Vegetarian Chili

September 16, 2009 by Stephanie | Leave a comment

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.

chili

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.

Scallion Pancakes With Dipping Sauce

September 8, 2009 by Stephanie | Leave a comment

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).

browning

Chocolate Babka

August 28, 2009 by Stephanie | 3 Comments

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!

Mehshi Kusa, or Meat-Filled Zucchini and/or Squash

August 21, 2009 by Stephanie | 2 Comments

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.

mehshi kusa

Hashu (Meat Stuffing with Rice)

August 21, 2009 by Stephanie | Leave a comment

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.

Szechuan Noodles, Ina Garten Style

August 19, 2009 by Stephanie | 3 Comments

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.

szechuan noodles

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.

Croissants

August 18, 2009 by Stephanie | 1 Comment

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.

Online Kosher Supermarket

August 17, 2009 by Stephanie | 4 Comments

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.

Noodles and Kelsonnes

August 10, 2009 by Stephanie | 3 Comments

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.

Vanilla

July 31, 2009 by Stephanie | 4 Comments

vanilla

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.