Jewish Mother-in-Laws chicken soup goes East

My mother-in-law makes great chicken  broth and every time I see her she gives me a large pickle jar full. Well our latest thing is to eat it with soba noodles and some simple carrots, scallions and sometimes chicken. Its so good.

Apple Sauce

I just wanted to share this with you. My sister made it and we couldn’t get enough of it…

Ultimate Jewish American Potato Pancakes-3 Flavors

We had a potato pancake comparative analysis session over the holidays.  The 3 schools were traditional, sweet potato, and Asian/Indian with curry.  Hands down the Asian/Indian pancakes were the best and with the home made applesauce, they were really terrific. Having said that, the other two were also quite good. The sweet potato pancakes had a hard time staying together, but were very tasty and the traditional ones were, as always worth all the effort.  The potatoes we used were large Idaho, and as I was more of a taster vs. a contributor I can’t really tell you if anything unusual was done to the potatoes, but I’ll check and get back to you.

Doughnut Plant

We had four 5 star doughnuts here on sunday.  The marzipan, the coconut square, chocolate blackout cake  and creme brulee…If you are a doughnut eater I don’t think it gets any better.  I especially liked the golf ball sized creme brulee doughnut, of course I could have eaten about 6, thankfully my family saved me from myself once again.

Sorry no photos…

Universal Peanut Sauce

I make peanut sauce a lot. Generally we eat it on noodles, but for Thanksgiving I made some that we had with vegtables, which was good.  As requested, here is the recipe.  It is very very flexible.  Start with the following and adjust to your taste. 

3 cloves of garlic/about 2 tablespoons of fresh ginger, which is a hunk of peeled ginger root/3 tablespoons white sugar/1 and 1/2 serrano or available hot pepper/healthy dash soy sauce/ half a cup peanut butter, use some kind of natural no sugar variety, it makes it easier to get it to taste the way you want./Vegtable stock to thin/Juice of 1 lime/Big handful of cilantro

Put the first 4 ingredients (garlic, ginger, sugar, pepper)  into the cuisinart and blend them until they are mush. Add the soy and the peanut butter and continue to blend, thin with the vegtable stock.  Add the lime juice to taste and at the end put the cilantro in and blend on last time for a second or two.  Of course if it isn’t hot enough you can add more pepper, or my son douses his with sriracha sauce.  You can also make it sweeter by using a sweet peanut butter.  My favorite is to make this and use it on chicken salad.

Potato Chips Galore and Tasting

We have been trying to think of another item to use as the focus of a tasting (the hot chocolate was such a success).  Dumplings got a little complicated, coffee would send us over the edge, brownies…maybe.  We (or rather I) decided to do a mini potato chip survey at Thanksgiving.  It was a good set up as there were 21 opinions available.  That doesn’t mean everyone participated, but we did get some good/humorous comments and had some fun.  The chips were: Cape Cod, Herr’s, 365 Organic, Kettle and a sweet potato chip for some variety.  In my opinion there are too many potato chips on the market to sample all of them, so I just tried to get a sampling and not get too too hung up on it.  Here are some of the choice comments. 

 

 

 

 

 Comments:  Kettle chips-A real jaw workout; re. color: golden, in memory of the long trip through the deep frier; gradient of pale yellow to deep orange, burnt sienna edges; not so attractive, re. aroma: baby powder and salt; oily smell; like fried food.

The Cape Cod chips got some interesting feed back, faint odor of Nantucket; crunchy yet yielding; no flavor-weak; crispy, slightly tough; potatoy.

As for the sweet potato chips-hearty and dense; enchanting; not very yummy; deep sunset orange; re. finger residue-minimal.

My personal favorite were the Herr’s.

Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving was quite good here in NY, however I have to let you know that we didn’t ‘eat in’.  We had terrific hor d’oeuvres before venturing out. Thanks to Judy the traditional jewish/american empenada’s were great and instantly inhaled. As always the cheese and olives were flawless.  Thank you Wegman’s. 

More later on the potato chip tasting as well as the peanut sauce.  Dinner was at the Harrison (which is  down the street from my apt.).  We are a large and changing group and sometimes the task of feeding and seating all of us is too much, so over the years we really have done all sorts of configurations for Thanksgiving. This year was eating out (last year was going to Key West).  I have to say, The Harrison was terrific seating all 23 of us at one table.  We are an opinionated group and like to sit together, no childrens table.  Here are some of the choice pics from the meal.  I think the only draw back of eating out for this holiday is the no left over situation.

Left Over Bread

My tolerant husband said he really didn’t understand why I would want to do anything with the left over dead sandwich bread that is crowding our freezer, in fact why freeze it, just get rid of it. I on the other hand am trying to be lest wastful and find this throw away just too excessive.  Of course at this moment I don’t know what I’m going to do with it…you can only eat so many croutons. I’ll let you know.

Ugly Fruits and Vegetables

Interesting (and strangely revealing) article in the times, a week or so ago about the ugly fruits and vegetables in Europe (and their persecution), caught my eye. I seem to have a lot of ugly vegetables in my fridge, and I have to say celeriac root is up there on the list. I also have the most beautiful veg. in my fridge right now-roman cauliflower. I am planning to consume both of them this week end. 

Hot Chocolate Map, Walk and Review

Here is this lovely map, which takes you around to a few of the choice hot chocolate spots in downtown NYC.  We went to 6 on Friday and our favorite (at least with the younger set) was Marie Belle, which serves a liquid chocolate which is more of a dessert hot chocolate than a drink. It is lovely, thick, rich and has lots of flavor.   Our favorite was the spicy, which had a strong cinnamon flavor and aroma. The runners up were panela and the Aztec. The atmosphere there is just charming, cozy and very euro groovy. We also liked Vosges which is much more modern than Marie Belle and serves a drink not a dessert chocolate. The sit down is different, at a shared table. Much more dash and go.  My personal favorite was the white chocolate drink, which had a mix of lavander, lemon and a beautiful milky flavor. The aroma was great. The younger set opted for the Aztec Elixir and the Parisienne.  Bathazar’s did not get high marks from us. We had much anticipated their hazelnut hot chocolate, but found it too sweet, with the chocolate flavor underwhelming.  But the smell was fabulous.  We didn’t sit down in Balthazar’s but stood outside and drank on the street…not very cozy.  Ceci Cela has a nice hot chocolate, with good mild flavor. The texture was smooth and we all enjoyed it. The back room is very sweet and cozy.  We also went to the Starbucks on spring street with the thought that their hot chocolate would be our control point. A popular well accepted and tested drink.  Our ace team found it not particularly good, very sweet, with a boring chocolate flavor.  We ended at the Cocoa bar on Clinton Street, which had very nice drinks. We sampled White Hot Chocolate, Mint, Spicy and Funky Monkey.  The spicy had a very strong cinnamon flavor and the white was surprisingly vanilla in its flavor. I couldn’t taste the banana in the funky monkey and the mint tasted just like an after 8 dinner mint to me.

In any event we marched the 3 children around to these places and they were great, filling out their forms and discussing the nuances in detail. I was impressed by their chocolate sophisitication. I’ve got the form below. We tried to go to Divalicious but they were closed as they were attending the chocolate show. I suggest you pick as many spots as match your stamina and get some friends together and go. Its alot of fun and of course very satisfying.