[Sca-cooks] Happy Passover!

[Sue Clemenger]

I just returned from a nice, casual Passover at a friend's house.  She's 
a very good, creative cook, and we had a rather non-traditional meal. 
Homemade chicken soup with matza balls (yum! ultimate comfort food, I 
think), using her great-aunt's recipe; and then we had a pie-sized 
version of spanakopita, with lots an lots of feta, and latkes with sour 
cream and applesauce, and falafel with hummus and tahini.  She's talking 
about doing a more traditional feast next year, and I've already 
volunteered to bring the charoset, since I remembered that I'd saved all 
the recipes for it that folks were posting a couple of years ago.
I've had gravlax--yummmmmmm.  A friend sometimes makes it as her special 
dish for winter holiday season potlucks.
What are you going to do with the salmon bits? Use them for stock or 
something?
--maire

Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius wrote:

> Hullo, the list!
> 
> For those that celebrate it (and I do, sort of, at least in the form of 
> attending a Seder at least once every year), may your festival of 
> unleavened bread (hello, topic of spiritual significance of bread!) be a 
> blessed and happy one, and may we all find the freedom we seek.
> 
> As the household hosting the Seder I'm attending aren't conservative, 
> I'm bringing the fish. Per the request of my hostess, this will be 
> gravlax. She had spoken glibly a few weeks ago of getting hold of salmon 
> fillet at one of the local gourmet shops in her area -- lovely seafood 
> but ridiculously expensive -- for a mere $14.95 a pound. I was shocked 
> by this, and offered to scout out whole salmon or sides at any of 
> several Chinese fish markets I shop at, figuring there was no way in the 
> world salmon fillet would cost more than $7 or $8 a pound, and probably 
> a lot less than that, probably more like 4 or 5 dollars a pound. We then 
> decided it made no sense for me to locate salmon for gravlax and make a 
> separate trip to their house in sufficient advance to make gravlax 
> there, the plan morphed into my making the gravlax. I spent a two-year 
> period making it in quantity about three times a week, so this was 
> nothing new to me.  At the first shop I entered, the one that's within 
> walking distance of my home, I asked them if they had any whole, 
> unportioned salmon fillet (they had single portions of skinless, 
> boneless salmon fillet for $4.99/lb. They said. "No!" I asked if they 
> had any whole salmon, and if I could buy a side. They said, "...uh, 
> maybe... but if you buy the whole fish it'll be cheaper." They brought 
> out a fairly monstrous eleven-pound salmon, which they weighed out and 
> announced the whole thing would cost me just under $29. They then 
> filleted it for me with more skill than I've ever seen before, including 
> picking out the little pin bones with tweezers, and sent me home with 
> about eight pounds of fillet, beautifully trimmed, scaled and boned, and 
> the split head, gills trimmed out, and the bones, in a separate bag.
> 
> So I think I got a better deal than $14.95 a pound for fillets. Now all 
> we have to do is figure out what to do with over six pounds of gravlax.
> 
> Anybody else doing the Passover thing, and cooking anything interesting?
> 
> Once again, a happy holiday week to all!
> 
> Adamantius