Flipping Houses & Pancakes

Do you love to cook? Are you always on the lookout for good recipes, but your kitchen is outdated and not conducive to culinary creativity and efficiency?

Or, do you have a beautiful new kitchen, but lack the skills to turn out easy, delicious and sometimes festive meals?

There’s a third possibility: Perhaps you just love reading cookbooks and getting new ideas.

A new cookbook, Flipping Houses & Pancakes: Kosher Recipes & Kitchen Design Tips from an Amateur Professional, checks the boxes of at least one of these three scenarios.

The author, Dora Segan-Kohanim, has entwined her passion for cooking and with her experience in kitchen design in this book. Think: Food Network meets HGTV.

Denverites may remember Segan-Kohanim as Dora Krausz, who grew up on the West Side and attended Hillel Academy and Beth Jacob High School for Girls. She is the daughter of Steve and Vicki Krausz, co-founders of the Jewish Children’s Adoption Network.

Segan-Kohanim taught at Beth Jacob while earning a degree in geography. She was also certified in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and took a lot of classes in hand-drawn and computer-generated mapping which would eventually serve her well in one of the aspects of this book.

Segan-Kohanim married Iranian Jewish escapee Mordechai Segan-Kohanim, and moved to Baltimore where they settled and established their family.

In addition to her new husband and new home, she acquired a new culture: Sephardi-Persian, a contrast to her own Ashkenazi Colorado background.

One day, Segan-Kohanim’s husband, who manages apartment buildings for a living, asked her if she could redraw a kitchen layout for one his apartments. He knew she had some experience with hand-drawn maps.

“It turned out that drawing out kitchens was a lot like drawing maps, and I was pretty good at it. I enjoyed it. I could picture what it looked like from the little squares on the paper,” she says.

Segan-Kohanim’s first attempt at designing a kitchen was for her own kitchen. She had paid for a custom design. She hated and thought she could do it better. She drew and redrew until she got the layout just right, and the kitchen turned out beautifully.

That gave Segan-Kohanim the confidence, or perhaps chutzpah, to offer to design a kitchen for a friend, which also turned out to be stunning.

This interest in having her own beautiful and functional kitchen became more than a hobby. She and her husband began flipping houses and her developing design expertise served them well as she redesigned not only kitchens but entire houses.

All along, Segan-Kohanim was honing her skills as a cook, learning Persian Jewish cuisine as well as the Ashkenazi Jewish standards, but with the twist of making food easily and quickly for her growing family of five children and a constant stream of Shabbat and holiday guests.

Flipping Houses & Pancakes is a mash-up of tips for imagining and designing the perfect kosher kitchen and the food which can be prepared in that dream kitchen. At the beginning of each food category are several pages of kitchen before-and-after photos and tidbits of advice for kitchen rennovations Segan-Kohanim has picked up along the way. Kitchen design tips are also interspersed as sidebars to some of the recipes.

Her recipes, presented in chapters entitled Drinks, Breads & Dips, Breakfast, Soups & Salads, Poultry & Meat, Fish & Parve, Dairy, Sides and Desserts, are accompanied by vibrant color photos of the actual dishes — “No plastic, no shaving cream and no raw meat,” as Segan-Kohanim puts it.

Below is a sample recipe from Flipping Houses & Pancakes. More can be found in the print edition of the IJN.