Posts Tagged ‘family favorite’

Latkes, latkes, I love latkes

NOT a little but a lot of

Latkes, latkes, I love latkes

NOT a little but a lot…

Of latkes

Okay, now that we’ve gotten my favorite preschool Hanukkah song out of my head, it’s time to get down to the business of potato latkes!

Let’s be honest. Like all ethnic food, latkes are personal. You usually like what you grew up with, whether it was heavy, soft potato pancakes or thin, crispy ones. You either like onions in ′em or you don’t. You’re of matzoh meal lineage or flour lineage.

My mom loved ′em crunchy, but I remember hers coming out fairly mushy, and once I developed my own recipe for them, she was more…

Category: Recipes

A few Sundays ago, we decided it was a fried chicken kind of day, and we figured that nothing goes better with all that crunchy goodness than top-notch mashed potatoes. Ina has three recipes for what I used to call “mash’ll tee-toes” as a toddler, and because of the buttermilk in the chicken recipe, we decided upon the buttermilk variation. The problem with mashed potatoes is that they either come out lumpy if you use a hand masher or gluey if you’re silly enough to put them into a food processor. Two words, my friends: food mill. Brilliant! Miraculous! Standing ovation! Those Yukons transformed into edible velvet. Moistened with milk, butter and buttermilk, they were…

Category: Recipes

(Wait – “real” meatballs? As opposed to, what, mock meatballs made from Ritz Crackers?)

There’s only one problem with these meatballs. No matter how many I make, I never have leftovers for the freezer.

Feeding my crew is a somewhat daunting task. The more time consuming a dish is, the more the five of them always like it. And the more they like it, the more they eat. And the more they eat, the less chance for me to have extra so I can save work on a lazy day and pull something dazzling out of the freezer.

I try. I really do. This time I started with five pounds of ground meat. That’s two-and-a-half times…

Category: Recipes

Okay, so it’s not a Barefoot recipe, but the whole family insisted I share their raves about this enchanting Italian masterpiece that we savored a couple of weekends ago.

Way back when ““ on our honeymoon actually ““ Dave and I had a scrumptious meal at a Northern Italian restaurant in St. Thomas called Romano’s (woo-hoo…I just checked and it’s still there!), featuring New Jersey-native chef-owner Tony Romano’s outstanding osso bucco. I had never before eaten osso bucco, with its braised veal shanks melting into a rich sauce, atop perfect, glistening saffron risotto, with a sprinkling of bright gremolata. I instantly learned the ambrosial joy that a marrow spoon can bring! The dish was positively beguiling,…

Category: Recipes

Kugel is like any other Jewish dish — you swear by the style that your bubbe made, and any variation of that is farkakte (literally “becrapped”). For me, raisins in kugel is farkakte. Cottage cheese, ricotta cheese or anything other than Philly cream cheese? Farkakte. No crunchy corn flake topping? Farkakte. Barefoot Contessa kugel? Farkakte!

The biggest variation between my mom’s and Nana’s versions of our family recipe was the use of vanilla extract in the batter. Nana insisted it should be in there; Mom, not so much. I happen to like vanilla so I use it, and I also sometimes use brown sugar in the crunchy topping. Other than that, our original recipe is unchanged.

I got kugel-ed…

Category: Recipes

Meeeee luvvvvvv cooooookiessss!

My super-duper sleuthing has uncovered the fact that Eli Zabar’s shortbread recipe is published over and over again throughout the Barefoot library in different variations. Shortbread hearts, linzer cookies, shortbread cookies with dragés…it’s all the same shortbread.

Granted it’s just four ingredients and it’s yummy, but I like making these because there are few things more fun than using cookie cutters! Takes me back to little cans of Play-Doh (“Doh!” ““ how Homer Simpsonian!), a tiny rolling pin and plastic cookie cutters. I haven’t made these cookies in ages, and I was so happy to find my worn bag of steel cutters in different shapes and sizes. (My favorite cutters? Four copper ones in…

Category: Recipes

A few very cool things have happened as a result of this Barefoot blog:

• I’ve gotten to spend some time in the kitchen teaching each of my boys a bit about cooking

• I’ve gotten more disciplined about planning meals in advance so dinner isn’t always a last-minute nightmare

• I’ve gotten to write every day!

• I’ve gotten to work on improving my pitiful photography skills

• I’ve gotten a HUGE compliment from Eli Zabar, who tasted my brownies and proclaimed them even better than Ina’s originals (he said it had to be the chocolate, and he was actually going to…

Category: Recipes

About the only thing more fun than spelling tzatziki is eating it!

This bright, fresh Greek dip is a cool complement to grilled lamb, and with the wide availability of strained yogurt (like Fage), it’s a cinch to make. Time was, you’d have to wrap up the plain yogurt in cheesecloth and let it drain over a bowl for a few hours to get all the liquid out, or you’d wind up with a thin, watery dip. Nowadays, the only thing you have to drain is the grated cucumber. And I mean you really need to have the time and patience to let it drain.

Check this out:

This is what’s left…

Category: Recipes

It’s no wonder my boys adore lemonade. Every time I was pregnant, I drank gallons and gallons of the stuff ““ and it had to be homemade. None of that powdered junk or frozen concentrate. In fact, the first hint I had that I was pregnant with the twins was a sudden craving for lemonade (and full-sour pickles from Carnegie Deli!).

Lemonade makes us all smile, and we even make it from time to time in the cold of winter as a cheerful reminder of warmer, sunnier days. The happy color and the sweet-tart flavor are like liquid sunshine, and we couldn’t think of a better way to end this fantastic summer than by sharing a…

Category: Recipes

Sixteen years ago today I ate chocolate cake. It was a beautiful three-tiered dark chocolate cake with chocolate ganache filling and white fondant, and I joyfully shared it with 160 people. It was our wedding cake!

There was likely a fair share of dubious guests toasting with us that Sunday evening and dancing into the wee hours of Labor Day. After all, Dave and I had met on a blind date, gotten engaged seven weeks later, and were married within five months. (And no, our first baby was still almost a year-and-a-half off…I know what you were thinking!) But as they say, when it’s right, sometimes you just know it instantly. After every blind date, my grandmother would…

Category: Recipes