Lockshin Kigel

I've been trying to make Lokshin Kigel from about two years now with varying degrees of success and I think yesterday I finally nailed it. I'm posting it here because I need to write down my recipe while I can still remember what I did.

EDIT: It's two years since I first posted this and since then I've made some improvements which I'm updating below.

It turns out you can't find a recipe for lokshin kigel on the internet. If you google it, all you get is results for "lockshin kugel". Are there no other Galitzianers out there posting recipes? Is the Internet run by Litvaks? We'll see if I register in the Google search after I post this...

My problem with cooking is that I'm always improvising. My theory is that how far wrong can you go if you stick to good wholesome ingredients? So let me try and remember what I did...

They had cottage cheese on sale for 99 cents at the Food Fare last week. I wouldn't have normally bought it because it was diet (1%) but I figured...what the hell, for 99 cents how bad could it be? I can always make up the fat content by using lots of butter.

And that's what I did...about a third of a pound, and half again as much Crisco (melted together in the microwave). I had two apples that I chopped up and threw in. Salt and pepper (don't skimp on the pepper) and just over a quarter cup of sugar. (That was one scoopful, and I just tossed another scoop into the measuring cup so you readers would know how big my scoop is.) Four eggs, and that was my mix.

OK, that's way too much butter. I'm now cutting at most a one-inch slice off my pound of butter (even a bit less). Forget the Crisco too. And instead of apples, I'm using a whole can (540 grams) of pineapple tidbits. I cut them up a little, but don't use crushed pineapple - the bits are too small.

AND THIS IS IMPORTANT: I got my best kigel so far when I used one carton (500g) of dry curd cottage cheese mixed with half a carton of sour cream. You can really taste the sour cream when it's done.

I had a half-used bag of fettucini noodles...it was a 900 gram bag to start with, and I'm guessing there must have been 5 or 6 hundred grams left over. So that's what I used.   A 450g package is just right.

I think that's it. I baked it for an hour at 350 50 minutes at 325 then turned down the heat and left it in the oven. Some of the noodles were a bit crunchy so you might want to cut that back 10 minutes or so, but I kind of like the jawbreakers. So unless I've forgotten something, there you have it.

And don't forget to grate in a generous portion of cheddar cheese.
 
I think we'll get back to the physics when we return.

EDIT: I knew I'd forget something! The marble cheddar. I had about 150, maybe 200 grams of marble cheddar in the fridge and I grated it into the mix.    I'm not sure there's such a thing as adding too much cheese.

Oh yeah, one more thing. About the cottage cheese. The reason it was 99 cents is that it was expired...what my Chinese wife calls "past the duty date". But what's five or six days to a tub of cottage cheese?