Okay, I admit, the 70 percent more edge part is just based on the pan you use to bake it in, and most people don’t have Baker’s Edge pans. But I do, so that’s what I use to bake mine in. Even if you don’t you should make these blondies in a regular pan. They’re easy, they’re rich and delicious, and they are easily adaptable.
What is a blondie, you ask? A lot of people ask me that question, and the way I like to describe blondies is that they’re chocolate-chip cookies in brownie form.
You can put almost anything inside two tortillas and pan-fry them. The insides get gooey and the outsides get crisp and you can cut them into tiny wedges and they will be delicious.
I prepared six of these in advance, fried them up a few hours before I was ready to serve them, and then heated them on a cookie sheet immediately before serving. Continue reading
Ina Garten’s Szechuan noodles are awesome, but I wanted to see if I could make my own version of sesame noodles. I’ve eaten them plenty of times at restaurants and I’ve tried out enough recipes to be able to reproduce them at home.
Last time I made them, Ricky Dweck mentioned that he likes to put coconut milk in his sesame noodles, so I made sure to try that out.
Tomorrow is Yom Kippur, and all I want to break the fast on is cinnamon buns. This recipe is very easy, and though there’s a lot of wait time, it’s worth it.
Can you tell that I really like cinnamon buns?
The recipe yields a tender dough. The egg yolks make it rich, and the buttermilk adds a hint of tang to the recipe. I changed Alton’s recipe only a little bit because I didn’t have any instant yeast.
Everyone’s really excited to eat these tomorrow after 25 hours of fasting. Continue reading
Remember when we made mehshi kusa and hollowed out all of that squash and zucchini? You didn’t think we’d just waste those precious insides, did you? Of course not. We popped those insides in the freezer for later use. And then gave them to our mom so she could make kusa jibben for lunch.
Kusa Jibben is a classic Syrian dish; kusa, as you know, means squash, and jibben is cheese. So basically it’s squash and cheese.
Somebody I know really likes banana cream pie. I really like Bobby Flay. So I decided to make Bobby Flay’s banana cream pie.
It was a lot easier than I thought it would be. Mainly because Bobby’s recipe calls for powdered vanilla pudding mix. Usually his recipes are a bit more complicated than mixes; not that there’s anything wrong with that. At least I made my own graham cracker crust…
Sometimes my refrigerator is empty and I have to go out and buy food. It gets expensive and truthfully, sometimes I just really don’t want to go outside. So I don’t. And I get very hungry/grumpy.
I already had some leftover vegetarian chili, and I was at the the supermarket and became inspired; tortillas were on sale and I didn’t want to pay the price of the kosher/vegetarian frozen burritos I saw there. So I decided to make my own frozen snacks. These are my emergency snack burritos:
Some are prettier than others, but they'll all keep me from starving.
I’m not really sure how it fits in to our Middle-Eastern style of cooking, but chili is a staple at the Blanco family’s Shabbat dinner. Our mom always makes it the same way, but when I make it I like to experiment a bit.
I had the perfect variety of fresh peppers on hand from my vegetable-picking trip to a farm in New Jersey so I decided to bring chili to my brother’s house for Friday night dinner. What I didn’t have readily available was ground meat. So I left it out.
I also wanted to put some chopped green pepper (also picked at the farm) in here, but when I cut it open I found a caterpillar, so I threw it out. It was green and fuzzy and still alive. And it freaked me out.
These make a great side dish (served with Szechuan noodles, for example) or snack and they’re easy to prepare once you get the hang of forming the pancakes (which took me a while, since the directions were kinda fuzzy and my dough was really sticky).
A couple of weeks ago I had some store-bought chocolate babka. It was delicious, and I was inspired to try it out with my sister as our next experiment.
Later on, we were scouring the internet and cookbooks for recipes.
We couldn’t find exactly what we were looking for, so we mixed and matched a few recipes to come up with what we hoped was the best chocolate babka ever.
It took a long time, but it was worth it!
