Pareve Pastry and Ice Cream Recipes?
In the Discussion area:
Emily O asks for help finding pareve recipes for authentic French pastries and ice cream. Read the post and respond!
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Shabbos Long-Cooking Recipes?
Can a dish other than chulent survive the long cooking hours necessary to serve warm for Shabbos lunch? I’m not talking about warming food up on Shabbos - that’s easy enough. I’m looking for a recipe that gets put up before Shabbos. “Set it and forget it”, as the infomercial goes. My wife believes that such a recipe exists, but I’m skeptical. I’m convinced that ingredients of our traditional chulent recipe enable the long cooking times. I figure that the high-starch content insulates the chulent from moisture loss, and the fatty cuts of meat keep the meat from drying out. Our recent attempt with meatballs-in-sauce resulted in meatballs that would be called “dry and gravelly”, if I was feeling kind.
How about you? Do you have a recipe that you put up on Friday and serve for Shabbos lunch?
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Great bulk lox?
Any suggestions on where to buy a large quantity of quality lox in the Boston area? (I noticed Trader Joe’s offers a 16 oz. pack for $10, but maybe the wholesale outlets like BJ’s or Costco have cheaper mega-packs.)
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I wasn’t looking for a Hechsher, but…
Boruch Hashem, Oriental Trading (my favorite bulk shlock store) is offering chocolate Easter eggs with a big cross on the wrapper - Kosher! This is almost as good as the Ham Glaze mix with O-U certification! Years ago, my mother-in-law was very persistent in getting Oriental Trading to identify all the Kosher items their catalog. Good to see that her hard work has paid off. They actually have a number of products that they claim are Kosher. No, I didn’t inquire whose Hashgacha it is - but if I recall correctly, I think they’ll send you a list of the product certifications, on request.
What products have you seen with valid certification, that you didn’t think we needed kosher?
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Milchig, Fleishig, Pareve — what are they?
Milchig, Fleishig, Pareve — certainly the indefatigable KosherBloggers know what these three words mean, but what’s the appropriate way to refer to them as a group?
Either we’re going to find the right term somewhere, or we’re going to coin it here! Some possibilities, none of which strike me as perfect:
* Kosher Ingredient Classes
* Kosher Food Types
* Kashrut Categories
Thoughts?
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Pareve pie crust — where can one find such a thing?
My friend Tracy was trying to make a delicious apple pie (you know, apples and honey, work with the holiday theme people!) and was distressed to discover a problem with pie crusts… apparently they’re either 1) treif with lard (ick!) or 2) dairy! What’s the deal? Any thoughts on where to locate PAREVE pie crust? (FYI, she also says good things about Cheryl Ann’s pecan pie… but as we know, nothing that says Cheryl Ann’s is less than fabulous!) Help!
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Shabbat Rice Help!
So, say I want to serve warm rice at lunch on Shabbat. How do I do it without a) having chewy, dried-out rice or b) mushy, formless rice? Suggestions most welcome.
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Experiences with “Meal Mart” glatt beef
First — let me get this out of the way — the Alle Processing/Meal Mart web site is the most idiotically-designed site I’ve ever seen. Ever. The amateur they had build the site chopped up giant images into 156 smaller images and pieced them all together into a single page. Any design guru will tell you that’s just plain stupid — a visitor’s web browser will have to open up over 156 HTTP connections to request all those images. The creation of connections takes time above and beyond that of actually transferring the data. Plus– pages made entirely of images cannot be effectively indexed by search engines. And on top of it all, folks with limited or no sight, using special browsers that read web text, can’t get any useful content from an image-only site.
But I digress.
I’m really here to rant about the meat itself. I’m coordinating the Young Israel of Brookline barbeque (scheduled for August 29, 10-2, nudge, nudge), and we’ve been getting prices for glatt hamburgers and hot dogs. The best price we have is for Alle Processing hamburgers (the folks who make Meal Mart products), so I wanted to try them out before buying. I bought a 1-lb. package of Meal Mart ground beef, formed it into four hamburgers, and cooked them up. First thing I noticed is that the meat weighed less than 16 ounces… more like 12 ounces. Second thing I noticed was that it had many more white spots in it than meat I’m accustomed to (more fat). Third thing — when cooked, all that fat melts away, leaving a burger weighing a whopping 2/3 less — from 3 oz. down to 1 oz. They tasted fine, but were quite greasy.
Has anyone had similar experiences with Meal Mart or Alle Processing products?
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Pizza for a crowd?
I love making home-made pizza, and it’s especially fun serving it to guests. But for a party of about 20 people, I’m stumped over how to serve it without being chained in the kitchen preparing these things all night. Can I parbake my pizzas and keep them in the fridge, inconspicuously popping them in the oven throughout the evening? Can I roll out several pieces of dough, flour them well, and stack them up for later assembly? The appeal of crisp, hot homemade pizza is too good to pass up — anyone have experiences to share?
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