Shana Tova!

Last entry before the holiday starts, and then the computer shuts down till Wednesday night. It’s late to be showing the last of the simanim, but just to show you what we’re having…

Simple carrot salad: just grated carrots, fresh tangerine juice, and a smidge of sugar.

Fish heads gross Daughter out; I waited till she left to visit her Granny to photograph them. We put a paper napkin over them to spare her feelings when we set out the simanim.

The dates are stuffed with toasted pecans. Many folks won’t eat nuts on Rosh HaShanah because the gematria of nut – egoz - is the same as chet - sin. In fact many folks feel pretty strongly about that.  We don’t.

We’re together with all of Am Israel in wishing to grow in mitzvot – may our merits become as numerous as the seeds of the pomegranate!

And may we all be granted a good year.

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Eat Your Words: Simanim

Over today and tomorrow, I’ll be posting about simanim, the symbolic foods we eat on Rosh Hashanah night. I love this custom because it combines tradition, food, and a  play on words. These symbolic foods don’t always represent the things we ask G-d to grant us in the coming year. They might represent words that do. For example, when we eat leeks, which in Aramaic are karsi, we associate them with the Hebrew word karas – to cut down – “May our enemies be cut down.”

You have to bend the brain a little to appreciate what you’re eating: a particularly Jewish way of looking at things.

I got to work this morning to prepare simanim the way my family like to eat them. Here’s the busy stovetop.

Beets, Black-Eyed Peas, Leeks & Mushrooms, Sauce

Beets are selek, which reminds us of the word lesalek – to remove. “May our enemies be removed.” I make a beet salad with some thinly sliced onion, salt, pepper, a little cumin, olive oil, a little sugar, and vinegar. No measurements to report here: I just add seasonings and keep tasting and adjusting till I like it.

Black-eyed peas are rubiah – similar to yirbu - to increase.  “May our merits increase.” .

Rather than serve them hot, I make another salad of them, seasoning it with a little chopped onion and a handful of mixed, chopped, cilantro, parsley, and celery tops. Lots of fresh lemon juice, to balance the earthy taste of the peas (which are really beans, but never mind) – salt and white pepper. Again, all seasonings to taste

I use pumpkin as the gourd – in Hebrew k’ra. This is a homonym, in Hebrew, for “tear apart” and “read.” “May any evil decree be torn up, and may our merits be read in Your presence.” This was a simple saute of onions, chopped tomatoes, and thin slices of pumpkin. Another handful of chopped, mixed herbs went into the saute, plus one fresh sage leaf. I also stole a couple of spoonfuls of the sauce from the leek tart, more about which below, to add some body to the dish. A splash of white wine, a good stir around, and it was ready.

Leeks are difficult to sneak past the family. They tolerate leeks in soup, and that’s about it. But we must have leeks, I think. So I make a savory tart of leeks and mushrooms. This is how I do it.

Leek Tart (meat)

Have ready some chicken soup left over from Shabbos; about a cup.

Clean two large leeks. Cut off the tough base and green part of each one. Slice them coarsely.

Clean 1 – 1/2 cups of fresh mushrooms. Slice each in half, or thirds if they’re very large.

Put a dollop of olive oil into a skillet.

Saute the leeks just so that the slices brown a little. Add the mushrooms and continue to sautee.

In the meantime, prepare a sauce. In a separate pan, put two Tblsp. of oil, shmaltz, or margerine. Heat it gently. To fat add 2 Tblsp. of flour. Stir this briskly, allowing the flour to cook out and rid itself of its raw taste, but not allowing the mixture to burn.

Add the cup of hot chicken soup to the above roux. Keep stirring: you don’t want flour lumps. When all is smooth, turn the flame off and keep it aside.

When the mushrooms are wilting and starting to release their juice, add the sauce to the skillet. Stir and taste to adjust salt and pepper. A little soy sauce or a teaspoon of curry powder are optional nice things to add. The leeks will need to finish cooking: depending on how tender they were to start with, this could take up to 1/2-hour longer. Stir once in a while.

Make the pie crust of your choice. You can either make only half the recipe, or make the whole and use the leftover dough for something else later. this makes a small tart, so you will need only a medium-sized pie pan. I don’t have one. What I did was take a sheet of baking paper and roll my dough circle onto it. I picked up the edges all around and folded them under, pinching to make a wall of dough to hold the filling in.  You’ll see the result below.

Fill the pie crust with the leek/mushroom mixture. Bake at 350 F – 180 C for 25 minutes. If the top looks like it’s browning too fast, put a piece of tin foil over the top of the tart and let the crust finish baking.

Here it is…

There should be a siman based on “batsal” – onion. Everything I’ve cooked has onion in it one way or another. Let’s see…batsal reminds me of “batsah” – to slice.

May it be Your will to cut us a large slice of blessing in this coming year!

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Stuffed Stuff

When my middle daughter was about seven, a friend invited her to eat Shabbat lunch at her house. The mother put a platter of of spicy stuffed vine leaves on the table. They looked, and smelled, very appetizing. The friend looked at my daughter in a superior way and said,

“Does your mother make stuffed vine leaves?”

“No,” said my daughter, “But yesterday she made stuffed mallows.”

In my house, “stuffed stuff” means a plate of colorful vegetables stuffed with rice and ground meat, or sometimes a vegetarian version made of rice, pumpkin seeds, and herbs. We like to eat stuffed eggplants, bell peppers, zucchini, squash, and artichokes. Then there are leaves good for stuffing: vine, chard, and from April to July, the big, flat leaves of chubeza (wild mallow). I hope to show you how tasty and valuable this wild vegetable is, come springtime.

Meantime, I was cruising around the supermarket yesterday, sizing up the frozen section and not finding anything very interesting in it. Then I saw frozen artichoke bottoms. I really love fresh artichokes. Frozen don’t compare. But I broke down and bought those bottoms because I also know how easy it is to stuff them.

This recipe was adapted from Faye Levy’s International Vegetable Cookbook.  It looks like a lot of work because of the long list of ingredients, but just assemble everything ahead of time and it will go quickly. I did this in about 15 minutes. Cooking is about 30 minutes.

Stuffed Artichokes, Moroccan Style

Ingedients:

2 Tblsp. white rice

14 frozen artichoke bottoms – the whole package: or 6 large, fresh ones, raw

2 Tblsp. olive oil

1/3 cup minced onion

1 cup ground beef

2 large, minced garlic cloves

1/4 cup chopped cilantro

1/4 tsp. sweet paprika

1/4 tsp. ground cumin

1/8 tsp. ground cinnamon

1/8 tsp. ground ginger

1/4 tsp. salt

1/4 tsp. ground black pepper

4 fresh, chopped tomatoes

2 sliced garlic cloves

1/8 tsp. turmeric

Method:

1. Boil the rice, uncovered, in 1 cup of boiling salted water, for 10 minutes. Rinse with cold water and drain. Put in a medium-sized bowl.

2. Heat 1 Tblsp. of olive oil in a skillet, add onion and cook over medium-low heat for 4 or 5 minutes.

3. Add ground beef and saute about 4 minutes or until all the meat has changed color. Take the skillet off the flame.

4. To the meat, add the minced garlic, cilantro, paprika, cumin, cinnamon, ginger, salt, and pepper. Mix well and add to rice. Mix the rice and meat well.

5. Sprinkle the artichoke bottoms with additional salt and pepper. Spoon stuffing into them. Spoon the remaining 1 Tblsp. oil into a heavy pan or casserole and add the artichokes.

6. Add the chopped tomatoes, sliced garlic, turmerc, and a little salt, plus more pepper to taste.

7. Add 1 cup of water or stock or half water, half white wine to the pan. Bring to a simmer. Cover the pan and cook over low heat for half an hour or until artichoke bottoms are tender. Serve this dish hot, with a little of the sauce and chopped tomatoes spooned over each artichoke.

There was about a half cup of stuffing left over. I had some fresh, brined vine leaves in the fridge – at this time of the year, supermarkets sell them next to the olives and pickles. So I decided to stuff the vine leaves. When the artichokes were done, I lifted them out of the pan and put them away. To the sauce in the pan, I added a sprig of mint and the juice of 1/2 lemon, plus a Tblsp. or so of good olive oil. I let that simmer and thicken while I stuffed the leaves. They took another 40 minutes to cook. The assembled result you saw above.

Shabbat shalom!

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Honeyed Challah Recipe

Honeyed Challah – as pictured 2 posts below.

Makes 3 loaves or 6-8 rolls. The recipe can be doubled or tripled.

I start my bread the night before I intend to bake, for best taste and crumb texture. If you want to do it all the same day, use 1 whole cube of yeast, allow the sponge to rise 1 hour, and proceed.

You will need 5-6 cups flour for the dough and 1 beaten egg plus 4 Tblsp. of softened honey for glazing the finished loaves.

Before going to bed, make the Sponge:

1/2 cube fresh yeast

2 cups water

1/4 cup honey

1/4 cup neutral-tasting oil (corn, canola)

1 beaten egg

1 Tblsp. salt

3 cups sifted flour

1. Rehydrate the yeast in all the water. Allow it sit for 5 minutes.

2. Add the rest of the sponge ingredients, in order, and mix very well. This should take maybe 5 minutes.

3. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and put it in the fridge overnight or for 8 hours. It can sit in the fridge even longer, but it might rise up and overflow like the mighty Amazon (don’t ask).

Next morning or 8 hours later, mix the Dough:

1. Stir the sponge down. Allow it to reach room temperature again: about 1 hour.

If you have started with a whole cube of yeast, let the sponge rise 1 hour.

2. Start adding flour by half-cups, mixing till you have a firm mass that holds its shape. This will take 2-3 more cups of flour, depending on how firm you like your dough and how long the sponge sat in the fridge.

I like a very tender crumb with some holes in it, so I add only up to 2 more cups. The dough is sloppy, but it can be shaped with sprinkles of more flour later on.

If you have made a firm dough, knead for 10 minutes or until it “talks back.”

If you have a softer dough for a very light challah, flour your working surface and plop the dough onto it. Stretch it into a plump rectangle, pushing the dough lightly with your fingertips. Fold the edges of the dough over to make a package, then stretch it out again and repeat the folds. You will see all kinds of descriptions of the stretch-and-fold method, but it doesn’t really matter how the dough gets folded, as longs as it does get folded. Stretch and fold the dough 5 times, sprinkling in more flour as needed to keep manipulating it. You will see that it works just as well as kneading. The dough should still feel loose in the hand, not dry.

Cover the dough and let rest for 15 minutes.

Now shape the challas. For Rosh HaShannah, it’s traditional to make them round, representing wholeness and the cycle of the year.

If your dough is firm, cut it into thirds (or whatever fraction you want). Roll out the dough into a long snake. Roll the snake up into a circle, pinching the bottom sides to keep the baked loaf shapely. Push the top down a bit with the palm of your hand, so it doesn’t rise like a cone in baking.

If you have a soft dough, just push it into a circle shape, pinching any seams shut with your fingers.

Either way, let your round challas rise, covered, till very light, with a few blisters visible under the surface skin. In a warm kitchen, this may take only 1 hour.

20 minutes before you figure on baking, preheat the oven to 350 F – 180 C.

For soft dough: About 15 minutes into preheating time, slash circles around the top of the challas. Use your sharpest knife or a clean retractable razor. Let the bread relax for 5 minutes.

Brush the loaves with beaten egg. Bake. Large loaves will take 45 minutes to 1 hour. Smaller loaves need from 30-40 minutes. Rolls have to be watched after 20 minutes to determine doneness.

When the challas are golden and baked through, remove from the oven and place them on a rack to cool off. BUT while they’re still hot, brush honey over all their surfaces. It will melt and drip, glazing the challas attractively.

Done.

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Honey Cake Recipe

Adapted from Jewish Cookery by Leah W. Leonard

Lekach – Traditional Honey Cake

Preheat oven to 310 F – 155 C. You will need 3 bowls: a small one to hold 1 cup volume for the raisins and nuts; a large one to hold the wet mixture, and another large one to hold the sifted dry ingredients.

NOTE: Israeli Kitchen has moved. The recipe for Lekach – Traditional Honey Cake is now on my delicious new blog at:

http://www.israelikitchen.com

All the old recipes are there, plus some cool new ones. See you there!

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Been Baking

I bet a lot of Israeli women are baking today. Mixing, kneading, stooping to slide trays into the oven, cramming the goods into the freezer. Are they all cheerful, energetic Jewish mamas, or are some of them  tired, like me? Damnably hot weather to be turning the oven on. And the flies at this time of year – they burst forth out of thin air and zoom around the kitchen, threatening my freshly baked lovelies with bacterial feet. I dance a frantic jig and wave a towel around, but they only buzz on.  I wonder: would make one tiny bit of difference to the ecology, if all the flies in the world were to suddenly drop dead?  I like that notion…they’d better stay off my baked stuff in the meantime. Today, it was challah and lekach. Tomorrow, carrot cake. After carrot cake – the world. The hands of my mind’s clock point to the sieve and the mixing bowl, not  to meditation and prayer.

In the welter of shopping and cooking, it’s easy to forget what this holiday is about. But my fellow Jews kindly remind me. Anywhere I stand for a few minutes – at the ATM, in line at the supermarket – I hear people blessing each other. May you have a good, sweet year.  May you have health and fulfillment.  A good year to you and your family. Sometimes it sounds formal – just what people are expected to say before Rosh HaShannah – but most times, those blessings sound sincere.

Well, that was this afternoon, when I was out in the street. Now, I’m hot and grumpy in my kitchen. I’m going to take a break.

I sit down by my open bedroom window. There’s a senior’s club right behind my building, and on Tuesday nights, they hold a sing-along there. A man called Moisheleh comes with his accordion, and leads the folks through an evening of traditional Israeli songs. I hear the singing clearly as I lean out into the warm, humid air. It’s a pleasure to hear how well the grandmothers and grandfathers sing, sometimes in harmony. They’ve been doing this together for a long time. But apparently the evening is winding down over there. I’m sorry to have missed it.

I’m just turning away when Moisheleh starts the final song, a kindergarten tune that falls for clapping, one, two, three.  The refrain goes, “Shana tova, shana tova” – a good year. The elderly folk sing and clap and sounded delighted.  And I;m delighted, with the song and with them.

So what am I going to put into my baking this year? In case I had forgotten, the old folks have just reminded me again. Put in a little prayer, Mimi. A prayer for a good year, a year sweet as honey and fulfilling as bread.

Please, and thank You, G-d.

*

Recipes for challah and honeycake next entry.

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Honey Cake and Slivovitz

It’s a beat-up, musty old book whose pages are spotted with cooking splashes. Jewish Cookery is the title, printed square in the middle of the front cover in angular letters resembling old-fashioned Yiddish print. Inside the front cover my father scrawled his signature and the date: Caracas, 1954. There is no ISBN number, but an interior page informs me that this was the sixth printing, 1952, and displays the name of the author: Leah W. Leonard. It is a classic Jewish cookbook.

The recipes inside are called “retro cuisine” today: fish rollups, macaroni casserole, herring salad in cucumber boats. Lots of meat recipes, lots of cakes and desserts. Leafing through the book, I see that the pages most stained indicate old favorites. There they are: rich, solid lokshen kugel, crisp matza brie, blintzes rolled over a sweet cheese filling. I sigh and smile, remembering the Shabbat and Yom Tov meals of my childhood. I’m searching for one particular recipe: Lekach, honey cake. That was one of my Dad’s specialties. He would bake it for Rosh HaShanah, and it was always honey-golden, honey-fragrant, light, and good. “I know the recipe by heart,” he would say. “The secret is to throw in a shot-glass full of slivovitz.”

When we were growing up, there was usually a squat round bottle of slivovitz – potent plum brandy – in the house. It has a heady, fruity aroma, tempting to the nose but chokingly strong and stinging in the throat. Dad loved it. Driving past a plum orchard in full pink blossom, he would say in a pleased tone, “Ah, slivovitz trees!” We kids would hoot and tease him for miles after.

Over the years, his hands gnarled with arthritis and his face, so quick to light up with intelligence and humor, seemed all beaky nose. We kept the empty slivovitz bottles for their odd beauty, but stopped replacing them with new. With age and illness, Dad had lost his taste for the fiery drink.

Yes, but look, now. The book opens easily here, to the pages most stained of all: honey cake recipes. Which was Dad’s? This must be the one: “Lekach (Traditional Honey Cake).” A line of ancient flour fills the crack between the pages. I don’t dream of dusting it away. This is flour spilled by Dad, when he assembled the eggs, sugar, honey, spices, and that one shotglass full of slivovitz instead of the brandy called for in the recipe .

What was in my father’s heart as he shooed Mom out of the kitchen and set to work? Was he anticipating our pleasure as he bore the beautiful Lekach, cut into diamond shapes, in triumph to the table? Was he remembering past Rosh HaShanahs, when the cookbook was new and the family was young? Or was he simply focusing on getting the measurements of his famous cake right? I will never know, for Dad died of heart failure a week before Rosh HaShanah four years ago. We had just celebrated his 80th birthday.

My own heart feels empty as one of Dad’s empty bottles, tonight. On the table where the Shabbat candlesticks stand, the yortzheit flame flickers over a 24-hour candle. How fine the thread of Jewishness can become; how lucky that it survived in Dad. My Jewish grandmother rejected her heritage when she married Grandpa. Dad chose, early in life, to rejoin the Jewish people. It was hard; my grandparents never understood or accepted his decision.

I whisper a prayer, asking G-d to raise my father’s soul even higher in the world of truth. I set aside some money for charity in his name. After all the years of living and working for us, this is what we can do for him. It seems little.

But here is the cookbook in my hand. Tucked between its yellow pages are recipe notes in three languages: English and Spanish jottings in my mother’s hand and a  Portuguese recipe for a Brazilian sweet, cut off a package of sugar. Jewish Cookery traveled with us on our roundabout circuit of Latin America, the USA, and back to Latin America. It finally came to rest, as did my Dad, in Israel. No one has cooked out of it since he died.

This year, though, I want to bake his Lekach. I will flavor it with a wine I made several years ago of dried fruit – it has the aroma of slivovitz, if not the potency. The honey cake will revive happy feelings, make us tell old jokes again, round out our holiday with the warmth of shared memories. And maybe – maybe – if I make it every year, my children and grandchildren will remember the taste of Lekach when they themselves have grown old, and will remember me.

Donn Michael O'Meara, 1924-2004

Photo by Ilan Ossendryver

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Roast Chicken with Figs

Late summer is when fresh figs are at their peak. We eat them halved and drizzled with sweet cream for a luxurious breakfast – baked like apples, with a little honey spooned over them – poached in a light white wine syrup. Or just rinsed and eaten as they are. It’s not a cheap fruit, and spoils quickly, too.  I try to estimate how much my family will eat, and buy only that much. But this week I did overbuy. They were small purple figs, with a curiously tough skin, although their hearts were red and sweet. What to do with them figs? I decided to roast them together with the Shabbat chicken.

Rosemary and figs taste good together, so I reached into the fridge and pulled out a jar of rosemary-infused olive oil. Then I felt that something was needed to boost the sweetness of the fruit, which otherwise might go unnoticed in all the chickeny things. I might have used honey, but that’s too sweet; or pomegranate molasses, but that’s not sweet enough. Silan, which is date syrup, was the right choice. Lemon seemed logical in this dish. Finally, I had a big handful of basil that needed to get used up. I was set.

Not in the photo is the bottle of Silan. Lacking that Middle Eastern ingredient, you might use two tablespoons of warmed, dark honey. And if rosemary oil isn’t something you normally keep in the fridge, it’s simple enough to make. Just pour about 1/4 cup of olive oil into a small pan; add 3 or 4 twigs of fresh or dried rosemary, and put the pan over the gentlest heat for about 20 minutes. Better is to put the pan inside a larger pan containing boiling water for an hour, and let the oil soak up the rosemary flavor that way – in any case, keep the pan covered while the oil is infusing. Cool and strain the oil before storing it in a jar. It will keep 3 months in the fridge.

Roast Chicken with Figs

Ingedients:

1 whole, clean, roasting chicken

1/2 lemon

2 large cloves of garlic, chopped fine

2 Tblsp. olive oil infused with rosemary

1 Tblsp. coarse salt

Black pepper 3 or 4 grinds of fresh or 1/8 tsp. powdered

1 small bunch of basil leaves, taken off the stems

14 small figs or 8 large ones, halved and their stems cut away

2 Tblsp. plain olive oil, if you don’t have rosemary-infused.

2 Tblsps. silan or warmed, dark honey

a dash of Tamari soy sauce

Method:

1. Squeeze the juice of the lemon over the chicken. Rub the lemon half all over the chicken. Tuck the spent lemon half into the cavity of the chicken. Cover the chicken and let it soak up the lemon while you’re preparing the next steps.

2. In a small bowl, combine 1 Tblsp. of the olive oil with the garlic, coarse salt,  black pepper  and soy sauce.

3. Rub the oily mix well over the chicken. Sweep up any garlic pieces that my fall onto the roasting pan and scoot them under the chicken.

4. Stuff the basil leaves under the skin of the chicken, anywhere you can find or force room. When in doubt, just put any extra leaves inside the cavity of the chicken alongside the lemon half.

4. Pile the figs up next to the chicken. Drizzle them with the remaining 1 Tblsp. rosemary oil and the silan. It won’t hurt if some of the garlicky mixture for the chicken gets mixed up with them.

5. Tear off a strip of tin foil and fold it so that it covers the figs, but not the chicken. Let the tin foil lie lightly over the figs; don’t tuck it in around them. You don’t want the figs to cook away to nothing while the chicken roasts – the tin foil will protect them.

6. Roast at 350F – 190 C till the chicken is an irresistible golden color and the house smells divine.

Serve with rice or couscous.

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Big Falafel, Little Falafel

Israel's Favorite Fast Food

In the mood for a quick, hot snack? Grab half a falafel. Or if you’re really hungry, stroll around to your local falafel stand and buy a whole one. Soft, fresh pita,  crammed with hot, crunchy, spicy, cumin-scented chickpea fritters, chopped cucumbers and tomatoes – all well drizzled over with tehinah …tasty, filling, and nutritious. Can it get better?

It gets better. On offer are all kinds of pickles and hot peppers; a variety of salads; thin white slices of onions, dotted with crimson sumac herb; amba, a mango-based curry sauce; and a heavy shmear of humous. I love a good drizzle of that spicy yellow amba, myself. (Recipes for the main falafel ingredients at the end of this post.)

NOTE: Israeli Kitchen has moved. The recipes for Falafel are now on my delicious new blog at:

http://www.israelikitchen.com

All the old posts are there, plus some cool new ones. See you there!

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Mama’s Little Babies Love Za’atar on Bread. Cornbread’s Good, Too.

An assortment of breads flavored with za’atar caught my eye as I passed by a bakery this morning. Knowing that Daughter would love me more if I were to bring some home, I bought three kinds. Here they are.

Two kinds of pretzels and a small pita with za'atar

But let’s leave za’atar alone for a while. My favorite quick bread is old-fashioned American cornbread. If you have all your equipment and ingredients assembled, it takes about 3 minutes to mix everything up and pop your pans into the oven. I made a double batch of cornbread this afternoon. One batch I baked as muffins to freeze, and one I served to guests in the evening.

Good Old Cornbread

Ingredients:

1/1/4 cups white flour

3/4 cup corn meal

4 Tblsp. sugar

3 tsp. baking powder (Israelis can just empty out a little package of baking powder into the bowl)

3/4 tsp. salt

1 egg

1 cup milk

2 Tblsp. melted butter. You can use oil or marg, but it will never be as good.

Method:

Preheat the oven to 375 F – 190 C.

Have ready a medium-sized bowl and a small bowl.

1. Sift the dry ingredients into the larger bowl.

2. In the smaller bowl, beat the egg. Add the milk and melted butter and mix well.

3. Add the liquid mixture to the dry ingredients, mixing well again.

4. Spread the batter in a butter 9-inch pie dish; or line your pan with baking paper.

5. Bake for 30-35 minutes or until it is a golden brown all over.

If you chose to bake muffins out of this batter, 15-20 minutes of baking might be enough.

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