My son Eliezer was about nine years old and heavily into grossing his sisters out.

“I’ll eat anything,” he boasted. “Even fish eyes.”

Eeeww. When had I ever served him fish eyes? But it caught his imagination. He strutted around talking about fish eyes, knowing he was safe. Who would ever test him on it? His friends were  impressed. Wallah, that’s macho, eating fish eyes!

Then Rosh HaShana came up and I started cooking simanim. I’d never cooked black-eyed peas before, but they’re one of the traditional foods, so I simmered some up. Then I noticed how much like little eyes they looked.

Hm.

I made up a little salad with the peas, and bided. On Rosh HaShana day, we all sat down to eat and I casually put a bowlful of black-eyed pea salad in front of my boy.

“Fish eyes for you, honey,” I said. “Since you like them so much.”

He looked down at all those little white beans with the black dots, and turned green. His  sisters watched, horrified. Was he really going to eat all those fish eyes? My parents, in on the joke, exchanged amused glances. He bravely poked his fork into the bowl and winced as the beans yielded.

“I’m kind of full already, Mommy,” he said. “I’ll eat them later.”

I looked at him sitting there and I melted. He was just a rambuctious little boy trying to prove himself. Finally I explained that it was really just beans. He accepted the joke with good grace, but never did eat any.

Eliezer is now 29 and says he has forgiven me, but he still doesn’t eat black-eyed peas.

I remembered this a few days ago when I was making fish soup out of the bones and heads of some fresh bass. With carrots, celery, tomato, a bay leaf, onion, chunks of potato and cilantro, it did make a rich, flavorful broth. A little drizzle of olive oil – a squeeze of lemon. Perfect.

I was pleased to have used up all the fish, even the bones, which still had some meat clinging to them. But I knew I had to remove every trace of the heads, because The Little One can’t bear to see fish heads. When she orders fish in a restaurant, I have to ask for the head to be removed in the kitchen. On Rosh HaShanah, we hide the fish head siman under a napkin.

So I took a slotted spoon and began straining out the bones. Oops. The heads fell apart, bones and cartilige separating all over the pan, and – where’d the eyes go? Oh no. There were four little boiled eyes in the soup somewhere, and I had to get them out or risk my daughter fainting at the table.

Sighing, I took up the strainer and ladled the soup into it. Aha – got one in there with all the carrot and celery pieces. Got two. Got three fish eyes, but where was the last one? I strained everything twice, poking under the vegetables with a spoon and turning every piece of fish over. No fish eye.

Well, maybe I’d already strained it out or something. It was lunchtime, and I had to get the soup on the table. I’d made a particularly savory herb bread to go with it, and the smell of fish and herbs and fresh bread was driving the family insane.

I must say, the soup was good. The Husband and The Little One served themselves seconds and sliced more bread. I looked into the pan – there was still enough for me to have seconds too. I ladled it into my bowl, put my spoon in, and sat frozen, looking into an eye.

There it was, in my bowl. I turned it over with my spoon, but it floated up again, iris side up.

Was this some kind of karmic retribution for tormenting an innocent nine-year child all those years ago? I don’t know, and I don’t care.

What I did was, I threw the damn thing out.

Savory and a little sweet, with the pungent touch of curry and wine, cooked slowly. That’s how I made this chicken today. I liked it cooked in a large, flat skillet because the juices stayed and reduced themselves into the most delicious sauce.

Curried Chicken with Sweet Potatoes and Apples

serves 2-4, depending on appetite

Ingredients:

2 chicken thighs with drumsticks

1 medium onion, quartered and sliced thickly

1 large tomato, thickly sliced

1 bay leaf

4 cloves of garlic, peeled but left whole

1 large sweet potato, peeled and quartered lengthwise

2 Granny Smith apples, washed but not peeled, and quartered

1/2 tsp. curry powder

1/4 cup wine, any kind

2 Tablespoons maple syrup or Silan date honey

salt and pepper

2 Tablespoons olive oil

Method:

1. Use a large, shallow skillet. Pour the olive oil in and add the chicken pieces. Keep the flame at medium.

2. Arrange the onion and tomato slices on top of the chicken. Add the bay leaf, the curry, the garlic, salt and pepper.

3. Cover the skillet partway and let the chicken start to brown. My skillet doesn’t have a lid, so I borrowed one from another pan and tilted it over the skillet.

4. After about 20 minutes, turn the chicken over, letting the vegetables and spices fall to the bottom of the skillet.

5. The chicken should be about half done. Add the sweet potato and the apples. Keep the apples skin side down so the pieces stay whole by the end of the cooking. Sprinkle salt and pepper over all.

6. Drizzle the wine and the maple syrup in. The liquids will bubble up and start to reduce. Let it go for a few minutes, then cover the skillet partway again.

7. Maintain medium heat and cook a further 20 minutes. You’ll probably need to stir the vegetables around a bit. If the liquids dry out, your flame’s too high – splash in a little more wine and reduce the heat.

Cook till the chicken is cooked through and golden, and the sweet potatoes are tender.

A big mixed salad goes well with this. And if you need to fill the menu out some more, serve the chicken with rice.

This meal is good enough to serve on Shabbat. We licked our fingers.

Last night, I opened the fridge and there was my sourdough starter, looking sort of reproachful. It had somehow migrated from the back of the fridge to the front, where I could see it and feel guilty about it. C’mon, little guy, I know you’re strong, I thought to it. You’re surviving. You don’t really need me to refresh you every week … do you?

I haven’t quite reached the stage of talking to inanimate objects, although the day is probably not too far off. Thing is, a sourdough starter isn’t inanimate; it’s full of live yeast culture, and I’m supposed to take care of it instead of leaving it in the back of the fridge for weeks at a time.

At least it didn’t think anything back at me.  But it did look neglected. So I shlepped the jar out, mixed the hooch back into the starter and removed a cupful to another bowl.

Once the original starter was refreshed and stored away again, I reached for the cupful to throw it out. But I hate to pour good, live  culture away. So I beat in about 3 cups of all-purpose flour, covered it with plastic wrap, and set it aside while I did more important things, like watching Shrek with my Little One for the eleventeenth time.

A lovely, bubbly sponge developed meantime. Hm.  This had possibilites. So I mixed in a tablespoon of olive oil, a tablespoon of salt, and about 2 more cups of flour. Stretched and folded. Floured the bowl heavily, covered my dough with plastic wrap again, and went to bed.

Funny how one thing leads to another, and how small things can shape your day (or destiny). I had errands to run this morning, but it was raining. Casting around for an excuse to stay home, the sourdough caught my eye. It was well risen, fair and light in its bowl, rich in the promise of good bread. Pretty good for a little cupful of starter I’d almost thrown down the sink last night. Wouldn’t it be a pity to let the dough keep on fermenting the whole morning? It would get too sour to enjoy. Better stay home and bake something wonderful.

So I divided the dough into thirds.

With one third, I made a quick little focaccia. Just olive oil, kosher salt, and plenty of freshly-ground pepper. I let it rise again for half an hour, meantime pre-heating the oven to 450°F and shaping the next two breads.

The focaccia baked up in about 20 minutes.  When it cooled down, I split half of it open and stuffed my breakfast omelette into it. Pretty good, with a tomato.

There were about 3/4 -cup of black olives that needed to get used up. I sliced and kneaded them into the second third of the dough. When I took the focaccia out of the oven, I put the boule to bake – it took 1/2 hour on top, then another 10 minutes upside down.

And there was some firm white cheese (Hemed, for Israelis). And a few tablespoons of grated Parmesan. The last third of dough I rolled into a rectangle, filled with cubed white cheese and the Parmesan, and rolled up into a fat snake. Then, using a technique more commonly used for sweet yeast cakes, I cut the snake almost in half lengthwise, and twisted the two halves around each other. Painted the whole with a little beaten egg I’d set aside before making my omelette, and let the cheese bread rise while the olive bread was baking.

That was some good bread.

And there went my whole morning, just doodling around with sourdough. Well, I did make a fish soup in between. Guess what’s for dinner tonight.

Another Israeli Kitchen – Baroness Tapuzina Food Adventure!

An email from Denny Nielson appeared in my Inbox. “We’re going to press apples for cider. Want to come?”

Did we ever. The Tapuzinas (if I may call the Baroness and her good hubby that) had come over for dinner and we were all feeling kind of full and expansive.  The Baroness thought it would be an adventure. Mr. B.T. was excited at the thought of home-brewed “scrumpy,” which seems to be the same as “hard cider,” only in British. Me, I was overcome by a wave of nostalgia for juice pressed out of real, live apples, like I used to drink in my Michigan childhood.

So we joined up last Friday and sped through the central plains on to the hills outside of Jerusalem, in search of cider. Denny’s home and homebrew supply store are located in Mevasseret Tzion, where nights are cool and a home-owner might grow a grapevine to twist over a garden wall. We opened the gate and climbed up stone steps to a sunny patio where people were standing around watching the apples getting crushed.

It was like crushing grapes. Throw the apples into the hopper, and press the button.

The lathe inside the crusher bumps and grinds, spitting apple particles all over you if you stand too close, and the pulp drops into a bucket underneath.

Take the bucketful to the press,

and get a nice strong volunteer to twist the rachet around till the pulp yields no more juice.

Strain the juice and measure it out. Add some sulfite to avoid spoilage.

That was all. The rest of the work is done at home. You throw some wine yeast into the juice, which already wants to start fermenting, and close the bucket (in my case a carboy) with an airlock. Airlocks are the plastic widgies that, filled with sanitized water or a mixture of water and vodka, allow the gases produced by fermentation to escape, while forbidding insects, dust, or bad mojo to enter.

But there was more to it than that. There was a garden with herbs.

Gorgeous basil, eh? Or as Mr. B.T. said, “Nice pesto plant.”

Views of the Judean Hills and the back side of Jerusalem. Yad VaShem stands in the far distance, a somber reminder of how lucky we were to be making cider in the sunshine, in the Israel of today.

There were people hauling apple crates together, managing the crusher, lifting the bucket full of juice, and suddenly finding it easy to talk to each other. Here is our host and homebrewing master, Denny.

An unfamiliar voice called my name, and when I turned around, it was a Twitter friend who had recognized me from my avatar. He is of Lebanese extraction, and this interested the Baroness. In a second he and she were talking about Lebanese cuisine and swapping recipes.

It was also neat to get more homebrewing supplies at Denny’s shop downstairs. I brought home 10 liters of juice and six bottles of beer.

I’m happy to see interest in good beer expanding in Israel. The appearance of several serious local microbreweries is making a difference to folks who (like me) enjoy a glass of suds and would rather support an Israeli small business. But only Denny does things like the apple crush for cider. So far; I’m sure the idea will catch on.

Next thing is to convince him to crush pears for perry, which is pear cider. Or pear wine!

So what does the cider look like?…Well, when I brought the juice home, it looked like this:

It ain’t done yet. Takes about 2 months for the cider to drop all its sediment (bits of apple pulp, a layer of used-up yeast), become clear, and be ready to drink. I expect it’ll have between 7-8% alcohol by volume. When it’s ready, I’ll show you.

We bloggers moved on to lunch at a Kurdish eatery in Or Yehudah. It’s called “Hapundak shel Moshe,” a crowded, working-man’s place that’s famous for its kubeh soup. I’ve never been all that fond of kubeh, but that day, I had to change my mind. There was bulgur kubeh, semolina kubeh, kubeh fried and kubeh in soup. I had pumpkin soup with kubeh dumplings ladled over rice made yellow with turmeric. The owner also put a few inches of Kurdish kishkeh on top.

It was spicy and savory/sweet and filling and so nutritious, I looked 10 years younger when I got up from the table than when I’d sat down.

And here are just a few of the pots full of mighty Kurdish food.

The Baroness was writing up her own blog post about our cider and kubeh adventures just a little while ago.  Make sure to skip over to her blog and see how the day looked to her.

Kosher Cooking Carnival #46

Israeli Kitchen is hosting this month’s KCC, a creation of Batya at Me-Ander.

Recipes, restaurant reviews, and the food thoughts burning tracks through the Jewish blogosphere. The Kosher Cooking Carnival leads you to all of that and introduces you to blogs with which you were, mayhap, unfamiliar. Open up some links and see for yourself.

Vegetables

Abbi at Confessions of A Start-Up Wife improvised a noodle-cabbage dish that turned out a hit for Shabbat…with her husband.

Leah at Ingathered guest-posted a tempting recipe on Cooking Manager’s blog: grilled eggplant and bell pepper dip.

Restaurants

Jet-lagged Batya at Me-Ander found comfort in a NY resto.

Soup

Leah at Ingathered shows us a cross-cultural chicken soup, with an added recipe for the Yemenite hawaij spice blend.

Sweet Things

Frum Cuisine calls it cherry crumb kugel, but it sure looks like a good cobbler recipe to me.

Pesky Settler offers a cinnamon chocolate-chip cake that wowed her family on Shabbat.

A pareve strawberry-cashew pudding features on Leora’s Here in HP.

Shimshonit offers a naughty recollection. And a jam tart recipe that made me want to get up and bake it, right now.

In Mol Araan says a mouthful about chocolate honey cake in her erudite, entertaining English/Yiddish blog.

Jamie on the Kosher.Com blog writes about a huge apple harvest,  puff-pastry apple purses, and candy-coated apples.

Annette at Craft Stew gives us the world’s easiest lemon pie.

Meat Dishes

Mrs. S. at Our Shiputzim re-created her grandmother’s recipe for sweet and sour meatballs made with cranberry sauce. (Thanks for the hat tip, Mrs. S!)

Hannah at Cooking Manager cooked up the most savory stuffed cabbage.

The Russian/English food blog Cooking with Yiddishe Mama / offers elegant recipes with a Russian flair. This recipe for home-made kishke is far healthier than any you can buy.

Zahava of Kosher Camembert went overboard with her brisket. Find out what she did with 10 pounds of meat!

Baroness Tapuzina did a gorgeous Georgian chicken in garlic/walnut sauce a while back.

Speaking of chicken, Israeli Kitchen bought some poussins (baby chickens) and stuffed with them rice and pine nuts.

What Kosher Folks Are Saying

Batya of Me-Ander is shocked to discover that meals on El Al flights have gone ‘way, ‘way down.

Soccer Dad laments the demise of his  favorite kugel-maker.

Baking

Ilana-Davita’s easy recipe for lighter pastry dough is meant for savory fillings, but I think it would work for sweet, too.

My  sweet, light challah recipe is an easy pleaser for Shabbat.

I hope you enjoyed KCC #46. For me, it was a pleasure to put together. Huge thanks to Batya and to each blogger who submitted a post.

…………………………………………………

Liked it?

* Why not submit your own recipe for next month’s carnival? Just chose one of your own blog posts and go to the carnival submission form. It’s easy to fill out.

* And since part of the idea is to help publicize each other’s blogs, please link to this post on your own blog. Spread the good word!

* Batya’s always looking for someone to host a KCC. Email her with your hosting offer here: shilohmuse at yahoo dot com.

* Next month’s KCC will be hosted by Pesky Settler.

* So much good food! Browse through the archives of the KCC here:

This is the challah I most often bake.  Husband and The Little One favor its just-sweet-enough taste, close crumb, and golden crust. When it’s just the three of us for Shabbat, I bake four big rolls instead of two braided loaves.

Plain Sweet Challah

Ingredients:

1 cup plus 1 Tablespoon warm water

1 cube of yeast

1 large egg

1/2 cup sugar

50 grams – 4 1/2 Tablespoons margarine

4 1/2 cups all-purpose flour

2 teaspoons salt

1 egg for glazing the challah

1/3 cup sesame or poppy seeds for decoration

Method:

1. Put the water, yeast, egg, sugar, margarine,  flour and salt into a large bowl. See step 2 below for the mixing method that will suit you.

2. If mixing by hand, add only 3 cups flour and mix. Then add the salt and beat the mixture fiercely.Then knead in the rest of the flour.

If using a standing mixer, put all the flour in at once. Beat on low for 3 minutes, then add the salt. Beat a further 8 minutes on medium speed.

I use a hand mixer and put in 3 cups of flour, mixing till I have a thin dough. Then I knead in the salt and the remaining 1 1/2 cups flour by hand.

2. Put the dough into a floured or oiled bowl, cover the top with plastic wrap or pop it into a plastic bag, and let it rise till tripled in volume – about an hour.

3. Ease the air out of the dough gently by pressing it onto a floured surface. Sprinkling a little more flour over it, knead gently for a few minutes. Cut the dough into 6 pieces for making two braided loaves (or 4 pieces for large rolls or 2 pieces for two plain-shaped loaves). Shape it as you desire.

4. Once your bread is shaped, place it on your prepared baking sheet and cover it loosely with a cloth. Allow it to rise a further hour and half.

After the first hour of this second rising, pre-heat your oven to 350° F – 180° C.

2. Just before the loaves are ready to bake, beat the egg for glazing and paint the beaten egg onto the raw loaves. Sprinkle seeds all over the loaves.

3. Bake for 30 minutes or until the loaves are golden-brown. Cool on a rack. Refrain from gobbling it all down at once.

*

This past Shabbat I cut crosswise slashes into the rolls and glazed them with no seeds on top. Just for variety. It looked like this:

Aardvark Alice seems to be settling in nicely here in the Israeli Kitchen. She trots around behind me as I do housework or cook, asking questions and commenting on everything. Husband has a soft spot for all animals, but the Little One has dark suspicions about Alice. She thinks Alice takes up too much of my time and eats too much. I point out that Alice doesn’t depend on me for food – she goes out to the park at night and licks up all the insects she needs.

Although she does complain that Israeli ants taste different than those of her native savannah, and I notice that she’s joining us at dinner more and more often. Well, she has very discriminating taste – for an aardvark.  Maybe the Little One feels just a bit jealous.

I mean, Alice is  only little, herself.

My daughter was scornful. “She’s greedy,” she said.  “She knows how to get around you. And she’s ugly.”

“She’s no oil painting,” I agreed. “But look, isn’t she sweet, really? Look at her eating her mushroom soup.” I gazed at Alice fondly; she was slurping up a bowlful in the kitchen.

“Mushroom soup,” said the Little One in disgust. “What next? Chocolate-covered matzahs, maybe? And by the way, how much is she supposed to grow?”

I looked it up online and got a shock. Alice, all  pink-skinned and wrinkly and only about 4 kg. right now, is actually still a baby. When she’s all grown up, she’ll weigh as much as 65 kg. (143 lb.) and measure 1.5 meters (5 feet) in length – without her tail!

Give one pause for thought, eh? I mean…our apartment isn’t all that big.

Alice trotted in, licking her face all over with her long, sticky tongue.

“Delicious,” she said approvingly. “Would’ve been even better with some chives sprinkled over the top, though.”

The Little One shot me a meaningful look. “Anything else?” she asked.

Alice cocked her head and looked up at the Little One. “A little shot of white wine, maybe,” she said sweetly.

Mushroom Soup of the Aardvark

serves 4 humans

Ingredients:

2 Tablespoons olive oil

450 grams – 1 lb. fresh mushrooms, clean and sliced thinly. Put 4 aside for later.

1 medium onion, sliced

2 cloves of garlic, chopped

1 small potato, peeled and diced

1 bay leaf

1 cup water

3 cups of milk

2 Tablespoons white wine

1 Tablespoon butter

1/4 teaspoon dried thyme, or a sprig of fresh

salt and white pepper to taste

1/4 cup chopped chives or chopped parsley

Method:

1. In your soup pot, sauté the onions till they’re wilted.

2. Add the sliced mushrooms and the diced potatoes. Stir and cook till the mushrooms have released their juice and the potatoes are starting to get soft.

3. Add the garlic and the bay leaf.

4. Add the water. Cover the pot and cook the vegetables over low heat till they are all soft.

5. Take the pot off the heat. Either transfer the soup base to a blender or food processor, or use a stick blender, but process it till the vegetables are blended.

6. Return the blended vegetables to the pot (I just take my stick blender to the whole thing – off the heat, of course).

7. Add the milk, bring it up to a simmer, and cook for another 15 minutes. Don’t let the milk boil over.

8. Swirl the butter in. Add the wine and the thyme and the 4 sliced mushrooms you put aside, and simmer the soup another minute or so.

Spoon out some of the mushroom slices into each bowl and sprinkle chopped chives or parsley over them. Serve.

An aardvark appeared in the Israeli Kitchen last night.  Robin (Around the Island) summoned him, at the Israeli Blogger’s Evening. These things happen when people of a certain ilk get together. People with wild imaginations, who like to write, that is. Like me, and Robin, and Hannah (A Mother in Israel) and Baroness Tapuzina and, actually, the eleven or so other bloggers who came to meet, network, nosh, and exchange URLs. (See Hannah’s post on everyone who came, which contains links to everyone’s blogs, which describe the evening.)

But how did this aardvark show up in my living room, speaking good English and swinging his long, hairless snout?

The bloggers were sitting around discussing how if one’s blog starts with the letter A, it’s going to be among the first on any blogroll. And more likely to get hits from the reading public. What could be better than naming a blog Aardvark something, then? We all laughed merrily.

I had just put my drink down and was heading towards the potato chips when we all heard a clacking sound, like nails tapping the tiled floor. Strange. And then, a moist, sniffing, snuffling sound, like a vacuum cleaner with a head cold. The hair on our arms stood up as a round, pinkish, piglike apparition lumbered in and said,

“Got any termites?”

We stared, speechless. Risa, who’s a warm, motherly person, was the first to say, “Oh! An aardvark! How cute!”

Actually he was kind of cute. In a strange, alien-like way. I was so sorry to disappoint him – I don’t keep termites. Nor ants.

The aardvark sighed. “Well. If you’ll just put together a couple of crackers with egg-and-olive dip, I guess I could make do with that. “

No problem! About five ladies jumped up and started pasting crackers together.  We kept warming up to the little guy; he looked kind of lost and hungry.  Sarah Peguin of OhSoArty already had her sketch pad out and was rapidly pencilling a  drawing in.

David and Jonathan, being guys and a little more cynical, stood a bit aloof. “Is this some new and obscure terror technique?” mused David.

“Don’t know about that, but an aardvark would sure make an expensive pet,” replied Jonathan.

“Oh, please,” said Chasida, “obviously the poor little guy just made aliyah and needs friends.”

“Yeah, have a heart, ” chimed in Kate. “He needs a friend. Just like every new immigrant.”

“You like choumous, er, Aardvark?” Abbi asked, dipping the spoon into the chickpea spread.

“I have a name,” came the dignified answer, “and actually, I’d like to snuff some of that coffee liqueur up my snout if you’d pour it into a bowl.”

I smiled. No one else had touched the coffee liqueur. Now there was an animal with taste.

“Your name…?” I asked delicately. “Arthur? Stuart? Bruce? Wellington?”

The answer took us by surprise .

“I am a lady,” sniffed our new pink friend. “An aardvarkess. My name is Alice.”

Baila, who had almost jumped out of her skin when she first perceived the creature, said, “Awesome! My kids will never believe this!”

DevoK, who doesn’t mince words, said, “Are you kidding, I don’t believe this!”

Alice looked around. “I didn’t come here to be a pet,” she said with a certain trembly defiance. “You bloggers called me forth. It was a long, strange trip, materializing out of the ether to join you here in the Israeli Kitchen – but here I am. So let’s network.”

I recovered myself.  “Welcome to the Israeli Kitchen, Alice.”

Sarah Melamed leaned over and scratched her behind the ears. “C’mon,” she said, “tell us what they’re cooking back where you come from. I’ll bet it’s exotic and fun.”

Alice smiled around her snout. “Thanks,” she said, “but I really like to talk about politics and the economy.”

Oy, I thought to myself. A know-it-all. Do I really need this aardvark in my Israeli Kitchen?

Stay tuned….

That recipe appeared here a year ago, without photo because we usually enjoy it on Shabbat. But I cooked my daughter’s Moroccan Shabbat Fish last night for guests. Here’s the photo.

Bloggers on all topics are invited to an evening of networking and discussion hosted by me and Mother in Israel on the 17th of this month.

We’re meeting on October 17, Motze’i Shabbat, at 8:00 PM,  in Petach Tikvah. Nosh provided by…me!

Please email djarred613@gmail.com with:

* Your name

* Blog URL

* Email and phone number

Type BLOGGER’S EVENING on the subject line.

Or  fill out this contact form.

We’ll get back to you with directions.