One of the highlights of each month is the appearance of my Real Simple magazine in my mailbox. When I first got married, my grandma ordered me a subscription, and she has renewed it annually since. I LOVE REAL SIMPLE. It is the perfect blend of organizing tips, heartwarming (but not vomit-inducing) stories, cleaning advice, gift ideas, and recipes. Every month when it arrives, I eagerly await Shabbos night, when I will finally have a chance to relax on the couch and bust it open. Inevitably, I fall asleep a few pages in (that's what Friday nights are for), and continue the next day. Once Shabbos is over, I go back through and tear out the pages I want to keep. At one point I had a large binder filled with articles and recipes I had collected from Real Simple, but I haven't seen it since we moved from Manhattan 4 years ago.
Most of my cooking is done without using recipes or following a set plan. I tend to just throw different things together and hope that it works! I do have a large selection of cookbooks, plus a recipe book of family favorites from a wedding shower, but on an average week (ok, really an average month), I don't crack those open. Following cookbook recipes tends to mean needing a lot of specific ingredients, which means planning ahead, and that's just not how things happen in my house.
So when I sit down to read the Real Simple recipe pages, I do so knowing that the likelihood of me cooking the dishes is low. What tends to lower these odds even further is the high prevalence of pork and shrimp in their recipes. Apparently cooking with pork and shrimp is fast and easy, which is the theme of the magazine's recipes. This doesn't do much good for a good shomer kashrut girl like myself. I am really good at adapting recipes to make them kosher or parve or nut free, but taking a pork recipe and making it a chicken recipe isn't as easy as it should be. What works with pork - or shrimp for that matter - will not necessarily taste so good with chicken. I tend to leave those recipes alone.
For the rest of the recipes, I have to read them with an open mind. If followed to the tee, most of them are not kosher. There's a lot of sprinkling cheese on top of meat, adding chicken broth to a dairy soup, or using cream to thicken a sauce. That's when my magical adaptation skills come along. After keeping kosher for a while, I started reading recipes differently. Here's an example:
You may see the word "milk." I see "soy milk."
You see "butter." I see "margarine."
You see "heavy cream." I see Rich's brand non-dairy creamer.
You see "milk chocolate chips." I see "parve chocolate chips" (so hard to find in a regular grocery store.)
Etc. etc. etc. You get the drift.
This may seem totally obvious and intuitive right now, but for many people who just start keeping kosher, it isn't. You see a recipe and forget that it can be changed and adapted and substituted until it meets your needs. This doesn't work for everything (there's a special family recipe that my mother-in-law holds dear which simply cannot be made parve, but we survive), but I'd venture to say that almost any dish can be changed to fit your needs.
Thinking about it can be exhausting, though. See why I tend to avoid recipes altogether? :)
Friday, February 4, 2011
Shout Out
I would like to offer a shout out to Butterflake Bakery, which is kosher, nut free, and DELICIOUS! They offer a large assortment of yummy challahs, cakes, cookies, and other desserts. They make quiche! They make focaccia!Their challah is perfectly golden on the outside and doughy on the inside. They make challahs of all different sizes, rolls, and even chocolate and cinnamon challahs! The cinnamon challah is more like cake or babka than bread. Mmmm...
Butterflake is based out of Teaneck, but they deliver all over, and their products are carried in lots of stores in my area. Check out their online store and order some for yourself!
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
The Wrong Lunch
It's been a while since I've blogged. I'd like to think that I'll post more often, but between workingshoppingcookingcleaningschleppingorganizingplanningchildrearing I'm sometimes a little pre-occupied.
Well, we're still kosher, and we're still nut free. The fun new cherry on top of the peanut allergy sundae is that my son now has asthma too, which apparently is connected to his allergy. The pediatric pulmonologist we visited told me that she's never met a child with a peanut allergy who didn't also have asthma. Wouldn't it have been nice for the allergist to mention this to me last year when he diagnosed my son? Wouldn't it have been nice for my pediatrician to mention this before sending my son for cystic fibrosis tests? Yes to both. In any case, our house is now a mini pharmacy. In addition to the usual mommy supplies like Tylenol (my new favorite are the meltaways), ibuprofen, and bandaids, we're fully stocked with epi-pens, benadryl, albuterol, flovent, and optichambers. The epi-pens and optichambers are not covered by insurance; thank goodness for flex spending accounts!
We've had a couple of nut free hiccups over the past couple of months. Each time my son was fine, B"H, but both incidents were scary nonetheless.
Scary nut incident #1: One Shabbos morning in December, my DH was sicker than I've ever seen him. No voice, fever, terrible cough, etc. I decided to bundle up the boys - and myself - and head to shul while leaving DH home in bed to rest. It was a regular week at shul with no special simchas, so they had laid out the regular post-davening snacks: herring (blech), crackers, soda, and an assortment of Entenmann's cakes and donuts cut into tiny pieces. The usual fair is predictable and nut free, so I don't tend to keep a close eye on my son while he runs around, socializing and making typical 3.5 year-old trouble.
Well, on this particular Shabbos, I was busy talking to my closest shul friend, who had just shared fabulous news with me (babies! babies! babies!), when my son ran up to me with a piece of something in his hand and said, "Ima, does this have peanuts?" I immediately said no, but as he turned away (while taking a big bite), I suddenly had a feeling that he wasn't holding one of the usual cakes or donuts. I called him back and grabbed the cake out of his hand. Sure enough, it was some kind of nut cake. It didn't have peanuts (BARUCH HASHEM) but it did have big pieces of either walnuts or pecans. I essentially threw the cake to the side, yanked the half-chewed piece out of his mouth, and started freaking out. "Do you feel ok? Does your throat feel funny? Is your mouth itchy?" I was staring at him from about 2 inches away from his face, just waiting to see if a rash started to form, or if his breathing changed. The poor kid was scared out of his mind. He looked like he was about to burst into tears. I didn't know whether it was because he felt sick or because his mother was going ape$hit ballistic in the middle of shul, but I managed to squash the situation before the tantrum began. After talking to him about it (and feeling better because a few minutes had passed and no symptoms had appeared), I concluded that he was sad because he had eaten nuts, and he was sad that I had taken his cake. With a new donut in hand and a big kiss from Ima, he was back to normal within moments.
I learned my lesson. Even "safe" places aren't. Grr.
Speaking of a false sense of security, let's move onto Scary Nut Incident #2.
My son's school is nut-free-seed-free, which is great...usually. There is the occasional day when my son comes home telling me that Shmuli (name changed to protect the innocent) had a birthday party but the cookies had traces of nuts, so he had a banana instead, but usually I can rest assured that when he is in school, he doesn't have to be worried about nuts.
A couple of weeks ago, my DH called me at work to tell me that my son's teacher called him to say that they accidentally served sesame seeds with lunch. Although my son's one confirmed allergy is to peanuts, he is also supposed to avoid all nuts and sesame seeds. So anyway, the school's food is cooked in Brooklyn, then shipped to Yonkers every day. Apparently, without realizing it, they had served sesame chicken to the kids. After a bite or two, my son's teacher realized what had happened and took the food away from him, brought him to the office, and called DH. Again, B"H he had no reaction, but he was sad that his food was taken away. DH expressed his disappointment that the situation had occured and his appreciation that they had handled it the way they did, but now we have to worry about him even when he's at school!
That evening, when I got home from work and asked him if anything sad had happened at lunch that day, he told me that his morahs (Hebrew word for teacher) had given him the wrong lunch. That just about broke my heart. My sweet, trusting little boy who knows that he's not allowed to eat nuts or sesames but also knows that food at school should be safe. When I asked him what they gave him after taking away the "wrong" lunch, he told me they gave him grapes. The image of him sitting in school eating grapes for lunch is just so sad.
Since that day, there have been a few mornings when he has said, "I hope my morahs don't give me the wrong lunch today." I hope not too.
Well, we're still kosher, and we're still nut free. The fun new cherry on top of the peanut allergy sundae is that my son now has asthma too, which apparently is connected to his allergy. The pediatric pulmonologist we visited told me that she's never met a child with a peanut allergy who didn't also have asthma. Wouldn't it have been nice for the allergist to mention this to me last year when he diagnosed my son? Wouldn't it have been nice for my pediatrician to mention this before sending my son for cystic fibrosis tests? Yes to both. In any case, our house is now a mini pharmacy. In addition to the usual mommy supplies like Tylenol (my new favorite are the meltaways), ibuprofen, and bandaids, we're fully stocked with epi-pens, benadryl, albuterol, flovent, and optichambers. The epi-pens and optichambers are not covered by insurance; thank goodness for flex spending accounts!
We've had a couple of nut free hiccups over the past couple of months. Each time my son was fine, B"H, but both incidents were scary nonetheless.
Scary nut incident #1: One Shabbos morning in December, my DH was sicker than I've ever seen him. No voice, fever, terrible cough, etc. I decided to bundle up the boys - and myself - and head to shul while leaving DH home in bed to rest. It was a regular week at shul with no special simchas, so they had laid out the regular post-davening snacks: herring (blech), crackers, soda, and an assortment of Entenmann's cakes and donuts cut into tiny pieces. The usual fair is predictable and nut free, so I don't tend to keep a close eye on my son while he runs around, socializing and making typical 3.5 year-old trouble.
Well, on this particular Shabbos, I was busy talking to my closest shul friend, who had just shared fabulous news with me (babies! babies! babies!), when my son ran up to me with a piece of something in his hand and said, "Ima, does this have peanuts?" I immediately said no, but as he turned away (while taking a big bite), I suddenly had a feeling that he wasn't holding one of the usual cakes or donuts. I called him back and grabbed the cake out of his hand. Sure enough, it was some kind of nut cake. It didn't have peanuts (BARUCH HASHEM) but it did have big pieces of either walnuts or pecans. I essentially threw the cake to the side, yanked the half-chewed piece out of his mouth, and started freaking out. "Do you feel ok? Does your throat feel funny? Is your mouth itchy?" I was staring at him from about 2 inches away from his face, just waiting to see if a rash started to form, or if his breathing changed. The poor kid was scared out of his mind. He looked like he was about to burst into tears. I didn't know whether it was because he felt sick or because his mother was going ape$hit ballistic in the middle of shul, but I managed to squash the situation before the tantrum began. After talking to him about it (and feeling better because a few minutes had passed and no symptoms had appeared), I concluded that he was sad because he had eaten nuts, and he was sad that I had taken his cake. With a new donut in hand and a big kiss from Ima, he was back to normal within moments.
I learned my lesson. Even "safe" places aren't. Grr.
Speaking of a false sense of security, let's move onto Scary Nut Incident #2.
My son's school is nut-free-seed-free, which is great...usually. There is the occasional day when my son comes home telling me that Shmuli (name changed to protect the innocent) had a birthday party but the cookies had traces of nuts, so he had a banana instead, but usually I can rest assured that when he is in school, he doesn't have to be worried about nuts.
A couple of weeks ago, my DH called me at work to tell me that my son's teacher called him to say that they accidentally served sesame seeds with lunch. Although my son's one confirmed allergy is to peanuts, he is also supposed to avoid all nuts and sesame seeds. So anyway, the school's food is cooked in Brooklyn, then shipped to Yonkers every day. Apparently, without realizing it, they had served sesame chicken to the kids. After a bite or two, my son's teacher realized what had happened and took the food away from him, brought him to the office, and called DH. Again, B"H he had no reaction, but he was sad that his food was taken away. DH expressed his disappointment that the situation had occured and his appreciation that they had handled it the way they did, but now we have to worry about him even when he's at school!
That evening, when I got home from work and asked him if anything sad had happened at lunch that day, he told me that his morahs (Hebrew word for teacher) had given him the wrong lunch. That just about broke my heart. My sweet, trusting little boy who knows that he's not allowed to eat nuts or sesames but also knows that food at school should be safe. When I asked him what they gave him after taking away the "wrong" lunch, he told me they gave him grapes. The image of him sitting in school eating grapes for lunch is just so sad.
Since that day, there have been a few mornings when he has said, "I hope my morahs don't give me the wrong lunch today." I hope not too.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
