Oorah Live Cooking Show: Shavuos at Home

So, we've done this twice before. Perhaps some of you have joined us by our cooking shows the previous two that we did on Pesach. But now, in honor of Shavuot, we decided we're going to try it again. But this time we're going to do a bit different. We do have our two master chefs that we had last time. We do have them back. Spotlight them for a moment. We have Who's first here? Chef Meish. Um Meish Chonoles is our chef of the zone. And Uncle Mike is been a chef for many, many years on Pesach programs. He's been the chef at the zone, too, for for for some time. So, we thank all of you for for joining. And we look forward and we're going to have a special a very special program tonight. In honor of Shavuot, there is it's customary that on Shavuot we eat dairy foods. Many have the custom to eat dairy foods. So, tonight's menu is going to be consisting mostly of dairy foods or at least part of non-non-meat. There's different customs in how to do the dairy foods throughout Shavuot. Some do an entire meal dairy meal. Some do they'll split the meal and have some dairy items and then and then finish that part of the meal, wait a bit, and then a second part of the meal a completely separate with meat. Obviously, only after the milk. There's different ways to do it and you know, every every custom is precious and however you do it, it's just fine. There are many reasons for this for this custom. I'll tell you one reason that's very popular and we can do it very, very quickly. We know that to cook to get kosher meat takes takes a much longer process. So, after the Torah was given, when when the Bnei Yisrael were at Har Sinai and they they stood at Mount Sinai and accepted the Torah, and that's when they learned the 613 laws and realized "Oh, no, my my kitchen is not kosher." So, now to start cooking uh meat products would be would be tremendously difficult, and it would take it would take some time to get their their kosher kitchen ready and get the meat ready. So, instead, they ate dairy for for a little bit until they were able to get everything ready. So, in honor of Shavuot, when we celebrate the re-accepting of the Torah, we we eat some dairy uh dairy food. So, we got we got some good stuff on the menu tonight. Uh we got cheesecake, we got um burekas with mushroom sauce. Uh we even have a salmon, uh not particularly dairy, um but it certainly goes with a dairy meal, blintzes, and um we got some pasta, too. Um and even for those that are having a problem with the a little bit of a shortage of cream cheese, finding kosher Israel cream cheese has been an issue over the last little bit. Tonight, we're going to get to learn how to make our own cream cheese. So, that's fantastic. And all the recipes that are discussed here tonight will be available. Uh they are available by email. Um throughout the show, you can feel free to email [email protected]. That's [email protected]. I'll announce it another couple of times. c o o k i n g s h o w @ urahr.org. That's urahr with two o's, o o r a h.org. And we'll be happy to send you um those those recipes. Okay. Um throughout Hag, um typically, cooking is permitted. Uh we certainly have to be careful not to light a fire during the holiday, but the fire is lit from before the holiday. We don't initiate a new fire, but if the fire is lit from before the holiday, it's okay to cook. However, this year, Shavuot, um here in the diaspora, not in Israel, uh where we celebrate two days. Shavuot comes out to be Friday and Shabbos. So even though Shabbos is a hug, the holiday is on Shabbos, too. There's no cooking on Shabbos. And we're going to be discussing hopefully a little bit later in the program how we are able to prepare for Shabbos properly because of the two days of Yom Tov, but we'll get to that a little bit a little bit later. So we're going to start and we're going to kick this off with Chef Moshe. Chef Moshe, are you ready? You're going to have to unmute. And Okay. You ready? Chef Moshe is going to start with cream cheese. Yes, welcome back. Nice to see you all. I'm glad you all came back. I guess you did enjoy the first two shows that we made. So the light that we did not have cream cheese till now and I just wanted to go grocery today and I saw that you can only get two cream cheese per family. Well, it's two cream cheese per family, not even can even make one cheesecake. I actually can make maybe one cheesecake, but that's it. So May maybe that's commercial size. Well Not not commercial. I'm going to teach you how to make your own cream cheese. I know you guys have a lot of milk at home because all these shivas everybody gives milk. You have tons of milk. What what you have to use is you have to use the whole milk. Whole milk is always better. It has more fat in it. It's going to give you out more cream cheese. You can use the low fat milk as well, but it's not going to give you out that much cream cheese because it doesn't have enough fat and it doesn't have enough milk in it to give you the cream cheese. So what we're doing now is you pour in one and one half gallon one quarter get one quarter bottle into the sauce pan over here. It's a little fire before so it's starting to get hot. And we got to stir it from time to time so it doesn't burn and we're going to wait a little bit longer till it gets cooked up. It's pretty hot already. Also, you got to be very careful. Milk, once it gets hot, it starts boiling, it can over boil. Once it over boiled, it's going to make a mess in your kitchen. You don't want that. There is costly places that do want to have it over boiled, but you don't want to have that cuz you don't want to have a mess in our kitchen. We're going to give it another minute. It's getting hot. Getting there. It's actually very easy to make. It doesn't take long and it actually tastes amazing. Once you have your own cream cheese, I don't think you'll buy cream cheese in the store ever again. So, what we use is we're going to use fresh squeezed lemons. So, you can also use lemon juice, ready bottled, but if you use lemon juice, bottled lemon juice, you can use vinegar as well. It's going to do the exact same thing, but it's not going to give you the exact flavor. It's not going to give you the taste, the the the texture that you want. So, what we use is we use fresh squeezed lemons, which gives you the exact texture and the flavor that you want. And what we're going to do is we're going to put in 1 tsp approximately at a time and mix it while we put it in. We'll give it another minute. It's still getting heated up. Another minute, it has to be like right before it boils over it boils over. And I have it on a high flame. Once it starts boiling really hot, once it stop boiling, we're going to lower the flame, which is going to be another probably 30 seconds. Chef Moshe? Yes. How did you manage? You know, I tried some of your recipes from Pesach. Yes. And and the scale is not liking it. Um how did you manage to get through a Pesach without putting on weight? Um that's that that's actually a very good question. You just got to Who cooked Who cooked good portion control. Who cooked in your Who cooked in your house at Pesach? Uh we cooked I cooked My wife so we cooked we basically joined the kitchen. You know what I mean? Two chefs in the kitchen usually doesn't work, but in my house we make sure it should work. Good for you. Uh yeah. It's all portion control. As I say, the second bite is not better than the first bite. Okay, as you can see it is starting to boil. How many ounces of cream cheese do you think we're going to get from this? Uh we're going to get out of about 12 oz of cream cheese, approximately. And there's actually another method how to do it. You do it with heavy cream with half and half, but that you have to like sit in the fridge for about 6 hours or overnight and let it drain and then then work it into a different process. This is the process that literally takes just a few minutes. You just got to boil up the the the milk. Once it boils up, the milk is it's a joke to me. So this is like really easy way to do cream cheese without having the like And according According to this recipe, how many how many servings of of cheesecake would you get from this? This is going to be for one cheesecake. I I one cheesecake like, you know, one person or one cheesecake? One 9-in pound cheesecake. A 9-in pan I don't know. Is that considered one 9-in pound cheesecake, you'll see what I I I guess it depends on the person. Yeah, I mean, some people would eat up the whole thing in one shot. Look at this, but uh Uh yeah. I'll tell you, you know what? When we're done, you send me the you send me the cheesecake when you're done, I'll make that decision. No problem. I'll make a stop in Lakewood tomorrow. It's a deal. Okay, as you see, it's starting to boil already. It's starting. It's nice. It's getting like showy. I'm going to wait another 30 seconds. I'm sorry, it's taking a little too long. But uh we don't want this over boil. So, what we're going to do is we're going to lower it right now. As you can see, it's starting to get the bubbles on top. This is when it starts getting really hot, and if you leave it too hot, this whole thing is going to rise up, and it's going to boil over. So, we're going to lower the temperature. And we're going to put in a little bit of the lemon juice. And we're going to stir it for about a minute. Raising and lowering fires on on Yom Tov is permitted, by the way. If you need it for cooking, you can raise the fire as needed, lower the fire as needed. Uh be careful, just don't turn it off. Cuz once you turn it off, you're not going to turn it on again. We're going to put in a drop more. Put in like 1 tsp at a time. And boil it more. As you can see, it's starting to break. Can you see that? Yeah, it looks it looks cloudy. It looks cloudy, it's starting to break. Now, it's set. This is good enough. It's like It's like quartz curtains on it. Now, what we're going to do is we're going to drain this. So, what you're going to use is a cheesecloth. Cheesecloth, you can get it on Amazon. You can get it on Stop & Shop. You can get it in in uh uh called ShopRite or maybe one of your maybe your supermarket has it as well. It's basically it's it's a strainer, but the beautiful thing about it is it doesn't leave any pieces in it, and it's fine mesh, so it leaves it it leaves the the water out, but not the not the cheese. So, what we're going to do is we're going to pour it over on it to get the solids out. Take the corners, we're going to pick it up. Let all the cheese out. Now, the finishing process is is depends how you want it. If you want to have it If you want to have a soft cream cheese, you don't drain it completely. You leave a little bit of water in it from the sauce that you're draining. So, you have you have a softer cream cheese. If you want more stiff cream cheese, more heavy cream cheese, uh you then you squeeze it out. So, we want to have a little bit more creamy cuz you want to have a nice creamy cheesecake out of it. So, we're going to let it drain a little bit. Just drop it into a food processor. Put a pinch of salt. Now, if you like scallion cream cheese, if you like um garlic cream cheese, if you like any other kind of spicy cream cheese, dill and cream cheese, you like you want to try out something different, you found a spice you love it, you want to try it out in a cream cheese, drop it into it. You'll have whatever cream cheese you desire. The sauce of it would be a good sauce for anything you want to have in your omelet. After you can cook a pasta in the sauce or whatever. It gives also good flavor. But now we just cover it. You put it on a high. You put on the blender. Blend it between a minute to 3 minutes. Hi back there. You got a lot of help there. Beautiful cream cheese. Oh wow. This is beautiful cream cheese. Nice. Don't ever say I don't have cream cheese. The store doesn't have cream cheese, we don't have a problem with that. We make our own. Because you don't have cream cheese, no problem. We have our own. Fantastic. Really, really nice. Thank you Chef Mike. Okay. We'll be back. We'll be back with you shortly. Okay, we'll see you soon. Yeah, don't go too far. I'm not. Staying right here. And we're going to go to Uncle Mike. I'm here. I'm ready. I'm waiting. Uncle Mike, yeah, we're falling a little bit behind schedule. All right. So I have to go fast. Okay, so No, did I I didn't say I didn't say you should go fast. Next. Uncle Mike, slow down. Okay. Uh we're waiting we're waiting for you. We're making rugelach. First, we have puff pastry dough. And then we have the same time we made the potatoes already. And the ingredients will come in when we do the recipes. We're going to have a nice mashed potato. You take three, four potatoes, you mash them up, boil them, mash them up, and you want to add a little bit of margarine. Now you can make this Some of the stuff we made tonight is is milk is dairy, so we use butter. Other things that we're doing use I made parve. So, I'm using margarine. What? With the sauteed onions I had sauteed them already also to save a little bit of time. We keep it on the fire till we melt We're going to melt in the margarine. You can turn off your camera. My partner here Yisrael is filming? Perfect. Once we have the margarine melted in just like that, we're going to mix that into the potatoes with the onions. And we mix that up until we get a nice creamy potatoes. We add salt to the potatoes when they're boiling, but we're going to add a little bit more salt, little bit of pepper for flavor, and if you like garlic or onion powder, um you can add that as well at this point. You can also add in some parsley flakes if you'd like for the color. I just leave plain mashed potatoes with sauteed onions. Before we start, I'm going to get ready for the mushroom gravy which is going to be our next step. And we're going to use a half a stick of of margarine. And we're going to slice up some some mushrooms. Add that on a little bit high. Melt down the margarine. Who's going to slice? This is a brand new knife. This is a a Wusthof knife. It makes Henckels, you know, puts them to shame. It's a brand new one I got for my birthday from my kids. Thank you very much. I love it. It's a phenomenal knife. Did do what the table there? I made for this recipe. I'm slicing up some mushrooms. We're going to add those into the diced up just a little bit a couple extra slices and add them into the margarine to saute. While those are sauteing, we're going to get our puff pastry ready. So, what we want to do is we'll sprinkle a little bit of flour onto a cutting board or onto the counter. And we'll lay out the pastry dough. If you just move the camera down a bit. Move the camera down a bit. There we go. We have squares. We're making squares. A lot of times pastry dough dough comes in blocks, comes in smaller pieces. I like the squares for this. It makes it a lot easier. It's pre-cut. You don't have to roll it out. And I'm just going to put them on on the counter like that. I'll make about six of them here. Then you can use if you have a scooper, you can use a scooper, you can use your hands. You can use a spoon. We're going to fill it up. First, take a little bit of of egg, very lightly brush the pastry dough. Does two things. Adds a little bit of flavor and it also keeps the dough closed when you fold it over, which we'll show you in the next step. So, we don't want to brush it too heavy, just a little lightly over there. We're going to put a scoop of potato in each one of the burekas. And I've already preheated the oven to 400. You can do it 375 400. Now, once we have the potato, it's a little bit off-center, you can see. And we're going to fold it over into a triangle, carefully pushing down the sides, flattening out the potato just a bit. So, we have a nice triangle. Beautiful. And with this also, we're going to cook it now, but you can make these weeks in advance. And just the way they are now, I'll show you at the next step, they can be frozen raw. And then when you're ready to heat them up, you just take them out, you defrost them in the fridge, and you can cook them, so you don't have to prep them on the day that you want to use them. Once we have those done, we're going to brush a little bit more egg on the top. It gives it a nice color when it when it bakes. And an optional step after we egg them, what I like to do is I add a little sesame seed to the top. Just a little bit of sprinkle of sesame seed to the top. Gives it a really nice look. Professional. Like in the We expect nothing less than you, Uncle Mike. we we put it on a baking pan. I put parchment paper down. If you don't have parchment paper, you could grease the pan. And then we just put them line them up. Just like that. And what I was saying about freezing them that you could take this pan once you have it before you bake it, you pop it in the in the freezer, you cover it with plastic, you put it in the freezer, and then just take it out whenever you're ready to serve it. Okay, now that we have this, we're going to put that in the oven in a moment. I'm going to show you our next step with the mushroom gravy. Here we have the mushrooms that we put into the pan before. You can see they're nice and sauteed just a little brownish, not too not too done, just a little soft. The margarine is melted. We're going to add a little bit of flour. Few tablespoons of flour into into the mix. What happens when you add a few tablespoons of flour, the flour soaks up the margarine. And it becomes like a little bit of pasty. Thick like a very thick pasty liquid. Once that's done, we're going to add a little bit of water. Put that The uh recipe that I have calls for a cup of water. And that'll come to a boil and a little bit of chicken soup base. Instead of the water, if you have soup stock, like um regular chicken soup, just chicken broth, you can add that as well. This goes very quick. As soon as it boils, if you look at it, nice and creamy. As it'll boil up, and become a little bit creamier. And you have this is a egg beige-ish golden color. Now, if you get Camera's a bit high. We're not We're not seeing the stove there. There you go. That's a little bit of like a golden color. And as soon as it's the water starts boiling up, you turn it down to a little simmer. Let it simmer just for a moment or two. And your your mushroom gravy is done. If you like, which I like to do, and I got to find They sell little jars. I don't have here. I have a big jar. It's something like this. It's a a gravy booster. This is small, but they have a little jar like that. It's called gravy booster. And what that does, when you cooking commercially, you have a big bottle of it. Put in just a couple of drops. Cuz I like my gravy instead of being a light color like that, you put in a few drops of the gravy booster. And you'll see in just a second now I have a nice beautiful brown. It's just a color. It doesn't change the texture at all? color does not change the taste. It just makes it a little bit brown, which is nice. Some people put in soy sauce. That changes the taste. Put that back up. And that's That's what we have. We have our mushroom gravy. We have our burekas. I'm going to pop that into the oven. And we're going to see it all done at the next segment of the show. I'm going to go back back to you. Quick question before you run. Um if if I wanted to do cheese burekas instead, what kind of cheese would I use? So, you could use a farmer cheese. You want something dry. You can't You don't want to use a cottage cheese. Maybe a little bit runny. Um so, you you might want to use a farmer cheese. You could use a ricotta cheese. And And if you want a cheese burekas, you want a little sweeter, you can add a little bit a into into the mix. You can also add if you depending on how much you do you can add an egg or a half an egg and a little bit of flour into the mix to soak up some of the liquid. If it's too liquidy it'll ooze out and then get get gunky underneath the the burekas. Got it. But I think Moishe is making cheese blintzes. If he's making I don't know for sure. If he's making them from scratch, his filling for the cheese blintzes you can definitely use um I believe so in the uh in the filling for a cheese burekas. Just as a word of precaution. burekas I would not do the mushroom gravy because that's more of a tangy. You want something sweet. You want more of a of a syrupy uh um drizzle on the top. That's a good point. And you also you certainly don't want to add the chicken stock if you're using cheese. I would definitely not. Just just just putting it out there. That's it. So so Moishe made his own cheese cream cheese. You know, the milk itself we can make go up to Ura. You could we could get our own milk. We got the milk make the milk straight into cream cheese without having to go to the store. We have the cow. So we're all done. So the whole milk we got. We're all ready to go. Yeah, it would be it would have been nice if we could have could have spent Shavuos up in the zone. But it wasn't meant to be for this year. All right. Thank you so much Chef Moishe. We're back to you. Um are you unmuted? Yeah. You're good you're good now. Chef Moishe. So we got the cream cheese. Um now we got the cream cheese. Now let's see the cheesecake. A whole year I'm waiting for Shavuos a whole year for the cheesecake. By the way, there's one thing I forgot to tell you before about the cream cheese. What you can do with this cream cheese is you have to you have to store in the fridge in a tight container. But if you want to have like a grated cheese just put it into the fridge uncovered for about an hour, put it back into the food processor and you'll have a nice grated cheese perfect to put into a salad. Oh, wow. Okay, so That's fantastic. Just a reminder for anybody that wants the the recipes, feel free to email [email protected]. That's [email protected]. It will be posted on all the social media web pages. Um all of Ura's and TorahMates and Chill Zones and all all the all the social media pages. Go ahead. Okay, so I'm going to make it a little quicker cuz we're running a little bit late. So, we have over here this is the crust. The crust recipe is made out of Lotus cookies. So, the Lotus cookies blended it, put in a half a half a stick of butter, blended it with it. And you just put it nicely around in the pan and you press it down from all sides. It's nicely covered. Now, we have our homemade cream cheese right over here. We got a 16 oz cream that we're going to pour it into the into the food processor. Make sure to empty out the whole thing. Uh we got some salt in. We're going to put in This is a half a cup of sugar. Four three eggs. Two teaspoons tablespoons of vanilla sugar. We're going to mix it all together. Get the whole thing nicely mixed together. Pour it into the into the crust. Now, if you want to make it nice and marbleized, want to make a nice design on top, you can do marble, you can put in regular chocolate syrup, or you can do a liquid marble. Which you can get in any store. You take a little bit of the liquid marble that I have over here. Take a spoon. Just run a line nicely over here. Another line over here. It doesn't have to be 100% perfect. Another line in the front. Just fix this one over here. Now, we're going to take a stick. And we're just going to pull them up one side, pull them back down, pull them back up. It creates a nice design of your cheesecake. So, you don't have to decorate it when you come out, or you can just leave it as it is. And you decorate it. You do your decoration later. Now, this goes in in a 350° hot oven for 45 minutes approximately. I will put it in the Chef Moshe, I thought you had some help there. Where were all your helpers there? Who do you think opened the oven? Uh-huh. Oh, they're just hiding in Behind the scenes. Um you want to put it into the middle of the oven, not on the bottom, not on the top because that's how your oven works. My oven works from the bottom and the top, so put it in the middle so it doesn't burn. In 45 minutes, this cheesecake should be done. Um we'll show it to you hopefully by the end of the show. It sounds like It sounds like it's really delicate. You really want to watch it. Yep. You got to be careful with it cuz it might It can crack on top. So, some people put it in in a bath of water. That's how they That's how they bake the cheesecake. But, I find just 45 minutes in the oven. When it's done, shut the oven for 15 minutes. Don't take it out. Take it out after 15 minutes when it cools off a little bit. You have a beautiful cheesecake. Let me Let me make one one little comment on the bath of water. If you cook the cheesecake on the top shelf and you just put any empty pan of water little pan of water on the lower level trick, same trick, yeah. Basically, you're steaming it. You're preventing it from cracking. So, if you have a little bit of steam in the oven, it doesn't have to actually be in a bath of water. If you have steam in the oven, you will hopefully prevent it from cracking. Fantastic. Yep. Beautiful cuz that you know, I hear that you know, ruining a cheesecake is you know, ruins a shvu's like like almost like not having matzah for Pesach. It's uh Yeah. All right. Thank you so much. So, we'll We're going to move We're going to move on and we're going to go back to Uncle Mike for a second and then we're going to get when we get back to Chef Moshe, we're going to want to see that that cheesecake. Now, Uncle Mike, are you are you muted? I don't know. Am I muted? good. No, no, no, you're good. You're good. Okay, so first thing we have to Um can I just throw out one quick thing before you start the salmon? Sure. Uh just a a very quick thing cuz this year um Shavuot comes out on Friday and Shabbat. Now, typically uh typically we do not cook. We're not allowed to cook from one day of um uh Yom Tov to the next day. Yom Tov we're allowed to cook, but only what is needed for that day. So, typically if Shavuot would be on two weekdays, um let's say it would be uh Tuesday or Wednesday, um for argument's sake, uh Tuesday you can only be you can only cook what you need for Tuesday, and Wednesday you would be allowed to cook what you need for Wednesday. This year we have a particular issue, which happens on many chagim, that when um Shavuot comes out Friday and Shabbat, obviously we cannot cook on Shabbat what we need for Shabbat. So, we're going to have to cook it before. So, how do we cook from Friday to Shabbat? And for that we do an Eruv Tavshilin. Eruv Tavshilin is a very fancy word for really what it means is it's uh what our rabbis taught us how we cook, we mix all the meals together. That's what the word Eruv means, to mix the meals together. And the reason why I'm mentioning this now um is because the typical process for an Eruv is I'll say very, very quickly is we take a matzah. Doesn't have to be Pesach matzah. Can be any any matzah. Could be a bread, a whole a whole uh challah, a challah roll, um and a cooked food. Very often um people use a piece of fish. Salmon would be a very popular a very popular choice. Uh many people use an egg. Um if we're going to put an egg away, we have to make sure that the egg is stays unpeeled. We don't peel an egg and then put it away for the next day. This is cooked the the food is cooked on Erev Yom Tov, which this year would be on Thursday, and that cooking begins the process to cooking for Shabbat. And with that we're allowed to cook on Friday for Shabbat. There is a process, there is a bracha that is recited for this eruv. This is done on erev Yom Tov, on this year comes out on Thursday. This is done Thursday afternoon before the onset of Shavuos. We say the bracha, there's a small paragraph to say, the head of the household says it for everybody. The challah or the matzah and the cooked food, the salmon or the egg or meat, whatever whatever you like is put away and that's eaten on Shabbos, typically by the third meal, by shaleshudos. I just mentioned that now because uh we're about to make the salmon. Uncle Mike, the floor is yours. Okay. So, the first thing to do when you're making a salmon is you got to go catch the salmon. So, let's go catch our salmon. Because now my guys weren't very happy about losing one of their friends. Oh, that's nice. So, he had a little bit of a friend. He's not so happy anymore because now we have our salmon all prepared. So, now we're back to the kitchen to prepare our salmon. I took regular fillet salmon with the skin on. We washed it off, we place it in a pan, separate a little bit one piece from the next. And we're going to make a little bit of a sauce. I also chose this as a pareve sauce because it's nice to um be able possibly to do it for Shabbos or a Yom Tov appetizer that you might be having a a meat meal. There's mayonnaise as the base for your pareve cream sauce. And if you wanted to use it for a dill sauce rather, if you wanted to make it dairy, all you'd have to do is substitute the mayonnaise, Hellmann's real is the only way to go. You'd substitute the mayonnaise with sour cream. And then we're going to add some fresh chopped garlic. Little bit of sugar. If you don't want the sugar, you can add Splenda. Little bit of lemon juice. Some deli mustard. When we say some, um just to remind you my recipe. A couple of All the recipes are there. Yeah. Cooking show at ou.org. And fresh dill. Two or three cubes of fresh dill, which I had defrosted already before. And we're going to whisk that up. We'll add a little bit of salt. See, if you recall from last time, I had the zhuzher. I don't need a zhuzher for this. Just a little bit of creamy mayonnaise. With the mustard, gives a nice color. I can smell the dill. Delicious smelling dill. And then what we're going to do is we're going to You can use a brush, you can use a spoon, you can use your hands. We're going to put it onto the salmon. Nice amount. Don't be Don't be cheap on the salmon. We want to cover it all up. First, we'll get it all covered. And we'll also let it go down the sides. This is a little little liquidy, which is nice. It's fine. And once you have it going down the sides and you're totally covered We have a preheated oven of 425. And we're going to put that in the oven. On the top shelf, uncovered for 22 minutes. The a I picked out. Some people say 20 minutes, 18 minutes, 25 minutes. I use 22 minutes. It could be a little bit longer if you like it if you like it a little firmer. Um if there's smaller pieces or thinner pieces or the tail pieces, you might want to go closer to 18 minutes. And that's it. That's That's cooking the royal salmon with a dill sauce. And I'll wait for you to get off the phone. And And Rabbi Forster is muted and I don't think he realizes he's muted. He's muted. I realized I just had to I just had to answer Here we go. Perfect. Okay, my my segment of the gefilte fish, I mean the salmon, is already is all done. And That's it. Here, you Say hello to your sucker. Here's my uh my friendly neighbor helper. Socially distant, 16 ft sort of. And we're all good to go. Rabbi Forster. Yes. Next Next segment. And we move on to cheese blintzes. Um I have Oh, what happened here? Uh 1 second. It might be 2 minutes. Chef Moishe. Okay. Now we're up to cheese blintzes. So, the first thing we're going to make is a crepe. So, we're going to have about four eggs. We got some sugar in it. We got 1 cup of milk, 1/4 cup of oil, pinch of salt in it, and flour. I do have my How's it called it? It calls it a boshesh. The blender, hand blender. You also do it in the food processor. I do it in the hand blender. The first thing I do is egg with the with the milk. Then I put the flour Sleeping on the city. You don't want to have it too thick. You want to have it a little bit runny. Not too thick. And on a frying pan, you heat up the frying pan with a spray. Not too much oil on it. Let it get nice and hot. You basically you're not going to flip it. I'm going to show you how to do it without flipping it. Okay, continue. It's nice and hot now. Put in a little bit. And we're going to roll it around so it covers the whole pot. Not too much, nice and thin. So as you can see, it's going to change the color. You're going to see it's going to start cooking the side start cooking already. I notice you got a high I got a high fire there. Is that Is that on purpose? Yeah. You want to You want to start on a high fire. You want to top the the pot to be very hot. But as it goes, you're going to lower the flame cuz you don't want it to burn either. But you want the pot to be very hot. Make sure the sides Once the sides comes off nicely, now all you just do, you flip it over. And that's it. It's done. So we're going to make a few of it. And we're going to show you how to do the filling. Is the cheesecake anywhere near done? I'm not looking at it. You know this is done as well. You see it gets nice and brown on the sides. This is done. It's not wet on the side anymore. We also do the same thing. You just flop it down. Done. We'll do another one. And now we have three down. We're going to go do the filling. Show you how we do the filling and how to fill it up. If you make it thin enough, you don't have to flip it. If it's a thicker if the crepe is thicker, then you got to flip it to finish the other side. But if it's thick enough, you don't have to flip it. If it's thin enough, you don't have to flip it. Certainly will make life easier. For some reason when I try flipping it, I get more on the counters than on the stove than in the pot. Yep. So then you don't have to flip it. You don't have to flip it. As you can see, this is not completely done. Has a little bit wet over here. The rest of it is dry. So you wait another second. We're going to shove it. We're just going to drop drop it here. Now what we're going to do is we're going to flip it over to this side cuz this side is where we're going to fill it up. So now we are going to do the filling. The filling is basically we have over here eggs, cream cheese, and and farmer cheese. We're going to put in 8 oz of sour cream. Put about half of this of sour cream. Sour cream. 1 and 1/2 cups of sugar. 1 tsp of another sugar. And one instant vanilla pudding. I'm going to do a pinch of salt. Flour. As a shout out, I noticed my parents are watching. Shout out Shout out to my parents. I hope I didn't disappoint them. They Maybe they thought I was cooking tonight. No, but we wanted the food to taste good. So, I'm not cooking. Oh, yay, yay. I was waiting to see who's going to be brave enough to take out their pots and and really cook along. I thought maybe on the on the pictures we'll see some uh stovetops and people people trying the recipes live. Anybody daring enough? And we finally got it to mix together. And it's nice and soft. You can also put in some heavy cream a little bit to make it a little more creamy. I'm just going to put in a little bit to make it a little more creamy. Depends how you like it. If you like it creamy, you don't like it creamy, you can also add some strawberries. You can just take frozen strawberries, blend it, and uh mix it into the mix and then have a strawberry one. And one of the other things that I do in sometimes is you take some caramel, some dairy caramel sauce and you just Sorry, it's not open yet. It's a brand new one. You used up the other one already. You just place a little bit of it. Just give it a little bit of a taste. Take a little bit of the mix. Drop it down nicely. Now, what you're going to do is you're just going to going to fold it in from the two sides first. And you're going to fold it in this way. Bring them back a little bit. Is that better than just making one one one roll? Now, you this is it doesn't fall out on the side. Watch, let me do it. I'll show you it's going to fall out. I know. That's why I'm doing it in my own way already. That's why Rabbi Forster you have to do the burekas, so you push down all the sides it won't fall out. And then do the same thing over here again. We're going to do a little bit of caramel. A few strips. I think on our next cooking show, maybe we should do it a competition. Maybe you should both do the same dish. And this way we can we can compare it. Who's going to taste? Uh what do you mean who's going to taste? Who's talking? Who's talking? You're going to do all the tasting. Again, you pick it up from the two sides. Pick it up from the other side. Pull them back. And just roll it nicely. And put it up on your plate. Put a little bit of caramel drizzle on it. You can do a little bit of drizzle. I'm going to do a little bit strawberry drizzle on it. And you got your beautiful lunches. Gorgeous. It doesn't get cooked again? No, that's it. Now, you can freeze it. You can freeze it. And if you want to warm it up, you can put it in into a frying pan and fry it a little bit from the two sides, but this is ready to eat. Beautiful. Fantastic. All right. Thank you so much, Chef Mike. So, we're going to go back to Uncle Mike. I'm here and waiting for you. There we go. And I hear you have some pasta for us. I do. So, what we started off with, we're going to do a penne alla vodka. Oh, smells good already. And I'm not going to talk about alla. We're just going to talk about penne vodka. So, I prepared the penne already earlier, so you're not cooking and whatever and waiting for me on the on the show to start boiling our pasta. I have it all prepared. Anytime you prepare pasta in advance, cool it off, drain it, wash it, let it strain out till there's no water. You can put it in a pan, then add a couple of tablespoons of oil and mix it up. That will prevent it from sticking. I did this hours ago, and as you can see, totally loose, perfect. And we're going to make the but the penne alla vodka sauce. We start off with some tomato sauce. Use a 15-oz can or two smaller cans of the 16-oz. And with this done in too many steps, you can put everything in together. We have heavy cream, which is all from the last recipe, same idea. We're going to put in a half a cup of heavy cream. We're going to put in some butter, nice uh nice spoonful of butter. Allow that to all melt in and some garlic. Keeping teaspoon or tablespoon of garlic. And we have some basil. You could use also you could use the fresh basil. I happen to have the dry basil. I didn't just froze the fresh one so I'm going to just use a little bit of of dry basil. And we are going to mix that all up together. Where is my my whiskers? We mix that up. That's all right. The butter is going to melt slowly. It's going to turn from a red from the tomato sauce to a nice pinkish color. Can you just move the uh the camera down a bit? There you go. Once it's hot, just before it's boiling, we get to the best part. The vodka. Hence the name, penne alla vodka. Oh, the vodka. I thought it was the eating part. Okay, I'll I'll take the vodka, too. Never drink alone. You're pouring about a quarter of a cup of vodka. With this measurement, doesn't hurt if you uh over exaggerate a little bit. And we're going to let that sit a little bit. It has to cook out. Anytime you're cooking with alcohol or wine or um uh beer or um vodka, hard liquor in any of the recipes, as long as it cooks out a little bit, once it boils and it simmers just a touch and it starts boiling out, the alcohol dissipates and there's no alcohol content that will be left in the in the sauce itself. While that's simmering, I'm going to go into our next pasta, which is fettuccine alfredo. Now, there different types of pasta and any of these pastas, you don't have to use the pasta you call so, you don't have to use penne for penne alla vodka. If you like macaroni, help yourself. Um this I actually use for the fettuccine. I use linguine because it's a little thinner cut. I like the linguine a little better. I did the same thing. I boiled it up before, added a little bit of oil and you see how nonstick that is. It comes out beautiful. And we're going to put in our pot a little bit of butter. This one will be It's going to be a similar start to the way we did the mushroom gravy before. Where is it instead of the margarine, I'm going to melt butter. And we're going to add a little flour to it. We're going to add a little bit of garlic. Um I happen to like mushrooms in my in my uh penne alla vodka, so I'm going to add some mushrooms as well. For this one, I'm going to use canned mushrooms. I'm just doing that just to show you. It really doesn't make a difference for this one. If you like fresh mushrooms, which I do, you use those and do it the same way. Let them boil out. When you're using the canned mushrooms, you do not do let it boil out. Um let it I I don't It do not have to let it saute. As long as it gets hot, then we're okay. And I'm going to add a little bit more butter. This is a little dry, but it'll soften up. You see that? There we go. We have just the mushrooms, a little garlic, and the butter. I'm going to add a touch of flour as well. Not quite as much. It depends how much liquid is in there with how much butter you're you to add. And I just want to dry it up just a little bit. Just to get it a little pasty. Make sure the flour is not clumpy. Make sure the flour is dissolved in the liquid. We're going to add a cup of milk. A half a cup of heavy cream. And about a half a cup of cream cheese. Just like Chef Mosha, I made this cream cheese myself. Aisle seven in the refrigerated department in supermarket. About a half a cup of cream cheese. As you can see, I didn't measure that. It's just a rough guestimate. And we're going to allow that to soften up and to cook. What happens is when the flour cooks up, it thickens up the sauce. Thickening up the sauce, what you want to What you're actually doing is making a roux, it's called. Many people have heard of a roux. A roux is a thickening agent. It's basically flour and oil. I'll give you a little example. We take flour, and this can be any type of gravy, a sauce, um a soup even that you want to thicken up. You make pepper steak, and you want to thicken it up. You want to thicken up the gravy, and you don't want to use cornstarch, um or you used cornstarch, it wasn't enough, you want to thicken it up a little more. Anything you want to do, take some flour, Is flour better than breadcrumbs? Then this is a totally different process. This is not um calling for We're We're not We're not thickening up We're not like coating it. What we're doing is as I said, we're making what's called a roux, which is a flour and oil mixture. Is that with bread crumbs? Would bread crumbs ever be used to thicken something? No. Not not in this application. Now, bread crumbs will soak up water like if you want to put bread crumbs in a soufflé, in a kugel. Um, so if there's too much liquid in it and it solidifies it, that's as you're baking it, the bread crumbs will soak it up and and help that. This is This as it's called is a roux. What you're doing is you're basically it's it's it's a heavy almost like syrup. It could be a little bit thicker, but as long as the flour is dissolved, you're going to add that to anything. You can add that to boiling water. You can add it to a soup. You can add it to a pepper steak sauce, a a sesame chicken sauce. As long as it's hot, simmering, you pour this in slowly. A little bit goes a long way. A small amount will thicken up a large a large amount. Cornstarch, you you have to mix with cold water. I hear the timer for my salmon, so we're going to take a 1 minute of supper. Wow, baby, does that look beautiful. Yes, I'll give you all a chance to see. Here's the salmon coming out of the oven. Beautiful. A little bit brown golden brown on the top. It's firm to the touch. If you want to touch it to feel, make sure it's not mushy on the sides. Beautiful. Delicious. The leftover sauce that we had from before, when you serve it, you could serve that hot or cold. Hot would make a nice sauce. You could put a little bit of drizzle of the leftover dill sauce from before. You could put it on the side. You could put it on the top. Drizzle it over. You could put it in a bowl on the table that people can kind of use as a dip as they need. Works however you like it to work. Okay, now I was in the middle of the road. So, that's the corn That's the flour road. The flour goes with oil. Cornstarch, when you're using cornstarch to thicken something up, you have to mix the cornstarch with cold water to get also a pasty um type of uh thick consistency. You're not adding if it's not um totally dissolved, it will clump up. And let me tell you the story one of the first uh weeks that I was on the job working with a chef, he was trying to help me out and I was trying to prove myself and he was leaving and he had this huge pot of gravy on the stove. He told me he had the cornstarch He had a box of cornstarch left on the side. Told me to add the cornstarch when it starts to boil to thicken it up. I thought I knew everything. It was boiling up. I dumped the whole box of cornstarch into this huge pot of gravy. And I spent the next 3 hours picking out all the little pieces. I couldn't let him down to say, "Oh, it was no good." I didn't want him to see it. Then I read the side instructions of the box on the next box, figured out how to do it correctly. But anyway, that's uh That's the cornstarch story. Here is our penne alla vodka sauce. Beautiful beautiful pink, perfect consistency. I'm going to taste it just to make sure. Oh, I love it when a plan comes together. And what we do is we take our We take There's a few different ways you can take your penne and you could just pour some over the top as in a a a bowl at a time. Give it a little bit of toss. If you'd like, you can add some parsley flakes to the top. You want to heat the pasta before you do it. If you're making a whole pound with the recipe listed up a little bit so they can see. They want to see me. They don't want to see the food. They lift up you uh you can add the whole pound to the to the sauce that I made. That's for about a pound of pasta. And you allow that to heat up and have a perfect penne alla vodka. Now, going to our fettuccine Alfredo. Here is Here's where we up to before. So, we're looking at the at the at the gravy, at the sauce. And you take a look at the fettuccine sauce. Different consistencies. Now, if I wanted to thicken this up a little Right now, I think it's perfect. Nice consistency. It's a little thin, little runny, which for me, that's the way I like it. The mushrooms add a delicious flavor. And as I said before, if you don't like the mushrooms, you can leave those out. And we can do the same the same thing. Take a bowl. Take some fettuccine linguine like I have. And we're going to pour right on top. There you have it. And again, you would heat it up a little bit more. The amount that I made um that's going to be included in the recipe card should be for a pound of pasta. Um you can make more, you can make less. You can make Like I said, the pasta earlier, you can make the sauce earlier and then heat it up, but when you heat it up, heat it up on a slow a low a low flame. Are you going to really make it so jealous like that? Wow, was that good? I think I could bring some to Mrs. Shifrin tomorrow. She'll be up in camp. I'm going up there. If there's any left, but I don't think so. Really delicious. You kidding? From from a portion that size, I wouldn't have any left by tomorrow. If make a trip to Lakewood within the next hour or two. If you Sukkah leaves you over any, there'll be some left. I forgot to shout out to all my kids watching in Florida, Aaron and Raizel, Ariella and Gitty, Ayala, Eliana, my new baby granddaughter Kaylee. Oh, nice. The Oceans feel over here in Lakewood with the Mosha and Shia. Hopefully with Hashem everybody test negative, maybe we'll get together very soon, I hope. Now, before I leave, I have to show you Sukkah, turn the camera around over here. Look at these burekas that came out of the oven. Oh, that's gorgeous. They beautiful golden brown. Perfect. I could freeze them. At least before we said you could freeze them. Or you can freeze them like that as well. Just when you heat them up, you want to heat them up uncovered, so it stays nice and crispy on top. I think that's it. Did I have anything else that I forgot about? Thank you so much. Nope. Nope. Thank you so so much. We just I'll wave my hands if I forgot something that's important that I have to tell you. Uh All right, you know how to get in touch with me. I'll try. I'll try. All right. I know we are we are running a bit late, but we can't leave before before we get a dessert. So, Chef Meish what do we got for us for dessert? Okay, first of all, Uncle Mike just sent me guys to Mrs. Shifrin when y'all get in camp. And uh if you want to take anything, you can make a stop on the way. Can I ask you for Can I ask you guys for a favor? Until we know for sure, 100% the camp is opening, can we not talk about it? Camp is opening. What do you mean? Let us stay positive. I I sure hope so. For sure. I sure hope so, but you know. It's opening. It's opening. If you make me dream too high, you know. Okay. Okay. Okay. I'm not going to talk about it. No problem. Okay. We're going to make it quick. We're going to do like an Ambrosia style uh strawberry drink. So, we have some heavy cream bottle over here, but I have What do What are we What are we making here? It's a strawberry cream cream drink. For dessert. Strawberry cream drink. Oh, wow. So, this drink you can you can technically use it as a entree as well. If you add cream cheese, it's going to come a little heavier. And you put it in a nice small cup with a little whipped cream and whatever you make a nice design on it, some strawberries, some uh caramel, whatever you want to put on it. And it's nice for a entree as well, but we are doing it now. We're doing it for the dessert cuz we're basically at the end of the meal. So, we got a half a cup of uh uh heavy cream. We got 1 and 1/2 cups of sugar. And we're going to add some sour cream in it. And a half a cup of Good. About two cups of milk. We're going to go You want to drink? Thank you for the ice. I'm going to take my house uncle my co-worker, my masher. The blender. Juicer. Juicer. The juicer. The thing that makes me feel a lot better. Just don't try Googling that. I don't think you're going to find it. That looks so good. Mike, shall I trade you a bottle of Penne Alla Vodka? Okay, no problem. By the time you're leaving Lakewood tomorrow, maybe I'll still catch you in Lakewood. I'm passing by Lakewood tomorrow. I heard that my son-in-law just texted me. My son-in-law Tzvi just texted me that in Lakewood, uh he calls I don't know he got the name he calls it a vrooper. Cuz it goes All right, besides all the all the nicknames, anybody know what this thing is really called? An immersion blender. All right. That's simple enough. Uh a little more heavy cream. A little heavier. Oh. One thing I do that I forgot to put in, I know I forgot something, is my orange juice. One cup of orange juice. Okay. Let's stir it. I'm going to fill up this cup nicely. Soak your drink. A little more on it. Put some whipped cream on top of it. And a small piece of strawberry on it. And that's your That's our Shavuot dinner, meal, delicious. Yep. You put it on a nice and a nice paper straw. Make sure you put a paper straw and not a plastic straw. Save the environment. Um And yeah, that's uh that's the straw. It looks great. It looks great. So, we got four meals. Um well, I guess potentially five meals of Shavuot. I think we have enough enough to last us a whole enough recipes to last us a whole Yom Tov. Beautiful. Especially if you're making prime rib for three out of four of the meals, then you know. Anyway, two chefs, thank you so so much. You don't miss a By the way, Excellent. Thank you so much for narrating. Are you kidding? You guys did That's the easy part. Um one day I'm going to try cooking. Remember that would that wouldn't work. I'll skip that. That'll be fun. Thank you so so much and thank you Thank you, Rabbi Forster. Our cheesecake is done. We're just going to keep it in the oven. So, this is our cheesecake. Oh, it's nice. Here you go, sir. Beautiful cheesecake. I like your pot holder. It's the same one I use. We got it at the That's why we have Yom Tov, right? Very nice. By the way, if I hope Rabbi Forster we can get the the recipe cards from Pesach if there anybody wants it, you can use it also non-Pesach. Yes. The rest All the recipes are available. The ones from the cooking shows we did, the two shows we did during Pesach, and from the one from tonight, they're all available. They will be on The Pesach ones are already on on Facebook and Instagram. The uh tonight's will be up. If it's not up yet, it will be up soon, but they're all available by email Uh [email protected]. That's [email protected]. Send your request and hopefully before the end of tonight we will get back to you with all the the recipes that you want. Thank you so much chefs. Thank you so much Thank you everybody for joining.