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April 26, 2013
Quick, easy 'n' healthy
Norene Gilletz speaks at Beth Israel event.
OLGA LIVSHIN
“My world revolves around food,” Norene Gilletz told more than 60 people at the Congregation Beth Israel-hosted presentation Food: Fast & Fabulous, which took place in the Wosk Auditorium at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver.
The author of nine cookbooks and numerous articles about food and nutrition, Gilletz, a longtime Montreal resident, is a known authority on kosher cuisine. Her cooking demonstrations and classes have been highly praised for years and, on April 11, she brought her expertise to Vancouver.
Gilletz became interested in food and cooking at a very young age. “I began my culinary training in my mother’s kitchen, when I was three,” she told the Independent. “I can still remember watching my mom make stretch dough for strudel and knishes. It was amazing how a small piece of dough could be stretched so thin that you could read a newspaper through it.... My mom was an excellent cook. She could prepare all kinds of foods: potato knishes, kugels, chopped herring, baking. She knew five million recipes for eggplant alone.”
Like her mother, Gilletz has always loved and excelled at cooking, but she didn’t think at first that it would become a career.
“I didn’t have any special cooking education in the beginning. I went to university and took some general courses for a few years,” she recalled. “Then, I became a secretary to earn some money. I moved to Montreal when I was 19, worked, got married and started a family. Then I joined B’nai B’rith Women. Our chapter members decided to write a cookbook as a fundraising project, and we asked our families and friends to share their recipes. We wanted to know their culinary secrets so that we could duplicate the dishes that were family favorites. I became the editor of that book, Second Helpings Please! The project took over three years to complete. It was a wonderful learning experience and it whetted my appetite for a culinary career.”
The book was published in 1968. Others followed, but writing cookbooks was only one corner of Gilletz’s cooking universe. She has had a café, a cooking shop that sold all sorts of gadgets, a catering service and a cooking school. “I tried it all,” she said.
“When I opened a cooking school in Montreal in 1980, I finally decided it was time to take professional classes. My first cooking course was with Jacques Pépin. I was so excited. I thought it would be important to prepare everything exactly as it was written in his recipes. Jacques set us straight very quickly. He asked us which recipe we had on our recipe sheet. When we replied that it was duck à l’orange, he said: ‘That’s a very nice recipe. You can make it that way one day but, today, I feel like doing it differently.’ That class shaped my teaching style in a major way. I learned it was important to be flexible, spontaneous and creative, to have the ability to improvise, and to be responsive to my students’ needs.”
Her cooking presentations and lessons reflect this attitude. “Nothing is set in stone,” she said. “When I first started to cook, I used to read other authors’ cookbooks from cover to cover. I often called my mother long distance with my cooking questions. I have an eclectic collection of cookbooks, over 1,500 and growing, and I still read them for inspiration, information and pleasure. But when I cook, I don’t bother opening up a cookbook. I just open the pantry door and the refrigerator and see what is there. I cook with the ingredients I have on hand, according to my mood. I cook until I run out of ingredients, time or energy, whichever comes first. Cooking, making recipes, is a creative process. It’s instinctive for me. I know in my guts what will be tasty, which ingredients go together.”
Gilletz’s inspiration for new recipes comes from different sources. “Sometimes, it’s a memory of a dish I tried as a child. I want to preserve that memory but I often adapt it to modern standards, make it healthier. Sometimes, I’ve tasted a dish at a restaurant or a dinner party, and I modify it to fit my personal taste. At other times, a trip to a supermarket inspires me to combine a variety of ingredients in a certain way. I may see a picture in a food magazine, cookbook or TV commercial, and that would spark an idea. Sometimes, I even wake up in the middle of the night with a concept for a dish. People also love to share their recipes and ideas with me.”
She admitted that she generally tries to create recipes with ingredients that are easy to find, nothing exotic. Quick, easy and healthy is her motto. “I also like to develop recipes that can be prepared in advance and refrigerated or frozen until needed,” she said. “I have limited time to spend in the kitchen; besides, it’s frustrating to spend two or three hours preparing a dish that disappears in two or three minutes.”
Throughout her career, when new cooking technology has become available – the food processor, for instance – Gilletz has embraced it wholeheartedly. Her latest book, The NEW Food Processor Bible: 30th Anniversary Edition, is proof that she’s an early adopter. These days, she is very active on Facebook, with hundreds of followers. Gilletz’s website is gourmania.com.
Her demonstration at the Wosk Auditorium showed why she is such a sought-after presenter. The event was friendly and informal, and Gilletz offered her rapt listeners many useful tips: how to handle dough, for example, how to adapt a recipe for various allergies, and how to make food low fat without losing flavor. The food at the presentation (prepared by Nava Creative Kosher) was, of course, delicious.
Olga Livshin is a Vancouver freelance writer. She can be reached at [email protected].
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