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One of my favorite things to do is look at cookbooks for interesting recipes or stories that authors might write to accompany their foods. Recently, while visiting my mother and step-father, I stopped to look at some of their older cookbooks. One that stood out among the others was “Cooking Kosher: The Natural Way.†While I don’t keep Kosher, I’m always looking for natural, low-glycemic meals.
As I sat in my parents’ kitchen paging through the recipes, I marked pages of dishes I would try later. My first pick was Hamantaschen.
The author, Jane Kinderlehrer, had been a senior editor at “Prevention’ magazine in 1983, when the book was published. She included informative and interesting stories as well as nutritional facts about the recipes included in the book. As you can see in the image above, Kinderlehrer gives a small synopsis of the meaning of this festive cookie as well as the benefits of its ingredients.
Here’s her recipe:
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1 tablespoon dry yeast
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1/4 cup lukewarm milk (I cut this by 1/3 to account for the agave nectar)
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1/4 cup honey (I used agave nectar)
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1/2 cup butter or vegetable oil (I used butter)
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1/2 teaspoon salt
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1 cup scalded milk
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2 eggs
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3 1/2 cups whole wheat pastry flour
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2 tablespoons soy flour (I skipped this because I didn’t have any)
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1 egg yolk
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Water
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Your favorite jam or filling
Dissolve the yeast in the lukewarm milk. Stir in 1 tablespoon of the honey and set aside. In a large mixing bowl, combine the rest of the honey, the butter, salt and scalded milk. Stir to blend. When this mixture is lukewarm, add the yeast mixture. Beat the eggs lightly and add to the mixture with 2 cups of the wheat flour. Add the remaining flour to make a soft, pliable dough. Knead for a few minutes.
Grease a large mixing bowl and turn the ball of dough in it to ensure that all sides are greased. Cover and let rise in a warm place (not difficult to find these days) until it has doubled in size.
Knead again for about 1 minute, and then roll portions of the dough out about 1/8 in thick. Cut circles 3 or 4 inches in diameter with a cookie cutter or an inverted glass. Place filling on each and shape by pinching the edges of each circle together to form triangles. Place on a greased cookie sheet.
Cover with a towel and let rise again until doubled in bulk. Mix the egg yolk with a little water and brush the tops.
Bake in a preheated oven at 350 degrees F for 15-20 minutes. Makes 12 large or 24 small hamantashen.
I used both apricot and black raspberry organic spreads for my fillings. The cookies turned out to be very fluffy, not like the dense, buttery cookies I grew up having at Mom and Dave’s house after he’d brought them home from Brooklyn. Of course, the sweet poppyseed (Mohn) filling will always be a pleasant memory, but I thought they would be worth a try.
Here’s what they looked like inside.
I brought home a few other cookbooks, and one of them has another hamantaschen recipe that I think I’ll try soon.
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