What do you do with the tomatoes that drop to the ground while still green? If they are large enough, you can put them in a windowsill or a paper bag and hope they ripen properly. Or you can make fermented tomatoes – a tasty, healthy treat.
Ingredients:
1 tsp. sea salt (approx.)
2-3 tomatoes, cut into wedges (the fermentation went quicker when I cut the tomatoes)
2 – 3 cloves garlic, peeled
1 tsp. pickling spice: mine has pepper, dill, mustard seeds
Optional: dill seed from homegrown dill
Put all the ingredients in a jar. Cover with water. Cover the jar with a cloth and a rubber band.
Does my jar look a bit like Laurence of Arabia? Let the pickles sit for about a week, maybe less if it’s very warm. Be sure to check it every day. When it begins to form a little foam on top, it is fermenting. That’s when I usually cover it with the jar lid and put it in the refrigerator.
If you try this, please let me know. It’s even easier than pickling cucumbers.
Beets: If you are in the kitchen anyway, boil some fresh beets. They take 1.5 hours to cook (quicker with a pressure cooker), but most of your work time is spent cutting the ends of the beets off before cooking and peeling after cooking (10 minutes). You can mix them with cucumbers, olive oil and dill right before serving.
Avocado: Buy an avocado or two a few days in advance. When it is ripe, wash and mix in salt, lemon juice (we have lemon juice in bottle so as not to squeeze lemon on Shabbat), possibly some hot sauce or spices.
Prep Time: 15 minutes / Total Time: 15 minutes
Ingredients:
• 1/2 cup lemon juice
• 1 tsp. tequila, optional (I left this out)
• 2 Tbsp. honey
• 1/2 tsp. salt
• dash white pepper
• 1/8 tsp. tabasco sauce
• 1 medium-sized watermelon, cut into cubes
• 1 cup 5% Bulgarian cheese, cubed (or feta or Roquefort)
Preparation:
Mix first 6 ingredients in small bowl and stir to dissolve honey. Taste for seasoning, cover, and chill for 1-2 hours to blend flavors.
To serve, mix watermelon and cheese. Pour sauce over and mix well.
Salad Bowl watercolor on paper, June 2011 by Leora Wenger
Thanks to everyone who inspired me to paint by responding to my Simple Summer Salad Hunt. Results of the hunt (and feel free to add more salad ideas to this post) will be posted next week. A funny anecdote on this painting: my husband was trying to figure out if we have bowl that looks like this blue starred bowl. I told him no, I just made it up. Poetic/artistic license.
I am looking for links to wonderful summer salads or spreads (vegan or pareve, please) – I plan to do a post next week with a list of these salads. Here are two examples to wet your appetite:
Ilana-Davita presents a lovely currant cake recipe. We don’t see many red currants in New Jersey – I suggest trying the cake with blueberries. I did find an article about red currants suggesting they do exist in New Jersey. I can ask the farmers at our local Highland Park Farmer’s Market. Ilana-Davita says she doesn’t see many blueberries in her part of France. According to this redcurrant Wikipedia article, the North American currants may not taste as good as those of Western Europe.
Ingredients
one pound of red currants
3 Tbsp spelt flour (yes, just that small amount of flour is needed)
1 pinch of salt
3 large eggs
3 Tbsp natural cane sugar
1 glass (appr. 200ml) of buttermilk or milk substitute such as almond milk or oat milk
1 pkt of vanilla sugar (may use vanilla extract)
Mix the flour and salt with the eggs. Add the sugar and milk. Grease a baking pan and lay the currants at the bottom. Add the batter and sprinkle with the vanilla sugar. Bake for 45 minutes at 360°F.
This recipe is my mom’s but I have changed it slightly. She uses plain sugar and flour and mixes the vanilla sugar with the rest of the batter.
This cake reminds me of Mollie Katzen’s Cranapple-Walnut Cake – I used to make that one with whatever fruit I had available. As Mollie noted at the head of the page: “~very moist ♥♥♥.”
And because Ilana-Davita took such a red photo of currants, I am submitting this to Ruby Tuesday:
Curried Chickpeas with Red Onion and Flat Parsley
Last week was the Jewish holiday of Shavuot. It is traditional to eat dairy foods; however, my body doesn’t care much for dairy. As I had a craving for a curry, I took a recipe for curried chickpeas from The Vegetarian Epicure Book Two by Anna Thomas and substituted coconut oil for the butter. I didn’t use all the spices listed in the original recipe, and I added the red onions. You can mix and match ingredients as desired.
Ingredients
1 Tbsp. organic coconut oil
1 tsp. turmeric
1/2 tsp. cinnamon
1 tsp. coriander
1 tsp. cumin
1 tsp. black pepper or to taste
1 tsp. sea salt or to taste
2 tsp. chopped ginger root
Optional 1/2 tsp. cayenne pepper
Optional: 1/2 tsp. ground cloves (I didn’t add this, but it sounds like a nice flavor)
Optional: 2-3 chopped garlic cloves
1 can of chick peas (or soak dried chick peas overnight and cook before using in the recipe)
Garnish: Parsley or cilantro
Optional: chopped red onion
Optional: lemon juice
Optional: chopped tomatoes – maybe I’ll add chopped tomatoes when they are season (August) – that’s the only time I eat them
In a saucepan or a wok, warm the coconut oil and the spices. After a few minutes, add the garlic, ginger and chickpeas and coat well. Cook for about 10 minutes. The original recipe suggested crushing a few of the chickpeas. Top with parsley or coriander and optional lemon juice, chopped onions and/or chopped tomatoes. You can serve immediately or reheat the next day. Delicious on rice.
I also made the same recipe with cubed zucchini – I may post that recipe next week.
These cookies were a Mother’s Day present from my daughter. She had a school assignment to get recipes for a book that would be presented to the mothers on Mother’s Day. So she and my husband went looking for the “perfect” cookie recipe – actually, they took various recipes they found online and combined them into a Raspberry Oatmeal Walnut Cookie. Last Friday I decided to make the cookies based on her recipe, and I was wondering why the recipe called for 3 cups of whole wheat flour AND 1 cup of oatmeal – that seemed to be an awfully dry cookie. I modified the recipe as I went along, and I found out when my husband came home that the recipe in the book was a conglomeration of various baking recipes. Oh, now he tells me. The recipe below is my modified version.
Ingredients
1/2 cup brown sugar OR 1/2 cup white sugar + 1 Tbsp. molasses (I did white sugar + molasses)
1/2 cup coconut oil
2 eggs
1 tsp. cinnamon
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1 cup oatmeal (old-fashioned rolled oats)
1 cup walnuts, chopped
1/2 cup flour (whatever you like – I used white, unbleached flour)
Topping (optional):
1/2 cup white sugar
6 strawberries or 20 raspberries (my daughter’s recipe called for raspberries – I improvised with strawberries – worked fine)
Heat oven to 375°. Mix coconut oil, 1 egg, cinnamon and sugar in a bowl. Mix well. Add baking soda. Add flour, oats and chopped nuts. Mix well. If it looks dry (which my mixture did), add the second egg.
Put spoonfuls of the cookie batter on a baking sheet covered with parchment paper. Put in the oven and bake for 4 minutes. While the cookies are baking, mix the berries in the food processor with sugar. Take out the cookies after 4 minutes, and apply a spoonful of berry topping to each one. Then bake the cookies for another 8 minutes or so. If you skip the berry topping, you can just bake the cookies for 10 minutes.
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My husband and I loved the cookies, and my sons said they were okay. My boys would have preferred the cookies without the berry topping. My middle son is considering making peanut butter with oatmeal cookies. His current peanut butter cookie recipe is just eggs, sugar and peanut butter.
Pickles in a Container Fermenting with Spices, Garlic and Brine
It sounds daunting, making your own pickles, but the trick is assembling the ingredients and equipment. The rest is throwing it together and patience. You don’t want to use vinegar in your pickles – the whole idea is to create your own fermentation, so you can reap the benefits of the good bacteria from pickling. This recipe was inspired by the Sour Pickles recipe in Sandor Ellix Katz’s book Wild Fermentation.
Ingredients and Equipment
1 large jar or jug or plastic bucket (just has to be big enough to fit your pickles)
6 medium-sized pickling cucumbers (you can use as many as fit in your container)
2 tsp. Ball Pickling Spice (or make your own with black peppercorns, dill seed, cardamom seed, mustard seed, allspice, coriander, bay leaves)
3 – 6 cloves of garlic, peeled and sliced in half
4 tsp. sea salt
water – enough to cover the pickles
grape or oak or horseradish or sour cherry leaves (to keep the cucumbers crisp – the tannin in the leaves is supposed to help) – I used oak leaves
1 piece of cloth and 1 rubber band
1 small lid + 1 weight, such as a rock or two to weigh down the pickles (I updated this recipe with this recommendation)
Place the spices, leaves, garlic and cucumbers in the container. Sprinkle at least 3 tsp. of sea salt on top. Pour water into the container so that it covers the pickles. If you want, you can then add some more salt. Sandor Katz suggests covering the pickles with a plate and a weight; since I don’t have a plate that small (he was using a big bucket instead of a jar), I used a smaller jar lid from a different jar and two rocks to weigh down the pickles. Cover with cloth and rubber band.
Check the pickles every day. If a little mold is growing on the top of the pickles, wash off the mold. The pickles may be ready in a week or in two. My first batch tasted a bit like a mild sour pickle after one week of soaking in the brine and spices.
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If you like homemade pickles, maybe you will enjoy homemade sauerkraut, too.
Wheat in the Hulah valley, 2007, retouched by Carol Spears
In introducing this edition of the Kosher Cooking Carnival (KCC), I want to talk briefly about the Omer and roots of Judaism in agriculture. From Passover to Shavuot (7 weeks) we count each day. In the days of the Temple, barley was the first crop to be harvested. An omer of barley was offered each day at the Temple. Anyone have a recipe for barley bread? On the 50th day, wheat was offered, as the wheat harvest had begun.
I didn’t get a chance to post any new Pesach recipes this year, but this is my mushroom pate recipe from last year. It was well-received by my relatives in Far Rockaway.
Pictured above, from left to right, are a portobello, maitake, and shiitake mushroom. I bought these at a local Asian supermarket on Route 27 in Edison called H-Mart.
Why use these special mushrooms? Why not just stick to white button mushrooms? In addition to the excitement of having something new in one’s soup, maitake and shiitake have medicinal benefits. Here’s a post on the health benefits of maitake (slows tumors, protects healthy cells from becoming cancerous, may reduce the need for insulin and more). This post on the health benefits of shiitake mushroom is on cancer.org. Susun at Planet Thrive writes about medicinal mushrooms in general.
Here are a bunch of maitake mushrooms.
This is a shiitake mushroom. Sometimes I put a shiitake mushroom in a mug of hot water and drink it the way someone would a cup of tea.
I’m going to use them in mushroom barley soup tonight. If I have leftover mushroom barley, sometimes I stuff it into my Friday night chicken. I’ve also made mushroom lentil soup. Here is another mushroom with shiitake soup.
