5. What are your favorite adapted recipes (originally non-kosher, converted to fit the laws of kashruth)?

My four favorite adapted recipes, available from Ruth’s Kitchen, are: Meatloaf, Spaghetti with Meat Sauce and Meatballs, Pie Crust, and Brie and Smoked Salmon Quiche. The meatloaf originally had beef, veal, and pork with bacon and a lot of milk in the recipe. I experimented with beef only, adding other binding ingredients – bread dampened with water, eggs, catsup, etc. to get the right texture. It’s delicious! The spaghetti recipe is based on early cooking experiences; I shared an apartment with three non-Jewish roommates one summer in college. They did a lot of cooking, mostly Italian food. I watched their methods and smelled the food constantly. One thing I learned was that the spaghetti sauces all had milk added after browning the meat. Later, I tried different kosher additions to make a tasty, thick, fresh-tasting sauce. The addition of flour after browning the meat, with the immediate addition of wine, makes a marvelous sauce. Pie crust seems like such a simple and common recipe. However, there is a real trick to having a tender and flaky pareve crust. Usually pie crust has a combination of hydrogenated shortening (or lard) and butter. The recipe I adapted from the “Joy of Cooking” solves the shortening problem by creating a paste first with the sifted flour and water. This starts to develop a bit of gluten in the dough before cutting in the hydrogenated shortening. You have to work really quickly and gently so as not to develop any more gluten as this would toughen the dough. Finally, the quiche is a more recent addition. It is based on a quiche with ham and brie in the movie “Waitress”. I created a quiche with smoked salmon and brie. In this case I use a butter-based pie crust, for both the flavor and the texture.

6.  How has kosher cooking enriched your life?

There is no doubt that keeping kosher and deciding to devote myself to having an exceptional kitchen has shaped both our eating and our social life.  Here I use “we” and “us” because this journey has been one that was shared closely with my husband and with my children. We always discussed food at length and worked together to build menus and eating habits.  This has also led to an amazing set of experiences that otherwise we never would have had. If we had not kept kosher, not only would the decision of what to eat but the knowledge of what goes into that food would have become less important and perhaps not important at all. Keeping kosher awakened in us an awareness of what goes into food, how it is prepared, what tastes good, what tastes terrible, and how food should be presented and eaten. Some of this comes directly from the laws of kashruth, but most of it comes from making everything from scratch at home. Our sensitivity to not eating artificial tasting foods or not just diving into a mediocre meal comes from trying to get the highest quality at the same time as we are trying to keep the highest kosher standards.

There is an amazing side benefit to keeping kosher that I think comes from keeping kosher in a small town and traveling extensively. That benefit is that the search for kosher food, whether it was in local groceries and bakeries and restaurants, led us to meeting interesting new friends. This includes new friends who landed in Urbana, Illinois looking for kosher food, or friends in the US, Europe, or Israel who entertained us, helped us find resources, or joined with us in our quest for new kosher food experiences. We enjoy so many relationships with people that began with a meal, a conversation about food, or a phone call asking for help in finding kosher food.

Our daughters also enriched their lives from their experiences growing up in Urbana. Each became seriously involved in the kosher dining facilities in college, becoming. kosher supervisors. My youngest worked a summer as the kosher supervisor at the finest kosher restaurant in Chicago. Each has had an unwavering commitment to kashruth, even when kosher food has been difficult to obtain, because they learned firsthand how to find or make kosher food under a variety of circumstances.  Because they kept kosher when no one around them did, they know how to keep kosher from the ground up.

Ruth Reingold is creator and owner of the online kosher cooking resource Ruth’s Kitchen.