Not only does Fishbein dazzle with her trademark recipes, but she takes things a step further with a thirteen page “Playbook”, designed to save both time and money, by transforming any extras into an entirely new dish.
“The Playbook tells you how to reincarnate leftovers into something your family will never recognize,” said Fishbein, who admits that her own family is not fond of having meals reappear in encore performances. “Sometimes it is extra ingredients that you bought for a particular recipe, other times it is entire recipes. The idea is to resurrect them into something great so that your family doesn’t know that they are eating leftovers.”
It is no accident that the Playbook appears at the very front of KBD Cooking Coach. Fishbein isn’t only looking to find new ways to dress up leftovers. Cooking extras in advance is another one of Fishbein’s great time savers.
“Not only is there no extra effort involved in preparing a double batch, but there is no extra cleanup either,” counseled Fishbein, who encourages using larger pots when doubling recipes so that the foods cook properly. “Make the most of your time and your ingredients so that nothing goes to waste.”
Suggestions in the Playbook include turning extra Vegetable Stuffed Cabbage into cabbage soup, Curried Sunflower Chicken into chicken croquettes and Israeli Eggplant Pepper Salad into a chunky pasta sauce.
While Fishbein, who has sold 450,000 copies of her books worldwide, has gained a reputation for recipes that are as pleasing to the eye as they are to the palate, she is quick to point out that especially in today’s difficult economic climate, she does keep prices of ingredients in mind when devising recipes.
“I try to balance some more economical dishes with recipes whose ingredients can be more costly,” explained Fishbein. “After all, it would be mean to have a book full of recipes featuring ingredients that aren’t affordable to most people.”
But ultimately KBD Cooking Coach is about educating readers so that they are so comfortable with their own kitchen skills and their own knowledge of ingredients that they can improvise, using seasonal foods, family favorites or whatever else strikes their fancy.
“For so many years, kosher cooking wasn’t up to the highest culinary standards,” said Fishbein. “But with food playing a central role in so many different areas of Judaism, we do so much more cooking than the average cook and it stands to reason that we want to have really, really good food.”
Fishbein, who acknowledges that she takes just a single day off after a new cookbook release before she begins work on her next volume, is already contemplating the next installment of the Kosher By Design series.
There is no doubt that her loyal fan base is already counting the days until Kosher By Design, Volume 9, hits store shelves.
