A Year In The Life Of Berrrale

Wow. I cannot believe so much time has elapsed since the last PWT (Professional Women's Theater) women's talent competition. At the time I was not exactly in a happy place, but somehow still managed to get out a good performance. It was the first time in my life singing in front of an audience and I must say it was really nerve wrecking. I actually dug around a bit and found a copy of one of my recordings from the semi-finals. I had a sore throat and kept gulping through the recording, but it's not too horrible. At the expense of completely embarrassing myself, here it is: Adio Querida. It is a typically melodramatic ballad in Ladino-the singer is a woman who is pained and heartbroken by her lover. I can't say the lyrics applied to me, but I did identify with the melancholy of the song back then. My other song was in Hebrew, titled "Life Is So Beautiful" so I thought they balanced each other out. I didn't end up making it to the finals, both because of my stage presence (or lack thereof!) and the fact that I don't actually write songs of my own-which was one of the most important criteria-but it was a really uplifting experience for me to even participate. Well, a year has elapsed and they are having a new season, so if you happen to be in Jerusalem and want to check it out-just read the details on their flyer and enjoy the talent.

It's All In The Filling

Oh bad lighting, how I detest thee!

I was told by a few people recently that the entries on my blog have not been juicy enough, where's the gossip they say. The truth of the matter is that cooking and baking really is what has been occupying most of my time lately. With work out of the way, I have even more time than before to go and pick the best and freshest ingredients, choose the recipes from my "culinary experiments" file (I kid you not, the list exists, sorted by categories like sweet/savory, cheesecakes, cookies, meat etc. which once made receive a "grade") and jump into my kitchen to make them. Such came together the cooking/baking night last week-except there were 2 of us.

We picked out our menu based on 2 criteria-we wanted to make it dairy and preferably dishes that are best served immediately. I will spare you the recipes this time since we pretty much followed already existing ones from other blogs, but here are the pictures.

the mushroom soup in the making

handmade regular and whole wheat ravioli dough resting

a ricotta cheese filling went in the regular dough

and a butternut squash and sweet potato filling in the whole wheat

and of course, to top it off, hot chocolate cake with its own chocolate sauce at the bottom

We had a great time and the food was very yummy indeed if I may say so myself. Well at least Shugi seemed to be enjoying himself:

The next entry will have nothing to do with food I promise (I think)!

Why, an apple pie of course!

and not just any apple pie, the best one I have ever tasted in my life!!!!!! Creamy and scrumptious, I could eat the whole thing on my own. It's actually in a bit of an identity crisis. Is it a pie? Is it a tart? Is it a crumble? Well, it's a bit of all.

1) The crust belongs to a tart (my absolute favorite tart dough):

Sweet Tart Dough

from Dorie Greenspan’s amazing book “Baking: From My Home to Yours”

Ingredients

1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour

1/2 cup confectioners’ sugar

1/4 tsp salt 1 stick plus 1 tbsp (9 tbsp) unsalted butter, chilled and cubed

1 large egg yolk (and now you know where the egg white for those macarons came from!)

Pulse flour, sugar and salt in a food processor. Add butter and pulse a couple of times. Stir in the yolk and pulse again until the dough forms clumps and curds. Turn the dough out onto a work surface and very lightly and sparingly, knead just to incorporate dry ingredients.

Butter a 9-inch tart pan. Press the dough evenly over the bottom and up the sides of the pan. Preheat the oven to 375 F (190C) degrees. Freeze crust at least 30 minutes before baking, this will enable you to bake without weights. Butter the shiny side of a piece of aluminum foil and press it, buttered side down, on the dough. Bake for 25 minutes. Remove the foil and let cool.

2) The filling is that of a pie, adapted from a great blog -the only changes I made were to use 4 apples and 1 cup of Tofutti cream cheese instead of the mascarpone and sour cream;

3) and finally the top is a made up oatmeal crumble whose ingredients I happened to have on hand and, you guessed it, was trying use up. I would recommend using the streusel in the link above, I am sure it comes out just as yummy if not more.

You may have noticed the use of Tofutti cream cheese in the last recipes. I've found it to be a great parve (non dairy) alternative for yogurt, sour cream etc. It is quite tasty when baked, with none of the after taste I usually associate with soy/tofu based products. In fact, I've even made excellent parve "cheesecake"s with it. Soy protein has a way of holding batter together, which I discovered when I baked vegan brownies once. I wonder if the cheesecake would work with egg beaters-then it may be possible to make a vegan cheesecake too! That sounds a little like kosher shrimps, doesn't it? Have a great day...

At Long Last... Macaroons (part 2)

Sorry for the disappearing act. Unfortunately I have been under the weather for about a week. Jerusalem saw its second bout of snow last week and I, being the idiot that I am, played in the snow, swam in an indoor pool and went outside in the freezing cold with wet hair all on the same day, thus allowing little creatures to attack my immune system. So much to catch up on-a few recipes, a baking night, a hike and future plans... but let us first tend to the lovely macaron sitting up there all on its own, shall we?

Once you have made the green batter, it is time to pipe the cookies on to the cookie sheets. If you are as aesthetically challenged as me, they will come out looking something like this,

but with any luck, you'll manage to pipe circles of identical size with no apparent peaks. Once you're done piping, hold the baking tray/cookie sheet thing and bang it on the counter strongly a few times. Bet you didn't see that one coming! Apparently it helps get rid of any air bubbles that might have formed during the mixing. Now it's time for the macarons to sit for an hour and form crusts. Only then can you pop them in the oven (previously heated at 175 C) for 10-12 minutes (watch them closely, they burn very easily). In the meantime prepare the filling:

Ingredients:

50 gr. ground pistachios

1 cup confectionary sugar

3 tablespoons Tofutti cheese (or regular cream cheese)

1 packet of vanilla sugar

Combine the ingredients and form a paste.

After the macaroons are out of the oven, wait until completely cooled and spread the filling between macarons of similar shape.

Now that I've finished writing this recipe, I cannot believe I actually spent so much time making them. They were really really really yummy, but I'm not sure I will be making them very often. I've actually made ridiculously simple "macaroon"s before-no whipping egg whites, no banging on tables-which tasted pretty good although the texture was nowhere near as delicate as these. I wonder how they would hold up with the filling. I'll be sure to let you know when I try.

In the meantime, can you guess what this is?

The Romantic Macaroons (part 1)...

Oh no, not because of Valentine's Day... I don't ever remember celebrating that day to be honest. Even when I was with someone, I never marked the occasion. It also didn't help that I have horrible memory and don't remember things like birthdays and anniversaries (yes, women can forget them too!)... No, the romantic refers to the conditions I was forced to bake in yesterday afternoon. You see, the fluorescent light in our kitchen decided to morph into a disco light, flickering on and off at annoyingly short intervals so it was given a rest. I ended up bringing my bed side lamp over so I could make out the egg whites from the yolks! So you will have to excuse the horrible lighting in the pictures. I fouind this one quite pretty and romantic actually, so there's your Valentine's Day present from me:

Notice the lamp and wires in the background. How very unprofessional! Anyway. Why was I making macarons anyway?? Aah yes, efficiency. I had an egg white left over from another recipe and some yummy ground pistachios from Turkey that I was saving for a special occasion. There was just enough pistachios for the one egg white and since I wasn't sure if I could get it right the first time, I figured I'll try a small batch. I guess that makes it a practical recipe actually, you can just multiply the quantities if you want to make more. I based my macaroons on a recipe I found in a Turkish blog, but ended up playing around with it a little bit, so I'll give you the measurements as I used them.

Ingredients

1 egg white (at room temperature)
50 gr. confectionary sugar
50 gr. ground pistachios
2 1/2 tbsp granular sugar (as in, regular sugar)

A useful piece of information here: eggs separate best when they are cold, so you can keep the egg whites covered in a little bowl until you are ready to use them. Place the confectionary sugar and ground pistachios (or almonds if you like) in a food processor and pulse them a few times until they are really thin and combined. This stage is important because apparently the confectionary sugar absorbs the moistness of the pistachios when they are pulsed together and you need them to be dry and lump free. In fact, most of the stages in this recipe are important because macarons are one of those delicate cookies that are not for the faint hearted.

In a separate bowl (do try and use a very clean glass or steel bowl as plastic bowls tend to have residual grease stuck to them and that, my friends, is a big no no for whipping egg whites properly), whip the egg white until soft peaks form. How do I know what soft peaks are, you say? When the egg white is no longer frothy, but looks more like cream, stop the whipping for a minute, take a teaspoon and dip it in and pull it out. If the batter comes up with the teaspoon to form a peak, but falls back a little later, then you have achieved soft peaks. Add the regular sugar slowly (about half a tablespoon at a time) and whip until you get stiff peaks (same test as before, peaks should keep their shape after teaspoon comes out).

Once you have the egg whites at the right stage, add in the dry ingredients you prepared earlier. Using a spatula or a wooden spoon, combine them until you get the green goop in the previous picture.

...And that's it for today! Sorry to do this, but Shabbat will be coming in soon and macarons can wait until nightfall. Plenty more coming up next week though-at least 2 other recipes and more updates from my life. Stay tuned...

Out of Her Mind!

I cannot believe how much the weather has changed in just a week. It is all sunny and gorgeous out in Jerusalem, the only remnants of last week's storm are little random piles of snow left on the sidewalks. Yes, we had our 2 cm. of snow this year and went through our annual snow panic mode-stock up on essentials for the 48 hour block down of the city. School canceled, work canceled. On the hour snow reports on television. People driving from the Tel Aviv area to see our beautiful city covered in white (except, well, it wasn't "covered"). Those of you from larger cities must find it as amusing as I do.

So it's in this beautiful weather that I was walking back from the shuk (open air market) the other day after having bought these pretty ramekins which inspired me to sing "I feel prrretty", when I thought about how South Americans pronounce "her" (as in "...well bred and mature and out of her mind!"). I wondered what kind of conditioning their throats go through as a result of speaking Spanish for years that makes them open their mouth wider as opposed to deeper. Then I tried saying "her" in the other accents I know. It was a lot of fun. Yes I do things like that on the street. Once upon a time I was embarrassed to be seen in all my craziness, but ever since I found the road to happiness, I have stopped caring about what others will think of me.

Sigh... That would have been a wonderful declaration if it were true... You see, I have found happiness, I do not deny that. If you were to ask me how I got there, well that's a long story. All I know is that when I glance at self help books and various little new age quotes about happiness, I find them hilarious. There is no formula to happiness! Do you think the search would still be going on if we had already figured out how to get there, if there was a "one size fits all" solution?? How does that even make sense to anyone? I have come to the conclusion that this very elusive concept can never be found if looked for. It is not acquired by doing certain actions. It is not achieved by acquiring certain things. Quite the opposite-it is a state of being that when one is in it, gives tremendous significance to whatever mundane thing you are doing. I am happy when I mop the floors, not because the mopping is such a life affirming and wonderfully joyous occasion (yeah, right!) of its own right, but rather because I already possess the basic happiness that brings it to a new level. It is actually a bit like how ordinary food becomes holy on Shabbat, but I do not want to get into a whole religious lecture here, it is not the place and I am certainly not the person! For me, happiness turned out to be the result of a long process (which is still going on) where I learned to be true to myself and give myself what I need. So what if I am a little crazy? I accept it, like I accept my idiocy. So what if I like to sing to myself on the street? Maybe I am still not comfortable enough to brush off what others think of me, but at least now I can turn to them indignantly and smile. Yes, I am singing "I feel pretty", you got a problem with that?

Speaking of cute songs, the story of berrrale must be told. A few years ago I came back to my office one day after lunch to find a little snail made of gummy candy-quite like the cute little guy right here-perched on top of my computer screen.

It turns out one of my colleagues got bored and decided to test out his arts and crafts talents on me. He was astonished to find out that I didn't know the berrale song that goes with it, so he was kind enough to sing it and bring me up to speed. Berrale is a snail whose friends call him out of his house to play while tempting him with a cake their mother will make. Not having grown up in Israel, silly children's songs are the kind of things we miss out on. Not to worry though, it wasn't too much of a culture shock for me-we have a similar song in Turkish for a ladybird. Although I think there the bribe is in the form of slippers. Because if there's something a ladybird can't resist, it's slippers? Aaanyway, from that day on, the name stuck and I have been berrale. The only problem is that a lot of Israelis seem to carry the nickname (and most of them are annoyingly male) so I have had to add a 3rd "r" to make it mine...

As for the fate of my little berrale at work? If you were disgusted by the idea of gummy candy sitting atop a computer screen, you will not want to know just how long he ended up staying there! He was so cute that I didn't have the heart to remove him until the inevitable happened, Passover came along and he went his leaven way...

My Very Own Apricot & Kumquat Chutney

You know how we sometimes buy into the commercial ploys right before the holidays and fill our houses with all sorts of junk we don't need? Having never lived in a Christian country, I only have movies and my friends' Christmas experiences to rely on, but here in Israel there is no shortage of pre holiday hype about food. And Israelis like their holidays, as can be evidenced by the fact that there is only one month in the Jewish calendar when there is no religious/national event going on and the said month has been dubbed "bitter" as a result...

Anyway, this whole long introduction is my way of telling you why I decided to make an apricot and kumquat chutney this past Friday. It was the Jewish festival for trees (Tubishvat) recently and the stores were filled with all kinds of dried fruits you could imagine-kiwis, papaya, mango, apples, bananas, grapefruit, fig, quince, pineapples etc. etc. And of course apricots and kumquats. My roommate decided to get the apricots for a party which she ended up not going to and I, in my infinite wisdom, decided to get candied kumquats which I don't even like... So they were sitting there in our respective cupboards waiting anxiously for their fate.

Now I'm a big believer in efficiency and there was no way I was going to let those poor babies go to waste. So in comes the genius idea of making my very own chutney. I am by nature a lazy cook, so a chutney seemed the perfect practical condiment to make to be used in future chicken dishes. After all, at any meal I was served chicken made with store bought chutney, the table is filled with ooh's and aah's and hey-I want some of those too!

My searches on the Internet yielded pork recipes with these fruits, which is not a food you will ever see on this blog. I'm guessing the recipe would have worked with chicken as well, but there was a lot of sugar in there so in the end I decided I have enough experience to make up a recipe of my own. From the reaction of my guests, it seems I did a pretty decent job...

Ingredients

200 gr. dried apricots
1 cup candied kumquats
1/4 cup sugar
1 tbsp chicken soup mix
1/2 tsp ground ginger
1/2 tsp garlic powder
1/2 cup boiled water
juice of 1 lemon
1/4 cup soy sauce
glug of white wine
glug of red wine

1. Combine the apricots and kumquats in a food processor and pulse them until you have small pieces of fruit.

2. Transfer the fruit to a saucepan, add the sugar, spices, chicken soup mix and water. Bring to a boil.

3. Stirring constantly over medium-high heat, add in the rest of the ingredients one by one, waiting until each one vaporizes to add the next one.

4. Remove from heat and cool. Keep in a sealed container in the refrigerator.

You can add the chutney to your chicken directly and bake it covered-both the chicken and chutney will release their juices while baking. I added some coke to my chicken (the beverage, not the drug!) in another attempt to make efficient use of stuff lying around in my house.

Even though I used these specific fruits, you can swap the kumquats for any citrus peel (and increase the amount of sugar if they are not candied) or sub part of the recipe (water, sugar, fruit & lemon juice) with a store bought/home made jam. You can also use orange juice and peel instead of the lemon to make it a little sweeter. In short, it is a very versatile recipe-have fun with it!

And now you'll have to excuse me while I go and dig into the leftovers...

On Idiots...

Before I can muster up the courage to finally publish my blog, a few words must be said about its title. The idea came from a friend who knows me better than I know myself and I can assure you no large amount of thinking went into it. We are proud idiots-the kind of people who seem to be good friends with Murphy, tripping on deceptively flat floors, slipping in a pool, breaking our teeth while eating bread (all real life stories) and just generally making silly the new normal. It is hard work being an idiot. And that deserves recognition. So if you know how not to take yourself too seriously and you have learned to embrace your idiocy like we have, we welcome you with open arms to this blog! Just make sure to listen to the idiot song on the side bar.

Oh and the picture above has no relevance whatsoever to today's entry and was posted solely on virtue of it being very cute. Just another one of the perks of being a self proclaimed idiot-anything goes... I love the panic in the baby's eyes: "Help!!!! I'm being loved!!!". Not much changes as we grow older, eh? Have a fantastic day!