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 […]

Last night I found myself thinking of breakfast options for my kid.  Lately, she hasn’t been into eggs, no matter the style, and porridge has been making her cringe. We aren’t serving conventional cereals in my house, and we are all out of yogurt.  So what does one do besides pancakes and smoothies?  Muffins, of […]

We didn’t have a lot of cookies growing up. This whole love affair with cookies is more of an American phenomenon.  What we did have was  more like crackers — dry and crunchy things of various shapes, flavors and colors, which my grandpa in the very old-fashioned way called biscuits. We loved them.  When I […]

Yep. We overbought bananas. Again.  I think my family is secretly trying to force me into baking sweets.  Somehow we always have exactly three overdone bananas left — three is just enough for a banana bread.

Growing up in Ukraine, we were consuming vast quantities of farmer cheese.  It was a staple, the kind of thing that you almost certainly would find in anyone’s fridge. It was cheap, it was filling, and it was made from whole milk.  Not ricotta. And certainly not the slimy clumpy foodstuff charmingly called “cottage cheese” […]