"Smells so good” said my better half as she got home after a long day at work. “I see you got back to use the present we bought you”. When we moved to the USA we couldn’t find any bread that we loved in our area, so one of the first presents my wife and kids bought me was a bread machine. “I’d like bread with garlic” said my older son “dad, I want bread with sunflower seeds” the young one add, “maybe you can make a rosemary dried tomato bread?” my better half asked.
I spent many fun-filled days at my childhood-friend Dan’s house. One of the times, his mom offered us something to eat and asked if I like casserole. “Very much” I answered. Moroccan casserole was one of my favorite dishes.
“At least wait for it to cool down,” mom would scold us as we stood around her, waiting for another batch to come on to the plate. We would stand there, in our small kitchen, staring at the half moon shape dough surrounded by small oil bubbles as its color changed from pale white to golden.
"Try it, at least one time, and if you don’t like it, I’ll make you something else” mom would try to convince me, but I stubbornly refused to even taste. “ I put only things you love: potatoes, carrots…” she said,
In my childhood there were two kinds of bread. White bread and dark bread. For shabbat there was chala, a round sweet chala and regular chala. When my parents wanted to treat us we got rolls. Not that there was a bigger variety, again there were two kinds, a long roll and a round one. As I have already confessed,
In my childhood home we ate couscous only in one way. Hand made and steamed over a pot of soup. It was almost impossible to enter our small kitchen when mom would make couscous. In one bowl there was the semolina that mom would wet slowly while stirring so that no clumps would form.
"What’s for dinner?” asks my teenager as he throws his bag at the corner of the kitchen and opens the refrigerator. “I don’t know yet” I answer. “I’m starving” he adds. As a family, one of the traditions that we try to keep is to eat dinner together every night, which means cooking daily. I have a few basic rules for day to day cooking.