This is another of my "easy baking" recipes, mostly because it doesn't require much kneading, and it's hard for it to fail on you. The oil makes sure it's tender, and the flat shape limits a lot of potential rising problems.

Depending on how much you use in the way of toppings, this bread can either be a side dish, or can be a lunch in itself, particularly with a small salad or a bowl of soup. Serves 6-10 people depending.

Giant Pan o' Focaccia

4 tablespoons fresh rosemary leaves (subs. fresh sage, oregano or thyme)
1 cup boiling water, plus 1 cup warm water
2 tsp active dry yeast
1 tbs honey (subs. 2 tsp sugar)
2 tsp salt
1/3 to ½ cup virgin olive oil
2 ½ cups whole wheat flour
2 to 3 cups bread or all-purpose flour

Toppings, any/several of:

• ½ cup sun-dried tomatoes, partially rehydrated and cut into strips
• ½ cup sliced olives
• 1 cup grated Italian hard cheese, such as parmigiano, pecorino, or asiago
• 2 tbs large coarse salt crystals, such as fancy sea salt
• ½ red onion, thinly sliced

Equipment: Large rimmed baking sheet, parchment, large bowls

Chop half the rosemary roughly and bruise it in a mortar (or mince it). Put it in a large mixing bowl, and pour the cup of boiling water over it. Dissolve the honey in the water. Let sit 10 minutes. Add the cup of lukewarm water; the mixture should now be just warm. Be careful it's not warmer than 90F, which would kill the yeast -- test against your wrist to be sure. Add the yeast, stir to dissolve, and let sit another 5 minutes.

Stir in the salt and two tablespoons olive oil. Add the whole wheat flour, stirring in 1/2 cup at a time always in the same direction, until completely mixed. Add about 2 cups of bread flour in the same manner. Then add flour until the dough just holds together and can be kneaded. Knead gently for 5 minutes, adding just enough flour as necessary to keep it from sticking. Form into a ball, oil the ball on all sides, and put it in a rising container in a warm place for 1 to 1½ hours, or until doubled in size.

Line the bottom of the baking sheet with a sheet of parchment and oil it. Punch down the dough and turn it out onto the sheet; using your fingertips, press it out gradually until it covers the whole baking sheet (a rolling pin will not work). Cover with lightly oiled plastic wrap, or a damp towel, and let rise for another 30 to 45 minutes.

While it's rising, heat the oven to 375F. Dimple the top of the focaccia all over with your fingers; drizzle it with 2 to 3 tablespoons oil, sprinkle on the remaining rosemary, and scatter optional toppings sparsely across the surface (this isn't pizza). Bake for 20 to 30 minutes, just until it turns golden brown. Cut into slices and serve.

There aren't a lot of foods specific to Rosh Hashana (the Jewish New Year), but one of the critical ones is a big round challah bread. Of course, I planned to bake. Between one thing and another, though, we ended up getting home on erev Rosh Hashana at 4pm. Could I get a challah on the table for a 6:30 dinner starting at 4:15?

My first thought was to run out and buy, but as you can imagine by 4pm everyone was sold out. So baking it is. But our family challah recipe takes 1 1/2 hours just for the first rising. We were looking at a challahless Yom Tov.

Then I remembered a recipe which my sweetie had made, for lagniappe rolls which due to editing errors had much too much yeast (2 Tbs instead of 2 tsp). Those rolls rose really fast, in like 20 minutes, and actually still tasted OK. Could I do something similar, maybe more controlled, with the challah recipe?

My first step was to double the usual amount of yeast, from 2 tsp to 4 tsp. I use high-quality active dry yeast, refrigerated, from Red Star, so it's more potent than supermarket yeast in any case; if you're using Fleishmann's, you may need to triple it. I then dissolved 3 1/2 Tbs honey in a cup of 95F water, and then proofed the yeast in it while I mixed the dry ingredients, really getting it going.

Once the dough was together, I put it in a plastic dough bucket (for some reason, dough rises faster in plastic than metal). I heated the oven, turning it off when it reached 120F and put the dough bucket inside. This cut the initial rising to 25 minutes.

With the shorter rises, I was able to make the 6:30 dinnertime with five minutes to spare. 20 minutes mixing, 25 for first rise, 10 minutes braiding, 15 for second rise, 30 minutes baking, and 15 to cool. Surprisingly, the challah didn't even taste yeasty. Rosh Hashana dinner was saved!

Berkus Family Challah (fast rise version)

• 1 cup water at 90F to 100F
• 3 ½ tablespoons honey
• 4 generous teaspoons active dry yeast (2+ packets)
• 5 cups all-purpose flour
• 2 teaspoons salt (1 if using salted butter)
• ¼ cup melted butter (or margarine)
• 2 large eggs + 1 yolk, beaten
• Oil sprayer
• 1 egg white beaten with 2 tbs water or milk for an egg wash
• Large bowl, dough rising bucket, dough scraper, bread board, cookie sheet, baking parchment, plastic wrap pastry brush.

Mix the honey into the warm water. Add the yeast.

While the yeast proofs, mix the salt and flour in a large bowl. Melt the butter, and beat the eggs plus yolk, reserving the white.

Turn your oven on to its lowest temperature setting. You're going to turn it off when it reaches between 100F and 120F, so if you can't set that, keep an eye on it.

Pour first the yeast mixture, then the butter, then the eggs, into the flour bowl. Mix until everything is incorporated into a sticky mass. Knead briefly (maybe 3 minutes); kneading in the bowl is fine. Shape into a large ball.

Spray the sides and bottom of the dough bucket with oil. Put the dough in, spray it, and then put the lid on the bucket. Put the bucket in the oven and close the door. Let rise until more than doubled in size, 20 to 30 minutes.

Dump the dough out on a bread board. Cut into 3 to 6 portions depending on what kind of challah you're making. Braid. Place on parchment on the cookie sheet, and cover loosely with oiled plastic wrap. Put in a warm, draft-free place for a 2nd rise, 15-20 minutes. While it's rising, heat the oven to 375F.

Remove the plastic wrap. Whisk the reserved egg white with water and paint the egg wash on the top of the challah with a pastry brush. Bake for 25 to 35 minutes. You'll know it's done when the tops of the braids are dark brown, the bottom is light brown, and the cracks between braids are no longer "doughy".

Cool 10-15 minutes, then serve. With apples and honey, of course!

Makes a 2lbs loaf.

L'shana Tovah!

Proper za'atar bread is a course of its own, herbacious, oily, crunchy and savory. I do adore it, and if you bake some yourself so will you. Now, there's a proper dough for this bread, but this is the "weeknight" version which starts with refrigerator pizza dough.

The hard thing about this recipe is obtaining the za'atar in the first place. If you don't happen to live near a good Middle Eastern grocery, that can be tough. What most American spice merchants sell as "zatar" is usually an unpalatable mix of sumac and salt (yes, this includes Penzey's). You really need something more like this Palestinian Za'atar to make this work.

If you can't reasonably buy decent za'atar near you, then use the mix I posted at the end of the potato cake recipe and double it.

Weeknight Za'atar Bread

1 cup za'atar spice
1/2 to 1 cup olive oil
1 lbs refrigerated pizza dough

In a bowl, mix the za'atar with 1/2 cup olive oil. Add more olive oil until the resulting paste is oily and semi-liquid; you'll need to be able to spread it, but you don't want it too thin.

Put a pizza stone or steel in the oven and heat it to 475F.

Divide the pizza dough into six balls. Roll each one out as thin as you can, like 1/8" thick. Dock it, either with a docker, or by poking it with a fork a bunch of times.

Transfer a dough round to a floured pizza paddle. Smear the top with 1/6 of the za'atar and oil mix; it should form a solid green coating. Slide the bread onto the pizza stone.

Bake for 4 to 7 minutes, until light brown on the bottom/edges. Cool on a rack. Repeat with the other 5 rounds.

Eat still warm, as a first course or side dish.

Optionally, za'atar breads can be enhanced with any of the following:

• halved cherry tomatoes (pictured)
• diced feta or village cheese (pictured)
• halved pitted olives
• small, sliced peppers

But they're pretty darned good without anything extra.

One of the biggest reasons to eat Georgian food is khachipuri, known as "the pizza of Eastern Europe". Like pizza, khachipuri is more of a whole category than a specific recipe; I think there are as many recipes are there are Georgian surnames. This year's khachipuri was based on an Ossetian recipe, incorporating beet greens since I had a lovely bunch of them from the beets I used for the pkhali. This was excellent; while somewhat less cheesy than other ones I've made, it was flavorful and did well as leftovers.

Speaking of cheese: the traditional cheeses for khachipuri are Imeretian or Sulguni. You can't get these in the USA, except maybe in New York, so substitute a 50/50 mix of block feta and dry mozzarella, and add a couple tablespoons of Greek yogurt. I've also seen American meunster cheese recommended as a substitution.

As always, I used a number of references for this year's holiday meal. In addition to georgianrecipes.net, I also used The Georgian Feast, The Cooking of the Eastern Mediterranean, and Flatbreads and Flavors.

If khachipuri and pkhali are two of the food groups of Georgia, surely lobio is the other. The word "lobio" refers to beans, whether dried red beans or green beans. So we had to have lobio, and this turned out to be the runaway success of the evening. Our guests raved about these, and they were probably the easiest thing in the whole meal. The recipe below is loosely based on a recipe from Flatbreads and Flavors.

Georgian Herbed Green Beans

2 lbs fresh green beans
Salt, large pot, large bowl

Dressing:
1/2 cup walnut oil
1 Tbs olive oil, plus more
1/4 cup red wine vinegar
2 tbs lemon juice
1 tsp salt, plus more
1/3 cup minced fresh mint
1/3 cup finely chopped dill
1/3 cup minced parsley or cilantro
1-2 cloves garlic, mashed
1 tsp sugar, plus more

Mix all ingredients for the dressing. Taste; it will probably be somewhat sharp. Add small amounts of salt, sugar, and olive oil until the flavor is balanced.

Heat a large pot of salted water, large enough for all the green beans, until simmering. Trim the grean beans and snap into 1-2" pieces. Fill the large bowl with cold water and a few ice cubes. Blanch the beans for 5 minutes. Immediately strain them out and shock them in the bowl of cold water, until completely cool. Drain and dry the beans.

Just before serving, toss the beans with the dressing. Serve at room temperature. Do not allow them to sit for long before serving, as the beans may turn an unattractive putty color.

Note: if you can get them, Romano beans are better than regular green beans for lobio.

Second Course

(continued from Part I)

The main choice I had to make for the second course was tagine vs. couscous. While I quite enjoy a good couscous — and let's face it, a major holiday is the only time I'll ever make couscous from scratch — I really wanted to try some bread recipes, so bread and tagine it was. Particularly, I wanted to try some of the semolina breads from Paula Wolfert's The Food of Morocco.

Pictured above is the "tagine bread" from her cookbook. I'm not sure it quite worked out; the bread was a bit denser and harder than I was expecting. Wolfert said that the reader could substitute coarse-ground (pasta grade) semolina for the fine semolina flour Moroccans use in the recipe, but I think maybe that didn't actually work.

The tagine itself, namely the "fish tagine with creamy onion charmoula", worked a lot better. In order to bring in another very old Thanksgiving tradition, I added mussels to it, and swapped out winter squash (butternut) for the summer squash in the recipe.

As a lighter side, I included "beet salad with cinnamon", again from Wolfert. This was another must-keep, as the cinnamon dressing just accented the beets without taking away from their essential flavor. It's displayed here in another one of my bowls from that nesting set.

Dessert

For dessert, we ranged a bit further afield and my sweetie made "Om Ali" a filo "bread pudding" from a Nigella Lawson recipe. But hey, Egypt is in North Africa too, right? Kinda?

Anyway, to Thanksgiving it up, she swapped the apricots and raisins normally in the recipe with dried cranberries. This was brilliant, more like a rich, light noodle kugel than a pudding made with filo.

So another successful Thanksgiving with no turkey ... and that's something to be truly thankful for! I know the turkeys are.