Gluten-free 3-cheese Vegetable Lasagna

This dish is heavy on the prep, but very rewarding. My husband and I decided we liked the leftovers even better, hot or cold.

Avi watching me slice eggplant

Fried eggplant

You will need three cheeses:

• Something salty (I used Bulgarit)
• Something soft like ricotta or cottage cheese
• Something stretchy and melty like mozzerella (I used "gvina tzuba", something like Edam.)

Sabra Sorbet (Frozen Prickly Pear) PLUS How to Safely Cut Them Open

Photo by Sarah Melamed

Drive down any highway in Israel this summer and you will see spiny golden balls generously sprinkled along the tops of the cactus patches. This cactus fruit or prickly pear is called tsabar צבר in Hebrew and is the name sake of the native born Israeli - called a Sabra - prickly on the outside and sweet on the inside.

I don't have patience for Sabras. All the Israeli friends I've made in the last couple years were friendly on the outside, and any prickly people I've met still scare me. But this year I decided to get over my fear and buy my my own tsabar. Of course, I wasn't venturing into a cactus patch, I was just crossing the street to buy some de-clawed sabras. But even with the big thorns cut off, they can bite. 

Since the sabras were packaged, I was forced to buy a whole kilo. If I had only bought one or two, I probably would have been turned off by the seeds and quit, but being stuck with a whole bowl-full, I had to find something to do with them. It turns out they make a wonderful sorbet!

My First Lychee Encounter with VIDEO

Lychee "nuts", or Litchi chinensis, are technically in season, though they're still not cheap. My kids go crazy for them and I think they are really beautiful inside and out. (I'd love to do an art project with the skin/shell.) They have prickly, leathery magenta skin. It doesn't have sharp spines, so you can easily handle them. If you leave them in the fridge the skins will dry out and become more difficult to cut open, but the taste of the fruit remains sweet. The texture is in between a grape and a plum, the pulp is white and translucent. I would describe the taste as sweet and perfumy. If you cut straight through to the the seed, like you might open an avocado, the flesh easily separates from both the skin and the seed.

Homebrewing - Part 1: Why make your own beer? Guest Post

Boaz with Sam Adams Award

I am honored to introduce Boaz Harel, the first place winner for Pale Ale in the 2012 Sam Adams Longshot home brew competition in Israel, and author of the Three Cats Brewery Blog. Boaz is also married to  Maya, the author of the hilarious and informative blog How to Be Israeli. I first met Boaz and Maya when we were college students in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. This October we both welcomed our first "Made in Israel" babies into the world. Congratulation Boaz and Maya!

Let's try a simple exercise. Go get yourself a glass of cola. Now look at the glass and ask yourself what's in it. Chances are you couldn't answer the question, and with soft drink companies being so cagey about their products (and for a reason - if you knew what was in it you'd probably never drink it) you'll probably never know. Now go get a glass of beer and the same question. What's in this? The answer to that question is just four words: water, malted barley, hops, and yeast. What's more, all the wonderful variety of beers in the world, from the black roasty Guinness, to the pale crisp Bud Light, is made from those same basic four ingredients. Water, Malted Barley, Hops, Yeast (and magic :) ).

Beers from Three Cats Brewery

In fact, beer is such a simple, easy, and natural beverage, that you can actually make it at home. In the second part of this post I'll show you how, but before we get into that, let's talk a little about what beer is, and why you should make it. 

Easy Arepas (Corn pancakes)

When I was growing up in South Florida, my family would go to Miami to see the Marlins play baseball. One of the highlights of the trip was the delicious, sweet, greasy, cheesy arepa I would usually order for dinner. I don't think this was the most authentic Venezuelan or Colombian arepa, but it was utterly delicious. Two sweet corn pancakes were fried on a griddle, with white Jack cheese melted in the middle. You eat it like a sandwich with a little cardboard holder. Imagine my surprise when I learned that every stadium and fairground in the United States does not host Arepa Queen stands!

I wanted my family to have a little taste of the pleasure that comes with this wonderful flavor combination, so I've been making my own wonderfully un-authentic arepas using an inexpensive sandwich maker. This could easily be made in a dorm or hotel room if you bring the ingredients. You can also serve it with salsa or guacamole on the side.

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!