The heady scent of new-crop oranges

Southern California is specialty-citrus country, so you’d think that ordinary navel oranges would come bottom of the exotica scale. But these ones–an accidental find, I’m sure–smell distinctly like orange blossom, and the peel tastes like it too. They make an unusual and elegant marmalade in the microwave, and it only takes a few minutes.

Hunan Tofu, spare the salt (spoil the child)

The issue today is tofu; see under: how to feed a vegetarian preteen some protein without overdosing her on sodium. Our favorite Chinese restaurant dish is tofu in black bean sauce, but no doubt about it, it’s loaded, both on salt and on fat. A reasonable home version needs a sauce that’s bigger on flavors other than salt and can help the tofu brown without deep-frying.

Stuffed onions in a hurry

Why, you have to ask, should I make such a big deal about stuffed onions–they’re a party trick, after all, not standard cooking. But we discovered we really liked them, and they’re a pretty good kind of party trick. But they take over an hour the traditional braise-and-roast way. My way’s so quick I can make them for supper after work, and they’re so good they may actually be better than the long-roasted ones.

A Slow Food Fast Thanksgiving

Despite my firm resolve after last week’s marathon kiddush that I will strive Not To Cook (could I possibly be Peg Bracken’s unacknowledged lovechild? Unfortunately, no), I know that most of us don’t have the luxury of not cooking tomorrow. If you absolutely have to cook, here are a couple of posts for speeding up a few of the obligatory or not-so-obligatory Thanksgiving items. Most can go in a microwave and none are really boring.

Tomato paste rules…

School lunch debates now apparently hinge on the 30-year-old question: if tomatoes are a fruit and not a vegetable, what’s tomato paste?

Stuffed Eggplants with Quince, A Vegetarian Odyssey

When I got “Aromas of Aleppo” for my birthday this week, the stuffed eggplant with quince was the first thing I had to try. It took two hours in the oven–not counting the time it took to make the tamarind concentrate earlier this week–but it worked beautifully the first time around, even with my vegetarian version, and it made a great addition to the Rosh Hashanah table. Next time, I’m going to use the microwave to cut the roasting time to a few minutes just for finishing, so my house doesn’t heat up in 90-degree weather.

The Birthday Project: New Year, New Food

Despite the unfamiliarity of some of the flavors in “Aromas of Aleppo”–allspice in meat dishes, tamarind-based sauces–this is the best kind of traditional Jewish home cooking, the kind that has your favorite great-aunts outdoing each other for Pesach, Rosh Hashanah, and other big celebrations. And like all Jewish great-aunt dishes for the holidays, this dish of stuffed eggplants and quinces comes with two required homework items: the beef and rice stuffing, and tamarind concentrate. The stuffing is easy enough, even in my vegetarian lentil version. The tamarind concentrate? I decided to mechanize a little to see if I could speed it up.

Really? No, not really.

In a recent cooking challenge, three top chefs tried to modify their dishes for better nutrition profiles. They cut a few calories but generally failed on sodium.They were all too fixated on whether diners could tell the difference between their originals and the modified dishes to make any daring changes.The real question is, would it have been a good dish?

Stolen!

Great rustic food and desert camp cooking skills are a part of Israeli life I fervently hope won’t disappear with all the new software companies and car dealerships and cappuccino joints that have popped up recently. As for the Wall Street Journal’s use of “Slow Food Fast” for a food column, I’m thinking I should take the attitude Monty Python did when Margaret Thatcher made free with their Dead Parrot Sketch in a speech.

French Food with Jewish Roots (and vice versa)

The obvious thing to conclude, and I think Joan Nathan does, is that a lot of these foods have traveled pretty far and wide before coming to rest in either the “French” or “Jewish” classifications, and a lot of borrowing is still going on.