Pinterest & iPad - Old Traditions & New Technologies

It's Passover, and like any traditional holiday, we feast on the same dishes and recipes (or variations) we ate as children and our parents ate as children...and before them, the first immigrants bringing the ones from "back home" when they were children to their new lands and new beginnings.

One tradition during Passover...for those of us who crave bread, but observe the ritual of no breads made with rising flour to remember the hurried departure from Egypt and the slavery of the Pharoah,... is the Passover Matzo Roll.  Delicious when fresh and hard as the proverbial cement used to make the pyramids within a day.

The recipe, in its variations seems to have been around forever.  My grandmother, (on the left - not sure what she and my aunt (baby of the family), and my mom are holding,) who emigrated from Russia during the time of the last Tsar at the tender age of 19 with her husband and one year old daughter somehow knew how to make them.  I certainly remember going to my grandparents' tiny one bedroom apartment with a kitchen the size of a small closet and enjoying them.... as did the other 18 grandchildren and their parents in the late '40s & early '50s.   Back in the "olden days", her kitchen tools consisted of bowls, pots, baking sheets, roasting pans with a grater, some spoons and knives for chopping.  No Cuisinart, no KitchenAid stand mixers... none of the things we take for granted... or at least that I take for granted... helped her make incredible dinners for her seven children, their husbands and children, not to mention cousins and friends.  The tables extended from the far wall in the living room through the apartment to the front door.

My mother, the "modern cook" of the "50s & '60s, had a much bigger kitchen and more tools - the Sunbeam Mix Master is the one that stands out for me.  But when she was diagnosed with MS in the early '70s, she handed over the Sunbeam and other utensils to me and I created the traditional feasts with some twists of my own.  And while preparing the four - five course meals for 24, I always thought of my grandmother and am still in awe of what she did with so little.

Today, I can't imagine life without my Cuisinart Food Processor, my gorgeous fire engine red KitchenAid Stand Mixer, not to mention microplanes, a Griddler, ... the list is endless.  I love each and every one of my kitchen toys... especially during holidays.  I couldn't imagine making a festive dinner without Potato Kugel, or latkes, but there's no way I would spend hours grating 10-20 pounds/ 5-10kg of potatoes by hand as my mother and grandmother did!

But I'm not done in my tale of traditions and technology...  I love my iPad and ... was there really life before Google and Google searches for great recipes?!  But that led to my most recent frustration... my bookmarking  techniques - bookmark on my NetBook, bookmark on my ipad, add to a recipe box on any number of great magazine sites, bookmark on Chrome, bookmark on IE.... ACKKKKKK!!!!   And my total inability to actually finding them again.

So welcome, Pinterest my latest and so far greatest tech toy... my Honey hates when I call technology toys, but I use the term lovingly.  I love being able to be in touch with whatever I want to be in touch with, wherever I am and whenever I want it.  See something you like - article, photo, recipe, whatever your passion and "pin" it for whenever you want it.  No brain wracking about where or when you saw it.

And, thanks to Marcy Goldman, one of my favorite bakers  and author of The New Best of BetterBaking.Com and A Passion for Baking are awesome.  Not to mention her blog or her participation on FaceBook's Jewish Cooking Group.   All this to say, not only could I "pin" the recipe... I could actually find it!   Incredible Passover Rolls as published in LA Weekly.  Not sure what the squid ink refers to, but has nothing to do with these mouth-watering rolls.

So... what's your favorite traditional dish and do you use old or new technology to prepare it?

Foodie Fun on iPads & iPhones

It's been a couple of weeks since I got my fantastic Apple iPad and I'm having a great time downloading foodie apps and checking them out. Sitting in my living room, I just pick one... do a search for any ingredient... and in an instant have a list of recipe options with tabs to create a shopping list that can get sent to my iPhone, notes I can add to make changes, write comments or change ingredients... like I usually do in the margins of my paper cookbooks. It's all very exciting.

But I have a confession... I'm one of those cooks that enjoys leaving a trail of fingerprints, ingredient splatters and notes on cookbook pages. Many people over the years have bought me those plexiglass stands to preserve the condition of my cookbooks. I scoff at them! Those marks add character... not to mention a very quick flip to have the book itself stop at a well loved recipe.

So, I've been stalling when it came to actually take my iPad into the kitchen. The last thing I want is to "decorate" it with gobs of oil or gravy! So I made one dish... more in a minute, wiping my hands every 30 seconds (or so it seemed) and telling my Honey that I had to find some sort of protective cover for it. He found this great idea with something I always have on had .... Just put the iPad into a gallon size ziplock baggie (the extra large size) with the labelling on the back, zip it up and you have the perfect protection without interfering with functionality.

So now that I'm not scared to death of messing it up, there's the other big challenge... which app do I start with.


In honor of Alex of A Moderate Life's cool Tackling Bittman Recipe Hop, I thought I'd find a lovely lamb stew recipe from my How To Cook Everything iPad app (I have the free iPhone version too).

I need a great comfort dish for the blustery winter weather we're having . If you look closely at the photo at the top of the page, you'll see a lovely dinner plate starring my iPad dinner of Mellow Lamb Curry.

I modified it a bit... but then that's exactly what Bittman is all about. Given my Honey's sore throat, I left out the cayenne pepper. I also used a different curry blend of spices, combining the last of the Sri Lankan Black Curry & the Singapore Curry blends to make my own curry blend.



Plus it's a great Hearth 'n Soul entry too, I think. A partner in crime to Alex, is GirliChef, but you can get to Hearth 'n Soul through either of these ladies (plus a number of others).

Now it's time to check out some more foodie iPad apps to download. If you have any suggestions, please leave them in the comments.