Vegetarian Split Pea Soup

It is getting to be hearty soup season. This vegetarian split pea soup gets a subtle savory lift from a little miso paste. The combination of carrots, parsnip, celery, onion, garlic and leek, plus a little dill and bay leaves, gives the soup a little color and rich flavor.

My mother gave me some matzoh balls and I had the idea to add them to my split pea soup, thinned out quite a bit. Even though I usually associate matzoh balls with clear broth, this ended up being a very delicious combination.

Super Easy Chocolate Pie a la Mode (Dairy Free)

 

Imagine a pie that has the flavor of brownies, but the texture of pecan pie. That is chocolate chess pie. Now, imagine that pie, served warm, with a scoop of coffee ice cream (pareve).

Sounds delicious, right? The best part is that it is ridiculously easy.

Taiglach

Ah, taiglach: that sticky sweet mountain of crunchy golden nuggets bound together with honey caramel sauce. My mother would always buy it from the bakery before Rosh Hashanna, and never make it herself (and my mother loves to bake).

It seems like the sort of thing you need to buy from a bakery, but it is surprisingly easy to make. Here is what you do: (1) mix up a very simple dough; (2) shape the dough into balls; (3) drop the dough balls into boiling honey syrup and simmer away until the dough balls have puffed up and turned golden and crunchy.

Okay, so it sounds complicated. But, I promise, it really isn’t.

The recipe I tried comes from Taste, the Yeshiva of Flatbush cookbook. It was submitted, I think, by Andrea Sultan, who got the recipe from her mother, Dubby Shulman. I adapted it a bit to suit my tastes, and the next time I make it, I think I will tweak it just a tiny bit more.

The bakery kind of taiglach I remember was composed of small crunchy nuggets glued together with honey caramel. The excess honey caramel pooled at the bottom of the tin, making a sauce that was so sweet and chewy and sticky as to be almost unmanageable to eat.  The nuggets were attached so tightly together that half the fun of eating the taiglach was the challenge of pulling off a piece to eat.

The Taste cookbook recipe creates a very different kind of taiglach experience. Instead of resulting in small, glued-together nuggets, the recipe makes large coiled dumplings floating in a caramel sauce. The crunchy texture and flavor are similar to the bakery type, but this teiglach is much easier to serve and eat.

In case you were wondering, teiglach is the diminutive for teig, which means dough. So, I think the name literally translates to “little doughs,” which means that the focus of the name, oddly enough, is on the dough part and not the honey sauce.

Sweet and Sour Meatballs

My sister and I were talking about how ground beef somehow is the starting point for Yom Tov cooking. First, you are in denial about how much needs to be done, then you just go out and buy a couple of packages of ground beef, knowing that it will force you to get started. Sweet and Sour Meatballs, in particular, is  “gateway” recipe for getting into the groove of cooking and baking and freezing ahead. They are easy to make, freeze well, and you know that you need to make meatballs.

Instead of the usual cranberry/tomato sauced meatballs, my husband asked for the grape jam kind. Usually this kind is excessively sweet, so I went with a recipe that went pretty light on the jam. The overall flavor reminded me a bit of the sauce that goes with stuffed cabbage–tangy sweet, but not cloying. I added a little sriracha sauce to give it a little hint of savory, garlicy, spicy oomph.

Fresh Ginger Honey Cake

One of my sisters-in-law loves ginger and  lemon. So, as a treat, I baked her a ginger cake and made some lemon curd to serve alongside. The ginger cake recipe I made (with a couple of small changes) was David Lebovitz’s famous Fresh Ginger Cake.

We all noticed how much the cake tasted like honey cake, even though it was made with molasses and white sugar. My husband asked if I could make this as a honey cake and I happily complied (adding a few more changes).

What makes this moist cake a little different from the run-of-the-mill honey cake is the massive amount of pureed fresh ginger (a whole quarter pound of the stuff).  To make this easy, I make this in a generic foil 9″x13″ pan, but it could also be baked in a 9″ springform pan or a 9″ round/3″ high cake pan.

David’s ginger cake was delicious with lemon curd, and I think that this cake would be nice with lemon curd, as well.

Welcome to the first ever Jewish Holiday Blog Party, hosted by Jessie of Taste and Miriam of Overtime Cook, and sponsored by Kitchen Aid! As you may know, Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year is coming up, and Jewish bloggers from all over the world are celebrating with all kinds of twists on traditional Rosh Hashanah foods.

To kick off the celebration, Levana Kirschenbaum is giving away a copy of her fabulous new book, The Whole Foods Kosher Kitchen to three lucky winners. To enter, leave a comment on this post. Limit one entry per reader per blog so click over to the other participating blogs below (at the end of this post) for your chance at additional entries! Giveaway ends 5 am eastern time on September 11th, 2012.

Prize is sponsored by Levana and available to readers from all blogs participating in the Rosh Hashanah Blog Party. Prize can only be shipped within the US.