The trick to these apple tarts is thinly and evenly slicing the apples. That and the judicious use of cinnamon sugar above and below the apple slices. And using cooking spray on the apple slices before baking to seal in moisture. And brushing honey over the tarts when they are warm from the oven to make the tarts shiny. Ok, so there are a few tricks.
This is another way to combine leeks, spinach and black eyed peas. This delicious salad is worth serving year round–not just on Rosh HaShana.
I had roasted a large (14 oz.) beet and had no idea what to do with it. I found a recipe on Saveur that called for combining shredded raw beets, carrots and apples. I shredded the cooked beet with a large carrot and two apples. I seasoned the salad very simply, with a little Montreal Steak Seasoning (salt, pepper, garlic and some other spices). The original recipe called for garlic, salt, pepper, olive oil, lemon juice and orange juice.
The beet salad works well as an accompaniment to gefilte fish.
This year, I made tzimmes by simmering carrots with apple cider, spiced with cinnamon, ginger and a pinch of nutmeg. As it bubbled away on the stove, the tzimmes filled the air with the intoxicating aroma of mulled cider. (more…)
If you like to serve leeks, spinach and black-eyed peas on Rosh HaShana, here is an easy recipe that combines all three.
This is so easy, you don’t really need a recipe, just an explanation. To make this, cut acorn squash in half and scoop out the seeds. Fill the cavities with applesauce and raisins and sprinkle over some cinnamon. If you like, you can drizzle over some honey. Roast the acorn squash until tender. Done.
This is most charming when made with really tiny acorn squash, so that each person gets a half acorn squash.
This goes perfectly with string beans and rice pilaf.
Other simanin recipes:
Fish: Sesame Salmon (Norene Gilletz)
Leeks: Leek Fritters (Poopa Dweck)
Beets: Golden Beets (Marion Burros, but leave out the vinegar and add a little honey and a cup of mandarin orange segments)
Black-eyed peas: this salad (I added a little minced ginger, which was nice) or this recipe
Spinach/Dates: Spinach and Date Salad (leave out the nuts)
Swiss Chard/Squash: Swiss Chard and Zucchini
(other Swiss Chard recipes include Morshan and Swiss Chard Chips)
Carrots: Tzimmes or Roasted Butternut Squash and Carrots or Einat Admony’s Carrot Salad (instead of following the directions for cooking the carrots, microwave them and then toss them while still warm with the spices, one minced clove garlic, the olive oil and a big squoosh of ketchup instead of the vinegar and tomato paste).
Another good salad for simanin (lubia), this comes from Jerusalem: A Cookbook, by Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi. It also appeared in Ottolengi’s column in The Guardian. For American measurements and a lower calorie Weight Watcher’s version of the dish, go here.
It is typical Ottolenghi: vibrant melange of vegetables, exploding with flavor from creative use of spices and herbs: Green beans, roasted red pepper, cumin seeds, fried garlic, capers, lemon zest, parsley and scallions.
Other interesting choices from this book for Rosh Hashana:
Chraimeh (fish in spicy red sauce)
Roasted Butternut Squash and Red Onion with Tahini and Za’atar
Baby Spinach Salad with Date and Almonds (well, leave out the almonds)
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.
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.
Pragmatic Attic 