Slow Food Fast

Regular hamantaschen with prune lekvar

Almond meal-based low-carb hamantaschen

Purim is here tonight, a little late thanks to the “leap month” this year (drawbacks to a lunar holiday calendar) but none the worse for it–it’s over 80 degrees here, which means it’s almost time for Purim. Los Angeles is the only place I’ve ever been, including Israel, where people were slathering sunblock on their kids and gasping for water bottles at a Purim carnival well ahead of lining up for hamantaschen and games. It was 94 degrees that year. Fifteen years of this and I’m still not used to it.

Purim, of course, means manic baking, heat wave or no, because the adults’ reading of the Megillah (the Book of Esther) had…ummmm….last-minute planning and no one thought about hamantaschen as part of the refreshments until midweek. I think I’m the only one left in our  shul who still doesn’t care about having a fabulously original themed cocktail party for the adults afterward. Any kind of cocktail party is more drinking than I want to do, and I’m damned if I wanna dress up in full office battle array again after so many years sidestepping all the suits in my closet, just so I can fit in with the Mad Men theme. I’ve never even seen the show.

But I actually make hamantaschen at home once in a blue moon instead of schlepping over to the Valley to buy them from a kosher bakery.

So I did the stupid, crazy thing and volunteered. How many people? I asked–maybe 60. So I have SIX batches of dough sitting in my freezer relaxing. It took about half an hour, about 5 minutes apiece,  to do all the batches in the food processor, one after another and weighing out the ingredients so they’d be consistent. And yet…after all the excitement from two weeks ago, I’m just not all that geared up to roll it all out and bake it just this minute. Maybe when things cool down slightly–half an hour? Maybe?

Friday happens to have been Pi Day as well–and to my daughter, who was supposed to be my second-in-command for this delicate operation, and to her algebra teacher this morning, that meant Pie Day. They had about four different kinds of pie for all the math classes, and none of them had to calculate the areas or volumes of the wedges they sampled. My daughter, of course, was so elated that she ate two entire meals’ worth of carbohydrate in about fifteen minutes, and still came out with a pretty good blood glucose number an hour later–good on the calculated guesses, there–but at the cost of running through insulin that could have lasted her three or four more hours if she’d eaten an ordinary lunch. Teenagers! Mothers of teenagers!

Still, not to lose the spirit of things too much. It occurs to me that hamantaschen qualify as very small pies, only triangular. So we eventually started the process of inscribing a triangle inside a circle–240 times, if we can get through all the batches before showtime. Me, I’d settle for 3 or 4 batches and call it a week.

The raspberry jam filling–all that hard work for the first batch of rolling and filling–leaked all over the place. Too bad there isn’t still a vogue for vampire-everything; the first batch would have qualified! Too thin. You need a thick serious filling to stay in place during the baking.

So–time to nuke the prunes for lekvar and the figs for the heck of it (plus toast a small sampling of the poppyseeds in my freezer to see if they’re still okay to use for a filling, and to make sure I don’t pour in the bag of nigella seeds instead by mistake!). I rarely see these anymore, but I still believe in doing traditional fillings alongside the modern, newfangled apricot-jam-and-chocolate-chip ones. It’s true that if we keep skipping the prune filling, we might not turn into our own grandparents, and if we miss out on the poppy seed filling (known in Yiddish as mohn) we might pass the all-critical drug tests (à la Seinfeld) with no interferences, but then again we’d miss the ta’am, and what’s the joy of hamantaschen without a taste of the past?

Hamantaschen Recipes

Low-Carb Almond Meal-Based Hamantaschen

My version of Joan Nathan’s Hamantaschen, with four fillings: poppyseed, prune, apricot/chocolate, labaneh/cheesecake

Microwaveable dried fig and dried apricot fillings (originally for fillo pastries, but still good for this, and a lot less drippy than jam)

However–if you are feeling “Mad Men”, you might think of reconfiguring the hamantaschen motif for cocktail party fare instead. I was thinking about this Thursday but figured it would be too weird. Then I saw an article about it yesterday in one of the big three newspaper cooking sections–dammit! scooped again! In any case, if you’re feeling a little avantgarde, you could do a batch of savory hamantaschen if you feel like it. Use rugelach, bureka or olive oil tart dough instead of the standard sweet dough. Roll it out fairly thin, and fill with feta or bleu cheese mixed with labne or very thick sour cream, plus a little onion and some thyme, maybe a pecan or two. Or something with very cooked-down mushrooms and onions (so they don’t get soggy). Or pesto and cheese. Or spinach with cheese and nutmeg and lemon rind. Or tapenade. Etc.

Chickpeas of all sorts and descriptions

Since Esther supposedly refused meat and ate only chickpeas, chickpea recipes are also more or less relevant to Purim. Mine are not particularly traditional–look up Iranian Jewish recipes elsewhere on the web.

Chickpea crêpes  These can be savory or sweet, and they don’t require eggs or milk

The “other” moussaka–eggplant and chickpea stew

Hummus from scratch (aka how to nuke dried chickpeas)

Fast Hummus made with chickpea flour (microwaved)

There’s also the possible “nahit”–fry chickpeas in olive oil, drain and sprinkle with salt and pepper.

Or a cold chickpea salad with mint, scallion, garlic, olive oil and lemon juice or vinegar.

Or channa masala dal, something like the red lentil dal but with chickpeas (and not mashed)

Filed under: appetizers, baking, Beans and legumes, cooking, Desserts, fruits, haute cuisine, history, holiday cooking, kid food, nuts, Revised recipes | Tagged: almonds, apricot filling, chickpea flour, chickpeas, crepes, eggplant, feta, figs, Hamantaschen, hummus, Jewish cooking, prune filling, Purim recipes | Comments Off on Purim options