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.
The Food Network website recommended that I try Ellie Krieger’s portobello lasagna rollups. These were very easy to make kosher – they are vegetarian, anyway. I didn’t use portobellos, just because they were kind of expensive. You can use any mushrooms, but I like the baby bellos, and they weren’t much more expensive than the white button variety. 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.
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.
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.
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.
After many years of finding challah recipes from books, cookbooks, and online, I finally found the best recipe. My cousin Sally gave it to me a while ago, but I was skeptical to use a recipe that used an entire 5-pound bag of flour. It was worth it; everyone at the shabbat table loved it, and there were no leftovers.
After watching the Good Eats episode “Use Your Noodle 2” (twice) I decided to try making my own tortellini. I had wanted to try homemade pasta for a while, but I don’t have a pasta maker. Alton said I can make these tortellini without one, so I had to try it. I spent a few hours making this batch, and ended up with a little more than 50 tortellinis (and messed up only four).
