Yes.

Its ready.

Got it all prepared.

Its finished.

It's stunning.

Yes.

It's great.

It's all so ready.

So just let it all begin.

Hi, I'm Chris Fennimore, and welcome to the QED Cooks Kitchen.

Today we're celebrating the almighty noodle with two segment from one of our pasta programs.

The first thing that comes t mind when I hear the word pasta is macaroni and meatballs or ravioli or spaghetti.

But today's recipes are worlds away from that tradition.

The first one comes from Nancy Polinsky and her family's Jewish tradition.

It's for a dish they call kugel.

But I'll let Nancy do the explaining.

Well, not all pasta is Italian.

Thank goodness.

It's just Jewish girls here to tell you.

Okay, we have a dish in m cultural heritage called kugel.

Right.

And no Jewish holida meal is not even a Thanksgiving.

What it is, is complete without a kugel.

Kugel, of course.

The basis of which is pasta.

It's some use thin.

Some use wide noodles.

My particular recipe uses thin.

And you know, everybody I know has a kugel recipe.

I never make kugel becaus everything I ever do is potluck.

Everybody brings something I never cook for the whole gang.

So somebody else, somebody always brings the kugel.

So I've had just dozens and dozens and dozens of kugel recipes.

This one I been into and I said, oh my gosh, several years ago I got to have this recipe.

I'm actually going to make this kugel.

I've never made it.

Until last night.

But it came from a friend of mine.

Her mother in Boston is a cookbook editor.

That's what she does for a living.

So I figure this woman has seen lots of kugel recipes go by.

And this is the one she' she uses.

So it's really good.

So I went shopping for it yesterday.

And the ingredients, it's so simple.

You go to the dairy case and you buy everything white that's in there.

Everything white.

You buy, you buy eggs, you buy cream cheese, you buy sour cream, you buy cottage cheese, you buy farmer's cheese.

And let me tell you, that's not so easy to do.

I couldn't find it at every store.

I found farmer's cheese finally in in the kosher department of a. I'm allowed to say if they sponsor of the Giant Eagl market district.

You found it.

That's where I found it.

And it comes like this.

And that's.

That's what this particular farmer's cheese look like.

So you get all these dairy products together and you start with six egg and I'm going to beat these up.

Am I going to start by cooking these noodles.

That would be a good idea.

This is what how many minutes?

A half pound of thin noodles.

And, you know, there's wide noodles and there's thin noodles, and there's those very, very fine noodles.

You don't want very, very fine noodles thin noodles.

Okay, so there you have your, six eggs beaten, and you're going to add a quarter of a cup of sugar.

And six tablespoons of melted butter.

You know this reminds me of your mother's cream cheese pound cake recipe.

Because you just get that hand mixer going in with the with the right hand.

And the left hand starts adding fat ingrediants.

Yeah.

And a cup of sour cream.

There you go.

I was mixing this up last night going, I can't believe all the stuff that's in here.

I you know, it's like I said, it's been so many years since I had tasted it but then I tasted it last night.

It was very good.

Then you add two cups of milk.

This is 2%.

So it's like, the only way I could possibly cut a few calories was not to buy a whole milk.

And then a pound of cottage cheese.

Oh, this is so white.

I can't believe.

And after the pound of cottage cheese, you add one half of a pound of farmer's cheese, which is honest to gosh, I have no idea what pharmacy's really is.

Do you?

It's like a dried, pressed cottage cheese.

It's a fresh cheese.

It's it's very dry.

It's nothing.

It looks like cream cheese.

But you can't spread it like three inches.

It gets all clumpy.

Actually, it's made with, skim milk, cream and salt.

Yeah, that's much to it.

Nope.

But it's got a weird consistency.

I like it, I love farmer cheese.

What do you use it for?

Actually, I make spreads with it and dips really, because it's nice and dry compared to cottage cheese, which always has too much liquid in it.

And it's.

But it's not as rich as cream cheese.

Right.

Well, I guess I like the richness of cream cheese.

All right.

So there's your half pound of farmers cheese.

And then a quarte pound of cream cheese, which I'm going to break up a little bit here.

I mean after we do this mixing, there's not much going on.

Okay.

All right.

It's kind of going all over the place.

It's the cream cheese.

It takes a little bit longer to mix in.

Yeah.

And then you add a quarter of cheese, half a teaspoon of salt I like a little bit more because I just feel lik it doesn't taste salty enough.

Although there was recently a report that was released that Americans are eating way, way, way too much salt.

So, maybe I shouldn't be adding extra salt.

How are those noodles?

I know they don't take long.

They don't take long at all.

They're probably, close to done here.

They done?

I'm going to test.

As only an Italian can.

Close enough for close enough for TV for kugel.

Because they're going to cook a long time.

All right those go in the bottom of this.

Do we need to butter this now?

Are you kidding?

All this creamy?

no we don't need to add any more butter to anything.

All right so these just go in the bottom.

Thats it.

All right, I'm going to stop this.

I think it's mixed enough.

All right.

Now I'm just going to go over this again.

For those of you that are trying to write this down, we started with six beaten eggs and we added a quarter of a cup of sugar, six tablespoons of melted butter, one cup of sour cream, two cups of milk, 1 pound of cottage cheese, a half pound of farmer's cheese, a quarter pound of cream cheese and a half teaspoon of salt, and a half pound of half pound of noodles that are cooked.

And you just pour this over and hope there aren't any huge lumps coming out.

Well, they'll bake out anyway.

Well, that means I want to mix the cream cheese up enough.

Okay, there you go.

You put that in the oven for half an hour while that's in the oven for half an hour go ahead and put it in.

Oh, okay.

Put that on the side.

I'll put this.

Oh, you don't need it.

It's not hot yet.

Okay.

Then we're going to make the topping.

And you know I'm not saying it has to be this topping.

God know there are all kinds of toppings that people put on all types of types of kugel.

Some have some crunched up corn flakes, and some start with graham crackers and some start with nuts.

These happened to start with nuts.

It is a half cup of crushed blanched almonds.

And I have to tell, you know, Chris, you often talk about cooking, being about memories and equipment and people.

My grandmother had this little nut chopper.

It's a little glass jar and the top of it was red metal, and it was painted and it had flowers on it.

And you put the nuts in topping and you churned it, and the little crunched up nuts came down below.

I would have given my teeth for that thing last night.

I had nothing to chop nuts with, so I put these in a plastic bag and I took a rolling pin, and I'm chopping them, banging and I'm banging and I bang my finge and I have no fingernail left.

It is black and blue and it hurts.

I'm there.

I got that out.

Okay.

So you see, I have seen those little choppers again.

They stil they still sell those, do they?

I want my grandmother's but I might go get one of those because they work as well as anything that was ever invented to chop nuts.

They really do.

And my mom had one, and I remember it because it had a red top.

And, and you would just put, you could only put a smal handful of nuts in the hopper.

That was the only problem with it.

So our job was that she would turn or we would turn and somebody else would just keep throwing nuts in, and then it would fil this little jar on the bottom.

Then you'd have to empty the jar and start again, because we never made like a half.

We never made a half cup of, of any of anything.

Right.

So, you had to, you really had to work at it.

I just asked one of our terrific floor crew people if they could run out and, and microwave a teaspoon of a tablespoon of butter for me.

Okay, so we'r melting a tablespoon of butter.

Here's the half cup of blanched almonds.

Now we're going to add two tablespoons of brown sugar to this.

And I see you using the dark brown which I like.

And usually in recipe it doesn't make any difference you know except on the flavor.

It does I think the dar I like the sugar taste better.

I will you do I don't I really don't recognize the difference in taste, but I like the dark color.

So I always go with the dark brown sugar.

But that's interesting that yo actually taste the difference.

Oh, yeah.

Because then I think it has more molasses in it, you know, that's how you Oh, is that how it gets darker?

I never thought about molasses and sugar.

And that's brown sugar.

Well, then I like you're thinking maybe it does taste more anything more flavorful.

More.

Not less.

Okay, so there's two tablespoons of brown sugar and a half of a cup of the crushed or chopped or pieces of fingernail in it, almonds.

And then this is two tablespoons of apricots.

You know, the one thing about kugel is there are so many different versions of kugel, and some of them have in them little cut pieces of dried apricots, and some of them have raisins in them, some have dried apples.

There's all kinds of different things.

But here the apricots are part of the topping on top, and our hot butter just arrived.

Thank you so much.

You guys are the best.

And yes, we have our ou kitchen magician here, Joe Soto.

We have our chief of cooks and bottle washers, Mary Irwin Scott, and we have speedy delivery.

Our version of speedy delivery.

Elizabeth Speed, who's here?

To, to make sure that we do everything in the right order and at the right time and get all those dishes washed, too.

Right.

And you know who would volunteer for this?

I can't believe they come here every time we have a show.

As long as we're thanking people.

If my husband is watching.

That's right.

Since I arrived here at the studio without the noodles, and we discovered just a few moments ago that we didn't have them, I called my husband.

And fortunately I live close to the station and he got in the car boom, went down the driveway, came into the QED studio where M was waiting at the back door.

And, we now have the noodles.

Okay, so after the kugel that you've put in the oven has been cooking for half an hour, you take it out and the recip says, spread this over the top.

There's no spreading this, this is this.

We got to just put it together.

Just goop is what a goop did on, you know, and then I thought, you know maybe we can add some more dry ingredients to make it more spreadable.

Maybe you could crunch up some corn flakes and throw it in there and make it a little more spreadable.

But, you know I mean, I stick to the recipe, and I just clumped it on, and then you bake it for 300 at 350 degrees for a full hour, and it's all bubbly and, we'll see, we'll see, we'll see again.

Here it is.

I got this recipe ages ago and never made it until now.

And now Mary's already anticipating our need for a spatula.

Let's see how this sucker tastes.

This is a very wide spatula.

So we're going to have a very big piece.

That's what I like more.

Oh my gosh.

Well no surprises.

White inside.

Here you go.

Okay I got to have a little cool little taste of this.

The great end to a blow on it.

It's going to burn you.

You know, I may have to make this.

I'm about to make a Latkesdinner, so maybe I'll have a kugel, kugel, dessert to go along with it.

Stay on the theme.

It's how it.

I don't know, it's so rich.

It's so rich.

Oh.

You know, bu I like the topping, especially.

There's just that little bit of, the almond on there.

I mean, the apricot.

Yeah.

You really taste that.

That's wonderful.

I have a taste.

You're going to love this.

Yeah.

It's cheesy.

It's got you can't you can't just like this if you like cheese and noodles a kugel a Google.

You know it shouldn't be limited just to the Jewish community.

Everybody can enjoy a kugel.

You see the thing is that kugel has to be in the top ten of all comfort foods with all those noodles and butter and cheeses.

And then the topping possibilities mean that it's easy enough to personalize that recipe for your family.

I think I would always want t include some almonds and apricot jam to my topping.

And next up is one of my creations.

Because we needed a recipe in the dessert category for our pasta program, we had lots of recipes for pastas in appetizers or side dishes, or as main courses, but nothing on the sweet side.

So I modified a family recipe for a pie.

We make it Easter and I came up with something I call pasta pudding.

Oh yeah, in the kitchen.

You know, one of the things that I was, I was looking through all the recipes that came in is that there weren' really very many dessert pastas.

But I know that pasta can be used in dessert, and I, I sort of modifie a recipe that we used for Easter for Grandma Pie to make, something that I call pasta pudding.

I like it.

It's somewhat it's sort of a cross between, a, cheesecake and pudding.

But it has, a couple of different stages to it.

The first thing you have to do is overnight, what you want to do is to take some raisins about a cup of raisins and put, about a quarter of a cup of, your favorite liqueur.

It could be frangelico.

Could it be amaretto or whatever, but it would be.

And that's and that's what I've actually put in here some amaretto.

I put it in there, and you want to soak them so they get nice and soft and so that they soak in all of that amaretto.

Then you want to put two cups of water on to, to simmer two cups of water.

That doesn't I'm sorry, two cups of half and half.

Okay.

It's almost like water for paying attention.

This is half and half, and I'm going to put a half a cup of sugar, and I'm going to put one cup of orzo.

Now, also, I love also this is the pasta.

You know, pasta is not always, spaghetti.

And this is pasta in the shape of rice.

And, you can find it in most supermarkets.

It's really, you know, it's not uncommon at all.

And, you can substitute it as rice, for, you know, serving with savory dishes.

Or you can put it into this dish.

And I'm just going to pour this into here.

I'm going to give that a little stir around.

And what you want to do is to simmer this.

You don't want it to let it boil because it there's a boil right over the pot.

Oh.

Well, frothy thing.

Right.

Exactly.

What you want to do is to, just, bring this to a simmer, lower it and let it simmer for about ten minutes, turn the heat off and put the cover on it.

That also will soak up.

And this is what it looks like when that's all done.

This has soaked up all of that liquid.

It's amazing how it absorbs at all.

Yeah amazing.

But you do want to let that cool and and to get to this point.

Now next stage you've got to get your pan ready.

And I lik to put on the bottom of the pan a little coating like a little, crust of, almond flavored.

These are almond toasts.

So if you have the food processor going, all you need to do is put these in there.

Half a stick of butter.

Not.

You know, usuall I use a whole stick of butter.

I didnt know it's on.

And you're just going to process this until they're nice little pieces.

I mean, I may have to pulse this a little bit.

And, this is going to form a crust that we're goin to put on the bottom of our pan.

Oh, it's a variatio on the old graham cracker crust.

Yes it is, but now we're you know, the flavor profile for this is all about almonds toasted almonds.

Right.

Oh I love this idea.

Okay I think that's nice.

It's startin to get a little crumbly there.

It's actually also startin to stick together a little bit.

I'm going to take this out.

Take this.

That's a great scent.

Oh yeah.

You could just spoon this over your your yogurt in the morning.

As you can see because of the butter that's in there you just press this down to make a bottom crust okay.

There we go.

Simple enough.

Right.

And by baking it'll stay together.

Actually, what I do, normally is to put this into the oven for just a minute or two.

I think we could do that.

If you want, you can have a minute.

Run that into the oven.

And what I'm going to do is to start beating some eggs, four eggs that I'm just going to whisk together.

I'm not going to put this into a mixer or anything special.

There's a lasagna in the oven that looks like it's about ready to about ready to go.

Go now to this I'm going to add, a pound of ricotta cheese.

Yes.

And that's what, you know, is different from a regular pudding.

And that is the addition of this plus a half of a cup of sugar another half of a cup of sugar.

So there's a total of a cup of sugar in the recipe but it's split between the eggs.

Okay.

And the pasta, just so everything's I mean, it's nice and sweet from top to bottom.

All right.

I can't wait to taste this.

Oh, yeah.

It's like rice pudding.

I mean, it's the same general idea.

Yeah, exactly the same idea only its orzo.

Yeah.

All right.

So now I put this in.

Now I'm going to flavor this, you know, just to keep the, the almond thing going wit a little bit of almond extract.

Little about a tablespoon.

What I love the smell of this stuff.

It's so delicious.

Okay, okay.

Nice and creamy.

Yes.

No lumps, no lumps.

Well now I'm going to add the lumps.

Because, I'm going to put back in that pasta that has been cooked already cooked in the half and hal and absorbed all of that.

Yep.

It's a pretty rich dessert.

You know, it's one of the it' that's why they call it dessert.

And I'm going to put in those raisins that have been plumped up with the amaretto.

And now I just want to stir this, I want to use the whisk because it'll all get inside the whisk.

And almond flavor is just like, you know, overwhelming us coming all over the top here.

Oh my gosh.

Plus that amaretto scent.

I have to tell you, I just on of my favorite smells on earth.

Now let's make believe that that has been in like 2 or minutes and it's lightly brown.

And if you will, because all that that does is that enables the crust to sort of harden up a little bit, before it'll harden up more as it bakes.

I just want to make sure this is nice and okay.

There you go.

Actually I did brown a little bit.

Did it did.

All right.

So not too hard.

You pour this in.

Did you make this recipe up I forget to.

Wow.

But it's a combination of a of some thing that I'm already familiar with.

I use a, I use either a nine by nine pan or one of these round cake pans.

Works fine in terms of siz for the amount of ingredients.

Okay.

That's it, that's it.

That goes into, 325 degree, 350 degree oven.

I use a convection oven so I have to, change it around.

And, when it comes out, you want to, Yeah.

You want to let this, cool?

You don't want to serve it hot or try to serve it hot.

Its so pretty.

Its so smooth Yeah.

Now, what I want to d first is to run a little knife around the, I want to ru a little knife around the edge because the bottom will have the crust on it.

It does stick a little bit.

You have to cut it out.

Okay.

And the bottom because o the butter isn't going to stick.

We hope you know we're going to have big pieces or little pieces.

What are we doing here?

Like lots of people.

Lots of people okay.

Pieces.

If you, want to sample our foods, give a call to our volunteer membership, the membership department, and say you'd like to volunteer to work on the telephones.

Yeah.

Then you, too can sample some of the goodies here.

Okay.

Yeah.

Always a question.

Is the piece going to come out?

Is it not going to come out?

Oh, you did it.

You did it.

Yeah.

Look at that.

Okay.

Oh.

Did you hear the low do the studio actually, I thin I need to take another piece out just because in order to really get the spatula in.

Well, I don't know.

You.

It does look like a cheesecake.

Yeah.

So, so there it is.

This is, you know, I call it pasta pudding.

You can call it, you know, call it whatever you like.

I would call it delicious.

even before I taste it, because there wasn't an ingredient you use that I don't like.

I gotta get a fork.

You're having a fork and I don't have a fork.

I'll use a spoon.

Now.

Yeah.

Oh my gosh I'm a big fan of bread pudding.

This is very much like it and very delicious.

I think my favorite is the fact that those raisins are just soaked with some of the amaretto the amaretto.

So when you bite into that it's got a nice sort of of, of an, of a rice pudding texture.

But, rice pudding, like I said, bread pudding.

I meant rice pudding.

Somewhere in the back there is cheesecake becaus of the, of the ricotta in there.

Oh, it's just, Oh, good.

Yes, it was all good.

A sweet and satisfying end to any holiday dinner.

And of course, you can mak the recipe without the liquor.

You could just soak the raisins in orange juice, maple syrup, or even just water.

After all that pasta, I think I need a nap.

And as I always say, we do it for you, but we can't do it without you.

So keep cooking and keep watch.

Its all so ready, So just let it all begin.