[Sponsored post] With holiday season just around the corner, party food has been on my mind.  Holidays put pressure on a cook because in my mind the traditional menu is so limiting. Not that there is a shortage of good recipes out there, but some of the traditional dishes are not something one would cook the rest of the […]

With Jewish New Year just around the corner, I feel a bout of phantom nostalgia coming on. Why phantom, you may ask? Because my family never really kept any of the Jewish traditions.  Sure, my aunt made Gefilte Fish every fall, along with some other staples of classic Jewish cookery. She’d invite the family over, and we […]

Borodinsky bread is my childhood staple food.  We had it practically every day and never grew tired of it. The aroma, the well balanced sweet and sour, the substantial “meaty” crumb and thin glossy crust — should I go on listing all the wonderful things that put this loaf in the bread hall-of-fame? Nowadays, it […]

If you are into bread baking, as I am, you probably know by now that finding the right kind of flour is a very important task.  Using predictable, good quality flour is key in getting predictable, good quality bread loaves day after day.  The task becomes doubly challenging if you are trying to stay away […]

In the years of being immersed in another culture I have learned to substitute most of the foods I missed about my native land with local versions of one kind of another.  Some products I learned to replicate quite successfully. Take kefir for example. I am now making a very nice creamy version of kefir […]

If there is anything there is seriously no shortage of in the bottomless pit of the Internet, it’s Challah recipes.  You find Challahs ranging from mildly dry bland quickly slap together loaves to fancy multi-egg and raisins, multi-stage productions with the rain-dance performed mid-baking, and everything in between.  To me, Challah is a very fine […]

If you’ve been following this blog, you should know very well by now that I am a big fan of home made bread.  I’ve been baking my own wild sourdough bread for a few years now (thanks to my friend Rimma, who showed me the light), wrote about it plenty, and took some pretty decent pictures. […]