Gimme some gribbies (AKA gribbenes)

July 14, 2014 by 1 Comment

The 2013 championship word in the National Spelling Bee was “knaidel,” the Yiddish word for matzoh ball. The fact that a Yiddish word was even in the National Spelling Bee was a cause of consternation for many people who cherish European Jewish culture.

Yiddish, after all, is written in Hebrew characters, and there are many ways to transliterate it into English. For the Spellilng Bee word, varients include “kneydl” (the spelling preferred by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Culture), “knaydel” and “kneidel.” (The “k” is not silent, and the emphasis is on the first syllable. It rhymes with “cradle.”)

What other Yiddish food word will make it onto the spelling bee list? I wouldn’t be surprised if one of them is “schmaltz” – literally chicken or goose fat, but a word that has come to mean something overly emotional or corny. If you want to stick with food-related similes, you could say “cheesy,” though a kosher cook would never mix schmaltz with cheese.

A related word that I don’t think we’ll ever see on spelling lists is gribbenes, again because there are so many ways to spell it in English, including grieven and grievenes.

A rare treat

Growing up, we called it “gribbies” – and it was a real treat.

Gribbenes (rhymes with CRIB-a-miss) is what was left when thrifty homemakers of yore rendered chicken or goose fat. The word literally means “scraps.” Most Jews in those days observed the dietary laws separating milk and meat. For meat meals, they couldn’t use butter for frying, there was no such thing as margarine, and oil was a luxury, so most Jewish housewives kept a crock of schmaltz to use in cooking.

Gribbenes are completely unhealthy – but oh so delicious! Eating them once or twice a year won’t kill you. Eat them as is as a snack, or mix into noodles or a cooked vegetable as a side dish.

Here’s how to make schmaltz and gribbenes. Save the schmaltz (you can freeze it) for the next time you make knaidlach (the plural of the infamous “knaidel”).

 

 

A true soap opera, with a recipe for laundry soap

July 6, 2014 by Leave a Comment

 

Prologue:

Today’s recipe isn’t edible, but this piece does offer food for thought. In 2011, when I was as director of communications for Lutheran Social Services of Michigan, I learned that many of the people with special needs our organization was helping were in serious financial straits. They received a monthly stipend from the state that enabled them to live independently, but after paying for rent, utilities and food, many lacked the funds to buy basic household cleaning supplies. Enter Linda Maday and Tammy Hynes.

Act I:

A few years ago, Linda Maday saw a recipe in the Bay City (Michigan) Times for homemade laundry detergent. She tried it. She and her family liked it. The detergent was easy enough to make. It was organic, additive-free, low-sudsing and good for sensitive skin. It cost only about $1.20 to make two gallons of detergent, a fraction of the cost of store-bought detergent, even at Costco. Maday, a retired social worker for the state Department of Human Services, has been using the recipe ever since.

Act II:

Tammy Hynes is Lutheran Social Services’ director of In-Home Services programs in mid-Michigan. She works with seniors and people with disabilities on fixed incomes. By providing various services, her staff helps these clients stay in their own homes rather than moving into an adult foster care home or nursing home. Some clients have very limited funds and are unable to buy basic cleaning supplies. So Hynes set up a Cleaning Closet in her office. The closet is filled with donated paper towels, laundry soap, bathroom cleaner, glass cleaner, sponges, mops, brooms—even vacuum cleaners.

Act III:

Maday lives in Essexville, Mich., with her husband, Gary, and toy poodle, Cubby. Her two sons are grown and gone. She read about the Cleaning Closet in her church bulletin and decided making detergent was something she could easily do to help people who are less fortunate. She made a double batch of laundry detergent, poured it into clean half-gallon milk jugs, and labeled each bottle with a sticker explaining how to use it. A few days later, she met Hynes in the parking lot of a Meijer super-store between her home and the Lutheran Social Services office in Midland and delivered 16 bottles of detergent for Hynes’s clients. Then she started collecting plastic bottles to make another batch.

Epilogue:

My husband and I have been making this recipe ourselves for several years. You need a bucket large enough to hold two gallons, a large wooden spoon, a food grater and a funnel to pour the detergent into bottles. You may not be able to find all the ingredients in your local supermarket, but you can probably find them in a hardware store. Don’t be afraid to grate the soap on your regular kitchen food grater or to cook the detergent in a regular saucepan; it’s just soap, and it will wash right off. Use it for your own laundry, and if you have time, make extra to donate to a program like Lutheran Social Services or to a homeless shelter or subsidized housing center. Congregations and social groups might want to take this on as a fairly easy service project.

 

A Brit acclimates to American cuisine (with a recipe for baked beans)

June 29, 2014 by Leave a Comment

A NOTE FROM YOUR HOST BOBBIE LEWIS: Twenty years ago my husband, Joe Lewis (who was born in Poole, Dorset, England) became an American citizen. This seemed like a good opportunity for him to reflect on the culinary changes he encountered as part of the Americanization process. (To read more about our nation of immigrants, you’ll enjoy this series by Michigan State University’s Joe Grimm.)

By JOE LEWIS

On the Fourth of July 20 years ago I joined more than 100 people born in dozens of countries as we became citizens of the United States. The sunny summer day was perfect for a joyful but serious ceremony at Hart Plaza on the riverfront in downtown Detroit.

This was 22 years after I’d arrived in the United States, and while I chafed at being taxed without representation, I was perfectly happy being a “resident alien” in possession of a green card that enabled me to study and work here.

But I heard that the price of the green card was going to go up to more than the price of a passport. When my card was up for renewal, I applied for citizenship.

It didn’t take much to transfer my gastronomic allegiance to the U.S. British food was not a heritage to cling to. We British long ceded culinary expertise to the French, even though (in our opinion) they smelled of garlic and couldn’t make a proper cup of tea.

British food: at least it fills you up

British food could be satisfying. Baked beans on toast makes a filling breakfast. Or spaghetti on toast—not the Italian kind of spaghetti that requires boiling pasta in water but the kind that comes out of a can. For a bold international experience, we might use an American condiment like ketchup, good for ketchup sandwiches! Our food may not have been chic, like French food, nor tasty, nor nourishing, nor sophisticated, but if you ate enough you could fill yourself up.

My father was the family cook. My mother never felt confident as a cook after a setback in elementary school. She was given the opportunity to cook the cabbage for school lunch—imagine the smell!—and despite all her careful cutting and rinsing and stirring, the cabbage never cooked. Finally, the teacher realized that nobody had turned on the heat. Of course, the child shouldered the blame.

My father, on the other hand, had been a cook in the British army and developed a fine reputation, because he knew how to make tea drinkable, which put him a full step above the finest French gourmet cook. At four o’clock in the afternoon, he’d run a tea towel up a pole to indicate a fresh pot of tea was available, and the soldiers would come running. His secret was simple: he cleaned out the pot; if need be, he’d use some sand to remove the tannic residue.

A nasty introduction to American cuisine

I arrived in the U.S. in August of 1972, hot and thirsty in 90-degree heat and 90-percent humidity. “Oooh, you have to try root beer, it’s a real American drink,” said my beloved as we reached the New York Port Authority from JFK Airport, sweating and woozy with jetlag. I took one sip from the frosty can and almost gagged. How could anyone drink such stuff? I have never drunk it since.

I spent my first weeks in America living with my in-laws in Philadelphia. Shortly after we arrived they took us out for a real treat: a trip to Greenwood Dairies, in then-rural Bucks County, for ice cream. I like American ice cream—British ice cream rarely rose above the gustatory level of a Klondike bar with the metal wrapper that sets your teeth on edge—but quantity sometimes seems to be more important than quality.

At Greenwood Dairies, the scoops were the size of softballs. On one of my first visits there I was horrified to see a young child, his scoop only half-eaten, puking in the parking lot. Suddenly, my appetite for ice cream disappeared.

Greenwood Dairies had a concoction called the Pig’s Dinner, similar to the well known Pig’s Trough at Farrell’s. It was five gigantic scoops of ice cream with a banana, a half-dozen flavored syrups and whipped cream. If you ate one unassisted you received a button that said, “I was a pig at Greenwood Dairies.” I never sought to qualify, but my beloved has one of the buttons in her vast button collection, picked up at a flea market.

After my swearing-in ceremony as an American citizen, we held a backyard barbecue for our friends. We served those all-American favorites: hot dogs and apple pie. (I’ve always liked soft, bouncy sausages with apples. When I was a child, occasionally the family cook would treat us to boiled viennas from a can, which we could dip in applesauce. However, as the American poet Walt Whitman might have said, I hear America retching.)

We also served home-made baked beans, which are different from Heinz (but would go very well on buttered toast and a decent cup of tea). The beans used for baking are native to North America, and the idea of baking them in sauce probably originated in New England, which is why they’re often called Boston baked beans and why Boston is often called Beantown.

This recipe came from Robert Wright, who ran the graduate program in religion at Temple University, where my wife worked the first year after we married.

It takes some advance planning, because you need to soak the beans overnight, then boil them, then cook them in a slow oven for eight hours. If you don’t want to have your oven on that long in the summer, use a slow cooker, or just sit outside all day, instead of in the hot house, and enjoy the warm weather. If you’re not kosher, halal  or vegetarian, you can throw in a hunk of salt pork when you put the beans in the oven..

(Recipe photo by Sonia, via Flickr Creative Commons)

 

Stalking the ordinary celery

June 23, 2014 by 1 Comment

A NOTE FROM YOUR HOST BOBBIE LEWIS: This week’s blog is by guest author Louis Finkelman (aka Eliezer) Finkelman, rabbi, scholar, teacher and freelance writer as well as a gardener, cook, home brewer and vintner and assistant to the cheese-maker with whom he shares his Southfield, Michigan home. It originally appeared in My Jewish Detroit, an online magazine published by the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Detroit.

I found a cookbook that describes a classical French combination, mirepoix, as a finely-diced mixture of onions, carrots and celery, simmered or sautéed. The writer explains what each ingredient adds to the mixture. According to this sophisticated expert, the celery adds texture, but does not add much in the way of flavor, since celery basically has very little flavor.

Go to the supermarket and you can find celery that proves his point. In fact, you cannot find any other kind of celery in the supermarket. The thick, heavy stalks of celery, with their creamy color, just barely green, gently whisper the secret information about their flavor, “we taste of celery.” The green leaves have a strong, bitter flavor, but who uses the leaves of celery?

Visiting my son and his family in Israel, some years ago, I made the trip to his local Shufrasol supermarket. The celery there did not look like American celery. It had little, thin stalks, all a deep dark bright green. When we got home and used the celery in recipes, it did not taste like American supermarket celery either: rather than whispering, it shouted. It yelled, “I AM CELERY! HEAR ME ROAR!” In a soup, in a stew, in a casserole, a few snips of celery sufficed to make a bold statement.

My growing affinity for celery

I started growing celery at home, in my little backyard vegetable garden. My garden celery comes up much more like its assertive Israeli relations than the kind in American supermarkets. It comes up small, but powerful. It has an attitude.

This year, during my annual trip to the farm supply store to pick up my vegetables, I got a quick lesson in why we have such different versions of celery. The manager of the store directed me to find “ordinary celery.” I commented that “it does not seem ordinary to me. It does not taste like supermarket celery.”

American commercial growers (according to the manager of the farm supply store) irrigate their celery heavily to get those big, bland stalks. I read somewhere that growers even put shades on parts of the celery plant so that it does not develop too much flavor.

I thought about that quest for celery without too much flavor. That goes along with preferring white bread to rye or whole wheat. It goes along with cutting off the crust of sandwiches. It resonates with preferring white meat to dark. Turkeys raised for meat usually have been bred for so much white meat that they move about awkwardly. Their huge breasts so limit their motion that they need artificial insemination. All this happens in the search for less intense flavor. It all goes together. It rhymes.

Appearance over substance

In a way, that quest for less intensive flavor matches the quest for perfect appearance. No doubt, the big, creamy, thick celery has a certain visual appeal that the small, thin, dark green stuff cannot match. The huge red strawberries in the market all look beautiful; sometimes they taste like strawberries, too. The only apples available in the supermarket look like wax models of apples: big, flawless, shiny. They come in bright red or bright green. Though growers have identified hundreds or thousands of different varieties of apple, our selection at the market usually gets restricted to the three or four prettiest. I will not even mention tomatoes. Some of us do not share the preference for bland and pretty. Those who seek intense, complex flavors have to look for produce at ethnic shops, or farmers’ markets or just grow our own.

When it comes to people, too — do I have to spell this out? — we might make an effort to overcome our resistance and put up with people who have too much flavor and too imperfect an appearance. We might find our best companions, our wisest guides and our most promising students. They might make our lives more interesting.

Editor’s note:  A mirepoix is a mixture of two parts onion, one part carrot and one part celery, roughly chopped and cooked slowly in a bit of oil until the onion is translucent. This recipe, from a contributor named Gordon on the allrecipes.com website, uses a mirepoix with braised chicken breasts. You can cook up mirepoix ahead of time and use it to add to soups or stews. The photo with the recipe is by naples34102, another Allrecipes contributor. 

Hotdish: Lutheran-land’s favorite dinner

June 16, 2014 by 2 Comments

This week’s guest blogger is Fran Ginn, whom I have never met. When I started this blog—a year ago now!—my “ideas” list included hotdish, an integral part of Lutheran culture (well at least according to Garrison Kiellor). When I did the obligatory Google search on the term, I found a piece by Fran that said everything I wanted to say and probably said it better. It appeared on the website of the  Marion County Informer newspaper in Mississippi. The newspaper is now defunct, and the link to the article no longer works, but I tracked Fran down via Facebook and she sent me a copy, along with permission to use it. Fran is a good writer and cook who runs a restaurant called the Back Door Cafe in Hattiesburg, Miss.  It’s in a historic building and is accessible, via an alley, by (you guessed it) the building’s back door. One final note: In Lutheran-ese, “hotdish” is also a synonym for “potluck,” as in “The Ladies Guild will hold its annual Hotdish Supper on Friday.”

Garrison Keillor’s tales of Lake Woebegon have long been a favorite of mine. The stories of the stalwart Scandinavian Lutherans of Minnesota always make me smile. I noticed that Garrison often mentions “hotdish.” He uses it in several contexts, including jokes, such as:  “You must be Lutheran—if you think anyone who says ‘casserole’ instead of ‘hotdish’ is trying to be uppity (or maybe even Episcopalian!)” Or: “You must be Lutheran—if you think ‘hotdish’ is one of the major food groups.”

I went right to the source, the Prairie Home Companion website, where I found an explanation of “hotdish” from Garrison himself. These are his words:

“It’s a meal in one dish, vegetables and grain and perhaps meat, and it’s good peasant cooking and it exists in every culture. Surely you ate it growing up. It might have rice or noodles and it needs some sauce and then you add what ingredients you are moved to add. Be inventive. If you want to start with a classic, do the tuna noodle hotdish, which employs a can of cream of mushroom soup (don’t add water), a can of tuna, a bag of egg noodles, and perhaps a package of frozen peas. Cook the noodles, glop in the soup, add the tuna and peas, and if you want to be fancy, crush some potato chips for a topping.”

Ubiquitous in the northern Midwest

As I explored further, I learned that hotdish did originate in the basement halls of Lutheran churches in the frozen northern states, especially Minnesota. It is as ubiquitous there as rice and gravy is in the South.

In the early days of the last century, farm wives discovered a new ready-made ingredient: cream of mushroom soup. This miracle ingredient gained such favor with the church ladies of the region that it became known as “Lutheran binder” and was considered a de rigueur ingredient in recipes submitted for church cookbooks. As flavors of condensed cream soups were added, it became fashionable to combine flavors of soup in the same hotdish. As time passed, home-cut potatoes and onions gave way to Tater Tots, canned French-fried onion rings and chow mein noodles.

I have been told that confession is good for the soul—and I have to admit this is hard for me—but I must disclose that one of my favorite dishes in the world is the green bean casserole recipe on the side of the onion ring can. And, I love Tater Tots with a passion usually reserved for things like lobster.

It’s easy to make

It is easy to see how hotdish became so popular in the frozen north. The basic ingredients often were ground meat (from a cow raised on the farm and butchered and in the freezer), canned soup, canned corn or the canned vegetable mixture known as “Veg-All,” and some type of starch, noodles, rice or potatoes, all grocery items that could be purchased in bulk and stored in a pantry when deep snow made the trek into town difficult.

In the early days, these farm wives used few foreign spices, such as thyme or (God forbid!) Tabasco. Common seasonings were good, plain salt and pepper. As time passed, the inventive Lutheran ladies began to vary their ingredients. A search of recipes on the Internet shows some the range of hotdish variations:

  • Sauerkraut Hotdish
  • Reuben Hotdish
  • Chicken Crouton Hot Dish
  • Pasta Ham Hotdish
  • Creamy Chicken Hotdish
  • Pepperoni and Tomato Hotdish
  • Sweet and Sour Chicken Hotdish
  • Tater Tot Hotdish
  • Church Supper Hotdish
  • Hamburger Hotdish
  • Mashed Potato Hotdish
  • Hula Hotdish (Spam and pineapple)
  • Cheeseburger and French Fry Hotdish
  • Wild Rice and Sausage Hotdish

Midwest Living, which I gather is similar to our Southern Living, has more than 50 different recipes for hotdish.

Can you name the No. 1 condiment for hotdish? It’s ketchup.

To give you an idea of how dear this very basic food is to the hearts of the people of Minnesota, I’d like to leave you with a very tongue-in-cheek version of the Christmas carol, “Hark the Herald Angels Sing,” as sung on A Prairie Home Companion.

Hark, the herald angels sing Is there hotdish we can bring?
Peace on earth and mercy mild,
Tuna hotdish, family style.
Joyful all ye nations rise,
Casseroles and shepherd’s pies –
With angelic hosts proclaim,
This is really good chow mein.
Hark the herald angels sing,
Is there hotdish we can bring?

The best hotdish ever?

This week’s recipe is touted as the best hotdish recipe ever. It draws on a number of the delicious, carb-laden ingredients that are popular in this food group. For this version of the recipe, we have amended the more bland seasonings from “up North,” and spiced up this hotdish Southern style.

A note from Bobbie: Fran didn’t have a photo of her hotdish recipe, so I found this one online. It’s a little different in that the Tater Tots are atop the green beans, rather than beneath them. I think this makes sense, since the Tater Tots will get crispier that way, but I present Fran’s original recipe.

 

A celebration of spring asparagus

June 9, 2014 by Leave a Comment

In the mid-1960s, I enrolled at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, a hotbed of liberal education (or as Antiochians themselves like to say, bootcamp for the revolution). Antioch College fell on hard times in the later years of the century. It had become part of a university whose administration no longer saw the value of a small, innovative liberal (in every sense of the word) arts college. They decided to close the residential college and invest the university’s resources entirely in programs for commuters and in distance learning. Alumni rallied and raised enough to take over the college name and property from the university but before the deal was final the college closed, in June 2008. Antioch reopened in 2011 as an independent, residential college. The revived Antioch will see its first graduates next year.

One of Antioch’s goals is to teach the skills needed for sustainable living, and the college practices what it preaches. Antioch has a working farm that produces much of the food for the college kitchen. Every month the alumni newsletter includes a piece called “From Antioch Kitchens.” This is the latest, written by kitchen director Isaac DeLamatre.

As a reward for surviving a long and brutal winter, spring’s bounty brings us a magnificent vegetable. Asparagus officinalis, whom we know colloquially as asparagus, begins punching through the thawing soil when temperatures finally begin to hover around 50 degrees.

While the rest of the garden is still shaking off winter residue, the asparagus harvest rolls in. As a harbinger of spring it is one of the very first locally available vegetables and is one of my favorites.  I enjoy the grassy, juicy flavor and appreciate its gastronomic versatility. It holds a symbolic significance to the changing of seasons (and the promising relief of more hospitable temperatures).

I think what I admire most about asparagus are the values that it represents. Asparagus embodies the practice of patience, one of the most admirable and sought-after virtues. The plant produces edible shoots for a short period of time only once a year; the wait in and of itself is a lesson in patience. But not only is there a yearly intermission between crops, the plant does not produce viable shoots for three to five years after planting.

A long-term investment

The planting of asparagus is a long-term investment of time, one that has been known to pay off for upwards of 100 years. So far is it removed from the modern ideas of instantaneous gratification and planned obsolescence! Asparagus appreciates attention and pampering; it likes its growing beds to be free of all other weeds and plants, and enjoys a generous top dressing of compost and leaf mulch every year. I feel that the plant’s cultural attitude is to be held in high regard and that asparagus has a lot to teach us if we are willing to listen and learn.

One of our most recent preparations of asparagus in the Kitchen involved lemon vinaigrette. It is a refreshing and simple composition that can be served warm or cool as a side or starter to any spring time meal.

Select evenly sized shoots. When I cook them I like them to all be the same size but the size that I choose for each batch falls within a range. I only accept pencil-sized to magic marker-sized asparagus. Any stalks smaller than a pencil shouldn’t have been cut in the first place and are a waste of everyone’s time. Parts of the plant that small need to be left alone so that the young plant it came from will stay healthy.

Anything larger is too woody and fibrous with therefore less usable stalk. The really big ones are good for using the asparagus tips in stir fries or soups. I like the stalks to be no more than six inches tall—when they get taller, the crowns start to branch out and they are not as tender.

Taller or longer stalks also mean I am buying a bunch of unusable product that I will trim off so that the stalks fall within six inches long. It is a general courtesy the grower should have extended so that I would not pay for more than I could use.

Some people like to peel asparagus. I generally do not.

After the vegetable is trimmed and washed it can be cooked in a variety of ways. For this pairing I like to steam or blanch it.

Tips for a successful vinaigrette

By slowly adding the oil to the vinegar, we are creating an emulsion. Two liquids that would ordinarily separate are going to allow for the fat (oil) to become suspended in the vinegar. Our emulsifying agent, in this case mustard, will prevent the oil and vinegar from separating or “breaking.”

When successful, we should end up with a viscous opaque liquid that holds its form as a sauce. An unsuccessful attempt will break. It will resemble an immiscible oil/vinegar project from science class.

 

Olive oil, the elixir of life

June 2, 2014 by Leave a Comment

All kinds of food-related businesses cluster around Detroit’s Eastern Market, site of one of the oldest farmers’ markets in the country.

One of them is Gabriel Import Co., a Mediterranean grocery store. It’s a food-lover’s paradise. There are numerous types of olives, hummus, falafel, stuffed grape leaves, oney-drenched pastries, many types of feta and other cheeses.

Taking up serious shelf space in the tiny shop are a dozen or more varieties of olive oil, most of them from Greece. Owner Mike Sandros, who has Greek and Lebanese parentage, insists Greek olive oil is the best in the world.

The best of the best

And the best of the best, says Mike, who emigrated from Greece as a teenager, is from Kalamata, on the Pelopponesian peninsula in the south part of the country – yes, the same place those almond-shaped black Greek salad olives come from.

In the Kalamata region, says Mike, there are 10 to 15 million olive trees.

Greece is one of the world’s largest producer of olive oil, but not the world’s largest exporter, he says. That’s because Greek families use so much themselves. Greece is the world’s largest per-capita consumer of olive oil.

“A Greek family will use a can in two weeks,” says Mike, motioning to the three-liter cans behind him on the shelf. “Just like the Chinese eat rice with every meal, the Greeks eat olive oil with every meal.”

They pour it on their salads, cheese and bread. They cook with it and bake with it.

And, like the father in My Big Fat Greek Wedding who thought Windex was the cure for everything that ails you, Mike is convinced of olive oil’s health benefits. Scientific studies back him up. Olive oil may help people lower their levels of bad cholesterol while raising levels of good cholesterol.

“On Crete, the island south of Greece, the men are 76 percent less likely than Americans to have heart attacks,” he says. “Every man there drinks a small cup of olive oil every day.”

Mike’s brother still lives in Greece and has access to all the best olive growers, from whom Mike imports his oil.

But Greek olive oil isn’t that easy to find in the United States. Because Greece is in the Euro-zone, they export first to Europe; the U.S. gets what’s left over. Actually, says Mike, Italy doesn’t grow enough olive oil to export, so the Italian brands we purchase may be blends that include Greek oil.

Look for EVOO

The olives are usually picked in the fall, when they’re green and bitter; they’re ground up and the oil is pressed out. The oil put in clay barrels for six to eight months to become sweet. This first pressing is what’s known as extra-virgin olive oil (EVOO). When you buy olive oil for salads or for dipping bread, look for extra-virgin oil that’s labeled “first cold pressed.” Oil that’s labeled “pure” is fine for cooking, but it might not have as delicate a taste as EVOO.

The price depends on the year’s olive crop. A single tree can yield anywhere from 25 to 200 pounds of olives, Mike says.

Although Greek olive oil can be more expensive than oil from Spain or Italy, it’s worth it, Mike insists it’s worth it. He sells three-liter cans for $25 to $40. “For a typical American family, that will last six to eight months,” he says.

EVOO is also great for sautéing, but don’t plan to use it for deep frying because it will burn. You also may not want to use EVOO for baking, because it has such a pronounced flavor – but using a blend of olive oil and other vegetable oils would work for frying and baking.

Here is a recipe for a delicious salad dressing that uses extra-virgin olive oil. It tastes different with cider vinegar than with Balsamic vinegar, so try it both ways and see which you prefer.