Kosher Cooking Carvival - Av

Welcome to the Kosher Cooking Carnival for the Hebrew month of Av. In the spirit of the nine days, we'll skip the meat, and the frills.  Welcome to the first ever Parve KCC! First, some news:

Tamar opened a "blogsite" - Kosher With Food Allergies - for information and resources for Jews dealing with food allergies. Maybe you have allergies and need tips for traveling outside your comfort zone, or you have guests coming this summer with food allergies, this is an incredible compilation/portal of resources.

Yocheved Golani is looking for a publisher for her new book The Comfort Foods Cookbook: Recipes to Calm You Down FAST Without Widening Your Waistline.  I've posted an excerpt from her book about whole grains and spreads.

Batya of me-ander is traveling to the states this summer and wants to know, So Which Starbucks is Kosher?

Israel has been threatened with rolling blackouts. Hannah K. of Cooking Manager wrote about Preparing Your Refrigerator for a Power Outage.

Photo credit: Mordechai Treiger

David Lebovitz (Living the Sweet Life in Paris) takes a culinary tour of Jerusalem.

At Isreview, Daniela reviewed PriGat’s "Retro" Blood Orange Juice and Bagel Bagel's Aleph-Bet Shaped Pretzels.

My friend Hannah Z. has revived her blog Keen on Quinoa and wrote A Lesson in Hilchot Kashrut.   Hannah posted several other blueberry themed posts including How to Can Blueberries, plus lots of cookie recipes.

Yosefa's Shakshuka

Now for the recipes:

I've been feeling extra Israeli in the kitchen lately. I recently posted Keys to Great Eggplant (you HAVE to try my eggplant and tehina) and I made sweet and easy Shakshuka.

Mrs. S. wrote The requisite fast day food post, including a  recipe for zucchini soup,  at Our Shiputzim: A Work In Progress.

A great idea idea for summer - Ester, of Frugal and Kosher, made Roasted Vegetable Gazpacho with a mixture of raw and cooked veggies. What a nice idea to get the fullest range of flavor and health benefits. Ester also made a vegan Raisin-Bran Cake. My mouth is watering!

Keys to Great Eggplant

Egglant with tahini (Hatzil v'tehina in Hebrew) is my Israeli claim to fame. My hummus might taste too Ashkenazi, I don't like to make shnitzel (fried, breaded, flattened chicken breast), and I've only recently started making shakshuka. But I would be proud to serve my eggplant to any native Israeli.  I have posted about this before (Eggplant & Tehina), and I've made some very good and very bad eggplant since then. I've gotten cocky, skipped steps, and learned the hard way that there are a few rules you shouldn't forget.

1. Salt the eggplant for at least 20 minutes. Unless you are dealing with the youngest of the skinny, light purple Japanese Eggplants, you should slice the eggplant and salt it very generously before any additional prep. This draws out moisture and bitter flavors and tenderizes the eggplant. Use the flaky kosher salt, or any salt that will stick. The eggplant will sweat. I often do this in the morning and leave it out for a couple hours while I prepare other things.  Then rinse it and blot try with paper towels or a tea towel.

2. Do not save the juices. The liquid that comes out of the eggplant while it cooks contains unpleasant flavors. It is best to cook the eggplant in a way that lets most of these flavors drip away. If you have a grill, use it. If not, you may use a grill pan or broiler pan. Lately, I have been making my own disposable grill pan by folding or twisting strips of aluminum foil and laying them out parallel on a larger pan to hold the eggplant off the pan and out of it's juices. I have made excellent eggplant without this step, but I find this is like broiler insurance. If you cook it in a flat pan it is good to put the cooked eggplant in a place where some of the liquid can drip off before you season and serve it.

Healthy Comfort Foods

This is a guest post from Yocheved Golani, auther of It's MY Crisis! And I'll Cry If I Need To: EMPOWER Yourself to Cope with a Medical Challenge. Yocheved is writing a new book, The Comfort Foods Cookbook: Recipes to Calm You Down FAST Without Widening Your Waistline. The idea intrigued me, so I asked Yocheved if I could share an excerpt with you. Below is an excerpt from the book about whole grains and sandwich spreads. These foods are comforting in the mouth and on a chemical level, but won't expand your waistline and made you feel like lethargic like traditional comfort foods.

Use fresh produce and grains. The evidence is in that commercially prepared products hold harmful synthetic chemicals. Fake foods are wreaking havoc with thyroids, metabolism (your body’s ability to burn calories), fertility rates, lifespans and lifestyles. Keep life simple. Don’t sicken yourself on additives, preservatives, food colorings and flavor enhancers. They make the scale stick its tongue out at you, too.

Want some bread? Great! Make yours whole grain. Those complex carbohydrates leave you feeling fuller. They also balance your body’s chemicals, including sugar levels. Bye-bye hunger pangs!

BONUS: Better4U Sandwich Spreads!

Smear avocado on the bread. Packed with potassium, hormone-balancing avocado (yes, ladies) is especially good for a woman’s cervical and womb health.

Men, avocados are guy-friendly, too. Avos, as South Africans call the fruit, hold compounds that can prevent oral cancer. Their oleic acid is a protection against breast cancer (YES, men do develop breast cancer!).

One avocado week can help almost anybody to shed excess weight and possibly prevent some cancers. The fruit is rich in lutein to support everyone’s eye health, too.

Top that snack with sliced tomatoes, loaded with lycophen for healthier hearts and blood systems! Tomatoes even hold four chambers, just like human hearts. Lycophen compounds are linked to lower rates of breast and prostate cancer.

Pears have the same properties as avocados, so enjoy them often. Ladies, pamper your PMS-y selves with avocado salads, guacamole and even plain old avocado scooped from the peel. Their natural fats are soothing.

Very Easy Apple Sauce Cake

My husband's birthday is on Thursday, but we're expecting a crazy week, so we had a little surprise celebration today. I had just over an hour until he would be home, in which time I hoped to clean the whole house, start dinner, and bake a cake. All with four kids at home. Thankfully, I had the perfect cake recipe for the occasion! It's a recipe I posted previously, Leah's Easy Applesauce Cake, but with a few changes of my own (in bold).
      

   Ingredients

• 2 cups (260 grams) whole wheat flour
• 3/4 cup (150 grams) demerara sugar
• 3/4 cup agave nectar
• 2 tsp cinnamon (I used freshly grated)
• pinch of fresh nutmeg
• 2 tsp aluminum-free Baking Powder
• 1 tsp salt
• 2 eggs
• 1 cup (237 ml) olive oil
• 1 cup (237 ml) natural, unsweetened apple sauce
• 1/2 - 3/4 bag of chocolate chips (save some to put on top in the last 15 minutes of baking)

Mix all ingredients very well. Bake at 180C / 350F for about 45 minutes.

Shakshouka

I never understood what the big deal was with shakshouka - a tradition middle eastern dish of eggs poached in a spicy tomato sauce. It seems like a staple on every breakfast buffet, from the watery sauce to the over-cooked eggs.

Then my friend Tzippy took me to Shvil Izzim restaurant. We shared (among other things) the best shakshuka I've ever had. Sweet bell peppers in a flavorful sauce with fresh tomatoes and not too much spice. And the eggs! Not the baked-to-death eggs I'd experienced in my previous shakshouka history. Delicate, gently poached, with rich, runny yolks!  And, of course, fresh bread to soak up all that rich tomato-y goodness. (See my post on Shvil Izzim and my photo restaurant review on Facebook.)

When I saw heaping piles of brightly colored, inexpensive peppers on sale, I immediately had an itch to recreate this traditional dish.  Shakshuka is the perfect nonrecipe meal. You make it how you like it. I didn't use a recipe and I didn't have an Israeli (or Algerian or Tunisian) grandma to teach me how to make it. But whatever I did, it was yummy AND EASY!

Kitchen Disasters: Sweet Peppers and Toast

I was looking forward to telling you about my perfect shakshuka. Eggs sunny side up, simmered or baked in a tomato based sauce, usually a little spicy, usually with sweet peppers.

It all started when I saw some beautiful, long, red peppers at the supermarket last week. I was nervous to touch them, so I picked them up with plastic. The sign said "Sweet peppers." I sniffed. Didn't smell anything sharp, so I bought a few. I also saw some beautiful orange bell peppers. So I decided to buy what I needed to make shakshuka. I grabbed another bag and used it to pick up what looked sort of like a banana pepper.

Vegan "Eggplant Parmesan" Baked, Not Fried

Thanks to the kind man at a local photo shop, my Sony DSC-S750 is temporarily back in commission. But now I have camera envy from all my recent camera shopping! I'm so glad I can show the delicious, simple, and perfectly rewarm-able dish.

You will need:
2 eggplants
a lot of salt (preferably the flaky kosher variety)
tomato sauce (that's another post)
nutritional yeast
bread crumbs (or your favorite healthier/gluten-free alternative)
cherry tomatoes (optional)

Sprout Report

For my birthday my brother gave me the book, THRIVE: The Vegan Nutrition Guide to Optimal Performance in Sports and Life, which has significantly influenced his diet. He bikes for a living, and relies on his body working at its best. He is 98% vegan. The extra 2% is because he is a self described "opportunivore," not wanting to turn down any free meal.

The book revived my interest in sprouting. You can sprout most seeds and legumes at home, they don't have to be sold for sprouting. Just look in the back of your cabinet and use the odds and ends of lentils, beans, or raw sunflower seeds. Though there are endless tips for success and instructions, sprouting is essentially two simple steps:

For the Love of Goats

Sometime in elementary school I decided I wanted a baby goat as a pet. Was it on the visit with my aunt and cousins to a farm in New Jersey where we got to hold ducklings, chicks, chickens, and kid goats? I remember how special I felt being the only kid in the family big enough to hold these adorable little kids. Maybe it was the family trip to the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina where we purchased ice cream cones full of goat food, before entering a trail of tourists trying to avoid being attacked by goats.

Since then, I've always held a flame for goats. But, until I have space and time for goats, I will settle for making our household favorite - goat yogurt cheese with olives, crocheting with mohair, and reading to my kids from the copy of Gregory, the Terrible Eater that my grandmother gave me when I was a kid.

Check out my photo essay and restaurant review on Facebook and don't forget to "Like" Cooking Outside the Box to see links I share and what I've been up to in the kitchen between blog posts.

Fruit Compote Intuition

Last month my husband requested that I make fruit compote for dinner on the first night of Passover. It was a tradition in his house growing up. I emailed his mom for the recipe, but her version had too many packaged foods that we don't use on Passover. I'm not a huge fan of fruit compote, but I threw some things together in a simmering pot and it was delicious!

Enjoy it on it's own or use it as a filling for Pesach Crepes.

I used:

• Pitted prunes (dried plums), coarsely chopped
• Dried apricots,  coarsely chopped
• Chopped fresh apples
• Sweet red wine
• Fresh orange juice
• Orange zest
• Freshly grated nutmeg and cinnamon
• a pinch of salt
• (optional) fresh or crystallized ginger