Welcome, Spring!

If you read my last blog post some two weeks ago, you'll know that between starting a new term at work and preparing for Passover, I've been running non-stop. That California vacation seems like months ago. No wonder things have been quiet here--though it's been hopping (relatively speaking) over at Magpie Eats!

Passover got off to a lovely start. We hosted my cranky relatives on the first night. They never stay past dessert to finish the seder, but I'm used to it now and it only drives me a little bit nuts. The Princess decided this was the year she'd learn The Four Questions to ask at the seder, which is kind of a big deal given that it involves singing in Hebrew. With MonkeyBoy's excellent assistance, she learned and snag beautifully and took the responsibility very seriously.

We spent the next two nights with friends, sharing another seder and a festive Shabbat meal complete with silly songs and much hilarity. It was a lovely few days of cooking and eating and talking and laughing and a great deal of wine so I spent the weekend mostly at home and mostly quiet which wasn't bad at all.

Now that things are slightly calmer, I'm gradually turning my thoughts towards the garden. I went out this morning during a sun break between the rain and the hail, and found that, while so much needs attention, thankfully there's a great deal happening despite my neglect.

We have bluebells all over:

The figs are just beginning to make leaf buds:

The peonies and rhubarb are up:

And the andromeda is covered in a froth of scented blossoms:

It was a long, hard winter and we lost quite a few things which we'd had for years, including the Meyer lemon trees that were a gift from my sweetie for our fifth wedding anniversary. Kind of bummed about that.

But the succulents seem to have mostly made it through and today's sun breaks were surely welcome:

It's supposed to start drying out soon and I'm hoping to spend lots of time on yardwork in the coming days. Welcome, Spring!

Pesach Brownies

The seders are over, but there's still plenty of time for Passover treats. Much as I adore it, even I can only eat so much matzoh crack (though I must say that this year's addition of coarse sea salt was brilliant).

I needed a quick dessert to share with friends last night and decided to look through a new cookbook I found the other day at the library: Jewish Holiday Cooking by Jayne Cohen. Its subtitle A Food Lover's Treasury of Classics and Improvisation pretty much says it all and I'm enjoying coming across the twists on classic dishes.

The Rich Fudge Brownies are lovely. Rather than a dense slab of heavy chocolate, these puff slightly in the oven and feel lighter than any Passover baked dish should. The cocoa flavor is deep and rich and the brown sugar provides a lovely moistness and depth of flavor but they aren't overpowering. I'll admit I'm not a huge brownie fan and I'm not sure these particular ones will make brownie lovers all that happy. But they worked for me. I guess we'll need to put these head to head with the Baked brownies to determine the new house champion.

You'll find the recipe here.

Matzoh Crack

We used to call it toffee matzoh around here, but the description from Smitten Kitchen seems to have taken hold this year and for good reason. This stuff is delicious and, yes, downright addictive. In fact, it's what gets us through the long, tedious, post seder days of Passover.

It takes all of 10 minutes to make and the only hard part is waiting for it to cool. Heat a stick of butter and a half cup of brown sugar in a saucepan and cook until the sugar is dissolved. Add a pinch of kosher salt and 1/2 teaspoon of vanilla extract. Set aside to cool. Line 2 cookie sheets with foil and cover completely with matzoh, breaking the sheets as necessary to fill in gaps. Spread the melted sauce evenly over the matzoh and pop into a 350 degree oven until caramel starts to bubble. Remove from the oven and sprinkle with chocolate chips. Wait 5 minutes or so, until the chocolate is soft, and spread evenly over matzohs. You can top the melted chocolate with chopped nuts if you like. Put trays in the refrigerator to cool. Then eat. Not all at once if you can help it.

I probably should have brought this up before the end of Passover, but the good news is you should be able to find marked down matzoh in stores now.

Passover News Item

I don't even know what to say about this other than it's nice to see a protest in Israel that doesn't involve violence. But still.

Iraqi Macaroons

The seder meal is rarely terribly innovative at my house, especially when I am serving to my older relatives. We start with gefilte fish and matzo ball soup and then move on to some kind of vegetarian main dish alongside brisket or chicken, allowing me and the kids who are concerned about such things to keep vegetarian while the meat eaters are satisfied, too. There's asparagus, tzimmes, and fruit salad as well along with charoset and horseradish.

Even dessert is pretty standard. Unless the holiday falls super early in the year and edible berries have yet to arrive on our supermarket shelves, I make a flourless sponge cake rolled around whipped cream and strawberries which, I'm sorry to say, does not photograph well. This year's berries were not so good, especially after the exuberantly fragrant ones we ate last month in San Jose, but liberal additions of sugar and vanilla brought them to life. Plus, when surrounded by clouds of whipped cream, what's not to like?

It was feeling a bit too formulaic for me this year and I started looking around for something to spice things up. While re-reading the Passover chapter in Nigella Lawson's Feast, I came across her recipe for Iraqi Macaroons which looked more or less like the standard homemade variety with the addition of freshly ground cardamom and rosewater. Freshly ground cardamom? I'm there!

Aren't they cute? So plump and nutty, and vaguely exotic. And they were the surprise hit of our seder. I thought they'd be politely declined (more for me!) but everyone requested a few in their take-home packages.

Do give these a try as they are quite delightful. Being quite sturdy I imagine they would likely travel well. Also, as I'm finding more and more folks eschewing wheat, I like having a few wheat free options for sharing. The recipe is here.

Public Debut

Yes, I am a crazy person. Elisheva commented that she was surprised I had time to take an all-day train trip three days before the first seder. I didn't, not really, but off we went anyway with a promise from the kids that they would work like Israelite slaves to help me get ready for Passover. And they mostly did. I did mention to my grandmother that I have been more prepared for seders than I was last night, but things came together and we managed the streamlined seder that my older relatives favor. I felt a bit let down after all my work, but I should know to think of this as an intergenerational gathering rather than to expect a spiritually significant ritual.

After all the racing to get ready for last night's seder, and knowing that we'd be spending the second seder with good friends, today stretched before me with virtually nothing to do. I decided to make good on my promise to The Spouse to have The Monster finished for him to wear at Passover. Technically I'd "finished" it two weeks ago. But after carefully following the pattern directions, the button band was a warped, distorted mess. I figured today was as good an opportunity as any to re-knit the button band and finish the thing once and for all. I knitted like a madwoman and sewed the last button on only minutes before we were due to leave. The Monster was finally ready for its public debut at tonight's seder where I couldn't help but smile every time I looked at my sweetie across the heavily laden table. It was a delightful evening made even better by knowing The Monster was done for good.

Passover is a festival of liberation and, while I realize its themes are far more weighty than my knitting struggles, I can't help but feel a sense of freedom at putting this particular project behind me. All the effort proved to be worth it once I saw the smile on its recipient's face.

Walnut Pate

It's that time of year again and the massive cooking extravaganza has begun. Today I started the stock for the matzoh ball soup. I also made tzimmes and lemon curd, as well as a large batch of walnut pate. A week without bread, pasta, and tortillas leaves us wanting lots of different spreads to perk up all that matzoh. That first taste at the seder is wonderful but as the week rolls on, a change of pace is appreciated. That's how lemon curd and walnut pate became staples for us this time of year.

In all my frenzied list-making I almost forgot about walnut pate. The Dark Lord reminded me yesterday and it's a good keeper so I made up a big batch today. This recipe is often called (rather sadly in my opinion) mock chopped liver. That makes sit sound like it's not quite something else when what it is is delicious. So we are making a concerted effort to rename this tasty, high protein Passover standby (though it could easily be made any time of year). It's simple enough: onions, eggs, and walnuts--but these few things work magic together once the onions have browned deeply and the walnuts are lightly toasted. It doesn't make a spectacular food photo, but as a spread on matzoh (or bread) it can't be beat. Think of this when you need something a little different for your next picnic or sack lunch. You'll find the recipe here.

A Passover Dinner

The seders are fun and engaging but the reality is that it doesn't take too long before matzoh gets old, along with eating Passover style. Knowing that by the weekend my family would be kvetching I made a big hunk of meat. This is very rare in our house. None of us are big meat eaters and a couple of us generally can't stand the stuff. But brisket, prepared in the style of my grandmother, is something we all love. So I spent an extraordinary amount of money on 4 pounds of kosher brisket, cooked it up and served it with new potatoes, carrot salad, and asparagus for Shabbat dinner.

I had the meal composed in my head well in advance except for dessert. Finding a good dairy-free dessert to serve with meat is challenging enough. I'm all for butter and cream whenever possible, really. But I also needed something without flour to make it kosher for Passover. I looked to The Book of Jewish Food by Claudia Roden where I came across a whole section of Passover cakes. The Almond Cake in Orange Syrup caught my eye since I'm already crazy for orange cake. I was thinking that a syrup cake would make up for the lack of butter. The cake is simple, made only of eggs, ground almonds, sugar, oranges, and cinnamon. Unfortunately because my Passover bakeware is limited, I had another notable lesson in using the proper size pan. The cake ballooned out of the pan I had, but I trimmed it up, plopped it into its syrup bath and it was quite delicious: sticky, moist, nutty, and tasting very strongly of oranges which I found a perfect combination. It's not particularly elegant but it is a simple and lovely cake. Try it and see.

Aaaahhhhhh.......

The 48 hour frenzy of cooking and cleaning is over and I won't have to cook again for days.

The first Passover seder was tonight. We were 14 all together which is accomplished in my house by putting two 6-foot tables together to make one large (not long) table, filling up the dining room. We pull dishes from two sets of china and use every wine and drinking glass in the house. It's a tight fit around the table and once everyone's in there's not a lot of up and down.

We had the following for dinner:

blanched vegetables with yogurt-dill dip
matzah balls in roasted vegetable stock
gefilte fish
apple-walnut charoset and cherry-pear-ginger charoset
sweet potato and carrot tzimmes
matzakopita
potato kugel
green salad
fruit salad
steamed asparagus

lighter-than-air chocolate cake
coconut macaroons

I cooked everything but the kugel, green salad, and macaroons (all of which were made by Fran and were absolutely delicious).

For those unfamiliar with the names, charoset is a paste of fruit, nuts, and sweet wine that is served at the seder in memory of the mortar used by the Israelite slaves in Egypt. Tzimmes is a stew made of sweet potatoes, carrots, prunes, and dried apricots simmered in orange juice with cinnamon. Matazakopita has no real history. I created it last year while looking for a new variation on the classic soggy matzoh and cheese genre. I make up a filling of spinach, feta, ricotta, and eggs like I'd put between layers of filo the rest of the year but instead I layer it with damp matzoh. It sounds horrid but tastes surprisingly good. The soggy matzoh is kind of like a delicate fresh pasta if you let just yourself believe.

It was a lot of cooking and by the middle of this afternoon my refrigerator looked like this, with barely an inch of space to spare:

The most fun was making the Lighter Than Air Chocolate Cake that I found recently over at Smitten Kitchen. It's four layers of flourless chocolate cake sandwiching a sweetened cream filling. It was a little bit fussy and the tiniest bit stressful when it came to getting the layers out of the pans but it was worth every minute of work and a perfect ending to a grand family meal. I didn't get any great photos to show how gorgeous it was but I like his photo because it shows the half-eaten cake with a marvelous, magical halo underneath.

That's kind of how I feel after pulling off one of these super meals, when everything goes right and everyone is well fed and well behaved--kind of glowy and warm and deliciously tired.

Gefilte Fish

Gefilte fish, the butt of many jokes and disparaging comments, is simply a long simmered fish dumpling. It's not particularly glamorous or lovely--the individual pieces are rather lumpy and homely. Nonetheless it's a holiday classic among Jews of Eastern European origin and making it each year has become one of my Passover traditions. If you've ever seen (or worse yet, tasted) gefilte fish out of a jar you may think that's how it's supposed to taste and why bother making it. The homemade variety is altogether different and quite tasty, especially slathered in horseradish.

You need to plan ahead and talk with your fish market to make sure they'll grind fish and provide you with fish bones for the stock. This used to be no big deal but recently, as more and more fish has come from far off places, many stores are unable, apparently by law, to give you bones and trimmings. So call around. Here in the Northwest, I usually use a mixture of salmon, cod, and halibut but you can certainly experiment with your fish varieties. Have the fish market grind the fish for you --the market I use has a grinder that is only used for fish (no shellfish, pork, or other meats) so that takes care of the kashrut issue, at least for our family. Ask them to throw in some onion and carrot while they do the grinding--this will save you work and mess down the road.

Once you get home with your package of ground fish and weird bones and trimmings, the first step is making the stock as seen in the photo below. Note the fin! This is, after all, ethnic cooking.Once the stock is cooked and strained, it's time to dig your hands into all that fishiness and mix in eggs, matzoh meal, salt, and pepper. The small patties are formed and then slipped gently into the simmering stock and cooked for a good long time. Eventually you end up with this:

Your seder guests will be delighted and amazed to have real, homemade gefilte fish which they will happily slather with horseradish and gobble down. It's expensive and stinky to make, but it's a big part of my Passover tradition. If you aren't completely appalled and actually want to try it for yourself (and I hope you will), the recipe is here.

It seems so obvious that I shouldn't have to say it, but .....don't taste the raw fish.

Lemon Curd

Passover is nearly here, my long stage of denial is over and I'm now in the frantic activity mode. I've had years when I really went nuts getting rid of every speck of chametz and completely changing over the kitchen to dishes and cookware used only during Passover. In the past we've been joined at our seder by friends who are considerably more detail-oriented Jews than I am but I always wanted them to feel comfortable so I prepared a bit more thoroughly . This year is simpler but nonetheless there's a ton of cleaning to do, all the regular cookware and flatware I'm intending to use needs to be made kosher for Passover through immersion in boiling water, the counters are scrubbed, the refrigerator is throughly cleaned and the cupboards are emptied of non-Passover foods and wiped down. And, with a houseful of guests coming Monday night for the first seder, there's plenty of regular old run of the mill housecleaning to do as well.

I try to look for the spiritual metaphors of liberation, freedom, and rebirth as I scrub but honestly, I just want to prepare the kitchen so I can get to the cooking. I was pretty wiped out after cleaning tonight, but I simply had to start my official Passover cooking with a batch of Meyer lemon curd.My email pal Ruth gave me this recipe years ago and it's become tradition in my home. When eating matzoh for a week, it's nice to have a special spread. The original recipe called for regular old lemons but I love Meyer lemons so much that I tried using them a few years ago and found that they make a delightful curd though I did cut the sugar back slightly as I like my lemon curd quite tart. It's remarkably easy to make, one of those things that comes out looking far more fabulous than the work really merits. I make a few jars each year, enough for us and to share with friends. The recipe is here.