The holiday season is upon us. In one short week, Hanukkah and its eight nights of fried food madness commence. Now, I may be a purist with many things — and often that includes baking — but I have a nifty trick I think you’re going to like: jelly-filled donuts, or sufganiyot, in roughly 15 minutes, with no frying. Is it blasphemy to serve a baked version of a traditionally fried food during the holiday centered around oil? Probably — but I’m doing it anyway.
Do you smell that? Oh yes you do! It’s the smell of delicious things frying in the kitchen! Hanukkah isn’t just the festival of light, it’s the festival of light because it’s really the festival of oil.
With the festive season approaching, it seemed the perfect time to highlight some pareve (dairy-free) dessert options available across the Twin Cities. While most of these places won’t call their offerings “pareve,” the advent of a growing vegan population has created a wealth of options for those of us who are looking for dairy-free goods for other reasons (like not mixing meat and milk). This is by no means an exhaustive list, but I hope it’ll get you started.
To hedge our bets, I offered to make Shabbat dinner our first week living with the parents. Requirements: Enough food to feed an undetermined number of guests (Would my brothers-in-law be there? What about their significant others?), and vegetables my 13-year-old sister-in-law and my husband would eat (damn picky eaters). Bonus points for using food currently on hand. My menu: Baked chicken thighs with leeks in white wine, honey-orange glazed carrots, mashed squash and potatoes, and — of course! — challah. Many components, but all of them fall (more or less) into the assemble-and-heat category.
If you’ve ever thought, “Oh God, how am I going to do this?” about entertaining for the holidays — any holiday at all — there’s a new cookbook you might be interested in: Jewish Cooking Boot Camp: The Modern Girl’s Guide to Cooking Like a Jewish Grandmother.
Every week, I get up here and rattle on about eating, cooking, and partaking in the smorgasbord that is Judaism, and although I’ve touched on kashrut briefly a small handful of times, we’ve never had a legitimate discussion. I’d like that to change.
Noshin’ News: Farm to Table, Eating Meat (and Animals), and the 2009 Hazon Food Conference.
I don’t know if I’ve had a legitimate evening off since August. Crazy, isn’t it? So what have I been eating? Shakshuka, basically. The first version is a classic, Israeli shakshuka, which includes tomatoes, peppers, onions, garlic, and parsley. The second version uses cabbage, a vegetable that will be readily available for awhile, since it’s a late-fall crop, and ingredients that store well (cheese, soy sauce, sriracha sauce, etc.).
I don’t like to have challah only a small handful of times a year. I would prefer to have it everyday, but I at least like to have some for Friday night dinner. What’s a girl (or boy) to do? Make “easy challah.”
Make this year’s Sukkot an excuse to eat locally. I propose sauteed chicken breasts with honey-date sauce, lemon couscous, and late-summer vegetable ragout.