Posted by: Deena | May 19, 2012

Turmeric potatoes – hygienic diet-style

For the first time, I had my friend over who keeps to the hygienic diet. This is an extremely strict diet including that she refrains from eating cooked oil or…. salt.

Let me repeat. She doesn’t eat salt.

So that was my mission. To create a dish she could eat. I googled “potatoes without oil” something like that and found this recipe. I adapted it as follows:

Ingredients

  • 4 potatoes, peeled and cut into cubes
  • 2 onions, cut into cubes
  • Turmeric powder
  • A handful of fresh parsley, chopped
  • Olive oil and salt on the table for those who just can’t take it

Instructions

  • Prepare potatoes and onions and place in cold water in a pot.
  • Bring water to a boil and then cook at a boil for around 4 minutes.
  • Drain.
  • Return vegetables to pot.
  • Pour quite a bit of turmeric on the vegetables.
  • Close the pot and shake it, baby, shake it.
  • Pour the mixed vegetables into a pan lined with baking paper.
  • Sprinkle parsley on top.
  • Cook in oven at 320C for around 45 minutes.

At first I thought that the dish was a failure. It was bland and a bit bitter from the turmeric. But I must say that when I added a bit of salt and olive oil on my own serving, it tasted quite good! I’d even make it again.

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Posted by: Deena | May 18, 2012

Flavoured bread – an apple filling and an onion leek filling

I could go on forever about the possibilities when you start flavouring your bread. But instead I’ll just write what I did today. But first a picture to get into the mood:

And one more:

There are two kinds of breads here. Well, both are the same bread recipe and then each have different things mixed in. The first is:

Apple filling

  • 1 apple sliced pretty small
  • Ground cinnamon
  • Ground cloves
  • Oats
  • Sugar
  • Lemon juice

Put the ingredients in a container. Mix well. When the dough is ready, fold the apple mixture in.

Onion etc. filling

  • 1 onion
  • 8 cloves garlic
  • 1 leek
  • 5 celery stalks

Chopped all ingredients pretty fine. Fold into dough when ready.

Alternatively, you can saute the vegetables before adding them to the dough.

Betei’avon.

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Posted by: Deena | May 18, 2012

Soy bean burgers

My good friends Orlee and Dafna’s mom, Levia Dolinko z”l, shared a delicious soybean burger recipe with my mom years ago. Turns out that even her daughters didn’t have the recipe but they have given me permission to share it here for the world to taste.

It is delicious and easy! I make it with any beans and I play around with other ingredients too but here is the original:

Ingredients

  • 1 cup cooked soybeans
  • 125 grams almonds (I just used one small bag that you get in the supermarket – it’s 100 grams)
  • 1 chopped onion
  • 1 grated carrot
  • 1.5 tbsp. soy sauce
  • 3 tbsp. oats
  • 1 egg
  • 3 tbsp. whole wheat flour
  • 1 tsp. cumin
  • 1 tsp. coriander
  • 3 tbsp sesame seeds

Instructions

I dunno… the way you fry any kind of burger. Around 5 minutes on each side.

Enjoy!

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Posted by: Deena | April 15, 2012

French toast really IS easy!

The other day I was telling my sister Devora about my plans to prepare more homepage food for myself and to eat out less. She mentioned French toast, saying it’s a pretty easy food to make.

And so today I made it. And it seriously was easy! I made up my own recipe and it’s probably like every other but here you go anyway.

Ingredients

  • 4-6 pieces small to regular slices of bread
  • 3 eggs
  • cinnamon
  • ground cloves
  • vanilla extract
  • butter
  • yoghurt
  • real maple syrup

Instructions

  1. Mix together eggs, spices and vanilla in a bowl.
  2. Heat some butter in a fry pan.
  3. Meanwhile dip the bread in the egg mixture and let it soak while the pan is heating up.
  4. Place bread in pan and fry until brown on both sides.
  5. The beautiful part is, once it’s cooked, putting it on a plate and pouring lots of maple syrup on top. Today I also tried having some yoghurt on the side and it worked perfectly.

Yum!

P.S. I used home-made bread and organic eggs. Just saying.

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Posted by: Deena | April 14, 2012

Chickpea and parsley burgers for sandwiches

For this recipe I used the very general direction of a lentil burger recipe.

Also, I’m currently obsessed with my food processor and so I used it here. I’m sure you could also make these without fancy kitchen machinery.

This recipe made 5 pretty large burgers. I shaped them with sandwiches in mind. I also sauteed onions to put on the sandwiches.

Chickpea burgers on homemade bread with mayo, mustard, tomato slices and sautéed onion

Ingredients

  • 2-3 cloves garlic (not peeled)
  • A handful of parsley, washed
  • One can of chickpeas, drained
  • 1 egg
  • 1/3 cup potato starch
  • 1/2-1 tsp. curry powder
  • salt
  • 2-3 glugs of olive oil
  • Olive oil for frying

Instructions

  • Turn on food processor and drop in garlic. Stop the processor and pick out the peel. Isn’t that cool?! Thanks, Norene Gilletz for that tip.
  • Add parsley and process. Scrape down sides as necessary.
  • Add chickpeas through hole while the processor is running.
  • Now open the processor and add all remaining ingredients: egg, potato starch, seasoning, oil. Mix.
  • Fry in olive oil until browned on both sides.

A couple more thoughts:

I am trying to decide if the burgers weren’t chunky enough. It is possible you should put the chickpeas in the processor and then pulse the blade. Anyway, you can eat that food for thought. Meanwhile, I’m eating these delicious chickpea burgers.

Of course you could easily substitute any legume for the chickpeas. You could also use different vegetables instead of garlic and parsley, or in addition to them.

Enjoy!

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Posted by: Deena | March 13, 2012

My green soup became a pasta sauce

Remember I wrote about the very green soup I made last week? I had leftovers and decided I’d make them into a pasta sauce.

I picked out a lot of the remaining vegetables (and some of the remaining grain and water) and warmed it up in a pot. Then I put in a container of prepared tomato sauce and started warming it out. I used a hand blender to process the whole thing so it would be smooth and then I put in freshly cooked spaghetti and warmed it up a bit longer.

That’s it! It’s delicious because the flavours are very rich. It tastes like sautéed vegetables and herbs, especially dill.

Yum.

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Posted by: Deena | March 8, 2012

Bread hamentashen with onion, garlic and mushroom filling

Bread hamentashen with sautéed onion, garlic and mushroom inside

I bake bread a lot. Well, relatively a lot. So for mishloach manot (the present of food you give to people on Purim), I decided to make hamentashen but instead of making them with cookie dough and a sweet filling, I make them with bread dough and a savoury filling. It is delicious, to say the least.

This time I used the basic bread recipe from the Netivot Hatorah cookbook (written by my cousin Carol!). Here it is with slight changes:

Bread recipe

Mix together the dry ingredients:

  • 9 cups whole wheat and/or 70% whole wheat flour
  • 2.5 tbsp. dry yeast
  • Around 1/2 cup sugar
  • 3 tsp. salt

Add the wet ingredients:

  • 3 cups warm water
  • Around 1/2 cup olive oil

Knead and let it rise.

Bread tip:
I mix all the ingredients together but I don’t worry about it being mixed perfectly. Because after it rises it’s easier to get it mixed together well. I let it rise twice and kneaded it both times.

Filling

  • 2 onions chopped small
  • 1 head garlic chopped small
  • 1 container fresh mushrooms chopped small
  • Olive oil
  • Soya sauce

Sauté onion garlic and mushrooms. I added soya sauce but you could also just add salt.

Putting it all together

Roll out flat circles of dough on a floured surface. Add the filling and then wet your hands in order to pinch together three corners with the filling showing a little in the middle.

Preheat the oven to 180C. Bake until browned, around 20-30 minutes. Make sure it’s baked underneath. Serve as fresh as possible.

Enjoy and happy Purim!

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Posted by: Deena | March 6, 2012

Green soup. Very green soup.

Ready for this one? Here is how it looks:

The beauty of this soup is that the bulk of it is green leafy vegetables. It is inspired by a recipe someone told me their mother makes that is basically like this but with meat. I’m sure that is delicious too.

Ingredients

With all the greens, I removed the very thick stems. But I still left them pretty chunky because I love chunky greens in soup. :) As always, do whatever you want.

  • Olive oil
  • Two big onions, chopped
  • 5 carrots, chopped
  • 5 cloves of garlic, chopped
  • 1 bunch of parsley, soaked
  • 1 bunch of coriander, soaked
  • 1 bunch of dill, soaked
  • 1 head of celery – the leaves soaked, the stalks chopped
  • Some grains – I added around 3/4 cups of a millet and quinoa mix.
  • Salt

Instructions

In a pot, saute the onion in olive oil. Meanwhile prepare all the other vegetables. I soaked all of the greens together.

Put in all the vegetables as they’re ready.

Add boiling water to cover the vegetables generously.

Please note! By the time you add the water, the vegetables should have sautéed for quite a while. That’s the beauty of immediately getting the onions sautéeing.

Add the grains.

Add salt to taste.

Time 20 minutes simmering.

I was considering pureeing the whole thing but instead left it chunky. Lovin’ it.

Enjoy!

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Posted by: Deena | February 14, 2012

Cute picture about how writers are perceived by everyone, including themselves

I just saw this through Facebook. It totally made me laugh… Because it’s true, of course. Take a look:

By the way, I really tried to find out who created this to give them credit, but to no avail. If anyone knows, please let me know!

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Posted by: Deena | February 11, 2012

Improvised curry vegetable, lentil, bean, bulgur and quinoa soup (or is it a stew?)

It’s exciting to prepare food based on whatever you happen to have in the house. It’s very creative and it helps prevent food going to waste.

So I decided tonight to create a concoction that I can take to work tomorrow (I warm food up and take it in a Thermos). I wasn’t sure exactly what it would end up being but now I already know. It is a spicy curry soup with vegetables, legumes and grains.

This recipe should serve around 4-5 people.

Before I get into the details, here are a bunch of pictures for your viewing pleasure. :)

Ingredients

So the ingredients ended up being (and please keep in mind that all measurements are estimates!):

  • Olive oil
  • Around 2/3 of the package of frozen vegetables
  • 3/4 cup legume/bean mix
  • 3/4 cup bulgur/quinoa mix
  • 1/2 cup tomato paste
  • Curry
  • Cinnamon
  • Spicy paprika (my favourite way to spice things up, btw)
  • 2 bay leaves
  • Salt
  • Water

Instructions

Start sauteeing all of the vegetables (including the frozen and fresh) in a pot (I made the recipe small so I used a small pot).

Put the legumes and grains in a strainer and soak them.

Mix the vegetables until they really start cooking.

Add the tomato paste. Mix.

Start boiling water in your kettle. Meanwhile rinse the legumes and grains and then add them to the pot. Mix.

Add all the spices. Mix.

When the water is boiled, pour it in to the pot to cover everything plus another few centimetres.

Yes, mix.

Make sure it’s at a boil, lower the heat and cook until the legumes are soft.

Serve cold. Kidding. Serve hot.

P.S. Don’t burn it… Like I did when I was paying more attention to this blog post than to my cooking. Oh well, it seems I saved most of it from tasting burnt. :)

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