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!

As Seen in Magazines: Watermelon Knife

Nothing says summer like…Watermelon!

I love Watermelon. The color. The taste. The texture…yum!

I do not love cutting melons. I find it laborious  (please read this word with an English accent) and messy.  My solution was this melon cutter from Bed, Bath and Beyond. Cutting the melon is still a little bit difficult, after all you have to cut the top and bottom off so that it can lay flat on the counter. You get nice little wedges as well as a funky tube of melon. All in all a crowd pleaser.

Something new on the market that I am dying to try is the Kuhn Rikon watermelon knife.  I have no idea why it is so good, but  it was promoted in three magazine that I read:

–Real Simple
–Time Out New York
– and The Jewish Week‘s Joy of Kosher with Jamie Geller special pullout section.

 

I just gotta find out what is so good about this knife. Although it looks really cute, the only thing that woud do it for me was it if you just touch the knife to the melon and then it magically breaks off into pieces.

A girl can dream can’t she?