Eat the Chicken. Take the Broth.

I know Rosh Hashanah was a while ago but I must tell you about this amazing pomegranate chicken I made. It is from Susie Fishbein’s Kosher by Design, a great book with phenomenal ideas and very awkward commentary that I sometimes find myself copying (like when you try to describe wine with a hint of cherry in an oak barrel, but really it just tastes like wine.)

While the recipe was great, I had all of this wonderful chicken, pomegranate broth afterward that I just felt to guilty to throw out. Not only do I hate wasting food but stocks are some of the best ways to make soup or marinade meats.

So, after some thought, I saved the broth for about a week in a rubbermaid container and took out my Le Crueset dutch oven and went to my local butcher and asked for 1 lb. of brisket. They looked at me like I had 9 eyes and said how many people are you cooking for? I said 2 and they happily cut off a slab of beef. And so, I put the broth (after skimming the fat)  in the dutch oven with the brisket, let it come to a boil and simmered for 2-3 hours and VOILA a yummy flavorful slice of meat that was super easy to make and eat 🙂

New Year, New Commitment

It’s been a long time since I came around, been a long time but I’m back in town and this time I’ll keep blogging regularly….

OK, so I’m no Lady Gaga (though I have been confused for her recently), but I am back with a refound commitment to this blog. Not only that, but I went on a Parisian adventure with my husband and I would love to share some insights I had while there.

Forgetting Paris, we are also in the middle of the Jewish holiday season, which means I have been cooking up a storm, which means I have had little time to write, which means I have awesome insights into what worked for me that I would love to share them with you in future posts.

In the mean time, take this blog post in the spirit of Yom Kippur and let me say I am sorry for not updating this post. To my adoring fans (mainly my father and mother-in-law who might be the only people who read this) there will be more to come.

But if you have a chance, check out my Rosh HaShana cards at my Etsy store…

Don’t Cry over Spoiled Chicken

Don’t you just hate it when you go to the supermarket (Jubilee) and buy spoiled chicken? I know I do. I was so excited to try this salad recipe from Real Simple which feature chicken as the star protein, when low a behold I opened my chicken that I had just purchased and it smelt a little ammonia-ish. I googled “spoiled chicken ammonia” and of course the Internet said it might be spoiled. Being that I love my stomach and hate food poisoning, I decided to forgo the chicken. But I didn’t feel like going back out to the supermarket. It was super hot and already 9 o’clock. So what’s a girl to do? Alas, in my freezer was frozen hamburger patties from Fairway. I quickly ran them under hot water so they would thaw a little and stuck them on my grill pan, sprinkling salt, pepper, garlic and onion powder on top.

Crisis averted! But what do I eat with these?? It was carb-free Monday so I reverted back to the Real Simple recipe, except I made a few changes as I don’t eat milk and meat together and I did not have said chicken. So here it goes:

2 cups Spinach (I get pre- washed, that’s how lazy I am)

1 avocado

2 corn on the cobs

¼ red onion chopped

½ lime

2 hamburger patties

salt and pepper to taste

1.Cut corn off the cob and microwave for 60 seconds.

2. Plate spinach, avocado, onion and corn and lie hamburger on top of salad.

3. Season with salt and pepper.

4. Squeeze lime on top of salad.

I enjoy a “grapefruit spritzer” on the side. Just a mixture of grapefruit juice and lemon/lime seltzer.

 

Doesn’t this look like a vacation in a meal? Where’s the pool?

 

Happy National Ice Cream Day!

On the third Sunday of every July we celebrate National Ice Cream Day!

In honor of this awesome holiday put into effect by President Ronald Reagan in 1984, here is a round up of some yummy ice-cream/icy desert related announcements that I thought were worth a mention:

The View– Yummy ice-cream from around the country!

Real Simple– Blogging about ice cream never sounded sweeter. Great ideas to add a little umph to your fave flavor.

The New York Times– Ice pops gone wild with Mark Bittman.

 

In addition, I am posting an article I wrote for Tablet Magazine last summer. It’s all about Chozen Ice Cream, a company that incorporates Jewish themes  in their very tasty deserts.

Ice Cream Goes Kosher, and More

Approximately 1.54 billion gallons of ice cream are produced in the Unites States annually, according to an International Dairy Foods Association spokesperson. “Every major brand you can think of has a kosher symbol on most (not all) of its products,” Rabbi Avrohom Gordimer, who oversees dairy product certification for OU Kosher, told me in an email. “A brief walk through the ice cream freezer aisle of any supermarket will testify to this.”

Now, kosher ice cream is getting a new face with Chozen, a Jewish sweets and holiday-inspired artisanal ice cream line that hit supermarket shelves this month with flavors like Matzoh Crunch, Coconut Macaroon, and Ronne’s Rugelach. (You’re probably thinking, didn’t I just see this today in that other daily Jewish magazine of life and culture? Yeah, well, Tablet Magazine tasted Chozen at its offices all the way back Monday afternoon. Just sayin’.)

Chozen is the brainchild of 62-year-old Ronne Fisher and her daughters, Isabelle, 34, and Meredith, 30. One evening in 2008, Ronne tells me, the family was doing a homemade mix-in of rugelach and vanilla, one of their typical culinary innovations. “We joked, ‘Wouldn’t it be delicious to just have ice cream with rugelach already in it?’” recalls Ronne. “‘Wouldn’t it be great to have sweet noodle pudding with ice cream, or potato pancakes with ice cream?’” (Let’s just stick with the rugelach for now!)

The company combines pastries from Green’s and other kosher bakeries in Brooklyn with ice cream produced at a kosher dairy in Ancramdale, New York, a small town near the Massachusetts border. Ronne Fisher drives a couple of hours to the dairy every other month. There she helps pour the delivered baked-goods into the churning vats of ice cream and labels the containers.

“I have never, let me say that again, never purchased processed desserts,” says Fisher. To determine which flavors Chozen would include, Ronne Fisher went to kosher markets and tasted hundreds of kinds of rugelach, babkas, macaroons, hamantaschens, and blintzes. “Invariably, I would taste something and then decide that I could make it better,” she says. The Fishers scoured kosher cookbooks for pastry ideas as well. “It’s not just about throwing a blintz or rugelach in vanilla ice cream,” says Fisher, “it’s about finding the essence of the rugelach.” Even if you don’t get a bite of rugelach in a given spoonful, for example, the ice cream itself should invoke that taste.

Fisher is at work refining Chocolate Babka and Apples and Honey ice creams, and is considering adding further new flavors down the road, including Chanukah Gilt, a milk-chocolate with edible gold sprinkles, and a halvah-flavored one.

For now, ice cream lovers in New York City who hunger for a taste of Passover can find Chozen at Garden of Eden, Pomegranate, and West Side Market. Come July 1, you can buy it online.

Margarita Korol

 

 

Go Nuts! Go Bananas! Go Ice Cream!