Old-World Jewish receipes

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I just woke up, and while trying to find a new tempting bread receipe for today - will have soon the proof of my backing experiences for this week - I thought about preparing the food shopping list for Chanukka. And the chala for the Shabbat. Here, some inspiration.

Wish everybody a wonderful day, whatever bad the weather is.

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A lesson in a couple of words

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I had today a bit more time than usual and I tried my hand with some backings (details, later, as it is still work in process). My cooking lessons for today: patience, patience and again, patience. For: measuring the quantities, mixing the ingredients, waiting for the proper baking time, avoiding big differences between temperatures. And I must confess that most part of my failures in this area were dued to a genuine incapacity to wait. 

Let's take cooking more than a culinary and gourmet experiment, but as a lesson of life.

The rice recommendation of the week

For almost one year, many time ago, I ate rice almost daily. Remembering these times, I tried myself various imaginary receipes. 

Here is the most recent:

Boiled rice

1 avocado

chopped garlic, to taste

1 zucchini, chopped and fried in the pan with olive oil

salt, to taste taste

The boiled rice, plus avocado, garlic and fried zucchini are fried together in the pan, for maximum 10 minutes. To be served separately or together with other meals or salads.

Enjoy your meal and have a happy eating week!

My funny tomatoes

One of my culinary memories of my childhood is of the tomatoes filled with cheese cream. After many friendly images coming back from the old times, I dared one day to prepare my own variant. To the old receipe I added avocado and dill. Maybe the pictures are not attractive enough, but believe me, they tasted wonderfully. 

The successful formula:

For the tomatoes: get rid of the seeds and clean it carefully. Actually, even for the salads or sandwiches, I am still cleaning the the seeds. 

For the cheesy cream: 

100 gr. cheese cream

1 bound of dill - chopped finely

salt, to taste

Mix the cheese, the dill and salt for 5 minutes. 

1 avocado - sliced and chopped

Fill the tomatoes, add the avocado and let wait for another 10 minutes before serving. 

Green and Red salad

In this house, we are crazy about salads. Without being 100% vegetarians, be in winter, spring or autumn, we are unable to refuse the offer of a colourful and healthy salad.

This time, we tried a Red-Green-White combination. As you probably know, the colours are having an important influence on increasing our appetite. 

The receipe:

4 big tomatoes

200 gr. mozarella

rucola, on taste

garlic, on taste

1 avocado

sesame seeds, on taste

olive oil, on taste

That's all!

Pumpkins time

Image via Wikipedia//Not my Hokkaido local German offer

Autumn is already here for more than one month already and the winter is preparing to enter the stage. Sounds like a second grade composition but by now the weather is creating me a couple of adaptation problems.

I thought that now it is about time to try a couple of pumpkin combinations. As by now, for me it is very difficult to find in my Berlin area anything else but Hokkaido pumpkin, I bet on this choice, even some of my friends with serious experience in the area told me that better not. For me, it was the first time ever when tasting and testing such tasty dishes.

Mashed pumpkin

First action: cut the pumpkin into slices - not easy if you want to do it alone, girl - and boil it for about 40 minutes. After, peel it carefully and add in the blender together with: 1-2 pairs of garlic finely chopped, olive or sunflower oil, curry powder. If you want, you could add 1 or 2 carrots too. Mash it all together and serve it as an accompaniement to chicken breast or as a simple, separate vegetarian dish. Me, I chosed the last option and I felt a couple of hours after as a quiet elephant.

The Soup

For the soup, I put some 1 liter water to boil and added the mashed combination, plus some more salt. Mixed it from time to time and let the combination boil for maximum 15 minutes. In comparison with the mashed option, the result is a very light soup, to which I added some very sweet French bread.

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Emergency pasta

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 It was one of the days when I was overwhelmed by work - writing, of course - and under the terrible pressure to solve in a very quick time the pressing question of feeding the impatient kid. The kid being in a terrible hurry herself, with only two hours between the school program and her sport class. 

I had a short look around and it was a kind of disaster, one day of the usual weekly refuel shopping. 

Then I saw the big salvation:

- four fat bananas 

- five delicate carrots 

- some curry powder 

- the rests of some butter - 150 gr. 

and...ladies and gentlemen, the queen of my kitchen - a pack full of commoner fussili                            

Without saying a single word for not disturbing the laments of the kid complaining as usual about the difficult fate to be about 12 yo and with a mother always busy writing various untranslatable things, I put the water in the pot for boiling the fussili and the carrots, peeled the bananas and cut into medium-size pieces, prepared the butter. In maximum 30 minutes - the good amount of time to finish polishing some words -, the pots were boiling. Took out discretely the carrots, cut them into medium-size pieces, added the bananas and the butter, plus some 100 mgr. of olive oil, spread the curry, mixed all together and...when the pressure from the children room was increasing, shouted loudly: do you expect a special invitation, sweet squirrel? If I remember correctly, somebody was hurrying up...                                         Without giving me any credit, she entered reluctantly the kitchen and asked: What is this? Your lunch, baby, of course. Set the table quietly (the duty of those who don't make the food) and in the next 15 minutes, it was so quiet in the house...Simply delicious, I was congratulated when nothing was left in the pan. Everybody was happy, but I was the happiest, for passing, once again, the difficult test of motherhood.

IKEA - Homemade is best

IKEA – Homemade is Best. from Forsman & Bodenfors on Vimeo.

My salad of the week

I am not a constant vegetarian, but most part of the time I prefer eating fresh vegetables and fruits. The following salad recipe is the full product of my imagination, the result was very tasty and filled my morning, lunch and evening. 

5 tomatoes, halved

2 packs of mozzarella cheese

100 gr. dried mint

250 ground salty peanuts - for grounding the coffee machine for bones helped me very much

100 gr. raisins

100 gr. sesame seeds

1 bunch of green onion, finely chopped - or 1 clove of garlic, finely chopped

100 ml. sesame oil/or usual sunflower or olive oil

You mix for 1-2 minutes the whole combination and it's ready to be served. The maximum time dedicated to this wonderful tasty work is maximum minutes. 

Bon Appetit!

Novels about food

Haven't read none of them, but I am decided to spend some time in the libraries reading I would like for my long winter vacation to have a look on some of these books.

Indian spices?

Are you interested? Some solutions for your Indian cooking ideas might be found here.
Good luck and enjoy your food!

How to shoot ugly food

A problem I faced several times, but promise to outperform shortly.

Add some zucchini

I am not a constant vegetarian, but I prefer for a long time to limit the meat ratio to once the week, maybe. I can live without meat, but to stimulate my appetite I need to create various combinations of vegetables. And, here, my imagination is playing an important role. 

A couple of weeks ago - when I was decided to start writing about what I am cooking, hence the photos I tried to take as professionally as possible - I was about to prepare some ready-made tortellini, but I had the feeling that it will not be enough so tried to think a bit about a new combination.

I pick up from my special food closet:

- sunflower oil (100 ml.)

- sesame oil (3 drops)

- 1 zucchini

- sesame seeds (100 gr.)

- salt

Peel the zucchini and cut into small cubicles. Pour the sunflower oil in the heated pan, together with the salt, zucchini cubicles and sesame seeds. Mixed them together for five minutes, then pour the sesame oil. After 30-35 minutes, mix the composition with the tortellini and wait for another five minutes.

Ready to eat!

Fresh and sweet honey melon

This is a very easy fruit dessert.
All you need is (beyond love for cooking):
- 1 honey melon
- honey
- nutmeg (or Cinnamon)
- mint - fresh or dried
- 1 fig
- powder sugar. In my case, I used a special chestnut sugar brought from Corsica, moderately sweet.
What you have to do is:

Cut the honey melon in two equal halves. Pull out the seeds. Cut and peel the fig. Spread the mint, together with the sugar, the nutmeg (or maybe cinnamon if you like it), 1 spoon of honey and slices of fig. Put them in the fridge and wait for one hour, in order to let all the ingredients to melt together. Good to serve it night, day, morning, summer, autumn, spring or summer. A fresh sweet taste.

Welcome to the world of boiled words

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A couple of weeks ago, during my long never ending process of reorganizing my writing life, I opened a blog dedicated to my writing journey - http://wildwritinglife.blogspot.com/ (which I kindly invite you to read and criticize). This is a diary about my modest efforts to improve and develop my writing skills - in another tongue that my mother tongue. One of the domains I wanted to explore is also the food writing, an area I am not familiar with though the high interest for this new intellectual challenge.

For a long time, for various reasons, I stayed away of the gourmet experiences. Not too much time, not experience in the world of tastes and food. But, for various reasons, practical matters equally, in the last two years I was faced with the necessity to start preparing healthy and eatable food. And, I embarked on this trip with lots of enthusiasm and courage. In most part of the cases, I didn't use recipes, although I have a couple of nice and colourful resources. I am using often Internet for various technical problems: as, for example, how to cut a mango fruit, but also for some inspiration - cookies, the weekly change of the menu.

I do not consider myself experimented cooker or expert. I learned a lot, but the most part of experience is waiting for me. This blog - I hope once to turned into an interesting resource for women like me - is the diary of my successful and unsuccessful experiment. Initially, I intended to host my food writing on my normal writing blog, but a couple of minutes ago I decided that it might be better to have a separate chapter of my life, as I am seriously thinking to gather all these experiences into an e-book one day. 

Once again, welcome into my world of tastes and looking back for advices, conversation, exchange recipes and everything interesting to share about food, learning and good life.