Raspberry Rugelach

August 23, 2012

Author: Bubbie

Ingredients:

Dough

7 Ounces butter

8 Ounces cream cheese

1/4 cup sugar

1 teaspoon Vanilla extract

2 Cup(s)s all-purpose flour

Raspberry Filling

3/4 cup White Sugar

1 cup chopped walnuts

3/4 cup dried apricots, chopped

1/4 cup packed brown sugar

1 1/2 Teaspoons ground cinnamon

1/2 cup seedless raspberry jam

1 tablespoon milk

Preparation:

In a mixing bowl, cream the butter and cream cheese together. Add sugar and vanilla, and mix until smooth. Add flour and mix lightly. Refrigerate dough for an hour or more.

1. In medium bowl, with spoon, stir walnuts, apricots, brown sugar, 1/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons white sugar, and 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon until well mixed.

2. Line 2 large baking sheets with parchment paper.

3. On lightly floured surface, with floured rolling pin, roll 1 piece of chilled dough into a 9-inch round, keeping remaining dough refrigerated. Spread dough with 2 tablespoons raspberry preserves. Sprinkle with about 1/2 cup apricot filling; gently press filling onto dough. With pastry wheel or sharp knife, cut dough into 12 equal wedges. Starting at curved edge, roll up each wedge, jelly-roll fashion. Place cookies on foil-lined cookie sheet, point-side down, about 1/2 inch apart. Repeat with remaining dough, one-fourth at a time.

4. In cup, mix remaining 2 tablespoons sugar with 1 teaspoon cinnamon. With pastry brush, brush rugelach with milk. Sprinkle with cinnamon-sugar.

Bake at 350 degrees for 20 to 25 minutes or until golden brown.

Ella Sax’s Rice Pudding

November 1, 2012

Author: David Sax

“Granny” Ella Sax’s signature dessert was her rice pudding, baked without dairy, studded with raisins, blanketed in cinnamon, and drenched in maple syrup. In her warm Montreal apartment, with its candy bowls and old world tchotchkes and hallways smelling of chicken soup, a casserole of rice pudding was always in the oven when we arrived from Toronto, as sure as her sweet and sour meatballs bubbled atop the stove. The aroma of those two dishes mingling in the same space form the perfume of memory for Granny Ella.

Granny grew up in Drummondville, a small Quebec town, east of Montreal, which is overwhelmingly French. I’ve been told she grew up in a priviledged family, with drivers, fine cars, and fur coats, but by the time we’d met, all that remained were photographs and antiques cluttering her apartment. My grandfather, Sam Sax, was a garment worker, and from what I heard, Granny Ella never let him forget that. She consistently held to the idea, throughout her life, that she was Austrian gentry, descended from landed Jewish nobility in the heart of Europe’s cultural capital. She dressed impeccably, accessorizing with scarves and costume jewelry befitting a duchess, and spoke as though she’d just stepped off a carriage into a ballroom, greeting everyone with a drawn out “Hellooooo Dahhling”. You could almost hear the waltz playing in the background.

The truth, however, was that Granny’s family was from Bessarabia, which, although technically in the far flung corner of the Austro-Hungarian empire, is in fact current day Moldova, about as Viennese as colonial Haiti was Parisian. Two years ago, I was visiting Romania, and ate at the house of a Jewish cook there, who served a baked rice pudding. It was nearly close to Granny’s, with no dairy, baked rice, raisins, and tons of cinnamon. The maple syrup, Granny’s decidedly Quebec touch, was replaced with fruit preserves, but otherwise it was similar in many ways.

“This is my grandmother’s recipe,” the woman told me. “She came from Bessarabia.” When I came home, I told my father and my aunts, which soon provoked the usual arguments. “Mom was Austrian” vs “Mom was Hungarian” vs “No, she was Bessarabian”. What I thought was definitive proof proved no more final than her recipe itself, which omits what kind of rice to use, its consistency, and how much maple syrup. Like its namesake, it’s best shrouded in mystery, left up to the next generation to shape to their narrative.

Ingredients:

1 1/2 Cup(s)s Rice

3 Cup(s)s water

1 cup(s) raisins

1-4 Tbsp vegetable oil

2 egg beaten

1 teaspoon vanilla

1/4 cup(s) Brown sugar

lots of cinnamon

1 apple peeled and grated

Preparation:

1. Cook rice in water just until all water is absorbed.

2. While rice is cooking, combine oil, eggs, vanilla, brown sugar and lots of cinnamon (the more the better) in a large bowl.

3. Combine with rice, raisins and apple until well mixes together, place in an 8-inch square pyrex pan, sprinkle liberally with cinnamon, and bake, covered, at 350 for 1 hour.

Serve warm with maple syrup.

Not Your Bubbie’s Banana Bread

December 27, 2012

Author: Naomi Leight

A take on Bubbie’s Banana Bread.

Ingredients:

2 eggs

1/4 tsp vanilla extract

3 ripe bananas

1/4 cup applesauce

1/3 cup plain yogurt

2 tbsp. brown sugar

1 1/2 cups to 2 cups white whole wheat flour

1/2 tbsp baking powder

Preparation:

Mix all wet ingredients.

Incorporate dry ingredients

Spray pan.

Bake at 350 degrees in loaf pan or muffin tin for 25 minutes

Sprinkle Chia seeds, oats or almond slivers for decoration and extra crunch.

Chocolate-Toffee Cookies

December 27, 2012

Author: Lillian Moon

Ingredients:

1 c. butter

1 1/2 c. brown sugar

2 eggs

2 tsp. vanilla extract

2 1/2 c. AP flour

1 tsp baking powder

1 tsp salt

1 cups milk chocolate chips

1/2 cup semisweet chocolate chips

2/3 cup toffee baking chips

1 c. chopped pecans

Preparation:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Grease cookie sheets.

Mix butter and sugar, beat in eggs one at a time then stir in vanilla.

Combine flour baking powder and salt.

Stir into cream mixture.

Stir in chocolate and toffee.

Drop tbsps. onto cookie sheets.

Bake for 10-12 minutes.

Allow cookies to cool.

Chocolate Chip Pudding Cookies

December 27, 2012

Author: Eliav Rodman

Ingredients:

1 cup (2 sticks) butter, softened

3/4 cup brown sugar

1/4 cup white sugar

1 small pkg instant vanilla pudding mix

2 eggs

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 pkg (12 oz) milk chocolate chips

Preparation:

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Beat the butter, both sugars, pudding mix, eggs and vanilla in a large bowl. Beat until creamy and fluffy. Then slowly mix in flour and baking soda. Stir in chocolate chips.

Drop by tablespoonfuls, onto an un-greased cookie sheet. Bake for ONLY 9-10 minutes. Remove from oven and let cool about 10 minutes before eating.

Delicious Apple Pie

December 28, 2012

Author: Lois Brenner

Ingredients:

Filling:

12 large Granny Smith or Pippin apples, peeled, sliced 1/3″

3/4 cup brown sugar 1/2 cup white sugar

1/3 cup bisquick

1 heaping tsp cinnamon, 1 tsp nutmeg (fresh grated)

1/2 tsp salt

2 Tablespoons each lemon and orange juice

1/4 cup good cognac

3-4 Tablespoons unsalted butter

Crust:

2 cups flour or Bisquick

1/2 tsp salt

3/4 cup unsalted butter

1/3 cup vegetable shortening

Preparation:

Mix apples slices with filling ingredients. Add juices and cognac last, mixing well.

Stir flour and salt together. Cut in shortening and butter. Add just enough water to make soft dough. Can use food processor, do not over mix.

Roll out crust, flute edges to seal 10″X14″X2″ pan. Sprinkle with granulated sugar, make slits in pie to allow steam to escape. FIlling should be bubbling when the pie is done!

Bake at 425 degrees for 20 minutes, then at 350 degrees for 30 minutes, till crust is brown, apples juicy. Cover with foil tent if top becomes to brown.

Serves 10

Blueberry Crumble

March 11, 2013

Author: Aviva Kanoff

This recipe comes from No-Potato Passover, now available on Amazon.com

Ingredients:

Blueberry Filling:

4 cups fresh blueberries

¼ cup white sugar

(do not add sugar if blueberries are naturally very sweet)

juice of 1 lemon

Crust and Crumb Topping:

¾ cup white sugar

¼ cup brown sugar

1 tsp. baking powder

2 cups ground almonds

2 cups matzo cake meal

¼ tsp. salt

zest of 1 lemon

¼ cup (½ stick) unsalted butter or

margarine, cold and cut into cubes

1 egg

¼ cup toasted slivered almonds

Preparation:

1. Preheat oven to 375° and grease a 9×13-inch baking pan.

2. In a mixing bowl combine the blueberry filling ingredients. Stir until mixed well and set aside.

3. In a separate bowl, mix together the white sugar, brown sugar, baking powder, ground almonds, cake meal, salt, and lemon zest until well combined. Add the butter and egg, and use a pastry cutter to blend the ingredients until well combined and you still have pea-sized chunks of butter. Mix in the slivered almonds.

4. Place half of the crust mixture into the baking dish and press it firmly into the bottom. Spoon the blueberry mixture into crust, being careful not to add too much of the liquid.

5. Crumble the rest of the crust mixture over the blueberries so that it is evenly distributed. Bake for 50 minutes until the crumb topping is golden brown.

6. Let cool for at least an hour before cutting. Cut into 24 squares. This dish is best served just slightly above room temperature, but any leftovers can be stored in the refrigerator.

Baked Apples

March 6, 2014

Author: Poppy Dave

My grandfather was a kosher caterer and had many recipes, I am sure. This simple one, however, sticks out in my mind. My grandparents lived in a basement apartment below us and every night my brother and I would go downstairs, after our evening showers, hair still wet. We would eat these apples (possibly sans brandy) and fall asleep in their arms.

Ingredients:

Apples

Cinnamon

Brandy

Brown sugar

Preparation:

Core the apples. Cover them in brown sugar and cinnamon- as much as you like. Pour the brandy all over and cook for at least 30 minutes or until the grandkids show up. Serve with ice cream.

Tsimmes

December 10, 2012

Author: Ronna Dell Valle and Sharon Mason

Ingredients:

1 1/2 lb. carrots, peeled and slice thick or use bags of baby carrots

1 (24 oz.) pkg. of pitted prunes

2 yams or sweet potatoes, peeled and cut in large cubes or very thick slices

1/4 cup OJ

1 Tbsp. Parve Margarine

1 cup water

1 Tbsp. brown sugar

1/2 tsp. cinnamon

1/4 tsp. cloves

Preparation:

Saute carrots in margarine in covered saucepan for 15 minutes. Add everything else and bring to a boil. Place in a baking dish and bake, covered (use aluminum foil), at 350 degrees, stirring and basting with the liquid until done (carrots & yams are soft and the liquid is “syrupy” in consistency).

BBQ Brisket

March 30, 2013

Author: yudicle

My mother gave me this recipe. I don’t know where she got it from, but my husband and kids love it. It’s not necessarily old world and not fancy. But it is delicious. Mom was first generation American, born in 1915 in Passaic, NJ. Bubbe came from Lithuania. Usual story – steerage with two little ones in tow to meet her husband who had come first to America. Bubbe had long gray hair by the time I knew her. Always in a long braid curled on her head. I saw her once with it down – I think it embarrassed her. 

Mom told me that one of the reasons Bubbe came here was that she disagreed with the tradition of cutting a woman’s hair and wearing a wig. Otherwise, she was strictly Orthodox in her observances. We’d visit on Saturdays at the apartment my mother grew up in, and we couldn’t turn the lights on until the sun had set. If we visited on Sunday, she’d slide a dime across the kitchen table to us, and she’d tell my mother in Yiddish that we should take it to the convenience store down the street to buy a treat. Usually some Hostess snack – it was the ’50′s. I barely ever spoke to her directly as she spoke no English. A quiet, sweet non-conformist who wouldn’t cut her hair just to please her folks. Who knew when I was growing up? I miss both of them.

Ingredients

2 onions

1 can condensed tomato soup

1 cup ketchup

2 tbl brown sugar

2 tbl lemon joice

brisket (whatever size is needed though generally a min. of 2 lbs)

Preparation

Saute 2 onions until golden.

In sauce pan, add onions to tomato soup, ketchup, brown sugar and lemon juice and stir.

Heat and set aside for the sauce.

Brown brisket on all sides in frying pan or Dutch oven large enough for meat to lay flat. Add 1/2 cup water, cover and simmer 2-2 1/2 hours.

Take out brisket, slice. In a baking dish – anything from 8×8 thru 9×12 – whatever fits.- spread some sauce in the bottom of the dish. Place sliced brisket in the dish and smother with remaining sauce.

It can be baked immediately. HOWEVER – it is best if prepared as above a day ahead and put in the refrigerator overnight. Bake (the next day) at 350 degrees, 45 minutes.

Savtah’s Famous Beef Tongue

April 9, 2013

Author: Kitchen Tested

Food memories are a huge part of my life, especially since I spend so much time thinking about food. When I think of my childhood, I think of comfort foods like tuna casserole, meatballs and rice, Wacky Mac, nachos, and homemade overnight potato kugel (thanks Mom). But those are just the memories from my own house. Sometimes I think about the Greek food I ate at my best friend Denah’s house and other times it’s the mouth-watering Thanksgiving stuffing in my Aunty Ellen’s dining room in Seattle. And one of my favorite memories is eating salmon skin sushi in Campbell River, Canada with my dad before our 10 day fishing trip! Well, this recipe post is devoted to another one of my favorite food memories.

When I think of my Saba and Savtah’s (grandfather and grandmother in Hebrew) dining room table, I think of Israeli couscous (I used to pick out the mushrooms and celery), sweet zucchini ring, cabbage borscht, homemade candy cane ice cream, pistachio’s in a bowl that my mom always told me not to eat, and beef tongue. As you can see, my Savtah was an incredible cook and I can keep going with my list of food memories from her house. She used to keep tins of sweets (meringue’s, mandelbrot cookies and hazen bluzen with powdered sugar) in a closet and I used to snack on them all the time. Okay, I need to focus! I can write about her cooking all day long, but right now, it’s about the beef tongue.

If you’ve never tried tongue before, this is the recipe you should start with! As I eat the sweet and tender meat, I wonder how anyone can dislike it and I realize it is all mental. If you can look beyond the fact that it is the tongue of a cow and that it actually looks like a tongue when it is sliced, you can join the club of people who are enjoying one of the most delectable meats out there. Go ahead…give it a shot! You won’t regret it.

Originally published in Kitchen Tested.

Ingredients:

1 beef tongue

1 onion

1 bay leaf

1 Tbsp pickling spice

pressure cooker

Topping Ingredients

2/3 cup brown sugar

2 diced onions

2 Tbsp lemon juice

15 oz can tomato sauce

1/2 cup water

white raisins

dried apricots

dried prunes

Preparation:

A raw beef tongue may not be pretty to look at, but it’s delicious! The first thing I did was set up my pressure cooker since I just got it in the mail. What a special moment for me to finally own my own pressure cooker. I remember my mom’s on the stove top, usually cooking chicken soup for Shabbos. Anyways, I placed the tongue on the rack in the pressure cooker with an onion, bay leaf and pickling spices. I filled the cooker halfway with water. I then spent the next 10 minutes trying to figure out how to close the top. I know it is so simple but I was trying to follow the directions and they were very confusing. When I finally figured out how to close the darn thing, I placed the temperature on medium-high and waiting until the jiggler (rotating) valve began to shake and hiss loudly, around 20 minutes. I then lowered the temperature to low so the pressure cooker wouldn’t explode. Yes, that can happen! At that point, the valve let out a light hiss. I set a timer for 40 minutes and let the meat do it’s thing.

40 minutes later, I turned off the heat and kept the cooker closed until the pressure subsided. If you don’t have the patience to wait, you can push the valve and the pressure will leave the pot faster. Just be careful of the steam. When I opened the top, a beautiful piece of cooked tongue was revealed!

I let the tongue cool until I could handle it with my hands, then I took it out of the pressure cooker and peeled it. I know that sounds a little gross, but it didn’t take long at all. I refrigerated the tongue over night, but you only need it to cool for a few hours. I also saved the onion to use in the sauce. I suggest you do the same.

The following evening, I took the tongue out of the fridge and sliced it (not too thin). I then layered the tongue in a pan and made the sauce.

I boiled the brown sugar, 1 onion from the pressure cooker and 1 raw diced onion, lemon juice, tomato sauce and water and poured it over the tongue. Tip: You can also use this sauce for meatballs. That’s what my Savtah used to do.

I added the white raisins, apricots and prunes over the sauce. There is no right or wrong way to do this. Use as much or as little as you like.

I covered the pan and placed it in the oven at 350 degrees for 1 hour. I then uncovered it and the tongue continued to cook for another 30 minutes. This gave the sauce and dried fruit a chance to caramelize before I served it. And that’s it! Nothing to it, right?!? For a side dish, I just roasted some green beans and mushrooms with olive oil, salt and pepper and chowed down! Just like my Savta used to make it.

This post was submitted by Kitchen Tested.

Tags: apricots, bay leaf, Beef, Beef Tongue, brown sugar, dried apricots, dried prunes, Kitchen Tested, lemon juice, onion, onions, pickling spice, pressure cooker, prunes, raisins, tomato sauce, tongue, water,white raisins

Grandma Sylvia Abraham’s Holupchus (Sweet and Sour Stuffed Cabbage)

October 26, 2012

Author: Chadley

Grandma Sylvia always advised me, “If you can read, you can cook.” Her mother died when she was very young and she was raised by her father, so when she married Grandpa Alex, she’d never learned to so much as boil an egg. After her wedding, she came home and cracked open her newly purchased Joy of Cooking, and the rest was history. Over fifty years of marriage, and even to the end of his life when cancer curbed his appetite, my grandfather refused to leave even a morsel of Grandma’s cooking — from anyone’s plate — uneaten. Although the reason may have been Grandpa’s Depression era mentality, I prefer to think it was because the cooking was so delicious.

In the kitchen of their Bethesda, Maryland house which I visited every Friday throughout my childhood, the dishwasher was Grandpa’s domain as he had a highly complex loading strategy which we all tried and failed to grasp. Everything else in that narrow, formica-covered space with the mushroom-patterned wallpaper, however, was Grandma’s turf. One of her specialties which I have searched for ever since, to no avail, was a big heaping dish of little fried, salty, whole fish called smelts. How she managed to get a 5-year-old to gobble down plates of whole fish, with the dead eyes staring out at you, is even more of a mystery to me now that I’m a parent of two picky eaters.

Like so many Bubbes, Grandma single-handedly prepared Passover dinners for a dozen hungry mouths with barely so much as a sit-down. But I don’t believe any other Bubbe in the world ended a Seder with her particular party trick. Once the plates were cleared and put into the dishwasher according to Grandpa’s incomprehensible mathematical algorithm, my grandmother would finally collapse at the table, pull off her apron, and roll back her sleeve. From there I can only describe what she did from the perspective of the child I was — My grandmother became a female, Jewish Popeye. With her palm placed lightly on her forehead, her bicep flexed, she then proceeded to pop and bounce her exceedingly large arm muscle in a staccato rhythm so that it danced like a Mexican jumping bean. This was a crowd pleaser for the whole family, and the grandchildren were left to wonder what made their Grandma so well-endowed in the bicep area. Maybe it was her cooking.

Ingredients:

1 lb Lean, raw beef chopped (i.e. hamburger meat), salted and peppered

2 Large Onions 1 chopped fine, 2nd onion chopped medium

2 Cup(s)s Rice cooked (1 cup cooked rice to put in stuffing, prepare 2nd cup cooked rice to accompany servings of holupchus)

1 tablespoon Water

1 Eggs slightly beaten

1 whole Cabbage (one head)

2 Cup(s)s Tomatoes canned, broken up a bit so that tomatoes aren’t whole

1 tablespoon Matzah meal optional

1/2 cup(s) Golden raisins or to taste

4-6 Tablespoons Dried mint or to taste

Pinon nuts optional; to taste

1 tablespoon Honey or more; to taste

Several pinch Ginger

2 Tablespoons Brown sugar or more; to taste

1 Lemon (juice of 1 lemon)

Preparation:

Boil enough water in a large pot to cover about 2/3 of the cabbage head, the goal being to steam it and soften the leaves. Put cabbage in and cover pot. Pull off outer leaves as they soften. This will probably have to be repeated several times as you work towards the middle. All leaves should be soft enough to fold but not overcooked. This is best to do a little ahead so that the cabbage cools enough to work with.

Mix together the raw beef, 1 onion chopped fine (save the other onion for later), 1 cup cooked rice (prepare and save the 2nd cup rice to serve with the holupchus), the tablespoon of water, the egg, and the optional matzah meal. Roll up the meat mixture into small balls for filling little cabbage leaf packages that should be folded up like envelopes, open side down.

When all cabbage rolls have been put into a large pot, put in on top the tomatoes, the second onion (chopped into medium sized chunks), the honey, the ginger, the brown sugar, and the juice of one lemon.

Cover and simmer on low heat 1 hour – 1 1/2 hours approximately, tasting as you go.

Serve the holupchus with the cup of cooked rice. You can prepare more rice to accompany this if you want to serve the holupchus as a main course rather than as an appetizer.

Enjoy the sweet and sour goodness!