Broccoli Kugel

Cartoonists and animators hate broccoli.
Probably because they're dead inside

There's a traditional dish amongst many Jews called Kugel. The word comes from a dialect of German in the middle ages, and roughly translates to "ball." This has absolutely nothing to do with what the dish is. Kugel, at least nowadays, is essentially a casserole or a cooked pudding made out of either noodles or vegetables. It's usually savory, but sweet variants have been known to exist that often involve raisins and other crimes agains humanity. So, you know, totally like a ball? If you talk to historians or linguists they'll tell you something along the lines of the original kugels back in the day probably had a rounded shape which is why they were named that. Being a historian or a linguist sounds like a boring job, so I'll forgive them for obviously being drunk.

Ingredients:

3 lb. Broccoli (You can totally use frozen bags of broccoli for this, but if you want to use fresh just cook the broccoli first. There are instructions, along with a recipe for an insanely good soup, here)
4 Eggs
4 TBSP Potato Starch
3 TBSP Mayo
3 TBSP Onion Soup Mix (If you don't like using mixes like this, you can make your own out of dried onion, onion powder, celery salt, dried parsley, garlic powder, and black pepper. Which is pretty much what's in the mix anyway, so cancel that feeling of accomplishment you had planned)
3 TBSP Vegetable Oil
1 Onion
Salt
Black Pepper

The first thing you're going to want to do is make some friends and invite them over for a meal. Partially because like most traditional recipes with a long history, kugel is best served amongst friends and family at a cheerful meal. And partially because this is going to make 2 pans of kugel, and you don't want to be that weird guy who eats three pounds of broccoli on his own and then has to shamefully avoid making eye contact with the cashier the next day when he has to buy more broccoli from the store (And don't even start about how it's a big store, and you'll probably get a different cashier. You could go shopping in a different time zone and you'd somehow end up with the same cashier). Now it's time to deal with your broccoli. Depending on your level of manliness and/or masochism, use either a food processor, a potato masher, several knives and forks, or your bare hands to reduce your broccoli into tiny pieces or goop. Bonus points if you use a food processor, but only the outside of it which you then smash down on your broccoli like a caveman. Bonus points are redeemable in the form of tiny shards of plastic in your food. Then add in your eggs, potato starch, mayo, soup mix, and oil, and stir until the whole thing is homogenous. Add in salt and pepper to taste (unless you enjoy tiny salmon swimming through your blood to their ancestral spawning grounds, I wouldn't actually swallow the raw eggs here, but follow your heart), then split that goop into two round 9-inch pans and bake it at 350 for about 45 minutes.

Insane amount of food made courtesy of Jewish Holidays
Jewish Holidays: like Thanksgiving, but WAY more often.

While your kugels are in the oven, it's time to make your house smell awesome for the benefit of those largely imaginary friends you invited over who've had nothing to do for a while but stare at you abusing some broccoli. So take your onion and choppity chop chop it into tiny pieces and then sauté it with some oil and kosher salt until it turns a nice deep shade of brown. The key to browning onions is patience. Don't constantly stir them. Let them sit in the hot pan, legitimately longer than you think you should. Like, just on the cusp of so long that you'd be concerned that they're burning. Willingness to burn your house down is also key for browning onions. Anyhow, once your kugels are out of the oven, sprinkle your browned onions over the top of them to add an extra dash of insane deliciousness to a dish that can, even on it's own, be described as "an awful lot of broccoli, even considering its name." And that's all there is to it. You've got a delicious view into food from the middle ages that didn't even end with you getting dysentery. I call that a win.

Apple Pomegranate Crumble

One of these things is not like the other, one of
these things is 90% seeds.

So the new year is upon us. Not the fun new year at the end of December that starts full of excessive alcohol consumption and excitement, and ends in hilarious tragedy or boredom. The Jewish new year, which is pretty much a time for merriment, introspective self-evalutation, and eating delicious foods until we can't lift our arms to eat any more, at which point a trained staff of hired help will continue to stuff food down our throats until we (or they) pass out. Also, there's a more recent tradition to eat some specific foods for the symbolism, such as pomegranates for a multitude of blessings, or apples and honey for a sweet year. There are like 100 more of these. I won't bore you or me by listing them. Especially since I've already taken this "Jewish Traditions 101" class to its intended conclusion, which was saying the words "apple" and "pomegranate."

Ingredients:

4 Granny Smith Apples
3 Honey Crisp Apples
3/4 Cup Flour
3/4 Cup Oatmeal
1/2 Cup Brown Sugar
6 TBSP Butter
1.5 TBSP Grenadine (Real grenadine. Made out of pomegranates. If you can't make or find it, use Pomegranate Molasses)
1 TBSP Cinnamon
The juice from 1/2 a Lemon (How you convince the lemon to give you its juice is between the two of you, however bribery is the preferred method.)

The first thing you're gonna need to do is skin your apples. This may seem like adding insult to injury after having climbed up into their ancestral homes and kidnapped them by the bushel. But it actually serves the very real purpose of being a warning to the other fruits that you're not to be trifled with. Also something about the skins not softening when the flesh does and creating a tough dish to eat, but that sounds like heathen nonsense to me. Now here's the thing. The second that the flesh of an apple hits the air, it starts to turn into disgusting brown goop. The entire process takes about 3 minutes, so it's time to work fast. As you peel each apple, take a knife and cut it off of the core. Then thinly slice it and toss it in a bowl with a splash of your lemon juice. The lemon juice helps keep the apple from falling completely apart. Sort of like an apple version of a security blanket, a savings account, or functional alcoholism. Repeat until you're out of apples, and then add in your grenadine, cinnamon, and any lemon juice you've got leftover. Stir that sucker up and throw it into a 9x13 pan preferably, but really just any oven-safe containment vessel you have that can hold it. Now the time has come to deal with the crumbly part of this crumble.

Looking at this, all I can think of is that I really need to get
me some of those servants to stuff food down my
throat that I made up in paragraph 1.

Whisk together your flour, oatmeal, and brown sugar. Then chop up your butter (Or butter substitutes, for those intolerant folk who can't abide by dairy) into little bits and add it in. Now it's time to "cut in" the butter, which essentially means to squish it thoroughly into the flour mixture until it incorporates into little crumbs of deliciousness. I've been advised by obvious lunatics to use something called a "pasty cutter" for this task, but I've found that my hands work better and faster. For those of you who don't have access to my hands, use your best judgement. Take your crumbly crumbs and sprinkle them on top of your apple mixture. Then toss that sucker into a 350 degree oven for about 40 minutes, once it gets golden and awesome looking. Then just sit there and let it taunt you while you wait for your guests to arrive. Make sure to ask them to bring dessert, because there's no way this thing is lasting until then.

Egg Salad

All of my bowls are garbage, so you can thank my parents for
the blue part around the egg salad.

I've seen a lot of people posting articles and recipes lately about how the summer isn't over yet. The main point of these seems to be that it's not too late to capture the spirit of the summer and have a great time, and you should totally make watermelon slushies while you still can, and also while you're at it click on some links and buy stuff. I don't know what these people are talking about, because nothing is more summery than going to a picnic or outdoor even of some kind, looking at the egg salad and doing some very frantic math about things like how hot it is outside and how long the food has probably been sitting out of the fridge. There's a reason for this. It's because egg salad is awesome. Or at least it can be. Think about it: if there was a pile of old gummy bears slathered in grape jelly and mayonnaise sitting out there you wouldn't think twice about just moving on to the pesto pasta salad and calling it a day. But egg salad we linger over, because it has the potential for greatness. The fact that it costs like 5 dollars to make a tub of it doesn't hurt either.

Ingredients:

1 dozen Eggs (Preferably chicken eggs. Definitely not fish eggs)

1/2 a Red Onion

1/3 cup Mayonnaise

1 TBSP Dijon Mustard

Salt 

Black Pepper

So straight off we're going to need to boil our eggs. Overcooked eggs end up with hard and discolored yolks which bring shame upon your dojo, and it can be a fine balance cooking them just enough. If only there was someone who had posted egg-based recipes before that you could read and learn from (For those of you too proud or lazy to follow the link, bring them to a boil then turn off the heat and leave them in the water for about 14 minutes. You want more details, hilarity, and also a recipe for deviled eggs? Then follow the stupid link). Once your eggs are cooked and cooled down to a reasonable temperature, it's time to get peeling. Peeling eggs is an art-form inasmuch as it's confusing, frustrating, and everybody who claims to truly understand it is clearly using cocaine. Allegedly, if your eggs are older then the membrane between the shell and the egg becomes more detached, making peeling easier. But, if like me you don't have the time to be lovingly aging your eggs before use, you're just going to have to power through it, and probably yell and cry a lot in the process. Once you've recovered from this process (Physically, that is. The emotional scars will last a good long while) it's time to slice your eggs. And sure, you can get all hipstery and have your eggs "artisanally sliced according to ancient methods," which we all know just means badly cutting your eggs with a knife. Or you can use egg slicers. You know, those cheap and useful things that have been around for decades that make this process take like 2 minutes instead of 20. Slice your eggs, then turn them 90 degrees and slice them again. 

The sandwich jauntily displays itself on a diagonal
cross-section to try and attract a mate.

Now that your eggs are finally finished, all that's left is to choppity chop your onion into tiny bits, then splorp in your mayo and mustard along with an average sized human's pinch worth of salt and pepper, and stir that sucker. Gently. Because the idea is to have a light and fluffy finished product where you can distinguish between egg whites and yolks, not dense and homogenous egg goop. So gently stir until everything is combined, and you're technically done. For a little added color and flavor you can dust the top with some smoked paprika, but that part's totally optional (as opposed to all the other parts of this recipe which are mandatory, and I can totally verify whether you've done or not). Now go ahead and serve that delicious nonsense up plain, or slather it on to a sandwich, or do whatever other weird things you normally do with egg salad. Although personally I think that it tastes better after having a couple hours in the fridge to relax. But what do I know? I don't even artisanally slice my eggs according to ancient methods.

Vegan Chili

Say hello to my sister. This is all her fault. Unless it turns out
great, in which case this is all my fault.

They say that necessity is the mother of invention. Then again, they also say that a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, which is ludicrous because the relative value of a bird doesn't change just because it's in a bush. I mean, sure, maybe if it was in some super hard-to-reach bush on top of a mountain, but that was never specified. And there are pretty much bushes everywhere. But I digress. The point is that I had a great need, and thus needed to invent. Specifically, my sister is in town, and she doesn't eat a lot of the basic foods that make up deliciousness and joy. And sure, she claims that while she's here she'll eat whatever you give her and won't be picky, but she says it with the same look in her eyes that the animals have in those over the top ASPCA commercials with the ridiculous Sarah Mclachlan music. So I needed to make something without red meat, processed sugar, flour, and probably a bunch of other things that I'm forgetting. And somehow I needed to make it taste good. And by coincidence, lately it's been kind of chilly in Chicago. And so, just like every major marketing campaign ever, inspiration was born from a stupid pun.

Ingredients:

2 standard issue Onions
3 ribs of Celery
3 largish Carrots
1 lb. Crimini Mushrooms
5 cloves Garlic
32 oz. can of Diced Tomatoes
15 oz. Black Beans (Personally, I used canned beans because I didn't have the time to deal with dried beans and their endless drama this week. But if you do, soak your beans for 6-8 hours, then replace the water and boil them for another 45 minutes in salted water. Same thing you do with communists.)
15 oz. Kidney Beans (Ditto)
1 Green Pepper
1 Poblano Pepper
1 Jalapeño Pepper
6 oz. Tomato Paste
2 cups Vegetable Stock (That you totally had left if you made my empanadas from last week. And it turns out that I made the empanadas that I made last week, so that worked out for me.)
1.5 TBSP Cumin
1.5 TBSP Dried Oregano
2 tsp Smoked Paprika
1/2 tsp Black Pepper
1/4 tsp Cayenne Pepper
2 Bay Leaves
Olive Oil
Salt

The first thing you're gonna need to do is prepare yourself. Not in an overly dramatic, "prepare yourself for destruction" sort of way, although that couldn't hurt either. But there are a fair number of ingredients here, and it doesn't hurt to get them ready in advance so that you don't have to worry about preparing your next ingredient in time before the fire burns everything (especially your pride and insurance premiums) to a crisp. So, if you've got the wherewithal, spend some time now cleaning and dicing your vegetables and rinsing your beans. For the rest of you who thrive on the constant thrill of possibly burning your dinner and/or neighborhood, feel free to twiddle your thumbs while you wait for the rest of us to finish prepping. Alright, now coat a pan with oil, and sauté your diced onions and celery over medium-high heat along with a standard pinch of salt. Cook it until the onions start to get some color before adding in your mushrooms and another pinch of salt. When you sauté mushrooms, they release a whole bunch of liquid, shrink, and start smelling kind of nutty and awesome. When this happens, add in your assorted peppers and garlic. Cook for another minute or so before adding in your tomato paste, cumin, oregano, paprika, black pepper, and cayenne.

Pro-tip: For the best results put your reddish chili in a red
bowl, and then photograph it under orangish light.

Pretty much all forms of canned tomatoes that I've encountered suffer from the same problem that diet coke does. Namely, they taste like cans. But cooking them down with the rest of your ingredients helps soften that metallic taste a lot (I haven't checked to see if this also works for diet coke, but I feel like it probably does). So cook your vegetable-tomato sludge down for a couple minutes before adding in your diced tomatoes and another pinch of salt. Let it keep cooking for another minute or two, at which point your entire home should smell delicious [or possibly smoky and ashy, depending on how successful you were at chopping as you go. I didn't burn my house down (this time)]. Throw that whole mess into a slow cooker/crock pot along with your carrots, vegetable stock, beans, and bay leaves. Cook it on the high setting for 2 hours, and then on the low setting for another 2-4 hours. Then remove your bay leaves and eat it. Like, all of it. Because this sucker isn't just "good for being gluten free," or "good for being vegan," both of which are code phrases for "bad, but maybe it could have been worse." It's just good for being food.