Daily Archives: 25 April 2010

In Which I Become A Sous-Chef

Having churned out four daughters, you would have thought one of them had inherited my food obsession, both in cooking and eating. But nooooooooo! I should have seen it coming early on with Sassy, my oldest. When she was born she weighed 2.3 kilos. That’s a little over 5 pounds for those of you more comfortable in avoirdupois. (I know, I’m being facetious.) Today, 25 years old and married, she doesn’t weigh much more. When she was little she would never eat, which was very frustrating to the Jewish Mother in me. I would equate food with love, and she would be full up after just looking at a spoon of cottage cheese. The other three didn’t weigh much more, and didn’t eat much more as well.

When I was a little girl I was also a picky eater (you wouldn’t know it from looking at me today), but I loved hanging out with my mother in the kitchen and watching her cook. She would let me stir, she would let me dig my hands into the hamburger and squish things around, she would let me scramble eggs — I was in kiddie heaven. I really have to thank my mother for letting me patchkeh around in the kitchen, wincing at the mess I would create and never letting that prevent me from making more messes. I still have this picture in my head of her trying to extinguish the small fire I started by trying to fry an egg in a plastic cereal bowl.

Don’t get me wrong, my girls can cook! Sassy married her soulmate, Sabraman (yes, he’s a superhero) and is trying to be more Yemenite than his whole family combined. She has become the Queen of Hawaiij. Her sister, Tinky, makes a mean mushroom Alfredo pasta. My girls can cook, they just aren’t as obsessed with it as I am. Sigh…..

Enter my stepson, Shy-boy. He’s Ju-boy’s youngest, and he loves to cook. Ju-boy loves bonding with his son while teaching him how to roast potatoes (he claims the secret is how much you sweat while making them), and I welcome having a sous-chef in the kitchen. Except usually, Shy-boy ends up doing the cooking, and I am his sous-chef. Which is exactly what happened today.

Carine Goren is the baking guru of Israel. I love her recipes and her cooking shows on the Israeli Cooking Channel. The recipe below comes from one of her books, אפייה זה משחק ילדים, which translates into Baking is Child’s Play. Shy-boy has been chomping at the bit to try out a few of her recipes and today we did.

Pizza Cookie

This is a giant chocolate chip cookie topped with strawberry jam and white chocolate. If you squint, it really looks like pizza.

Pizza dough:

1/2 cup white sugar

1/2 cup brown sugar

1 egg

1 teaspoon vanilla essence

1/4 teaspoon salt

100 grams (1/2 cup) butter or margarine

1 1/4 cups flour

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1 cup chocolate chips

Pizza sauce:

1 cup red jam (we used strawberry, raspberry works too)

Cheese:

100 grams (4 ounces) white chocolate, grated (we didn’t have any so I chopped up some white chocolate chips instead)

Line an oven tray with parchment paper.
Preheat the oven to 160 degrees C (320 in F)
In a bowl, mix together the white sugar, brown sugar, egg, vanilla essence and salt.
Melt the butter (marg) in the microwave and add to the mixture in the bowl. Stir with a wooden spoon.
Add the flour, baking soda and chocolate chips and stir until you get a uniform dough.
Pat the dough down on to the parchment paper in the shape of a thin circle (pizza-shaped). This will form one large cookie. If the dough sticks to your hands wet them a bit and continue to pat the dough down until you have your pizza base.
Place the tray in the oven and bake for 30-35 mintues. The cookie should be golden and a little bit soft in the middle. When ready, remove, and let cool completely.
With the back of a spoon spread the jam as you would pizza sauce.
Grate the white chocolate over the jam, until the entire base is covered.
Cut your pizza cookie into triangular slices with a pizza cutter. Come on, if you’re going to pretend this is a pizza, pretend all the way.