Get cooking tips and family-favorite recipes now! Dena loves cooking for her family and she gives helpful advice for moms. Keep reading to find out her kids’ favorite recipes that she’s created.
Tell us more about yourself, your site, and your family.
Hi everyone! My name is Dena. I am a librarian by day and a blogger by night (except when I have to be a librarian at night). My hubby and I have a daughter living on the west coast, a son in the Middle East, and another son away at college. So when the phone rings at 2AM, while most people go into panic mode, we wake up thinking, “let’s see … it’s 11 p.m. in CA, 9 A.M. in Israel …”
I first created my blog as part of a term project for a computer class as part of a master’s degree in library science. After graduation, I continued with the blog, tinkering with the design and html and such along the way, as a way to organize and share my recipes. It eventually became Oh! You Cook, marketing it as “delicious recipes that just happen to be kosher” so as not to scare off people who mistakenly think kosher food is exotic or strange. In fact, most of my everyday recipes are no more exotic than chocolate pudding, my kids’ favorite dessert.
Chocolate Pudding
And my own favorite dessert, Almond Rice Pudding with Amaretto-Cherry Sauce, doesn’t take that much more work.
Almond Rice Pudding
How do you create all your recipes? Do you follow any family recipes?
Most of my recipes are either childhood favorites or adaptations of others I find along the way. One family favorite is Baked Chicken Breasts with Balsamic Apricot Glaze, which I have been making for years.
Baked Chicken Breasts
The kids love it and it’s easy enough for a weekday dinner, but fancy-schmancy enough to serve on special occasions as well.
Another family recipe is challah, a honey-egg bread.
Challah
So delicious, I have to hide a few slices for French toast or Slow Cooker Challah Pudding the next day or two.
Are there any cooking challenges you want to overcome?
I can’t make a decent pie crust. I either overwork the dough or under bake it. Same problem with tender cookies. I’d share some photos, but they are embarrassing.
Are there any foods you won’t eat or include in a recipe?
I am kosher, so pork products are a no-no. Serving dairy and meat products in the same meal is also forbidden. As a result, many of my recipes are meat- or dairy-free, useful for someone with milk allergies or is a vegetarian/vegan. But if a recipe requires massive changes to make it kosher-friendly, I’ll just skip it and try something else.
What are five cooking tips you can share with moms?
Invest in a slow cooker with a timer. When someone’s game or recital runs late, a slow cooker will hold dinner at a safe temperature until you get home.
Give older toddlers frozen peas and carrots to eat. It makes veggies fun to eat, and any that falls on the floor is easily cleaned up by the dog.
It takes about the same amount of time and energy to cook twice as much of anything. Freeze leftovers in family-size portions or in single-servings, whichever works better for your family.
Giving the kids cereal for dinner occasionally does not make you a bad mother.
Sometimes presentation is everything. Pack cooked rice into a cup, then invert onto a dinner plate. Takes maybe 30 seconds to prepare several individual servings. Then serve any main dish over or next to it. I did this one day on a whim and the kids went nuts. They talked about that rice for days. I even do this with couscous or quinoa, as you can see in the chicken photo above.
Do you have any food heroes?
I grew up watching the Galloping Gourmet and Julia Child. Pretty much anything they made I couldn’t duplicate, but they both made cooking look like so much fun! My more modern-day hero is Jamie Geller (The Joy of Kosher).
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