This is me in bread form! Chinese, Jewish and pretty doughy, whether I can help it or not. I originally developed this recipe for an article on a Jewish site where my assignment was to explain what it’s like to be Chinese and Jewish. The answer is simple: • Anything involving numbers and math comes…
Not many things in life are better than a rich, moist chocolate cake covered in buttercream and doled out with birthday songs and birthday wishes. But as my old timpani teacher used to say, “If it ain’t broke, fix it anyway.” Chocolate cake, meet tahini. Chocolate cake and tahini go together fantastically, but not like…
Growing up, I always looked forward to the Jewish holidays, even though my family was not very religious. Those were pretty much the only times we had real food in our house. During the holidays, my mom and I would cook together to recreate my grandmother’s classic old-world recipes — chicken soup, brisket, salmon patties…
Chicken soup, known as “Jewish penicillin,” is an essential recipe for all grandmothers and mothers to have in their bag of tricks. It’s delicious, and bone broth is touted for its restorative powers. I used to look forward to preparing this sweet soup with my grandmother Beauty as a kid, and now as a mom…
An essential component of the Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashanah, known generally as the Jewish New Year, a honey cake (lekach in Yiddish, derived from the German lecke, for “lick”) is meant to symbolize a sweet year ahead. Slices of apples dipped in honey, the other food tradition most associated with Rosh Hashanah, are served…
I’m not going to encourage you to whip this up on a work night. The prep takes about 45 minutes and is followed by 30 minutes of pressure-cooking time. But if you’re interested in making what tastes like a proper slow-cooked tagine — a spicy, complex North African-inspired stew with meat that’s moist and tender…
You don’t have to let an awards show stand in the way of a haimish Sunday feast. Here are a few of our favorite festive finger foods to satisfy and delight family and friends during the Emmys. The show airs Sunday at 8 p.m. (ET) on ABC. To make an easy, excellent brisket (called for…
Mustard is a key player in Ashkenazi cooking. The mustard plant, a member of the Brassica family, has some pretty important relatives in cabbage and horseradish. Can you imagine eastern European Jewish cooking without them? Probably not. And you also probably can’t imagine a hot deli pastrami sandwich without spicy ground mustard. Personally, I can’t…
This is the perfect finish to a family meal. Our family has one, and only one, person who will always make this dessert. No one else has it in them to even give it a shot. I’ve changed it so that it’s more of an American-Israeli cross between a crumble cheesecake and a whipped-cream kind…
Summer might be beginning to wind down, but peak harvest season — which, where I live in the Northeast of the United States runs roughly from July through mid-October — is going strong. The farmers market is entering that magical sweet spot where late summer’s sweet corn and glistening eggplants meet early fall’s new crop…
There I was, like a character out of a Nora Ephron film, standing in the middle of Zabar’s, asking anyone within earshot the difference between their two beet soups. The bustling Manhattan store’s two versions of borscht boast the same color, almost the same ingredients. Scrutinizing the two containers, I hold them up to the…
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