Easy Kreplach for Purim

Hooray, Purim is coming! Another chance to eat great Jewish food, this holiday is a gold mine of dough-filled delights called hamantaschen.  Although you can now buy them at other times of the year, when I grew up, they only appeared at Purim, with fillings of all types peeking out from a cookie-liked dough triangle.  My favorite hamantaschen fillings are poppy seed – not too sweet and definitely made from scratch, not with that horrible poppy seed filling sold in grocery stores - and chocolate, a modern variation but truly delicious surrounded by the buttery dough on the outside.

Fooled you!  This post is not about hamantaschen at all, but about kreplach.  I’d heard of kreplach before, but had never eaten or made them until last week, when I went looking for traditional Purim recipes.  To my amazement, 3-cornered hamantaschen are not the only surprise-filled Purim treats.  Kreplach are their savory cousins, filled with meat, potato, or in some communities, turkey.  You can float them in chicken soup or serve them as a side dish with a meat or vegetarian meal. 

If you search for kreplach in cookbooks or online, you’ll notice references to them as Jewish wontons or the Jewish version of pierogi, ravioli. agnolotti, tortellini, or empanadas.  Suffice it to say, every ethnic group that cooks with dough has figured out that putting filling in it and cooking those small “packets” is a great idea.

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Raspberry-Blueberry Galette

I was going to skip this TuesdaysWithDorie baking “assignment” – it’s a berry galette and I just did an apricot-plum galette with the Avid Bakers group. But then I realized how much fun it would be to compare the recipes and I was hooked.

The Abby Dodge dough is a simple flour, sugar and salt combination, held together by butter and ice water.  A small amount of lemon zest and juice were the only ingredients out of the ordinary.  By contrast, the Baking with Julia galette dough recipe by Flo Braker, one of my favorite bakers, uses cornmeal in addition to white flour and adds sour cream to the ice water. 

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Blueberry & Cherry Tartlets

When deciding what to contribute to our traditional July 4^th potluck dinner, I decided to go all out.  Inspired by the July Avid Baker’s Challenge, Abby Dodge’s Classic Fruit Tart, I figured that a red-white-and-blue tart would be grand.  Then I couldn’t leave well enough alone and morphed the concept from one large tart to 2-dozen tartlets. 

Despite the storm last weekend and the triple digit temperatures that continue even as I write this, I was determined to follow through with my plan.  Luckily we didn’t lose power in the storm (for which I am grateful beyond words) and I could work in an air-conditioned kitchen. 

This plan and my initial efforts violated at least 3 of my own basic rules:

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