Recipe: Challah Bread with Sponge Method
Bread making is an art as well as a science, and may take a while until you get the kind of challah you want. It takes more time than most recipes on this site.
My friend Miriam Kresh of Israeli Kitchen suggests using less yeast in baking, leading to a lighter, airier bread with less yeasty taste. But it involves a longer rising time. She helped me work out the recipe below.
A sponge contains all of the yeast and liquids, and about two-thirds of the flour called for in the recipe. It allows you to use less yeast, compensated for by a longer rising time. This means that you end up with an airier dough with more flour taste than yeast. Sometimes it consists of only the water, yeast, and the majority of the flour.
The Potato Cake Mystery
Potato cakes are a food I remember fondly from my childhood. My mother made these crispy treats often, for two reasons: First, the main ingredient was leftover potatoes, and second, they cooked in the broiler.
Friday Roundup #28: Purim and the Olympics
The Kosher Cooking Carnival is up at Adventures in Mamaland.
PhD in Parenting wrote on the irony of fast-food companies sponsoring the Olympics. What do you think?
Below are posts from Cooking
Guest Recipe: Grandma Rose’s Hamantashen
Thanks to Norma for sending in this recipe. Purim, the Jewish holiday celebrated this Saturday evening through evening. Hamantashen are meant to remind us of the three-cornered hat supposedly worn by Haman, the villain in the biblical book of Esther that will be read in the synagogue.
Hamantashen are made from any kind of rollable cookie dough. Cut the dough into circles, then fill and pinch into a triangle shape so the filling shows through on top.
This Hamentaschen recipe comes from Grandma Rose. The cookie is based on a classic sour cream cookie— light and airy. It’s one of the few Hamentaschen recipes where you actually enjoy eating the cookie that surrounds the filling! I sometimes make the cookie dough and leave the rounds plain.
Sofrito and Shepherd’s Pie: Interview with Yonit:
Please welcome reader Yonit van de Metz of Collecting Hats for today’s interview.
Name, location, family: Yonit de Metz, Philadelphia, wife and work-at-home mom to two toddlers and lots of houseplants.
What do you remember about family meals when you were growing up? What was your mother’s cooking style?
I have realized recently how diverse my mom’s cooking style is. Besides the traditional Jewish foods she brought from her own family she learned to cook Puerto Rican food from my grandmother and aunt. She also made Italian, Chinese, American, Mexican, and all kinds of different things. We have been known to have Thanksgiving meals with kugel, matzo ball soup, arroz y gondules, Turkey, enchiladas, and flan next to the traditional pumpkin & apple pies.
When Using Up Leftovers Is a Waste of Resources
Tesyaa left this comment on Why You Should Eat Everything on Your Plate:
Another thing about waste – quite often I’ve tried to avoid waste by making, say, a banana bread with overripe bananas, or using up rice in some other type of dish. Those items use energy to cook, and use other ingredients. If there is no real need for banana bread, making it to use up old bananas just wastes oil, eggs, sugar, & flour.
To me, avoiding foood “waste” is only helpful if it frees up other food items. If not, it’s not doing anyone any good.
I’m not sure what you mean when you write “there is no real need for banana bread.”
Red Snapper with Lemon and Dill
Wednesday is Recipe Day at CookingManager.Com.
Yesterday I went for a walk to our local shuk (open air market).
I wasn’t in the mood to cook, so when I passed the fish stand I knew that’s what I would get. Fresh fish is so easy to make, and the red snapper cost only $5 for three medium-sized fish.
Brightening a Bleak Culinary Landscape: Interview with Robin
Name, location, family, website
Robin, Central Israel, work-at-home mom of 2
Personal blog: http://aroundtheisland.blogspot.com/
Photography blog: http://aroundtheislandphotography.com/
What do you remember about family meals when you were growing up? What was your mother’s cooking style?
We always ate dinner as a family. Meals were very “American” – a meat, a vegetable or two, usually half a grapefruit or a slice of melon as an appetizer. The style for weekday meals was casual, with an emphasis on quick and easy. More elaborate meals were saved for weekends or company (but only tried and true – my mother never tried a new dish when company was coming. Still doesn’t for that matter.)
How is your cooking style different from your mother’s? We tend to favor much more ethnic cooking – Thai food is my “what to cook when there’s nothing to cook” staple, but I’m just as likely to throw together enchiladas or a vegetarian curry or a sauce for my husband’s homemade pasta. I tend to favor a lot of “Moosewood” style dishes and one-bowl with everything in it meals while my husband is all about dough – he bakes all our bread, keeps us well stocked with homemade pasta, anything as long as it involves dough. It’s a hobby and a stress reliever for him.
Why You Should Finish Everything on Your Plate
“Finish everything on your plate!” That mantra from Mom has gone out with the leftover corn flakes. Over the years we’ve learned that forcing children to eat can lead to eating disorders.
But Mom had a good reason. By the time it gets to your plate food that has been grown, watered, picked, transported, processed, packaged, stored and cooked. Whenever we throw out food, we also waste a portion of the resources that went into getting it onto our plates.
And I don’t need to remind anyone that wasting food costs your family money. If only one person in the family leaves just half a teaspoon of oatmeal each day, you’ll throw out more than 11 cups over the course of a year.
But there is yet another reason to scrape that last bit of food off your plate.
Links on Obesity, Packaging Waste and Poverty With Friday Roundup #27
I’ve collected a few food-related links to share with you.
We tend to think that since food is biodegradable, we don’t have to worry about throwing it out. At Wasted Food, Jonathan explains why food waste is worse for the environment than disposable packaging: When Packaging Helps.
At one of my favorite cooking blogs, Cheap Healthy Good, explains Why Healthy Eating Doesn’t Have to be Expensive.
Vered at Blogger for Hire gets attacked when she wonders about a fat girl in an ice cream parlor: Fat Acceptance. Check out the discussion in the comments about the reasons for obesity. To read about my mother’s methods for raising slim children, see Individual Portions or Family Style and Putting Food in Perspective. Our society puts too much emphasis on dieting and not enough on preventing obesity in the first place.
Parenting Squad writes on whether Michele Obama’s comments about her daughter’s BMI were embarrassing to her daughter.
