Recall - Rice Pasta

Taste of Asia announced the following recall:

Due to a production error, the following product, labeled gluten free, CONTAINS GLUTEN:

Rice Sticks (Spiral Shape), barcode 7290012911316
Production Date: 30/11/2016
Expiration Date: 30/05/2018

The product is safe for the general population, but gluten sensitive people and those with celiac disease should NOT eat it.

The product is being recalled from store shelves.

Please direct inquiries about returning/replacing this product to Taste of Asia customer service at 1-599-500-960

If you've put your rice pasta away for Pesach, like I have, be sure to check it after Pesach is over!

Food Recall!

Machsanei Lahav announced a recall of a number of products, due to a bug infestation.

The affected products are:

"Lahav" brand Basmati Rice, 1 kg packages, ?.7.17, 19.8.17, 16.2.18



"Lahav" brand Persian Rice, 1 kg packages, 19.8.17, 15.12.17


"Lahav" brand Italian Pasta (Fussili), 500 g packages, 9.12.17, 10.12.17

 "Lahav" brand Italian Pasta (Penne), 500 g packages, 16.12.17, 17.12.17

"Lahav" brand Italian Pasta (Farfale), 500 g packages, 15.12.17, 16.12.17

"Lahav" brand Italian Pasta Spaghetti No5, 500 g packages, 14.12.17

"Lahav" brand Italian Pasta (Tricolor), 500 g packages, 12.12.17

"Lahav" brand Italian Pasta Spaghetti No3, 500 g packages, 15.12.17
 
Customers can return the products to the store where purchased and receive a full refund. 
Please direct  any questions to Machsanei Lahav customer service at 03-681-2494

Improvised "Pasta with Cheese Sauce"

A couple of months ago, I noticed an interesting post in one of those groups on Facebook where people post their dinner menus.

Among all the fancy "poached salmon with risotto and wilted baby spinach with fresh mushrooms" and other such gourmet (um, read: unrealistic for a busy family) menus was a GEM. It was a "Cheater's Macaroni and Cheese" recipe, that, get this -- had no cheese in it! 

I was intrigued and filed away the idea. Because, after all, we know that the cheese is the expensive part of a pasta meal, and I was wondering if we could find a way to "frugalize" our pasta meals, but still have milk protein in it.

So this week, I took that recipe and tweaked it to work with my family's preferences.

And here's what I came up with:

Improvised Pasta with "Cheese" Sauce

This makes a really large batch. Enough to feed my family of 6, including a teenage boy and a bottomless pit almost teenage boy AND have leftovers for my hubby to take with him to work for lunch the next day. Feel free to cut it in half.

 What You Need:

large pot
5-6 cups water
2 bags whole wheat pasta
1-1.5 liters milk
1/4 tsp turmeric
salt, pepper, granulated garlic, oregano to taste

First, bring the water to a boil in a large pot. Add the pasta. It will' look like there's not enough water in there, but that's because there ISN'T. Bring the pot back to a boil and stir the pasta as it cooks in the small amount of water. Eventually the water will all be absorbed, and the pasta won't be fully cooked yet. Turn off the flame. Add milk and seasonings to the pot. Stir well, and turn the flame back on. Bring it to a boil, and continue stirring as the pasta cooks in the milk. It will absorb some of the milk, and some of the milk will thicken as it absorbs the pasta's starches, so it will become somewhat saucy. It won't be super saucy, because if you don't let the pasta absorb enough of the milk, you'll just have pasta in spiced milk. When it appears to be ready, turn off the flame, cover the pot, and let stand for 5 minutes.
Mix once again before serving.

Note: the pictures in this post are from my attempt with whole wheat linguini, but it worked better with whole wheat fusilli.

Second Note: this is not a perfect imitation of macaroni and cheese, but for us it was "good enough". And just as I strive in life not for perfection, but rather for "good enough", that is what I strive for with my kitchen experiments as well. Especially the money-saving ones when money is tight.

I hope this helps someone out there!

Healthifying my Pasta nights

Pasta has been my go-to solution to the constant "what should we have for supper" that comes up when there's hardly any time to think or prepare food.

Way back when, we bought the cheapest white pasta we could find (think Stop & Shop pasta on sale for the now unheard of 5 boxes for $1!! I still remember lugging that pasta home from the supermarket every time that sale came up, a young wife and mother and full time student just trying to stay afloat and keep everyone fed...) Now, we live in Israel, where even cheap white pasta is not so cheap, and we've long since moved on to whole wheat pastas. We've taste tested a lot of whole wheat pastas, focusing on finding the best one among the affordable options. In America, I tended to buy the Whole Foods brand pastas (stocked up when they were on sale) and one or two shapes from Target, but WF was far better. Now, we've tried lots of kinds here in Israel, the cheapest being the Taaman brand, but it's not so good. So now, I buy mine from Nizat HaDuvdevan for about 6.50 shekels for a 500g bag (roughly 1 lb), which is not bad for a relatively high quality pasta (and it's organic even though I didn't need it be).

In the past, I'd opted to make my own sauce using tomato paste or crushed tomatoes and spices over buying prepared sauce (although in America, I'd buy good sauces on sale and with coupons. I still miss that convenience). Lately I've decided to kick the sauce up a notch. It can be made in advance and stored in the fridge to be heated as necessary. Mine never sits in the fridge more than a few days, so I can't say how long it lasts, but I'd freeze it if I wasn't using in the next 3 days.

Homemade chunky tomato sauce

olive oil
cut vegetables - whatever you have that you have or what you think will work: onions, celery, peppers, eggplant, summer squash (kishuim), tomatoes, mushrooms, etc
tomato paste or crushed tomatoes (packaged or homemade)
water
fresh or dried basil (fresh is best!)
chopped garlic (fresh is best!)
seasonings to taste - salt, black pepper, and any others you want to add like oregano or rosemary or thyme...

Heat olive oil is a large sauce pot. Add vegetables and stir till they are soft and fragrant. Add garlic and continue stirring for a few minutes. Add tomato paste/crushed tomatoes, water, fresh basil and seasonings, and stir well. Continue to stir occasionally while you bring it all to a boil, then lower the flame and simmer for a while. Serve over pasta and garnish with your favorite cheese if you like.

I will admit that this has not come without objections from my family. They prefer when I don't do anything "funny" to their food, but I figured they'd get used to it and eventually come to appreciate it.

This was the first week that only one child objected to all the vegetables in the pasta, so that is major progress, in my opinion!

I serve this supper with a make-your own salad, as well. 

What's your go-to quick, sort of healthy supper?

Pasta with lentils and carmelized onions

I made my son take over some of the cooking.

In particular, I let him know that he needs to know how to cook food he will eat, so we are starting with food for Shabbat. He's a vegetarian, and even though the rest of us are weekday-vegetarians, he's also a vegetarian on Shabbat.
And that means that sometimes I end up making a TON of different foods, with the hope that he'll agree to eat enough to satisfy his 14-year-old-boy appetite.

But it's just a lot of cooking, and my thought was that if HE prepares something, maybe he'd eat more of it. He's a little suspicious of food he's not familiar with, especially anything with more than one ingredient, so what better way to be familiar with it than to PREPARE it?

He agreed to make this pasta with lentil dish that I suggested, as I was trying to make sure he got some protein into him over Shabbat (this was after he looked through one of my vegetarian cookbooks, On the Road to Vegetarian Cooking, and declared that there is nothing there to try).

Pasta with lentils, carmelized onions, and garlic

Ingredients:
1 small onion, sliced in strips
1 T. olive oil
1 cup green lentils, dry, sorted and rinsed
1/2 pkg of pasta (he used spirals)
salt, pepper, granulated garlic (or you could use fresh garlic, crushed and roasted in olive oil), and another tablespoon of olive oil

Bring a pot of water to a boil, and add the lentils
While the lentils cook, heat 1 T. olive oil in a cast iron frying pan (over medium heat), and cook the onions in it, stirring from time to time, till they brown. Set onions aside.

Once the lentils have cooked for about 10 minutes, add the pasta to the pot. Simmer till pasta is fully cooked.
Strain the pasta and lentils and toss in a serving bowl with the carmelized onions, more olive oil, and seasonings.
Serve warm, although I suspect it can be served cold as a pasta salad too.

He ate it readily!
And the other kids all sampled it too, and most liked it. Most of all, they were impressed that their big brother cooked something REAL...

Sunday, December 18, 2011

Just taking a break from hunting down coupons to write up our supper menu!

It was super simple:

Whole wheat spaghetti (I buy this at Yesh, where it is 4.79NIS/500g bag. best price I have found)

Primavera sauce (my version - saute onion, pepper, mushrooms in olive oil. when onions are soft, add lots of diced tomatoes. cook till soft. add liquid if necessary and spice as desired. This time I added a 100g package of tomato paste to hurry the process along) - I got onions, peppers, and tomatoes cheap in the last couple weeks. The mushrooms were the end of my stash of frozen sliced mushrooms. Now I need to find a reasonable source for mushrooms... any ideas?

Shredded mozzarella cheese sprinkled on top - use this sparingly, as mozzarella cheese costs about 70 NIS/kg right now. We used about 15 NIS worth, for the 6 of us.

Carrot sticks - got carrots really cheap a couple of weeks ago

Avocado - got avocados really cheap a couple of weeks ago and they are slowly ripening. we've been sharing a couple among us every day. we all (well, almost all!) love avocado just the way it is.

Thursday, December 8, 2011

Today turned into one of those errand running days, and it rained and rained, and then when the rain cleared we found ourselves surrounded by a crippling fog! By the time we got home, everyone was wishing we had just gone out to eat! (And they were all whimsically recalling the fettucini alfredo they had at the restaurant the last time they were treated to one!)

So for supper tonight, I quickly pulled together the following:

Garlic bread (on baguettes from the supermarket)

Spaghetti Alfredo

Pasta with tomato sauce

Sauteed vegetables (Eggplant, Peppers, and Garlic)

Boring, but definitely a crowd pleaser. And FAR less expensive than getting pasta at a restaurant! No surprises, no whining. Sometimes I need a day like that!

Back to Posting Menus! Nov. 8, 2011

I've taken quite a long break from posting, but now I'm trying to get my life back in order, and that includes finding time to plan (and blog about) menus!
This week I'm back to trying to minimize the shopping (but can't pass up Mega's special - 2NIS/kg for avocados, pomelit, and bananas, so I'm going to have to get there tomorrow!)... I peeked into my freezer and realized that there's enough in there to keep us going for a while.

Here are some foods we made this week using the items already in the freezer, fridge, and pantry:

Red Lentil Soup - saute 1 small onion and 1 clove garlic in olive oil. when soft, add water, red lentils (sorted and rinsed), salt and pepper (optional: juice of a lemon. I like it lemony but my finicky family disagrees. You can always add lemon to the bowl!). This soup is my go to soup when we are all cold and I hadn't planned soup, as red lentils cook so quickly it can be ready to serve in about 15 minutes!

Chinese Vegetable Soup - this soup starts the same way most of my soups do: saute onion and garlic in olive oil. (you can also saute fresh sliced ginger with the onion and garlic, if you don't have any, you can use the dried ground version, just add toward the end of the cooking process) when soft, add your choice of vegetables - I used mushrooms, broccoli stalks (peeled and thinly sliced), carrots (scrubbed and thinly sliced), and snow peas (still had some in the freezer from when they were buy 2 get 1 free at Shufersal). You can also use bok choy, celery, and any other vegetables you have around that seem like they'd fit. saute it all. then add soy sauce and rice vinegar. Allow to simmer for 10 min. Add water to desired level. Add pepper (and ginger) to taste. garnish with green onion, if you have some!

Pasta with creamy sauce (I cheated and used up the leftover garlic and dill cream cheese as the basis of this sauce)

Pasta with tomato sauce

Baked Potatoes

Steamed Broccoli

Make your own Salad

Fruit Salad

These foods came together in different combinations to make several nights worth of suppers!
What have you been making?

Thursday night, Sept 8, 2011

I don't normally post on Thursday nights, but we ended up swapping pizza night this week - we had that Wednesday instead!
So here is my very simple plan:

Macaroni & Cheese
Cut vegetables (we have tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, and carrots)
Some sort of dip for the vegetables
Watermelon

I'm hoping to get my Shabbat menu planned and posted very soon. What's your plan?

Wednesday night - July 13, 2011

So I went to the store and bought some fruit. Somehow I couldn't quite manage not to buy anything else. I'm so bad at pantry challenges! But I tried to keep it reasonable, and everything I bought is something that will get used,  like a large bottle of vinegar to make more vinegar/water/orange oil solution for cleaning, 2 bottles of wine (and we will need that for Shabbat), and other simple necessities, like pitot and yogurt...

Anyhow here is the supper plan for tonight:

Pita Crisps

Fruit & Yogurt Smoothies

Cut Vegetables

Pasta with cheese or Pasta with tomato sauce and cheese (you got it! some of my picky children - esp reflux girl - won't eat tomato sauce!)

Melon

Sunday, July 10, 2011

We just kind of randomly pulled supper together tonight. It was just too hot to think and I am too stingy frugal to run the A/C, especially now that I can breathe again!

Here's what we pulled together:

Jelly sandwich on whole wheat bread for one picky child

Cereal and milk for another picky child

Whole wheat pasta spirals with tomato sauce

Make-Your-Own-Salad

It wasn't too creative and didn't require a lot of cooking. No one went hungry despite the lack of creativity...

My pantry is starting to look sort of bare. We are left with lots of lentils, rice, and barley, but none of my family members want me to make soups and stews! This will be interesting continuing with the pantry challenge. I just may have to cave and go to the supermarket this week, but I'll try not to. We plan to bake some muffins and corn bread tomorrow. We'll see what else we come up with...

Pantry Challenge! July 3, 2011

First of all, I want to thank Yosefa at Cooking Outside the Box for including me in this month's Kosher Cooking Carnival! If you haven't seen it yet, go check it out! There are some great links there!

On a more personal note, with a move around the corner (4 weeks away, be"H!), I've got to get back to my pantry challenge... So, I guess I will be planning menus around whatever is in the house. I've never been able to stick to a true pantry challenge - I crave fresh fruits and veggies - but I'm going to try to do my own modified version. And I reserve the right to stock up on staples if there is an awesome sale, and fill up a box of dry goods to start the pantry off right in our new house. After all, we're only moving about 1/2 an hour away, so it's not like the food will be sitting on a boat for 6 weeks like last summer (and yes, I did bring food in my lift. Most if it survived.)!

Hopefully, though, this pantry challenge will mean we will spend a lot less at the supermarket over the next 4 weeks, and that will help us buy an oven for the new house. I have no idea where the oven will go though. The people who designed the kitchen did not put an oven in, nor did they leave a space for an oven... My guess is they ate take out and ate out all the time - what a different life than mine!

So, without further ado, I will jump right into the pantry challenge!
Tonight's menu:


Pita Crisps (I have some pitot in the freezer)
Pasta with Cheese
Make your own salad (we have lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, and yellow peppers)
Watermelon

Tuesday Night, May 24, 2011

It's pasta night! While I still haven't found a really great place to buy whole wheat pasta now that my Yesh stopped carrying it (your advice is appreciated!), I did buy some anyway...

Here's the menu:

Pasta with a choice of sauce: homemade tomato sauce or cheese sauce. Perhaps I'll add pesto into that equation - a bit of splurge, though.

make your own salad - lettuce, tomatoes, olives, feta cheese (yay for kimat chinam's cheese counter sales!), carrots, purple cabbage - assuming I get around to washing and chopping it all...

fruit salad (i have a few lone fruits in the fridge, so we'll throw it all together!)

Wednesday night - April 27, 2011

Everyone is craving chametz and kitniyot around here! It was only a week, but they are acting like it was a month! Is your family behaving the same way?

I didn't want a carb overload, but I did want to indulge their cravings a bit, so here's what we  had:


Corn soup (saute onion, garlic, red pepper in olive oil. add frozen corn niblets and water. Bring to a boil and simmer for 10 minutes or so. Turn off flame, and puree with an immersion blender. Add some milk, salt, pepper, and fresh chopped scallions (just the green part). Reheat, but don't boil again. Yummy, and easily vegan if you use soymilk or ricemilk...)

Spiral Pasta (whole wheat) with roasted veggies and homemade tomato sauce (we also served plain spiral pasta, and had shredded mozzarella on the table for topping it, for the pickier palettes) Today I roasted onions, red peppers, and zucchini with fresh chopped garlic - the veggies that were just hanging around waiting to be used up!

Make your own salad - lots of lettuce (Yesh has nice, large, crisp heads of lettuce for 1.25 NIS), cucumbers, tomatoes, and carrots (all at Yesh for 1.85 or so per kilo), and sliced olives. Served with homemade ranch dressing (still working on the perfect recipe!).

The salad was in my pretty bowls that my 6 year old loves, and thinks are so fancy. She's really into "fancy" things right now, so she ate lots of salad!

Monday Night, April 4, 2011

Continuing the freezer cleanout, I still have a few things to use up.

Among the odds and ends I've found are peas, corn, green beans, oats, oat bran, sesame seeds, and more.
Tonight we'll use some of that up:

Coming to the table tonight:

Corn soup (saute onion, garlic, and red pepper. Add frozen corn and soup stock (or water). Bring to a boil, then simmer for 10-15 min. Puree with an immersion blender. Add milk or soymilk, if you like it creamier, and heat gently, but don't boil again.)

Pasta with cheese
Make-your-own-salad
Apple crisp (using some of those oats and oat bran!)

Tuesday Night, March 8, 2011

I'm so tired; one of my kids has a cold that is not going away on its own. I'm starting to get concerned... and it's wearing her out and wearing me out. We are not sleeping so well at night!

So, even though it feels like spring, we're still eating soup!

Here's my plan for Tuesday night:

Vegetable Soup (with extra garlic to help get rid of that cold)

Chick Pea & Tomato Salad - don't forget to soak the chickpeas overnight before cooking them! Combine cooked chick peas with diced tomatoes, olive oil, basil, salt, and pepper. (it really is worthwhile cooking the chick peas from scratch - the frozen and canned varieties cost so much more per kilo! and the cans may have BPA in them, so best to avoid them altogether...) I was considering making this a chick pea and roasted tomato salad... any idea how that would taste?

Cut Veggies (we have cherry tomatoes, carrots, cucumbers, and celery)

Baked Ziti or other pasta (something without tomato sauce for the picky kids!)


Banana Bread - I bought too many bananas and now we MUST find a way to use them!

We're definitely working our way through the pantry and freezer stuff. How about you?

Easy ideas for Shabbat

Lucky for me, I'm actually not cooking this week! (So rare, and I really appreciate it when that happens. Even though cooking makes me happy, I still like having a break sometimes.)

In any case, I figured I could just share a few tips and shortcuts for making Shabbat a bit more frugal and simple without it feeling stingy. We try not to waste the chicken - I splurge and buy organic chicken for ethical and environmental reasons - so I don't cook much extra chicken. Instead I make sure that there is plenty of good stuff on the table, using in-season produce and inexpensive, filling grains and legumes.

Here are some simple ideas:  steam those vegetables you bought when the shuk was closing, or roast them if you're already using your oven. Roasting really brings out the flavor in so many vegetables. Certain kinds do best if roasted alone (like beets), others can be roasted as a medley (I like roasted ratatouille - place diced onions, garlic, zucchini, mushrooms, tomatoes, and eggplants in a roasting pan and toss with olive oil. roast uncovered in your oven till they smell amazing and look done).

Rice, barley, couscous (whole grain, of course) and other grains are nutritious and frugal can be embellished in so many ways. I like to add mushrooms to most dishes, but that's because I really like mushrooms!

If you're looking for a side dish with some zip, you can make a southwestern-style pasta salad. Simply combine cooked pasta with diced tomatoes, peppers, green onion, cooked black beans, and frozen corn niblets (these defrost very quickly when mixed into the salad!). Season with a jar of salsa (hard to find here - so you can use one of those spicy tomato based piquante salads instead), lemon juice, and ground black pepper.

Enjoy your Shabbat! Let me know what you do to fill your table with good food without spending all night and day cooking! I could always use more ideas.

Tuesday Night (Feb. 1, 2011)

I think I've been doing pretty well making sure our meals are balanced, nutritious, and frugal, and even a healthy mom deserves a really easy supper night sometimes!

So, it's Pasta Night!

Pita Crisps
Spaghetti with Rose Sauce
Spiral Pasta with Cheese (for those picky children)
Cut vegetables with "Ranch" dressing
Citrus Fruits for Dessert

Some notes about these foods:

If you have day-old pitot to use up, split them open, cut into wedges, brush with olive oil or melted butter, sprinkle with garlic, salt, and oregano (optional: parmesan cheese, but at approx 100 NIS/kilo, I decided not to buy the parmesan right now), and bake at 375 F (190 C) till crisp.

I use whole grain pastas. This makes me feel better about serving pasta, and my kids don't know about any other kind. Occasionally my husband says he misses white pasta, but I have convinced him that the health benefits of eating whole grains outweigh all of his complaints. Nitzat Haduvdevan has organic whole grain pastas on sale this month, the Teverya Mazon Organi store has them for just over 6 NIS, or I found (conventional) whole grain pasta at Yesh last week on sale for 3.99 NIS/bag.

Rose Sauce: I use shortcuts! I just simply combine crushed tomatoes with basil, garlic, salt, and pepper, and mix it with Gevinah Levanah (Israeli white cheese), and heat, but not to boiling. It makes a passable stand-in for Rose sauce.

Ranch Dressing - we really do miss Newman's Own Ranch Dressing. We haven't found anything like it. So I just mix up some yogurt and spices and pretend it's ranch dressing, and the kids eat it, but they do say there's something missing. Any ideas to improve it are appreciated! Just leave me a note in the comments!

A note about organics: I prefer organic over conventional in most cases, but having recently made Aliyah and still trying to figure out how to make our new budget work, I find that I have been forgoing some of my organic purchases for now. I have found that some things (bulk grains, legumes, sugar, etc) are about the same price at the health food store as the conventional version in most supermarkets - sometimes even less, so I'm sticking with affordable organic items for now, using lots of "Sterily" fruit and vegetable cleaner on my produce, looking for lab-path "pachot hadbara" certification, etc, and trying to buy items that are as natural as I can find. (Oils have been a challenge - you can find lots of cold pressed olive oil here, but it's very hard to find oils of any other kind that have not been chemically extracted. I've been splurging on organic sunflower oil and using it sparingly...)