Fruit is not just dessert or snack, but a valuable part of many wonderful easy dishes. Fruits pack lots of flavor and nutrition, and are fun to cook with.

I’ll be demonstrating:

• Moroccan chicken dried fruit tajine with jasmine rice
• Curried parsnip apple soup
• Mixed greens with mango dressing
• Tropical fruit cake
• Mixed fruit salad

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Excerpted from my latest cookbook, The Whole Foods Kosher Kitchen. Israelis affectionately called this dish chraimi, insisting that’s what Moroccans call it. (Hello! Never heard of the word in Morocco! Something probably got lost in translation . . .) This is precisely the kind of dish where preserved lemon makes all the difference: You should always have them on hand, as they are heavenly in this and many other dishes. Please note the dish has no added salt as the preserved lemon is enough to season it. No preserved lemon? Substitute 1 thinly sliced lemon, and be prepared for a dish 90 percent as good.
Any thick firm fish will be suitable in this dish. My daughter Bella asked me to make sure I don’t forget to recommend using diced mock shrimp too, her favorite.

Ingredients:

1 cup water
¼ cup olive oil
2 large tomatoes, diced small
½ teaspoon red pepper flakes,
or to taste
Good pinch ground cloves
3 bay leaves, or ½ teaspoon ground
1 tablespoon paprika
8 cloves garlic
1 bunch flat parsley
1 small bunch cilantro
½ preserved lemon, skin only, rinsed
1 red pepper, sliced thin lengthwise
8 serving pieces salmon fillet, or any other thick fish (or 2 pounds mock shrimp, cut across in thirds)

Instructions:
In a large wide-bottom pot, bring the water, oil, tomatoes, red pepper flakes, cloves, bay leaves, and paprika to a boil. Meanwhile, coarsely grind the garlic, parsley, cilantro, and preserved lemon in a food processor using the pulse button. Add the ground mixture to the pot and stir. Add the red pepper and the fish and bring to a boil. Reduce the temperature to medium and cook covered for 20 minutes. Serve hot or at room temperature, topping each serving with the sauce. Makes 8 servings.

There is no Moroccan cooking without preserved lemons, and the store-bought variety doesn’t even begin to compare with homemade. They take minutes to prepare and two weeks to “incubate,” totally unassisted, and the result is a few months’ supply of the single element that will convert many of your dishes from plain to glorious. The fragrance is intoxicating: a pure lemon quintessence for lemon lovers only. Call this great condiment our secret weapon for countless tajines, soups,  fish, beans and rice dishes.
When lemons are plentiful, buy a dozen or two, a box of coarse salt, and a couple of wide-mouth glass jars. That is all you need, along with some elbow grease to cram the lemons into the jar and force the juices out. That is the secret of their swelling and pickling, as well as their heady aroma. Do not let the amount of salt daunt you. Much of it gets washed away, and you can reduce, or even eliminate, salt from the dish you are preparing with the preserved lemons.

Ingredients:
8 to 10 large thick-skinned lemons
Coarse sea salt

Instructions:
Wash and dry the lemons thoroughly. Remove any green points attached to the ends of the lemons. Cut them in quarters lengthwise. Place 2 to 3 pieces in a clean wide-mouth quart-sized glass jar, top with a thick layer of salt. Repeat: Lemon, salt, lemon, salt, and so on, all the way to the top, pressing down hard as you go to draw out the juice. Don’t worry if the juices don’t appear immediately; they soon will, with all that salt. The lemons should be totally submerged by their own juice, and reach all the way to the top of the jar. Top with an extra layer of salt to ensure that no lemon skin is exposed (or it will mold). You will need 2 jars. Place the jars in a dark cool place (I keep mine under the sink). They will be ready in two weeks, at which point they should be refrigerated. To use, take out a quarter of a lemon at a time. Discard the pulp, rinse the skin thoroughly, and mince. Add to fish and chicken dishes, bean soups, salads, and salsas. Makes about 2 quarts. After the two weeks of pickling at room temperature, store refrigerated.

It is really fascinating, when we are on the road, or too harried, or trying to loose a few unwanted pounds, that we can find a whole meal snugly fitting in a tiny packet, which we can enjoy with great abandon, whipping it out on a moment’s notice, taking no room, making no mess, needing no maintenance, calorically ideal, and making you as strong and energetic as a champ!

Or is it?

It seems every trouble we get into in every area of our lives is, we never bother to read the small print. Think about a few examples: Some marriages not made in heaven; some business deals gone sour; some diets gone unslimming, maybe even fattening; some miracle cures meant to make one stop smoking that caused hallucinations and suicidal thoughts – or worse: actions! All right, I think you get the picture.

A “glowing” example is, the ubiquitous energy bar. I decided to look in earnest into their contents after I used them several times (Delicious: that, they were!) on a multi-city book tour that kept me on the run and included very few kosher amenities. Pretty soon I was doubled over with bloating, cramps and blinding headaches. Probing into it deeper, this sleuth had no trouble finding the culprit: Soy Protein Isolates: I don’t think I will explain it better than the linked article will: Please read it and act on it! I hope it is not too presumptuous or too optimistic to hope that very soon, we will be able to trace many diseases and allergies to the offending soy protein isolates that swarmed our continent and our food, looking treacherously small, tasting treacherously sweet, and ripping through the figures and well being of millions of unsuspecting people. You think because it is marketed as health foods it is good for you? I beg you think again! The Health Food Industry is governed by the exact same principles as the rest of the food industry: tugging at your heartstrings, tugging at your purse strings, and in the process sending out the constant seductive but nefarious message that is getting our country so sick: “You don’t need to cook or do anything! We will do it ALL for you! You just relax!” That’s right, relax, lose total control of what you ingest, and miss a good time: meal time!

When you  need to maintain your diet, with less food and more energy, make yourself hot cereal, which will take ten minutes from beginning to end: Throw in the greatest quick-cooking grains: Thin granulation buckwheat (kasha), millet, quinoa, teff, steel-cut oats, thick corn meal. Mix and match any way you like. Cook it with some water or milk, dairy or dairy-free. Gluten-free? It will work perfectly as well! Add some olive oil or butter, a nice handful of raisins or cranberries, lots of cinnamon, salt to taste. Thin it to your personal taste. Make a nice amount, and save for the next couple days. It doesn’t hurt that it is delicious too!

18 grams protein in 2 ounces of energy bar food? Hello: Shouldn’t this raise a red flag? Twice the amount of the protein contained in a steak the size meant for a St Bernard (to the extend that you would feed your dog, say, fillet mignon!) or Olympic swimmers, and obtained by the most unnatural unorthodox, and yes, dangerous methods? Please repeat after me “High Energy Bars? No thank you! I’ll have hot cereal!”

But what about when we are on the road? OK,  let’s see what we got: Fruit, salad greens, frozen yogurt, cottage cheese, yogurt, hummus, nuts etc… What’s wrong with that? We’ll have more protein at our next meal, always coming up soon enough!

]]> http://www.levanacooks.com/what-price-protein-beware-of-those-energy-bars-the-dark-side-of-soy-by-products/feed/ 5 http://www.levanacooks.com/upcoming-cooking-demo-in-nyc-monday-january-30th-wholesome-salad-dinners/ http://www.levanacooks.com/upcoming-cooking-demo-in-nyc-monday-january-30th-wholesome-salad-dinners/#comments Wed, 25 Jan 2012 00:09:39 +0000 Lévana http://www.levanacooks.com/?p=5334 I’m always asked what my lucky husband gets for dinner every night. And the honest answer is: Salad, salad, and more salad, in every shape and form! Here are three wonderful main-course salads you can adapt to your personal preferences: Play with the flavors and textures and get different results every time! We’ll round out the meal with a surprise dessert!

I’ll be demonstrating:

• Lentil sausage salad with sprouts on baby spinach
• Chicken endive Waldorf Salad
  
• Mock crab, smoked trout, potato and fennel salad on arugala
• Curried tofu egg salad with romaine and rice noodles

Click Here to Register!

Straight from my Latest Cookbook, The Whole Foods Kosher Kitchen

For many years, I have made liqueur from etrog, a very rare citrus fruit—“the fruit of a goodly tree,” as it is reverently referred to—used in the celebration of the Jewish holiday of Sukkot. Every year at the end of the holiday, I call all my friends in the nick of time to bum their etrog before it gets discarded and proceed to make gallons of a fascinating liqueur, diligently and resignedly removing the myriad pits contained in the fruit before slicing it and combining it with other ingredients. This year I decided that since the fruit is so rare and the liqueur made from it so labor-intensive, I would experiment with the fruit that comes closest to it in flavor—the more reliable and widely available grapefruit. I even pushed my luck and made it with agave syrup and made a gallon of fabulous liqueur in no time. After about a week, I sampled the delicious dram: It was a triumph!

Ingredients:

2 large grapefruit

4 cups white agave syrup

8 cups vodka (generic brand OK)

Instructions:
Scrub the fruit thoroughly with a vegetable brush under warm water, and cut it in eighths, then in thin slices, by hand or using the slicing blade of a food processor, removing any occasional pits. Place the fruit in a wide bottom stainless steel pot, add the syrup and vodka, mix thoroughly and bring to just below boiling. Transfer the mixture to clean wide-mouth jars. Let the mixture sit for a week at room temperature. Before using, strain the amount you intend to use and leave the rest in the jar, fruit and all.
Don’t just discard the fruit when most of the liquid has been used: Throw in a little more vodka and agave in the jar and let the mixture steep again a few days. The longer it sits the more intense the flavor. Serve chilled. Makes about 1 gallon mixture, 2 quarts clear liqueur. Store at room temperature.

Variation: Apple Liqueur
Substitute 4 Granny Smith apples, unpeeled, cored, quartered and sliced thin, for the grapefruit, and proceed just as above.

]]> http://www.levanacooks.com/grapefruit-liqueur-recipe-apple-variation/feed/ 0 http://www.levanacooks.com/fish-tandoori-recipe/ http://www.levanacooks.com/fish-tandoori-recipe/#comments Tue, 24 Jan 2012 23:26:44 +0000 Lévana http://www.levanacooks.com/?p=5316

The term Tandoori is Indian and signals the present of a yogurt or buttermilk in the sauce ingredients, which makes the chicken or fish prepared this way incredibly moist and tender, and most importantly, dairy-free and suitable for any kind of meal! I obtain the buttermilk tang and texture by making a soy milk-lemon juice mixture curdle: It only takes seconds, and is very useful not only for this Tandoori dish, but for many other dishes calling for yogurt or buttermilk: Blinis, corn bread, lemon cake, salad dressings, etc…. Soy milk is the only dairy-free milk that will curdle with the addition of lemon juice or vinegar, so don’t try with rice, almond or other dairy-free milks.

Ingredients:
1 cup soy milk
1 tablespoon lemon juice
3 tablespoons olive oil
2 tablespoons curry, a little more if you like it hotter
1/3 cup lemon juice or lime juice
Freshly ground black pepper to taste
1 medium onion, quartered
1 2-inch piece fresh ginger, peeled
3 pounds salmon or other thick fish, sliced 1 1/2 inch wide, or cubed 2 inches.

Instructions:
Preheat the oven to 450 degrees. Combine the soy milk and the lemon juice in a large mixing bowl and reserve. In a food processor, place the olive oil, curry, lemon or lime juice, pepper, onion, and ginger, and grind finely. You will obtain a slightly runny paste. Transfer this mixture to a mixing bowl with the reserved soy mixture.
Rub the fish with this mixture and place on a baking sheet in one layer. Bake for about 20 minutes. Serve hot.

If there was ever a time Caesar salad went out of fashion and was eclipsed by a new salad on the block, however briefly, I can’t remember it. The queen, albeit with a king’s name. What is the secret of its enduring popularity? In my opinion, a short but unbeatable classic ingredient lineup. Only the best: crisp romaine, croutons made from good-quality bread, freshly grated Parmesan—all totally attainable! Make a double batch of the dressing and enjoy it with many other goodies. And if you can’t have the cheese, the salad will be good to go even sans fromage!

Ingredients:
6–8 slices good-quality bread, gluten-free OK, cut in ½ inch cubes
3 romaine hearts, torn into bite-size pieces
½ small purple onion, sliced very thin (food processor)
½ cup freshly grated Parmesan, a little more to taste
1 cup Caesar’s dressing

Instructions:
Preheat the oven to 375°F. Make the croutons: Place the bread cubes in one layer in a baking sheet, and toast until light brown, about 12 to 15 minutes. Reserve.
Place the romaine, onion, and cheese on a platter. Just before serving, add the croutons. Pour the dressing over the salad and toss. Makes 8 servings

Ingredients:
6 anchovies, rinsed
3 tablespoons capers
½ bunch flat-leaf parsley, stems and leaves
3 tablespoons Dijon mustard
4 large cloves garlic
½ cup extra-virgin olive oil
¼ cup wine vinegar
½ cup water
1 tablespoon oregano
Ground pepper to taste

Instructions:
Place all the ingredients in a food processor and process until smooth, about half a minute. If the dressing gets too thick as it sits, thin it with a little more water. Makes about 2 cups. Store refrigerated in a glass jar.

I’ll be demonstrating:

• Vegetable tofu curry
• Fish Tandoori
• Jasmine rice
• Chick pea and lentil paratha with coconut chutney
• Ghee- and saffron-scented sweet potato pudding
• Chai tea

So sorry this demo is sold out. Wonderful problem: We will be full beyond capacity! Would you like to see this exact same menu repeated in the next semester? Please be sure to email me and let me know, and always register in advance: We have lots of exciting demos coming up, and our next semester schedule will be posted just before Passover!