JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
I was around 10 when I fell in love with cooking. I liked the way ingredients could be shaped and assembled by my small hands and transformed into something delicious — a quick and satisfying victory. But more than anything, I loved watching family members devour my food, what my then-pre-adolescent brain couldn’t have understood…
I had a beautiful Hungarian grandmother, born Erzsébet Weisz and redubbed Elizabeth Weiss when she and her parents and brother and sister moved to New York from Miskolcz in the 1920s. I called her Nana and she called me darling. (It sounded like dahhrrlink, as if spoken by a brainiac Zsa Zsa Gabor.) Nana said…
Like matzo balls, bagels used to be plain — or sesame if you were lucky. There were no pumpkin, jalapeño or asiago-cheese bagels on which to shmear your cream cheese. Now, it’s the matzo ball’s turn to diversify, and Dr. Susan Sandler, a creative kosher cook in suburban Philadelphia, is doing her part: She’s doctoring…
“My father would always say that there are two kinds of people: those who eat to live and those who live to eat,” my grandpa, who I call Zayde, said to me over the phone. “I definitely eat to live.” And, believe me, if you knew Zayde, you’d know that this could not be more…
“For me, noodle kugel has special significance because it is the one thing that I get credit for,” said my maternal grandpa, who I call Zayde. As you can tell from his daily eating routine, Zayde is not much of a chef. Though he can’t recall when my great-grandmother (and namesake) Goldie gave him the…
When it comes to latkes, we are a sour cream family. In fact, my mother thinks sour cream goes with everything. Not that there’s anything wrong with applesauce. But sour cream, or smetana in Russian, is in our DNA as one of the key ingredients in Russian cuisine. So this year, I’d like to take…
The following story, posted a year ago today, is as relevant now as it was then. As you’ve doubtless heard, the citizens of these (decreasingly) United States of America are freaking out about Thanksgiving this year, worried they’ll find themselves trapped at the table with relatives whose political points of view are painfully opposite their…
I have had many things passed down to me by my matriarchs including my grandmother’s cast iron blintzes pans, which she inherited from her mother and are well over 100 years old. On Shavuot, my daughters and my mother and I have had the honor and joy of making blintzes in these magic pans seasoned…
