The Rachel Chronicles

Rachel Cooks...Chocolate Peanut Butter Cheesecake Marbled Brownies

YUM!
 
I found the recipe for these delicious brownies here. The recipe makes its own brownie mix....I cheated a little and used a pre-made mix, you know, like, from a box.

If you're in a more authentic mood, here's the recipe for the chocolate brownie part:

8 oz unsalted butter – (230 grams)
2 1/4 cups granulated sugar (447 grams)
1 1/4 cups Dutch process cocoa (or European Style)
1 teaspoon salt (5 ml)
1 teaspoon baking powder (5 ml)
1 tablespoon vanilla extract (15 ml)
4 large eggs
1 1/2 cup unbleached all purpose flour (192)
1 cup chocolate chips (170 grams)

And here is the peanut butter mixture:
3 ounces cream cheese, softened (90 grams)
1/3 c. peanut butter (85 grams)
1/4 c. sugar (50 grams)
1 tsp. vanilla extract (5 ml)
1 egg

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. (180 C) Line a 13×9 inch pan with non-stick foil or parchment paper.

In a medium-sized microwave-safe bowl, melt the butter on high. When butter is melted, stir in the sugar. Return the mixture to the microwave and heat until mixture is very hot but not bubbling (1 minute). Stir well to help dissolve some of the sugar – mixture should appear shiny.

Stir in the cocoa, salt, baking powder and vanilla. Add the eggs, beating till smooth; then add the flour and chips, stirring until combined. Spoon ¾ of the batter into the prepared pan.

Prepare peanut butter mixture by beating “Peanut Butter Mixture” ingredients in a bowl until smooth. Drop spoonfuls of peanut butter mixture over brownie batter, then drop remaining brownie batter of peanut butter mixture – not covering it entirely but creating kind of a big speckled pattern. Gently drag a knife through top to create a pretty marbled effect.
Bake the brownies for 28 minutes, until a cake tester inserted into the center comes out dry.

[The picture is from my brownies cooking in the oven. Click on the link above if you want a picture of the brownies after they've been cooked and "plated".]

Remove them from the oven and after 5 minutes, loosen the edges with a table knife. This helps prevent sinking as they cool. Cool completely (and chill for better cutting) then cut and serve.

Delicious!

Rachel Cooks....Banana Bread

I know its been a while since I've cooked for you. Don't take it personally, I really haven't been cooking for anyone in the non-blogging world either!

I did a little meal planning last night, looking through recipes that I wanted to make for next week's holiday of Sukkot. Its a harvest festival, one that happens as the weather changes from summer to fall. Its filled with friends, food, and fun. Really, all three of those things are a required part of Sukkot - particularly the fun part. The Talmud tells of a festival that took place during Sukkot during Temple times.
It is described as THE party of a lifetime. If you haven't seen the partying at the Temple during the Festival of the Water Drawing, then you haven't seen a party!

But I digress....I was meal-planning for the holiday. And I decided, what else says fun like chocolate chip banana bread?!? Besides, once I got it in my head, I wanted some. So I made two loaves. The plan is to freeze one and a half of them for next week, to share with guests....and to eat the other half myself :)

  I found a recipe online, added a handful of chocolate chips to it, and it is quite delicious!

Here it is for you:

INGREDIENTS
1/2 cup of margarine softened
1 cup white sugar
2 eggs
1 1/2 cup mashed bananas (this came to 2 and 1/2 bananas for me)
2 cups all-purpose flour (I used whole wheat, to make it a tad bit less unhealthy)
1 teaspoon baking soda
Chocolate chips

DIRECTIONS
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
2. Cream margarine and sugar until smooth. Beat in the eggs, then the bananas. Add flour and baking soda, stirring until combined.
3. Pour into pan and bake for about an hour.
4. Store in fridge or freeze....or EAT AND ENJOY!

Rachel Cooks....Passover Sponge Cake

What I really wanted to title this piece was "Rachel Cooks....100 Year Old Passover Sponge Cake". But I thought I'd lose some readers doing that.

This beautiful sponge cake has been served at my family's Passover seder every year since at least 1899! How's that for a family tradition?!

My grandmother told me that the recipe comes from her grandmother, Chaya Pesha (Clara Pauline), who immigrated to the United States in 1899. A few years later she gave birth to my great-grandmother, and that is who my mother remembers serving the cake. But Nana tells me that it was indeed Chaya Pesha's recipe - which makes the cake at least 109 years old!

Although I have to admit that its not my favorite cake to eat (I prefer the non-Passover, real flour, non-strawberry, non whipped cream variety), it is one of my favorite cakes to decorate! And it has often been my birthday cake because even when my birthday does not actually fall during Passover, it is the time when my whole family gets together and we often celebrate all the spring birthdays.

Here's the recipe as my grandmother wrote it for a cookbook that our synagogue created years ago (ok, that my mom created for our synagogue years ago!)

Ingredients:
3/8 c. potato starch
1 c. sugar
1 t. salt
1/2 t. lemon extract or 1 T. lemon juice
lemon rind
3/8 c. cake meal
8-9 eggs
1/2 t. vanilla
4 T. water

Separate eggs. Beat white sand sugar until stiff, but not dry. Beak yolks. When good and yellow, add salt. Then fold yolks into whites. Gradually fold in 1/4 flour and 1 tablespoon water. Continue folding in flour and water, alternating and ending with flour. Add flavoring and rind. Pour into un-greased tube pan. Bake at 325 degrees for about 1 hour. Invert in pan until completely cool. Use knife to loosen edges when you take out of the pan.

What is not added here, is how to frost the cake. So the whipped topping and strawberries might be a newer (than 109 years ago) addition. Nana, you'll have to leave a comment and tell everyone the real story.

We use store bought non-dairy whipped topping. It comes in a container as liquid, you whip it up and woola! it becomes whipped cream! The brand that we use is called "Ungers" and is both parve and kosher for Passover! My mom says there is another brand called "Rich's" that is also Kosher for Passover and parve. If you prefer, cool whip works just fine too! Top with the whipped stuff of your choice, add some strawberries and enjoy!

[as a side note, I wonder what my great-great grandmother used to top this cake, seeing as I imagine 1899 must have been before the days of cool whip!]

A fun trick that my mom likes to do is to neatly cut out some of the middle of the cake (from the bundt pan), mix some strawberries with some of the whipped topping, mix it up, stuff it into the hole that she just created in the middle of the cake. Then she re-stuffs that cut-out cake back into the hole! This creates a fun surprise inside the cake!

Happy Passover! חג שמח לכולם

Rachel Cooks...Sweet and Sour Meatballs!

One of my favorite meals that my mother makes  for holidays (or when I come home and request it) is sweet and sour meatballs. If I remember correctly, the recipe goes back at least to my great-grandmother, but perhaps further. Speaking of my family...rumor has it that my Aunt Gloria reads my blog! Hi Aunt Gloria!

One day when I was making the meatballs in my kitchen, I found that I didn't have all the required ingredients, particularly the crushed tomatoes and the vinegar. So I replaced them with tomato paste and balsamic vinegar. I would never be so ballsy as to say that my recipe is better...but definitely a little bit different, and I like it! So here is my mother's recipe, I'm sure you can figure out my changes:

Meatballs:
1 lb. ground beef
1 chopped onion
1 t. salt
1/2 c. matzah meal, bread crumbs, or uncooked rice
1 egg
1/4 t. pepper

Mix ingredients together.  Use your judgment on the amount of bread crumbs or matzah meal.  It shouldn't be too wet that it doesn't hold its form.  Form meatballs.

Put all the ingredients into the bowl....

...and then smush!!!

Sauce:
2 chopped onions
1/2 c. vinegar
3 c. water
pinch of garlic
salt/pepper to taste
1 c. sugar
couple dashes ketchup
1 can tomatoes (I like diced.)
1/2 c. raisins (optional)

Brown onions in sugar until glazy.  Add rest of ingredients.  Add meatballs.  Cook for 3 hours or more.  Serve over rice.  (1 recipe of sauce holds double recipe of meatballs.)

This is what your sauce may look like, boiling on the stove.

Then you add the meatballs, one by one. Be careful not to splash yourself with sauce!

It may not look quite as delicious in the pictures as it tastes...so you'll have to just trust me. I served them to a usually non-red-meat-eating friend at the beginning of the year. Not only did he try them (because they looked and smelled good), but he could not stop eating them! He and his wife talked about the meatballs for their entire walk home that night! I promise, if you make them, you will never go back to your old meatballs again. These are far too good to pass up!!!

Rachel Cooks...Cookies!

Ok, I didn't cook these cookies, I baked them. But the name of this blog segment is "Rachel Cooks". I'm over it. Do you like the graphic? Does it bother you that I'm posting it on Sunday and not Saturday? I'm over that too. The graphic is part of a link-carnival over at Fiddledeedee's site, and this way I can post my delicious recipes (which aren't really mine) on her blog too.

Anyway....why bake cookies? The long version of the story is that Yoav and I hadn't seen each other in too long, and made plans to do something "fun and different" last night. Then one of his co's got sick, which meant that he had to spend Shabbat at the pnimia, working - and that included Saturday night too. So "fun and different" was out. But...hanging out with a bunch of fourth grade boys was in! And what better way to win 8-year-old-boys' hearts than cookies?! (it doesn't work too badly with a twenty-something-year-old too!)

Ok, honestly, the boys weren't really that into me. They were much more excited about The Lion King #2 (dubbed into Hebrew). But they took a  momentary break from the movie to eat the cookies and say thank you. Then they went back to ignoring me and watched the movie. I was definitely ok with that! :)

Because I had little else to do on Friday, and I enjoy methodically rolling dough into little balls, I actually made three different kinds of dough. My roommates thought I was nutso. But I froze many cookies for next Shabbat when my parents are here, and filled our cookie jar for people in the apartment to eat in the meantime. So I actually have three recipes for you - but they all come from elsewhere on the web. And I only did a so-so job of remembering to take pictures:

I should have made the peanut butter cookie dough first because it requires an hour in the fridge, but I didn't. Let's pretend I did. Here's that ingredient list:

         1 cup unsalted butter
         1 cup crunchy peanut butter
         1 cup white sugar
         1 cup packed brown sugar
         2 eggs
         2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
         1 teaspoon baking powder
         1/2 teaspoon salt
         1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda

And the recipe:
     1 .Cream together butter, peanut butter and sugars. Beat in eggs.
     2  In a separate bowl, sift together flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Stir into batter. Put batter in refrigerator for 1 hour.
     3  Roll into 1 inch balls and put on baking sheets. Flatten each ball with a fork, making a criss-cross pattern. Bake in a preheated 375 degrees F oven for about 10 minutes or until cookies begin to brown. Do not over-bake.

I found a great tool to make the criss-crosses with - it was a large salad tong. But alas, even though I made them, once the cookies baked, I don't think you could tell. Sometimes I also stuck chocolate chips in the top of these cookies -just for the added excitement!

Sugar cookies are my absolute favorite kind of cookie. I love them. And this recipe came out just perfect. I even decorated some of them, to make them extra-special. Ok, my cookies don't look quite like the Christmas cookies that the website has a picture of, but that IS where I got the idea to decorate them from!

Here are the ingredients:
         2 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
         1 teaspoon baking soda
         1/2 teaspoon baking powder
         1 cup butter, softened
         1 1/2 cups white sugar
         1 egg
         1 teaspoon vanilla extract

And here are the directions:

    1      Preheat oven to 375 degrees F (190 degrees C). In a small bowl, stir together flour, baking soda, and baking powder. Set aside.
    2      In a large bowl, cream together the butter and sugar until smooth. Beat in egg and vanilla. Gradually blend in the dry ingredients. Roll rounded teaspoonfuls of dough into balls, and place onto ungreased cookie sheets.
    3      Bake 8 to 10 minutes in the preheated oven, or until golden. Let stand on cookie sheet two minutes before removing to cool on wire racks.

The KEY to making these cookies come out round and perfect, seems to be NOT greasing the pan! Who would've known?! Not me! But I followed the recipe and it worked! It makes sense, because as my roommate Lisa said, the cookies contain so little that the extra grease from the Pam spray (or butter or oil) would've made them dissolve and spread out. Next time I want to make cookies, someone remind me that I don't want to spray the pan!

I debated whether or not to make chocolate chip cookies. But I had the extra time, and really, who makes cookies without making chocolate chip ones? Especially if they're for kids? So I found a recipe that didn't call for butter, because of the massive amounts of margarine used in the other recipes, I was all out - and didn't feel like going back to the store. This recipe comes from Levana Kirshchenbaum's cookbook. She uses vegetable oil instead of butter (or margarine, since thats what I used). I will say that of all three doughs, this one was the most "oily" and thus the most sticky (to my fingers) and the least likely to stay in the round circular shape that I attempted to put them in.

Here are the ingredients - I forgot to take a picture of them, because you know, I was already on my third kind of dough (crazy person that I am):

    •     2 eggs
    •     3/4 cup sugar
    •     3/4 cup dark brown sugar, packed
    •     3/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons vegetable oil
    •     1 tablespoon vanilla
    •     2 1/2 cups flour
    •     3/4 teaspoon baking powder
    •     3/4 teaspoon baking soda
    •     1/8 teaspoon salt
    •     1 1/2 cups best-quality chocolate chips, the smaller the better

and here are the instructions:

1. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit.
2. Using an electric mixer, beat the eggs and sugars together until light and fluffy. Add the oil and vanilla and mix in thoroughly. Add the flour, baking soda, baking powder and salt and mix at low speed.
Fold in the chips by hand.
3. Drop the dough by heaping teaspoonfuls 1 inch apart onto cookie sheets lined with foil. Bake only one tray at a time. If your cookie sheets are the professional heavy-gauge type, bake the cookies for 10 minutes. If they are lighter, bake for 8 minutes. The cookies will firm up as they cool, so do not be tempted to bake them longer or they will harden.
4. Store the cookies in tin boxes, separating each layer with foil or wax paper so they don't stick.

She says that it yields four dozen cookies. It did not. But perhaps that was because of my inability to roll the dough into the small round balls that I was supposed to. It was just too sticky. Also, I can't believe that I am going to say this, but I think that the recipe called for TOO MANY (can you imagine such a thing?!) chocolate chips. Next time I would put in, at most, 1 cup, but maybe even less.

Here is a picture of the box of cookies that I brought to the kids. Trust me, you don't want to know how many cookies are left in the freezer...But they got very good reviews! Yoav sent some cookies downstairs to a co-worker, and got a text message back saying how good they were! That made me happy :)

Happy Baking!!!

Rachel Cooks....Peanut Sesame Noodles!

Shabbat this week was lovely. My roommate Lisa had a bunch of people from Pardes over last night - and I joined them. I knew about half of the people from other contexts, so it was really a lovely meal. And I had a smaller group of people over for lunch - it was a random collection of people from different areas of my life, but it was lovely none-the-less!

I actually cooked two fun and delicious things this week for Shabbat. I will tell you about them in the order that I cooked them, not the order that we ate them. [really, this is because I am sitting downstairs on my couch, and my camera is upstairs in my room - and the pictures of the noodles are already off my camera on my computer, and my pictures of the meatballs...well, they're still on the camera, upstairs]

When I decided to make these noodles, I was missing a couple of ingredients that make the noodles taste better. I searched the web to see if I could find a recipe that didn't call for the things that I didn't have...I found one, made it, and then later added some extras to make it a little less bland. I'll share with you the recipe that I used - but you can also add some sesame oil, rice wine vinegar, and green onions to give it a little bit more of a kick.

Here are the ingrediants that I used initially:

Pasta

peanut butter

sugar

garlic

soy sauce

And just because I think its lots of fun, here is a close up of the peanut butter and sugar...Recognize the peanut butter?! its in Hebrew!

You boil the pasta - you don't need me to tell you how to do that. In fact, I probably had to ask one of my roommates to tell me whether or not I wanted to keep the pot covered...

Anyway, here's a picture of what the sauce looks like - you have the soy sauce, the chopped garlic, the sugar, and chunky peanut butter. This is when you might want to add the sesame oil too.

Mix the sauce until its smooth. If you have a whisk, that would probably work well. Then pour it onto the cooked pasta and mix! (I saved you the picture of me pouring what looks like brown gunk onto the unsuspecting pasta...be glad!)

Serve cold and ENJOY! :)

Rachel Cooks....Shakshuka!

Along the same lines as, although perhaps no more frequent than, the "Rachel Reads" features on this blog, I have decided to bring you "Rachel Cooks"! According to my mother, I come from at least three generations of fabulous cooks and bakers - so I figure you, my readers, should benefit from that immense amount of cooking wisdom.

I'm not convinced, however, that I have inherited the cooking gene, as in college I used to call my grandparents for cooking help so often that my grandmother started answering the phone, "Betty Crocker Hotline"! I was particularly embarrassed the day I called for help hard-boiling an egg, and since my nana wasn't home, my papa quickly rattled off the instructions. Never the less, there are definitely some specific dishes that I have  mastered - and this is one of them.

I am most definitely a cooking-with-pictures kind of girl. If I wasn't, this entry would be titled "Rachel Cooks...yummy apricot chicken that she made on Wednesday night but forgot to take a picture of"! Next time I make that recipe, I will remember to take pictures of it and share it with you.

Shakshuka is my favorite "Israeli" food. When other people are at a falafel stand eating laffas full of falafel or shwarma or even shnitzel, I'm ordering shakshuka. I'm told that the origin of shakshuka is Middle Eastern/North African - which makes sense when you see that its main ingredients are vegetables (which are amazing and very fresh here) and eggs (which are plentiful in farming communities).

Here is my recipe for shakshuka - think of me when you make it!

Ingredients:

garlic
peppers - I used yellow and red, but green is great too
eggs
oil
tomato paste
salt and pepper - to taste - I don't use any, but you probably will want some!

Chop the veggies and oil the pan...

Cook the veggies first, before adding the tomato paste and garlic. When they are browned to your satisfaction, pour in the tomato paste. After the tomato paste has had a chance to heat up, crack two eggs (or more, depending on how many people you are feeding) into the mixture:

(notice the whole garlic cloves and the two cracked eggs)

Let the pan simmer for a while, as the eggs cook. You may want to flip the eggs or cover the pan, to allow the eggs to cook more to your liking.

Serve with bread - and since I love avocado, particularly with anything tomato based, I added that too. When I buy shakshuka at a falafel stand, I usually get french fries added to my sandwhich - and as I was eating this, I was thinking, "wow, potatoes would go so well with this! why hasn't anyone thought of that yet?!" - and then a light bulb dawned..."french fries ARE potatoes, Rachel!"....right....

So although I didn't make this with potatoes, I highly recommend it! Try making this and come back here and let us all know what you think!