Everyday Cooking » Israeli Kitchen

Nut Butters That You Make At Home

Everyday Cooking, Just Hungry, Useful Flavorings and Relishes, Vegetarian 10 Responses »

Mar 102011

Looking at the price of almond butter in the health food store, I put the jar back on the shelf and thought, I can make it myself. So I strolled out and headed for the shuk, where almonds are plentiful and affordable.

I could have bought American almonds, but sampling all of them, I found the local ones best. Probably they’re fresher, not having been sitting in the hold of a ship for who knows how long. And while I was at it, I indulged in cashews. Some sunflower seeds went into my cloth shopping bag too.

At home, I pulled out my trusty food processor (of mayonnaise fame) and got to work. It took almost no time to produce three individual nut and seed spreads. It’s worth making small batches, because they really taste best fresh. And while these spreadable butters usually wind up on bread as a snack, you can do a lot of different things with them – as you’ll find out.

Almond Butter

Yield: 2/3 cup

Choose either blanched (white) whole nuts, or almonds with the papery brown skin still on them. Either way, the almond butter is delicious.

2 cups raw almonds

Salt

2 tablespoons almond oil or other neutral-flavored oil

Heat the oven to 300 degrees F, 150 degrees C.

Spread almonds on a baking sheet in a single layer.

Sprinkle lightly with salt.

Roast for 7 minutes, then turn nuts over and roast another 5-7 minutes. There should be a light, nutty aroma when you open the oven door.

While the almonds are still warm, transfer them to the food processor. Add the oil.

Process for 5-12 minutes. Processing time varies according to the age of the nuts and how dry or moist they were when you bought them. There will be a dry flour at first, but persist, stopping the food processor once in a while and scraping the sides down. Process till you have a smooth paste. Store in a clean, dry, covered jar for up to 1 month.

Things to do with your Almond Butter:

Substitute it for peanut butter in cookies and Oriental sauces.

Stir a tablespoon into hot cereal. It will add protein and fat.

Milk substitute: blend 2 tablespoons almond butter or cashew butter with 1 cup of water and 1 teaspoon honey till foamy; strain and drink, or use in cooking or baking. Cashew butter doesn’t need straining.

Sweet variation: add a handful of good chocolate to almonds when processing. Or 1 tablespoon maple syrup, or 1 tablespoon brown sugar.

Kid’s favorites: the classic “ants on a log –“ celery sticks stuffed with peanut butter and dotted with raisins – tastes new when you substitute almond butter and cranberries. Or spread almond butter on toast and top with sliced bananas or jam.

Cashew Butter

Use the same procedure as for almond butter, above. It will be firm, but moist. A delicious thing to do with cashew butter is mix finely chopped chives with grated sharp cheese like cheddar or Parmesan and roll little balls of cashew butter in the mix.

Sunflower Seed Butter

Sunflower seeds pick up the taste of salt strongly, so start by adding only a pinch, then add more to taste – up to ¼ teaspoon salt.

1 cup shelled, roasted sunflower seeds

1 tablespoon oil

Pinch of salt

Sunflower seed “techinah”

½ cup sunflower seed butter

¼ cup freshly squeezed lemon juice

¼ cup water

1 small, mashed garlic clove

Salt to taste

Blend all.

Spread toasted slices of challah or French bread with sunflower seed butter and top with one of the following:

A slice of tomato

Slices of hard-boiled egg

Thinly sliced leftover roast chicken

Garnish the open sandwich with olives, pickles, and sprigs of fresh herbs like parsley, aragula, and basil.

Ratatouille

Everyday Cooking, vegetables, Vegetarian 2 Responses »

Feb 172011

Just an eggplant and me. It was a slender young thing, all in shiny dark purple. Almost too beautiful to slice up.

But I was hungry.

Ratatouille takes minutes to prepare. It’s deliciously Mediterranean, redolent of olive oil. It’s filling. And low-carb.

I sharpened my knife.

Ratatouille

4 servings

Ingredients:

1 eggplant weighing about 350 grams

1 large onion

2 slender zucchini

2 large, very ripe tomatoes

1 large, red, bell pepper or (1 medium red and 1 medium green)

2 garlic cloves, minced

Olive oil

salt & pepper

Method:

Cut the eggplant into slices as thick as your thumb. Cut each slice in half.

Slice the onion into thick rings; halve each slice.

Cut the zukes into slices the same width as the eggplant, but do not halve.

Chop the tomatoes into rough chunks. Do the same with the bell pepper.

Mince the garlic.

Heat 1/4 cup olive oil in a wide pan. Add onions and fry till starting to soften. Add all the other vegetables, including garlic.

Drizzle a little more olive oil in. Cook for 5 minutes over a medium flame, stirring once in a while.

Cover pot, lower flame, and cook without uncovering for 15 minutes.

Season with salt and pepper, stir, cover again, and cook another minute or two. Taste for seasoning. Ratatouille is done when the eggplant is cooked through and everything is kind of soupy.

Pronto! Eat hot, at room temperature, or cold, with crusty bread to mop up the sauce.

Poached Eggs For Breakfast

Everyday Cooking 5 Responses »

Feb 132011

Who doesn’t love Julia Child? Even when she goes on about foods congealed in (urgh) aspic, I love her. Last night I sat around reading From Julia Child’s Kitchen and her treatise on poaching eggs, when I should have been doing energetic housewifely things or catching up on writing assignments.

A craving for a well-poached egg came over me. Tender egg white surrounding moist, yellow yolk, sprinkled with salt and pepper, topping buttered toast. OK, Julia-in-the-sky, I said. I’m going to poach me some eggs, your way.

Julia recommends piercing the egg first, with a pin, “to let air out of egg and keep shell from cracking.” I had never seen the need for that because I was going to crack the raw egg’s shell anyway, but I was doing it her way, so I did it. I pierced two room-temperature eggs, bemused.

I was to poach no less than 4 eggs, in 2 quarts boiling water, adding 1/3 cup vinegar…couldn’t do it. I’m the only poached-egg eater in the house. I did two, with about 2- 1/2 cups of water, and 1 tablespoon vinegar.

Water was boiling and a slotted spoon at the ready. Following instructions, I lowered the eggs in and counted 10 seconds – like Julia says: one thousand, two thousand, three thousand….not too fast. This is to heat up the whites inside so that they’ll keep their shape when cooking. Another thing I’d never done, but okay, I did it. Slipped the eggs out and placed them in a small bowl.

A tablespoon of apple cider vinegar into the boiling water, then, as instructed, I held the eggs as close as possible to the liquid and broke them wide open. They went to the bottom. I turned the timer on for 4 minutes.

It took me about 1 minute, while I was slicing sourdough bread for toast and putting it in the sandwich grill, to remember that there were mushrooms and onions in the house, and butter, and that those three things would taste really good with poached eggs on toast. Hurry, hurry! I chopped up half a small onion with a small handful of the fresh button mushrooms. A tablespoon of butter in the frying pan to melt and froth up. A quick sauté, seasoned with nothing more than salt and a few grinds of black pepper. The mushrooms were done at the same time the timer went off.

The eggs had floated free of the pan floor and were plumply good, although not perfectly oval. A little drippy in the center, which is how I like them. To have them cooked through, I would have simmered them one minute longer. Gently placed on the toast and with the mushrooms spooned over them, they were delicious.

To accompany the homely meal, a plebeian glass of milk.

Next time, I’ll boil an artichoke and place my poached egg on top before spooning hollandaise sauce over it all. And open a bottle of Chardonnay. Today, alone in my rather dark kitchen, still in pyjamas and with the day ahead of me, this 5-minute breakfast as gourmet as I wanted to get.

I’m ready for anything now.

Klops: Jewish Meatballs

Everyday Cooking, Fleish: Meat and Poultry 15 Responses »

Feb 102011

A long time ago in Eastern Europe, a Jewish housewife stood by her wood-burning stove, wondering what to make for lunch. The kids would be coming home soon, rowdy and hungry.

So much noise they make, like wild Indians, she sighed. She tied an apron around her waist and put her hands on her hips. How was she going to satisfy the Wild Indians on half a kilo of ground meat?

Klops, she said.

Naturally, there had to be sauce. And plenty of mashed potatoes. The kids loved the klops, stuffed themselves, and remembered them when they left Europe to make a new life in the Goldene Midina. Sons pestered their wives to cook them; daughters served them up “just like Bubeh used to make.” And so the Jewish meatball migrated – or so I’d like to think.

I was never introduced to klops, although my Latina mother makes divine Italian meatballs and good old American meatloaf. Following her style, I add only a few tablespoons of something starchy to ground meat, more to help it keep its shape than to stretch it out.

Anyway, I always thought of a “klop” as a blow to the head, like how you kill a fish. Maybe it’s because butchers had to “klop” the meat with a heavy knife to get it fine enough – before there were meat grinders? But there they are, klops.

My friend Mirj sent me a recipe for American-style klops, which I interfered with greatly. If it’s slow-cooked meat, by mir it has to have red wine and Mediterranean herbs. Our Ashkenazic great-grandmothers wouldn’t recognize either recipe, I’m sure, because tomato sauce and wine were luxury items back then. But the rich flavor, the piquancy of onions and the soft texture of the meatballs, I think they would have known. Husband and the Little One gobble this up and ask me to make it every so often, so I guess it’s good.

In fact it’s darn good. And easy to make. Try my klops, they’re almost as good as chicken soup.

Klops in the Crockpot

Printable version here.

Ingredients

The Klops:

1 kilo – 2 lbs. ground beef or turkey

2 eggs, beaten

1/2 cup breadcrumbs

1 tablespoon paprika

3 scallions, chopped fine

1 teaspoon salt

pepper

The sauce:

1 medium onion, chopped

3 cloves garlic, chopped

3 medium tomatoes, chopped

1/2 cup tomato paste

1 cup dry red wine

1 sprig fresh rosemary, or 1/2 teaspoon dried. Or oregano.

1 teaspoon salt

pepper

Method:

Mix the ingredients for the klops well. Set the meat aside, covered, to for the flavors to start integrating while you make the sauce.

In a medium pan, sauté the onion in a little oil till golden. Add the garlic and tomatoes; cook 10 minutes or so till everything is very soft. Add the tomato paste, wine, rosemary, salt and pepper to taste. You should have a thick sauce. Simmer it a few minutes longer.

Wet your hands and form big, flat, plump patties. Place them in the crock pot, and when you run out of room, make a second layer on top.

Tip the hot sauce over the klops and cook for 4 hours on low. Mirj says that 1 hour on high works well too. Serve with crisp-skinned potatoes or for comfort, mashed potatoes. And to balance, a leafy salad.

Ess gezundterheit!

Kosher Chicken and Dumplings

Everyday Cooking, Fleish: Meat and Poultry 5 Responses »

Dec 072010

Way back in 1964, a group called The NewBeats recorded a song called “Bread and Butter,” where a lover of the plainest food surprised his girl eating chicken and dumplings…with another man. I’d always been intrigued by the mystique of chicken and dumplings, a Southern dish I didn’t know, growing up.

Maybe I was also piqued by the incredible falsetto vocals of the NewBeat’s lead singer. Anyhow I found some recipes, all easy, and resisted the urge to do my usual wine-and-Mediterranean- spices thing to cook up this down-home chicken.

Kosher Cooking Carnival #61 Up

Everyday Cooking, Hanukkah No Responses »

Dec 072010

Mirj of Miryummy hosted this month’s Kosher Cooking Carnival, with plenty of entertaining insights into the State of Jewish Home Food. Have a look and go through the recipes…plenty on Chanukah for last-minute recipe inspiration.

2 Recipes: Spiced Olives and Potatoes with Olives

Appetizers, Everyday Cooking, vegetables, Vegetarian, What's Cooking for Shabbos and Yom Tov 9 Responses »

Nov 062010

My neighbors and I cook at around the same time of day, and our cooking smells waft around the building. I stick my head out the kitchen window and sniff judgementally. One neighbor’s food smells great, with sharp notes of onions, turmeric, cumin. Another’s cooking is so bland it depresses me. (Boiling potatoes again, are we? Don’t you get tired of boiled potatoes?)

Yesterday, Friday, every woman was cooking for Shabbat. Naturally, she needs to put something nutritious, filling, and cheap on the table. Potatoes suit the menu every time. I looked at my potato bin. This Friday, I was bored with them. I needed some potato inspiration.

Flipping through my cookbooks, I found an interesting recipe in Joyce Goldstein’s Saffron Shores: Jewish Cooking of the Southern Mediterranean. Actually, it’s two recipes in one, because first you must prepare spiced olives, then add them to potatoes and cook them together.

Goldstein’s recipe calls for crushing whole olives with the flat of a cleaver or a mallet, then soaking them overnight. I didn’t have time for that and figured that canned, pitted olives would release plenty of their salt with a few good rinses. So they did. And the dish was very good. It has the advantage of being vegetarian and pareve, for everyday meals as well as for Shabbat. And the olives, you can serve serve and eat as an appetizer all by themselves.

Spiced Olives

Yield: 2 cups

Ingredients:

2 cups of pitted olives

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 large bay leaf

2 cloves of garlic

½ teaspoon sweet paprika

A large pinch of cayenne pepper and/or ¼ teaspoon ground black pepper

Juice of ½ lemon

Method:

Rinse the olives thoroughly, three times in cold, running water. Drain them.

Heat the olive oil in a large skillet or shallow pot, over a low flame.

Cook the bay leaf, garlic, paprika and cayenne or pepper for 3 minutes.

Add the olives to the skillet and cook for 5 minutes, turning them over occasionally.

Remove from the fire and let cool. Put the olives, with the bits of garlic clinging to them, in a clean dish.

Add the lemon juice; mix.

You may store the spiced olives in the refrigerator for a week if kept in a clean, dry jar.

Potatoes Stewed with Olives

Serves 6

Ingredients:

The olive oil left from cooking spiced olives, or 3 tablespoons fresh olive oil

1 large onion

2 ½ lb. – 1 kg. potatoes, unpeeled but scrubbed and sliced 1 inch (2 centimeters) wide.

1 teaspoon sweet paprika

1 bay leaf

1 teaspoon ground black pepper

2 cups spiced olives

¼ cup finely chopped parsley or celery leaves

Method:

Chop the onion finely. Sauté it for 5 minutes in the skillet where the spiced olives cooked, with their oil returned to it. If using fresh oil, sauté the onions in 3 tablespoons of oil.

Add the potatoes and the spices. Don’t add salt – the olives will add enough.

Add water to halfway up the potatoes, and bring to a boil.

Cover the skillet, lower the flame, and cook the potatoes 15 minutes.

Add the olives and cook another 10 minutes, turning everything over once or twice.

Check to make sure the potatoes are tender; give them a few more minutes if necessary, but don’t let them get mushy.

Sprinkle the dish with the chopped parsley. Serve hot.

Tabbouleh Recipe

Everyday Cooking, Vegetarian 9 Responses »

Oct 282010

Tabbouleh is regarded as a main-dish salad for summer meals. But tabbouleh fits into chilly weather menus too. Cracked wheat, chopped vegetables and herbs bathed in olive oil and lemon juice – all that vitamin C. How can you go wrong? Not to mention that tabbouleh is delicious, inexpensive, colorful, and ethnic. A favorite with vegetarians. And takes very little effort to make.

I think I just talked myself into tabbouleh for lunch tomorrow.

There seems to be a difference of opinion as to the correct proportions of bulgur wheat to parsley in tabbouleh. Middle Easterners like less bulgur, more parsley – and plenty of lemon. Westerners don’t enjoy so much herb in their tabbouleh, and favor a mellower dressing. American recipes sometimes include a cucumber, which makes Middle Eastern people raise their hands in horror. Some add cumin to the salad; a shocking departure from the traditional recipe.

Shall I confess the dreadful truth? I like to chop a little bell pepper into my tabbouleh, and favor the greater proportion of bulgur. I guess I haven’t lived in Israel long enough to change my errant ways.

By the way, cooked, firm quinoa makes a delicious tabbouleh.

Tabbouleh

serves 4

printable version here

Ingredients:

1/4 cup fine bulgur wheat

hot water

4 tomatoes

1 small onion

1- 1/2 cups parsley

1/2 cup fresh mint

juice of 3 lemons

6 tablespoons olive oil

salt and pepper to taste

Method:

1. Soak the bulgur in hot water for 20 minutes. Drain excess water out and if need be, squeeze the mass between your palms to get as much moisture out as possible.

2. Chop the parsley and mint as finely as you have patience to – or chop them up in the food processor. If you use the machine, watch it carefully so you don’t get green mush instead of chopped herbs.

3. Chop the onion and the tomato.

4. Add the herbs and vegetables to the tabbouleh, seasoning it with salt and pepper. Add the lemon juice and olive oil, again tasting and adding more if liked.

It’s ready. Serve with yogurt or tahini, or both, on the side.

Jamie Oliver’s TED Prize wish: Teach every child about food

Everyday Cooking 7 Responses »

Oct 142010

We hear a lot about the obesity epidemic in first-world countries. But we don’t believe those lunchtime hamburgers (or bourekas) are actually cutting our lives short. Below, chef Jamie Oliver delivers a powerful talk about the physical and financial damage junk food inflicts on us, and how to save our children’s lives by teaching them 10 healthy recipes. See my 10 below the video.

Now, what are your life-saving recipes? Comment, and I’ll post the ones I think are the winners.

If you’re also a blogger, please get the video from YouTube, post about it, and include your own 10 life-saving recipes. Pass the message on: Real food saves lives. Junk food kills.

Mimi’s 10 Life-Saving Recipes

These are mostly vegetarian recipes. That’s because grains and vegetables are cheaper than poultry and meat. It’s important to know, and teach, that real food is accessible to anyone with the will to cook, no matter how skinny the budget.

Toasted Pumpkin Seeds – healthy snacking.
Black Beans – you can just about survive on black beans and rice.
Kefir – a yoghurt-like drink packed with things that are good for you.
Onions Roasted with Olive Oil and Herbs - an easy way to cook any vegetable I can think of.
Kasha Varnishkes - buckwheat for protein, noodles for quick energy and that satisfied feeling.
Majadra - lentils and rice, with the same benefits as kasha varnishkes or rice and beans: protein, carbs, fiber, minerals, vitamins….
Polenta – quick, nutritious, filling, and cheap. Top it with tomato sauce, and no one will miss pizza.
Sourdough Oatmeal Bread – everyone should know how to make bread from scratch. If you know how doable sourdough really is, you’ll make the healthiest bread in the world.
Curried Turkey Salad - this recipe is really 2 recipes. New cooks learn how to make a quick broth and how to put together a cold salad with poultry, vegetables, and fruit in it. And something about using seasonings.
Ful ve-Choumous – beans, eggs, humus and tahini. You can move mountains on the nutrition in this.

…And here’s an eleventh recipe. Something sweet, because there has to be something sweet. But much healthier than mass-manufactured desserts: Rice Pudding with Drunken Raisins.

Hannah of the Cooking Manager blog has already posted her 10 recipes.

Fish Fillets Baked with Tomatoes and Herbs

Everyday Cooking, fish No Responses »

Oct 082010

Scallions, tomatoes, lime juice and cilantro, with a good drizzle of olive oil. It’s simple, and a truly Latin American taste. To me, it brings back the delicious home cooking of the maids that worked for my friend’s mothers, when I was a teenager living in Rio de Janeiro. Some of those ladies had been with their employers for many years and spoke Yiddish. It was really a spicy patois of Portuguese and Yiddish, which they spoke with the resident grandmothers or the little ones.