Challah

Two nights ago I brought a couple of homemade loaves of challah to some friends’ house for Shabbat dinner, which was also the last night of Chanukah. Their mother, a fairly well-known kosher caterer, was there and my jaw dropped when she said she’d never learned how to make this classic bread. Challah looks beautiful once it’s baked even if you’re not a champion braider (I’m definitely not), but it’s not such a big deal.

Microwave tricks: Pasta You Don’t Have to Babysit

I started cooking pasta in a microwave when my daughter was a toddler. I couldn’t leave a pot boiling away on the stove to go and chase her. Even though my daughter is now kitchen-savvy, it worked so well I’ve never been tempted to go back. You can cook standard dried or frozen pasta very well in a microwave, with only a few minutes of actual cooking time and almost no need to stay close by. You can cook rice too–and we’re not talking Minute Rice, either. Basmati rice, the queen of difficult rices, cooks perfectly in a microwave.

Thanksgiving Vegetariots, or, How Can You Have Any Pudding If You Won’t Eat the Meat?

The idea of vegetarians at the Thanksgiving table seems to throw everyone from newspaper food columnists to my mother-in-law and even Top Chef contestants way off their game, even in California. The world’s cuisines are full of good vegetarian protein dishes, and some of them are pretty easy to make on the fly. So maybe it’s time to feed the people and stop worrying about who eats turkey and who doesn’t.

Dolmas by microwave

When we first moved to Pasadena 10 years ago, one of my favorite places for Sunday dinners out was Pita! Pita!, a family-run Lebanese restaurant in the “Old Town” section of the city. One of the reasons I loved it was the usual reason to love middle eastern food: the mostly vegetarian mezze were wonderful, [...]

How to Eat Vegetables and Lose Weight and Save the Planet (Without Really Trying)

One of my favorite stops at the New York Times online is Mark Bittman’s “The Minimalist” column, a series of 5-minute videos in which he demonstrates simple but pretty good cooking with clear and manageable directions and an easy close-up view of the pots and pans in action.
I’d say he takes a no-nonsense approach to [...]

“High Protein Bran Muffin”–A good idea gone bad?

This is what’s wrong with American thinking today:

That muffins are healthy, or as in the example below, “healthful”
That bran muffins are really healthy and therefore can be eaten big
That such healthy muffins should be eaten as a source of protein.
That muffins this perfect can and perhaps even should be eaten as a substitute [...]

“But it’s organic! But it’s vegetarian!”

Vegetarian and organic foods are gaining popularity in supermarkets around the country–it’s been happening for at least a decade. Vegetarian- and organic-seeking customers assume they’re getting something closer to fresh if it’s labeled vegetarian or organic, and most of them also assume that vegetarian automatically means healthy. So, apparently, do nutrition researchers when they’re not [...]

A Bowl of Dough in the Fridge

If you have the room for it, keeping a bowl of basic Italian-style bread dough in the fridge allows you to make a wide variety of flavorful and very easy “slow food”-style breads fresh over the course of a week as you want them, without requiring a lot of work or day-long kneading-and-rising procedures each [...]

Oatmeal Flat or Round

Oatmeal is one of those nutritional bargain foods, a simple grain so full of fiber (that’s much of what it is) that even the overprocessed brand-name instant flavored varieties can’t ruin it entirely, other than dumping in a bunch of salt and strangely spelled preservatives.
But why ruin it and pay so much extra for the [...]