-
Challah
In mid-April, around the period of this-stay-in-place-thing-has-already-gone-on-forever-how-much-longer-will-it-last (a lot longer, it turns out), I decided that I needed a way to make different days feel, well, different. Based not on religious practice but on a desire for a ritual to regulate the week, I started to make challah every Friday. For a few short weeks (three weeks, to be exact), while winter still hovered over Chicago, it was a great way to welcome in the weekend.
Over the years I’ve tried a few challah recipes, and this one is easily my favorite. (Hot tip: for anyone in a place where good hamburger rolls are difficult to find, you can make great rolls out of challah dough.) This recipe comes from Tori Avey, whose blog is my go-to for all Jewish foods. When I first made this challah, we discussed making French toast out of it. That never happened, since the challah never lasted long enough to get stale. (Or until Sunday, the day of Big Breakfasts.)
You May Also Like
Banana Bread
-
Herring, Beet, and Potato Salad
Last summer, in what feels like an eternity ago, I visited a friend in London. We spent the days roaming the city, eating goat cheese and lox on baguette, and browsing through second-hand bookstores. In one of these bookstores, I spotted Luisa Weiss’s My Berlin Kitchen. Although my next flight was on EasyJet (which has notoriously terrible limits on carry-on luggage), I knew I had to buy the memoir – and somehow fit it into my already overly-full backpack.
This summer I pulled out the memoir to reread it, and one recipe stuck out: a potato salad with herring and beets. I don’t know what drew me to this, since I was never a huge herring fan. But the recipe kept calling to the Eastern European Jew in me, so one day I grabbed some beets and decided to make it. And I’m so glad I did. This salad is perfect for a hot summer day: filling, yet summery, sweet and a little salty, with just the right amout of crunch. Every time it has been above 90 degrees this summer, I find myself craving this potato salad. For the herring skeptics out there, it’s really good without the herring. But if you eat fish, please try it with the herring. I don’t think that you’ll regret it.
-
Turkey Meatballs
When I started this blog, I promised myself that I wouldn’t rely on too many of Deb Perelman’s recipes from Smitten Kitchen. But here’s the problem: because her recipes are perfect, for years they’ve been the core of my cooking. Whenever I needed a recipe – for dinner, a picnic, or a party – I’d turn to Smitten Kitchen, and Deb always delivered. These meatballs are no exception. They are a simple, do-ahead, hearty meal that became a staple for me during law school. Delicious over pasta, they are just as good on their own – and even better with garlic bread.
The original recipe calls for ground beef and pork, but I like to use ground turkey. I’m sure the beef/pork mix is delicious, but I’m not a huge fan of ground pork and it’s never tasted quite as good with beef as with turkey. So I stand by my choice of ground turkey – with a caveat. These meatballs are good when you first make them, but to truly enjoy them as they‘re meant to be enjoyed, make them a day ahead of time. The flavors mix overnight in a way that is magical.
-
Gazpacho
Gazpacho is one of the true joys of summer, along with picnics in the park and reading on the beach. As July begins and real summer hits Chicago – hot and humid, and miraculously, this year perfectly sunny – it’s time for gazpacho. For years my mother made this recipe and I always loved it. When I finally asked her for it, I realized just how simple it is. You chop up some vegetables and mix them together with liquid, and then wait for the soup to get cold. That’s it. But despite its simplicity, there’s something special about it – especially when you add the crunch of the croutons to it.
I’ll stop raving about the gazpacho and get to the main ingredient: tomatoes. I know that I’ve already written about tomatoes and that there are a lot of ingredients I haven’t yet discussed. But it’s the middle of summer and a great time for socially distanced picnics, so I want everyone to be able to enjoy this recipe. For this post, I focus on tomatoes from Italy, which is a large producer of processed tomatoes. In 2018 Italy exported 1.74 billion Euros worth of processed tomatoes – 53 percent canned tomatoes, 35 percent tomato paste, and the remaining 12 percent of tomato sauce.
