Standing at attention, eyes front, my elementary school days began with a resounding rendition of G’d save the Queen, the British national anthem. Canada is a commonwealth country and the Queen is its constitutional monarch. On the 6th of February this year, Her Majesty The Queen became the first British monarch to celebrate a platinum jubilee, marking seventy years of service. The Queen has reigned longer than anyone in modern…
“That’ll be one eggs over easy, toasted bagel on the side, one order of French toast, and a hot chocolate to go”, I muttered to myself as I swung into the early morning breakfast rush. And no, I was not working as a short-order cook at Smitty’s waffle house. When our children were school age, breakfast time was twenty minutes of controlled chaos. OK, not so controlled. Kind of like…
“How come I can’t act like a normal person and just throw something out”, I recently bemoaned to my sister. I was complaining about a box of peaches that tasted like they were never going to reach their sweet spot, and wondering aloud how I could repurpose them. “It’s called upcycling and it’s a good thing, using food in a way to create something better than the original. Make jam”,…
Catching up with my sister last week, she described her Sunday brunch menu in mouth-watering detail. But it was her pronouncement that the bagels were “the best that I ever made”, that really gave me pause. “You made your own bagels!”, I sputtered. Slightly warm, with a crispy golden crust and a soft, chewy interior with a schmear of cream cheese, a well-made, fresh bagel is the ultimate comfort food.…
Meyer Lansky, better known as the “Mob’s Accountant”, was a regular patron of Ratner’s, a Jewish dairy restaurant in New York City. It was there that Lansky, along with fellow mobsters Charlie “Lucky” Luciano and Bugsy Siegel, enjoyed their favorite item on the menu, cheese blintzes. Fortunately, pursuing a life of crime is not a necessary prerequisite for indulging in this ethereal comfort food. Crispy crêpes filled with just the…
I settled in comfortably at the kitchen table with a steaming mug of coffee at my elbow for my Sunday morning catch-up call with my daughter. As we reviewed the last few days’ events, I overheard her giving some gentle direction to my granddaughter Avigail, aged nine. Avigail was baking chocolate breakfast muffins, a deep, dark, chocolate muffin studded with chocolate chips and topped with a crunchy lid of turbinado…
Have you ever taken a big bite out of a hamantasch, the traditional three-cornered pastry eaten at Purim time, thinking that it was prune-filled only to realize that it was actually mohn or poppy seed. Although poppy seed continues to be the most popular filling for hamantaschen, my personal preference is for anything but mohn. But these muffins are the exception to that rule. Lemon poppy seed muffins are an…
Lunch dates with my friend Shoshana at our favorite café is one of the many things that I miss these days. At the appointed time, we would meet, hugging one another like long lost relatives, no matter that we already spoke on the phone twice that morning and saw each other three days ago. After having resolved the crucially important issue of where we should sit, we would study the…
For the last few years I have been sending out breakfast-in-a-bag on Purim morning as mishloach manot, the food gift that we send to one another in honor of the holiday. Consisting of a freshly baked muffin or two, yogurt, orange juice and a bag of homemade granola, it can be easily assembled with a minimal amount of advance preparation and lets family and friends know that I’m thinking of…