Grating horseradish (at least for a small quantity) is not really the big deal I once thought because I saw a superhostess friend of mine struggle with it every year. While you’re admiring my diligence and handmade everything, just like my friend but slightly saner, please go ahead and dig the groovy paper plates. The only way to do Passover, or any obligatory celebration, in my humble opinion.
Last week a friend at shul asked me, tongue in cheek, whether we could use an extra couple of boxes of leftover matzah. What can you say to an offer like that?
I asked him if he wanted to trade with us–we both seemed to have the same amount and brand. He sighed and said that even his chickens, which eat almost any kind of scraps, are still sick of matzah at this point. So’s our cat (do not ask why cats think matzah is interesting. It makes no more sense than why they go after taco chips).
This is all by way of explaining why I haven’t been blogging so much lately. Is there still something new to discover about Passover cooking? Other, I mean, than the tentative trend to re-include legumes and rice. This year, unpleasantly, the bag of rice I bought turned out to be rancid (you don’t need me to explain this. The sour or barny smell will clue you in if you ever get a bag that’s off, and no it won’t rinse or cook out. Take it back to the store). Was it a Message from the Almighty ™ or just a bad bag of rice? Only the potato knows. In any case…
The week before Passover, I tend to feel a lot more like Bart Simpson than usual. Even my hair gets spikier (though not blond, never blond). I envision Bart standing before the chalkboard at Pesach, having committed yet another farfetched classroom sin. Only my litany goes something like this:
- I will eat mostly vegetables.
- I will not eat any foods containing hidden matzah after the seder.
- I will not eat foods adding up in practice to six eggs a day OR anything made mostly of potato–except for an actual plain steamed potato.
- I will not just scarf canned coconut macaroons when I don’t know what I really need to be eating or am too lazy to find it.
- I will not let my husband buy fake Passover cheerios for a zillion bucks a box when five full boxes of whole wheat matzah are staring at me, I have sliced almonds AND steam-defatted organic coconut shreds in the freezer, AND brown sugar and cinnamon, and that’s all you need to make matzahnola from scratch in five seconds flat. Or we can just eat plain yogurt with a spoonful of jam or some berries.
- I will eat yogurt.
- I will make soup.
- I will resist the temptation to buy yet another fresh unopened can of potato starch. I still have 95 percent of last year’s.
- Next year I am launching the Paschal answer to the Washington Post‘s Peeps Competition. I think I’ll call it The ‘Roon Run. Dioramas made from canned macaroons in any configuration, with or without goggle-eyes, toothpicks, pipe cleaners, construction paper in many forms and (of course) glitter. Almost like the real thing, only not purple, pink or yellow…
Sigh. Now that Pesach is over, except for the three boxes of matzah we still have and which we are supposedly allowed to eat any time of the year….I can add one or two more items to my chalkboard manifesto.
Number one, I will not cook seventy-two times a day. For anyone. Which is what it often feels like when your husband and child are both at home the whole week, or nearly.
And really, what great things was I making? Mostly the same stuff I always make, only with potatoes instead of pasta or rice.
Well, there were a few improvements this year:
Zucchini latkes–Grate a zucchini or two and about a quarter of an onion or just add a couple of chopped scallions into a bowl, then a clove of garlic, then crumble some feta and add chopped basil or a bit of thyme, stir in an egg and a spoonful of matzah meal, and fry in patties in olive oil. Quantities? Quantities are for finicky people who actually follow recipes. I’m not sure I qualify anymore.
More refined whole-wheat Passover blintzes: Whole wheat matzah cake meal still tends to be a bit gritty if you use it straight, and it doesn’t have as much cohesiveness as you’d like for crêpes. I found I could grind it finer successfully by dumping half a cup at a time in my poor abused coffee grinder and whizzing it a few seconds.
Crêpes for 10 blintzes should be about half a cup of “Turkish grind” whole wheat matzah cake meal, a spoonful of potato starch, a cup of milk and two eggs mixed in. Then you have to let the batter sit because matzah meal is so much drier than regular flour that it will thicken much further than you expected. Add more milk to thin it out to a drizzle, about the texture of cream. A spoonful of sugar and a small shake or pinch of nutmeg will give it that French flair.
What else? Oh yeah:
Hrein. Horseradish. I’ve never made it by hand before, and whenever we go over to a super-cook friend’s house for Passover, she makes a blenderful of excessively potent horseradish and says how tough it was to grind up, so I always figured it was more trouble than it was worth. The fresh roots always look awful and muddy, too. But this year there wasn’t any horseradish in the supermarket without either dairy or odd ingredients. So I bought one of the huge foul-looking muddy roots on sale in the produce section.
I have a very sharp paring knife, and the peeling went much easier than advertised. I cut a two-inch chunk of the peeled root and grated it on the small holes of my trusty cheap plane grater (note, not “microplane”, which might not hold up under the pressure) by hand over a plate. It took only a minute or so. I piled the shavings into a cup, poured just as much apple cider vinegar over them as they could absorb, added a pinch of salt (Joan Nathan and most others say add a pinch of sugar and some black pepper as well, but I didn’t bother), and stir and cover and chill.
Verdict: pretty good!
– – – – –
But back to the chalkboard litany. My second hard-won lesson, which I assure you I will exercise much past the final sundown of Passover, is to pick my guests carefully.
I got an eye-opener as to why hostesses with the mostess use white tablecloths and cloth napkins and those awful cut-glass olive dishes when they have people over. Turns out it’s not just to be fussy. No. All that formal crap I always hated is very important protective armor to keep the guests in line via mild intimidation and prevent them from taking advantage of you. Same strategy as used by all the major French restaurants. To wit:
We had friends over for the 7th night. Stressful enough without it also being a seder they had suggested–and somehow it ended up being at our house! Which meant I had to do the cleaning and yelling at my nearest and dearest to help get the bathrooms and living room cleaned up somewhat in advance of the guests’ arrival…and it meant doing most of the cooking! How did I let this happen?!
It would never have worked at all if our friends hadn’t been reasonably unpicky, and to be honest in the aftermath, it mostly turned out okay. It was still stressful in unpredictable ways, though, ways I am planning to learn from for my daughter’s bat mitzvah celebrations in a couple of months.
What exactly went wrong? Despite a simple but pretty decent menu for 6 Continue reading
Filed under: cooking, Desserts, holiday cooking, unappetizing | Tagged: cautionary tales, etiquette, horseradish, Passover, tableware, tips on entertaining, WPlongform | Comments Off on Post-Passover and the Unholy Host(ess)
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