Rugetella

by hungry rabbit


Hanukkah started at sun down on this past Wednesday. To no surprise,  the chatter among my Twitter community is all about the food that they will prepare for this festive holiday. Latkes, matzo ball soup and even sufganiya, jelly doughnut, are some of the hot topics of the week. Granted I lived in New York and are familiar with the Jewish culture; but I am certainly no expert in cooking the dishes. Most Jewish households have  their own favorite recipes, passed down for generations or cookbooks written by experts such as Joan Nathan.

Since this is also Cookie Week, I will stick to my goyim approach and do what I know best. Rugelach is one of my favorite cookies. Biting into a slightly crispy sugary exterior, you will encounter a tender buttery dough wrapped around either fruit or nut filling. No matter which flavors you choose, it always yields the sound of ecstasy.

Another ingredient that can produce the same reward would have to be Nutella, a hazelnut chocolate spread. This is also an ingredient that has a huge following in Twitterverse. Many have made delicious baked goods that highlight the seductive capability of Nutella. So I say, why not make Rugetella-rugelach with nutella filling.

Since Nutella is produced as a spread, it oozes out of a typical rolled up crescent shape rugelach, so I use a different technique. A sprinkling of toasted hazelnuts and Nutella spread sandwiched between two sheets of rugelach dough, baked in a baking pan until golden and slighty crispy. Unlike a bar cookie, Rugetella has a softer body, I cut them into small finger-size stripes to prevent them from crumbling.

Bake these Rugetella to celebrate Hanukkah, but since Nutella is a spread that everyone loves, why not archive this recipe and baked the Rugetella when ever you have the urge to hit that special spot.. Have a wonderful holiday season and bake something special for your friends and family.

Welcome the Tiger

By Hungry Rabbit

To all people who trace their roots back to China, the most important date in the Lunar calendar is Chinese New Year, also known as the Spring Festival. As in all traditional Chinese gatherings, food plays an important role as this holiday’s dinners tend to be very elaborate involving tables laden with “auspicious” foods. The significance of food symbolism is sometimes based on appearance--other times, the sound of the Chinese name carries the added meaning. Tangerines and oranges, for example, are passed out freely during Chinese New Year as the words for tangerine and orange sound like luck and wealth, respectively. Steamed cakes are very popular during the Chinese New Year season, and sticky Rice Cake has symbolic value on many levels. Their sweetness symbolizes a rich, sweet life, while the layers express rising abundance for the coming year, and the round shape signifies family reunion.

During the week-long New Year celebrations, every household keeps its tables topped up with sweet and savory specialties so it can welcome family and friends with a choice of festive treats. Another prerequisite of Lunar New Year is the "tray of togetherness," a tray or special box filled with an assortment of auspicious treats. Among the more popular treats are sweetened lotus roots (embodying abundance), sweetened lotus seeds (suggesting fertility), dried melon seeds (stand for profuse earnings), and all kinds of candies, which are a source of long-term sweetness.

Walnuts are amongst the foods that have a special meaning--they represent happiness of the entire family. When friends visit, I’ll put out a bowl of walnut cookies to wish them and their families happiness in the Year of the Tiger. Interestingly, this recipe comes from another tradition. Springerle, which means ‘little jumper,’ is a type of German cookie or biscuit with an embossed design made by pressing dough into a mold. Molds are traditionally carved from wood. Their origin can be traced back to at least the 14th century in southeastern Germany and surrounding areas.


(More - and recipes - after the jump.)

Chocolate-and-Spice Treats for the Holidays

Posted by Brooklyn Bill

Chocolate-and-spice—especially chocolate-and-ginger—is a favorite flavor combination of mine. In this post, I'm going to do a wrap-up of chocolate-and-spice treats I've made around the holidays the past few years, with links to the full stories on my personal blog. It's sorta like one of those lame-ass sitcom episodes in which they repeatedly flash back to things that happened in other episodes so they don't have to write that much new material. Only with 100% less lame-ass-ness and absolutely no clips of Kirk Cameron as Mike Seaver!

My favorite cookies of all time are Martha Stewart's Chocolate-Gingerbread Cookies. I also love to make ice cream; during the spring and summer, I typically make 6 to 10 batches of various flavors (and I'll make the occasional batch in fall and winter). So it was probably inevitable that I'd eventually get the big idea to make an ice cream version of the cookie. The results, I gotta say, were pretty damn good.

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The Holiday Craft Sale at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia

Posted by Brooklyn Bill

I went to a craft fair yesterday at Martha Stewart's headquarters in the Starrett-Lehigh Building in far-west Chelsea with my pal Mark, a gay man who's a crafting enthusiast and a former professional crafter,* and Joyce, my straight girlfriend who, like me, enjoys cooking and baking but isn't one to make handicrafts. Though we enjoy buying them.

Until this year, the fair was open only to Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia employees. A friend of mine who works at MSLO told me about the fair last weekend. She and her co-workers got first dibs on Friday. She said that jewelry was the predominant offering but there were plenty of other neat items** to be had.

We arrived separately and met up inside the large exhibit space shortly after noon, when the fair began. M&J hadn't previously met. Mark is from North Dakota and rode downtown from the Upper West Side on his bike. Joyce is from Ohio and took a "little yellow thing" (Joyce-speak for a cab) from Brooklyn Heights. Both of them have lived in the city for many years, and one other thing they have in common (besides their longtime residency here and their friendship with me) is that they always make sure to check out the department store window displays around Christmastime. Joyce took her Mom to view them while her Mom was visiting from Kent for Thanksgiving. And Mark scoped out the windows at three stores—Macy's, Lord & Taylor, and Saks—after he left the fair before succumbing to the rain, cold, and crowds.