While I really don’t know what the Macabees ate during that first Hanuka I’m sure that it wasn’t potato latkes. Potatoes didn’t exist in Ancient Israel or even in Ancient Greece. The iconic tuber known in Yiddish as kartoffel (and in Hebrew as tapuach adama or sometimes tapud, a literal translation of the French pomme de … Continue reading
For years, even decades, I avoided baking bread. Bread baking? Me? Bread has strange ingredients like yeast–now what does one do with that? And even stranger instructions. Proof the yeast. What kind of proof? Is this something legal? Punch down the dough Why? What did the dough do to deserve such violence? Meanwhile, my friends had … Continue reading
A curse on your head Martha Stewart, Maybe not a curse but perhaps a friendly pigeon could fly above you and do what pigeons do on top of your perfectly streaked coif. I want revenge. Frankly Martha, I’m good and mad In your cookbook, the old one, that came our before food porn and coffee table cookbooks, you … Continue reading
I never baked for Pesach. Frankly, the entire subject led me to despair. What can you possibly bake with matzo meal and/or potato starch that justifies the ingestion of hundreds of empty calories?Because of that, my standard Pesach desserts were strawberry fluff(two egg whites, one cup sugar, one bag frozen strawberries, process together and then … Continue reading
When I discovered that my formerly lovely red delicious apples were growing soft brown patches on their sides I knew it was time to perform cosmetic surgery. No I didn’t botox the fruit, I pared off the ugly patches, shredded the healthy flesh and gave my apples a new lease on life as apple muffins. My salvage operation … Continue reading
For the past few weeks, my youngest son has had a tummy ache of the mysterious kind. Knee jerk psychologists: this ailment is not psychosomatic. I know this kid. He isn’t being bullied or abused. This is physiological but as of today, medical science hasn’t reached the root of the trouble. The standard tests turned up nothing … Continue reading
When I discovered this recipe on allthingssimpleblog.com my curiosity was piqued. Onion marmalade? It sounded like an oxymoron or a joke, but there were relatively few steps and the humblest of ingredients, onions, sugar, kosher salt and vinegar, except for one glitch—the vinegar had to be balsamic I didn’t have any at home. That wasn’t … Continue reading
I think that I’ve stumbled upon the secret fuel to the Jewish brain. It’s Pistou, an ancient condiment, dip, relish (you pick) and, close cousin to Pesto. Pistou originates in from Provence, a lovely town on the French- Italian border which had a Jewish community that was neither Ashkenazi or Sephardic but followed it’s own minhagim. … Continue reading
