You adored it as a kid, but you’ve never outgrown it. Here are two words that make everyone’s eyes light up – ice cream!

“In the store-bought category there’s good, not so good and really bad,” said food writer and consultant Peggy Fallon, author of “The Best Ice Cream Maker Cookbook Ever” (HarperCollins) from her Northern California home. Ice cream maker? Do I need yet another unused appliance taking up space on my counter, I wondered.

Then I leafed through the book and I was smitten. Chocolate Pumpkin with Hazelnuts. Peaches ‘n’ Cream. Double Ginger. Utterly Peanut Butter with a whole cup of peanut butter in a quart of ice cream!  But with so many even gourmet ice creams available today, why would I want to make my own?

“I think the appeal of homemade ice cream, sorbets and frozen yogurts is that you control what goes into them,” Fallon noted. “There are so many odd ingredients in most supermarket ice cream. Just look at the labels. When you make your own, you use real cream, eggs, sugar and milk. If you’re concerned about what you put into your body, it’s better to eat real food.”

Sounds great, but I’m thinking, remember that bread machine you couldn’t live without and the havoc it played with your waistline?

Then I read on. A chapter called “On the Lighter Side” offers mouthwatering light ice creams, frozen yogurts, granitas and sorbets with alluring titles such as Maple Crunch Light Ice Cream, Tangy Orange Iced Buttermillk, Honey Vanilla Frozen Yogurt and Pear Sorbet with Zinfandel and Fresh Basil.  Read the whole story 

New Orleans Times-Picayune
by Judy Walker

Judy Bart Kancigor started "Cooking Jewish: 532 Great Recipes From the Rabinowitz Family" (Workman, $19.95) as a family project.

The flourless chocolate cake recipe, bete noire, "came from my cousin's daughter," said Kancigor, a writer for The Orange County Register in California. "She brought it to my kids' house the first time they had Passover." And she had given it the name "Too Good to Call Passover Cake."

Find this flourless chocolate cake recipe as well as Goat Cheese and Pine Nut Mini Cheesecakes with Cranberry Haroset when you Read the whole story

from the New York Daily News March 31, 2008
by Rosemary Black

The very first recipe that Judy Bart Kancigor tested for her new book, "Cooking Jewish" (Workman) was her grandmother's Passover nut cake. When it came out of the oven, the author gave a piece to her mother and asked, "Ma, is this it?" And was astonished to see her mother's eyes widen and brim with tears as memories flooded her mind of Passovers gone by.

(Find recipes for Gramma Sera Fritkin's Russian Brisket, Chicken Soup and Shiitake Mushroom Matzoh Balls when you read the whole story.)

Remember the movie “If It’s Tuesday This Must Be Belgium”? That was my life for the past few weeks when my book tour brought me to South Florida where I had 13 gigs in 11 days.

The highlight was my cooking demonstration at the KitchenAid Culinary Center at Robb & Stucky Patio, a chichi furniture store in Palm Beach Gardens offering cooking classes in its fully stocked, state-of-the-art professional kitchen.

The event was sponsored by the Jewish Community Center of the Greater Palm Beaches, and here are the four dishes I taught that evening – Layered Hummus and Eggplant Appetizer, Yemenite Haroset Truffles, Malaysian Latkes and a flourless chocolate cake we call Too Good to Call Passover Cake Bete Noire.

But enough about me!

The Center’s Chef Christian Mailloux, a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York, generously turned his kitchen over to me for the night, but more importantly, his services as sous-chef!

“I’ve been interested in cooking since I was a child, watching my mom and dad,” Mailloux told me as he chopped my onions in preparation for the class.

Mailloux’s grandparents and great-grandmother were from the Azores, and he grew up with the Portuguese cuisine of his mother’s family and the French of his father’s.

“There was always some sort of French-Portuguese dish floating around,” he recalled, “veal braised in tomato sauce, Portuguese sweet bread, cured olives. My brother and I would run around the house with an olive on every finger.”

by DEBORAH S. HARTZ

Sally Bower - nee Rabinowitz - has celebrated a lot of Passovers. But the one she remembers most fondly happened 70 years ago in Brooklyn. The Seder was at her boyfriend’s house, and it was the first time she would meet his family. When he opened the door, he had a bouquet for her.

During that evening, he put a ring on Bower’s finger in front of his family - even though the couple had been dating only three months.

Although this story is not in "Melting Pot Memories" by Bower’s niece Judy Bart Kancigor, many other exploits of the Rabinowitz family are. What started as a book written as a family heirloom has become popular across the nation with the book in its fifth printing and more than 3,200 copies sold.

It begins with the story of the Rabinowitz family leaving Slonim, in what is now Belarus, for the United States. It includes a history of the area, the family tree and 600 recipes gathered from 159 family members.

"It’s more of a story than a cookbook," Kancigor says by phone from her home in Fullerton, Calif.

But many of the recipes are from Bower, who was one of the tribe’s better cooks. She learned her way around the kitchen from her mother, who made a mean challah, and her mother-in-law, who had prepared meals for bar mitzvahs and weddings in the old country.

She remembers her mother soaking glasses for three days and burying the silver outside with hot coals for purification. The house was cleaned and any remaining crumbs of chometz - leaven - were searched out with a feather and burned.

Then there were the fish. The live ones kept in the bathtub so they’d be fresh when it was time to make the gefilte fish.

My grandmother, Mama Hinda, was a burier. No, not an undertaker. Okay, spell it berye. Yiddish for major-domo cleaner extraordinaire. As in white glove test above the door frame. As in you could eat off the floor. As in using the basement oven to keep the upstairs kitchen clean.

And if Mama was thorough during the year, before Passover she was fanatic. Passover preparation is spring cleaning on steroids – a joyous frenzy to ready the house for the holiday and remove all chometz (bread or any food containing leaven)…every last crumb.

Weeks before she would scrub, scour, scald, polish and shine. As the holiday approached, her Passover dishes – one set for milchig (dairy) and one set for fleishig (meat) – would be brought from the basement and washed. My Aunt Sally remembered, when she was a child in the 1920’s, Mama soaking glasses for three days and burying silverware outside with hot coals for use during the holiday. No closet, no shelf, no corner evaded her purification ritual.

On the night before Passover, Papa Harry and the children would search the already scoured home for any remaining crumbs of chometz, which would be swept up with a feather and burned. (So stringent is the prohibition that Jews are forbidden not only to consume, but even to possess such things as bread, noodles, yeast and other leavening agents, or anything made with flour during the holiday.)

Downstairs in the cold cellar, the earthen crock of rossl (fermented beets) Mama had started weeks before stood ready to infuse her borscht (beet soup), and eggs by the crate awaited her practiced hand to whisk them into ethereal citrus sponge cakes and irresistible chocolate nut tortes.

Lisa Keys writes in the JTA (Jewish Telegraphic Agency) that new traditions can start at any time, with a little inspiration from COOKING JEWISH. Read the whole story.

My column at OU's ezine "Shabbat Shalom" features the following recipes from Jayne Cohen's "Jewish Holiday Cooking": Chickpeas with Garlic and Barbeque Spices, Poached Prune Kreplach with Honeyed Cream and Pecans, Mishmash Kreplach (Beef, Potato and Fried Onion Kreplach). You'll find them at the end of the story.

When Jayne Cohen and her sister returned home after their grandmother had passed away, they were determined to recreate the holiday dishes they had grown up on. But neither had ever attempted these traditional recipes. Those had been Grandma’s province. Read the entire story.

The March issue of Better Homes and Gardens features three Passover recipes from Cooking Jewish: Apricot Squares, Chocolate Macaroons and Flourless Chocolate Cake. See pages 160 and 162 and enjoy!