What's cooking on the Web
By Hannah Brown

(September 2) - With the High Holy Days coming up, it's a time of year for reflection, new beginnings and having lots of relatives over. And when they show up, they'll be hungry.

Whether it's your first time hosting the family, or the 20th, you can minimize the trauma and maximize the good times by getting ready far in advance. Sure, you have cookbooks, but the Internet can be a big help in all kinds of ways you may not have thought of.

If this is the year you really want to cook in style, log on to the Epicurious Web site at http://www.epicurious.com. It's the cooking site of CondeNet, the Internet branch of the Conde Nast magazine empire, which publishes Vogue, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and many others. This site gives you access to hundreds of recipes (many of which can be adapted for kosher cooking), as well as the on-line versions of Bon Appetit and Gourmet magazines. You can register and set up your own recipe box, which stores your favorite recipes on-line. There is a special Jewish holiday section, with recipes by cookbook author Joan Nathan at http://www.epicurious.com/e_eating e06_jewish_ cooking/nathan_home.html.

Espresso Ice Cream Cookie Wrap-Ups The American Heart Association

Click on the Rosh Hashana section and you'll get a menu for a traditional Hungarian feast for this holiday. In the Yom Kippur section, there is a menu for a deli-influenced American-style break-fast. There's also a link to a section of Rosh Hashana Italian recipes by Joyce Goldstein, author of Cucina Ebraica: Flavors of the Italian Jewish Kitchen. Goldstein, visiting executive chef at the CIA office in St. Helena, California (what a credential!) and a restaurateur, provides unusual dishes such as Pollo Arrosto all'Arancia, Limone e Zenzero (Roast Chicken with Orange, Lemon and Ginger), which, apparently, is a High Holy Day favorite among Italian Jews.

If some of your young guests have just returned from their Far Eastern treks and you want to remind them of their travels, head for http://www.kashrus.org/recipes/recipes.html. Here, you can find kosher recipes from several countries, including China, Thailand, Malaysia, India, Burma, Sri Lanka and Vietnam. Under each country heading, you'll find an extensive list, including soups, side dishes, main dishes and desserts. So, this year, why not try Tandoori Murgh or vegetable curry instead of brisket? Another section has a list of ingredients needed for cooking kosher Asian recipes and tips on how to use them. This site also has a link to http://www.kashrus.org/kosher/info.html, which features all kinds of kosher food and product information. It's a strange site in that it has far more than the usual quota of misspellings and it's often impossible to navigate from one part of the site to the other (you have to go back to the home page). It looks as if it was put together very much as a labor of love by someone who had traveled far and wide and wanted to share that knowledge.

If you'd like to find your exotic flavorings a little bit closer to home, try http://www.bsz.org/seph-food.htm. This address gives you a list of Web sites featuring Sephardi dishes, plus a list of favorite Sephardi recipes right on the site itself.

But for some, it isn't Rosh Hashana if there aren't familiar holiday meals with a simple chicken or beef main course and the inevitable honey cake for dessert (not that there's anything wrong with that, as Jerry Seinfeld used to say). There are many sites that provide traditional recipes. For a user-friendly site, try http://www.koshercooking.com/recipes/highholidays/index.html. There are only a few recipes in each category, but they are clear and easy to follow. The roasted pomegranate chicken recipe here sounds especially good. And http://www.kashrut.com/recipes has a long list of traditional holiday recipes. If you like basically traditional food with a slight California-cuisine twist, try http://www.holidays.net/highholydays/. Here, you'll find interesting ideas such as bread-machine halla and honey-cake ice cream.

If you're having enough guests over, chances are some of them will have health problems that will require special diets. Here, too, the Internet can be a great help, since many health organizations post recipes on-line. If your guests have heart disease and require a low-fat and/or low-sodium diet, two Web sites can help. The first, http://www.americanheart.org/catalog/Health_catpage6.html is part of the American Heart Association's Web site and features sample recipes from its cookbooks. Here, and with all of these organizations, be warned: naturally, these recipes are not kosher, but many of them can be adapted to kosher cooking.

A much more extensive selection of heart-healthy recipes is available at http://www.deliciousdecisions.org/cb/rec.html. This site has a great feature. There are several categories here (meal time: breakfast, entrees, vegetarian entrees, etc.; main ingredients; international: Italian, French, Middle Eastern, etc.; and special criteria: low-salt, etc.). You check off as many criteria as you'd like, press the search button, and you get a list of recipes that fit your criteria.

Although cooking for diabetics should not be much of a challenge except for dessert, you may find the recipes at http://www.diabetic-recipes.com helpful. The biggest culinary challenge will come if any of your guests have celiac disease, an intolerance to all food containing gluten, which is found in grain, including wheat. You can cook tasty meals for them without too much fuss, but it requires planning. The two best Web sites for gluten-free recipes I've found are at http://members.ozemail.com.au/~coeliac and http://www.celiac.com/recipes.html. Each site contains dozens of gluten-free recipes, and the "members.ozemail" site contains an entire gluten-free cookbook transferred to the Web.

Have you got a vegan coming to dinner (and who hasn't, these days)? Don't despair. Vegweb at http://www.vegweb.com/frames/index has an extensive recipe directory. And if all of the above sites don't solve your holiday cooking problems, Zipple.com, the site that bills itself as "The Jewish Supersite" has an extensive collection of recipe links at http://www.zipple.com/food/recipes.shtml.

Finally, it's important to remember that a lot of people get depressed during the holidays. If you're one of these, you might find it helpful to log onto the Centers for Disease Control Web site at http://www.cdc.gov/safeusa/blues.html and check out these tips from the American Psychological Association for fighting the holiday blues.

Send comments and suggestions to: hannah@jpost.co.il