Dairy | Slow Food Fast

OK, Fried PLUS Dairy for Chanukah

Posted on December 17, 2014 by DebbieN

Another good version from a previous fry-up: slices of panela browned with marinated artichoke hearts (bonus: a hit of garlic and lemon flavor from the artichoke marinade, plus the lemon juice increases the browning)

Well…I figured out something quick to fry for the first night of Chanukah: slices of panela cheese, a white rubbery fresh cheese that’s almost exactly like halloumi. Only it’s Mexican rather than Greek, so it’s a locally abundant variety (along with queso fresco) and about half the price per pound here in Pasadena.

I decided to do something a little different with it though. While the spoonful of olive oil was heating in the nonstick (very important) pan, I pressed the slices of panela into about a tablespoon mixture (not shown in above photograph; we ate these too quickly to take a picture of any worth) of pre-toasted sesame seeds, crumbled oregano, sumac, a pinch of ground caraway, and Aleppo pepper–essentially za’atar mix, only without added salt. It didn’t stick incredibly well to the cheese but I was able to press it in on both sides long enough to get it into the pan.

When I started frying the cheese, some of the whey immediately bubbled out into the oil, but although the slices softened up and started melting a little, they mostly kept their shape and I was able to flip them with a wide spatula to fry the other side. Halloumi firms up again as it cools–a little flatter, but pretty tasty, especially with the za’atar mix I improvised. I served it on top of our salad, but in restaurants it goes by itself, with its own bed of greens, maybe a bit of chopped tomato and onion, or with bread and olive oil. It’s only a few minutes of work for something unusual and delicious.

Filed under: cooking, Dairy, DASH Diet, holiday cooking | Tagged: appetizers, Chanukah, halloumi, Jewish cooking, panela cheese | Comments Off on OK, Fried PLUS Dairy for Chanukah

An Appreciation of Lox

Posted on June 12, 2014 by DebbieN

Homemade bagel with nova from a local Los Angeles smoked fish company

For its annual Mother’s Day brunch, the Men’s Club at our synagogue always serves a surprisingly lavish spread with the woiks–lox, bagels, fruit salad, eggs and mimosas. Although I’m not a huge fan of big and slightly-kitschy gatherings featuring big and slightly-kitschy piano acts, I really deserved someone else making me a lox-and-eggs Sunday brunch right about then. But at the last minute I had to miss it in order to hock my kid about her last oversized ridiculous semester projects for 8th grade (due the next day, naturally). Better mothers complained to the principal, who just smiled nicely but did nothing useful. I just figured we’d get through it all so my daughter never had to be an 8th grader again. It worked–salutatorian, even–so, moving on but not required to give a speech: win/win.

But the lost lox! and the not having to cook or do dishes for Mother’s Day! Then I agreed to chaperone a school science camping trip the last week before graduation and ended up with sand, grime, KP duty, outdoor showers, iffy Boy Scout Camp-style food, and not just one but 32 whole teenagers preoccupied with their hair and late to class.

So now that it’s all over I’m in serious need of payback.

My local Armenian greengrocer has locally-smoked nova lox (they have sable, too–I was tempted) and I had a bowl of dough in the fridge just sitting there waiting to be used up–so I made a few impromptu bagels the last Sunday morning of the school year, as soon as I’d gotten all the sand back out of everything and my kid was done with classes for the year. The bagels weren’t quite as dense as they ought to be because I used my standard pizza/pita/calzone dough instead of the genuine classic, but they did well enough because the dough was several days old, cold-proofed and straight from the fridge, and I boiled them before baking. And there was lox. Throw in a few once-over-medium eggs and some shmear and some fruit and hot coffee and you’ve got the ideal late-spring/early-summer breakfast, even if you have to make it yourself.

Now I know lox is a high-salt item–even the Nova. I anticipate it not for the salt, which I always think we could do with a little less of, but because it’s lox. A delicacy. Something to enjoy on the rare occasion when you get to celebrate. Something to treat with respect.

I’m not going to apologize for enjoying it, either. In the modern world of food publishing, people are forgetting how to do that. Even Jews. Maybe especially Jews, some of whom act as though our traditional deli and “appetizing” (bagels, cream cheese and smoked fish of all kinds) is suddenly something to shove under a rug or apologize for liking on the grounds that it’s not organic or locally sourced or Whole Foods or food-mag-trendy enough, and because it doesn’t include bacon or pancetta. Or kale.

The idea that enjoying lox simply because it’s lox isn’t cool enough anymore has gained a lot of traction in the past few years of foodieism. A couple of years ago, Martha Rose Shulman committed a serious travesty in the New York Times with “Lavash Pizza with Smoked Salmon” (she didn’t even call it lox). Toasted lavash is perfectly good for other things, but not for lox. Too fragile, and frankly too flavorless. I mean, why not rice cakes, as long as you’re being tasteless? But it wasn’t just the bread choice.

Somehow Shulman had abandoned the Joy of Lox. Shulman actually called her lox on lavash “a great way to work more salmon, rich in omega-3 fats, into your diet.” I have to ask, are most of us really having that much trouble “working in” more salmon? More to the point, does any lox fanatic really want to be thinking about fatty acids of any kind while eating it?

But at least she wasn’t agonizing over it as too Jewish. Mark Bittman pulled this inexplicable self-flagellation-in-print a few weeks ago in the New York Times, apologizing publicly for eating lox and bagels on a Sunday morning. In New York, yet. (Maybe it’s because he moved to Connecticut?) He’s kvetching about skipping his morning run, his usually-so-virtuous-but-betrayed-just-this-once-by-shameful-genetic-temptation stance on (gasp) farm-raised salmon, his devouring of shmear, which he says is too bland for the calories to like officially. He even had the nerve to blame his decision to eat it all on a sudden mental breakdown. And then he went further and called bagels and lox “comfort food.” As though it were in the same low-grade category as mac and cheese or mashed potatoes from a box.

Vey ist mir! I mean, come on. I’m pretty sure Woody Allen still eats lox without apologizing for it.

Bittman should be apologizing for being ashamed of enjoying lox (all the while glupping it). Along with apologizing for promoting pancetta and guanciale while professing a greener and more affordable diet. And for forgetting to add garlic to his recipes. That’s almost worse than deprecating lox.

More recently, Melissa Clark met with one of the scions of Russ & Daughters, which by now you’d think was the only serious lox and whitefish emporium left–it’s the subject of a documentary I just missed at the last LA Jewish film festival. The two laid out a spread for at least thirty or forty very lucky people, by my standards, but I think they were doing it mostly for a few family and friends–maybe 10-15 people–and posing it all on the table for the camera. It was beautiful but way too much. At least, though, she was both thrilled and nostalgic, the right way to be when faced with a complete beauty pageant of smoked fish.

Altogether, I could only think Shulman, Bittman and Clark all grew up in big cities with too much lox around. Because when I was a kid in the small-town South, we could only get lox twice a year when one or another set of grandparents came down from New York.

Other people’s grandparents bring toys. Ours brought pastrami, corned beef, half-sour kosher dills, pickled green tomatoes, real bagels, serious breads you just couldn’t get down South, and lox. All of them were special, not just to us but to our grandparents–real deli was part nostalgia, part roots, part pride, part simply great eats.

Pastrami and corned beef to go with the pickles and the tough, chewy pumpernickel and rye with the union label pasted on the end (you were supposed to fight for it)–these were the working people’s foods of their youth on the Lower East Side and the Bronx, and they still loved them. And so did we.

My mother’s parents, born in the shtetls of Poland and Ukraine, came to America as children and, thank G-d [only instance of poverty being worthwhile], couldn’t afford to go back when their parents got homesick.

Fast forward to the ’70s: My Grandma Thel, short, plump but ladylike, coiffed, and wearing those pale oxford pumps I used to think of as librarian shoes, would step off the little regional plane in Charlottesville loaded down with huge grocery bags full of chewy, crackle-crusted bagels, Jewish kornbroyt or “corn bread” (a heavy European wholegrain sourdough; no actual cornmeal except what’s dusted on the baking sheets to keep the loaves from sticking), rye bread laced with bitter caraway seeds, sometimes a babka, and always, a huge half-wheel of her own light chocolate-flecked sponge cake (for which I’ve inherited the recipe but haven’t tried it yet–will post when I get it right). I hope the other passengers were smart enough to be jealous. The aromas alone should have clued them in. Grandpa Abe, of vishniak fame, was a lucky man.

On the drive home from the airport, Grandma Thel would tell me and my sister how she just managed to argue another customer at Andell’s or Goodman’s out of the last loaf of kornbroyt with seeds because she was bringing it down to her very special grandchildren so we would grow up knowing the real thing, and that the other lady Continue reading →

Filed under: appetizers, breads, Dairy, fish, frugality, haute cuisine, history, shopping | Tagged: bagels, Jewish food, lox, Mark Bittman, Martha Rose Shulman, Melissa Clark, Russ & Daughters | Comments Off on An Appreciation of Lox

Post-Kiddush: our leftovers are better than yours

Posted on March 6, 2014 by DebbieN

Round spare spanakopita just for us after the big kiddush

Round spare pinwheel-style spanakopita just for us at home. The big ones for the brunch had three pounds of spinach apiece (and were cut in small diamonds), but they still went together pretty fast–except for squeezing all that spinach dry…

This weekend I did it again–I made the kiddush, or in common speech a lunch buffet, for my congregation’s Saturday morning service. My husband kind of volunteered us for this week and because he doesn’t cook, most or all of the cooking, shopping, chopping and schlepping landed on my shoulders.

Last time he volunteered us, it was for our anniversary, and I was ready to skip ahead to the divorce until I got over it, because it’s a lot of work to cook for 60 or so people who like to eat. And kibbitz. Especially when the 60 suddenly turns into 80-plus and having to use the synagogue kitchen with the more complicated and confusing rules on only a week’s notice. As they did this time…..

Soooo….a two-day hell of shopping and then marathon cooking-and-juggling in my little galley kitchen. The microwave got a serious workout. So did the food processor and the oven. Sometimes all at once. And it was raining hard for three days, so bringing things over to the synagogue kitchen as I went got a little tricky. I triple-wrapped the chocolate cake and stuck it in a USPS Priority Mail box so it wouldn’t get left out in the rain. Same idea for the spanakopita trays.

A few hints about cooking big and real for a synagogue brunch, learned the hard way by moi and passed on for your edification and safety (and sanity):

1. You can buy a 6-lb can of chickpeas for massive half-gallon batches of hummus (Mid-East brand, maybe Goya as well). Cost? about $5. But–as I found out, and I’m glad no one was filming the process–industrial-sized can equals industrial-strength steel. A dinky hand-operated can opener is no match for such an item. I got just far enough to be able to pry open a kind of spout but there were tears and long-fluent-repetitive-all-throughout-the-house swearing sessions involved.

Still….

2. If you have a good corner greengrocer, you can buy quantities of eggplant for cheap–eleven or twelve eggplants made for a large tray of roast eggplant and onion slices (with garlic slivers and za’atar sprigs and olive oil) plus a large vat of baba ghanouj. Only the five eggplants I nuked for the baba ghanouj didn’t feel like cooperating fully when it was time to peel them. Might have been easier to peel first, then nuke, since it was all going into the food processor eventually. Next time…

3. Whole smoked whitefish for whitefish salad comes two ways–cold-smoked or hot-smoked. What’s the difference? I asked the counter guy at my favorite Armenian grocery. “Cold-smoked is a little less hard,” he said. So I bought it, thinking he meant the hot-smoked was tough as shoeleather and twice as chewy. I was wrong. Cold-smoked actually means the fish is smoked raw, like lox, only a little drier and tougher. But you don’t necessarily want to put it in whitefish salad that way. Man, it still had the scales on too. I couldn’t get it off the bones for love or money, and there were a lot of bones.

However, the microwave came to the rescue. I cut the fish in half and Continue reading →

Filed under: appetizers, baking, Beans and legumes, breads, breakfast, cooking, Dairy, DASH Diet, Desserts, Dips, fish, frugality, Grains, haute cuisine, holiday cooking, Microwave tricks, Revised recipes, sauces and condiments, shopping, Vegetabalia | Tagged: baba ghanouj, buffet cooking, chocolate ganache, dolmas, fillo dough, hummus, Jewish cooking, Jewish deli, kiddush, microwave cooking, smoked whitefish, spanakopita, stuffed grape leaves | Comments Off on Post-Kiddush: our leftovers are better than yours

Starting with Breakfast

Posted on February 24, 2014 by DebbieN

“The Well” blog at the New York Times has posted a new interview with pediatric endocrinologist Dr. Robert Lustig about his new book, the Fat Chance Cookbook, and about the possibilities for treating obesity in children with a better, less processed diet.

Two or three takeaways from the interview surprised me by echoing things I’ve either thought or written about here since my daughter became a Type I diabetic four years ago.

Almost always, we see an obese kid come in with an obese parent. And when the kid loses weight, the parent loses weight, because the parent actually changed what’s going on in the home.

We do something called “the teaching breakfast.” Every kid comes in fasting because we’re drawing blood. So they’re all hungry. They go to the teaching breakfast with their parents – it’s six families all at a communal table – and our dietitian spends an hour with them. The dietitian narrates exactly what’s on the table and teaches the parent and the kid at the same time….We make sure four things happen. No. 1, we show the parent the kid will eat the food. No. 2, we show the parent that they will eat the food. No. 3, we show the parent that other kids will eat the food, because they have other kids at home and they have to be able to buy stuff that they know other kids will eat. And No. 4, we show them the grocery bill, so they see that they can afford the food. If you don’t do all four of those, they won’t change.

Also, and I think this is my favorite:

…my wife is Norwegian… When she’s mad at me, she bakes…My wife has learned by experimenting that she can take any cookie recipe, any cake recipe, and reduce the amount of sugar by one third, and it actually tastes better…. And you can taste the chocolate, the nuts, the oatmeal, the macadamia – whatever is in it.

Right on!

Back to the top, though, I’ve got to say I love the idea of the teaching breakfast. My one concern is the reality of time cost for families with school-aged children, because eggs and vegetables, two of the (sometimes) inexpensive staples of the UCSF clinic’s teaching breakfast, take more time to prepare than a bowl of cereal, and require more cleanup. On weekdays, that might be a real challenge, especially for families with two working parents and/or long drives to school. A lot of the families I know in this situation (long drives and no school buses being a common problem in Southern California) are used to tossing their kids in the car with some kind of makeshift breakfast to eat on the way–often resorting to bagels, pop tarts, or bananas, none of which are great choices.

Perhaps if the dietician showed some simple microwaveable 5-minute meals like oatmeal or an easy vegetable-filled frittata (with some of the yolks left out) that can be made the night before and refrigerated? The plain yogurt with fresh fruit idea is also quick and simple but not especially cheap–these days a quart of plain non-Greek yogurt goes for $2.50 at Trader Joe’s, almost the same as a gallon of milk, and costs even more at the local Ralph’s (west coast Kroger affiliate), but it serves only 4 if each serving is a whole cup. Cereal with milk is a lot cheaper–but it could certainly be better cereal, high in fiber and low in sugar and salt, and measured by the cup or on a scale before pouring it into the bowl to make sure you don’t get more than you think you’re getting.

Cutting up fruit and vegetables takes time that parents usually feel they don’t have. And berries, which don’t need cutting up, are relatively expensive fruits, even when frozen. So showing parents a couple of “instantly grabbable” ways to serve the less expensive fresh (or fresh-frozen) fruits and vegetables instead of Froot Loops might be key.

A simple “just wash and nosh” approach would probably be a good start. I know I generally rail against buying precut, expensive little baggies of manicured (and dried out) vegetables in the supermarket, but the big bags of “baby carrots” that don’t require peeling and are finger-food size would be an okay starting point to get kids and parents to think about vegetables as a good snack or even breakfast choice. My daughter lived on them for lunches (along with a PBJ on whole wheat and an apple) for most of her grade school years, and even though she has (and will probably always have) a mean sweet tooth, she still seeks out raw green beans, wedges of red cabbage, roma tomatoes and broccoli or cauliflower branches to break off, rinse under the tap and nosh on after school.

Filed under: books, breakfast, cooking, Dairy, DASH Diet, Diabetes, frugality, kid food, nutrition, shopping, Vegetabalia | Tagged: breakfast, childhood diabetes, childhood obesity, dietetics, Dr. Robert Lustig, healthy kids, nutrition, pediatric endocrinology, UCSF, vegetables | Comments Off on Starting with Breakfast

Ganache

Posted on February 14, 2014 by DebbieN

Ganache–the most versatile Valentine’s Day dessert in the world–takes about 5 minutes to make. If that.

This post started out being about Valentine’s Day 2013, if you can believe it, and all the lame, anemic, inferior, chocolate-free pastries being touted in last year’s February food mags–Thomas Keller’s very, very plain beige custard tart without any decoration on it comes to mind as one of the worst offenders. He named it–get this–“Pomme d’Amour”. If you served me that as a Valentine’s date dessert, without so much as a raspberry or a mint leaf on the side, much less a caramelized-sugar top as for crème brulée, I’d be very unimpressed with it and probably with you. Especially at French Laundry prices. I’m not giving the link for it. If you’re genuinely hung up on Keller’s recipes, go away and don’t come back until you’ve convinced yourself that I’m right–a lot of fuss for so much bland. Because…..

Valentine’s was meant to be about chocolate. Or, if you’re very lucky, chocolate sauce. I don’t hear any dissent out there–except perhaps among the lovers of beige food. Takes all kinds…

So anyway, it should surprise no one that I’m late for this by an entire year. And dinner is tonight. In any case, you should know this post has morphed, thanks to time, tide, procrastination that knows no bounds, and my deep, deep love of chocolate ganache (because it is bitter and because it is my heart? Hell no: because it is unbelievably simple and quick and fun to play with and tastes damn good and impresses people who don’t know any better. Why else?)–Ahem! This post has morphed into a couple of ways to impress people who no longer cook. Including yourself if you’re one of those most of the time, and even if you’re not, because tonight you don’t want to spend a lot of time fussing over the food, you want to be taken out to dinner or else, if you’re snowed in, you want something delicious and very quick that takes only very simple, not too expensive ingredients you probably (hopefully) already have on hand somewhere at the back of the cupboard.

As I think I discussed in my post over the summer about the dangers of baking for one’s kid’s bat mitzvah (or other big celebration), many of these lost souls who never cook at all, to my great chagrin, can be counted among my close friends. To the point where making a cake of any kind, even from a box mix, is impressive.

Anyway, irritated by the selections I’d seen in all of last year’s February foodie magazines, I realized that most of my ideal recommendations, that is, the ones that I wasn’t seeing but wanted to, all relied on some form of chocolate ganache or fudge sauce–variants on a shockingly simple recipe. Even the French expert versions are just about this simple–mine’s better because I use a microwave and save washing a saucepan (always key), but the rest is history either way.

If you’re ready to mess around with the proportions until they feel and taste right, you’re my kinda cook. If you’re not, well, just consider that it’s “holiday season” (well, President’s Day, anyway, on Monday) and this is almost a free gift. Seriously, a five-minute (plus a little cooling time) recipe with two or at most five (fanciest variation) ingredients can win you a lot of unearned praise and maybe even a hot date.

All this is merely to point out that, if, like me, you have been tasked with dessert on short notice, you can skip the supermarket frosting horrors if you feel like it (and if your intended audience deserves it) and be amazed (and disturbed) as you flaunt instant and completely fictitious pastry “skills” that–and you don’t have to tell your heart’s desire or any of your friends this–rely almost entirely on some half-and-half and some dark chocolate chips or bars and a microwave. In short, I give you: Ganache.

. . .There is never a completely wrong time for chocolate ganache, except perhaps in the middle of a corned beef on rye with half-sour dills. OK, sorry I mentioned that. . .back to that romantic “cooking” thing. . . Continue reading →

Filed under: cooking, Dairy, Desserts, frugality, haute cuisine, holiday cooking, Microwave tricks, top 10 | Tagged: 2 ingredient recipes, 5-minute recipes, chocolate, chocolate truffles, Desserts, ganache, Valentine's Day | Comments Off on Ganache

Pinned for Purim!

Posted on February 25, 2013 by DebbieN

Thanks to Yael Shuval for choosing my Low-Carb Hamantaschen for her board at Pinterest.com.

Three years ago I developed almond-meal based hamantaschen for my daughter, who had been diagnosed with Type I diabetes only a couple of weeks earlier and needed something that was low enough in carb that (at the time, anyway) she could actually have one or two when all the other kids were having theirs and without having to get an extra shot of insulin.

Almond meal has only about one-fourth as much carbohydrate per cup as wheat flour, so it seemed like a good substitute. To our surprise, although the dough was a little finicky to work with, the hamantaschen came out tasting pretty good, and they were indeed pretty low carb, about 4-5 grams per mini-hamantaschen. Granted, they were also pretty small, but it was a symbolic triumph in the first few weeks and made us all feel like being diabetic wasn’t going to be the end of having fun.

Now that my daughter is on an insulin pump, getting an extra shot is no big deal, though in our experience the pitfall is that it’s now just a little too easy, especially for a preteen, to “eat anything you want, at any time, without thinking about it, as long as you program the insulin for it” which is one of the less responsible marketing messages in Medtronic’s brochure for teenagers (note: the pump itself is pretty good, but it still doesn’t mean you don’t have to be careful about what you’re eating). Those sour gummy heart candies the teacher handed out for snack earlier this week and left on my daughter’s desk, for instance….well, candy never seems like as much food as it really is, and I think my daughter gained a valuable lesson when she added up what she’d really eaten…she wouldn’t be the first one.

It’s always good to have a general plan in place for holiday eating so you don’t overdo the treats or eat an entire meal’s worth of carb in just a few cookies or candies or whatever…what can I say, we’re working on it.

Still. In the last year or two I’ve mostly gone back to making standard hamantaschen based on Joan Nathan’s classic cookie-dough recipe, which I like a lot and which looks and tastes much, much better than the dry, pasty-white horrors at the annual Purim carnival.

What I like about the standard flour-based recipe, other than that it tastes and looks good and is easy to work with, is that I can roll the dough out very thin and get crisp, delicate hamantaschen that are a decent cookie size but still hold together nicely and are not extravagantly carb-laden, particularly if the fillings are reasonable and you don’t eat ten at a time (the big challenge). They’re not as low-carb as the almond meal ones, but they still work out okay–about 7 grams apiece for a 1.5-2″ cookie. They taste good even made with pareve (nondairy) margarine instead of butter.

The LA-area idea of hamantaschen usually involves M&Ms, colored sprinkles, anything completely artificial. I bet gummy sour hearts (this afternoon’s culprit) would be a huge hit too. I don’t think they’ve heard of either prune or poppyseed out here in at least a generation.

Traditional fruit or nut fillings are a much more decent bet for carb, and they taste better (and look nicer too, because I’m not 6 years old and don’t insist on rainbow colors anymore). They’re also easy to make from scratch in a microwave or on the stove top so that you can decide how much sugar to put in them. Continue reading →

Filed under: baking, books, cooking, Dairy, Desserts, Diabetes, Food Blogs, fruits, holiday cooking, kid food, Microwave tricks, sauces and condiments | Tagged: baking, cookie recipes, diabetes, Hamantaschen, Jewish cookbooks, Joan Nathan, L.V. Anderson, low-carb desserts, low-carb hamantaschen, poppyseed, prunes | Comments Off on Pinned for Purim!

Rugelach and the Chanukah Fairy

Posted on December 23, 2012 by DebbieN

Doesn’t that sound like the perfect title for an equal-opportunity holiday-themed kiddie book? Too bad my daughter’s too old for it now, and so are my nephews. Plus no one under 30 knows how to pronounce rugelach anymore. The “ch” always makes for Adam Sandler jokes because it’s so obviously Hard to Pronounce and even more obviously Not English–you use your throat to talk? Gross joke alert! The young and self-conscious have even taken to respelling Chanukah Hanukkah, just to avoid getting laughed at by their friends. Or their parents.

You may be asking what on earth rugelach have to do with Chanukah–and I’m a little late discoursing about Chanukah this week, since it just ended. However, let me warn you, they’re entirely relevant to the holiday treats vs. self-control dilemma.

Rugelach rolls slashed, baked and ready to be cut apart

Forming long rolls, slashing them partway before baking and then slicing them after is a quicker and easier way to form rugelach, especially with a very soft, delicate and hard-to-handle dough. It also lets the dough bake into crisp layers without letting the jam leak out. These two rolls are half the batch.

Fresh cheese (cream cheese, farmer’s or pot cheese) and sour cream are symbolic of Chanukah just as much as frying latkes or sufganiyot (doughnuts) in olive oil. During the war with the Assyrian Greeks in ca. 165 BCE that led to the rededication of the Temple (the event that sparked Chanukah), a Jewish woman named Judith invited the Assyrian Greek general Holofernes into her tent for what he thought was dinner and a movie–and she served him rich cheesecake (sometimes the story says “cheese pancakes”–maybe blintzes? who knows) to make him thirsty and then offered him a lot of undiluted wine. After that, the tryptophan got to him as she’d hoped (they didn’t have turkey back then) and he fell asleep. She chopped off his head (possibly to save the Jews, probably to stop the snoring) and Famous Western Painters from Rubens to Klimt have been painting her portrait ever since.

Puts another spin on the supposed tameness of homestyle baking, don’t it? Also serves as a warning on the more-is-more approach to pigging out. But old-style rugelach are designed to prevent both tameness and pigging out.

Now rugelach–the real thing–are what Pop Tarts never aspired to be (see Jerry Seinfeld’s Pop Tart joke in development at the New York Times online). That is, rugelach are self-limiting (an anti-commercial value) not because there are only two in the package but because they are serious pastry and taste like it.

The real thing is rich and flavorful enough that a few bites, one or two rugelach, are plenty even though they’re small. And before you ask why, it’s the use of cream cheese in the dough; the tang makes the flavor seem a lot richer with a little less fat than an all-butter pastry dough. And it makes the dietary badness self-limiting: you really know when you’ve had enough.

One or two–delightful, blissful, they don’t do it like this anymore, it’s really Old School, my grandmother used to make these, how do you get them so flaky? Three–these are delicious, these are so evil, you’ve got to try the chocolate apricot one, I’ve already had so many! Four–klunk, groan (head hits knees in queasy stupor). It never fails.

Despite the Americanization and factory production of rugelach (even Starbucks sells a tame untangy version of them occasionally, or they used to), rugelach are a Jewish bakery specialty with a very simple dough that gives unbelievably rich, flaky, almost strudel-like results if you do it right. And luckily for me, it’s easy to do right. But it’s still too dangerous to do often.

And yet I’ve found myself making several batches this “holiday season”–one for my daughter’s piano recital, using the classic (and palming off the leftovers on the hosts so I wouldn’t have them at home), one for an experimental “lite” version that almost, but not quite, worked. It had flake, it lacked character. Sort of like the bland Americanized versions. What can I tell you? The lack of tang can’t be made up with salt and sugar–the tang is really what does it, which is why I went back to the classic and won’t revisit it again until next year.

…Although a woman in my congregation says she has a recipe that uses cottage cheese instead of cream cheese and is really good, I am choosing not to believe her.

Note on the dietary badness factor: If you go with either of these doughs and the fillings as directed in the recipe (i.e., you don’t double the sugar or use very sugary jam), a single rugelach comes out with about 6 grams total fat and 6 grams carbohydrate, about 65 calories, and about 20 mg. sodium. The degree of saturated fat depends on which recipe you use.

Classic Rugelach Dough (makes 44-48)

The classic recipe for the dough is:

2 sticks (8 oz., 1/2 lb.) unsalted butter
an 8 oz package cream cheese
2 c. flour

So basically equal and large amounts of butter and cream cheese. Soften them both and beat them together (a food processor is fine). Put the blended fats in a big mixing bowl and fold in the flour very gently with a wooden spoon, a couple of forks or the like, and don’t mix too thoroughly, just barely enough for everything to come together as a very soft crumbly dough you can press into a ball. Put the dough in a plastic bag and pat it into a disk, divide it into four parts with a knife, and chill in the fridge or freezer about an hour until it’s firm enough to roll out. Easy, right?

Some people decorate the basic recipe with extra salt or sugar or, G-d help us, vanilla (Gale Gand puts in all three, why I don’t know). But really, the basic is the best. It gives you a nonsweet, very savory base for a sweet filling, and it’s anything but boring. It does NOT need jazzing up any more than French or Danish puff pastry does. And it builds character to make a pastry that doesn’t bow to middle-American excess. We have plenty of our own excess, thank you very much.

But cream cheese AND butter. A pound of fats for only two cups of flour, and almost all of it’s saturated. Yikes.

So I got to thinking (it had to happen sometime last week). Could I make the dough a little less rich and still great? Subbing in a reduced-fat labaneh from Karoun Dairies for the cream cheese? Maybe–but there’d be some water in it. Might not flake right. Hmm. Try it anyway, report back. Continue reading →

Filed under: baking, Dairy, Desserts, history, holiday cooking, nutrition, nuts, Revised recipes | Tagged: food, holiday baking, Jewish baking, recipes | Comments Off on Rugelach and the Chanukah Fairy

Pistachio madness two ways

Posted on August 4, 2012 by DebbieN

(plus a handful of other frozen yogurt ideas)

It’s over 90 degrees most of the day in Pasadena, and I’ve gotten tired of looking at the limited selection of Dreyer’s (Edy’s east of the Rockies), Breyers, Haagen Daz, and Private Selection flavors with my daughter. It’s starting to get tedious, and they’ve dropped many of the classics for the cheapest possible quality candy-plus-ersatz-vanilla (note: their real vanillas are better). The forgotten classics were better-tasting, less dependent on goo and sweetened brown wax parading as chocolate or (if salted) peanut butter.

No supermarket ice cream brand in the non-superpremium range today offers rum raisin or pistachio worth considering anymore. It’s easy enough to doctor your own version with storebought vanilla ice cream and the aforementioned rum and raisins, but pistachio?

Pistachio used to be a standard ice cream flavor, didn’t it? Maybe I’m just getting old? Naah. Even in the ’70s when I was a kid, most of the “pistachio” ice cream around was already fake. I want the real thing, not the artificially green, mostly-vanilla-with-a-tinge-of-synthetic-almond kind.

And I want it low-fat for me and my husband and low-carb for my daughter (and us too, why not?) And I want it to taste delicious despite all that. Tall order? Actually, it’s easier than you’d think.

David Lebovitz has a Sicilian pistachio paste-based gelato in The Perfect Scoop, and he blogged about it a couple of years ago as well. He made it sound delicious, but also expensive and hard to find the ingredients for. Not that I’m against a trip to Sicily, except in July when it’s about as searing as LA (been there, done that, got the sunburn and the Fellini moments combined with heat exhaustion).

About the same time, a local gelateria owner in my area took much the same position on the utter superiority of Sicilian pistachios versus California ones for an interview in the LA Times. Which is lovely if you have a good source of Sicilian pistachios or pistachio paste at a decent price, but what if you don’t?

Most of the home-brew pistachio ice cream recipes I’ve seen in magazines, blogs and cookbooks call for adding significant amounts of heavy cream. Or else they involve large amounts of sugar. Or both. Yes, those recipes will give ice cream-like results, but they’re completely offtrack for what I need.

In my universe, good taste on a hot day shouldn’t mean losing your svelte, your cool or your wallet.

The nuts themselves are okay–pistachios, like most nuts and seeds, are very low carb and though high in calories from total fat, most of that is unsaturated. If I can keep the rest of the ingredients low fat and low carb and the stuff still tastes good, I’ll have it. Right?

So okay. I’ve been playing around with California pistachios and–not gelato, that requires making an egg-based custard and blending it with flavorings. Done it once or twice, and it worked, but it’s more work than I want to do most days. Or it used to be. Nowadays I’ve got the microwave moxie to make custard without so much work, but it’s still not what I want today. I want easy.

Frozen yogurt made with real yogurt is too tart to work with anything much but fruit unless you mix in some milk–and then it’s icier and freezes harder.

However, this summer I’ve been playing around with fat-free Greek yogurt as the base for a couple of different ices in small quantities. Greek yogurt varies a bit in nutritional stats from brand to brand, and it’s expensive, which is why I took so long to try it out. But the cheapest all-real (no gelatin) stuff–Trader Joe’s O% fat plain version–while still twice as expensive as the regular plain nonfat yogurt ($5 vs. $2.50 a quart), has considerably less carb, maybe only 7 grams of carb per cup as opposed to 17 for regular. And it has about twice the protein–22 grams per cup. It’s a lot thicker and less acidic, so I’m assuming they drained out a lot of the carb in the whey. And it makes really easy frozen yogurts that taste like something and aren’t overwhelmingly tart.

Just mix in your flavoring of choice (preferably not too watery) with some sugar, and you can still-freeze it within an hour or two. If you think the tang needs to be tamed further, a little milk mixed in works okay and it stays thick enough to freeze fairly gracefully.

The texture is never going to be like ice cream, not entirely. It still mixes up pretty hard and a little icy if you still-freeze it, but once you’ve got it thawed out to the point where you can dig out a serving, it tastes good and changes to a creamy texture as you eat it, something like khulfi. Higher-fat yogurt would break the iciness up a bit but would defeat my purpose of lowering the saturated fat to something I can handle.

And the heavy fats and sugars mask any delicate flavorings. Think Italian gelato (the real kind you get on the street in Florence, not the overpriced stuff you get in pints in the supermarket here) and you know that a lighter base allows you things like rose or ricotta or apricot or kiwi, or hazelnut, or four different highly refined grades of chocolate. If you want to taste anything delicate in your ice cream, you have to get the fats and sugars down enough not to overwhelm it.

Not that I’m entirely subtle. My favorite icier-textured frogurt for when it’s broiling out is mint–Greek yogurt, a couple of drops of mint extract, if that’s strong enough without tasting like postage stamps, and a tablespoon or so of sugar. Divvy it up into 2-4 paper cups or popsicle makers (small is okay for this), freeze. On a searingly hot day it’s pretty good, intensely flavored and refreshing, and its popsicle-style texture is fine with me.

For something like coffee frogurt, I really do want a creamier texture if I can get it. I finally figured I should just brew a little bit of triple-strength coffee so I can mix just a few spoonfuls into a cup of Greek yogurt, maybe with a few spoonfuls of milk, and still get strong enough flavor.

A spoonful or two of alcohol-based flavorings like rum, amaretto, even just vanilla extract can soften the hard-freeze effect, since the alcohol freezing point is lower than that for water.

Or you can add something protein or starch to the mix–egg custards and cornstarch are the usual route for gelati and standard commercial ice cream, but silken tofu and nonfat powdered dry milk also work to break up the ice crystals. Greek yogurt is providing most of the protein here and little water, and the carb is a lot less than for the powdered dry milk.

The last thing on my list, and it sounds either weird or completely obvious, is to add a fat–but I want something unsaturated. Oil? Yuck (though I have seen some olive oil ice creams flavored with basil or the like). But what about nut butters? Those, don’t laugh too hard, work pretty well and give the frozen yogurt a richness that feels like ice cream, only without big saturated fats or modifiers or xanthan gum or corn syrup solids or whatever. Plus they’re interesting flavors.

Halvah: I started with my trusty jar of tehina–sesame paste. It’s got almost all its fat in polyunsaturated form. A tablespoon in a cup of Greek yogurt, plus a tablespoon of sugar, stir, freeze, dig out a chunk–not so hard! And the flavor–kind of like frozen halvah. Very rich, though. Maybe I could get away with less tehina or more yogurt?

Chocolate halvah: I tried a chocolate version–also not bad–by adding two tablespoons of cocoa powder and an additional spoonful of sugar to the tehina/yogurt mix. Pretty good, but the tehina taste was definitely still there alongside the chocolate. Like chocolate marble halvah. You have to be a fan.

Peanut butter? Probably more Americans would like it than the tehina version. Go easy on the peanut butter; a good-tasting mix I once made with half a cup got way, way way too rich very quickly once it was frozen. Stick with a tablespoon or so per cup of yogurt. I’d use natural peanuts-only peanut butter, preferably the crunchy one, for the purest taste, limit the sugar and add a pinch of salt.

But really. I started out wanting pistachio, and that’s where I’m still going with this. Because I ended up with two, count ’em TWO, really good, really different variations on pistachio, and both of them were really easy, really low in saturated fat, and REALLY low-carb. And actively delicious, which is definitely the point.

California pistachios may not be the Sicilian ideal, but they taste pretty good for what they are. TJ’s sells 8 oz of roasted unsalted ones for about 5 bucks. Not exactly cheap. Still, the shelling’s been done, and for a pint of finished frogurt, you only need an ounce of pistachios. Will that be enough to taste like something? Oh, yes. Continue reading →

Filed under: cooking, Dairy, DASH Diet, Desserts, Diabetes, haute cuisine, Microwave tricks, nutrition, nuts, Revised recipes | Tagged: California pistachios, cardamom, coffee frozen yogurt, diabetic desserts, frozen desserts, frozen yogurt, Greek yogurt, halvah frozen yogurt, ice cream, low-carb desserts, low-fat desserts, pistachio ice cream, pistachio khulfi, sorbets | Comments Off on Pistachio madness two ways

Eat the City, Read the Book

Posted on June 3, 2012 by DebbieN

I’ve just received an advance copy of Robin Shulman‘s forthcoming book, Eat the City: A Tale of the Fishers, Foragers, Butchers, Farmers, Poultry Minders, Sugar Refiners, Cane Cutters, Beekeepers, Winemakers and Brewers Who Built New York.

[Or at least that’s the title on the cover art–the copyright info page version of the book title squeezes in even more food trades–what, or rather who, the heck are “hungers”? People who “curate” aged hanger steaks?]

Shulman, a well-known reporter who has worked for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Slate and other venues, has covered hard-news beats from city politics and urban blight to Middle East diplomacy. In Eat the City, Shulman explores the neighborhoods of New York, where she lives, and from hundreds of interviews, she harvests seven key stories to tell in depth: Honey, Vegetables, Meat, Sugar, Beer, Fish and Wine.

Each chapter, rich and multilayered, cuts across decades of urban history, whether development or decay, recounts conflicts and unexpected cooperation between would-be urban farmers and the neighborhood factories or city agencies they deal with, and uncovers the not-so-obvious ways these individual entrepreneurs bring a sense of connection and vitality to the city.

So we meet a man who after returning not entirely whole from a stint in Iraq, got enthusiastic about beekeeping when it was still illegal. In 2010, he rallied New York’s clandestine beekeepers to convince the city to rescind its ban on rooftop hives, and started training hundreds of apprentices. The retired numbers runner who farms vacant lots in Harlem–something he started as a cover for his gambling operations in the ’60s and turned into one of the first urban community garden projects–is still going strong in his 70s, but he’s seen several of his neighborhoods fall silent over the decades as buildings crumbled and the city neglected the people. The Manhattan ad exec risks her health and her freedom sneaking into taped-off areas to fish striped bass from the East River–she’s not sure it’s safe to eat, but she’s as hooked as her catch, and often announces her triumphs on Facebook. And somewhere toward the end of the book is the true and presumably unvarnished story of Manischewitz, the first big brand of kosher wine in America (and actually, probably anywhere, since before the 20th century most people made their own kosher wine at home).

Eat the City is due out in July, and all I can say is get out there and reserve yourself a copy, or clamor at the cash register of your local bookstore to order you one. Because this is the best book I’ve read in quite a while on the history and present fortunes of small independent food growers in one of America’s largest urban landscapes.

Like Michael Pollan’s books, it has depth and thoughtful analysis of the meaning of food in modern life. Unlike Pollan, Shulman isn’t advocating a lifestyle choice, she’s giving you a window on individuals as they elbow their way into a crowded city to make room for themselves.

Food is the medium here, but the impulse is universal, and the result is a better understanding of both food entrepreneurs and the meaning of city life itself. If you want to know what’s really happening beyond the wide-eyed grow-your-own-tomatoes-in-Brooklyn blogs, just pick a chapter and start digging in.

Filed under: books, Dairy, fish, Food Politics, frugality, history, Odd food, Oddities, shopping, wine | Tagged: beekeepers, community gardens, Eat the City, entrepreneurship, food producers, Manischewitz, New York City, Robin Shulman, urban farmers | Comments Off on Eat the City, Read the Book

Coconut, minus the hype

Posted on May 25, 2012 by DebbieN

Palm and coconut oils have made a huge comeback in the last few years. Both are very high in saturated fats, which promote high blood cholesterol and heart disease, but the vegan community has embraced them as “natural” and they’re turning up in all kinds of baked goods and sweets these days at Whole Foods. Which also sells big mayo jars full of coconut butter. Looks like Crisco, scoops like Crisco, costs 10 times as much.

A lot of the newer vegan recipes and packaged foods are direct mimics of things that used to include lard, beef tallow and suet at the lower end of the classiness scale, or butter at the high end. My local Whole Foods’ pastry case features a lot of croissant and baklava variations these days, all now made with palm oil, as are many of the muffins. Starbucks’ “old-fashioned kettle” doughnuts feature palm oil in two places, both the dough and the icing.

Why are these fats getting so popular? Why all the wishful thinking that a plant source automatically makes them healthy to eat in quantity? Why are all the nutrition advice columnists in the major newspapers and health magazines suddenly “holistic coaches” who graduated college with psych majors and the like rather than board-licensed nutritionists and registered dieticians?

The truth of the matter is that your body doesn’t care so much whether a saturated fat came from lard, a coconut, or a chemical vat–regardless of the source, the fat molecules are shaped the same and your digestive and metabolic enzymes process them all the same way.

Palm and coconut oil? The hip vegan crowd, who consider themselves really indie, would be surprised to learn how thoroughly they’ve been manipulated by a very big industry. In the past 10 years, these oils have suddenly ramped up production wherever palm trees can be grown, mostly in Malaysia and Indonesia, where producers started by stripping the jungles to plant a single crop (though some of the main palm oil traders, like Lever–yes, the soap manufacturer–have made statements that they’re working to reverse some of the damage and buy only from those who “plant sustainably”). The other main centers of palm and coconut oil growers are Africa, India and Latin America.

Palm and coconut oils have taken off not because they’re vegan (outside of India, there just aren’t enough to support the industry boom) but because they’re such a cheap source of fat. Well, cheap everywhere but the Whole Foods shelves. They are indeed useful to the processed baked-goods industry for lending that heavy grease “satisfaction” factor to things that used to be made with butter, suet or lard. And they’re much less heavily regulated in the US by the agricultural inspectors because they don’t trigger all those livestock rules.

But should you be eating them? Buying jars of coco butter for your home cooking? Something tells me you’d be better off eating less of anything that requires cooking in heavy fats as opposed to regular polyunsaturated vegetable oil. And cutting down on all fats unless you’ve actually been diagnosed by an MD, not a holistic coach, as underweight.

Because even the unsaturated fats have a lot of calories. Rip Esselstyn’s “Fire Engine 2 Diet” specifically cut out all oils because the people he was training to eat better really needed to lose weight, and the bottom line is that the 120 calories in a tablespoon of ordinary unsaturated vegetable oil are still extras. There’s no real way around that. Not even if you’re vegan.

And wasn’t the point of nonstick pans supposed to be so you could cut down on cooking fats? (ok, it was really so the pans would be easier to wash, but why not take advantage while you’re at it?)

I’m not saying you shouldn’t ever use coconut itself in cooking–I’ve been a Mounds fan from way back, and please just don’t ask about those poufy huge coconut-sprinked, bright pink marshmallow things we used to clamor for as kids (“Snowballs”? I think it was a half-dome of marshmallow that sat on a cookie…almost as bad as Moon Pies.) These days I try to eat it sparingly, because it’s still fatty, and because most of my coconut exposure now takes place in the form of macaroons at Passover, when I’m already feeling like if I see another can or box of something packaged I’ll pass out.

But seriously–and more sophisticatedly–coconut itself is a worthwhile cooking ingredient in some savory dishes, and it has a subtle, penetrating flavor that means you don’t have to use a ton. You can also find good steam-defatted versions of shredded coconut that have about half the fat of regular, and look for partially decreamed canned coconut milk as well (I think Trader Joe’s sells it, maybe Whole Foods as well). Unfortunately, half the fat for coconut is still pretty fatty, but it’s an improvement.

Even a spoonful of unsweetened shreds can give a curry or aviyal (i.e., coconut-based “dry curry” class of dishes) a satisfying suggestion of richness without adding loads of fat. Maybe a gram or two per serving, and it can help even out jagged edges in the spicing.

To get the most flavor out of a small amount of coconut, I do one of two things. In the aviyal of cowpeas below, I toast a spoonful of dried shreds Continue reading →

Filed under: Beans and legumes, cooking, Dairy, DASH Diet, Food Politics, frugality, history, Microwave tricks, nutrition, Revised recipes, shopping, Vegetabalia | Tagged: 66o Curries, aviyal, coco butter, coconut, coconut oil, cowpeas, curry, dal makhani, feta cheese, Indian cooking, low-fat cooking, microwave, palm oil, Raghavan Iyer, saturated fat, spices, vegan lifestyle | 2 Comments »

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OK, Fried PLUS Dairy for Chanukah

An Appreciation of Lox

Post-Kiddush: our leftovers are better than yours

Starting with Breakfast

Ganache

Rugelach and the Chanukah Fairy

Pistachio madness two ways

(plus a handful of other frozen yogurt ideas)

Eat the City, Read the Book

Coconut, minus the hype

About Slow Food Fast

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(plus a handful of other frozen yogurt ideas)

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About Slow Food Fast

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