I got up yesterday and went to the grocery store to buy the things I needed to teach the girls how to prepare several traditional Jewish dishes. I was so enamored with the King Soopers near Ben and Sue’s house that I wandered around for an hour and half just having a completely marvelous time! I’ve been doing a lot of the cooking and cleaning up to help Sue since she’s still recovering from knee surgery. She still gets in there and does a lot, but I swore I would NOT allow her to wait on us while we’re here.
Daughter #1 and Little came over around 1:30 and Little’s friend and her mom came at 2:00. We promptly got to work. The first thing to do was mix up the matzo ball batter and get it chilling in the fridge. Then I taught the girls how to pare and core the apples, chop them, toast the walnuts and chop them to make Charoset. We added cinnamon, honey, brown sugar, and Kosher red wine then popped it in the fridge to chill.
Next up was the Matzo Ball Soup. We poured a large box of low sodium chicken broth into a stock pot with a tight fitting lid. Little filled the broth container with water and we poured that in as well. While it was heating up, we sautéed a mirepoix…chopped onions, celery, and carrots till the onions were translucent. We added that to the pot and adjusted the heat to a simmer. We did add about half of the soup mix packet that comes with the boxed matzo ball soup mix.
We removed the matzo ball batter from the fridge and started forming small balls around the size of a big marble. You need to do this with wet hands. This allows the surface of the matzo ball to be smoothed out to seal any cracks, thus preventing them from falling apart while cooking. You keep the lid on the pot while it’s simmering, then remove the lid quickly when you add a matzo ball then put the lid on fast. This traps the steam in the pot and makes your matzo balls fluffy.
Once that was done, it was time to start the Hamantashen. These are triangular shaped cookies filled with a variety of different fillings. We chose raspberry jam, apricot jam, and chocolate. Traditionally they are filled with poppyseed paste, but I couldn’t find any. I think it’s usually only sold for Purim in the spring. We mixed up the dough and it needed more flour than the recipe called for. We finally got it at just the right consistency. We rolled it out between two sheets of parchment paper then cut it in circles with a biscuit cutter. We placed the circles on a cookie sheet (I forgot to line it with parchment paper so they stuck a tiny bit). Then we dropped a scant teaspoon of one of the fillings, folded up three edges and pinched the three resulting corners together.
We also needed to bake the cookies about five minutes longer than the recipe called for. Once the last sheet of cookies was in the oven, we started making the potato kugel. Daughter #1 has discovered a brilliant hack to make this a much easier process. Traditionally, potatoes are peeled and then grated into ice water to keep them from turning a dull grey. Once they’re all grated, you have to squeeze all the water out. If you have any arthritis in your hands, this is a killer. So my brilliant daughter just buys a big bag of shredded hash browns. So smart this girl.
My daughter added about a half a cup of vegetable oil to a 13”x9” pan and popped it in the oven to get hot. We added about half of a chopped onion, half a cup or so of matzo meal, and salt and pepper to the hash browns and tossed that together. Then, we whipped up six eggs and poured it over the hash browns and combined them well. Once the pan was hot, we poured the potato/egg mixture in and baked it in a 400° oven till crispy and browned around the edges. Yummmmy!
The last dish we prepared was Matzo Brei…a sort of Jewish French Toast. We took six sheets of matzo and crumbled it into a bowl then put hot water over it to let the matzos soak it up. In a separate bowl, I beat four eggs with a heaping tablespoon of brown sugar, added a few shakes of cinnamon, and a generous tablespoon of my home brewed vanilla. We scooped up handfuls of the now soggy matzo and squeezed as much water out as we could and put it in the egg mixture. Once all the matzo was in the bowl, we mixed up the “batter” and dropped it by spoonfuls into a medium hot skillet with melted butter in it. We fried them till they were golden brown on each side then removed them from the pan and worked on the next skillet full.
We were just finishing when Mr. FixIt and Ben walked in the front door. They took the camper to the cattle ranch out on the eastern plains. I was tickled when I learned they were able to park it under cover to protect it from severe weather. I fed the guys with all that yummy Jewish food and called it a night! My back hurt and my feet were cramping from standing on them all day. But it really was a fun afternoon of cooking foods I haven’t made in ages. I left the photography to Little so I’ll just post the ones I have. We didn’t get every dish but you’ll get the idea. I’ll try to leave a link to the recipes we used. Some were just in our heads because we’ve made them for so long.
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“So don’t let anyone condemn you for what you eat or drink, or for not celebrating certain holy days or new moon ceremonies or Sabbaths.”
Colossians 2:16 NLT