Seder Cooking Part 2: Matzo Ball Soup and Apple Kugel

After Friday's epic day of cooking, we only had to make a few things on Saturday: matzo ball soup, apple kugel and the second edition of the layer cake.

My family has always  made our Matzo Balls from scratch.  My grandmother and great grandmother both had recipes.  My grandmother's recipe called for Nyafat, which, to my mother's and my great consternation, was discontinued a few years ago. When we tried to sub oil, we got more matzo chunks than matzo balls.  So, we switched to my great grandmother's recipe, which calls for oil.

Making matzo balls can be a time consuming process, but I love it.  I have fond memories of my grandmother walking up to our front door in a little black hat, while my grandfather followed behind with jars of home made chicken soup.   My grandmother, mother and I would always make the matzo balls together, so I've had about 20+ years of practice at this point.

The "rules" ok making the matzo balls are as follows:

•   When doubling the batch, make each batch in a separate bowl.  No one knows why this is.
•   The mixture must chill in the fridge for at least 1 hour
•   When forming the mazto balls, you must barely touch them lest they become the dreaded "hockey pucks."
•   Any recipe of my great-grandmother's that says parsley is "optional" really means that parsley is mandatory.  We added in some chopped fresh stuff, since we had it handy for the seder anyway.

  So, here is the step by step process of the making of the family Matzo Balls:

You can see here the two bowls for the two batches.  I can get about 13 matzo balls from each batch, which was perfect for our 11 seder guests, plus leftovers.  While some people do put seltzer in their Matzo balls, it's a McGuffin here.  It just happened to be on our counter.  You don't want to make your Matzo balls too big, as they will swell mightily when cooking.  Mine are a heaping dinner spoon full.

Fill a LARGE (I'm serious here - it should be huge) stockpot with water.  We use my grandmother's stockpot for this purpose.  Once your water is at a rolling boil, lower in your Matzo balls.   The best tool to have on hand for this is a flat skimmer with a sturdy handle.  It doesn't have to be expensive.  My skimmer was $2 at Ikea.

When you first lower your Matzo balls into the water, they'll sink to the bottom.  When they rise to the top, lower the heat and cover.  Cook for thirty minutes.  The water should be barely bubbling - if the boil is too heavy, your Matzo balls will break.  After 30 minutes, remove the Matzo balls with the skimmer.  When your soup is ready, reheat them in the soup.  I used a combination of low salt Pacific Organic vegetable broth and the leftover broth from when we made the veg mixture for the vegetable kugel.

One note - have lots of salt on hand.  I like my Matzo balls to be very salty, and even with the salt in the recipe, there wasn't enough salt for my taste, especially since we used low sodium veg broth.

The other thing we knocked out was the apple kugel.  You can see the recipe on the Maneschewitz website.  We did not include walnuts, and we soaked the raisins prior to cooking, per my mother's suggestion, so that they would not sink to the bottom of the kugel.  I'd make this even for non-passover meals - it's a pretty tasty side dish.

Seder Cooking Part 1: Vegetable Kugel, Roasted Potatoes and Roasted Brussels Sprouts.

We started our Pesach cooking today.  With full disclosure, I did make some non-veg dishes for the guests, namely beef brisket and gefilte fish.  That said, there are plenty of veg sides that will make a delicious meal for me and my non-red meat eating mother.

The three veg dishes I made today were:

Veg cooking away!

Vegetable kugel.  This is one of my favorite Pesach dishes.  Most recipes call for frozen spinach, but I used fresh.  We also added onion, celery, carrots and yellow pepper (the recipe called for green pepper, but we thought yellow would make it prettier).   After letting the veg cook for 20 minutes in broth, we strained it and mixed in an egg & matzoh meal mixture.  It then baked in the oven at 350 for about 45 minutes.

Before baking.

The finished product.

Yummy browned potatoes!

We also made roasted potatoes, which were soaked in olive oil and onion soup mix, and then roasted in a 450 degree oven for about 50 minutes.

I also made my roasted Brussels sprouts with shallots.  Tomorrow, when we reheat them, I'll stir in some fresh parmesan.

Tonight, I will make the lemon "cream" filling for my cake, and tomorrow, it's the rest of the cake and Matzo ball soup!

Quinoa with Greens & Tomatoes and Golden Beets

Every year, at Passover, I make an attempt to be semi-observant.  I don't clean all the chametz out of my kitchen or switch the dishes, but I do try and give it a few days of good old Ashkenazi (aka, Eastern European ancestry) style Pesach eating - no leavened bread, no corn, no rice, no pasta and no beans.  When I was eating meat and fish, this was a no brainer.  Visualize a lot of salads with grilled chicken, broiled salmon with veggies, etc.

As a vegetarian, Passover becomes more complicated.  I want to get my protein, but my standards - beans, chickpeas, seitan, quorn - are verboten.  Given my activity level, I know I need some protein to keep me going.  So, in addition to eggs and nuts, I intend to eat a lot of quinoa.

For those unfamiliar with quinoa,  it is a "grain-like crop grown primarily for its edible seeds" and "elated to species such as beets, spinach, and tumbleweeds."  It's also considered by some, but not all, to be kosher for Passover.  But, I say if Mayim Bialyk, who is a much better Jew than I am, includes it in her "Passover Survival Tips for Vegans," I'm eating it.

Quinoa is super easy to make.  The ratio is one cup of quinoa to two cups of water.  You can make more, but I would not cut that down any further - I found this out the hard way when I burned 1/4 cup of quinoa in 1/2 cup water. But, quinoa keeps really well in the fridge, so it's a great item to make a lot of and use through out the week. To prepare, pour it all in a pot, bring it to a boil, then bring down to a simmer for 25 minutes or so or until all the water is absorbed, stirring occasionally.

You can put anything on top of quinoa and it's good.  Some people even have it for breakfast in lieu of oatmeal or hot cereal.  I chose to use what I had in the kitchen - onion, grape tomatoes, broccoli raab and some mixed bagged greens (chard, turnip and mustard greens).  I sauteed all of that up in olive oil and mixed it with the quinoa.

I also decided to roast the golden beets I picked up a few days ago.  If you like the taste of beets, but dislike dealing with the red ones, which stain, golden beets are a great option.  I peeled mine, sliced them about 1/4 thick, and mixed them with olive oil, fresh ground pepper and sea salt.  They roasted at 400 degrees for just over 30 minutes.  I sprinkled some goat cheese crumbles on them, as the two flavors compliment each other well.  But, if you prefer to make this dish vegan, you can omit that part.

Adventures in Passover Baking Edition, aka - I screw up, I throw a tantrum, I fix it, I reclaim my title as baking wunderkind!

Yes, it all turned out JUST fine.

My cousins invited me to join them tonight for Seder.  Since I have been on a baking roll lately, I offered to make the dessert, specifically the paerve Lemon Layer Cake from last week's Washington Post food section.  Paerve was key, as my cousins keep kosher and are serving meat for dinner.

The recipe started off easy enough.  I make pastry cream all the time, so the lemon "cream" (eggs, sugar, lemon juice and lemon zest) was a no brainer.  And whipped cream icing, which is normally the source of my culinary temper tantrums, was blissful with the kitchen aid mixer.

Now, it was on to the cake.  I make cakes ALL THE TIME.  I have never effed one up.  Seriously.  Perfect track record.

I do believe we see where this is going.

The recipe called for separating the eggs.  No problem.  Then it called for combining the yolks, sugar, lemon, etc. and then beating in the matzo cake meal and potato starch.  No problem - into the mixer.  Ah, but I have to beat the egg whites in a separate bowl.  And I only have one bowl for the Kitchen-aid . . . Hmm.  I don't feel like dragging out the hand mixer.  Surely I can get these nice and frothy by hand.  So, I sat there whipping the egg whites with a whisk and feeling very proud of myself.  Look how strong my arms are - I barely feel this!  It must be all the chatarungas I do in yoga!  I don't need modern machinery!  I can whip egg whites!

Do we see where this is going yet?

If not, behold what I had 45 minutes later:

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, behold the Guiness Book of World records winner for the largest passover cookie.

Now, as a yogini, you think I would handle all of this with grace and strength.  I would acknowledge it as a teaching experience.

Not so much.

To recap - I tried to convince the fiance that I needed to start over that night.  He said that it was 10:30 and we were out of sugar and my relatives would be fine with the cookie.   Cue minor temper tantrum. 

So, I decided to instead bump up my work departure time an hour to attempt a cake remake so as not to show up at a Seder for 27 people with no dessert, or worse, a soggy cardboard cookie.  This morning, I bought eggs at CVS so they'd be at room temp by the time I got home, and, once I got back to my neighborhood, I ran to the local market for more lemons and sugar.  This time, I used the hand mixer for the batter and beat the egg whites into a veritable nimbus cloud in the mixer.

See the difference?

Not well beaten egg white cake

Well beaten egg white cake.

 

Cookie on the left, cake on the right.

After some time in the freezer, I was able to get the cake into two layers.  I didn't dare attempt three.

Still fairly scrawny looking, but fluffier in person.

So, after adding the lemon "cream" filling and mixing the leftover "cream" with the whipped topping and then frosting and decorating, let's look at the final result again: