Boerewors And Biltong

Boerewors is a South African sausage, the name is made up of two Afrikaans words: boer (farmer) and wors (sausage). Biltong, is a cured meat, also of South African origin. This past week I got to taste both, after I found them on an expatriate’s website. Joburg Kosher, makes them both and is certified Kosher Glatt by the OU

David Libesman, arrived in the US in 1989 from Johannesburg (“Joburg”). Unable to find either Boerewors or Biltong, with the taste and texture he was used to, he finally decided to make his own. With the recipes given him by his father, perfected over forty years as a butcher, he finally produced these delicacies. His family and friends loved them and Joburg Kosher Foods, LLC came to be.

Nice texture, very tasty

These Boerewors are marinated and seasoned, made from beef (including the edible casing!). The package includes four sausages, I grilled them in the oven and found them superbly delicious and very juicy. With a beer they were a perfect meal. I ordered their Traditional flavor, next time I’ll try the Peri-Peri and the Garlic flavors.

Next I tried their Black Pepper Biltong. Biltong‘s look is reminiscent of beef jerky; it is typically made from raw fillets of meat and unlike beef jerky it is never sweet, the seasoning also differs. Biltong is made up of two Dutch words: bil (rump) and tong (tongue).

Great as a snack, great in salads.

I had the Biltong by itself and liked it, I also tried it in a salad where it gave it a little kick that greatly enhanced the overall taste. I found both Joburg Kosher products very tasty and will order them again and again.

CS

Kosher Food & Wine Experience 2011 – Part 1

It was billed as bigger than its preceding shows… it was, it was billed as better than its preceding shows… it was! This was one of those rare occasions when hype and truth actually walked in locked step. The food, the wine, the liquors, all added up to a wonderful evening, an epicure’s dream come true.

SYR and I went in at 4:00pm, we saw and met many friends, magazine editors, fellow foodies and bloggers. We delighted in some products we’d already raved about on these pages, we discovered the new and revisited some great restaurants. As we spoke to favorite chefs, we  were happy to hear their craft was more than just a job, their passion for food, their creative juices continue unabated. Chef David Kolotkin of Solo and Prime Grill, Chef Jeff Nathan of Abigael’s and his wife Alison, Chef Mark Green of Glatt A La Carte, Jose Mireilles of Le Marais were among old friends showing off their creations.

Pomegranate had a large booth serving up some dishes that could have been made at any top restaurant.

Chef Emilio getting ready to hand out some delicacies.

Shana Wendel and staff presented Pardes‘ fares…

Lamb Meatballs with Turnip and Olive. Juicy, succulent, beautiful to look at... unmistakably Pardes!

Dr Alan Bronner and Chef Jack Silberstein of Jack’s Gourmet were serving  Chorizo Tacos, Pepper and Onion Soup with Sweet Italian Sausage and Bratwurst Sliders. We sampled all three and and loved them, here is an easy recipe they shared with us:

Bratwurst Sliders

Ingredients

• 1 package (4 links) Jack’s Gourmet Cured Bratwurst Sausage sliced 1/4″ thick on an angle
• 12 slider buns (4 burger buns can be substituted instead)
• 1/2 cup sauerkraut
• 1 tablespoon caraway seeds
• 4 tablespoons grain mustard
• 1 tablespoon chopped fresh tarragon leaves

Directions

1. Combine the sauerkraut and caraway seeds and reserve.
2. Combine the mustard and tarragon leaves and reserve.
3. Heat a saute pan over medium heat with 2 tablespoons oil. Add sausage and cook until golden brown, about 3 – 5 minutes.
4. To serve, slice the buns in half. Spead a small amount of mustard on the bottom half of each bun. Top with sausage and sauerkraut and place other half of bun on top. Secure with a toothpick if necessary.

Some other friends with a great product are Valerie and Robert Groper from My Brother Bobby’s Salsa. SYR finally got to taste their salsas, she fully agrees with me they are superb. Can’t wait until they are available in Brooklyn!

Shalom Bombay was there as well, I had a selection of their Chicken Pakoras, Chicken Biryany and the Chicken Tikka Masala liberally sprinkled with the Mint and Tamarind Chutney and loved the whole combo. Noi Due still makes the best Espresso I’ve ever tasted in the US.

A new discovery was got cholent? Inc. I had their Moroccan Dafina and the Polish Cholent (just like my mamma used to make!!!). They have 16 different types of cholent, wish I could taste them all… The same people folks also own Gemstone Catering and we were very impressed with their Eve’s Apple and Hickory Wood Smoked BBQ Pulled Brisket Sliders. Tammy Polatsek from Aristocratic Design Co. told us these guys make superbly delicious food, well… they do!

There were so many restaurants to choose from, so much looked, smelled and tasted great I could write a very long post extolling the virtues of each, suffice it to say that the choice of eateries and caterers represented was tops. We also talked to cookbook authors Chef Lévana Kirschenbaum, Chef Jeff Nathan, Chef Susie Fishbein, Chef Jamie Geller. All in all a delightful evening, amidst delightful people.

CS

Purim Koton at Liquors Galore

This past Thursday evening, Liquors Galore (1212 Avenue J – between 12th and 13th Streets; Brooklyn, NY 11230-3702; Telephone: 718.338.4166) celebrated Purim Koton with an extensive wine tasting, food, live shtetl music, the Zev Brenner Show, a goat for petting and miniature horse rides for the kids.

It was mobbed outside, mobbed inside.

The air was festive, management and workers were merrily dressed up…

Aaron Zimmerman, welcoming one and all!

Aaron Zimmerman has written a four part series for The Kosher Scene on how to buy wine, how to taste it, how to store it, and the characteristics of the different grapes (here, here, here and here).

A nice selection of wines and liquors was served by both the Royal Wine Corporation and Happy Heart Wines.

...and a wine tasting we will go.

From the Chateau Piada Sauternes to the Or Haganuz Cabernet Franc, the wine choices – in all price ranges – were truly outstanding.

It felt like like being at a celebration in the old shtetl, with these musicians…

The two of them, plus a violin and a string bass completed the lively band

All the merchandise was discounted by 20% from the marked price. A nice selection of canapés, kishka and petit fours rounded up the evening. The chassidische owners of Liquors Galore truly know how to celebrate Purim Kuten!!! I can’t wait until their next event, hope it’s soon.

RELATED POSTS

Wine Tasting

CS

There Is Still Time…

The Kosher Food & Wine Experiences 2010 was very good, this year – with more restaurants and caterers exhibiting, with more Chefs demonstrating and answering questions, with more wines – it promises to be better!

There are a few days left, you can still get your tickets, you can still get your 10% discount

As always, the star of the show is the food and wine on offer. This year over 300 wines from all over the world will be available from wineries including Herzog, Yatir, Castel, Capcanes, Elvi, Goose Bay and more! In addition, Royal Wine will be launching some new wines at KFWE2011 including the Herzog Special Edition Chalk Hill Warnecke Vineyard 2008, the Oak Knoll Single Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon and a new line of GamlaReserves. Additionally, the wines of Alexander Winery in Israel will be making their debut in the United States market.

Guests will also be able to taste delicious food from some of the top rated kosher restaurants and caterers in the Tri-State area. “This is an opportunity to try some exceptional wines and great food, we don’t hold anything back,” said Mr. Landsman, “KFWE is our gift to our customers. We want to give people a chance to try the wines they are hesitant to buy, the special occasion wines they read about or see in the store.” Another benefit of this event is its proximity to Passover, giving people the opportunity to trywines that they would like to feature at their Seders.

A notable addition to the event this year will be the attendance of celebrity cookbook authors/food personalities Joan Nathan, Jamie Geller, Suzy Fishbein, Lévana Kirschenbaum and Jeff Nathan who will all be available to discuss food and wine pairing and their newest books.

KFWE 2011 will take place on Tuesday, February 22, 2011 at 6:30pm at Pier 60 – Chelsea Piers, NYC. For more information on the 2011 Kosher Food & Wine Experience or to order tickets, please visit: www.kfwe2011.com .

Don’t forget to enter KSCENE10, as your discount code, when you buy your ticket(s). Hope to see you there, gentle reader!

CS

Events of the Week

There are a couple of interesting events going on this week and we urge everyone to attend

Monday, February 14th

Lévana’s Dinner an a Show

This week it will be held in Lévana’s house at: 210 West 101st Street, Apartment 9L (in Manhattan, between Amsterdam Avenue and Broadway). The subject of tonight’s class will be: THE STUDENT’S – AND EVERYONE’S – SURVIVAL GUIDE. She will demonstrate the following:

• Assorted smoothies
• Assorted omelets
• Grilled cheese sandwiches
• Steel-cut oats with assorted toppings
• Crepes with assorted toppings

The Demo runs from 7:00 to 9:00 followed by dinner, classes cost $45.00 for one session, $120.00 for 3 sessions or $200.00 for 5 sessions and a signed cookbook. Make your reservations at: 
http://www.levanacooks.com/kosher-cooking-classes/weekly-classes/

Thursday, February 17th

Liquors Galore Purim Kuten Extravaganza

Liquors Galore (1212 Avenue J; Brooklyn, NY 11230-3702; Telephone: 718.338.4166) will present and evening of food and wine, entertainment and Zev Brenner’s Show Live. It will start at 6:30pm and will continue until 11:00pm

Enjoy the wines, enjoy the food, enjoy the entertainment, all for one low price… FREE!!! Try beating that value!

Enjoy this week’s events, gentle reader, enjoy.

CS

Yummy Grill

It may be small and unpretentious, but don’t let that fool you. This hidden jewel, Yummy Grill (543 Kings Highway – off East 4th; Brooklyn, NY; Tel: 718.375.7557), serves up delicious food featuring Cavcasian and Israeli cuisines.

A partial view...

Chef/Owner Eli Hizkiyahu graduated, as Chef, from Israel’s famed Tadmore Hotel School in Herzliya. He arrived on the American shores about 19 years ago and made a successful career using food as his canvass. From fashioning Tfillin out of watermelons, to birds about to take off in flight – out of fruits and vegetables, he’s done it all as he travelled the length and breadth of the US plying his trade of food decoration at numerous catered and private affairs. About 9 months ago, Chef Eli and his wife opened up their current venue.

My companion RN and I stopped by for lunch, recently. She started out with a Lamb Soup…

Lamb Soup

It was nicely presented, spicy and very savory; in fact, it could have served as a complete meal by itself. It contained a few lamb bones, slivers of lamb and rice. Excellent! She described it as perfect comfort food for a winter day.

I started with an Avocado Salad. I have never been a fan of avocado, but the taste of this one was exceptional. Colorful, nicely but subtly spiced, it contributed to change my mind about avocado.

We then shared a platter of Baby Lamb Chops…

Baby Lamb Chops

They were tender, juicy and had a very attractive aroma; came with a side dish of mixed Grilled Vegetables, consisting mostly of mushrooms, onions and peppers grilled to perfection.

We followed with a plate of Baby Chicken Kebab…

Baby Chicken Kebab

Tender, juicy delicious, it also came with those superb Grilled Vegetables (we just couldn’t enough of them!). All was served us in whimsically shaped but practical china, a delight to the eye. I washed it down with an Israeli malt. RN finished her meal with a delightful Tea w/Nana (mint leaves), while I had a coffee.

Ample portions, superb flavors, and very reasonable prices… isn’t it time to visit Yummy Grill?

CS

Our Guest This Week Will Be…

Last week we presented Jay Buchsbaum the Executive VP of the Royal Wine Co., as our interviewee. You can hear Jay and his encyclopedic knowledge of all things wine, here

This coming Wednesday, at 8:00pm, our guest will be Chef Lévana Kirschenbaum, the regulars of this blog know how much we enjoy her cooking demos, how much we enjoy her recipes. Mrs. Kirschenbaum has written three cookbooks Lévana’s Table, In Short Order and Lévana Cooks Dairy-Free!. She’s now hard at work on her fourth cookbook on Superfoods, due out this coming summer.

Who is Lévana? What are her credentials? Most of you may remember her ground breaking restaurant Lévana’s, but there is far more as we are told on her website:

For nearly thirty years Lévana Kirschenbaum has owned and operated a catering business, a bakery and a successful Manhattan restaurant all while raising a family. She understands that even gourmet chefs don’t want to spend all day in the kitchen. With this in mind, she keeps the recipes simple, insisting that using fresh, natural ingredients will yield fantastic results without a lot of fuss.

When Lévana opened her eponymous restaurant with her two brothers-in-law twenty five years ago, all Kirschenbaums were perfectly aware they were facing a hard sell: introduce fine kosher dining to the Kosher public, who until then was content either eating at home or grabbing a bite in the rare joints that served institutional old world treats. The general prediction was that the presumptuous idea would fall flat on its face.

Undaunted by being the trailblazers of the trend, they surrounded themselves with the best chefs, developed the most delicious dishes and waited patiently until the idea of gourmet kosher caught on. The rest, as we all know, is history: kosher food and wine has experienced a veritable explosion and has its place among the most prestigious competitions. Many luxury kosher restaurants have opened and thrived since Lévana’s pioneering days, bearing out the dictum that imitation is the greatest form of flattery.

With over 25 years of experience in professional cooking, recipe development, catering and teaching, celebrity chef Lévana makes the preparation of nutritious and exotic gourmet cuisine easy. She gets countless devoted fans for her fearless, practical and nutritious approach to cooking and spreads the good word on simple, streamlined, elegant and wholesome dining in her classroom on the Upper West Side – where she gives weekly demos – and around the country.

What is her goal?

Fine dining that is also contemporary, nutritious and easy to prepare is a way of life that Lévana instills in her classes. Lévana’s unfussy, straightforward approach utilizes fresh, all natural ingredients to create international flavors from her native Morocco and other wide-ranging culinary influences.

I’ve known Lévana for a while now and I can assure you that the show will be truly informative and entertaining. Just listen in, gentle reader, at 8:00pm on Wednesday, February 2nd, on Jewish Radio Network. Enter the site and click on the red “here” under the white “Radio,” then wait about 30 to 90 seconds for the application to start streaming.

CS

Shabbat Comfort Food

Last Friday we posted Oyfn Pripetchik… – In the Fireplace… with an unusual but interesting kugel recipe. Today we follow up with a very easy recipe for a great Yerushami Kugel. Truth is, I’ve never been a fan of this type of kugel, the idea of sweet pasta just doesn’t do it for me, but, last Monday at Chef Lévana‘s cooking demo I tasted this and was forced to change my mind:

Yerushalmi Kugel

Ingredients

• 1 pound thin noodles, any noodles (gluten-free will work too!)
• ⅔ cup vegetable oil
• Salt to taste
• 1 teaspoon ground pepper, or a little more to taste
• 1 tablespoon cinnamon
• 1 tablespoon vanilla extract
• 4 eggs
• 3/4 cup sugar or Sucanat
• 1/4 cup agave syrup
• 1/2 cup water

An individual portion of Chef Lévanas' Yerushalmi Kugel

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350°F.
2. Boil the noodles until just barely tender. If you started with long noodles, cut through the whole pile with scissors until you get smaller pieces.
3. Place in a mixing bowl, and mix in the oil, pepper, cinnamon, vanilla, and eggs. Combine thoroughly.
4. Meanwhile, heat the sugar, agave and water in a small saucepan.
5. Reduce the flame to low and cook about 5 minutes, until the mixture turns a nice amber color (watch the cooking, don’t let the mixture burn).
6. Immediately add to the noodle mixture and stir to combine.
7. Pour the mixture into a greased 9 x 13-inch pan or a greased tube pan.
8. Bake about 1 hour, or a little longer, until the top looks set.

Delicious warm or at room temperature.

Enjoy, gentle reader, and have a gutten Shabbos, Shabbat shalom umevorach!

CS

For Your Superbowl Party…

If you are hosting a Superbowl Party, you can either have the wife or yourself slave away preparing a meal, or you can save the aggravation and get a great price on delicious Indian fare:

If you are already watching the games and are hosting a party, why not do so with minimum patchke, with delicious Indian cuisine and with maximum enjoyment?

This Week’s Upcoming Internet Radio Show

Elizabeth Bland, photo from her website (cheesemistress.com/)

Last Wednesday we had a very interesting discussion on cheese and kosher cheese in particular with Elizabeth Bland (we will soon post, on these very pages, a supermarket trip with Mrs. Bland where we will look at various kosher cheeses. Meanwhile you can hear an .mp3 file of our radio show here.

This coming Wednesday – January 5, 2011 – our guest will be Gill Marks. Gill recently published the Encyclopedia of Jewish Food. What are Gill Marks credentials? What qualifies him to talk or write about food? As his website states:

Gill Marks, at The James Beard Foundation. Photo from gilmarks.com

An author, rabbi, historian, chef, and social worker, Gil Marks is a leading authority on culinary subjects in general and Jewish cuisine in particular. Among his published books are Encyclopedia of Jewish Food (Wiley: 2010), James Beard Award-winning Olive Trees and Honey: A Treasury of Vegetarian Recipes from Jewish Communities Around the World (Wiley 2004), and James Beard Award finalist The World of Jewish Cooking (Simon & Schuster, 1996). Marks was included in the Jewish Forward’s annual “Forward 50,” a list of the fifty most influential Jewish-Americans in the year 2010. 
http://www.forward.com/forward-50/

A self-taught chef, Marks entertained at his New York City home, earning a reputation as a gourmet cook. He began moonlighting for several caterers before branching out on his own. Some of his early jobs involved baking 150 apple pies for a cooking spray promotion, an all-dessert bat mitzvah, and a health food wedding. In 1986, Marks combined his interests in food, history, Judaism, and writing to become founding editor of Kosher Gourmet magazine, a position he held for six years. After leaving Kosher Gourmet, Marks turned his attention to writing fiction and biblical research as well as continuing his work on culinary subjects. His efforts include two plays, Therapist, and, in collaboration with Stanley Allan Sherman, The Golem of Gavah. His other books are The World of Jewish Desserts (Simon & Schuster, September 2000) and The World of Jewish Entertaining (Simon & Schuster, 1998) and he was also among the international team of contributors to the prestigious Meals in Science and Practice: Interdisciplinary Research and Business Applications (Woodhead Publishing, 2009).

Marks has also written articles for numerous magazines; served as a guest lecturer at the Culinary Institute of America,Hazon, Kosherfest, and Drisha Institute; acted as consultant for various companies and organizations; and given presentations throughout the world, including the 92nd Street Y, Macy’s DeGustibus Cooking School, The Learning Annex, the Kislak Adult Center, and the Fresh Start Program at New York’s Rikers Island. Marks continues to write, research, lecture, and perform cooking demonstrations for groups across the country and make appearances on various television and radio programs.

When I first contacted Mr. Marks to arrange the radio interview I thought it would be a short call, instead I was totally fascinated listening to his stories and the call was rather a long one. He is a captivating repository of anecdotes and history, this upcoming show promises to be a very interesting one!

Please, listen in on Wednesday at 8:00pm on Jewish Radio Network. Click on the red “here” under the white “Radio,” then wait about 90 to 180 seconds for the application to start streaming.

CS