I have a very tasty recipe for noodle kugel, one of my favorite dishes around this time of year. It’s full of carbs and fat and sugar, which is why I only make it as a seasonal dish, because eating it year-round would be deadly. Today I made some for a holiday potluck party.

The recipe I use calls for cream cheese, eggs, and milk. It specifies full-fat cream cheese, but says that any kind of milk may be used, even soy milk. We didn’t have enough dairy milk on hand for the whole thing, but I did have a package of Vitasoy Holly Nog soy milk. Though it may seem a bit odd to mix soy milk and eggs and dairy — and egg nog-flavored soy milk at that — it really worked. In fact, it might have been the best noodle kugel yet!

I brought it to the party tonight and many people enjoyed it heartily. My favorite comment: “It’s Jewish Christmas on a plate!” I just might make it this way every time.

Attention veg*ns and veg-friendly folks: the Boston Vegetarian Food Festival is two days this year instead of one!

Saturday, October 31, 2009, 10 AM - 6 PM
Sunday, November 1, 2009, 10 AM - 4 PM

As ever, it’s held in the Reggie Lewis Athletic Center at 1350 Tremont Street in Boston.

Bring your reusable shopping bags, some money, and your appetite for free samples!

It has very abruptly become the time of year in New England when roasting vegetables becomes especially appealing, which brings me to two things I’ve learned:

• Brussels sprouts, which I rarely consider edible, are rendered vastly tastier when picked, roasted, and consumed when tiny. By “tiny” I mean less than an inch in diameter. Once they are golf ball-sized, they are just icky.
• Roasted beets are made even better when cubed and soaked in cold water for up to an hour before roasting. Someone told me this tip the other day and I tried it last night. Result: the beets retain their shape and texture better and the flavor is even better.

I was in Porter Square Books yesterday; I never buy anything, but I like to pretend I might. I was looking at Jessica Seinfeld’s Deceptively Delicious, which had made it to the discount section. Most of the recipes seemed to be ‘puree something that’s close in colour and blend it in; using pureed carrots as the moistener in meatballs, for example, one that kept on my mind was her original ‘recipe’, a couple spoonfuls of butternut squash in some macaroni and cheese. It just stuck in my brain, so I decided to try something similar.

I am not a child, and I am actually very fond of roasted squash, so in this case, I wasn’t trying her method (which was, basically, to mix in very small amounts of squash so that kids wouldn’t taste it. I went all out; the mac and cheese sauce started with a dark roux (non-traditional, but I really like the nuttiness that it brings over a light roux). I made it with bread flour instead of regular flour, and it was great; the finer texture made it much smoother much faster. Then I melted half a block of cream cheese into it, and added maybe half a cup of roasted, pureed acorn squash (butternut squash, while delicious, and technically cheaper than acorn, all weighed at least 4lbs, while the acorn was under 1lb. I like squash, certainly. But I’d be eating it for 4 days if I’d gone for that).

That got whisked until smooth (I added a small bit of pasta water when it seemed it needed it), and then I added about a cup of sharp cheddar, and a few sprinkles of ground cayenne (my paprika is missing).

I reflect that when I was a child, I thought that recipes were astonishing, and I remember, being 9 or 10, and thinking to myself that I hoped when I grew up, I’d be able to write just one recipe. I didn’t even think of the idea of making more than that - recipes were obviously *hard*, and I just wanted to create *one*. Now that I can create recipes, including pastries and such, from my head, I never measure anything. It’s *awful*. People ask me for my recipes for things, and I haven’t the foggiest (I can’t give you the recipe for my baitcon frozen custard- it all just got made up on the fly). I’m also terrible at how I measure; the only reason I know the cheddar amount is because I put it into a 2 cup measuring cup while it was waiting. I shredded it ‘until I have about a fist sized lump.

This is totally useless as a measurement to anyone who doesn’t have access to my fist at time of shredding.

anyway, it was AMAZINGLY good. Probably the best mac and cheese I’ve made. Eben had a bowl and said it was quite good, so I’m definitely going to do it again.

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