Mehshi kusa (koo-SAA) is a traditional Syrian dish. In order to stuff the squash, you first need to hollow them out with a melon baller. Ideally the shells will be very thin. After hollowing out the vegetables, you stuff them with hashu and cook them in a Middle-Eastern-style sauce.
Hashu is used in many Syrian dishes, mostly as a stuffing, and sometimes added to dishes as meatballs. Soaked rice is mixed with meat and spices and can be stuffed into just about any vegetable – this is called mehshi (MECH-she).
We use it for potatoes, eggplants, squash and zucchini, onions, cabbage, tomato, grape leaves, etc.
I decided to try out a new recipe for Asian-y peanut-y noodles and remembered seeing Ina Garten make some for a barbecue on the beach (don’t ask me how this fits in with a barbecue), so I searched for “sesame noodles” on the Food Network’s website and didn’t see it. I didn’t think I imagined this particular episode of Barefoot Contessa, so I narrowed my results by chef – and these Szechuan noodles were the first, third, and fourth hit (out of four).
Okay, so maybe the words sesame and Szechuan aren’t interchangeable, and maybe you don’t barbecue them, but I made them anyway, and I’m glad I did. The ingredients were overwhelming at first: Fresh ginger? Tahini? Sherry vinegar? But I ended up having many of them in the fridge/pantry already. I bought almost everything else from Whole Foods, and for the rest I left out or substituted with something I had lying around.
All of the spices and ingredients resulted in delicious layers of flavor, and although I made way too much (a whole pound of pasta for two people!?) I was able to enjoy leftovers, since this dish is just as tasty at room temperature, or even out of the fridge, than it is hot.
flaky deliciousness
Ever since I saw Ina Garten going to the bakery and buying six croissants for a breakfast party (why she needed so many for so few people at her breakfast party I have no idea) I wondered how hard they would be to make. I googled “croissant recipes,” but really got no good instructions. Everyone I mentioned making croissants to told me I was crazy, just buy them. Instead, I bought a cookbook that happened to have really good instructions for folded pastry dough.
We planned to bake these on a day when we had lots of time, a fast day. We stayed up all night doing the first three turns and then shaped, proofed, and baked them the next day. It was hard to do this without just tasting the dough, but we had a delicious meal to break the fast with. We froze the leftovers and had them for Saturday lunch.
In the end we had 24 croissants. They weren’t giant like bakery croissants, but they were definitely delicious.
On August 4th Ricky Dweck saw ads for Avi Glatt Kosher and tweeted about it. I then saw the ads for the online kosher supermarket on a bus, so I thought I’d check it out.
Although I was never one for online supermarket shopping (online everything else shopping is a different story), I think it’s a great idea! They deliver kosher food to anywhere in the United States.
These baked egg noodles and kelsonnes (kel-SON-ess) are easy and delicious. We keep the ravioli-like envelopes in the freezer and boil them with the noodles for a quick dinner.
The crunchy and almost burnt parts are my favorite.
Real vanilla extract is so expensive, and imitation vanilla is no substitute for the real thing, so now we make our own.
All you need is some vanilla beans and some alcohol.
I can never make enough of these cookies, they always seem to go. I use this recipe and tweak it to my liking: butter instead of shortening (unless I need a pareve dessert), and chocolate chips instead of raisins and walnuts. Obviously you can but anything you want in them; I once tried dried cranberries.
It was Friday afternoon, we were having company for shabbat dinner, and we still had some leftover raspberries. Naturally, we broke out the ice cream maker in order to prepare a delicious pareve dessert; sorbet! We keep the bowl frozen for such emergencies.
Unfortunately, we didn’t take any pictures of this. But it was pretty.
Sure, it’s a silly name, but don’t let that stop you from trying raspberry boy bait. We adapted it from this recipe, substituting the blueberries for raspberries, since we had more than enough fresh ones on hand.
This cake, when it came out of the oven, smelled incredible. When we finally got to eat it, it tasted just as good. But really, We couldn’t get over how good it smelled. We should bottle and sell it; that’s sure to be a success!
