Passover food for Tuesday night

[DianaCox]

So I did some of my shopping a couple of weeks ago (matzos, Manischewitz concord grape fortified wine, seltzer to make it semi-tolerable, gefilte fish), and most of the rest today for our Seder on Tuesday. Right now, my house is redolent of the smell of chicken soup being made. 11 lbs of chicken legs (dark meat, plenty of skin and fat to flavor the soup) are boiling on the stove in my super (souper?) sized pot we bought a few months ago (it's practically a cauldron). In the pot are:

• 1 huge yellow onion, cut in sixths
• The inner stalks and green tops of a head (head?) of celery
• White pepper
• Kosher salt
• A huge spoonful of minced garlic
• Celery salt
• A bit of allspice (I read that as a chicken soup ingredient somewhere - I'm thinking I didn't use enough because I don't taste or smell it)

When the meat is falling off the bone, I will strain the soup, pick the meat off the bones for my daughter's dog (I will not eat meat that's been boiled to death) and chill it to skim off SOME of the fat (I won't remove it all) and reserve for Tuesday (if I can keep from diving in it before then).

On Tuesday, I will boil some carrots in the soup. In the meantime, my father is making and bringing a zillion of his light fluffy matzo balls. His are better than his own mother's were, and better than my mom's too. A couple of years ago, I finally got him to confess his secret - it was (I was appalled!) - buy the Maneschewitz matzo ball mix, and follow the directions exactly. WTF?? THAT is the family secret??

Anyway, the soup will be served with thinly sliced raw white onion and red and orange bell peppers (you would be amazed at how good they taste, salted and taken with a spoonful of rich chicken soup, carrots and matzo balls).

There will be the usual Passover ceremony foods - instead of lettuce, I have a boatload of endive that our FarmFresh coop delivered a couple of weeks ago - they will work nicely as little canoes to hold the charoset, etc. The charoset will be made over the weekend, because it tastes better when the wine, honey and cinnamon have had time to soak into the apples and raisins. I'm thinking of using this technique to peel the apples:


There will be a richly flavored pot roast. I have lovely marrow bones, cut to order, in the freezer, and I'll buy the roast at the butcher shop to ensure a good cut. Normally, I would cook the vegetables in with the roast, but we have a vegetarian coming to dinner as well eyeroll, so I will make them in a separate roasting tray. I have:

• Red potatoes
• Regular yellow and white pearl onions
• Two different colors of asparagus (courtesy of the FarmFresh boxes)
• Fennel
• Multicolored carrots
  
• Turnips
• Broccoli (can you roast broccoli? or should I just steam it?)

The meat will be roasted with onions, garlic, salt and pepper, and the marrow bones, and probably some honey and balsalmic glaze, as well as the fennel fronds. I might put some fresh rosemary from my garden in too.

Other things:

• Costco sells already peeled hard boiled eggs - I will NOT miss having to make and peel the eggs this year!
• Two kinds of store bought gefilte fish - regular and sweet
• Two kinds of horseradish - superhot for the manly men, and cut with sweet beets for the rest of us - also store bought, but bought in NYC in January at Russ and Daughters, so it is super-premium hot shit.
• Matzos
• I have some nice tomatoes, fresh basil in the garden, salt, ricotta cheese and balsalmic glaze for appetizers or on the side.

There will be bakery made orange spongecake for dessert, and probably fruit salad and homemade whipped cream to go with it. And macaroons and those weirdly delicious jellied candies that look like slices of candied citrus fruits, but are not. Assuming anyone has room for dessert.

Other than the soup, and all the cutting up of fruits and veggies (for which I will impress my sous chefs into service), and making the matzo balls (which I'm not doing), there really isn't a lot of time-consuming cooking involved. My kind of fancy meal.

Now I need to find the 30 minute Seder Haggadahs ....

 

[DianaCox]

Larra is coming - but was still need a Passover goy ... can you get here by Tuesday?

By the way, if there is any doubt - the matzo balls are DS deadly. They ARE to die for - and they very nearly kill me and anyone around me a few hours later, but are TOTALLY worth it. Another reason to keep the Seder to 30 minutes.

By the way, not Jew food, nor DS food either, but here's another of my favorite delicious easy recipes, which I am eating right now:

• Strawberries, cut up
• Green grapes, cut up
• Fresh pineapple (bought pre-cut in spears at Costco), cut into bite size chunks
• Bananas, sliced and stored separately in lemon juice
• Marie Callender's poppy seed dressing

Mix the first ingredients in a bowl with some lemon juice. Prepare the bananas separately in lemon juice, Put a few slices of banana in a dish, and add a bunch of the other fruit, add a couple of generous tablespoons of poppy seed dressing - YUM.

 

[Spiky Bugger]

This Shabbos Goy is on Sick Leave. I enjoyed a few too many (they were small) Passover macaroons and had a HORRIBLE awakening at about 3:30 this morning.

But...how many sets of dishes does one need, do you suppose, when there is an orthodox vegetarian involved in tbe seder? Give 'em a tub of tofu and wish them well!

 

[DianaCox]

More dishes than I have! Most of my relatives wouldn't drink a glass of water in my house, unless it was from a paper cup. But the real answer is that vegetarians would eat off the milkhik (milk-type) dishes.

We're having ricotta (dairy) on the tomotoes before the meal - but according to the kosher rules, you can eat meat 30 min after dairy, but you can't eat dairy again for six hours - but there will be whipped cream available for the dessert. The fish, eggs and veggies at the start of the meal are pareve. But not the chicken soup.

OMG, I just finished cooking the soup - it looks like about 2 gallons and it smells fantastic, if I do say so myself - but with no cooked carrots or matzo balls to eat it with, there is no point. I have a bucket of meat waiting to cool off enough to remove the bones and gristle (and any limp onion and celery that didn't get separated in the first pass) for the two lucky dogs who will be getting it (stupid cats won't eat it, if you can imagine - they don't even like wet cat food). That is for me the messiest and least pleasant part of the cooking for the dinner - but - it's for the doggies.

 

[newanatomy]

As a recovering Catholic, I would love to come observe and EAT!

Have a lovely Passover!

 

[shann]

@DianaCox I'm Lutheran, but I'm thinking about doing a Passover meal for my kids. I remember doing something when I was younger and it was meaningful to me. The story stuck with me. If you were going to do a goy-friendly version, what would you suggest? Should I just read passages out of my regular Bible or is there a version you can point me to? Can you list the foods that I need to get? Is there a Passover for Dummies??

 

[southernlady]

Yes, you can roast broccoli!

I'm drooling!

 

[brooklyngirl]

@DianaCox I'm Lutheran, but I'm thinking about doing a Passover meal for my kids. I remember doing something when I was younger and it was meaningful to me. The story stuck with me. If you were going to do a goy-friendly version, what would you suggest? Should I just read passages out of my regular Bible or is there a version you can point me to? Can you list the foods that I need to get? Is there a Passover for Dummies??

I was raised Lutheran too and my grandmother's church did a Seder every year. It always made so much sense to me since Easter and Passover are so intertwined. I'm going to my first "framily" Seder this year and I was asked to make my roasted brussel sprouts with Canadian bacon, lol.

 

[Spiky Bugger]

I am a Catholic-School-Survivor/Atheist...but all the neighbor girls my age, except Weird Florence, were Jews. So I was the only Mexican-Italian at BBG meetings...and my mom not only had her own car...just about the only mom who did...but worked outside the home, which meant that my after-school cookies and mothering came from Mrs. Marks , Mrs. Margel, Mrs. Samson, Mrs. Warschaw, Mrs. Simon and Mrs. Schwartz. That food takes me back to those days and those moms.

 

[DianaCox]

@DianaCox I'm Lutheran, but I'm thinking about doing a Passover meal for my kids. I remember doing something when I was younger and it was meaningful to me. The story stuck with me. If you were going to do a goy-friendly version, what would you suggest? Should I just read passages out of my regular Bible or is there a version you can point me to? Can you list the foods that I need to get? Is there a Passover for Dummies??

You really need a Haggahdah to follow, and you need everyone (or every other person, sharing) to have a copy, because an important part of the Seder is responsive readings. This is what we have used for a couple of years:
http://www.30minuteseder.com/ (You can cheat buying this if you want to put a little effort into copying each page and printing it out, and then making multiple copies)
There are all sorts of variations and ancillary traditions and "equipment" of course - the Seder plate, the afikomen bag, the other three-compartment matzo bag for the Seder leader, and of course the foods vary all over the place with family traditions.

Charoset (or charoses) is a mixture of chopped apples (I use a mix of Granny Smiths and a crisp red apple), walnuts, yellow raisins, honey, some of that awful concord grape wine and cinnamon - I can't give you the amounts, because I don't measure anything). I always make WAY too much (you just "need" a tablespoon or so for the ceremony, but everyone likes to eat it later for a snack), so I use 6 apples, most of box of raisins, the better part of a 1 lb bag of walnuts, to give you an idea of the proportions.

Many of the other traditional foods can be purchased - matzo, wine, gefilte fish, horseradish, even the matzo ball soup (though I would STRONGLY urge you to make your own - the soup is the heart of the meal, and storebought just can't match homemade, even if you are a novice - and as my father says, the trick to making the matzo balls is to follow the directions on the box of matzo ball mix). You can even buy the precooked and peeled hard boiled eggs! Do NOT skip the step of dipping the halved egg in the salt water - it tastes really good - I don't know why I don't eat hard boiled eggs that way all year. Other things - parsley, lettuce, kosher salt - you just buy them. We save a lamb chop bone for the plate, but have used a chicken bone in the past when we didn't have one!

And the dinner food is not mandated - I just happen to like pot roast with marrow bones. The marrow on a piece of matzo and heavily salted is unspeakably delicious.

One of the main things of course is that there is no leavened anything during the meal, or any of the other chametz: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chametz: "Chametz is a product that is both made from one of five types of grain, and has been combined with water and left to stand raw for longer than eighteen minutes."
What is chametz?[edit]
The five grains[edit]
For the rabbis, five specific species of grain become chametz after wetting. The actual species are not known with certainty, although they would necessarily have been crops that grew in the middle east in Biblical times. When the Bible was translated into European languages, the names of food grains common in Europe, wheat, barley, spelt, rye and oats, were used, some of which were not grown in ancient Israel:{Mishnah P'sachim 2:5}

As more accurate historic and botanical evidence comes to light, some scholars today propose that only the 'five grain species' native to the Land of Israel can become chametz.[2][3] They are, as described in the Mishnah:[4]

שיפון Shippon (shifon) – einkorn wheat (Triticum monococcum),
כוסמין Kusmin – emmer wheat (Triticum dicoccon),
חיטים Ḥittim – durum wheat (Triticum durum) and bread wheat (Triticum aestivum),
שעורים Se’orim – six row barley (Hordeum vulgare), and
שיבולת שועל Shibbolet shual – two row barley (Hordeum vulgare).

Spelt, rye (Secale cereale), and oats (Avena sativa) did not grow in the Land of Israel in the biblical period. Since spelt (Triticum spelta) is genetically closely related to bread wheat it is also considered to be prohibited. Rye should not be eaten since it closely resembles wheat[citation needed] and can be mistaken for it; it was considered chametz during Exile, even though in fact it did not grow in ancient Israel and was not on the list of chametz-capable grains. According to the Talmud, when any grain not listed is exposed to water it begins to "decay or rot", rather than "rise" (sirachon).[5]

Coincidentally, these are also the grains that people with celiac disease or gluten intolerance must avoid.[6]

 

[DianaCox]

I made some lists:

Roast beast

Marrow

Asparagus

Carrots

Potatoes

Onions

Fennel


Charoset:

Apples

Walnuts

Yellow raisins

Honey

Cinnamon

Wine


Rest of the plate:
Lettuce (endive?)

Parsley

Horseradish

Roasted egg
Lamb bone

(Charoset)

Hard boiled eggs

Kosher salt water


Matzos

Haggadahs


Candelabra

Candles

Soup:

Chicken

Celery

Onion

Garlic

White onion

Red bell pepper


Gefilte fish

White horseradish

Red horseradish


Matzo ball mix

Oil

Eggs

 

[Munchkin]

Yum!!!! Sounds wonderful!

 

[DianaCox]

My sous chefs are sick this weekend. Time to get out the power tools. And to eat leftovers now, to clear out the fridge.

Hmm ... add artichokes to the list of appetizers - I need the space in the fridge they are taking up too.

 

[Larra]

I'm bringing sparkling cider and sparkling lemonade tea. shopping is done and no cooking required. Now that's MY kind of seder!

 

[shann]

Thanks so much @DianaCox ! I'm going to try and do some sort of modified version just so my kids get the idea