[Sca-cooks] Happy Passover!

Sat Apr 23 22:02:28 PDT 2005

Also sprach 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.

We had knoedeln in soup (matzoh balls, but these were softer, 
lighter, almost like soft matzoh spaetzeln or gnocchi, definitely 
spoon-dropped, free-form, not rolled balls), the gravlax served plain 
on little appetizer plates with lemon and dill (it was a big hit, and 
these are old Brooklyn Jewish lox aficionados, so I was quite pleased 
to note that the recipe I used three times a week for a couple of 
years produced something they regarded as special -- it turns out 
there's a small but fundamental addition to the process I use that is 
not traditional... it's just the way I was taught to do it...). I 
ended up slicing and serving about 80% of one salmon fillet, but the 
rest'll keep for a while and there are other Seders within the week, 
so it's a good thing to have on hand.

This was followed by braised brisket pot roast, which seems to have 
been braised in a slightly tomato-ey brown gravy, then cooled, 
trimmed, sliced and reheated in the oven until it was 
melt-in-the-mouth tender, plus a butterflied, boneless, marinated and 
broiled leg of lamb (mostly medium rare). Roasted potatoes (possibly 
Yukon Golds), plus a sweet noodle kugel with raisins which was 
surprisingly good with pot roast gravy under it from a previous 
portion of the pot roast on that plate. This was followed by a mixed 
green salad, then a flourless chocolate cake and a fairly plain 
sponge cake which my hostess informed me was made with eight eggs and 
equal parts of matzoh cake meal and potato starch, with mixed fresh 
berries, and some rally strong, dark coffee. With the cakes and 
berries there was a mysterious white substance which, if I did not 
know better and trust my hostess implicitly, I would have sworn was 
whipped cream. But that would have been against the rules, so I must 
have been mistaken.

>I've had gravlax--yummmmmmm.  A friend sometimes makes it as her 
>special dish for winter holiday season potlucks.

It's good stuff... I haven't made it in a while.

>What are you going to do with the salmon bits? Use them for stock or 
>something?

I am informed by the Commander-In-Chief that I'm making a 
Toysan-style casserole with the salmon head, a stock made from the 
bones, fried bean curd and tomatoes.

Adamantius

>--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
>
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-- 

"S'ils n'ont pas de pain, vous fait-on dire, qu'ils  mangent de la 
brioche!" / "If there's no bread to be had, one has to say, let them 
eat cake!"
	-- attributed to an unnamed noblewoman by Jean-Jacques 
Rousseau, "Confessions", 1782

"Why don't they get new jobs if they're unhappy -- or go on Prozac?"
	-- Susan Sheybani, assistant to Bush campaign spokesman Terry 
Holt, 07/29/04