Mom's magnificent noodle kugel

My mom sometimes makes this sweet kugel recipe as a main course - heaven knows it has enough calories to be a whole meal.  She got the recipe from my Great Aunt Lillian, whose photo oversees my kitchen.   I find noodle kugel is also a great breakfast, even served cold!  It's a great comfort food, reminded me of home.  It's also easy and fairly fast to make.

I've added one tweak to it over the years - the cornflakes (or rice flakes) coating the top.  I picked up this trick from Norman Mael, our synagogues premier chef.  I find it prevents the top noodles from burning, plus gives the kugel a satisfying crunch.  The only problem is if you can't serve it straight out of the oven.  The corn flakes get soft over time.  But it'll still be tasty!

Last time I served this was at our synagogue's pot luck Rosh Hashanah picnic at the Bloomsburg town boat launch.  The day reaffirmed the benefits of living in a small town - particularly THIS small town.

Rosh Hashanah is the Jewish New Year celebration.  An optional ceremony for it is a Tashlich service, which involves throwing bread into a body of water to symbolically throw away your sins.  I thought having the potluck immediately afterward, in the picnic pavilion by the boat launch, would be a grand way to celebrate the holiday. 

But I misremembered the number of picnic tables under the pavilion. 

I thought there were four. There were only two - not enough for a congregation picnic.  I discovered my error the day before, during a morning jog past the pavilion.  It was too late to move locations.  I didn't have a truck to haul the tables from the synagogue there, and they're tough to maneuver out of the basement anyway.

So Leon went to the town crew's building and told them my dilemma.  And by the next morning, those wonderful people used heavy equipment to bring two more tables to the pavilion there.  Yay, Bloomsburg!

Ingredients:
1 package of wide egg noodles, cooked al dente according to package directions.
Three eggs
1/2 C sugar
1/2 pound cottage cheese
1/2 pint sour cream (1 Cup)
1/4 pound cream cheese
1 tsp. vanilla
1 small can of crushed pineapple
golden raisins to taste (I use at least a cup)
1.5 C crushed cornflakes (optional)
cinnamon to taste.

1. Butter a 9x13 inch baking pan. Cook noodles al dente, according to the package directions.

2. Beat eggs well. Add 1/4 Cup sugar,  the cottage cheese, the sour cream, the cream cheese, the vanilla and the crushed pineapple. Mix.

3. Add the egg mixture to the cooked noodles. Mix. Add the raisins. 

4. Crush the corn flakes - I use a rolling pin.  Mix with the rest of the sugar and the cinnamon until you like the taste.  In a pinch - or if you misread the label - you can also use Special K rice flakes. Spread the corn flakes on top of your kugel.

If you don't use cornflakes, just mix the sugar and cinnamon and spread that over the top of the kugel.

5. Bake at 350 degrees for 45 minutes to an hour.

Portobello Mushrooms with Red Wine Reduction or "You'll be Happy as a Hobbit"

Sunday, March 20, 2011

Portobello Mushrooms with Red Wine Reduction

We got these beauties in our produce mix this week.  I make mushrooms this way as salad toppings, a side, mixed in pasta or a delicious topping to a steak or chicken.  They are SO flavorful! I absolutely love these. Cooking with wine can be intimidating at first, but trust me, it's nothing!  Open up a bottle of red wine, pour yourself a glass and get ready to eat in 10 minutes.  You will feel like a gourmet chef after this!

photo by sara tady ©

Ingredients:
Portobello or Crimini Mushrooms (wiped clean with a damp paper towel-do not run under water!)
Red wine
Butter
Salt and Pepper

Instructions:
1) Melt about about 1 tbsp of butter in a non-stick pan.  Medium heat.
2) Drop sliced, unseasoned portobellos or whole crimini mushroom caps in pan to saute 3 minutes.  Do not touch or mix around.
3) Flip over, salt and pepper. 2 minutes
4) Pour about 1/4-1/2 cup of red wine into pan.  Let reduce for 1-2 minutes until wine reduces or becomes absorbed.

photo by sara tady ©

Print this Recipe

Endive, Apples, and Grapes

Ingredients

4 Servings

• 2 large unpeeled tart-sweet apples (such as Fuji or Gala)
• 1½ tablespoons salted butter
• 2 large heads of Belgian endive (12–16 ounces total), halved lengthwise
• 4 small clusters green grapes
• 5 small rosemary sprigs
• Fleur de sel or other sea salt
• 2–3 tablespoons water
   

  Preparation

  Quarter and core apples. Using vegetable peeler, shave off thin strip of peel down center of each apple quarter, leaving remaining peel intact. Melt butter in large nonstick skillet over medium-low heat. Add endive, cut side down, to skillet. Add apple wedges, 1 cut side down, to skillet. Add grape clusters and scatter rosemary sprigs over; cook, uncovered, without turning or stirring, until endive is caramelized on bottom and apples are just tender, 15 to 20 minutes. Carefully turn endive, apples, and grapes over; baste with liquid in skillet and cook until apples are very tender, 5 to 10 minutes longer. Season with fleur de sel and freshly ground black pepper.

  Transfer endive mixture to platter. Add 2 to 3 tablespoons water to skillet, scraping up any caramelized bits, forming small amount of sauce. Spoon sauce over endive mixture and serve.

  Recipe by Dorie Greenspan

Vegetable Noodles

Summer is best time to start making vegetable ‘noodles’

By MELISSA D’ARABIAN

Published: July 12, 2017

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Vegetable “noodles” are super trendy, and summer is the best time to make them since the king of the veggie noodle — zucchini —is ubiquitous, and inexpensive.
Go ahead and load up, because zucchini is a true powerhouse of vitamins. One cup provides over a third of your daily vitamin C, and about 10 percent of five additional vitamins and minerals, and weighs in at under 20 calories.
While “zoodles” are easily the most popular noodle, noodles can be made from a variety of vegetables.
Try other summer squashes, winter squash such as butternut, beet, carrot, sweet potato and parsnips.
Veggie noodles are easy to make, too. You can buy an inexpensive spiralizer to make quick work of cutting perfectly-shaped noodles.
Or, you can even use your vegetable peeler to shave long, thin ribbons from your vegetables; no special equipment needed.
Cooking the noodles is quick, too: usually by steaming or sauteeing briefly.
Some veggies, like summer squash, can be left completely raw if you want, and made into a cold summer noodle-like salad.
If you have been seeking the perfect recipe to dip your toe into the veggie noodle world, today’s recipe is perfect.
Sunshine Vegetable Ribbons can be made in mere minutes using only a vegetable peeler and a pan as equipment.
The flavors are bright and familiar: a little garlic, lemon, toasted pine nuts and nutty parmesan cheese.
Serve this as a pretty first course, as a side dish or even as a vegetarian main course, with a thick slice of crusty Italian bread on the side.
Once you’ve mastered the vegetable peeler noodle, get creative and explore the endless options for this new technique, swapping in vegetables for pasta in your favorite recipes.
Sunshine Vegetable Ribbons
Servings: 4
Start to finish: 15 minutes
2 large carrots, peeled
2 crookneck squashes (yellow summer squash)
2 zucchini
2 teaspoons olive oil
1 garlic clove, minced
2 tablespoons lemon juice
2 tablespoons toasted pine nuts
1 ounce parmesan cheese, shaved into shards with a vegetable peeler
Lemon zest or fresh herbs for garnish, if desired
kosher salt
Freshly ground black pepper
Use a vegetable peeler to shave long, thin ribbons (like flat noodles) of the vegetables. (You will likely have a thin core remaining of each vegetable.)
Heat olive oil over medium heat in a large saute pan.
Add the garlic and saute for one minute, until fragrant.
Add the vegetable ribbons, a pinch of salt, and stir.
Add the lemon juice and cover with a lid for just one minute (or longer if you want very soft ribbons).
Remove the lid, and remove from heat.
Serve on four plates, topped with pine nuts, parmesan cheese, black pepper and lemon zest or fresh herbs.
Nutritional information per serving: 128 calories; 66 calories from fat; 7 g fat (2 g saturated; 0 g trans fats); 6 mg cholesterol; 408 mg sodium; 13 g carbohydrate; 3 g fiber; 7 g sugar; and 6 g protein.

Garlicky chicken with lemon anchovy sauce (Stolen from the New York TImes)

Garlicky Chicken With Lemon-Anchovy Sauce

Melissa Clark

• Yield4 servings
• Time25 minutes

There’s nothing wrong with a dinner of pan-seared chicken seasoned with salt and pepper. But there’s everything right about the same chicken when you add anchovies, capers, garlic and plenty of lemon to the pan. What was once timid and a little dull turns vibrant, tangy and impossible to stop eating. And the only real extra work is chopping the garlic and a little parsley for garnish. In this dish, the cut of chicken is less important than the pungent pan sauce. Most people will probably want to use the workhorse of all poultry dinners, the boneless, skinless breasts. But the thighs cook nearly as quickly, and have a greater margin of error in terms of doneness. Overcook your breasts by even a minute, and you’ll get dry, tough meat. Thighs are more forgiving. However, if your family insists on white meat, you can substitute breasts and subtract about 3 minutes from the cooking time. There is no need to mention the anchovies until after people have complimented you on the meal.

Featured in: Anchovies Elevate A Pan Seared Chicken Dish. 

Anchovy, Chicken

1,423 ratings

Ingredients

• 1 ¼ pounds boneless, skinless chicken thighs (4 to 5 thighs)
• 1 teaspoon coarse kosher salt
• Freshly ground black pepper
• 6 garlic cloves, smashed and peeled
• ¼ cup extra-virgin olive oil
• 5 anchovy fillets
• 2 tablespoons drained capers, patted dry
• 1 large pinch chile flakes
• 1 lemon, halved
• Fresh chopped parsley, for serving

Preparation

1. Heat oven to 350 degrees. Season the chicken thighs with salt and pepper and let rest while you prepare the anchovy-garlic oil. Mince one of the garlic cloves and set it aside for later. In a large, ovenproof skillet over medium-high heat, add the oil. When the oil is hot, add the 5 smashed whole garlic cloves, the anchovies, capers and chile. Let cook, stirring with a wooden spoon to break up the anchovies, until the garlic browns around the edges and the anchovies dissolve, 3 to 5 minutes.
2. Add the chicken thighs and cook until nicely browned on one side, 5 to 7 minutes. Flip the thighs, place the pan in the oven and cook another 5 to 10 minutes, until the chicken is cooked through.
3. When chicken is done, transfer thighs to a plate (be careful, as the pan handle will be hot). Place skillet back on the heat and add minced garlic and the juice of one lemon half. Cook for about 30 seconds, scraping up the browned bits on the bottom of the pan. Return chicken to the pan and cook it in the sauce for another 15 to 30 seconds.
4. Transfer everything to a serving platter. Squeeze the remaining lemon half over the chicken and garnish with chopped parsley. Serve.

Blueberry Pancakes

At a glance

Prep

5 mins.

Bake

5 mins.

Total

15 mins. to 20 mins.

Yield

1 dozen 5" pancakes, 6 servings

Nutrition information

Ingredients

• 2 large eggs
• 1 to 1 1/4 cups milk*
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract, optional
• 3 tablespoons melted butter or vegetable oil
• 1 1/2 cups King Arthur Unbleached All-Purpose Flour
• 3/4 teaspoon salt
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 2 tablespoons sugar
• 3/4 cup blueberries, fresh or frozen
• *Use 1 cup milk if you're baking under hot, humid conditions, or if you're going to let the batter rest longer than 15 minutes. Use up to 1 1/4 cups milk in cold, dry conditions.

Instructions

1. Heat a griddle to 350°F. If you don't have a griddle, heat a large frying pan over medium-low to medium heat. Grease the griddle. When it's hot enough, a drop of water will skitter across the surface, evaporating immediately.
2. Beat the eggs, the smaller amount of milk, and vanilla until light and foamy, about 3 minutes at high speed of a stand or hand mixer. Stir in the melted butter or oil.
3. Add the flour, salt, baking powder, and sugar, stirring just to combine. A few lumps are OK. Set the batter aside to rest for a couple of minutes; it'll thicken a bit as it stands. Thin the batter with additional milk if it's not pourable consistency.
4. Drop the batter by 1/4 cupfuls onto the prepared griddle or pan; a muffin scoop works well here. Sprinkle 1 tablespoon berries atop each pancake.
5. Cook the cakes till they're golden brown on the bottom, about 2 minutes. Flip them over, and cook till the other side is golden, 2 to 2 1/2 minutes.
6. Serve the pancakes immediately. Or transfer them to a platter, cover, and keep warm in a 200°F oven. Enjoy with butter and maple syrup.

Tips from our bakers

• What kind of milk should you use in this recipe—skim, whole, something in between? It's up to you; skim milk will yield the least tender pancake, whole milk the most tender.
• If you use fresh berries, mix them right into the batter. If you use frozen berries, it's better to scatter them atop the cooking pancakes. If you mix them into the batter, they'll tint your pancakes a rather unappetizing shade of green.
• Why is it helpful to let pancake batter rest before cooking the pancakes? Because it gives the baking powder a chance to start working, and the flour time to start absorbing the liquid, both of which make for fluffier pancakes.

Canelli bean soup with garlic and parsley

This recipe is being stolen from my friends, Justin and Dillon Naylor at Old Tioga Farm. If they say it's good, I have no doubt it is!

Cannellini bean soup with garlic & parsley

30 Tuesday May 2017

Posted by Justin Naylor in Cooking, Recipes, Restaurant

≈ 2 Comments

Tags
Italy, Marcella Hazan, recipes

When Marcella Hazan passed away almost four years ago, tributes came pouring in from every major newspaper, and from chefs and home cooks from across the country. Invariably, the eulogist would mention Marcella’s most simple and exquisite pasta sauce with tomatoes, onions, and butter. It’s a sauce I’ve never had in Italy (perhaps Marcella made it up herself), but it became a symbol to many people of her forceful dedication to simplicity and flavor.
Another dish that comes to mind in this way is Marcella’s cannellini bean soup with garlic and parsley. It exemplifies the same extreme minimalism as the pasta sauce and demonstrates the principle that Marcella was always preaching: what you leave out of a dish is as important as what you include. Her understanding of her native country’s cooking was not only at odds with the caricature of Italian food in America at the time, but it was also at odds with the great majority of cooking from restaurant chefs, with their fixation on presentation and technical execution over freshness and taste.
We’ve been serving the bean soup this month at Old Tioga Farm, and though I’ve been making the soup for myself and family for almost twenty years now, I hadn’t served it at the restaurant in a while. Making it for the past few weeks has given me the opportunity to reflect anew on the recipe and on Marcella’s understanding of good cooking.
Marcella knew that it was not presentation, but flavor, which matters most in cooking. The bean soup is not going to win any prize for beauty, nor is it likely to appeal to the food porn crowd. But that’s not the point. When you taste the soup, if it is well made, you’re struck by a few very simple but powerful flavors: the beans themselves, soft and rich, substantial but yet dissolving; an underpinning of garlic, not so much as to overwhelm but just enough to serve as a sort of bass line, aromatic but not browned or harsh; parsley, the most common herb in Italian cooking, which provides freshness like no other herb; a light meat broth, refined and delicate, never intense and concentrated; and last but not least, olive oil of the very highest quality, an ingredient whose quality will make or break this soup. The oil infuses the beans with and enfolds them in its glow. A great oil will elevate the beans. A poor one will flatten them.
This, to me, is what good cooking is all about; at least, good Italian cooking. A few ingredients of highest quality, assembled in a way which just develops their full potential without confusing everything with excess complication. This is food meant not to impress so much as nourish. This is the philosophy of cooking which I learned from Marcella, which changed the course of my life, and inspires me every day in my home and restaurant kitchens.
Cannellini Bean Soup with Garlic and Parsley
I make this soup almost identically to Marcella. Of course, Marcella knew that not even the same cook prepares the same dish identically every time. My version is definitely a little more liberal with the garlic, and I also like the soup less thick but more pureed than Marcella. According to Marcella’s husband Victor, Marcella learned the soup from her father. She taught it to countless cooks through her classes and books, and now I share it with you.
Begin the night before by soaking one pound of dried cannellini beans. Certainly, if you must, use canned beans. I certainly have on occasion. The best canned beans I know of are the ones from Goya. Be aware that other brands might be over- or under-seasoned with salt. But do try to use dried beans for the full experience. If you forget to soak them overnight, you can skip that step, but it will take a little longer to cook them. Not a big deal. Cook in a big pot with water to cover and 2 or 3 teaspoons salt until tender, about an hour or two.
The soup also requires good homemade broth, which is one of the very simplest things you can do to improve the quality of your soups. The simplest vegetable broth just contains an onion and a few carrots and celery stalks, simmered for an hour in about 2 quarts of water. A more complex broth adds a whole chicken, or just a carcass, or just some chicken parts thrown in with the vegetables and simmered for closer to 3 hours. Another layer of flavor would involve adding some beef scraps or bones. There would be no harm in adding some tomatoes, or sweet peppers, or potatoes, or zucchini. But all of that is icing on the cake. A simple vegetable or chicken broth will do just fine.
When the beans are tender and the broth is made, you can begin to make the soup by sautéing one tablespoon garlic (Marcella used only 1 teaspoon) in 1/2 cup highest quality olive oil. You might find this an excessive amount of olive oil. It most certainly is not. It is an essential flavor component of this soup. As the winemaker Paolo di Marchi once told me: “In Tuscany, we think of olive oil as just another vegetable.” And so it is.
When the garlic is sizzling and taking on just a hint of color, add the beans, which should have been drained from their cooking liquid and tasted for proper seasoning. Let the beans absorb the flavor of the olive oil over moderate heat for about five minutes, and then add 2 cups or so of broth.
Pass about one third to one half of the beans through a food mill, or (if you must) put them in a blender, and then return them to the pot. This will thicken the soup a little.
Add more broth as needed to create the consistency you want. Some like it very thick. I like it more like a traditional soup. After the flavors have married for 10 minutes or so and the seasoning is just right, add a generous bit of freshly chopped parsley and several grindings of black pepper.
Garnish with a little drizzle of olive oil, what Italians would call “a benediction.”