Adaptation

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? :)

What's for Dinner?

I love to cook. That is to say, I love to cook when I have the time and energy, spending time in the kitchen isn't going to pull me away from one of my favorite tv shows, and I am interested in eating whatever it is I am about to cook. In an average week, I rely on Shabbos leftovers for Sunday night dinner, make a baked ziti for Monday and Tuesday dinner, cook something random for Wednesday night dinner, and order out on Thursdays (did I mention I love...as in love...pizza?).

In other weeks, I rely heavily on cereal, ice cream, and takeout to get me through the week. Healthy, I know.

Anyway, on those nights when I do decide to cook dinner, I am usually only interested in making something that takes 25 minutes or less, doesn't involve a lot of cleanup, and uses ingredients that I already have on hand. This is what I came up with this week:

Tuesday: Chicken hot dogs over ziti with broccoli (thank you frozen bodek veggies) and mushroom tomato sauce

Wednesday: Baked breaded flounder with rotini pasta tossed with olive oil, mozzarella, fresh basil, and fresh tomatoes

Thursday night is reserved for Shabbos cooking (as is Friday afternoon after I get home from work). We're having guests this week. Honored guests at that! My mom is coming in town to spend Mother's Day with her grandsons (my husband and I will be there too, but we're just an added bonus; it's the kids she comes to see), my best friend from college just finished her JD and is coming to town with her husband, and my brother is making a special guest appearance to surprise my mom! A regular menu won't do. Here's what I have planned:

Shabbos Dinner:

• Butterflake challah
• Homemade chicken soup (from the freezer; I made it a few months ago and was saving it for an occasion like this one)
• Tomato basil chicken (Kosher By Design, Short on Time)
• Salami Quiche Florentine (KBD, SOT)
• Hearts of palm/avocado/tomato salad
• Sweet potato casserole
• Cake (should have been brownies, but more about that later...)
  

Shabbos Lunch:

• Challah
• Red bliss potato salad (Kosher By Design)
• Tomato basil chicken (sound familiar?)
• Green beans with garlic
• Corn on the cob
• Cake (should have been brownies, but more about that later...)