YOUR HEALTHY PLATE: Mushroom Potato Stew (gf, vegan)

A dear friend of mine, a great cook, recommended this recipe to me a couple of weeks ago. She made it, her daughter made it, and now I’ve made it. A triple play! It was not originally gluten free, but I made it gluten-free by substituting tamari and oat flour for the soy sauce and wheat flour in the prior version. Easy peasy. 

Try serving this with a plate of sliced oranges, maybe sprinkled with a few berries. Nothing specific, just use whatever you can find in the fridge.  Continue reading


YOUR HEALTHY PLATE: Curried Lentil, Tomato, and Coconut Soup

If you are not familiar with the celebrity chef, Yotam Ottolenghi, now would be a good time to get acquainted.

Everything Yotam touches turns to gold. I am sure that his kitchen must have more than three dimensions. He mixes ingredients better than I mix metaphors.

If you don’t already have one of his cookbooks [Ottolenghi (2008), Plenty (2010), Jerusalem (2012)] in your home, prepare yourself. YO takes flavor to the next level. Look at this list of ingredients – I’ve used all of them, but never to such glorious effect. And it’s not just flavor. He takes texture to the next level, and color. You could make this and turn an ordinary dinner into a celebration, or share it with a deserving friend, or make a memorable contribution to a workplace potluck. This recipe falls into the category of “contributions from the heart.” You have to try it to believe it. Continue reading


YOUR HEALTHY PLATE: Lentils & Collards Soup

I’ve posted this recipe in these pages once before, but it’s so unusual and delicious that it’s definitely worth repeating. Plus I have a lot of collards in the fridge at the moment. I love how the aromatics supplied by the cumin and cinnamon and lemon in this soup yield a result whose flavors are so different from the spice combinations I normally tend to reach for. Continue reading


YOUR HEALTHY PLATE: The Season for Cholent (Crockpot Stew, vegan/GF)

This weekend I made our first cholent of the season for Sukkot, the fall harvest festival. We ate it inside our beautiful sukkah, built mostly by my husband, but this year with the help —for the first time — of our very young grandchildren. Cholent warms you from the inside out in chilly weather, and then, just little while later, it is gone.

I have made cholent (a crockpot stew traditionally served on holidays and Shabbat) a thousand times or more in my life, and no two versions have ever come out exactly the same. But, like riding a bike, there is a rhythm to the recipe, and once you get the rhythm, it belongs to you for the rest of your life. Continue reading


YOUR HEALTHY PLATE: Luscious Lentil Salad To Go

Here’s a wonderful recipe for you to try! Especially after weekends of the kinds of food extravaganzas that the coming weeks are sure to bring, this salad will be a great choice for helping your digestive system to get back on track. Lentils are a very special food. Not only are they a fantastic source of protein, but they are also rich in fiber. There are only a few categories of foods that can make that claim. Not just that, but they are delicious, especially as prepared in this recipe. Continue reading


Real Breakfasts for All You Champions

Last week I wrote about the sorry story of how boxed cereals came to predominate morning choices for breakfast; this week I’m sharing some of my own breakfast choices. The first thing I am going to point out is that my breakfasts do not differ significantly from other meals I eat through the day. That is to say, I don’t keep a separate list of breakfast options from lunch and dinner options. While I would say that I probably eat less spicy stuff at breakfast time, it’s more of a suggestion than a hard-and-fast rule, as you will see.

A major category of breakfasts in my house is the leftovers I find in the refrigerator, with or without a little extra something. So it could be that I heat up a bowl of leftover stir-fried vegetables, and that might be enough by itself, but I might also add some leftover rice if there is any. Or maybe I will fry an egg and slide it on top, or melt a slice of cheese (vegan for me) on top.  Continue reading


YOUR HEALTHY PLATE: Red Lentil Soup for Rosh Hashanah

Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, begins tonight at sundown. High Holiday foods tend toward the sweet and the circular: sweet to represent our wishes for a sweet new year, and circular to symbolize the seasons that run one into the next, round and round, year after year.

So it is traditional to eat many different kinds of fruits, especially apples, prunes, pomegranates, dates and apricots; and sweet vegetables such as beets, carrots, sweet potatoes, and leeks (sliced into rounds, of course), as well as black-eyed peas and lentils. And lots of honey, especially for dipping bread and apples. Continue reading


Making Special Meals Even More So (plus a recipe)

The other day my son-in-law and I were talking about my upcoming plans to pass along some of our dishes (the ones we use for meat meals), and instead start using my mother’s beautiful china. Those dishes, which lived happily and visibly in my parents’ house for sixty-plus years, have not been used at all for the past 10 or 15 years, and it seems a waste for us not to be using them now. So it will be out with the new, and in with the old. And also, since we don’t eat meat very much anymore, chicken and turkey not more than once or twice a month, and beef no more than once or twice a year, I had the idea to move the meat dishes out of the kitchen itself, and into a little pantry off the kitchen. That way, they will be nearby when we need them, but the rest of the time we will be able to fill the kitchen cabinets with items we use a lot more often.  Continue reading


YOUR HEALTHY PLATE: Red Lentil Soup for the New Year

This coming Monday evening, as the sun slips below the horizon, we will begin our celebration of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. Rosh Hashanah dishes traditionally tend toward the sweet and the circular: sweet for a sweet new year, and circular to represent the seasons that run one into the next, year after year, around and around. Instead of the usual braid, even challah is twisted into rounds at this time of year.  Continue reading


YOUR HEALTHY PLATE: French Lentil Salad

If you like lentils as much as I do, this simple recipe is probably looking pretty good to you. I would not have thought of mixing a classic dijon vinaigrette with lentils, but it works oh-so-deliciously. These lentils are exactly the kind of thing I love to find in the refrigerator when I don’t know what I’m looking for. To make this recipe easier (pandemic style), feel free to skip the bay leaf, substitute 1/2 tsp. garlic powder for the garlic, and use some kind of halfway decent Italian dressing instead of the olive oil, vinegar, mustard, and spices. Then if you can get yourself or someone else to peel and slice a carrot and onion, the whole recipe will come together. Good enough. Continue reading