional, but very large; I used one that was 2 1/2 inches), cut the dough into circles. Spoon a teaspoon of you filling of choice in the center. Fold the dough in from three sides and firmly crimp the corners and give them a little twist to ensure they stay closed.  Bake on a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper and bake until golden brown, about 20 minutes.

If you are new to baking and you don’t have cookie cutters, find the widest-rimmed drinking glass you have and use that.  If the dough is super sticky you will need to add a bit more flour along the way.  Super sticky dough will not stay together when baked.

 

 

Guest chef Marissa in the Miami kitchen!

 

 

Ready for the oven

 

 

Pizzataschen - a.k.a. exploded hamantaschen that look like pizzas

 

 

 

 

 

 

**Side note: If you visit the recipe on the Smitten Kitchen blog, you’ll notice she comments on the cookies not being kosher if they include butter.  Butter in a cookie doesn’t make it treif (or non-kosher), it just means that they are dairy and therefore not parve and cannot be eaten after meat.

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L’chaim!
03/08/11

I’ve spent a lot of time lately trying to figure out a new balance.  Am I doing the right things?  Am I working where I should work?  How can I turn the work I do into a better extension of who I am?  Where can I find more time to write, cook, see friends, perform, exercise, read, be a better Jew, spend time with my husband?  How do I balance everything?  Can I balance everything?  How do I get all these emails written and sent?  How do I get all these bills paid?  How do I turn my life in to the beautiful picture that I’ve always hoped and dreamed that it would be?  Yeah.  Welcome to my inner monologue (panic attack). I’m stretching really hard.  I’m trying a lot of new things.  I gotta say…I’m feelin’ a little worn out.

I decided to deal with my insanity the way everyone else does.  I went to the store, got some produce and some cheese and came home to make a veggie lasagna.  What.  Isn’t that what you do when you’re stressed out?  I find that sometimes when I cook?  I find a life lesson.  Don’t make a face at your computer and call me a cheese ball.  I’m serious.  Well, except for the part where I wanted to come up with something new and exciting to make for you…and I’m much calmer now.

So I started searching through my Paula Deen recipes.  I love turning her sinful southern treats into something that might be a little closer to healthy and totally Kosh.  It took me a minute or two to find something that didn’t use a gallon of bacon fat or some other weirdness.  I thought her veggie lasagna would be perfect, since it wouldn’t require any modifications.

I was running back and forth between the recipe and my stove and the TV (I sometimes over multi-task) and happened to notice that my dog had gotten sick.  Let’s just say that the smell stopped me in my tracks.  Yeah.  I had little surprises all over the house.  Luckily she’s the cutest dog that has ever lived so I can overlook the cleaning I’ll be doing for the rest of the night.  But…I couldn’t stop.  I had pots of boiling vegetables and tomato sauce to tend to!  I made sure Sally was going to live and continued with my kitchen drama.

Once everything was prepared and in separate bowls (you’ll understand this once you’re making the lasagna) I got a little stressed out about making my layers perfectly perfect.  There’s the sauce and the noodles then the cheese then the veggies then the other cheese and the other cheese.  Are my layers right?  Does it look OK? I kept going.  I built my Kosher Lasagna and tossed her in the oven.  As I tasted my little prize I realized that I had cooked a life lesson.  Stay with me here, I promise I have a point.  There are layers and layers of things.  Maybe you have too many veggies in this one spot.  Maybe there could have been more cheese over here.  Maybe there’s a shit storm happening in your living room.  You just keep going.  You keep building.  Everything works out.  The gifts come eventually.  The important thing is to remember to tressure them when they show up.

Ingredients

  • 2 cups thinly sliced zucchini
  • 2 cups thinly sliced yellow squash
  • 1 cup thinly sliced carrot
  • 1 cup thinly sliced fresh mushrooms
  • 1 medium onion, diced
  • 1/2 green bell pepper, diced
  • 1/2 red bell pepper, diced
  • 1 (14 ounce) can crushed tomatoes
  • 1 (8-ounce) can tomato sauce
  • 1/2 (6-ounce) can tomato paste
  • 1/2 tablespoon dried oregano
  • 1/4 cup sliced fresh basil
  • 2 cloves garlic, minced
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper
  • 1 (8-ounce) package cream cheese, softened
  • 3/4 cups small cottage cheese
  • 1 large egg, lightly beaten
  • 8 oven-ready, “no cook,” lasagna noodles
  • 12 slices provolone cheese, thinly sliced
  • 2 cups shredded mozzarella

HOW???

Combine zucchini, squash, carrot, mushrooms, onion and peppers with water to cover. Bring to a boil over medium-high heat; reduce heat, and simmer 10 minutes or until vegetables are tender. Drain well, and reserve.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.

Combine crushed tomatoes, tomato sauce, tomato paste, basil, oregano, garlic, salt, and pepper in a medium saucepan. Bring to a boil, reduce heat, and simmer 20 minutes.

In a medium bowl, combine cream cheese, cottage cheese, and eggs. Stir together until smooth.

Spread 1/3 of the sauce evenly over bottom of a 13 by 9 by 2-inch baking dish (it can be a clear one…it doesn’t have to be fancy). Place 4 uncooked lasagna noodles on top of sauce. Do not overlap noodles. Spread 1/2 of cream cheese mixture over noodles. Cover cheese mixture with 1/2 the vegetable mixture, more sauce, and top evenly with 6 slices provolone cheese and 1 1/2 cups mozzarella cheese. Repeat layers with 4 noodles, rest of the cream cheese mixture, vegetables, sauce, and remaining cheeses. Don’t stress about the layers…you’re making a casserole…not sending a man to the moon.  Place in oven for 35 minutes or until lasagna is hot and bubbling

Let lasagna stand for 10 minutes before serving.

Shalom, Y’all!

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