Orange Bundt Cake

August 27, 2012

Author: Joan Lynch

My mother-in-law, Bridie Lynch, emigrated from Ireland in her early twenties and met her husband, Michael, in Chicago. When I met my husband, Jack, I was immediately welcomed into a large, loving Irish family. My mother had died when I was 7 years old and we did not have a large extended family. I enjoyed meeting Jack’s 2 sisters and the many aunts, uncles and cousins who were an important part of their lives. My Bubbie, Bridie, had a good sense of what she could do to help out and make me feel comfortable with my “new family”. She loved our 4 children and welcomed each one enthusiastically.. The Irish were good cooks and they cooked simply. I have included a family cake recipe.

Ingredients:

1 1/2 sticks of butter

1 cup(s) Sugar

2 1/2 Cup(s)s flour

1 teaspoon Baking Powder

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon salt

2 rinds of oranges

2 eggs

1 teaspoon Vanilla extract

1 cup(s) raisins

1 cup(s) finely chopped walnuts

Sour Milk

1/2 cup(s) canned milk

1/2 cup(s) water

1 teaspoon vinegar

Glaze

2 Oranges

1 cup(s) Sugar

Preparation:

1. Cream butter and sugar

2. Combine flour and other dry ingredients and add to sugar mixture

3. Add liquid ingredients and beat well

4. Add raisins and nuts and beat again

5. Put batter in a lightly greased bundt pan and bake at 350 degrees for 1 hour

6. Squeeze two ouranges and combine with 1 cup sugar. Pour slowly over cake when you take it out of the oven.

Ella Sax’s Rice Pudding

November 1, 2012

Author: David Sax

“Granny” Ella Sax’s signature dessert was her rice pudding, baked without dairy, studded with raisins, blanketed in cinnamon, and drenched in maple syrup. In her warm Montreal apartment, with its candy bowls and old world tchotchkes and hallways smelling of chicken soup, a casserole of rice pudding was always in the oven when we arrived from Toronto, as sure as her sweet and sour meatballs bubbled atop the stove. The aroma of those two dishes mingling in the same space form the perfume of memory for Granny Ella.

Granny grew up in Drummondville, a small Quebec town, east of Montreal, which is overwhelmingly French. I’ve been told she grew up in a priviledged family, with drivers, fine cars, and fur coats, but by the time we’d met, all that remained were photographs and antiques cluttering her apartment. My grandfather, Sam Sax, was a garment worker, and from what I heard, Granny Ella never let him forget that. She consistently held to the idea, throughout her life, that she was Austrian gentry, descended from landed Jewish nobility in the heart of Europe’s cultural capital. She dressed impeccably, accessorizing with scarves and costume jewelry befitting a duchess, and spoke as though she’d just stepped off a carriage into a ballroom, greeting everyone with a drawn out “Hellooooo Dahhling”. You could almost hear the waltz playing in the background.

The truth, however, was that Granny’s family was from Bessarabia, which, although technically in the far flung corner of the Austro-Hungarian empire, is in fact current day Moldova, about as Viennese as colonial Haiti was Parisian. Two years ago, I was visiting Romania, and ate at the house of a Jewish cook there, who served a baked rice pudding. It was nearly close to Granny’s, with no dairy, baked rice, raisins, and tons of cinnamon. The maple syrup, Granny’s decidedly Quebec touch, was replaced with fruit preserves, but otherwise it was similar in many ways.

“This is my grandmother’s recipe,” the woman told me. “She came from Bessarabia.” When I came home, I told my father and my aunts, which soon provoked the usual arguments. “Mom was Austrian” vs “Mom was Hungarian” vs “No, she was Bessarabian”. What I thought was definitive proof proved no more final than her recipe itself, which omits what kind of rice to use, its consistency, and how much maple syrup. Like its namesake, it’s best shrouded in mystery, left up to the next generation to shape to their narrative.

Ingredients:

1 1/2 Cup(s)s Rice

3 Cup(s)s water

1 cup(s) raisins

1-4 Tbsp vegetable oil

2 egg beaten

1 teaspoon vanilla

1/4 cup(s) Brown sugar

lots of cinnamon

1 apple peeled and grated

Preparation:

1. Cook rice in water just until all water is absorbed.

2. While rice is cooking, combine oil, eggs, vanilla, brown sugar and lots of cinnamon (the more the better) in a large bowl.

3. Combine with rice, raisins and apple until well mixes together, place in an 8-inch square pyrex pan, sprinkle liberally with cinnamon, and bake, covered, at 350 for 1 hour.

Serve warm with maple syrup.

Fluden

March 6, 2014

Author: Shirley Bemel

Came from Russia and enjoyed through the generations. They are known as “bricks”. Great to freeze them and bring them out for any occasion. Lovely with tea/coffee.

Ingredients:

For the pastry:

¼ cup vegetable shortening

¾ cup unsalted butter

1 cup sugar

3 eggs

¼ cup milk or orange juice

1 ½ tsps pure vanilla

¼ tsp orange oil

½ tsp salt

2 ¼ tsps baking powder

3 ¼ cups all purpose flour

For the cornucopia filling:

6 cups peeled, shredded, and finely chopped apples

1 ½ cups cranberries, coarsely chopped

⅓ cup dried cherries

1 cup raisins

⅓ cup ground walnuts

⅓ cup apricot jam

¾ cup sugar

2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice

½ teaspoon cinnamon

2 tablespoons flour

Preparation:

For dough, in a medium bowl, cream the shortening and butter with sugar.

Blend in eggs, milk or juice, vanilla, and orange oil. Fold in flour, salt, and baking powder and stir to make a stiff dough. Pat dough out and knead gently on a lightly floured surface.

Wrap and chill for about an hour.

For filling, in a large bowl, combine the apples, cranberries, cherries, raisins, ground nuts, and apricot jam. Toss with sugar to combine and fold in remaining ingredients: lemon juice, cinnamon, and flour. Set aside.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Generously grease a 9-inch-by-13-inch pan.

Divide the dough into 3 portions. Roll out one portion, or simply pat and trim the dough to fit the pan bottom. Spoon on half the filling. Roll or pat another portion of dough on top of the fruit.

Cover with the remaining fruit mixture, then the last portion of dough.

Bake for 20 minutes at 350 degrees, then reduce heat to 325 degrees and bake for another 30 to 40 minutes, or until the top of the pastry is lightly golden.

Cool and cut into squares to serve. Cover the pastry well to store. (This ages well.)

Makes 25 to 35 squares, depending on size.

Feferman Family Kugel

November 1, 2012

Author: Rebecca Feferman

A wonderful dairy kugel from Bubbie!

Ingredients:

8 Ounces Medium or Wide Egg Noodles

4 Eggs

1 pint milk 2%

1 pint Cottage cheese lowfat

4 Tablespoons butter melted

5-6 Tablespoons Sour cream Light is fine

1/2 cup(s) Sugar scant (if adding raisins, use a little less)

1/2-3/4 cup(s) raisins

to taste Salt

Cinnamon

Preparation:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees and grease 9×13 baking dish. Boil noodles in salt water until tender (slightly al dente). Drain and place in a large mixing bowl. Add beaten eggs, melted butter, sugar, milk, cottage cheese, sour cream. Mix together, then add raisins (if clumped, try to break apart raisins before adding). Tase before putting into baking dish- add salt and adjust sour cream as needed.*Remember that raisins will add sweetness, so adjust sugar accordingly.

Pour into baking dish and even out. Sprinkle cinnamon across the top for color (go easy). Cover loosely with foil and bake for 1 hour. Remove foil and turn oven up to 375 degrees. Bake for an additional 10-20 minutes, or until kugel is sent and top noodles and slightly browned.

Remove and allow to cool 5-10 minutes before serving.

Lukshun Kugel

March 6, 2014

Author: Merle Orelove

My step-daughter (age 18) had never tasted kugel until I married her dad. She loved it and wanted it for every meal. She is a vegetarian, so every Thanksgiving I make one for her in the shape of a turkey and we call it “kugelurkey”!

Ingredients:

1 lb cottage cheese

½ pint sour cream

1 stick butter

12 oz noodles

1 tsp vanilla

1 tsp cinnamon

1 cup raisins or dried cranberries

Preparation:

Cool noodles as per directions on package and drain. Mix together the eggs, ¾ of the butter, sour cream and cottage cheese. Add vanilla, cinnamon and raisins and stir in with noodles. Dot with remaining butter. Bake at 350 degrees for 45 mins-1 hour. Serve hot or cold.

Savtah’s Famous Beef Tongue

April 9, 2013

Author: Kitchen Tested

Food memories are a huge part of my life, especially since I spend so much time thinking about food. When I think of my childhood, I think of comfort foods like tuna casserole, meatballs and rice, Wacky Mac, nachos, and homemade overnight potato kugel (thanks Mom). But those are just the memories from my own house. Sometimes I think about the Greek food I ate at my best friend Denah’s house and other times it’s the mouth-watering Thanksgiving stuffing in my Aunty Ellen’s dining room in Seattle. And one of my favorite memories is eating salmon skin sushi in Campbell River, Canada with my dad before our 10 day fishing trip! Well, this recipe post is devoted to another one of my favorite food memories.

When I think of my Saba and Savtah’s (grandfather and grandmother in Hebrew) dining room table, I think of Israeli couscous (I used to pick out the mushrooms and celery), sweet zucchini ring, cabbage borscht, homemade candy cane ice cream, pistachio’s in a bowl that my mom always told me not to eat, and beef tongue. As you can see, my Savtah was an incredible cook and I can keep going with my list of food memories from her house. She used to keep tins of sweets (meringue’s, mandelbrot cookies and hazen bluzen with powdered sugar) in a closet and I used to snack on them all the time. Okay, I need to focus! I can write about her cooking all day long, but right now, it’s about the beef tongue.

If you’ve never tried tongue before, this is the recipe you should start with! As I eat the sweet and tender meat, I wonder how anyone can dislike it and I realize it is all mental. If you can look beyond the fact that it is the tongue of a cow and that it actually looks like a tongue when it is sliced, you can join the club of people who are enjoying one of the most delectable meats out there. Go ahead…give it a shot! You won’t regret it.

Originally published in Kitchen Tested.

Ingredients:

1 beef tongue

1 onion

1 bay leaf

1 Tbsp pickling spice

pressure cooker

Topping Ingredients

2/3 cup brown sugar

2 diced onions

2 Tbsp lemon juice

15 oz can tomato sauce

1/2 cup water

white raisins

dried apricots

dried prunes

Preparation:

A raw beef tongue may not be pretty to look at, but it’s delicious! The first thing I did was set up my pressure cooker since I just got it in the mail. What a special moment for me to finally own my own pressure cooker. I remember my mom’s on the stove top, usually cooking chicken soup for Shabbos. Anyways, I placed the tongue on the rack in the pressure cooker with an onion, bay leaf and pickling spices. I filled the cooker halfway with water. I then spent the next 10 minutes trying to figure out how to close the top. I know it is so simple but I was trying to follow the directions and they were very confusing. When I finally figured out how to close the darn thing, I placed the temperature on medium-high and waiting until the jiggler (rotating) valve began to shake and hiss loudly, around 20 minutes. I then lowered the temperature to low so the pressure cooker wouldn’t explode. Yes, that can happen! At that point, the valve let out a light hiss. I set a timer for 40 minutes and let the meat do it’s thing.

40 minutes later, I turned off the heat and kept the cooker closed until the pressure subsided. If you don’t have the patience to wait, you can push the valve and the pressure will leave the pot faster. Just be careful of the steam. When I opened the top, a beautiful piece of cooked tongue was revealed!

I let the tongue cool until I could handle it with my hands, then I took it out of the pressure cooker and peeled it. I know that sounds a little gross, but it didn’t take long at all. I refrigerated the tongue over night, but you only need it to cool for a few hours. I also saved the onion to use in the sauce. I suggest you do the same.

The following evening, I took the tongue out of the fridge and sliced it (not too thin). I then layered the tongue in a pan and made the sauce.

I boiled the brown sugar, 1 onion from the pressure cooker and 1 raw diced onion, lemon juice, tomato sauce and water and poured it over the tongue. Tip: You can also use this sauce for meatballs. That’s what my Savtah used to do.

I added the white raisins, apricots and prunes over the sauce. There is no right or wrong way to do this. Use as much or as little as you like.

I covered the pan and placed it in the oven at 350 degrees for 1 hour. I then uncovered it and the tongue continued to cook for another 30 minutes. This gave the sauce and dried fruit a chance to caramelize before I served it. And that’s it! Nothing to it, right?!? For a side dish, I just roasted some green beans and mushrooms with olive oil, salt and pepper and chowed down! Just like my Savta used to make it.

This post was submitted by Kitchen Tested.

Tags: apricots, bay leaf, Beef, Beef Tongue, brown sugar, dried apricots, dried prunes, Kitchen Tested, lemon juice, onion, onions, pickling spice, pressure cooker, prunes, raisins, tomato sauce, tongue, water,white raisins

Grandma Sylvia Abraham’s Holupchus (Sweet and Sour Stuffed Cabbage)

October 26, 2012

Author: Chadley

Grandma Sylvia always advised me, “If you can read, you can cook.” Her mother died when she was very young and she was raised by her father, so when she married Grandpa Alex, she’d never learned to so much as boil an egg. After her wedding, she came home and cracked open her newly purchased Joy of Cooking, and the rest was history. Over fifty years of marriage, and even to the end of his life when cancer curbed his appetite, my grandfather refused to leave even a morsel of Grandma’s cooking — from anyone’s plate — uneaten. Although the reason may have been Grandpa’s Depression era mentality, I prefer to think it was because the cooking was so delicious.

In the kitchen of their Bethesda, Maryland house which I visited every Friday throughout my childhood, the dishwasher was Grandpa’s domain as he had a highly complex loading strategy which we all tried and failed to grasp. Everything else in that narrow, formica-covered space with the mushroom-patterned wallpaper, however, was Grandma’s turf. One of her specialties which I have searched for ever since, to no avail, was a big heaping dish of little fried, salty, whole fish called smelts. How she managed to get a 5-year-old to gobble down plates of whole fish, with the dead eyes staring out at you, is even more of a mystery to me now that I’m a parent of two picky eaters.

Like so many Bubbes, Grandma single-handedly prepared Passover dinners for a dozen hungry mouths with barely so much as a sit-down. But I don’t believe any other Bubbe in the world ended a Seder with her particular party trick. Once the plates were cleared and put into the dishwasher according to Grandpa’s incomprehensible mathematical algorithm, my grandmother would finally collapse at the table, pull off her apron, and roll back her sleeve. From there I can only describe what she did from the perspective of the child I was — My grandmother became a female, Jewish Popeye. With her palm placed lightly on her forehead, her bicep flexed, she then proceeded to pop and bounce her exceedingly large arm muscle in a staccato rhythm so that it danced like a Mexican jumping bean. This was a crowd pleaser for the whole family, and the grandchildren were left to wonder what made their Grandma so well-endowed in the bicep area. Maybe it was her cooking.

Ingredients:

1 lb Lean, raw beef chopped (i.e. hamburger meat), salted and peppered

2 Large Onions 1 chopped fine, 2nd onion chopped medium

2 Cup(s)s Rice cooked (1 cup cooked rice to put in stuffing, prepare 2nd cup cooked rice to accompany servings of holupchus)

1 tablespoon Water

1 Eggs slightly beaten

1 whole Cabbage (one head)

2 Cup(s)s Tomatoes canned, broken up a bit so that tomatoes aren’t whole

1 tablespoon Matzah meal optional

1/2 cup(s) Golden raisins or to taste

4-6 Tablespoons Dried mint or to taste

Pinon nuts optional; to taste

1 tablespoon Honey or more; to taste

Several pinch Ginger

2 Tablespoons Brown sugar or more; to taste

1 Lemon (juice of 1 lemon)

Preparation:

Boil enough water in a large pot to cover about 2/3 of the cabbage head, the goal being to steam it and soften the leaves. Put cabbage in and cover pot. Pull off outer leaves as they soften. This will probably have to be repeated several times as you work towards the middle. All leaves should be soft enough to fold but not overcooked. This is best to do a little ahead so that the cabbage cools enough to work with.

Mix together the raw beef, 1 onion chopped fine (save the other onion for later), 1 cup cooked rice (prepare and save the 2nd cup rice to serve with the holupchus), the tablespoon of water, the egg, and the optional matzah meal. Roll up the meat mixture into small balls for filling little cabbage leaf packages that should be folded up like envelopes, open side down.

When all cabbage rolls have been put into a large pot, put in on top the tomatoes, the second onion (chopped into medium sized chunks), the honey, the ginger, the brown sugar, and the juice of one lemon.

Cover and simmer on low heat 1 hour – 1 1/2 hours approximately, tasting as you go.

Serve the holupchus with the cup of cooked rice. You can prepare more rice to accompany this if you want to serve the holupchus as a main course rather than as an appetizer.

Enjoy the sweet and sour goodness!