Yom Tov Recipes – Cranberry Apricot Bread Pudding

Last year we had a few posts with recipes for this time of the year:

Orange Honey Cake

Yom Tov Recipes – Carrot Kugel

Yom Tov Recipes – From Prime Grill’s Chef David Kolotkin

Yom Tov Recipes – Rib Roast

Yom Tov Recipes – Personal Honeyed Chocolate Lava Cake

This year we feature yom tov recipes again and we’ll start this year’s series with one of  Chef Lévana Kirschenbaum‘s dishes, from her new book The Whole Foods Kosher Kitchen.

Photo by: Meir Pliskin

Cranberry Apricot Bread Pudding

I often whip up this treat after a party, when I look to recycle my leftover bread. Attention gluten- free diners: This is for you too!

Any bread will do as long as it is not too crusty (in other words, don’t use baguette or ciabatta!). You will love the kick and the bold ruby-colored specks the cranberries add. Nothing to it: All aboard-one step and you’re done! Individual desserts: Pour into greased muffin molds and reduce the baking time to about 45 minutes.

Sometimes cranberries can be hard to find, like in this Rosh Hashanah holiday season, so I am making the pudding with apples, which is every bit as delicious. I have included the apple variation, every bit as delicious and as pretty.

• 3 cups milk or dairy-free milk, low-fat OK
• 4 eggs
• 2 cups all-fruit apricot preserves
• ½ cup sugar
• 1/2 cup oil
• 2 tablespoons orange flower water  (settle for 2 tablespoons orange zest)
• 3 tablespoons apricot brandy or rum
• 3 cups fresh or frozen cranberries, coarsely chopped (food processor)

Preheat the oven to 375°F. Mix all ingredients except cranberries by hand in a bowl, breaking up the bread and preserves as you go. Fold in the cranberries. Pour the batter into a greased 9-by-13-inch pan, or a greased 10-inch round pan. Bake for about 1 hour, or a little longer, until the pudding looks nice and puffy, and the center is firm. Serve warm or at room temperature, alone or with caramel sauce (recipe follows), and a scoop of sorbet or vanilla ice cream. Makes a dozen servings.

variation: Apple Bread Pudding GFA

Skip the cranberries and the orange flower water, reduce the milk to 2 cups. Add 4 Granny Smith (green) apples, unpeeled and coarsely grated and 2 tablespoons ciinamon. Proceed just as above.

Caramel Sauce

Another glowing example of a treat known as dairy that doesn’t in the least suffer from a dairy-free adaptation, au contraire! (Go ahead and multiply the recipe if you would like-it keeps very well.)

• 1 cup Sucanat
• ½ cup agave syrup
• ⅓ cup water
• ¾ cup dairy-free milk, low-fat OK
• ⅓ cup soy or rice milk powder
• 3 tablespoons brandy or rum
• 1 tablespoon vanilla extract
• 1 teaspoon salt

Bring the Sucanat, agave, and water to boil in a small saucepan, stirring. When it comes to a boil, stop stirring and cook until thick and a deep amber color, 2 to 3 minutes. Whisk the remaining ingredients in a small bowl until perfectly smooth, then carefully add to the saucepan (to avoid splattering). Cook another 3 minutes on a medium flame, whisking. Makes about 2½ cups. Store refrigerated in a glass jar.

Enjoy, gentle reader, enjoy!

CS

A Cookbook for our Times

Fame and fortune come and go these days in a twittered flurry of viral activity signifying not much at all. The famous and infamous become blurred distinctions as we dismiss events with hurried trigger happy flicks of ADHD fingertips itching for the next headline or news byte. We live in a society ruled by obsolescence, disposability, surface chic and ‘what’s in it for me?’ priorities.

It’s hard not to get caught up in the frenzied momentum of the transitory inane; yet some rare individuals manage to adapt to the paroxysm while maintaining their intrinsic skill-set, talents, passions and beliefs. Some of these self possessed champions rarer still can reach out and teach with mass appeal, sharing wisdom, talent and their years of expertise so that even the maniacally distracted stop and take notice.

There is no better master teacher in the culinary world than Levana Kirschenbaum. The woman is a firebrand of positive delightful anecdotal information on fresh healthy wholesome easy ways to cook delicious meals. In her new cookbook, which I got a sneak peak of, Levana holds nothing back. All her collective years of experience are evident in this latest cookbook gem.

With more than 350 recipes in its general index, it includes over 250 delicious gluten-free adaptations and more than 250 Passover friendly dishes. All of these use natural, healthy, wholesome ingredients; what could be better at a time when we becoming increasingly health conscious about our food intake?

The Whole Foods Kosher Kitchen is a precious dowry of cooking essentials that any loving mother would pass down to her daughter as a loving legacy of easy and healthful food preparation. This tell all manifest destiny of healthy cooking has wonderful recipes, with multiple variations on a theme, detailed with beautiful pictures, formatted for ease of use, organized and indexed for quick referencing and recipe selection. It’s like all her collections rolled into one, you’re going to love it and come back to it as ‘the source’ time and again for preparing delicious nearly effortless meals. I’ll bet it goes digital! For now you can see it on the shelves by June 1st. Don’t miss it!

Pasta with mock crab , artichokes, and olives. Photo by: Meir Pliskin

SYR