Creative Cooking

Pre-Pesach, before Passover is the time of the year when one must be extremely creative in one's cooking to get rid of the various chametz, forbidden on Passover, foods in the house.

I don't know how the malowach, the puffed pastry circles got into the freezer, but they have to leave!

They make great "pie crusts" for vegetable and meat pies. So I put one on the bottom and layered soy hotdogs (which should have been defrosted first), onions and squash and topped them with another. Then I baked it all. You can use anything for fillings:

• cheese, onions, tomatoes
• cooked vegetables
• all sorts of left-overs

The same basic technique, to reduce calories, just use malowach on top, can be used with batzek elim, the puff pastry dough used for bourekas. It's available in any freezer section here in Israel.

Now, for my second cooking invention.

I found lots of cooked food in the freezer. This is a marriage between a meatloaf and a potato kugel. First I made a simple tomato sauce in the frying pan. That's done by:

• sauteing onion in oil
• add tomato paste (I like the 28-30%)
• dilute with boiling water
• whatever spices you want, like garlic, oregano, basil etc

Then when the sauce was boiling, I added slices of the meatloaf and kugel, covered and cooked. We ate it Friday night.

Now, that brings me to the Kosher Cooking Carnival...

The next one is a bit early, because of Pesach. So please send all your kosher food posts and anything you see on the net, to Mother In Israel via the carnival submission form.