Help! I Have A Fire In My Kitchen

I get a great many emails from people all over the world, not necessarily with recipes but with a thank-you or just to drop a line and say they like Help! I Have A Fire In My Kitchen . I appreciate the email and though you can comment some people find it better to send an email instead of commenting on a specific post. An email from Pat Crosby hit my system today, and some of it I would like to pass on to readers of Help! I Have A Fire In My Kitchen . Pat says her products are certified OU Dairy. This means they are kosher and healthy to boot. I kind of like her take on things, and those of you in the US may want to check out the following products and resources. Pat writes: Hey Ted! Love your blog! But then who wouldn't! KEWL! (editor comment: Smart woman! Of course she has to love Help! I Have A Fire In My Kitchen!!!!!!!) Anyway, I rep some healthy school snack cookies that have just been certified kosher by the OU. Kosher Dairy. Wonder if you would to include them somehow on ...

This year I decided, through some incredible attack of true craziness to do most food shopping in the famous "Machaneh Yehudah" shuk - (marketplace) in Jerusalem. There are many people that love shopping here, and others who, like me, do not like having to shlep tons of food in bags all over the place. But there is certainly a magic in places like this, and one cannot beat the prices or the selection. So while buying (in two trips) fruit, veggies, carp (to make homemade Gifilte Fish) a 7 Kilo Turkey, spices, drinking glasses, wine glasses, tea and coffee glasses and on and on and on... I snapped a couple of pictures. Machaneh Yehudah is already very crowded as you can see, but will get nutso by tomorrow and certainly on Sunday and then on Monday morning. (Towards Monday afternoon the prices start dropping drastically - but only the brave or the very poor wait till then to buy food for Passover.) There is nothing on this planet that could convince me to go back there over the ...

Recently I visited the Jerusalem International Book Fair which I wrote about in Cobwebs Of The Mind , in the post, Jerusalem International Book Fair - Flashlight Press . While there, I was handed a cook book with the request to have it reviewed in Help! I Have A Fire In My Kitchen . I warned the person requesting the review that I would be brutally honest about the book and gave them a chance to cancel their request for the review. However, and this I say to their credit, they insisted they wanted an honest review of the book in question. Before I enter into my thoughts on the book, I know that some readers of Help! I Have A Fire In My Kitchen have contributed recipes to this book, as will become apparent soon, since this is somewhat of a conglomeration of recipes from many home cooks and some chefs at some fine restaurants in Israel. So it kinds of puts me on shaky ground, as it is never really a great place to be when you happen to know some of the people who contributed to a book t...

If you have not done so already, please read the following two posts before reading this one for an understanding of "Cholent" and how to begin to prepare the dish. The Magic Of Cholent - Introduction The Magic Of Cholent - Preparation & Ingredients All Right. Let us first recap the Ingredients: Potatoes Sweet Potatoes Fresh Onions Fresh Garlic Carrots Fresh Mushrooms Fresh Basil Fresh Oregano Turmeric Fresh Bay Leaves White Kidney Beans Dark Red/Brown Kidney Beans Barley Hawwaj Honey Cooking Wine Parsley Meat Marrow (Meat) Bones Kishke Olive Oil There are only three ingredients here which must be placed in order. The Olive Oil must go in first and the Honey must go in before the Kishke which goes in last. That is about it. So if you screw up don't worry. However, for the sake of making a really good cholent, try and follow the order I put down here. There is method to this madness in terms of the cooking cycle and the pot. In order to do this "correctly" I...

Before reading the following please make sure you read: The Magic Of Cholent - Introduction and after finishing this post read: The Magic Of Cholent - Directions For Cooking Preparing your cholent for the first time is going to be difficult. A lot of this will work on instinct and knowledge of the ingredients you are going to use. It also demands attention. For this recipe we are assuming a 9 liter pot. (That is fairly large and can feed at least 10 hungry people - if not 25 - with cholent.) 1. Pot(s) The first and important critical factor in making Cholent - is the pot(s) you are going to use. Do not even try to make this dish in a cheap thin pot. Simply put you will have burned cholent by the time you have to serve it. Completely burned and completely impossible to eat. You need a real good pot(s) for Cholent. So make sure you have them. I have, actually had, (I will explain the "had" later) until this past Friday, three great cholent pots. My friends call them my ...

The idea of a book on cooking for single and busy parents honestly all began with an email a few years ago when someone was complaining to me that all the books they seem to see were junk books written by celebrities making much-ado-about-nothing. They went on to rant about the cook books that were being produced by Gourmet chefs and the like that had dishes which took a whole month's pay to create and needed like 10,000 pots - and they still never came out right. "Why the hell doesn't someone write a normal cook book that normal people can use to learn how to cook?" this person asked knowing that I had taught myself how to cook since I divorced. I had to. I had kids to feed! And oh boy, can kids eat! Help! I Have A Fire In My Kitchen is about REAL LIFE, REAL KIDS, REAL PEOPLE, REAL KITCHENS AND REAL COOKING. I shrugged and let it go. Actually the whole subject did not interest me at the time. I was in the middle of getting some fiction WIP's together and workin...

Over the past few months I have promised and promised a great "cholent" recipe for the readers of Help! I Have A Fire In My Kitchen . So before the actual recipe let me explain to the readers who are not familiar with this dish exactly what it is. Actually Wikipedia has a fairly good article on Cholent. But there are some things missing and some things which must be added. First and foremost the dish is called "Cholent" by "Ashkenazi" Jews and called "Hamin" by Sephardic and Yemenite Jews. Wikipedia gives the Etymology of the word Cholent as follows: The word cholent is thought by some to be derived from the Old French words chaud meaning "hot" and lent meaning "slow". Others believe it is derived from the Latin calentem, meaning "hot" — a term documented with this exact meaning in the Spanish form caliente ever since the Late Middle Ages. The term chamin is mentioned in the Mishnah Tractate Shabbat (3:1). Whereas I...