Curry Chicken Pita with Cucumber Yogurt Sauce

A summery lunch! Serves 2, with leftovers.

Ingredients:

For chicken marinade:
2 boneless/skinless chicken breasts, pounded to uniform thickness
3 garlic gloves, smashed or rough chopped
2 tsp. curry powder
1/4 c. olive oil
juice of 1 lemon
salt and pepper

For cucumber yogurt sauce:
1 c. plain greek yogurt
1/4 seedless cucumber, grated or small dice
1 shallot, minced
a handful of parsley, rough chopped
lemon juice to taste
salt and pepper

Additional ingredients:
pita bread, tomatoes

Directions:

1) Mix together the garlic, curry powder, lemon juice, and olive oil and pour over pounded chicken. Marinate chicken in the fridge for a couple hours, but not overnight (the acid in the marinade will start to break down your chicken, making it tough and chewy).

2) Meanwhile, assemble your yogurt sauce by mixing together all the ingredients. Let it sit in the fridge for a while so that the flavors develop.

2) When your chicken is done marinating, heat up a good heavy skillet, preferably cast-iron (no need to add oil, by the way!). Season the chicken generously with salt and pepper. Brown the chicken on both sides (about 4 minutes per side, without peeking!), and then transfer to a 350 degree oven so that the chicken cooks through--about 15-20 minutes, depending on the size of your chicken breasts.

3) Slice chicken thinly and let cool.

4) Serve the chicken and yogurt sauce in warmed pita pockets, with a simple Israeli salad (tomatoes, cucumber, parsley, lemon juice, olive oil). Enjoy!

Chicken!

Cucumber yogurt sauce (in ingredient form)!

This is adapted from a recipe I made at work, and it's so good (and also makes great leftovers!). The flavors are so bright and summery and will make you want Mediterranean food all the time. Aaaand, it's pretty healthy! For best results, put your Israeli salad INSIDE the pita pocket. Happy lunching, friends!

Kimchi Soup

Serves 4
Total time: 40 minutes

Ingredients:
2 filets pork loin
2 cups Asian rice cake slices, photographed below (NOT American rice cakes!)
6 cups chicken broth
4 cups kimchi
4 eggs
2 tablespoons gojuchang (Korean red pepper paste)
3 tablespoons mirin
1/2 tube extra-silken tofu, about 6 oz
Vegetable oil
Salt and pepper
Optional: toasted sesame seeds and minced scallions to garnish

1) Toast the rice cakes in a dry large pot at medium-high heat. Stir them around occasionally, but allow them to blister and develop little brown spots, about 5 minutes. Remove from the pot and reserve.

2) Cut the pork into thin slices and season with salt and pepper. Coat the bottom of the soup pot with vegetable oil and heat it until a piece of pork sizzles when touched to the oil. Sear the pork for 2 minutes, stirring once, then remove from the pot and reserve.

3) Pour the chicken broth, and kimchi, along with all the kimchi juice, into the pot and bring to a boil, then keep at a simmer,

4) Stir in the gojuchang until dissolved. Add the pork, rice cakes, and mirin. Make sure to keep the broth at a simmer, then spoon off tablespoon-size globs of tofu into the pot. Then, crack the eggs into the pot one at a time. Don't stir. After two minutes, the eggs should be poached and the pork, rice cakes and tofu will be heated through. When serving, search for the eggs carefully so you don't break them! (They will sink a bit when cooking.)

Toasting the rice cakes

Reserved rice cakes and pork, plus tofu at the ready

Everything in!

Et voila

This is an inauthentic soup. I sorta just took all my favorite Korean soups and combined them in one tasty experiment. Don't be turned off by the weird ingredients. They are all standard items that can be found in Asian or Korean grocery stores, or possibly even your regular grocery store's Asian food aisle, if you are lucky enough. Items like rice cakes, kimchi, mirin and gojuchang will all keep for a crazy long time, at the ready whenever you feel like revisiting these flavors. In fact, the main ingredients you need here are really only chicken broth, kimchi, and mirin. Whatever else you add is just a matter of mood and what you have in your fridge. Dream big!

One could also be so bold as to add a few spoonfuls of gojuchang any time one makes basic chicken soup, and that alone would make for exciting times.

Last but not least, this is the ideal soup for a cold! Really opens up those sinuses.

Bubbie's Cookies - or - The Original Potchke

By Gracie, Molly, Julie, Liza, and Emeline

Bubbie's cookies are a sacred thing in Shore/Friedman history. Our parents and aunts and uncles and cousins all remember these flaky, filled cookies and rave about them. The only problem is that few attempts to make Bubbie's cookies have been made in the past few decades, and a lot of it was based on memory.

This potchke was an attempt to re-create the magic of Bubbie's cookies - working from the following, decidedly un-modern, recipe - in order to save them for posterity! Our additions and clarifications of the recipe will follow the pictures.

Dough--
2 cups (1 lb. shortening – Crisco)
2 cups flour
Pinch salt (?)
Mix into a paste

3 cups flour
2 egg yolks
½ cup vinegar
¾ cup water (about
Make flour into a well, stir and add water (about ¾ cup) add egg yolks and vinegar
Until soft dough is formed

Roll out dough ½ “ thick and spread paste over the dough. Rollup and refrigerate overnight.

Filling--
1 box raisins (white) blend w/water ‘till chopped
Pour off water and strain, a little at a time
Apples (big – ½ dozen) peel and grate, toss out core
Sugar, at least ½ cup
Add not too much cinnamon, (2 tsp.?)
Add pulverized nuts or bread crumbs or both

Grated apple (don't forget to toss out the core!)


Chopping raisins


Adding almond meal to the filling


Dough!


Filling the dough


Dough rolled...


And look at those beauties, about to bake!


Regarding the dough-- interestingly, two cups of Crisco is slightly less than a pound (I think we decided there were about six extra tablespoons in the jar of Crisco). We went by the two cup measurement and everything seemed fine. This made quite a lot of "paste," so I don't think any more would have been needed! We did add the pinch of salt. The second part of the dough recipe turned out to be just about right. Start with 1/2 cup of water, and go slow before you add more. You don't want your dough to be too wet. We rolled the dough out to closer to 1/4", and folded it (letter-style, multiple times, rotating it), rather than rolled it. We refrigerated our dough for about 36 hours. Oh-- and don't be alarmed by the vinegar smell emanating from your dough. You won't taste it!

Moving on to the filling. We used six average-sized apples. The raisins were the most interesting part. We had one 15-oz box of white raisins-- Auntie Gracie remembered her mom, our Bubbie, chopping them in a blender. We tried a mini food processor, and succeeded only in making a mess. Luckily, an immersion blender worked like a charm. You don't want the raisins quite pureed, but you want them slightly broken up-- a few pulses will do it. We also drained off all of the water we could. To the raisin/apple mix, we added the 1/2 cup of sugar, a scant cup of almond meal, and probably almost a tablespoon of cinnamon. Add your almond meal slowly-- our apples and raisins were pretty moist, so we ended up putting in more than anticipated.

Note-- this is the EXACT amount of filling needed for your Bubbie cookies if you have five people in the kitchen sneaking spoonfuls. Otherwise, you may end up with extra!

We worked with the dough in quarters. Flour your surface VERY well. ExTREMEly well. This dough is super wet, and extra flour won't hurt it. Roll out the dough pretty thin-- close to 1/8", I'd say. You can try to roll it into a long, thin rectangle, but it's no big deal. Any scraps can just be re-rolled later. Make a line of filling down the middle of the dough, and use less than you think. You don't want filling oozing out or making the cookies too mushy.

Fold the dough over towards you, kind of sealing the filling in along the edge with your fingers. Trim off excess dough, leaving only about 1/4" excess. Use a knife to "fringe" the edges, then cut into 2-3" cookies. Form the cookies into a crescent, then bake at 350 degrees for at least 30 minutes (this was a huge shocker for me). You want them to be really nice and golden brown, so you may find yourself going close to 40 or 45 minutes. Sprinkle them liberally with powdered sugar, and ENJOY!

Shore tip: when eating, hold your hand under your mouth to catch all of the flaky crumbs!

Potchke mission accomplished! Generations of Shores to come will be enjoying Bubbie's cookies.

Granola!

This recipe proves it: I'm the laziest potchkyer of them all.


(yields about 4 cups granola)

Ingredients:

3 cups rolled oats
1 cup assorted nuts (I used walnuts and sliced almonds, but you could use any of your favorites), chopped
1/2 cup sweetened coconut (optional, but if you omit it you may want to add a bit more of granulated sugar to your honey/butter mixture)
1/4 cup brown sugar
1/2 tsp. cinnamon
1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 stick butter
3 tbs. or so honey (just eye-ball it, don't bother making a mess!)
3 tbs. granulated sugar

1) Mix oats, nuts, coconut, brown sugar, and salt together in a large bowl.

2) Melt butter in a small saucepan and add honey and granulated sugar.

3) Pour the hot butter mixture over your oats/nuts and mix with a spatula until combined.

4) Turn out onto a sheet tray lined with parchment paper or a silpat (if you just try using non-stick spray, as I did one time, then you will definitely be potchkying with clean-up!), and bake at 300 for about 20-25 minutes. About halfway through, take a spatula and mix the granola around. Watch it carefully, because it can burn! I've found that the coconut is a good indicator of doneness; once it has toasted, it's likely that the granola is ready to come out of the oven.

As I said before, this is hardly a potchke! It's infinitely customizable and is a satisfying salty/sweet snack, particularly on top of some Greek yogurt. Make it on a lazy morning when it's raining outside and you don't feel like leaving the house.