Skip to main content

Blintzes

Shavuot starts tonight. There is a tradition to eat lots of dairy of Shavuot. My youngest informed me that he loves Shavuot food because it is so plain. He came home from school just as I had finished making the pancakes for the blintzes. He then asked me what flavor blintzes I planned to make. As far as I am concerned, there is only one flavor of blintzes worth making and that’s cheese blintzes. One of the nice thing about being the mom is that I am free to indulge my culinary quirks. I suppose if one of my kids begged for a blueberry blintz I might relent, if I were in a particularly good mood.

100_1610

The blintz recipe comes from my mother’s almost relative Adele. Adele and my aunt became close friends in high school. Adele then married her High School Hebrew teacher,  a distant cousin of ours.  We always loved claiming  Adele as a relative.  She was so cool. She was serious about museum and gallery going. She was really smart and fearsomely opinionated, and usually right. Adele wasn’t pretty, her face looked like a beautiful gnarled tree root.

At Adele’s memorial service, my cousin handed out copies of Adele’s honey cake recipe. I loved the idea. I never ate Adele’s honey cake. But Adele made these blintzes for us when she visited us the Shavuot after her husband died.

Blintz Pancake or Bletl
3 eggs
1 C milk
1 c flour
1 pinch salt
1 pinch baking soda (or powder)
1 Tsp sugar
mix in blender
fry on one side only in an oiled blintz pan. Which if you don’t know, is a 6 inch cast iron frying pan. Stack blintzes on a napkin lined dinner plate. Cover blinztes with napkin corners until ready to fill100_1608

Filling
1 1/2 lbs soft cheese. Farmer cheese is lovely for it’s dry and squeeky nature. Cream cheese alone is just too fat. I suppose if Paula Deene were making blintzes she would use cream cheese. Tonight I’m using a combination of drained yogurt and drained cottage cheese. Do not use non fat cheese. You may as well fill your blintzes with erasers instead. Drained yogurt with fat content is tart and has a nice body. We are going for an Eastern European flavor

1 egg – to hold everything together
sweet: a bit of sugar..you want a hint rather than something that will get served for dessert. Vanilla or cinnamon or orange peel or lemon peel all are nice. Think hint of flavor

or

salty: some salt and lots of freshly ground pepper

put a heaping teaspoon of filling in the center of the pancake. fold in the east west sides of the blintz and then roll up. Fry in a pan with very little butter. Fry seam down first.brown, then flip and brown the other side. You can fry several blintzes at one time


Tomorrow I plan to make home made lokshen mit kaese – noodles with home made cheese. More plain food to make my youngest happy. Happy Shavuot!!!

Comments

  1. I so enjoy cheese blintzes so thanks for the recipe and directions. I will definitely make my own soon.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I love hearing from my readers. I moderate comments to weed out bots.It may take a little while for your comment to appear.

Popular posts from this blog

Connecting with the past

A few months ago I had a craving for my father’s chicken fricassee.  If my father were still alive I would have called him up and he would have talked me through the process of making it.    My father is no longer alive so I turned to my cookbooks and the recipes I found for chicken fricassee were nothing at all like the stew of chicken necks, gizzards and wings in a watery sweet and sour tomato sauce that I enjoyed as a kid.  I assumed that the dish was an invention of my father’s. I then attempted to replicate the dish from my memory of it and failed.   A couple of weeks ago I saw an article on the internet, and I can’t remember where, that talked about Jewish fricassee  and it sounded an awful lot like the dish I was hankering after. This afternoon I went to the butcher and picked up all of the chicken elements of the dish, a couple of packages each of wings, necks and gizzards. My father never cooked directly from a cook book. He used to re...

The light themed tallit has been shipped!!!

 I had begun speaking to Sarah about making her a tallit in the middle of August. It took a few weeks to nail down the design. For Sarah it would have been ideal if the tallit were completed in time for her to wear it on Rosh HaShanah., the beginning of her year as senior rabbi of her congregation. For me, in an ideal world, given the realities of preparing for the High Holidays I would have finished this tallit in the weeks after Sukkot. So we compromised and I shipped off the tallit last night.  I would have prefered to have more time but I got the job done in time. This tallit was made to mark Sarah's rise to the position of senior rabbi but it was also a reaction to this year of darkness. She chose a selection of verses about light to be part of her tallit. 1)  אֵל נוֹרָא עֲלִילָה  God of awesome deeds ( from a yom kippur Liturgical poem) 2)  אוֹר חָדָשׁ עַל־צִיּוֹן תָּאִיר   May You shine a new light on Zion ( from the liturgy) 3)  יָאֵר יְהֹ...

A Passover loss

 My parents bought this tablecloth during their 1955 visit to Israel. It is made out of  linen from the first post 1948 flax harvest. The linen is heavy and almost crude. The embroidery is very fine. We used this cloth every Passover until the center wore thin.  You can see the cloth on the table in the background of this photo of my parents and nephew My Aunt Sheva bought my mother a replacement cloth. The replacement cloth is made out of a cotton poly blend. The embroidery is crude and the colors not nearly as nice. The old cloth hung in our basement. We used the new cloth and remembered the much nicer original cloth. I loved that my aunt wanted to replace the cloth, I just hated the replacement because it was so much less than while evoking the beauty of the original. After my father died my mother sat me down and with great ceremony gave me all of her best tablecloths. She also gave me the worn Passover cloth and suggested that I could mend it. I did. Year after year ...