Get Your Game on With Chocolate Halva Balls

In honor of the World Cup – and for those of you, Beautiful People, who call it soccer, it’s FOOTBALL! – with all its surprising results and insane scores, we made chocolate halva balls at our Lasting Joy Club get-together – watch the videos here. Actually, according to http://www.sportsaspire.com, the word itself came from an abbreviation assoc. (Association of Football),…

Placinda – Flaky Pumpkin Pie

A prominent Rabbi picks up an apple, pronounces the appropriate blessing, and bites into it. One of his students also picks up an apple, mutters a blessing, and takes a bite. Then he stops and asks: “Rabbi, what is the difference between you and me eating an apple? We both say the same blessing, yet…

Sweet Rose of Thanks

This beautiful rose and a beautiful sentiment by Paolo Coelho are for all of you, Beautiful People, with all my love and best wishes for Thanksgiving! I also have a delicious sweet potato rose to grace your table with love and heartfelt promises. I have been asked to post “something new to do with sweet…

Smoking Turkey

This is not a mistake. It’s not smoked turkey; these are turkey cigars. You can’t smoke them, so you’ll have to eat them! They are pictured next to a real cigar, made by my husband’s boutique cigar company Senor Solomon Kosher Cigars. This unique cigar is 12 inches long, 70 gauge, and it’s called The Senor. Some…

Something Wild About That Turkey

Of all the silly infantile jokes, this one takes the cake (or a pumpkin pie, in this case): What did the turkey say when he saw a computer? “Google, google, google!” I guess that was a wild turkey who had never been introduced to a Publix freezer. But then, if we believe the story about…

Crock Pot Turkey Breast and Finding Courage to Love

In 1863, President Abraham Lincoln issued an historic document that started with the following words: The year that is drawing towards its close, has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. The Proclamation continues: I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those…

Falstaff on a Diet: Chunky Soup for a Chunky Knight

Once again, our gracious host Renard has published my guest post. Yes, Beautiful People, I am happy to report that I am out of the wheelchair, I am walking around the house (with a walker), and I am cooking. Here is my humble contribution to Renard’s wonderfully informative blog:

Tweaked Green Papaya Salad and Carol’s Naughty Corner

Originally posted on koolkosherkitchen:
South Florida is a crazy patchwork of little cities, towns, and villages, each boasting tropical flavor and colorful history. However, only one bears an official title City Beautiful, the City of Coral Gables. One of the seven cities in the United States influenced by the City Beautiful North American architectural movement…

Dracula and Klyotzki Dumplings

Originally posted on koolkosherkitchen:
It looks like my Monster cookies were not scary enough for you, Beautiful People. Let me introduce you to some truly terrible real monsters who have become legendary. Count Dracula really existed. He was born in Transylvania in fifteenth century and ruled the province called Wallachia. His name was Vlad III,…

MONSTER ChoCo Squares

We don’t do Halloween, but we have our own monsters. One of them is world famous. You see his heavy footprints throughout the world literature and arts, from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to The X- Files.  You hear his eerie voice in Karel Capek’s R.U.R., where the word “robot” comes from, in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, recognizable as Gollum, and in Isaac Bashevis Singer’s The…

Strong and Sweet: Poached Pears

Holidays are over, yet there is one more recipe for dessert that I usually serve on Shabbos Chol-ha-Moed (in the middle) of Sukkos. “For never was a story of more woeThan this of Juliet and her Romeo.” Do I really have to cite a source for this one? I’d rather have you enjoy the beginning…

Silver Chair, Polygamy, and Mount Sinai

Rabbi Gershom ben Yehuda, widely known as Rabbeinu (our teacher) Gershom, lived in 10th century. He can’t really be called a Renaissance man, since he pre-dated Renaissance by a couple of centuries, so let’s call him a pre-Renaissance man. Like some other medieval Jewish scholars, he was also a scientist, a mathematician, a physician, and as a…