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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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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: , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Post-Kiddush: our leftovers are better than yours

Little Green Footballs

Posted on May 26, 2013 by DebbieN

…and Other Lessons from the Fillo Stratum

cheese and pesto triangles

Two or three weeks ago I got a frantic email from the assistant at my daughter’s Hebrew school: could I lead a cooking session for the 8th graders for an hour that Sunday?

Teens and preteens are not my specialty–I have a friend who’s really terrific with them; she’s an 8th grade and high school teacher and would rather deal with kids than write. I’m the other way around, and my own kid’s turning 13 very soon. Very soon.

Suffice it to say, my answer probably should have been, “Who me? Are you off your nut? Cook with preteens in only an hour?”

And then I thought–but wait. Fillo. It’s inexpensive (a big plus), it’s  easy enough to fold, it’s almost (if you squint) kind of a craft.  Like origami. Make some tasty and quick fillings for it (though no nuts–schools have gotten annoyingly leary of anything with nuts. How are you supposed to teach baklava? Eh? Eh???) and let the kids go to town, a couple of sheets of fillo apiece in the synagogue kitchen. An hour should do it, and it’s a cool, sophisticated food to know how to make–very different from the standard summer camp challah with blue or green food coloring.

So…I bought a couple of packets of fillo (about $2.69 for a roll of 20-24 sheets), a couple of pounds of loose-frozen spinach, an onion, some garlic, a bottle of olive oil and another bottle of canola oil (for the sweet fillings), a packet of dried apricots, a packet of dried figs, some farmer cheese (mistake, doesn’t taste that good; stick with ricotta) and some feta. And some dill and scallions I had at home. Also a lemon or two. I left the fillo in the fridge overnight to thaw slowly the way you’re supposed to, and not the way I usually do (i.e., take the thing out of the wrapper and let it sit an hour on the counter and then wonder why it cracks when I rush to unroll it).

I made the fillings the Sunday morning in a microwaver’s frenzy of immense efficiency:

  1.  Nuke a stick of unsalted butter in a bowl, pour it into a snaplock container.
  2. Thaw the spinach on a plate–4 minutes on HIGH. Take it out.
  3. Dump the dried apricots in a bowl with water to cover and a saucer on top–3 minutes. Meanwhile, start squeezing the spinach dry, and I mean dry, in handfuls over the sink. Nothing worse than soggy spanakopita. Except maybe soggy pizza.
  4. Take the apricots out, put in the bowl of figs with the stems cut off, some water and a lid, 3 minutes for them.
  5. Blend the apricots with a little sugar and water and lemon juice to make a thick paste. Get it out of the food processor and pack it in a disposable container with a lid.
  6. Do the same thing for the figs, only no sugar necessary.
  7. Rinse out the food processor, stick the scallions, wild thyme, fresh dill and basil in and chop them fine, drop in the spinach, a fat clove of minced garlic, and the feta. Pack that too.
  8. Grab all the bags with the goods and don’t forget the oils and the butter and the fillings and the extra feta and farmer’s cheese just in case there’s time to make some cheese-only filling there and somebody wants it. …

I hustled, I got to the synagogue kitchen on time, I set up stations around a stainless steel work table–foil sheets at each place, paper bowls with a dab of melted butter and a pour of oil, plastic baggies to go over everyone’s hands instead of pastry brushes, the carefully unrolled fillo under plastic wrap. The oven–on. The fillings–ready to rock. And then I waited. And waited.

An hour really would have been enough time for that class. But none of the kids showed up for the first 20 minutes because it was also the day the photographers were herding all the classes out into the basketball court area for graduation photos. So when they finally straggled in, all eight–and surprisingly, three of them were boys–I made them wash their hands and then set them to work.

The first thing I did was hand out individual sheets of fillo and pointed out that they were nearly as thin and tearable as tissue paper. They were all surprised when they saw it. None of the kids, who’d been cooking all year and who had attended a lot of bar and bat mitzvah celebrations, had seen fillo “in the raw”.

I got them started on spanakopita triangles–also known sometimes as bulemas (Greek root found here; you’ve heard of bulimia, right? Didn’t mention that connection, of course. You would never want to get into that with a batch of preteens. Don’t get too disturbed, though. The rough translation as used in Hebrew is “appetizers” or “things to gobble”. Of course, in Israel “bulmus” is also what they call anything like the American after-Thanksgiving shoppers’ frenzy or otherwise a run on the stock market…so much for appetites gone hog wild…)

I naturally thought fillo triangles would be a cinch for the boys especially–you do it the same way you fold a paper football and try not to get caught in class. Only with a little more butter and olive oil involved, and hopefully no punting in the kitchen, because I wasn’t gonna clean it up for them when the spanakopita went flying.

Here came the second generational surprise, though: none of the kids, not even the boys, had any idea how to fold a basic paper football! They’d never done it. Paper airplane? I asked desperately.  Continue reading →

Filed under: appetizers, baking, cooking, Desserts, frugality, fruits, haute cuisine, holiday cooking, kid food, Microwave tricks | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Little Green Footballs

Jazzing up Creamed Spinach

Posted on November 23, 2009 by DebbieN

Passing by the refrigerated prepared-foods shelves in the produce section of my local Whole Foods a few days ago, I couldn’t help noticing a 24-oz tub of creamed spinach…for $8.99. Six dollars a pound. Given that most of their deli and salad bar foods are about $8/lb., maybe that’s a comparative bargain, but still. You could buy six 1-lb. bags of frozen spinach from the Trader Joe’s for that. At my local Latino supermarket, you could get at least six and maybe twelve bunches of spinach, turnip greens, mustard greens, kale, maybe chard or beet greens too. Of course then you’d have to wash it all. And chop it, and cook it. But you’d also get to decide how.

Standard creamed spinach is one of the easier and frankly quicker side dishes to put together. If you want the plain-o, Norman Rockwell version, go to an older American cookbook such as Joy of Cooking or even the Victory Garden Cookbook. Basically you sauté fresh chopped or thawed frozen spinach in a little butter, stir in a spoonful or so of flour until the white flecks disappear, add cream or milk and heat it up until the flour thickens it. Sprinkle salt and pepper and maybe grate some nutmeg over it.

But gawd, is it bland. Rich maybe, but bland.

I’m not a huge butter-and-cream fan, more because I can’t really stomach large amounts of it personally than for any particular virtues of character. If I’m going to have calories, I want them to come from a knockout dessert, not the spinach. So rich isn’t enough. I want it to taste like something.

Of course, I’m also speaking from the perspective of someone who grew up wondering “If there’s no garlic, is it really food?” No, don’t just laugh at me–think about it: most of Nigella Lawson’s recipes work precisely because she adds a clove of garlic to old-standard British stodge. You know–garlic smashed potatoes. Magic! If just adding a clove of garlic to a batch of boiled potatoes was such a big revelation, it’s no wonder the Brits fell so hard for Indian food. And Italian. And Greek. Of course, I’ve fallen hard for them too.

So of course the first thing to add to spinach is garlic. To my mind the second necessity is lemon, and the third is herbs or spices. And possibly some kind of white fresh cheese. Here are a couple of possibilities that taste satisfying without relying on heavy cream or butter, and they can be done either on the stove or in a microwave. Continue reading →

Filed under: cooking, Dairy, DASH Diet, frugality, high-speed soup, Revised recipes, Vegetabalia | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Jazzing up Creamed Spinach