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    This mostly-raw blueberry pie is a snap to make and very versatile--the filling microwaves in a few minutes, and you don't even have to bake the zippy gingered graham cracker crust--perfect for a hot Fourth of July and all summer long.

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The Afikomen Conundrum, plus a quiche for our times

Posted on April 16, 2020 by DebbieN

zucchini crustless quiche

On the lighter side of Passover, now that it’s the last day for anyone outside Israel, I did catch Terry Gross’s wonderful Fresh Air interview with Adam Sandler and the Safdie brothers on NPR back in December and was delighted to hear that the brothers included the first-ever mention of the afikomen in an English-language film. It’s about time! I mean, bagel and chopped liver references can only take you so far with Jewish culture. Afikomen is the real insider stuff.

Then, of course, Terry realized that all four of them, herself included, were talking inside matzah-ball or at least Aramaic amongst themselves on-air, and the uninitiated radio listenership who had never even been to a Passover seder might need some enlightenment on the subject of afikomen. Yes, it was exactly like having to explain a joke, and no, the great mass of society probably still didn’t get why a broken matzah is more important than a whole one, or why you’d bribe the kids to give the other half back once you’ve hidden it somewhere cleverly during the meal.

But Sandler and the Safdies ran with it and tried not to make it any more like explaining a joke than they had to. At least Terry didn’t pick the Hillel sandwich to riff on. (Partly because no matter what the Haggadah says about it, there really is no good logical or culinary explanation for eating a combination of apples, nuts and horseradish all together on matzah. It just is, you know? Tradition!)

Anyway, the interview was actually enlightening and smart, and the link is still up online, so go listen to it and donate to your local NPR station while you are wondering, as I am, where we go from here.

I look back to where we were only a month ago and realize that I am thankful my daughter is with us, that my mother and sister and their families and my in-laws are all well if a bit frustrated at home, especially the younger generations with young kids. Back then I  was starting to wonder if there was actually going to be matzah in the stores by the time we needed it or whether I would have to enlist my daughter for some not-quite-kosher-but-best-we-can-do homemade matzah from the leftover bag of flour that I couldn’t bring myself to throw away this year–it seems like more than a sin to throw away anything you could use later, anything you might need, or that someone else could use now.

I mentioned this to a friend back east when Governor Hogan of Maryland decided to declare a statewide a lockdown a week or so after California’s, and we were comparing notes about having college-age kids stuck at home for the duration. It was about a week before Passover started, and a few days later not only was there finally some matzah available at the store, just in the nick of time, but a big mystery box arrived at our door later the same day. When we opened it, we discovered she’d sent us two boxes of Streit’s matzah, just in case. She’s really something else!

As mentioned above, today is the last day of Pesach (Passover in English) if you live outside Israel. My husband is hoping for pizza tonight but since  the stores are closing before sundown, I somehow doubt it’s going to happen tonight. Plus we have two whole boxes of matzah left and a bunch of rice, which I cooked starting with the second night. Turns out many, many American Jews other than us have also decided this year to expand their Passover cooking options to Sefardic traditions that include rice.

I even have most of a packet of quinoa, which is so recent in the Jewish world that rabbis everywhere have declared it kosher for Passover. Somehow that declaration annoys me. Quinoa’s an expensive grain compared to rice and the major importers and cultivators probably paid someone off under the table to get this vegan-trendy chic grain declared ritually different from all other grains, cereals and seeds including rice. Call it Dizengoffia or Beverly Hills Syndrome, and yes, I’m really that much of a cynic, but put it this way–nobody’s bribing anyone about rice as far as I know. Rice is common, inexpensive and traditional, and it’s already approved for Sefardim and most Mizrahi Jews as well.

Small wonder a lot of us have decided to go Sefardi this year, and possibly every year from now on.

Anyway, since this is me, I made some of the quinoa last night in the microwave just to see how it would go–answer, not bad, and pleased my daughter, who along with her college housemates is more conversant with quinoa than I am. I think it’s twice or three times as expensive as rice; they’re still young and excited and into brandname olive oil, gourmet coffee, designer vinegars and  and vegan-chic ingredients because they’re all so new to cooking on their own and still a bit gullible.

It takes time, practice and ruining a few expensive buys on your own dime to realize that fancy-label ingredients won’t make you a great cook automatically. You can go online all you want–even here, if you have the patience to read through all my grumbling and occasional bouts of wild enthusiasm. The fact is there’s no substitute for trying it yourself and being willing to eat your mistakes as far as they’re edible and figure out from them how to fix them up now and do better next time.

But in any case, the quinoa, microwaved or not, is still quinoa, with an earthy, bitter edge similar to buckwheat (kasha).  So definitely squeeze on some lemon or mix in some vinaigrette; instant improvement. My kid agrees–there’s vegan chic and then there’s too chic. And if you’re going to buy it and try it anyhow, you need to be willing to work with it and make it good or else. At least not waste it.

More to the point of frugality, I have been trying mostly to practice what I preach and buy and use cheap vegetables plentifully this week instead of reaching for yet more matzah and cheese at every turn, or using up more eggs at once than is wise in a time when you’re limited to two cartons a customer when you can even get them, and where a lot of supermarkets are now stocking medium-sized eggs when they can’t get enough large ones.

My standard Israeli-style spinach and feta flan for Passover (or any other time) calls for 6 large eggs for a pound of squeezed-out spinach, but you can reduce the eggs to 3-4 and increase the milk to 1.5 c and/or add a bit of bread or flour (if you’re not cooking for Passover), rice, matzah meal, grated or mashed cooked potato etc. –the starch absorbs some of the excess liquid and acts as a binder. And you can use a different vegetable as the main ingredient.

Zucchini are some of the common inexpensive fresh vegetables being neglected most often at the Ralph’s (Kroger affiliate here in the west). I bought a bargain bag for a dollar on my last shop (still doing that where possible) and washed them carefully à la COVID-19 precautions (spritz with dilute dish soap along with all the other groceries, rinse well, airdry, hope for the best). Today I decided it was time to use them for the last Pesach lunch and that they were better to use up now for a crustless quiche than the bags of frozen spinach which cost twice to four times as much and can stay in the freezer. Continue reading →

Filed under: cooking, Dairy, frugality, holiday cooking, Vegetabalia | Tagged: , , , | Comments Off on The Afikomen Conundrum, plus a quiche for our times

Three Films on Food and Memory

Posted on April 7, 2020 by DebbieN

In the weeks before all the shutdowns and my daughter coming home from university for spring break–and now staying, to our relief–I decided to give myself a day’s mini-filmfest break as a reward for doing taxes. By the time I looked up from the 1040 checklist, though, nothing I really wanted to sit through was still playing at any of the theaters, and I’d missed both The Farewell and Uncut Gems. And now the theaters are closed.

Since I’m not on one of the streaming services, I took advantage of my local library DVD collections before the libraries, like everything else, decided to close. If you can stream these and you like thoughtful movies with food somewhere in the mix of topics and character sketches, they’re all worth watching.

First is Oscar-nominated foreign documentary Honeyland. I’d missed its limited run at my local independent theater only the week before (taxes, as mentioned), so when I spotted it at the library I snatched it up along with two others that were also surprising finds.

Honeyland follows Hatidze Muratova, possibly the last traditional wild beekeeper who, in her fifties, lives alone with her bedridden, elderly mother in a one-room stone hut, part of an abandoned village outside Skopje, Macedonia. She takes the regional bus into town on market days to sell the jars of honey she’s harvested from beehives in the rocks and gets a good price for them, but it’s still just enough to buy groceries with. Then a large, noisy family moves their cattle into the abandoned homestead next door and she makes friends with them, helping with the younger children. The father, ambitious to make a go of things, tries beekeeping himself, but ignores her advice for handling his box hives gently, gets a bad price at market and contracts bulk sales he can’t deliver to an aggressive and ruthless middleman. His hives start to fail, and the hungry bees attack her carefully fostered hives while his neglected cattle start dying. Eventually the family gives up and moves on, having squandered much of their own living as well as what she relied on–but not all.

Honeyland is fascinating just for its portrait of Hatidze, her resilience and her forthright, cheerful way of dealing with both bees and people. She and her mother live on the absolute brink, in a hut with a Franklin stove, a few cats, no other neighbors and very little food. Most of their daily diet is just cooked grain and yogurt or ayran and she still feeds the scraps to the cats. But she makes the most of everything she can.

When she goes to the city market she brings back some bananas and watermelon to tempt her mother to eat and enjoy a few bites of sweetness. She has just her one yellow dress and her kerchief, and no one to appreciate them, but while she’s in Skopje she spends two euros on a bottle of hair dye just for herself, and once home, she combs it through her hair with a sense of satisfaction, as though she were being pampered at a salon, while she chats with her mother about old times. Even at the end of the film, you get the feeling that Hatidze will find a way to prosper.

You do wonder a little how this documentary was achieved–they found room to fit a camera inside the tiny hut as she feeds her mother and helps her turn over on the bed, they filmed the bees stinging the neighbor’s children and his calves weakening and dying in the yard, they filmed the neighbor and the businessman raiding a nearby wild hive Hatidze relies on, just to supplement their jar count–how did the filmmakers get all that? What happened afterward?

Sometimes an extraordinary documentary like this weaves its way into your imagination more intriguingly than fiction, and sometimes the filmmaking unintentionally affects the subjects and becomes its own kind of quasi-fiction just by the nature of what it shows, what it doesn’t, and what’s behind the scenes. Did she stay or go? You have to ask, you have to wonder. The filmmakers do actually answer many of these questions on the Honeyland website, but you have to poke around and follow the press kit link to download the “press notes” PDF–a fascinating read.

The next film, Ramen Shop, is fiction and a bit slighter, but still with some pretty good moments. A young ramen chef working for his hard-as-nails father in Japan arrives at the shop one morning to learn that his father has died of a sudden heart attack. The son consults his uncle, who also works for the shop, about his childhood in Singapore with his Chinese mother, who died young, and the impossibility of recreating the soup she used to make him. Against his uncle’s advice, he decides to go back in search of the recipe and his mother’s family. Continue reading →

Filed under: history, movies | Tagged: , | Comments Off on Three Films on Food and Memory