Microwave

This is such a great salad—especially in the fall, when beets are in season. The sweet, earthy flavor of the beets provides a nice foil for the tangy blue cheese and peppery arugula. By lightly crushing the walnuts, you need less of this healthy but high-fat nut in your salad. Sometimes it’s the little things that make a big difference.

The unhealthy parts of deviled eggs are the yolks and the devilish amounts of fat—usually in the form of mayonnaise—that most recipes call for mixing into the yolks. These deviled eggs are yolkless. The traditional seasoned mashed yolks have been replaced with seasoned mashed sweet potatoes mixed with mustard. They look just like the real thing. No one will miss the yolks—or the fat and cholesterol, either.

Most crab cakes are made of breadcrumbs and crab-flavored mayonnaise. And while I agree that mayonnaise is damn good, I just wish it wasn’t so fattening. By broiling instead of pan frying, and using low-fat mayo with some green veggies, this very lean version of crab cakes is a new kind of good.

Fried calamari and tomato sauce is one of the great food combinations. Fried calamari is sweet and crispy, and tomato sauce is slightly acidic—that’s a culinary trifecta! Without the fat and calories of the original, you get to eat a lot of this. Use as a spicy fra diavolo pasta sauce as you can handle—the heat will make the dish feel bigger and richer.

A classic—like biting into a chocolate-covered cherry, only lower in carbs, and better!

While the squash cooks, work on the chops (recipe follows).

Like the title says, this is lasagna but it’s not. Veggie lasagna is often served up layered with a creamy white sauce and seasonal vegetables. This dish incorporates vegetables, ricotta, and a just-creamy-enough sauce tossed with pasta—without all the work and the long baking time.

Do you have trouble making up your mind? How does this sound: grilled meat, salad, take-out Thai food, and pizza, all in one meal? There are no special ingredients required; you can get them all in the regular market and have this pizza on the table in less time than it would take the delivery man to get to your door.

Get in “The Zone.” These calzones are meat-free, super hearty, and super healthy. Eat up, chow down, and enjoy.

This custard shows off the way that you can combine different types of carrageenans to create a custardlike dessert with a soft, tender texture that holds its shape beautifully. It gives you the gentle, set texture of a baked egg custard but it can be cooked on top of the stove. Beyond that, if you love peanut butter, you are going to be in hog heaven. It’s that good.

This delicious cauliflower dish comes from Michelle Cahen Bamberger, whose family had lived in Lorraine since “forever,” as she told me, until World War II brought her to the south of France, where she was forced into hiding. Madame Bamberger says that she feels and cooks French. And she feels French first and Jewish second, despite all that she went through during the war. “One day, I was going home with a bottle of wine under my arm to the place we were hiding in Lyon during the war,” she told me in the parlor of the apartment in Toulon where she and her husband now live. “I saw the Gestapo coming, so, instead of going into the house, I kept walking and saved myself. When we were in hiding, our life wasn’t bad compared with others. Because my parents were in the clothing industry, we traded fabric for butter and rabbits. I remember one day we received a lamb roast. That was really something.” Her cauliflower dish, with its crunchy golden exterior, is similar to ones I have tasted in Israel and elsewhere.

Like many French Jews today, Jocelyne Akoun (see page 28) is a cultural amalgam. She grew up in a Turkish-Spanish family that lived in Algeria for many years before immigrating to Marseille. This dish could as easily be Provençal as Algerian, the tomatoes having been added when they came to the Old World with the discovery of the Americas.

When Suzon Meymy rubs the grains of ready-made couscous between her fingers to separate them, she thinks about her mother, the couscous-maker of Mogador. Unlike Suzon, her mother prepared couscous from scratch. First she would take a kilo or so of coarse semolina, moisten it with a little water, and carefully separate the grains. Then she would rake the fingers of her right hand through the semolina in sweeping circular movements, creating the tiny pellets of couscous. She would rub them against the weave of a fine basket to shape them, and they were then laid out to dry. Afterward, she would pass the couscous several times through a wood-handled sieve to obtain granules of uniform size. Finally, she would steam the couscous twice in a couscoussier, a special pot similar to a doublelevel steamer, which was filled with different kinds of hearty meat-and-vegetable stews. Today, with the availability of presteamed “instant” couscous, the process is much easier. Even so, Suzon mimics the gestures she learned from her mother, rubbing her fingers through the grains. Each time she makes this dish, it is a return to her childhood, her family, and a life that is no more in a small coastal town in Morocco. Although with instant couscous you really don’t need to steam the couscous, I still do, to fluff it up and make it lighter. If you do not have a couscoussier, use a regular stockpot with a vegetable steamer. If the holes are too big, simply line the steamer with cheesecloth to prevent the couscous grains from falling through.

“I was lucky during the war,” Albert Jacobs, a tiny man whose personality belied his stature, told me at his home in Ingwiller. “When war broke out, I was eighteen years old and was mobilized into the French army. I left Ingwiller with my knapsack on my back, marching in the middle of the road. My beret and wooden shoes gave me the air of youth.” Instead of taking the train he was supposed to take, he and his comrades had a picnic and took the following one. As luck would have it, the Germans bombed the first train. Later, when it got dangerous for the Jews in the army, Monsieur Jacobs had to go into hiding. “Here too I was lucky,” he told me. “An old grandmother who owned eight farms let me stay with her. She never told anybody that I was there.” Until he was almost ninety, Monsieur Jacobs dressed up three days a week, drove his car slowly into town, and ate lunch at the Cheval Blanc, where he also often dined with the local priest. “Everybody knows that I don’t eat pork,” he told me shortly before his death. When I asked him why he didn’t move to a larger city, like Strasbourg, his response was quick: “Here I am someone, and there I would be just an old Jew.” At Monsieur Jacobs’s home, a virtual museum of Alsatian Jewish history, the jewels were the old cookbooks in the attic and basement libraries. The books contained some handwritten recipes and were those of his late wife. “Books were her life,” he said. She collected all the old recipes from her mother, who lived with them until she died at ninety-five. When I looked through her handwritten book, I saw recipes like grimserle, which I know as krimsel or chremslach, a Passover fritter with nuts and raisins (which I wrote about in Jewish Cooking in America), schaleth (see page 251), cou d’oie farci (stuffed goose neck), gemarti supp (see page 76), and this grumbeerekugel, a potato kugel with onions, eggs, and soaked bread—all humble dishes of country Jews who used the food that was available. In the old days, they cooked with goose, chicken, or veal fat. In the recipe that follows, I have substituted vegetable oil or butter for those not serving a meat meal, and I often mix the potatoes with celeriac and sometimes cooked peas or green beans. By microwaving the grated potatoes for a minute, I cut down the cooking time from 2 1/2 hours to 45 minutes. This kugel is crisp and very delicious.

In the heart of Dijon, at the Municipal Museum, right next door to the majestic stone kitchen of the dukes of Burgundy, Alette Lévy checks coats. Once the owner of Dijon’s only kosher butcher shop, she talks food between customers, such as this chicken-tagine recipe she makes for her French friends. The trick to this recipe is to put the almonds in the microwave for 3 minutes, to make them crackly. This way you don’t run the risk of burning them, the way I always seem to do when I forget them in the oven or frying pan. Alette told me you can substitute lamb for the chicken.

This recipe is very similar to the last, only a bit grander.