creative jewish mom

Simple Flowers And Leaves Decorated Challah

I am rushing to post this as there is still cooking to be done for the holiday of Shavuot, which we are welcoming tonight! Round braided challahs decorated with simple flowers and leaves really do make your holiday table special, so if you have a few extra minutes, give it a try, even for just one challah! This design is quite simple to make, and if you follow the instructions, I do think you'll be happy with the results! Trust me, I've been doing this for years, with varied results, and this design actually looks good after baking as well, which many just do not. So make some round braided challahs using my 4 strand round challah tutorial, set aside a grapefruit sized piece for the decorations, and keep on reading!

Flower Covered Challah For Shavuot!

We are welcoming the beautiful Jewish holiday of Shavuot tonight, and I decided last night that it was time to make some decorated challahs to embrace the holiday, in which we bring flowers and greenery into our homes to remember the lush surroundings on Mt. Sinai. Yes indeed, I did take note of the relative luxury of this act while many of my fellow Israelis were in bomb shelters, and I am grateful to live in a location that is generally not a target, and we have never used the bomb shelter room in our home as such, though I am relieved that we have one! Okay, back to challahs and the upcoming holiday! I love to make round challahs, and they are especially lovely to distinguish a Yom Tov from shabbat.....and a four braided challah looks amazing and is so simple to do once you get the hang of it. Check out my four strand round challah, and become a pro, you can do it! Incase you missed it the link is HERE. Regarding the simple flowers that top this challah, keep on reading......

Spelt And Oatmeal Rolls For The Meals Before T'isha B'Av

A whole eight years ago I posted these photos of my healthful spelt and oatmeal rolls, and now I myself had to visit the blog to look up the recipe, so I realized that I should just re-post it as the photos are good enough, (though I did have to add a title and a watermark) unlike some of my very early blog posts. Tonight we are ushering in the very solemn day of T'Isha B'Av, which is also a mandatory 25 hour fast, (there are of course exceptions for children under bar/bat mitzvah age, those with illness or women after birth,) and we will be eating two vegetarian meals before the fast: one for sustenance and one right before the fast, that is eaten sitting on the floor and with symbolic foods of mourning.

So of course the family and the teens have to eat, and when the kids used up the bread I had planned to serve them later in the day I realized that once upon a time I did bake bread (pre-teen daughter taking over the baking) and that I could certainly revisit those days in order to serve my family something really healthy and great tasting before the fast. To top it off we just happened to have a bag of spelt flour in the freezer, so voila, I baked, or rather I am baking as the rolls have yet to go into the oven.

Special Grape Leaf Challahs For Tu B'Shevat

Wednesday night is the perfect time to bake delicious homemade challah, and with the special shabbat of Tu B'Shevat coming up this week, how about making your challahs just a little bit special? Well, of course all challah is special, but when you spend a few minutes to add a bit of extra something, well special takes on a whole new meaning! Let's do it, shall we?

Lacto-Fermented Pickled Vegetables Are Healthy And Delicious!

Fermented foods like pickled vegetables, sourdough bread, kombucha tea, kefir and yogurt, to name a few, are all great ways to eat healthy pro-biotic foods in order to colonize your gut with good things. One of the interesting and really important things that I learned towards the end of 2016 is what a major role intestinal health plays in our overall health, and how oblivious traditional medicine is to this idea. If you or your loved ones are unfortunately dealing with health issues I highly highly recommend looking into the field of Functional Medicine that addresses the role that food plays regarding illness.

That said, it turns out that my family really has not been eating enough pro-biotic foods, as we are not big yogurt eaters, so I have decides to change this by providing an ongoing source of good bacteria via lacto fermented vegetables. And I have to say, everyone is really happy about this, well except for my husband who for some reason doesn't love the taste of my recent experiments, but I'm going to work on that one!

Pickling vegetables via lacto-fermentation is simple and really so much fun, keep reading for all you need to know, and pat yourself on the back for all those jars filled with lovely pickling veggies!

Chickpea Flour Flatbread

Introducing my favorite new recipe, chickpea flour flatbread, especially great for someone like me who is not eating wheat, or needs to avoid gluten! Of course you could call this is a chickpea flour pancake, whichever sounds better to you! It is true that the taste of the chickpea flour may not be for everyone, but when accompanied by something a bit savory or spicy I think even the pickiest eaters may be won over. I gave my kids a bite together with my hot pepper dip, and they didn't spit it out! So there may be a family meal using these pancakes in the future (with a huge selection of delicious veggie and bean based things to spread on them) in the meantime I'm just going to enjoy them myself, starting with tonight when I plan to enjoy some with the traditional Moroccan salads that I make every week for shabbat.

Ingredients:

• 1 1/2 cup chickpea flour
• 2 cups water
• 1 small white onion finely chopped (and you could add some fresh chopped coriander too)
• 1 tsp baking powder (optional, try with and without and see which you prefer!)
• a dash of cumin, ginger, turmeric and cinnamon (and more than a dash if you like these spices)
• 1/2 teaspoon salt (omit if possible, but my family will more likely eat them with the salt)
• olive oil (preferrably spray) to lightly coat pan

Preparation:

Combine dry ingredients and onion. Add water and use a wisk to make sure all lumps are dissolved. Heat a non-stick frying pan and lightly coat with olive oil spray. Use a ladle to place batter in pan, flatten batter with ladle, and once pancake starts to bubble, flip over and continue cooking until nicely browned on both sides.

Pancakes can be stored in the fridge and easily re-heated, though have yet to try freezing them. Cut pancakes into wedges, or if you are skilled at making a thin pancake you may be able to use them as roll ups. I folded one in half to make a very satisfying sandwich. Enjoy!

 

Whole Wheat Pita Pockets Make The Perfect Succah Meal!

It has been quite some time since I've made some delicious whole wheat pita bread for my family, and so these pita pockets were especially enjoyed by all yesterday for brunch in the succah. I served the pita bread with an assortment of cheeses, and especially feta cheese to enjoy with the Israeli salad, and of course chummous, green olives and scrambled eggs with garlic.

If you live in Israel, or will be visiting soon and live in a country with 220V, I highly recommend purchasing the kind of pita pot that I use, namely electric coil on top, pan to be placed on the gas for the bottom portion. These pots are generally aluminum and made in Israel, and as far as I know, one of the few things that one actually can't find in the United States!

But not to worry, pita pot, or not, one can certainly bake pita bread in the oven, just check out the comments and my notes in my post from several years back, delicious home baked pita. Oh, and by the way, the recipe calls for 2 kilos, but one can certainly make half that amount, which is what I did!

Have a wonderful succot holiday!

Easy To Braid Round Challahs For Rosh HaShana!

With Rosh HaShana just a week away, now is a great time to bake traditional round braided challahs for the holiday, with raisins of course! Thanks to some readers who left comments on my post showing how to braid these beauties, I realized that I ought to share some photos I took last year just before the holiday!

This technique is so simple and while the braid can split a bit in the middle during baking, as you can see in the challah above, it is still lovely and retains its round and full shape quite nicely.

Check out my post how to braid a round challah for rosh hashana, and you're all set. And this might sound funny, but you can certainly practice with knee socks or knee highs to get the braiding down before you start with the real thing!

And no, my house does not exactly look like this at the moment, as I'm very busy preparing not only my own container garden, but a garden with actual dirt that I'm in the middle of designing for the New Year. This year we are entering a year called "shmittah" which has specific laws regarding gardening in the land of Israel, more on that later! Happy baking!

Whole Wheat Pizza Dough, Yippee!

At long last, whole wheat homemade pizza has become a mainstay in our home, thanks to a simple recipe for whole wheat pizza dough that I have been quickly whipping up in my food processor!  And I couldn't be happier,  because I have to admit,  if there was one thing that I felt guilty about feeding my family (namely on Thursday nights when I was busy cooking for shabbat) it was storebought frozen pizza, which I knew just wasn't good for them at all, but which they were happy to eat.

But now, that they've tasted homemade pizza that is so much more filling on account of the whole wheat crust and real tomato sauce, well, hopefully there's no going back. Even my husband said the pizza was "Sof" which means "end" in Hebrew meaning at the end, or really top, of the rating scale. He just wished I had made a bit more!

Ingredients:

1 cup warm water,
1 tablespoon date syrup
3 tablespoons olive oil
2 1/2 teaspoons yeast
2¾ cups whole wheat flour
1 teaspoon sea salt

Preparation:

Preheat oven to 500 degrees Fahrenheit with rack in the upper position. (I've been using a toaster oven for this, set on the highest temp. and it works just fine.)

Homemade Bagels!

What kind of a creative jewish mom would I be if I didn't try my hand at homemade bagels? Truthfully, before this blog was born I did actually bake bagels a few times as we had just moved from Jerusalem (where American style bagels are aplenty) to Northern Israel (where at the time American style bagels were scarce) and one of my sons just had to have bagels! Fast forward to a good five or six years later, and with the husband out of town for the first shabbat after Passover, I decided to try bagels instead of the traditonal key shaped challah I would normally bake. (Of course I did not forget about the key theme and made key shaped napkin rings!) Lest I digress, I enjoyed making the bagels, but it certainly is quite time consuming, and best done when one is not under pressure!

After the dough rises once, bagel shapes are formed. I did remember from my previous bagel baking that the recipes call for bagels that are half the size of the store bought ones, so I took this into consideration and made half the amount of bagels that the recipe indicated....which turned out to be about 23 bagels for 2 kilos of flour.

Here we are, boiling those bagels, so far so good. And after boiling they were looking really big and fluffy. Something happened though as they began to bake and they deflated a bit, could be because my oven somehow wasn't up to the required temperature however. Hmmmm.

Nonetheless, the results looked pretty good. As far as taste, not all the kids loved them, I gave myself a B+ though my daughter loved them toasted during the week.

So hopefully this wasn't a tease, but sorry, I'm not going to share a recipe with you, until I find a recipe that is excellent! This is just some inspiration to try making bagels yourself, and it's certainly a fun thing to do with the kids! I'd like to try making something healthy, like spelt, so I'll let you know if it happens!