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    raw blueberry pie with microwaveable filling and graham cracker crust

    This mostly-raw blueberry pie is a snap to make and very versatile--the filling microwaves in a few minutes, and you don't even have to bake the zippy gingered graham cracker crust--perfect for a hot Fourth of July and all summer long.

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Technique: How to Squeeze an Eggplant

Long ago, I threatened to post the unlovely but effective method of peeling cooked eggplants that I learned the hard way, in a kibbutz kitchen. We used to make baba ghanouj routinely for a thousand members–something like 50 to 75 baked eggplants went into it each time, mixed in a stand mixer the size of a wheelbarrow with a base that was cemented into the floor. You can’t be fooling around with spoons and forks when you’re working on that scale. Instead, we cooled the eggplants in a huge colander and then started squeezing them out as though they were pastry bags or tubes of toothpaste.

It takes a bit of practice…to say the least. But each eggplant only takes about half a minute to empty into the colander, and once you get the method down, the skin stays together and is just about completely clean inside. Very effective. Not very dignified, though, unless you do it enough to get good at it.

However, since I have no vanity whatsoever, I finally took some pictures (not easy to shoot while actually squeezing the eggplants, so don’t expect photogenic–eggplant is only pretty raw…) and have steeled myself to walk you through it. Wear goggles and a hairnet the first time if you’re afraid of flying goop, or make your little sister do it first. And don’t forget to rinse your hands (and arms) well right afterward, because the juice is still a bit caustic and will make them itch after awhile. Anyway, the following is for if your little sister refuses to take the bait.  Click directly on any of the pictures if you want a closer view.

How to Squeeze an Eggplant

First, microwave your eggplant(s) (best if you’re only doing up to 3; any more and it’s worth roasting them for a whole hour in the oven at 400F). Scrub them well, cut off the cap (watch out for thorns!), rub or sprinkle a little salt on the damp skins, and set them to microwave 10 minutes on HIGH, until they’re soft and collapsed.

whole eggplant before microwaving for baba ghanouj

Whole eggplant prepped to microwave for baba ghanouj

Eggplant after microwaving

After microwaving 10 minutes, the eggplant has collapsed

Next, let the eggplant cool enough to handle–this is probably the most important part. Trying to squeeze out a scalding eggplant leads to explosions of scalding eggplant goop, plus the peel usually toughens a little as it cools, which makes ruptures a little less likely.

–Am I making it sound good yet? No?–hang in there.

Poking the eggplant

The all-important poke

Set the cooling eggplant cut-end-down in a colander over a bowl to drain off some of the juices. If you have the asbestos-like fingers for it, you can poke a hole in the cut end while it’s still hot and earn yourself untold macho points as long as you only wince after you’ve slunk off to the bathroom. Never let ’em see you cry. If you’re not that brash, you’ll have to poke a hole in the cut end once it cools. That’s the easy part.

Once the eggplant’s cooled enough to wrap your hands around it, it’s showtime. Keep the cut end facing down.

Grab the eggplant like a pastry bag, cut end down

Grab the eggplant like a pastry bag, cut end down

Cup your hands around the fat round end at the top and very gradually push in and downward, closing your hands over the top, Continue reading

Microwave Cheesecakes

Microwave cheesecakeThis week we celebrated Shavuot, the feast of first fruits and giving of the Torah at Mt. Sinai. Shavuot has only two solid traditions I can remember from childhood: studying all night (three ultra-dedicated guys from my congregation would hang out and do it for the rest of us, kind of like the Jewish Scholarship Marathon), and eating cheesecake. Which is a pretty good tradition, actually.

I go for the serious New York-style tall, lemon-tinged cheesecakes that are rich and just dry enough to have a fluffy crumb to them. The only one of these I ever made myself was the glorious one from (once again) Joan Nathan’s The Jewish Holiday Kitchen. It was huge, it was beautiful, it took two whole hours of baking with the oven on and off, and I was just barely smart enough to wrap it tight in a double layer of heavy-duty tinfoil  right before carrying it out to the car for a brunch setup. Because of course it took a nosedive onto the parking lot pavement–but the foil held up! And the cheesecake was only a little bashed! And we covered it pretty liberally in sour cherry jam, and everyone ate it happily, and no one kvetched. A miracle!

The story of how G-d gave the Torah law to the Jewish people on Mt. Sinai, is kind of hard to picture. Supposedly it was all so shockingly loud and bright people started to hear colors and see sounds (or else the lightning was so close it started to short out their neural circuits). But what is clear is that  everyone was so awed and shocked they stopped arguing, at least for a few minutes.

So of course it has everything to do with today’s topic, which is still cheesecake. It’s an established fact–feed cheesecake to your people and you’ll get a few minutes of blessed silence. It’s quicker and cheaper than group electroshock therapy, too, and it tastes better.

So I’d wanted to make a cheesecake for Shavuot, but not take two hours about it, especially in May in Los Angeles. Also, cheesecake is  a traditionally loaded food–one look and you can hear your gallbladder calling you.  But it’s a real challenge to make a decent-tasting, genuinely low-fat version that isn’t just “use neufchâtel and cut out 3 calories!” Or else hideously tough or gelatinous or watery or flavorless or grainy or otherwise weird.

Drained nonfat yogurt–no. Tough, tangy AND watery after baking. Ricotta–not bad, especially for Roman-style cheesecake, but bland and a bit grainy. Gelatin’s out for me because it’s not a kosher ingredient. Fat-free cream cheese–I’m just not a fan, it’s too salty and processed-tasting somehow. Not fresh. And on the web I’ve seen everything from tofu to tehina (sesame paste)–I can’t imagine, but to each his or her own.

Still, I think with the microwave I’ve got the time thing solved in a way that will work for a number of different versions. A while back I discovered you can take pretty much any standard New York-style cheesecake recipe (eggs, flour, cream- or other suitable cheese, vanilla, lemon juice), put it in a microwaveable baking dish, cover and nuke it through in a couple of minutes without ruining the texture. It’s probably better without a crust, but if you prebake the crust then pour the filling, cover, and nuke while it’s still hot, it might prevent sogginess.

The only versions that might be really troublesome would be ones with yogurt, which is usually too thin and watery even when drained, or else cottage cheese, which works in a conventional oven but not the microwave. For some strange reason cottage cheese curd liquefies into a buttermilk-like mess in the microwave rather than setting up. Frustrating. But ricotta works pretty well, cream cheese–of course, labaneh–astoundingly perfect, and even…nonfat powdered dry milk (NFPD) with buttermilk. Odd but true. So it will work with a range of adaptations from full-fat to ultra-lean, and the rest is up to your tastebuds. Continue reading

Adventures with Cheese, Part II: Paneer in the Microwave

Paneer is the fresh white curd cheese used in Indian dishes like saag or palak paneer, aloo mattar paneer, and so on. Panela or queso fresco are okay substitutes, if you can get them, and they taste a lot better than tofu.

But you can also make paneer very easily (if a bit messily) at home in a few minutes, if you have a pyrex bowl, a microwave, and a colander. If milk is going cheap in your neighborhood market this week or you have half a gallon that you really need to use up quickly before you go on vacation, making paneer isn’t a bad way to do it.

You’ll get about 5 oz fairly dry curd for a quart of milk, so not a great yield, but it’s pretty versatile. Whole milk makes a richer cheese than skim, obviously, but both work okay. Press the curd hard when you drain it and it’s sliceable. Press lightly and it’s spreadable. If you use a quart of buttermilk on its own rather than mostly milk, you can blend in a little garlic and some herbs and a drop of olive oil to the drained curd, and you’ve got something close to Rondelé cheese spread.

And don’t just toss out the whey–it still has a lot of soluble smaller proteins and calcium in it, so it’s worth keeping if you can use it within a day or so. You can use some of the warm whey instead of water to make a moist, chewy-textured Italian-type yeast bread (whey is extremely good for rosemary focaccia). Or puree the whey with some lightly cooked broccoli or cauliflower or canned pumpkin, a bit of onion or garlic, and some marjoram and/or thyme for a quick fresh cream-of-vegetable soup.

Paneer from scratch (makes about 5 oz, can scale up if you prefer)

  • A quart of milk
  • 1 cup of buttermilk if you have it
  • juice of a lemon

1. Pour everything into a 2.5 qt. pyrex mixing bowl, mix, and microwave on HIGH about 5 minutes, until the milk solids separate from the clear yellow whey. The solids should float in a mass and be pulling away from the sides of the bowl.

2. Take a colander or strainer over another large bowl, line it with a couple of layers of cheesecloth or 3-4 overlapping round paper coffee filters, whatever works for you. Carefully pour the whey over first, keeping the curd back in the bowl with a serving spoon or spatula for as long as possible, until you’ve poured most of the whey through (otherwise it takes forever to drain…). Then drain the curd on the filters and press it until it’s fairly firm and could be cut into cubes without crumbling apart.

Microwave tricks: Quiche in 15 minutes

Spinach quiche in 15 minutesNo. Not kidding. Not even a little. This actually works, and comes out tasting much better than I ever expected. It rescued dinner last night, to tell you the truth.

I’ve made a lot of strange things with a microwave oven in my time. Honeycake, rice, taco chips (not recommended–it worked beautifully but I’m pretty sure that’s what shortened the life of my last microwave), pasta, dulce de leche, lasagne, baba ghanouj, beans, dolmas, flan, marmalade, rolls, even paneer from scratch. Sometimes I really need a quick method, sometimes I’m just fooling around to see what’s possible, but much of the time it actually works. Usually the first try is good enough that it’s worth either repeating as-is or fine-tuning to get it closer to what you want. This one I didn’t have to fiddle with at all–it just worked.

If you’ve got a reasonably modern microwave (1000 to 1200 W), a pyrex pie plate, a microwaveable dinner plate and the basic ingredients for quiche, you’re in business. All with real and very ordinary quiche ingredients, and no odd cooking methods other than the use of a microwave instead of a standard oven.

The olive-oil-based pie crust itself I made and parbaked in a regular oven for 10 minutes while I prepared the filling and custard. Continue reading

Matzah Brei–blintzes?

Matzah Brei Blintzes

Thursday morning I broke down and decided to cook  breakfast for my daughter instead of leaving it at matzah, jam, yogurt and fruit. I’m not a big fan of matzah brei, a poor substitute for french toast in which the eggs never really seem to absorb very well and you’re left swallowing the hard corners of the matzah. Neither crisp nor soft, it always seems like a wrong turn to me.

On the other hand, I didn’t have any matzah meal in the house for pancakes (how much extra matzah product do you really need when you’re trying to eat less of it?) So I broke down and took a couple of sheets of the whole wheat matzah from the latest box and prepared to do battle.

I think I’ve mentioned once or twice that I hate waiting for water to boil. But a pyrex pie plate with half an inch of water in the bottom takes only 2 minutes to heat up fairly well in the microwave. And it has room for the matzah, which I broke up into halves. But whole wheat matzah doesn’t soak up all that well, even after several minutes in hot water. It’s the tougher bread of affliction. What now?

I fished out a dinner plate and covered the pie plate with it, stuck it all back in the microwave, and hit stun for another minute. To my surprise, it worked–really worked. The matzah didn’t fluff up or anything–but it was soft and pliable and even a bit elastic, something like just-cooked lasagne noodles. No hard corners. I drained off the hot water and poured on the egg-milk soak, which didn’t really soak in much even though the matzah was now soft. Sigh.

My daughter came around a corner, looked at me fishing one of these matzah halves out of the pie plate, and said, “I wish we could have blintzes” and I thought–well, these actually bend–could we? Why not?

Matzah brei blintz ready for frying

Matzah brei blintz, ready for frying

Continue reading

Not Gefilte

For most American Jews, gefilte fish is one of the standard, unchanging preludes to the actual dinner part of the Passover seder. And normally I have no problem with that, especially with hrein, or horseradish. By the time the recitation of the Haggadah and the explanation of the items on the seder plate are done, everyone is joking about (or egging on their kids to pipe up and ask) the Fifth Question: When do we EAT??? And gefilte fish is the first answer.

It’s worthwhile to be hungry enough for once to feel, rather than just nodding as someone tells you self-righteously, that such a modest dish, made with fresh fish in the days when most of our grandparents and great-grandparents were too poor to eat it often, can be something to look forward to.

Gefilte fish is basically an oversized quenelle of ground whitefish and pike, filled out with eggs, onion, and matzah meal to stretch it. Simmered in fish stock for a couple of hours with or without added sugar, cooled to let the broth gel, served room temperature or cold, with horseradish as contrast.

But since most of us don’t make our own gefilte fish at home anymore, it’s usually bland, salted (and sometimes sweetened) ovals of stuff pulled from a pricey store-bought jar–no longer what you’d consider fresh, and no longer economical. And it’s usually about twice as big as any normal/sane appetizer for a meal that’s going to include brisket, chopped liver, meatballs, eggs, chicken and/or turkey, and other big proteins.

Can it be made well fresh? Yes, actually, and a number of Jewish cookbooks–Joan Nathan’s among the leaders–tell you how. But do I want to cook it myself, or eat it any other time than at someone else’s seder? No. Flat out, no. Not only is it a two-hour-plus process, it’s a big chore. All for a mediocre, bland kind of fish dumpling.

The other problem this year is that my daughter is now diabetic, and for the first time I’m going to have to help her count carbs so we can give her the right amount of insulin for a seder meal that will probably last over two hours. It’s tricky enough to do that accurately for a restaurant meal–desserts, which come last and for which the menu isn’t usually even presented until you’ve already eaten the meal, are by far the hardest foods to estimate by sight.

But traditional Ashkenazi-style seder dishes like gefilte fish and matzah ball soup are stuffed full of surprise carbs too, and you can’t be sure how much they contain unless you’re the cook. And that’s not counting the mandated matzah and haroset. All you can say is, all that matzah meal really starts to add up. Will my daughter overrun her carb count before she ever gets to the meal itself, with a chance to risk it on (more matzah-filled) desserts?

If I cook some kind of fish during Pesach week, I want it to be fresh and without much in the way of carbs. Most of all, I want it to taste good. Actively good. Continue reading

A Year of Artichoke Hearts

“Top 10 Recipes” lists are a big thing at the new year, a way to look back and figure out which dishes made a hit and which ones were just so-so. But sometimes, after an entire year, the top-10 judging criteria can get a little distorted. How do dining section editors compare five quasi-Asian stir-fried noodle-and-greens dishes, most of them mysteriously pumped up with bacon crumbles (2009’s star ingredient), and decide all five really belong in the top 10 for the year?

In one of my early posts, I was thinking about toasted cheese sandwiches (grilled cheese, hard to believe, was a Top 100 Dishes entry for Bon Appétit at that point). At the end, I threw in a quick little recipe for marinated artichoke hearts done in a microwave as an antidote to all the middle-American boredom. Yesterday I ran across an artichoke and potato salad from the LA Times‘s 2009 top-10 list and realized my artichoke hearts would probably make it better. Because they make everything better, or almost.

Marinating your own artichoke hearts takes five minutes, is less expensive than buying a jar of prepared ones, tastes fresher, and has a short list of real ingredients. A ~12-oz batch lasts more than a week in the fridge, where it’s  ready to serve as a pick-me-up for sandwiches, pasta, fish, omelets, salads, and hot vegetable dishes. I use these artichoke hearts so often that whenever I get to my Trader Joe’s and they’ve run completely out of bags of plain frozen artichoke hearts in the freezer and won’t get any in for weeks, I feel horrible and deprived, like someone who’s just been told not to talk with her hands.

That puts it in MY top 10.

You don’t need more than a dash of salt in this recipe to make the artichoke hearts taste intense and bright. The fresh lemon juice and garlic do it for you, and something about the artichokes themselves makes the combination work. Continue reading

Impatient for Orange Peels

Microwave Candied Orange PeelTonight is the first night of Chanukah, or as the next generation spells it, Hanukkah, and instead of blogging about latkes, which I’m not making tonight, in favor of a congregational dinner (yay, no cooking, no dishes, no family kvetches), I decided to pick something else I like more. Like candied orange peel, which is outrageously expensive if you buy it at a candy store. Chocolate plus oranges is the flavor of Sabra liqueur, an Israeli elixir from the days of my childhood which I think is now out of production. Of course, so’s my childhood, or at least my first childhood…

But the standard recipe for candied orange peels goes something like: “Boil some water. Blanch the de-pithed orange peel strips from a couple of oranges for two minutes. Throw out the water and do it again. Then simmer the peels in 4 cups of sugar and 4 cups of water for an hour or two. Then drain them. Then toss them separately in a bowl with fresh, dry sugar to coat and spread them out on a cookie tray to dry for another couple of hours.”

In all, that’s about 4 or 5 hours. Oy! My inner second childhood is whining already.

Following up from my microwaved kumquat marmalade experiment, which worked beautifully, I decided I could probably do something similar to candy orange peels. The final result was not perfect-perfect by professional confectioners’ standards and I wouldn’t be surprised if Martha Stewart disapproved, but it looked okay to me, was done in 15 minutes from peeling oranges to dredging-and-drying, and the taste is not bad, not bad at all. Makes you wonder.

The oranges I picked were a bit bland and nonacidic, and tangerine or clementine would be a bit livelier if you can find organic ones, but this is what I had. And as I discovered, the flavor seems to improve as the peels sit after being dredged in sugar and dried. Continue reading

Microwave tricks: Pasta You Don’t Have to Babysit

Mark Bittman’s post-Thanksgiving look into the brave new world of absorption pasta and Pete Wells’s “Cooking with Dexter” piece in the New York Times yesterday on the virtues of a pot of boiling water have me thinking hard about why neither of them has even tried the microwaves that must be sitting on their counters. Especially Wells, who has not one but two very young and active children to watch out for.

You can cook standard dried or frozen pasta very well in a microwave, with only a few minutes of actual cooking time and almost no need to stay close by. You can cook rice too–and we’re not talking Minute Rice, either. Basmati rice, the queen of difficult rices, cooks perfectly in a microwave.

The setup for microwaving tortelloni

The setup for microwaving tortelloni and other filled pasta

I started cooking pasta in a microwave when my daughter was a toddler. She was pretty active and I couldn’t leave a pot boiling away on the stove to go and chase her–either the pasta or I would have boiled over. By the same token, I had nightmares of her getting over the baby gate and into the kitchen as she got bigger and more impatient. My mother-in-law still has extensive scars from having a boiling pot tip over on her when she was a child, and it’s one of the reasons I decided to try microwaving pasta instead. Even though my daughter is now kitchen-savvy, it worked so well I’ve never been tempted to go back. Continue reading

Spaghetti Squash Too Many Ways

Just half of a microwaved spaghetti squash makes 5 or 6 cups

Just half of a microwaved spaghetti squash makes 5 or 6 cups!

This week my local Trader Joe’s had crates of beautiful–and hefty–spaghetti and butternut squash for less than $2 apiece–on the order of 30 to 50 cents/lb. So of course I got two of each and wobbled out of the store unsure which bag was pulling me down further. And then came the task of cooking them.

One spaghetti squash–a good-sized 5-6 lb. beast–will feed a lot more people than you’d think. It’s got some serious advantages over standard pasta: more fiber, no sodium, some vitamin A and potassium, perhaps fewer calories and carbohydrates per ounce. And it’s incredibly versatile. And you can cook it in the microwave in about 10 minutes rather than spend an hour baking it and heating up the house.

But there’s one big disadvantage–if you cook the whole thing, you have to eat the whole thing. Cooked spaghetti squash doesn’t hold up in the freezer–the strings go flat and shrivelly. And reheating too long can make it wilt as well. So can very acidic dressings.

So the choices are (for a small, moderately but only moderately tolerant family unit):

  • Cook half at a time and store the other half raw and wrapped in the fridge for a few days
  • Cook both halves, use one right away, and store the other half in the fridge for a few days, either wrapped in its shell or else scooped out into a container  (recommended)
  • Give the other half to a friend–but not too good a friend…
  • Cook it all and make it for a big potluck. Maybe people will think it’s innovative and exotic…depends on what you do with it (I don’t so much recommend marinara for this if you’re looking to impress–maybe a peanut-curry sauce or an Alfredo-style sauce with lemon peel, or something involving oyster mushrooms)
  • Cook it all and serve it a couple of different ways over the course of the week
  • Make a couple of the variations ones that taste good cold and eat the leftovers for lunch (recommended)

One important tip (learned the hard way):

The strands grow crosswise inside the spaghetti squash, not lengthwise. If you cut the squash in half the way you would a watermelon, you’ll be cutting the strands into shorter bits–not what you want. Cut the spaghetti squash in half across the middle of the SHORT side, NOT from the stem to the flower end.

If you have kids, let them count the seeds in each half of the squash–it’s a good lesson in plant survival strategies. My daughter and I counted about 80-90 seeds per half and decided to wash, dry and save them for her school’s garden. At this rate, they’ll have spaghetti squash for several years. Note of caution: out of 10 that we thought had been lost down the sink but actually got caught in the drainer, a full 9 germinated, so be careful what you wish for… even commercially grown, these things are very, very determined. But we’re not ready to name any of them “Audrey II”–yet. Continue reading