MUST Parve Dessert

As my husband jokes, there's nothing more tragic for an yiddishe man, than to be "Fleischig" the rest of the day.

I love meat. Especially beef. My husband prefers fish, but loves meat the way I cook too. I take all the credit here - I am not a good baker definitely, but I love making meat, it always comes out good. And I don't do anything special, I just have the right feeling how to roast onions and garlic before adding meat.

Today was the day when I cooked chicken breasts.
(My quick recipe goes like this: take a big pan, roast 5 onions and 2 cloves of garlic (if you are fond of it, have more) in rapeseed oil (or any other oil). Cut 3 medium breasts of chicken into small pieces and pour in the pan after onions and garlic are roasted, add 2 cups of water and let it boil. Before chicken is finally boiled, pour half cup of tomato juice, let it boil a minute, add salt and pepper to taste.)

It doesn't end here though. You can't just cook chicken breasts for dinner, you need to make something for dessert. Something which won't be dairy because we can't eat dairy after meat, have to wait 6 hours before that. As usual in Judaism, everything is harder for men - they have so much mitzvot to keep and never get leniency; it's only different with pregnant or breastfeeding women, who can eat dairy after meat in an hour's time.

Since I've been married and started cooking and baking, my biggest headache have been desserts. I learned how to bake brownies, banana chocolate chip cake, ultimate chocolate cake (fancy this "ultimate" word, don't really know what makes it ultimate though), American apple pie (with 300 grams of butter in it and your flat will smell like butter for a week), lemon bundt cake...
The problem is to find a Parve recipe, cake or pie without dairy ingredients, rather finding is not a problem, but the taste is - nothing comes out as delicious as with dairy products, I believe.

(Anyway, here's the recipe of the Raspberry-Apple crumble... I mean,Raspberry-Blueberry-Strawberry one. I didn't have Granny Smith apples and nutmeg that were in the original recipe, so I made it my way.
Defrost one package (400grams) of frozen raspberry-blueberry-strawberry mix or use fresh and drain it. Then pour two cups of flour and one cup of sugar and mix them together in a bowl, cut in one cup of margarine and make crumbles by hand.
Preheat the oven at 180c.
Put some crumbles on the bottom of the round spring pan and press with fingers a little. Add drained fruits. The rest of the crumbs go on top.
Bake for 25 minutes. If you like your crumble drier and fruits transformed into jam, leave it in the oven for 40 minutes (from my failure experience which actually came out quite fine) ).

Now, it's worth to become Fleischig for 6 hours, isn't it?

Pink Banana

What do you do if you have loads of bananas spoiling in your kitchen and all you think of is to make a banana cake. Well, it would not work if your family does not approve banana cakes as a matter of fact.

I am not fond of cakes, I'd rather have some juicy fruit or just a juice. Banana cake is not popular at our household either because my husband loves only traditional cakes with loads of cream or Georgian sweets such as Gozinaki (YES!). So, waking up in the morning and seeing poor, once yellow bananas going black melts your heart and you decide to find a recipe how to make Banana Mousse.

Here.
I did not use liqueur though because we have none. Instead I poured apple juice and lemon acid; added some cherries, which painted the banana in pink. Now my mousse is resting in the fridge waiting for the time to come and be eaten at the dinner.

Oh and the dinner is going to be meaty so banana mousse is just perfect for a dessert, isn't it?
Thus, when life hands you bananas - make a mousse out!

Happy Wednesday!!!

Italian/Russian/American Job

This post is dedicated to елишева роз :)

Once upon a time there was this Italian cook Roberto? Alberto? Can't recall his name, but what really matters is that he cooked Mediterranean food. But hello, are we on Mediterranean peninsula here? (For the record - Peninsula is my favorite word even though it does not really fit in here ;) ) Thus he was replaced by someone else as we are in Eastern Berlin and some years ago it belonged to the Socialist society (which one I still belong to). So revolution was to start. It was not very easy as the girls needed to arm midrasha to make even Che Guevara jealous.

After 4 months of resistance Italian guy was defeated. And midrasha now has a new cook. He is Russian and fresh as a morning grass. He cooks amazing pies (pirozhki) with potatoes, violet cabbage & etc. If you ever been in Russia or other slavic countries you may know that mayonnaise, cabbage, potatoes and dough go everywhere :) that is because of the cold weather... & vodka, cannot forget that. Midrasha girls just love the new cook guy and he is the number 1 man around.

Not for some little funky girl though. She needs liberal democracy as it is in the USA and I am looking forward when she rebels against socialism and brings democracy for us all :)
Never lose your hope, you are not alone for G-d Has already blessed America.

SHABBAT SHALOM!