Kosher
984 recipes found
Polenta or Grits With Beans and Chard
Anson Mills creamy polenta or grits is very inviting for a savory, brothy bean stew with lots of greens stirred in at the end of cooking. I like to use a reddish bean for this – I have used a number of heirloom varieties from Rancho Gordo, but also regular supermarket pintos and red beans. The recipe makes twice as much bean stew as you will need for 4 portions of polenta or grits. So make the polenta (or grits) again the next day and polish them off!
Deep-Fried Cauliflower With Crispy Dukkah Coating
Deep-fried cauliflower is a Middle Eastern specialty, so why not make it even more Middle Eastern and use a batter made with dukkah, the complex Middle Eastern condiment made with a mixture of nuts, seeds, spices and, in this version, chickpea flour. The batter is thin (you have the option of adding a bit more chickpea flour) but the cauliflower gets just enough of a coating to come out of the oil with a perfect thin crispy shell. Serve it with garlic-laced yogurt or with tahini sauce. In this recipe you have the option of using olive oil, which is traditional; but use a work-horse oil, not the expensive oil you reserve for drizzling and dressing salads.
Crepes With Raspberry-Cassis Sauce
These sophisticated crepes can be made ahead of time and reheated in a low-temperature oven. The sauce, made by simmering raspberries in a rose-scented, cassis-spiked syrup, is what makes them special. While most of it is poured over the folded crepes, a bit is added to the yogurt, honey and lime filling, making it just sweet enough.
Greek Bulgur With Brussels Sprouts
I love the way the bulgur swells and fluffs after you let this comforting, nourishing dish sit once it’s cooked. In fact, I liked the leftovers even more than the freshly made dish. I also love the lemony flavor, the result of just a small amount of lemon juice added at the end of cooking. This is one of the few times I am happy to allow brussels sprouts to cook until they are quite soft.
Amaranth Porridge With Grated Apples and Maple Syrup
Amaranth is a tiny seed – it isn’t really a grain, though that is how we treat it – and has both sweet and grassy overtones. I experimented with preparing it as a polenta, like the teff polenta I made earlier in the week, and seasoning it with nut oil or mixing in a little Parmesan. It worked that way, but I still found that the flavor of this food works better with sweet flavors, and the texture did not benefit from the long oven simmer, the way the teff did. So again, I decided that amaranth is best served as a breakfast porridge. I toasted the seeds in the pan before adding water, and this added a wonderful popcorn dimension to the flavor. The aroma of this cereal as it cooked reminded me of the smell of the whole wheat Ralston Hot Cereal that my mother used to make for me. The amaranth will cook in about 20 minutes on top of the stove. I add milk halfway through the cooking, and the amaranth retains a nice grainy texture.
Creamy Goat Cheese and Cucumber Sandwich
A creamy goat cheese and cottage cheese blend provides satisfying and comforting flavor. I use sumac to bump up the already satisfying and comforting flavor of the creamy goat cheese and cottage cheese blend that blankets cucumbers, celery and dill. My first choice for bread is pumpernickel, but black bread or whole wheat country bread are also good.
Baked Orzo With Artichokes and Peas
This is a Greek-inspired pastitsio, a comforting béchamel-enriched mix of orzo, artichokes and peas. Rather than butter, the béchamel in this dish is made with a couple of glugs of good extra virgin olive oil.
Baked Orzo With Tomatoes, Roasted Peppers and Zucchini
Orzo is a type of pasta that looks like rice. It’s popular in Greece, where it is baked in casseroles like this one. If you like comforting dishes like macaroni and cheese, you’ll like this.
Greens and Chayote Enchiladas With Salsa Verde
Lightness is not an attribute usually associated with enchiladas, the most comforting of Mexican tortilla foods. But these enchiladas, filled with a mix of blanched seasoned chard and succulent diced chayote and covered with a classic cooked tomatillo salsa, are both light and incredibly satisfying.
Herb Fritters
Inspired by a recipe in Clifford A. Wright’s “The Little Foods of the Mediterranean,” these fritters are light and delicate. You can use a mix of herbs and finely chopped greens – mild ones like spinach and chard, or more robust greens like dandelion or arugula – or all herbs, or all greens. You can also use this batter as a vehicle for other finely chopped or grated vegetables, like cabbage or carrots, onions or leeks. The fritters make a great hors d’oeuvre or side dish.
Teff Polenta With Toasted Hazelnut Oil
Teff is a challenging grain to work with. The flavor is strong, the grains tiny, and the mixture stiffens up very quickly once the grains are cooked. The chef Jason Bond makes a comforting teff polenta at his Bondir restaurants in Cambridge and Concord, Mass. He cooks the teff on top of the stove, in milk, and adds a finely chopped chipotle chile to the mix, which contributes a nice smoky/hot flavor. I liked the idea of teff polenta, and tried a few different methods for it. Teff will cook up in about 20 minutes on top of the stove, but if you use the oven-baked method outlined here, modeled on the method I often use for cornmeal polenta, you will get a creamier result. The oven method takes much longer, but the time is unsupervised – no frequent stirring as you must do on the top of the stove. This method doesn’t work so well if you use milk, however, because the milk forms too much skin in the oven, which forms curds when you stir the mixture (though I do like the flavor of the teff cooked in milk a lot). I tested the recipe using both stock and water, and liked both results equally. The chipotle adds a nice smoky/spicy flavor to the teff, but you can leave it out and just focus on the nutty flavor of the teff alone, with the hazelnut oil. I love the toasted hazelnut oil finish; it harmonizes with the nutty/earthy flavor of this grain. Serve the teff as a side dish or top with roasted vegetables or a vegetable or bean stew. You can also allow the teff to stiffen, then cut into squares and fry in the squares oil or grill them. You will get best results if you soak the teff for a few hours or overnight.
Skillet Beet and Farro Salad
This hearty winter salad can be a meal or a side dish, and warming it in the skillet makes it particularly comforting. Cook your farro until you see that the grains have begun to splay so they won’t be too chewy and can absorb the dressing properly.
Endive, Apple and Kasha Salad
Nutty, earthy grains of kasha go beautifully with crunchy, juicy apples and bitter endive, long a favorite salad combo. Cut the apple into small dice – 1/4 to 1/2 inch – to maximize this marriage of grain, fruit, nut and bitter salad green. The acid to oil quotient in the dressing is on the low side; I use lemon juice only and sweeten the mix with a little honey. You could also use agave nectar, and leave out the Gruyère in the salad for a vegan version; though I love the Gruyère here because it, too, has a nutty flavor. This salad holds up well on a buffet.
Roasted Cauliflower, Hazelnut and Pomegranate Seed Salad
In this memorable salad from "Jerusalem," the beloved Middle Eastern cookbook from Yotam Ottolenghi, roasted cauliflower, celery and hazelnuts are combined with pomegranate seeds, fresh parsley, cinnamon and allspice. A sweet-tart vinaigrette finishes it off.
Orzo With Peas and Parsley Pesto
This is like a pasta version of the classic rice and peas risotto, risi e bisi. It’s a beautiful springtime dish. You can make a whole batch of pesto so that you have it on hand for other uses (like sandwiches), but for this dish you’ll need only a half batch.
Teff Polenta Croutons or Cakes
One of the things I like most about teff is the texture of the tiny grains. This is particularly nice when you cut up stiff teff polenta into rounds or squares and fry them in oil. The surface browns beautifully and the little round grains on the surface become toasty and crunchy while the centers remain soft. I serve thin slices with salads, or in place of a cracker, topped with something. The thicker cakes can be used the same way you would use the softer teff polenta, drizzled with oil, topped with a sauce or a vegetable dish, or sprinkled with Parmesan, feta or blue cheese. They can serve as a side dish or at the center of the plate or bowl.
Spiced Green Beans and Baby Broccoli Tempura
Deep-frying is not something I do often, but after I’ve eaten well-executed tempura at a restaurant and can’t shake the memory of delicious batter-fried vegetables, I get out my wok. I turn on the hood fan, open the window and start heating up oil. I like to play around with different batters and coatings. This spicy, delicate batter is somewhere between a puffy beignet-type coating and a simpler egg, flour and bread-crumb dusting. It’s mostly cornstarch, with a small amount of cornmeal and whole wheat flour — just enough to hold the batter together. I add dukkah, cilantro and cumin for flavor and texture. Ice-cold sparkling water helps keep the batter light; it fries up crispy rather than bready because there’s very little gluten to toughen it. You can use this batter with all sorts of vegetables, but I particularly love green beans and baby broccoli. The batter wraps itself nicely around the smooth beans and nestles in among the spindly flowers at the end of a baby broccoli stem, resulting in lacy, extra-crispy tempura. A wok is ideal for deep-frying. It can accommodate a lot of vegetables at one time without crowding, and it holds heat well. The oil should hover between 350 and 375 degrees so that the vegetables cook quickly and crisp up without absorbing too much oil. Be sure to let the oil come back up to temperature between batches, and use a thermometer. You will be amazed to find a green bean tender and hot inside its crispy coating in two minutes or less.
Freekeh, Chickpea and Herb Salad
There is a lot to love about freekeh, an earthy grain that I’d like to see catch on in more kitchens. It cooks up in about 25 minutes, and it’s light, like coarse bulgur, which it resembles, except that the color is darker and greener. But freekeh has a more complex flavor than bulgur. What stands out is its smokiness, a result of the production process, in which durum wheat — the type used for many pastas — is harvested while still green and soft, and carefully roasted in the husk over open fires. The wheat is beaten to remove the chaff, and in the Middle East it is sold whole or cracked. The cracked version is what you’re more likely to find here in the United States, and happily it’s become easy to do so. Look on the shelves of Middle Eastern markets, at whole-food markets or online. Cracked freekeh is tastier and easier to work with than whole freekeh. Add it to soups or stews, or use in the same way you would use rice or bulgur. The cracked wheat has a grassy, herbal quality that also makes it great for use in lemony salads like this one, in which the freekeh is tossed with chickpeas, scallions and a welcome dash of bright green in the form of fresh mint and parsley.
Penne With Mushroom Ragout and Spinach
Mushrooms and spinach together is always a match made in heaven. I use a mix of wild and regular white or cremini mushrooms for this, but don’t hesitate to make it if regular mushrooms are all that is available.
Roasted Brussels Sprouts With a Pomegranate Reduction
If you thought you did not like brussels sprouts, this recipe will definitely change your mind. The first time my grandmother served roasted brussels sprouts to me, I could not stop eating them. When brussels sprouts are roasted, they become crispy on the outside and sweet and delicate on the inside. The addition of a warm pomegranate glaze, and the cool, sweet pomegranate seeds, makes these brussels sprouts a festive delight.
Kasha
For years I have had uneven results with buckwheat groats, or kasha, as the dry-roasted grains are called. I have tried different methods, both stovetop and oven, and usually mixed the grains with an egg before cooking. Sometimes my grains cooked up to a mush, other times they held their shape but still seemed rather soft and indistinct. I sort of gave up on kasha for a while, opting for more predictable grains and pseudo-grains like quinoa and spelt. But I love the flavor of buckwheat, so this week I took another stab at buckwheat groats with a box of medium-grain kasha I bought at the supermarket – and everything changed. These grains were cracked, like bulgur, something I hadn’t seen before. I followed the directions on the box, and they turned out perfect -- dry and fluffy, with the wonderful nutty/earthy buckwheat flavor I find so appealing. To see if it was the cut of the grain only or the combination of the cut of the grain and the cooking method that gave me such good results, I used the exact same cooking method using whole toasted buckwheat groats. The whole groats turned out better than any I had made before, but they took three times as long to cook than the cracked groats, yielded a little less, and because all of the egg is not absorbed by the whole grains the way it is by the cracked grains, which have more cut surfaces to absorb the egg, you get some egg flakes floating on the top of the cooked kasha, which is not very attractive (though it’s easy to remove them).
Taralli
Taralli are delicious ring shaped rusk-like Italian snacks from Apulia and Campania. Now that I know how easy they are to make I could be in big trouble, as whenever I’ve bought them from one of my favorite Italian delis I have a hard time resisting them. It’s the olive oil, I now know, that makes them special and different from other twice-baked breads. They are crisp but not hard, and this whole wheat version is as good as any traditional taralli I’ve tasted. I particularly like the version with black pepper. But I like them plain, without any embellishment, as well. The olive oil gives them so much flavor on its own. This recipe is based on a recipe in Carol Field’s “Italy In Small Bites.”
Frittata With Peas, Herbs and Feta or Parmesan
This frittata is just one good reason to stock peas in your freezer. My favorite herbs to use are tarragon and chives.
Baked Coconut Balls
During the traditional Mimouna celebration at the end of Passover, many Israeli Jews lay out an elaborate table with sweets. Because dietary rules during the holiday ban flour from the house (including frozen cookies that contain it), the treats are usually flourless. Here, ground coconut turns the texture of these cookies into a soft and pleasantly cloudlike.