Maa Maa Mack Meep

Have you any Maamoul?

These cookies are pretty fun to make, especially if you have pastry tweezers. I don't have pastry tweezers.



The recipe hails from the book what's cooking Jewish by Elizabeth Wolf-Cohen, and is a simple one. It's a Sephardic recipe, and the most refined version of these cookies is found in Morocco. Fillings can be date (seen here) or walnuts and pistachios.

You'll need:
6 oz/175g flour
2 tbsp sugar
3 oz/85 g unsalted butter
1 tbsp rosewater (or orange flowerwater)
2-3 tbsp milk
powdered sugar

2/3 c pitted dried dates, chopped
102 tsp more of rosewater (or orange flowerwater)

Preheat your oven to 325F, and grease a baking sheet.

With a food processor, combine rosewater and dates til smooth, adding a tbsp or two of boiling water if necessary. Set aside to cool. I let my filling stay a little too lumpy.

Now, sift flour into a large bowl and stir in the sugar. Cut in the butter, til *~FINE CRUMBS~*. Sprinkle over rosewater and 2 tbsp milk. Mix gently==> soft dough. Add more milk if necessary. Make a large ball, and pinch off pieces to shape 1 inch balls.



Press into the center of a ball, and rotate your finger to create a well. Add some filling, and pinch the edges of the dough together to seal it up.

Arrange all the cookies on the sheet 1 inch apart, seam-side down. Press balls into long leafy shapes, and use tweezers to pinch the tops 3 times (or craftily use two knives to do the same). Bake 20-25 minutes (until just set. Must remain pale!)

Let cool 10 min ==> sprinkle with powdered sugar ==>let cool completely ==>sprinkle once more.

I skipped the powdered sugar alltogether and still enjoyed my cookie experience.



-Anna

Madeleines in May-Hmm

That was a play on Amanda's title!

check it

We made those! Yeah they were good, yeah we love our dates and our earl greys. Lady grey? No thank you.



I won't lie--I struggled with the use of blender. I forgot to add water, and those blades did not appreciate waltzing with rough little dates. I actually wish I underblended, though, because finding little specks of juicy date really made the madeleine for me, and I wish the madeleine could've made it over and over and over.

We love the grease n flour. Classic.

Also the pelmeni :) Teaching Amanda the difference between pelmeni and pierogi was fun, because, i got hungry but I gave a pretty lumpy explanation. That's ok, our pielmeni were lumpy!



recipe aqui. Minor adjustment: we searched through aisles of beans, parking lots of angry food-shoppers, and mental inventories of frustrated grocers, and no adzuki beans could be found. So we went with the garbanzo. Admittedly, this made our pelmeni a bit drier, but half the work is showing up, right beans?

-Anna

Getting Up Close and Personal with Bran

If I had to choose two foods to live on for the rest of my life they would be greek yogurt and bran muffins. Some people don't like bran muffins--they are unenlightened.



But until last week, I'd actually never made them myself. If you live in L.a. I recommend Zen Bakery's vegan line. The cranberry (not dried!), blueberry, mango are incredible.

I found this recipe here.

{Their blog entry is funny-read it!)
Except, I
a) Doubled the recipe--yay more bran!
b)Used skim milk instead of soy or low fat.
c) Put in extra orange zest--good call, I recommend!
d)Put in dates instead of raisins, but only half the amount called for.
e)Added frozen cranberries.
f)Used almonds instead of walnuts but only a few tablespoons.
g)Added some chopped strawberries that were going bad.



I would say next time--more fruit and less honey. There was wayway too much honey. Any vegan would have cried. Well they wouldn't have touched it in the first place thanks to the eggs or milk, but regardless. I would say halve the amount of honey.



Also they would go well with this song.. Actually, I don't know what wouldn't go well with bran, or this song.
Enjoy!
-Amanda

Date Day

Dates used to scare me. In second grade, my primary relationship was them was the fact that you could say the sentence, "On that date I ate a date while I was on a date," and feel really cool. Now they're just delicious. Sometimes they're desecrated though when they're a date nut bread and the nut in question is pecan or walnut. Sometimes you're lucky though, and that nut is almond, or in this case, pistachio. I found this recipe, for scones, which I always thought were so refined. And these are supposed to be healthier scones (though next time I would add a tad more sugar and definitely the orange zest which I skipped out on in this batch). I kept the basic structure of this, but played around with a few things like poppy over fennel seeds, almond extract over vanilla, and clabbering the milk over ready-buttermilk. This would also be wonderful with fig instead of dates, and almonds instead of pistachios, and maybe with ginger or cardamom...so many possibilities.



Date, Pistachio, Poppy Scones
1 3/4 c.flour (I'd say a tad less next time)
2 TBS sugar (increase this, maybe 1/4 c.)
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
6 TBS butter, chilled (I used that vegan stuff Earth something, I forget.)
1/4 c. non-fat cottage cheese
1/4 c. low-fat milk plus a teaspoon of lemon juice to clabber it, takes 5 minutes (I needed to add more milk as I made the batter, so I'd increase this to 1/3 c. or maybe even 1/2 c.)
1 tsp orange zest (I didn't use this, but I would highly recommend, or lemon juice would be fine too, or blood orange, mmm)
1/2 tsp almond extract
1 c. chopped dates
1/4 c. chopped pistachios
1 TBS poppy seeds

1. Preheat the oven to 425 degrees Fahrenheit.
2. In a small bowl, clabber the milk with the lemon juice, then add the cottage cheese, and almond extract and whisk.
3. In another bowl mix the flour, sugar, baking soda, baking powder, and salt. Then cut the butter into small pieces and mix it in to the dry ingredients by rubbing it all together with your fingers (because a) I don't have a food processor and b) pastry cutters are useless).
4)Mix in the zest, dates, pistachios, and poppy seeds with the dry ingredients. Combine the dry ingredients and the wet ingredients but don't overmix! No one loves tough scones.
5)Throw out some flour on a cutting board or any surface really and take handfuls of the dough and shape into biscuit shapes, turnover shapes, whatever suits you really. I made mine about 1/2 inch thick and biscuit looking.
6) You can put an egg-wash on at this point, which in retrospect would have looked pretty, but I was too lazy. Just crack open an egg, beat it a bit, and spread it over the top of the scones with a pastry brush or your fingers.
7). Spray a baking sheet and put scones out. (I got about 11 out of this.)
8) Bake for about 15 minutes, more or less.

-Amanda