I was out of butter, so we actually used coconut oil as our fat, which worked well, yielding a crispier cookie with added bonus hint of coconut flavor!

Not that I’d specifically set out to make pareve cookies, but I sort of got excited about the idea. And then I realized that we were using regular old semi-sweet milk chocolate chips.

So we ended up with dairy cookies anyway.

But something I’ve been percolating on lately is what kashrut is really all about, and I think that I obliquely touched on a piece of it in that last post.

To make a kosher meat omelette, one needs to sub out the butter for a vegetable fat or oil. This seems like a simple replacement, but what it really means is that you can’t start the butter heating and throw anything into the pan that strikes you. Because of this broad stroke of kashrut (milk and meat separation is certainly not a complicated issue as long as you’re starting with a kashered pan) even the simplest dish requires some forethought and mindfulness.

Mindfulness. Something built into Jewish law and Jewish life, and something that certainly has become another broad stroke in our “raising awareness” culture.  Mindfulness is something I’ve found to be central to my experience of Judaism from early in the period of study that led to my conversion.

I found that in my attempts to fulfill mitzvot (commandments), I couldn’t help but take a fresh look at the things that surround me.  If you flip through a siddur (prayerbook), you’ll find that there is a blessing for almost anything you can experience: the first fruit of a season, a beautiful sunset, any special occasion, etc.  Early on, before I knew any blessings at all, I found myself being more engaged in the things I did, saw, heard, tasted, smelled and touched.  “There must be a blessing for this,” I said to myself ALL THE TIME.

But the crux of the matter was not that I knew or didn’t know the words, but more that because oft he commandment to say these blessings, I felt more joy and wonderment at the things so integral to my daily life that I had otherwise stopped even noticing them at all.  And I started noticing far more details.

It’s been helpful for me, in the experience of trying to keep kosher, to try to see the “value added” in my life as a result of my efforts.  (Kashrut can be a little bit crazymaking; it’s a difficult thing to do correctly, especially when it was never part of one’s family background, and even moreso when one is attempting to do so in an environment with others who don’t wish to do so.)  My life is, despite the challenges, better for the experience of it.

I don’t know how a book from 50 years ago read my mind, but there you go.

I used the first of two omelette recipes, L’omelette Brouillée (Scrambled Omelette.)  The recipe calls for heating butter in a pan until it is very hot – hot enough that the ubiquitous melted-butter foam subsides but before the butter has begun to brown – and then pouring in eggs  for a very quick and dextrous cooking moment.

What could go wrong with an exercise that should take less than a minute?  Haha, this practically requires military precision, so a better question might be, what could go right?

I made a few mistakes. I didn’t chop the cheese up before the butter was in the pan starting to melt, and so I couldn’t get the eggs in the pan before the butter started to brown.  I didn’t chop it fine enough, so the cheese didn’t melt on contact but sort of wadded up and slowed down the egg cooking.  And I don’t think I got the jerking-pan motion described in the recipe quite right, because while the eggs did not stick to the pan, they didn’t really move or roll the way the recipe predicted they would.  (That last isn’t so much a mistake as it is room for improvement.)

Despite the mistakes, I did enough right that the product was edible.  The eggs were cooked.  The outside was brown and slightly crispy.  The cheese was, for the most part, melted.  It didn’t fall apart like most of my efforts at omelettes, pre-Mastering.

I expected that the egg mixture would contain dairy of some sort, as I’d always been taught to do that.  I assumed that French tradition was the source of the conventional wisdom, but I was wrong.  (The scrambled eggs, a separate recipe, did include milk or cream, added at the end to halt the cooking process.)  Which means that while I chose to throw cheese into my omelette, this dish could just as easily be made with meat ingredients, as long as the cooking fat wasn’t butter.

I tested this theory by actually making a chicken omelette for lunch today.  I made a few changes, starting with using canola oil in place of butter.  Canola oil burns and smokes much hotter than butter does, so in this case I estimated that waiting about 5 minutes for the oil to get that wavy, rivery look would be about right.

This time I also had my filling chopped AND pre-heated by microwaving – I took 2 ounces of the leftover Poulet Rôti, roughly chopped it and put it in a small dish with a teaspoon of that special sauce, and nuked it for two minutes, until it was steaming, popping hot.

Hot pan, hot oil, hot filling.  The eggs were beaten and seasoned.  I had one try at the lightning mechanics under my belt, so I felt a little better prepared for my second attempt.

It went like this (a synopsis of what the recipe instructs):

-pour two beaten eggs into superhot oiled pan, stirring relentlessly
-when eggs are apparently half-cooked, pour on hot chicken
-give it a few seconds, then engage patented MtAoFC pan-jerking method until scrambled omelette sort of folds itself into a lump on the far side of the pan
-give it ten more seconds to brown on the underside, then slide it off onto a warmed plate

It all took under a minute, from the time the eggs hit the pan until the omelette skidded onto the plate.  And it looked much better than my first offering, which just goes to show that I learned something!

I found the oil easier to cook with than the butter – possibly because I underestimated the impact of cooking in butter that had already started to brown.  The motion required to move the omelette as the book directs is part intuition and part brute force, but ultimately with practice one can get a feel for it.  This recipe is, like all the recipes I’ve tried so far, something of a cop-out from the kashrut standpoint, but things will get much harder down the road (have you read the Boeuf Bourguignon recipe?) so I am appreciating every bone this book throws my way, for the time being.

And learning to be the master of egg preparations large and small is no insignificant feat, that’s for sure.

So, here goes!

Inspired by Julie and Julia, the memoir by Julie Powell and new film featuring Meryl Streep and Amy Adams; as well as by an enduring love of food, cooking, and doing it myself (whatever “it” is); and now as always fueled by unlimited admiration for Julia Child and her impact on the life of the home cook in America; I’m undertaking this blogging adventure to see what the limits are for engaging in and learning from Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking while also adhering to Jewish dietary observance.

This is a pretty tall order.  Last night I made Gateau de crépes a la Florentine – and to summarize it is comprised of some flour, butter, milk, spinach and mushrooms; no meat – and yet the recipe did call to prime the hot pan by rubbing it with some good old pork fat instead of or in addition to using oil.

Naturally, I used oil and omitted the lard, but I think this is instructive of the nature of my project.  French cooking and Jewish cooking are at complete odds with each other; French seemingly hedonistic in its call and response to food simply for the flavor, texture and pleasure of the experience.  Jewish cooking seeks the flavor, texture and pleasure but with the additional project of attaining them without mixing meat and dairy, to name just the most basic of limitations.  French: complete indulgence and satisfaction.  Jewish: calculated and hard-won delicacy.

So the crépes Florentine.  I pre-made the crepe batter combining milk, water, eggs, salt and butter in the food processor and letting it sit refrigerated for the afternoon.  The harder work was more immediate in anticipation of dinner; think three hours sweating over a hot stove top in my un-air-conditioned brick oven of a house and you’ll have a good picture.  From 4-7 pm last night is now a blur to me of flipping crepes (successfully made in my well-seasoned cast iron pans without any sticking casualties!) blanching spinach, sauté-ing mushrooms and onion, and of course building a cheese sauce from the basic butter-flour roux on up.

I stacked crepes with alternating layers of the spinach and mushroom fillings and buried it all in cheese sauce (sauce Mornay, to be precise) topped it with shredded Swiss cheese, and browned it in a hot oven for 25 minutes.

I’m not sure how to give you a sense of this creation – except to say that the recipe called this 6 servings, but I ate less than a tenth of it and was completely satisfied by the richness of it all. (Use that much butter, cream and oil and you better get some satisfaction out of the experience.)  To give you a better sense, let me say this: my lactose intolerant husband, who hates spinach and generally lobbies for meat in every meal, thinks it was the best thing I’ve ever made.  This is saying a lot not only because it was vegetarian and enough dairy to cramp his stride for weeks, but since he raves and brags about my roast chicken, which is admittedly also very good.

The real trick will be to find a way to make crépes that in themselves are pareve (neither milk nor meat, therefore able to be served with both.)  The dairy-only recipe was kind of a freebie, since realistically I would have skipped the pork fat whether for this project or otherwise.  I haven’t projected a timeline for this undertaking because of this problem: recipes can be made kosher in two ways: eliminating meat or eliminating dairy.  The fun will be experimenting and deciding what variations taste best; the struggle will be someday actually finishing it, since it has the potential to take a very, very long time.

But this was an auspicious first stab.