Light the Bonfire of Love with Chocolate Logs (reiteration)!

Happy Mother’s Day, Beautiful People! Our sages said, “Who is wise? One who learns from every person” (Ethics of Our Fathers, 4:1). The first person in our lives we have a chance to learn from is MOTHER. From her we learn kindness, caring, and most importantly, unconditional love. Sometimes, it’s not a biological mother who does…

Strange Bedfellows: Banana Peanut Butter Bread

Once again, our gracious host Renard of https://renardsworld.wordpress.com has welcomed me as a guest on his wonderful blog. I managed to get it under the deadline, too; it was published in February, which is a Black History Month, albeit on the last day of it. This is what happens when you teach eight courses, when…

Chocolate Roses for Valentine’s

I’ve been getting an impression that you, Beautiful People, like reading my historical improvisations more than my recipes. I am happy to accommodate. As we say in Odessa, “If it’s songs you want, I’ve got them for you.” This is Frida Kahlo, a great Mexican artist famous for her self-portraits and paintings of flowers. She…

Going Nuts Over Coffee Chocolate Cake

This is the first time, Beautiful People, that I am answering a challenge published by a blogger. I am only doing it to support a delightful and talented Marla of https://marladragon.wordpress.com/2023/01/23/challenge-for-january-23-2023 who has just come up with her first challenge. Here it is: Consider this challenge a “Wordle” lite. Pick at least three bullets from…

The Holy Hole-less Doughnuts

When Adam and Eve had to leave the Garden of Eden in a hurry, they hadn’t thought of packing a lunch box. Supposedly, He Who had kicked them out, sent them a comfort parcel with a dozen hole-less doughnuts filled with jam. Yum! The Hebrew word for doughnut, sufgania, is here presented as an abbreviation of…

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),…

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…

My Grandmother’s Recipes: Part 7, Strudel.

This Sunday we start celebrating a series of holidays commonly called The High Holidays. In Yiddish, we simply say Yontoivim – The Holidays,  and everybody understands which holidays are meant. That’s because there are four holidays that follow each other not only on the calendar, but also in meaning and significance. In this chapter, you will see the…

Secret Mango Flower Pie

Today is a National Mango Day, Beautiful People, so I am repeating one of my favorite dessert recipes. Flowers are not only pretty; they have meanings.  The language of flowers, sometimes called floriography, has been used throughout the ages to express messages of love, longing, happiness, desire, pity, and sometimes even suspicion and sarcasm. Although…

Light the Bonfire of Love with Chocolate Logs!

Happy Mother’s Day, Beautiful People! Our sages said, “Who is wise? One who learns from every person” (Ethics of Our Fathers, 4:1). The first person in our lives we have a chance to learn from is MOTHER. From her we learn kindness, caring, and most importantly, unconditional love. Sometimes, it’s not a biological mother who does…