A Good Lidl Haul

 LIdl is fast becoming a favorite of American shoppers. Not only do they have good prices but also good food on many unusual imported treats. It's a fun trip to see the stroes. You'll never know what you'll find.

I recently went to my local Lidl in Elmwood Park, new Jersey,. I was not impressed on my very first trip there but almost a year later that changed.I always lik their focaccia pizzas,. Those are great but that was it.,Now they have much more, very much like another German import Aldi. 

I fell for their frozen chestnut squash soup which when heated for five to six minutes transforms from chunks of frozen soup to a creamy potage. This is going to be first course for my Thanksgiving dinner. Their croissants are pure heaven, done correctly with crunchy layers and an airy middle. I bought apricot jam to go with them.

I'vve been into Greek olive oil recently,preferring its' rich flavor to the Italian variety. This was a steal for six dollars.This will b eperfectin for sauting the frozen veggie and potato mix I also  bought a margherita style frozen pizza.

Along with two packages of steamed veggies with potatoes.Lidl

has some excellent vegetarian and vegan choices, including their version of Impossible Meat.

Of course Lidl has some good sweets too. I could not resist their version of the classic fudge stripes and straight from Fmance macarons.

I definitely could not resist Diana's Chocolate Covered bananas.

This I will be buying over and over. My whole haul, including a big family box of Cheerios

was only forty bucks total!!!! I'm definitely holiday food shopping here!

If you want good and gourmet food for much less, then head to your local Lidl. You'll find some interesting foods that will enlarge your culinary palate. It's worth a trip.

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Small Parties Everywhere

 May is almost upon us and that means a slew of parties, from showers to graduation celebrations. it is time to celebrate yet many don't like the idea of big crowds. What do do? Go small. A gathering of only a few people over a series of days is better than a big do.

This is the season for bridal and baby showers. You can scale them down to six to ten people at a time. This makes for easy prepping cooking and clean up. Hosts can spend more time on cooking a smaller variety of nibbles and hors d'ouevres. Showers can have individual mini quiches. These are smaller than the usual nine inch ones and bigger than the appetizer ones. You can customize them with guests' favorite ingredients .Make a bacon and cheddar for one guest and two or three veggies for those who want a vegetarian version. Another great idea for a smaller party is serving Cornish game hens.  All you would need would be three or four for a small party. They can be easily spatchcocked and grilled on an outdoor grill. Think a honey mustard glaze for more flavor. Serve with timbales of rice and minced portabella mushrooms. A simple salad with a vinaigrette is s lovely side. You don't have to go crazy making a huge one. An average sized one will do nicely for a small gathering. As for desserts, think little tea cakes or a tray of prettily colored macarons or meringues.

Graduation parties, especially college ones have always been splashy with kegs and endless burgers on the grill. Suppose the grad leans towards a more intimate get together? Throw a small outdoor party under the backyard trees. You can still have grilled meats but instead of hot dogs and hamburgers, think filet mignons Just slice and marinated in a mix of olive oil, lemon and rosemary. The slices can be put on grilled sliced baguettes. London Broil can also be put on the grilled. Again for a moister meat marinated in olive oil for a juicier bite.  A truly memorable graduation meal for a small crowd is grilled lobster tails.  They're an easy outdoor cook which can be made in under twenty minutes. If lobster is a tad expensive then think of marinated shrimp kebobs for a tasty party meal.Intersperse with onions and grape tomatoes for a fun colorful look. Keep the sides simple. A plain garden salad is your best bet.Add some radishes and bell pepper strips for some color. As for the cake, think a delicate pavlova , a confection of meringue , whipped cream and fresh fruit  layered to airy perfection. You can also think a Bundt cake  that can be served with ice cream.

Little parties are the way to go these days. Think about an intimate dinner , small on guests but big on flavor.It makes for a more memorable gathering all will enjoy.

Back With Meringue

 Foodie Pantry is back open thanks to a reprieve on the gallbladder. With it comes the magic of meringue.It's the elegant topper on citrus pies or  delicate puffs of goodness. Best of all it's not complicated to make as people think it is.

Melissa Clark wrote about it in her Good Appetite column in yesterday's New York Times Food section. Many home bakers shy away from making this classic. Meringue can be tricky to make and bake. When it comes out good it's phenomenal, When it comes out bad, it can be drippy , weepy or just gooey. Meringue is one of the oldest recipes having first been made in the 16th Century. Making it was real chore with bakers of the time using everything from birch branches to knives to bundles of  straw.It only improved with the invention of the wire whisk in the 19th Century. The basic make up of it is just foam. Shake or agitate any liquid and bubbles will appear However the specific proteins in the whites and its' vegan counterpart aquafaba (chickpea water) allow them to turn into a billowing mousse. when beaten these proteins uncoil, trapping in tiny bubbles.The proteins thin out the more they're beaten and they become more and more aerated with each whip. Add sugar or heat or both will help stabilize them by firming up the proteins as their structure remains intact.

There are three different types of meringue. The simplest is commonly called French meringue,It made solely from egg whites and sugar.It's the lightest and most voluminious of the three. It's also the least stable and can break down. It's used to boost sponge cake and macarons and gives those crunchy meringue kisses. The second is Swiss meringue, where the egg whites and sugar are heated in a double boiler until the sugar melts, then beaten until buoyant and creamy.It's the coating on baked Alaska and added to buttercreams for richness. The densest, smoothest and most stable is Italian meringue.It's also the most challenging to work with. The sugar is heated to 240 degrees Farenheit and it's then carefully beaten into a bowl of whites.It's kind of like making candy and it can be used interchangeably with the Swiss version. Ms. Clark gives a wide array of different recipes. You could try her extra lemony meringue pie, made with  sharply bright Meyer lemons or the chocolate meringue raspberry tart. This is a fruit tart  with a meringue zinged up with cocoa powder and frozen dried raspberries. There is also a blood orange pie with a butterscotch meringue made with brown sugar to create that butterscotch flavor.

Whipping up a meringue for any of these recipes is a nice touch. It does practice to make the perfect one. Once mastered the end result is  amazing.

Passover Sweets

 Passover starts this coming Saturday and with it special dishes and holiday restrictions. One of the highlights of the Seder table is dessert. It can be quite a challenge to home bakers because of the no flour or yeast rule. Yet there are some interesting sweets that are easy to whip up.

Luckily there are other flours other than wheat or chametz to use. Almond flour is perfectly acceptable as is matzoh meal. You can easily make a flourless chocolate cake using almond flour. It produces a dense , packed crumb, perfect for the other ingredients which are chocolate , butter,eggs yolks and sugar to shine. Orange zest and egg whites are added later, the whites to give the cake some lift. It's baked for thirty to forty minutes in a 350 degree Farenheit  oven. It can be served with candied orange zest or whipped cream if you'd like. Almond flour can also go into making blondies, a fun treat for the kids. This again is ground almonds (which you can make yourself using a food processor),l sugar, vegetable oil and eggs. Chocolate chips can be added for more flavor. The batter is poured into a parchment lined pan and baked at 350 degrees Farenheit for half an hour. Keep in mind you can also use the almond flour for cookies. These are almost like a macaroon  in that they use only egg whites and not the yolks along with a cup of sugar. Of course if you want totally vegan you can sub in the egg white with aqua faba, the brine from chickpeas. These make for excellent meringues and macaroons, the last more in the French style.

Matzoh meal can also be used to make an array of delicious Passover cakes. Remember that you may have to buy matzoh meal because the homemade kind is a lot crumbier and grainier than the finely processed store bought one.,Yet, you can use the first if you have a very strong, almost industrial strength food processor. There are a number of different sweets you can bake. Try an apple cake that's more like a fruit filled coffee cake with a walnut streusel topping. The topping has a refreshing blend of cinnamon, ginger,  mace and nutmeg. to keep the cake interesting. You could also make just a simple vanilla cake and top it with frosting made from heavy cream and confectioner's sugar. Matzoh meal can also be used to make cookie dough too. whip up a couple of batches of chocolate chip cookies using it for the week ahead. This is the basic chocolate chip cookie recipe  that has the usual brown sugar, butter, eggs, and chocolate chips for that classic flavor. Yet instead of wheat flour , there's matzoh meal and honey to sweeten it. You could also bake chocolate cookies too with it, using melted bittersweet chocolate and chocolate chips along with egg whites for  a more meringue like texture.

The seder meal and the week following can end with delicious cakes and cookies. Use either almond flour or matzoh meal for the recipes. They'll give you an array of tasty  sweets , perfect for the holiday and beyond.

Just Desserts For Your Holidays

Everyone obsesses about the Easter and Passover dinners  - what to serve and how its' going to be cooked. Yet dessert is just as important . It provides not only an end to the meal but the time to really relax and chat with family and friends. There should be just as much thought put into it as the main meals.

Easter can be a time of  gravity or fun.  An easy idea for a cross is buying  five pound cakes and arrange in a cross shape. It's then decorating them with white buttercream icing and marzipan flowers. Craft shops do sell cross cake molds so making one is doable. It's usually double the amount of batter and icing.Another religious themed cake is the Easter lamb. You need a special mold for this which can be bought at any kitchen store along with a dense pound cake batter. Ice with buttercream and coconut to simulate the lamb's wooly coat along with colored icing for the eyes, ear interiors and nose.  Another idea is just a regular round cake decorated with buttercream or cream cheese icing lilies. Then there is the fun shaped egg, bunn,,y and carrot cakes. Bake these in a simple chocolate or vanilla or for whimsy  - carrot. Decorate an egg cake with colored icing, pastel sprinkles (which can be bought at your local grocery or Target) and colored sugar.. A bunny cake can also be coated in flaked coconut for a fuzzy look. If there are kids, then think fun cupcakes iced in Easter colors. You can do a two color swirl on top for extra fun or turn the cakes into mini baskets. This requires green icing for the grass. Use red string licorice or green pipe cleaners for the basket handle and of course, jelly beans for the eggs.

Passover presents a different but exciting challenge - baking without flour.  There are many cakes and cookies that are flourless, and would work well ending any seder. For the first night, you may want to try a show stopper. Think a chocolate sponge made with ground almonds and ten eggs to give it a chewy , sweet density. A real crowd pleaser would be the Passover brownie cake, made with finely ground matzoh which many cooks use  to create all sorts of baked goods.It, too, is rich in eggs, using five along with a cup and a quarter of almonds.Passover cakes can even be layer cakes and there is a seven layer one created from  not surprisingly - matzoh sheets. It's creating a kind of mousse with eggs, melted chocolate margerine, and sugar and spreading it on layers of  kedim soaked matzoh. This is made with raw eggs, so be careful with who it's served to. Macarons are another holiday tradition. It's creating airy puffs from egg whites, and white sugar along with desiccated coconut. You can go trendy and use aquafaba - bean water.It's the protein rich water that chickpeas are canned in and since it has the same make up as egg whites can be made into a glossy meringue . The bean flavor dissipates with cooking and the finished product is a glossy , light as a feather treat.

Easter and Passover are all about the traditional foods. Just remember to just make dessert as important as the min meal. It can be serious or fun,. but always full of sweetness and flavor.

That Holiday Baking Guilt

Yes, it's that time of the year when all home chefs are expected to magically transform into bakers. That's great if they have a lot of time along with having a knack for turning their kitchen into a Keebler tree. As for the rest of us? Uh oh, here comes that holiday baking guilt.

We all feel that our families deserve the best especially around the holidays. We want them to have the best presents, the best Christmas meal, the best time ever.In other words, a nearly impossible experience only exacerbated by giving them store-bought cookies to go with that Christmas morning hot cocoa or leaving Oreos out for Santa. There are a couple of solutions here. One is the classic  Pillsbury Slice and Bakes which gives the same homemade taste without all that work. As we can all attest the chocolate chip ones taste exactly like the Toll House recipe.The chocolate is gooey, even hours out of the oven and the cookie itself has rich brown sugar taste.There is also their sugar cookie flavor which is perfect if you have little artists who love to decorate. The snaps can even be turned into sandwich cookies thanks to the addition of a super easy cream cheese filling. It's just the cheese (or Neuchatel if you want to go fancy ) confectioner's sugar and a small drop of vanilla. Roll in red and green colored sugar for a fun holiday look.

Of course the second, easiest of the easiest holiday cookie solutions is bakery cookies. Some, such as the century old B&W Bakery in Hackensack, New Jersey have an amazing array of recipes that have been passed down from the bakery's original German owners. What I love about them is that they don;t follow trends. You're not going to see anise curry cupcakes or pistachio basil macarons. These are just simple butter stars and plain almond macarons.

You can see just how home made looking the butter stars are, with just a drop of green or red sugar in the middle, affixed with a simple egg white wash or glue. They are mouthfuls of pure butter and sugar, light, crisp and delicate. B&W's macarons' are the perfect holiday cookie, too. These bite size rounds have just the right amount of sweet chewiness with the perfectly laid back taste of almonds - and nothing else. I don;t feel guilty when I serve these to family and friends as a holiday treat.To me they're a holiday tradition, Also, with the cookies already taken care of, I can concentrate on wrapping and cleaning,No guilt there, just relief that I have more time freed up.

If you;re too busy to bake, don't. There are a few alternatives to scratch cookies, from Pillsbury to your favorite local bakery.Everyone can still have tasty sweet treats and be happy. No need to suffer any regret from not making the perfect cookie.

A Proper Jubilee Tea

 England and its' commonwealths are having a massive tea party thanks to Queen Elizabeth II celebrating her Diamond Jubilee.Anglophiles here can also celebrate with their own afternoon socials. Teas can have both savory and sweet dishes , all washed down with a variety of teas from around the world.

The most important part of any tea party is the tea. Any strong flavorful one is good. Earl Gray is a nice one.It's strong yet it doesn't have an aftertaste and won't cancel out the flavor of the food. Lady Gray is also a wonderful choice.it has an mild orange taste that goes well with both sandwiches and tea cakes. Since England had her Empire all over the world you can also add Chinese tea or the spicy Indian chai.Chai is basically just black tea steeped with cinnamon cardamon clove and ginger. Tea can also be iced if it's ah hot day  or made into a punch by adding seltzer and fruit. Toss in some sliced oranges, lemons or strawberries for a nice flavor. For a different punch add sliced limes or any other berry such as black or blue.

Teas usually have sandwiches and small cakes. The Windsors have a tendency to like chicken and their teas probably feature poultry. A light yet yummy sandwich is either whole wheat or white toast spread  with a chicken salad.It can be made with either deviled or freshly grilled sliced into pieces.A sprinkle of tarragon gives it a delicate herbal taste A variation can be made with deviled ham with celery seeds. Of course the most loved tea sandwich is watercress. Lightly butter small slices of bread and put three or four watercress leaves on them. Sweets are a nice ending to a tea. Try petit fours or the ever popular macaron. Nix the cupcakes because they're too American. Try smaller cakes that can be cut into wafer thin slices.

England is celebrating sixty years of a remarkable reign by a remarkable woman. Celebrate with them with a proper tea. Bring forth the tea pot along with cakes and sandwiches and cheer Elizabeth!

Holiday Nibble Time

These next two weeks are going to be filled with all sorts of parties from tree trimming to at home office gatherings. It's the time of the year to dust off all those hors d' oeuvre recipes and pick out what works. After all, a full blown sit down dinner is a bit too fusty for all that mingling. The best bet is to serve trays of nibbles, first savory and then sweet with coffee and liqueurs afterwards.

Savory appetizers are easy to serve and to make. They also go great with everything from non alcoholic punches and sodas to champagne. One of the easiest is bruschetta . This is just simply toasted rounds of sliced Italian and/or French breads with a scoop of chopped tomatoes , olive oil and spices. You can vary the recipe by placing slices of Italian cold cuts such as Genoa salami or soppressata under the tomatoes. For healthier fair try inch long celery bits stuffed with a mix of cream cheese and chopped hard boiled egg. These are tasty and fun without being oh so decadent.Another idea is getting trays of frozen nibbles. There are some great ones out there,especially from Target's Archer Farms brands. Try crab or chicken puffs which are easy to dip and easy to maneuver. Themed savories such as Japanese or Mexican also make for fun eating.

Nibbles aren't only relegated to the salty and savory. There's nothing like ending the evening with tiny bites of sweetness. A fun ender is stuffed dates. These are easy to make, with stuffing pitted dates with either creamy or chunky peanut butter and then rolling in granulated sugar. You can also make mini brittles which is forming small clusters or hills of nuts and then pouring a heated sugar syrup ove r them. Spiced nuts are also good. All it takes are any nut of choice and then dipping them in egg white. Later roll in a mix of cinnamon and sugar or for more zip and zing nutmeg and mace . Bake for twenty minutes for 25 minutes. Mini tartlets or galettes are a great dessert. These can be made with biscuit dough cut in small squares and filled with pie filling. Of course there are the traditional cookies and bars too. If you're serving these , then vary it with a melange of shortbreads, bars, sugar cookies and chocolate chips. You can add some sophisticated types such as madeleines and macarons.

This is the time for fun eating and fun parties. Try a night of nibbles to satisfy guests . Nothing beats a bize size treats to get a gathering going!

Much Ado About Food Trends

Trends rule our lives. Women gear their calendars by what's hot in the spring and fall. Techies of both sexes get excited over the latest I -something. Even foodies go completely gaga over what the experts and trendistas tell us to put into our mouths.The question is: is a food trend all the fuss?

I recently found this out when I tried macarons for the first time. Recently writing about them made me curious. When I spied them in one of my favorite New Jersey bakeries I had to get them. I wanted something sweet for a dessert later that evening. It was either them or home style oatmeal cookies. Of course the macarons won out. Let me preface by saying that this particular bakery is one of my favorites. I love their cupcakes . They're even better than the ones that are found in Magnolia Bakery . Their cookies are wonderful. I had anticipated that their stab into the newest sweet trend would be too. They were not what I thought they were going to be.. The chocolate ones were a bit gooey and reminded me of a brownie. The vanilla was better, redolent of almonds with a non traditional butter cream filling. So this is what all the fuss was about.

Maybe I 'm not used to them . I thought my first macarons were going to be heavenly. They were more leaden than what I imagined. Maybe another bakery would do them differently., create a lighter, crisper shell with a sinful filling.However that's the problem with food trends. There's so much hype about them . What's good? What isn't? It's kind of like the fuss about fashion.Platform shoes may look wonderful but in reality they hurt the calves and make walking cumbersome. The hype overwhelms and sugar coats the actual product sometimes.

What to do about foodie trends that make you scratch your head? Like any other trend, ride it out. In the end it's all about what makes you happy - not others.Listen to your taste buds - not the style makers.