Please welcome Adele, our favorite brother’s wife, who knows we’re busy so is helping us out on the blog this week with three recipes that make up a great Shabbat dinner!
Hosting Friday night dinner is not as easy as my mother makes it look; especially when you have a baby who loves to climb all over the place. To make it easier, I decided that my recipes needed to have five ingredients or less—and no fussy stuff!
Why hello there!
File this recipe under “delicious dinners you can cook while caring for a 5-week-old.
Ina Garten usually makes roast chicken for Friday night dinner. When she decided to make a traditional Jewish meal of brisket, she made rugelach for dessert. It looked delicious. There was a small problem with the recipe, though! It was very dairy. She used two sticks of butter and a package of cream cheese to make the dough. For a Shabbat dessert, this is not okay. Luckily, Toffuti makes some pareve cream cheese that you could substitute quite easily.
Happy 2013!
I finally got Ina Garten’s new cookbook! It took a while, especially because I pre-ordered it on Amazon. Turns out, shipping during Hurricane Sandy got kinda iffy, and it just never showed up. Thanks to Amazon’s amazing customer service (once I figured out where to find it), they overnighted me a new copy! Yay! After looking through the recipes, and weeding out the very unkosher ones, I decided that a one-pot pasta dish was the perfect first recipe to try. Why? Because we love pasta! Because Richie loves pasta. Because It reheats easily on a weeknight. And because sausage is something I don’t cook much, so I thought I’d give it a try.
Genius! Instead of plain old boring croutons, make grilled cheese and cut it into cubes for grilled cheese croutons. Makes the classic winter meal a little fancier and is completely amazing, especially if using fresh mozzarella, which I did.
I am always boring when it comes to fish. I always make salmon or tilapia, and don’t often vary the recipes. Well, the first time I saw Ina make this fish, I knew I had to try it. But I didn’t. And then I saw the episode again, and I remembered how badly I wanted to try it last time. And then I saw it yet another time, and still I hadn’t made it. Well, come one random Wednesday night, when I just didn’t know what to make for dinner. And Stephanie wasn’t helping, but she knew she didn’t want anything with tomato sauce (she had red sauce two nights in a row) or meat (since she had meat the night before). Fish it was! And I racked my brain trying to think of some easy (I was cooking in my mom’s kitchen with limited resources) yet delicious fish recipes I heard of recently, and immediately looked this one up. Continue reading
I love making lasagna for company. It’s not so easy, but it’s something that can be made ahead of time, making the day-of much easier to handle. This lasagna is a little different and “dressier” than the classic cheese-and-tomato-sauce or meat-and-tomato-sauce kind. Plus, it is a nice filling main dish! We all really enjoyed it, and I’m glad I made the entire box of lasagna noodles and made a little extra of this for the freezer. That’s right, lasagna is a great freezer food!
Your side dish can’t get easier than this. If you have pesto in your freezer (either store-bought or homemade will do?), then you can prep this dish in about five minutes. Have basil growing like a weed in your garden? Then it might take a bit longer to make, but it’s still pretty simple, and always a big hit. Continue reading
What do you do when you have (what feels like) millions of figs on your tree? You eat as many as you can, obviously. And then you give a couple bunches away. And then you eat some more. But when you get sick of eating them raw, you have to think of other stuff to do with them. In the past, we made jam (yum!), but we wanted to do something different now. Like roasting them. And then we looked through How Easy Is That? and saw that Ina has a recipe for roasted figs with caramel sauce! We LOVE caramel. So of course we had to try this recipe out, and aren’t we glad that we did! Continue reading
Sour cherries and chocolate are an amazing combination. And muffins are a great freezer-friendly breakfast or snack. So when I bought an extra bag of dried sour cherries, I just knew I had combine them with chocolate. And I did! These muffins are great, and I made them a little healthier by using whole wheat pastry flour and cottage cheese in the batter, instead of all white flour and sour cream.
The tartness of the cherries combined with the sweet chocolate and batter is perfect. You may think you want to cut down on the sugar in the recipe, and I was thinking about it, too, but the cherries are super sour, so I was pretty sure we needed the sweetness to counteract the tart cherries. Maybe I’ll try to make these even healthier with raw sugar, agave, or even honey next time. Continue reading
