In keeping with the traditional symbols of Passover, I planned a menu of lamb shanks braised in homemade lamb stock and red wine, braised romaine lettuce, maple brandy carrots, matzo ball soup (stock AND dumplings hand made, of course!) and a mushroom and green onion kugel for the vegetarians.

The challenge of doing this all not only non-dairy but without chametz (prohibited grains) was, truthfully, much diminished by the culinary education I’ve received up to this point.  This is not to discount the number of tasks completed nor the accomplishment of completing everything well and timing it all effectively; only merely to appreciate how much I’ve learned in a relatively short time.  (I prep things, such as chopping vegetables, much more quickly now as well.)

I’m most proud of the vegetarian entrée because it was an exercise in creative thinking within the constraints of the non-dairy, non-chametz.  To make the kugel, which consists of making a custard to soak the matzo and binding it all together by baking, normally I’d use milk and eggs.  In this case I’ve learned that a custard can be any liquid bound with eggs, and so I substituted soy milk.  I know, soy is kitniyot, or foods that can be confused with the actually prohibited chametz.  I’m personally not so concerned about avoiding soy products, and vegetarians gotta eat, too.

Every year I’m reminded about how much I love the idea of tradition, both as part of a rich ethnic and cultural history but also for tradition’s own sake.  I made an Egyptian date-raisin charoset (fruit-mortar, intended to remind us of the mortar the Hebrews used in slavery to build the structures in Egypt) but also made sure that we had the traditional Ashkenazi apples-and-nuts version on hand.  It wouldn’t exactly be Passover without them.

We always have a symbolic bone on our seder plate, but this year I knew for sure that it was actually a lamb /shank/ bone – because it came out of the lamb cuts I prepared for the meal.  This is my first Pesach as a Jew, my first as a cook with training, and so the richness of the symbolism combined with the seasonal freshness of all of the traditional foods have really heightened my experience of this spring harvest festival.

And I appreciate the freedom that I have to choose to be Jewish, the educational opportunity I always have at my disposal, and I will continue to work and pray for freedom for everyone who still is not free from all types of bonds.

Chag Pesach same’ach!

I’m sad to report that a taste from the jar offers a flavor shockingly similar to Bac-Os, which is disappointing to say the least. But I am willing to give it a real shot, in a recipe, in heat, over the stove.

Now that it’s sitting on my counter, I don’t know how I feel about Bacon Salt. On one hand, it really is vegetarian, kosher, etc. On the other hand, is it just an easy way around the dreaded bacon prohibition?

I will give it a fair shake. I have my doubts that it will adequately impart that irreplacable bacon flavor. Perhaps it will require immersion in schmaltz to be effective… that is an appealing idea.

I am now at a point where, while I watch my weight, I detest “diet food.”  If I have to eat less of richer food to maintain a healthy weight, then I will do so, because life is too short to waste eating low-fat sugar free crap.

That said, when I first started roasting my own chickens, making my own stock, and generally using as much of each chicken as I could find means to do, I became intensely interested in the cult of schmaltz (chicken-fat, for the uninitiated.)  I discovered that I could toss and roast firm leafy greens (hello, kale!  Hello, chard!) in the shimmering golden pan drippings from the resting chicken, and those two tablespoons of otherwise wasted leftovers made green vegetables so heavenly delicious that even my herbiphobic husband would eat them.

How exciting that schmaltz is making a comeback!

I now will regularly trim wads of fat off the edges of my chickens, render it, and pour it off into a container to be frozen for future use.

I arrived at my present general dismissiveness of diet food some time after I became inspired to ‘do it myself’ in my own kitchen.  (As I discovered, it’s hard to replace the fattiest or sugariest parts of a recipe and still wind up with something satisfying.)  Julia Child, as you might imagine, played a huge part in my personal food revolution; it was watching her show and reading about her that made me realize something critical: that the recipes in her books weren’t designed to be outlandishly rich.  This was how people *ate* as a matter of course in the 50s in France, and probably in general before food- and diet-science got out of control.

What is the point of food if it isn’t satisfying?  I will admit that I’ve been struggling with my weight recently, and spending time feeling deprived.  Just recently, I decided that I am simply no longer going to waste calories eating food that I don’t enjoy.  Life is too short… but I’ve already said that.  I may wind up eating less, but I will wind up more satisfied.

This article about Julie and Julia, Julia Child and what it might really mean to be a woman who loves food without reservation, got me thinking down this path.  I don’t hold out a lot of hope for being a food lover with complete abandon; I’ve regarded food as an adversary for too long to ever truly leave that mindset behind.  But it’s meaningful to me to be closer to Julia’s end of the spectrum than I was when I started out 5 years ago trying to put together meals with a modicum of flavor that I wouldn’t feel guilty eating.

Eff that, that’s what I have to say about feeling guilty about eating.  It’s an affront to all of humanity both to eat more than one needs to, and also to feel guilty about nutrition.  I am also a strong proponent of slow food, and to that end believe that less processing is healthier for the food, for the eaters, and for the environment.  De-fatting and de-sugaring certainly qualify as processing.

In a world where so many people go hungry, don’t I – as a person, a woman and a Jew? – have a responsibility to approach food in a healthy way?* And not just in a “health food” (as in turkey bacon?) kind of way.  So much of what we consider culturally Jewish cooking is founded on principles designed to squeeze out every ounce of flavor and nutrition from food sources animal and vegetable alike, and to make delicious and truly satisfying food in a physical and emotional sense.  (There’s a reason that “comfort foods” of all cultures are the richest ones.)

Shouldn’t we all be eating food, and not processed food products?  And I mean all of us, from the richest breakfast-bar-buying demographic to the poorest literally starving population on the planet.  I didn’t start this post intending to soapbox about sustainability, but the same principle that encourages me to explore economy for not entirely economic reasons – say, to stretch a single chicken to its absolute limit, and my vegetables to main dishes, scraps for stock and trimmings for compost – to me suggests that the entire human population could be getting a lot more nutrition out of raw foods than we are getting from high fructose corn syrup and bleached white flour.

This entry is my committment to eat foods I love, and love the foods I’m eating.  It’s a committment to avoiding waste and leaving more for others.  And yes, it’s a committment to whole foods, which includes fat, glorious fat, an important dietary component and biological requirement.

If it’s going to be struggle to find a balance between enjoying whole foods and not enjoying them *too much* then that is a burden I am willing to bear.

*Hazon thinks so – they host the Hazon Food Conference every year, which Wikipedia tells me is “an annual meeting of farmers, culinary experts, global citizens, business, community and Jewish leaders to focus on contemporary food issues and exchange ideas on improving health and sustainability in communities throughout the world.”

Fat Camp – by Daniella Cheslow > Tablet Magazine – A New Read on Jewish Life
Celebrating “Julie & Julia”

There is so much truth to be told on this subject, but underneath it all, I truly never thought of it because I don’t think of turkey bacon as food, despite the fact that it can be kosher and might technically fill the role of “bacon.”

People who have never tasted bacon might not have much use for the turkey substitute, so for those out of the loop I will summarize turkey bacon: it’s a health food, the particle board of cured, sliced meats, processed and pressed together with way less fat and absolutely none of the natural muscular/fatty structure of the real pork bacon or even its distant relative, beef bacon. (I’ve had beef bacon, but it tastes suspiciously like corned beef.)

So yes, the short answer is, I never even remotely came close to considering it as a bacon solution because even when I am not trying to match recipes, I am not inclined to eat it.

The longer answer has a lot of parts. First, I suspect that turkey bacon, designed as most packaged turkey bacon products will tell you to have less fat and be way more “heart-healthy”, doesn’t have enough natural salt or fat to infuse a recipe with the kind of flavor that pork fat provides.

Second, that stuff never gets crispy.  OK, well only if you microwave it within an inch of its life between two wads of paper towel.  But then you’ve lost the fat to the paper towels, and so far none of the recipes I’ve witnessed call for totally crispy bacon.  So it’s a lot of work for not a lot of return in the areas for which bacon might typically be used.

Third… well, this is disingenuous but whatever.  I’m tired of talking about this.  I’ll just refer you back to the short answers, in which I’m not motivated by or attracted to turkey bacon as an ingredient.

However, I feel sufficiently guilty dismissing it that I will probably seek to include it in experiments in the not too distant future.

Nothing really does compare to a rich, flavorful dinner with friends, good wine and limitless time, and that’s what we had on Saturday night with a couple we haven’t spent much time with lately.  Dinner was on the table well after dark, which was fine because the prep started quite late in the evening and it was, frankly, worth the wait.

I chose a beef sauté specifically because out of the beef recipes these were the shortest in preparation time, and so accomodated the end of Shabbat without putting our meal off until 10 PM.  In effort to get things done in the time allotted, I was tempted to make one of the simpler variations on the sauté recipe;  the Provençale iteration actually would only require omitting the butter to “kosherize.”  But that recipe also includes olives, a flavor that I couldn’t substitute for on the fly, and something one of my guests strongly dislikes.  Scratch that.

The Bourguignonne iteration (Sauté de Boeuf à la Bourguignonne) got me thinking quite a bit.  It’s a beef sauté with red wine, mushrooms, bacon and onions.  I could have easily omitted the bacon and, of course, butter, but I really have a problem with this and here’s why.

Not having always been Jewish, I am a rare specimen in that I’m a Jew who does not eat bacon, but knows what it tastes like.  It’s a blessing and a curse, certainly.  So I read the Bourguignonne variation of the recipe, wherein I am instructed to brown the bacon, reserve the bacon fat for later, and ultimately include both bacon and sauce containing rendered bacon fat in the final dish.

While I could easily pull a substitute (for example, chicken fat might be a good substitute here for the bacon fat, and the flavor from the fat might well disguise the lack of any substantial bacon replacement), the truth is that I don’t want to.  I know what bacon tastes like, and I know that it offers not exactly just a flavor, but a whole sphere of flavor, texture and accent that will be hard to mimic.  I’m now presented with an occasion where I’d rather not even try, because I don’t think that I can compete with what I’m sure in my head this recipe would taste like, though in fact I’ve never *actually* had this preparation.

Of course, the blessing side of this is that I do have a reasonable idea what this should taste like with bacon, and so while I don’t eat bacon now, I can evaluate how well a replacement approximates the “real thing.”

Needless to say, I skipped the sauté Bourguignonne and went with the original recipe, à la Parisienne.  This required omitting the butter, as usual, and substituting pareve soy creamer for the whipping cream.  This is perhaps the first recipe in the entire book that didn’t recommend rubbing the pan with bacon or somesuch; refreshing to be off that hook for once, and yet odd in that “who are you and what have you done with the real Julia Child recipe?” sort of way.

I did not disclose to my dinner guests, whom I am certain are reasonably free of food allergies and aversions (other than the aforementioned olive affliction), that I pursued the recipe under auspices of this blog.  Not that it mattered, because as with the lobster I referred to in an early post, there aren’t circumstances where I’d throw cream into a meat recipe.  In any case, my point is that this creamy, mushroomy, beefy recipe was prepared with discerning foodie-types in mind who didn’t know that this was a “kosherized” preparation, but who might reasonably be expected to notice.

Nobody particularly noticed.  Ben tasted the sauce, which included sautéed mushrooms and shallots, reduced beef stock and pan juices, white wine, pareve soy creamer and thickened with a little bit of corn starch; and his one-word reaction was, “Beefy!”  Other reactions included a vague comparison to Stroganoff, though “darker, less sour.”

I didn’t say, and no one noticed, that there wasn’t any bona fide dairy included in the sauce.  Thus, I declare victory.

Making the sauce was truthfully a gleeful experience.  After the wine and stock reduced down, pan juices were mixed in, and the mushrooms and shallots were added to the pan, THEN the faux-cream was added.  The final step was the thickener after all the other ingredients were well combined: a well-blended tablespoon of creamer and tablespoon of corn starch.  That had an immediate, dramatic effect that was fun to watch and very satisfying to stir – upon contact it felt and looked as if it had almost turned my sauce into fluffy clouds.  (Julia Child referred to that texture as having “a light liaison.”  I plan to hang on to that phrase.)

My only real disappointment with the final dish was that I was so focused on preparing the meat dish that I never remembered to toss out a vegetable side dish.  I wound up serving the beef with a barley-rice-quinoa mix and a green salad with apples, dressed in olive oil with balsamic vinegar.  I just felt that the plates were a little too brown looking, and could have been aesthetically improved by a couple of spears of asparagus or some grilled carrots, just something, anything, with a splash of color.

Despite my own criticisms, and I’m always harder on myself than anyone else is, I served it all up with pride and without apology.  More than anything, this is my take-home message from Julia Child.

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.

But then, it was also the most delicious, and probably the most fattening, so there you go.

One of the first things this recipe calls for me to do is slather the salted inside of my chicken with a Tbsp of butter, and truss it up.  This sort of set the tone for how I had to approach the recipe – this was a battle, and I needed to be atop my game at all times in order not to be tricked into doing something to defile the beautiful, potentially kosher deliciousness of this chicken.

With my wits about me, I “buttered” my bread chicken with Philly olive oil instead.  Not a particularly neutral oil, but the richest one I had on hand.  Since I don’t think there’s a comparable substitute for the flavor and texture of butter, I figured I’d just go for the luxe.

I placed the chicken in a slightly-larger-than-the-chicken-sized baking pan, strew about some sliced carrot and onion, and slid the whole she-bang into my preheated 425-degree oven.  (The first 15 minutes were the biggest pain in my chicken-roasting life, because the recipe required that I brown the top and each side of the chicken for five minutes before reducing the heat to 350.  Thomas Keller, whose recipe I previously used as my general guideline, does not require this very hot acrobatic feat.)

In prepping the chicken, I trimmed off some of the enormous wads of fat that surrounded the opening of the cavity.  I assumed I’d render this later and fry something awesome in it (schmaltz, or chicken fat, is the flavor equivalent of golden indulgence.)  Little did I know what lay ahead of me.

That’s a lie, though, because as Julia Child recommends in the foreword to MtAoFC, we must read recipes in their entirety before proceeding, in order not to be blindsided by an unexpected ingredient or unfamiliar technique.   So I did know that I’d be instructed to prepare basting liquid using 2 tbsp of butter and 1 tbsp of cooking oil in a small saucepan.  What I hadn’t realized was that I would render the schmaltz in the saucepan with the olive oil and use it as my basting liquid – there, we have something that truly does give butter a run for its money.

Rendering schmaltz is honestly one of the great joys of my life.  I usually do this in my cast-iron grill pan (designated for meat meals, of course.)  Not only is it convenient to pour out the hot liquid fat through the pan’s groove, but the process sustains the seasoning of my pan.  Most satisfying of all is watching an enormous whitish fat globule melt down until it’s just a crispy flake of skin or meat surrounded by boiling, popping chickeny fatty essence.

But I digress.  Needless to say, this is the first chicken (or any item, really) that I’ve ever basted.  In fact, for something roasted, which typically connotes a fast and easy process of popping something in a preheated oven and maybe adjusting the temperature a little ways down the road, this was a lot of work!  After those first 15 minutes of frequent flipping action, the heat turned down to 350 and the bird was lying on its right side.  I basted it every 8-10 minutes, first with the liquid I discussed above, and with the pan juices after the stovetop preparation ran out.  Halfway through the remaining roasting time, I salted the up-side and flipped it over onto its left side, and 15 minutes from the anticipated end of roasting, I salted the up-side and returned it to the breast-up position.

I felt a little dubious at this point because while the sides were nicely browned and crisped, the breast side was kind of pale (though cooked) and un-crispy looking.  Not to worry, however, because in the last 15 minutes of roasting it came together nicely.  I wish I’d taken a picture when I took the bird out – it was without reservation the most beautiful poultry I’ve personally ever prepared.

While all these chicken-roasting antics were going on, I was also preparing a brown stock.  (I’ve never heard of brown stock before reading MtAoFC.  As far as I can cobble together, brown stock is a stock prepared by browning chicken parts and onions and carrots, then cooking them in pre-prepared stock to make a richer, well, stock.  I detest using a word in its own definition, but near as I can tell, brown stock is made using a pre-existing stock.  So I do the best I can.)  I attempted to cut up giblets of a chicken, but my meat cleaver made barely a dent in the neck and the gizzard.  I gave up and browned them whole, boiled them in the stock whole, and discarded them afterward, you guessed it, whole.  It smelled and tasted extra super chickeny, which is the ultimate goal of this entire exercise, according to Julia Child.

When the chicken came out to rest before carving, I cooked minced shallots in 2 tbsp of the pan juices, then added a cup of the newly made, and strained brown stock.  This was 1+ cup of liquid, reduced down to 1/2 cup, then seasoned with salt and pepper.  The recipe wanted me to enrich it with butter at the last second before serving, but instead I added a tablespoon of the fat skimmed from the strained stock.  I would hardly say that the sauce lacked for richness.  One spoonful over the top of the golden-crisp chicken, the rest in a Pyrex vessel (I have no gravy boat, sadly.)

I called it “the hardest damned chicken” but that doesn’t really convey what I mean.  No part of this process was difficult, by any stretch.  It did require an active engagement with the chicken with which I am generally unaccustomed.  I worked hard to follow the instructions on this chicken, and it was worth it.

The Roast Chicken Experience called to mind what I consider to be a central theme of Julie and Julia, which is the distinction between that which is simple and that which is easy.  This chicken was simple – instructions straightforward, tasks so basic that anyone can do them – but it wasn’t easy.  You can’t sit back and put your feet up and read a good chunk of novel while waiting for the end of the roasting time.

If pressed to make a larger point, I might add that keeping kosher is simple – simply follow rules! – but it isn’t easy.  But this is a post for another time.  Right now I’m remembering my delicious chicken and sauce prepared 100% dairy-free, appreciating the hard-won simplicity and the bonus of rich flavor and superior texture that were the return on my investment.