Student gardeners grow stoplight salad and more

May 19, 2014 by Leave a Comment

Now that the weather north of the Mason-Dixon Line is getting warm enough to at least think about gardening, I thought it would be a good time to run this article by Detroit freelance writer Amy Kuras. It originally appeared last January in Model D, an online newspaper, and is reprinted with permission.

Over the last two years, schoolyards at Detroit Public Schools all over the city have begun sprouting raised garden beds. Not only do these beds grow produce that nurtures students’ bodies, the gardens nurture their minds as well, being used in lessons across the curriculum from science classes to math and language arts.

The gardens are part of the Detroit School Garden Collaborative, a partnership between the Detroit Public Schools and The Greening of Detroit. The DSGC got started in 2012, with funding through the Healthy and Hunger Free Schools Act. Betty Wiggins, the executive director of the office of school nutrition for DPS, earmarked some of the funds the school district got from the government to start the program. When the gardening season gets started this April, the program will be active at 51 schools.

The school district provides six raised beds and clean soil to fill them, along with seedlings to plant. The principal at each building assigns a key teacher to helm the program and implement the curriculum. The district also provides a garden attendant to help the teacher keep the garden weeded and watered and assists with some of the lessons. And at some schools, they hire students age 14 and up to be garden assistants, who help tend the garden through the summer months and get to participate in field trips to see agricultural producers all over the state.

The district produces most of its own transplants for the garden beds as well, from a greenhouse maintained by students at the Randolph Vocational Center. Some classrooms also produce their own transplants in half the beds, the key teacher can grow whatever produce they want to use; in the other half, they grow what’s called “stoplight salad” — red tomatoes, yellow squash, and green zucchini. That goes on the menu at the school, so the kids are actually eating food they helped grow. It also goes to charter schools for which DPS is the school food authority.

Helping students eat better

“The overall goal is to have an impact on what these young people eat,” says Zaundra Wimberley, DPS director of school gardens and farms. “We want to have an impact on their thought process that an orange or an apple or a red pepper is just as viable a snack as a bag of Cheetos.”

Barbara Lothery, a fifth grade homeroom teacher at Nichols Elementary-Middle School in Indian Village and the co-lead teacher for the school’s garden club, says her students demonstrate a much greater awareness of where their food comes from and the impact it has on their health. “They’re so eager to even taste food that they may have been scared of before, or never liked,” she says. “One day we had some spinach and one little boy asked ‘Is this how real spinach tastes? I’ve only ever had it from the can.’ It blew me away.”

Lothery and her co-teacher, Angela Link, have around 10 kids in third through eighth grade in the garden club, and they also use the garden for lessons in math, science and language arts. Greening of Detroit created the curriculum they use. Lothery also emphasizes the career aspect for her students – that even though they are living in an urban environment, they can grow up to pursue careers in agriculture and make money doing something they enjoy.

The garden also illustrates how growing your own food can bring a healthier diet within reach for students whose families may struggle financially. Some parents have begun growing their own food at home, Lothery says, and one student told her she’d seen the price of organic spinach at the store and couldn’t believe they got it for free right out of the beds at school.

Nichols Elementary-Middle’s garden has drawn support from the surrounding neighborhood as well. The Indian Village Garden Club raised funds and brought volunteer muscle to build six additional raised beds at the school; they also helped use extra soil to create supplemental gardens around the fence line of the school. Volunteers helped Lothery construct a rustic classroom for the children, as well — they sawed pallets into tables and created stools out of a trunk from a tree that was cut down in the neighborhood. One volunteer even came in to teach the children about composting, Lothery says.

Community benefits

Community connections are one of the more important goals of the program, says Tepfirah Rushdan, Greening Of Detroit’s urban agriculture manager. When school is out for the summer the garden attendants will reach out to the community to distribute the produce that is ready to be harvested. At Nichols, their extra food goes to a senior center; other garden bounty goes directly to the neighborhood residents, at no charge.

“We want the garden to be part of the culture of the school, just like the gym or the cafeteria,” she says. Rushdan says she’s been struck by the effect being in the garden has had on children who might have some issues with behavior in a traditional classroom.

“They are the same ones sticking their hands in the dirt and pulling a wheelbarrow,” she says. “It’s a return to nature for a lot of student who don’t get the exposure to nature that their suburban counterparts may get.”

Lothery says she’s been extremely pleased with the reception her school’s garden has received from parents, volunteers and the community. “Everyone has been amazing,” she says. “Our garden is called the ‘Garden of Love,’ and everyone who comes over is just beautiful.”

The Model D article didn’t include a recipe for Stoplight Salad, but here’s something similar. I saw many different vegetable combinations online under the terms “stoplight salad” and “traffic light salad.” All you need to do is combine red, yellow and green veggies: tomatoes, cukes and yellow peppers, say, or tomatoes, green peppers and yellow squash, with a simple oil-and-vinegar dressing. One recipe even laid the salad out like a stoplight, with mounds of chopped green, yellow and red veggies in a vertical row on a bed of lettuce.

 

Barbecued chicken wings for Lag B’Omer

May 10, 2014 by Leave a Comment

In Israel, Sunday is a regular workday. The “weekend” is the Sabbath; it starts at noon or mid-afternoon on Friday and lasts through Saturday. If you live in Israel and follow the traditions for the Sabbath and holy days, your weekend is spent preparing for the Sabbath or observing the Sabbath, which means no driving, cooking, or using money (and that includes credit cards).

So in Israel, minor holidays like Lag B’Omer – which this year falls on Sunday, May 18  –  are important. They’re a day off, but they carry none of the restrictions prohibiting work, travel or other everyday activities. Lag B’Omer is a weird holiday because no one really knows where it came from or what it means. The first mention of it is in a 13th century text, where a scholar mentions that on this day a plague that killed 24,000 students of Rabbi Akiva – one of the great sages in Jewish history – stopped. Another tradition says that Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai, a great sage of the second century, revealed the secrets of the Kabbalah, Jewish mystical teaching, just before he died on Lag B’Omer.

The name refers to the date of the holiday. An “omer” is a sheaf of barley. In Leviticus (23:15-16), the Israelites are told to make an offering of an omer on the second day of Passover and then to count 50 days until Shavuot, the Feast of Weeks. The period is known as the Omer. On the second night of Passover, we begin “counting the Omer.” Every day at evening services, we say “Today is Day Six (or whatever) in the Omer.” In the ancient Hebrew system, letters were used for numbers; the letter signifying 30 sounds like “L” and the letter for 3 sounds like “G,”  and together they sound like “lag”.” So the 33rd day of the Omer became known as Lag B’Omer.

A break in a period of semi-mourning

Other than counting, not much happens during the period of the Omer, except it’s traditionally a period of semi-mourning. No weddings or other joyous events are scheduled during this time, and many men don’t shave or cut their hair. Lag B’Omer marks a break in that depressing stretch of time.

In the Middle Ages Lag B’Omer became a holiday for rabbinic students, when they engaged in outdoor sports. Today it’s a great day for holding picnics, barbecues and sporting events. And because it’s the only day during the 50-day Omer period when weddings are permitted, it’s considered an auspicious day to start a marriage; in Israel, hundreds of weddings take place. On Lag B’Omer, people light bonfires in fields and open spaces to remember Rabbi Shimon and the light he brought to the world. Hundreds of thousands of Orthodox Jews gather at the tomb of Rabbi Shimon on Mount Meron in northern Israel for an enormous bonfire.

The other big Lag B’Omer custom is for children to play with bows and arrows (often rubber-tipped), though again no one knows why. Maybe the bow represents a rainbow, God’s sign that he would never again destroy the world with a flood. Jewish lore says the rainbow was not seen during Rabbi Shimon’s lifetime, because his merit was great enough to protect the world. After his death, we again needed the rainbow. An alternative explanation for the bows and arrows is that anti-Roman rebels led by Simon Bar Kochba achieved a minor victory on Lag B’Omer, before being utterly crushed by the Romans. Some say those 24,000 students of Rabbi Akiva actually fell fighting the Romans.

Gadna, the Israel Defense Forces’ youth brigade, was founded on Lag B’Omer in 1941 and has a bow and arrow as its emblem.

I thought a barbecue recipe would be appropriate this week, in honor of Lag B’Omer and also because it’s finally getting warm enough in Michigan and other northern climes that we can hope we might once again be able to enjoy outdoor activities.

This recipe for Asian-style barbecued chicken wings is quite easy and makes a nice break from the traditional tomato-based barbecue sauces.

Eiren Zoyren, a favorite family recipe from Poland (by way of Australia)

May 3, 2014 by 1 Comment

Andrea Cooper, the author of today’s column, lives in Melbourne, Australia. We met more than 15 years ago on a listserv for public relations professionals. I can’t remember how long ago it was, but my children were still at home and her son, now in his 20s, was not yet a teenager. We discovered that we had much in common, including traditional Jewish practice, and have been in touch via email and Facebook since. We frequently chat about the similarities and differences in Jewish customs between the U.S. and Australia, not the least of which is their weird way of spelling many of the Yiddish terms that have made their way into English. Andrea currently runs a consulting firm called ComAbility, to help companies and organizations create communications that are accessible to people with disabilities. I’ve kept Andrea’s original British spellings for this week’s column, which reminds us how important it is to get recipes for beloved dishes from our elders. Here’s Andrea …

Most of us remember a special dish our mothers or grandmothers cooked. The flavour lingers in our memories, bringing back family gatherings and meals. When I was growing up, one of the treats Mum might make for Shabbat was an entrée dish called Eiren Zoyren. She often made it for visitors, who would say they’d never had anything like it before.

Eiren Zoyren is served cold. It is essentially eggs poached in a sauce. Over the years, Mum cooked it less often and then not at all. People were cutting back on the number of eggs they ate, fearing that too many might add to their cholesterol levels. The taste has stayed with me all my life. Whenever I would see a new Jewish cookbook, I’d unsuccessfully flip through trying to find the recipe.

Don’t procrastinate—get those recipes!

About a decade ago, when mum was getting near the end with her terminal cancer, it was one of two recipes (the other was her chicken soup) that I requested she show me how to make. We both procrastinated and finally she wasn’t well enough to make it with me. So we talked about how it was made, but not the exact quantities.

After she passed away, I presumed I’d find the recipe online. No luck! Over the years I’ve searched. The nearest is a German recipe that has some similarities, but is clearly different. My mother’s  family comes from Lublin in Poland, so the original source of this recipe is likely to be amongst the Jewish community of that region. (My grandmother  Pearl Redelman’s maiden name was Kelner. I’ve traced her Kelner line back to 1756 in Lublin. In the 1780’s census, a third of Lublin’s population at about 1,400 were Jews.)

My sister and I both were determined not to lose what we began to realise was a unique family specialty. None of my cousins had the recipe written down.

Aunty Dora to the rescue

A few years ago my sister visited my mum’s older sister in Adelaide. In her late 80s, she hadn’t made Eiren Zoyren for many years. Together my aunt and my sister made a batch and wrote down the recipe.

Yesterday, I found my sister’s handwritten copy of this recipe.

Today, I have made it, though with a few adjustments to meet my own taste memories.

In two days’ time, I will proudly serve my Shabbat guests this unique entrée.

Now I am writing this recipe down to share, so it may never again be lost. I present it in memory of my mother, Bell Cooper, and her mother Perl Redelman (nee Kelner), with special thanks to my Aunty Dora Chester and my sister Abigail.

Persian rice with tahdig is perfect for a lazy day

April 27, 2014 by Leave a Comment

Before I get started on today’s topic, I want to put in a plug for Detroit Soup, which I wrote about in June (one of the earliest Feed the Spirit columns). As you can see from this article in Deadline Detroit, they may have to close due to a lack of funding. If you’d like to donate, go to http://www.detroitsoup.com/donate. It would be a shame if this creative community support program were to disappear. And now for something completely different…

My husband’s cousin married a woman who emigrated to England from Persia as a young woman—the emigres never called it Iran.

One day shortly before we moved from England to America, they invited us for a meal. Freda served the most incredible rice dish. Every grain was separate and perfectly cooked, but mixed in with the fluffy rice were bits of really crunchy, golden brown potato.

“Wow, how do you make this?” I asked her.

“Oh it’s easy,” she said. “You cook the rice part way and take it out of the pan. Then you heat up some oil, put in sliced potatoes, put the rice on top of the potatoes and let the rice steam to finish cooking while the potatoes cook.”

I couldn’t wait to try it. But when I did, what I got was a gummy mess.

She forgot a few details!

Freda had forgotten to tell me a few important details:

  • You have to use basmati rice, or at least extra-long grain rice.
  • You have to rinse the rice to get rid of the starch and then soak it.
  • You have to cook the potatoes on one side and flip them over before steaming the rice.
  • When you steam the rice, you have to line the pot lid with a kitchen towel to absorb the moisture.

It would be 40 years before I tried to make Persian-style rice again. When I got a copy of The New Persian Kitchen by Louisa Shafia, it was one of the first recipes I wanted to try.

I was only slightly intimidated by the basic recipe for tahdig. (Pronounced “tah DEEG,” it’s the name of the crispy layer as well as the whole dish.) The recipe takes a page and a half in the book! That’s for the plain rice version–adding potato adds another few paragraphs of instructions.

Read the recipe repeatedly

I read the directions about a dozen times until I felt comfortable trying to make it. And I watched a couple of videos online; this one was helpful, although each video had a slightly different method, and none matched my cookbook exactly. One soaked the rice for two hours, one didn’t soak it at all. Some added oil to the water before parboiling the rice; some added water to the oil before making the tahdig layer. Some added turmeric or saffron to give the rice some added flavor and a nice yellow color.

After I made it a few times, I felt I could do it even without a recipe, the same way I make plain white or brown rice. Well, I could if I made it more frequently. The last time was long enough in the past that when I do it again I’ll at least read the recipe carefully before starting.

The basic steps are these:

  • Rinse the rice several times.
  • Soak the rice for at least 30 minutes, up to a few hours.
  • Parcook the rice for about 5 or 6 minutes, then drain.
  • Make the tahdig layer using some of the rice and optional lavash or potato.
  • Mound the rest of the rice on top of the tahdig layer and steam it.
  • Invert the pot over a serving plate, or scoop out the steamed rice and then remove the tahdig layer, which you can serve whole or broken into little pieces.

This recipe makes a lot – about double the amount of rice I usually make.  The first time I made it, we gorged ourselves and reheated it the next night, which was less than ideal. The second time, I was confident enough to serve it for company — and it got rave reviews.

I don’t have a large, deep skillet or a paella pan so I used a Dutch oven. If you halve the recipe, you can probably use a large saucepan.

Many variations on the theme

There are lots of variations to the basic tahdig. You can put a layer of lavash bread at the bottom of the pan the same way you would potatoes. Cut the lavash to fit the pan, or make pie-shaped wedges of smaller breads so they’ll cover the whole pan in a single layer. You can probably use a tortilla just as well.

You can add a few tablespoons of plain Greek yogurt to the rice you use in the tahdig layer, or you can mix in a whisked-till-foamy egg white; both the yogurt and the egg white will keep the tahdig layer from falling apart, but neither is essential.

If you have a free afternoon and want to be adventurous, give this intriguing rice dish a try!

Please a picky eater with these marvelous meatballs

April 21, 2014 by Leave a Comment

 

A few years ago my book club read a wonderful book by Elizabeth Ehrlich called Miriam’s Kitchen. It’s a collection of essays, many connected with her mother-in-law Miriam, the foods she cooked and the lessons the author learned from her. Each chapter ends with recipes.

But the story I most remember from the book was a short anecdote about Ehrlich trying to feed her young children. Once Ehrlich labored to cook a veal stew and brought it to the table with a flourish. “Voila!” she said, as she presented it to her hungry family. Whereupon her 3-year-old said, “I hate voila!”

I’ve been thinking about that story now that my 3-year-old granddaughter has been visiting for Passover. She has a similar response to most new foods: “I don’t like it!” she’ll say, wrinkling her cute little nose, even though she’s never eaten it.

How do children learn to be picky?

Most children eat almost everything when they start on solid food. But as soon as they learn to say “no,” it seems they use the word very liberally when it comes to food.

When my kids were little, I thought there must be some kind of pre-school underground where they learned this stuff. “Don’t eat the crusts, crusts are bad,” I imagined one toddler saying to another. “Don’t eat raisins, raisins are yuck.”

How else to explain why kids who cheerfully ate an entire sandwich and gobbled “raisin boxes” by the dozen would suddenly refuse to eat bread unless the crust was removed and would no longer touch a dried grape?

Being stuck with a truly picky eater can be very frustrating. Parenting magazines, books and website are full of advice, most of which doesn’t work, as Debbie Koenig can attest.

You can lead a kid to food but you can’t make him eat

Koenig, a food writer and cooking teacher, wrote about her son Harry’s picky eating on Parents magazine’s website. Here are some of the strategies she tried:

  • Sam-I-Am-ing: We tried to encourage Harry to just take a single bite—hey, he might be surprised by how good it tastes. He stalled, he sobbed, he finally succumbed … and I felt like the worst mother in the world. Who wants her child to succumb to food?
  • Bartering: We promised dessert in exchange for a mouthful of a new food. That iron-willed whippersnapper would just forgo the treat—something I’d never be able to do.
  • Going dessert-neutral, serving it together with the rest of the meal, so as not to turn it into a reward. (That’s right, we flip-flopped.) I was pleasantly surprised that Harry didn’t gorge on sweets, but he also rarely tasted a new food.
  • Reverse psychology: We told Harry that the delicious gnocchi, over which his dad and I were loudly oooing and aaaahing, was off limits to kids. Nope, no siree, he couldn’t have any. This was generally met with a shrug and a request for more yogurt.
  • Homemade versions of processed foods: He turned up his nose at my meatballs, preferring one particular brand of frozen minis. Hand-cut-and-breaded fish sticks went untouched. Macaroni and cheese, my mom’s recipe instead of the powdered packet? “That’s not macaroni and cheese,” he said, fighting tears.
  • Cooking with Harry: Experts insist that kids are more likely to eat food they helped to make. For a while, Harry was happy to be my sous chef, although he never tasted the results. And then one day I suggested that since he’d enjoyed spinning the salad so much, he might like to try some. He packed up his specially purchased, kid-friendly knives that very day.

A healthy appetite

We may roll our eyes when we get the “I don’t like it!” response. But we can hardly complain, because our granddaughter is still a good eater. She does have her favorites: watermelon, pizza, pasta (with and without sauce), scrambled eggs and “chicken on the bone” (a drumstick—with no skin!). She won’t touch a green bean, but she adores artichokes, black olives and Chinese food.

She also adores this recipe for sweet-and-sour meatballs. Last January she was sick and in the hospital for several days, with little appetite. When she felt better, the only food she requested was meatballs. One of my daughter’s friends brought her a containerful, and she downed about three servings before coming up for air.

Come to think of it, I haven’t met a kid who doesn’t like these meatballs, and they’re extremely easy to make.

 

 

Hot cross buns are a Good Friday treat

April 14, 2014 by Leave a Comment

 

Hot cross buns!
Hot cross buns!
One ha’ penny, two ha’ penny,
Hot cross buns!
If you have no daughters,
Give them to your sons
One ha’ penny,
Two ha’ penny,
Hot Cross Buns

These buns go back a long way, but for much of their history they were known simply as “cross buns.”

The earliest record of the familiar nursery rhyme is in Christmas Box, published in London in 1798. However, there are earlier references to it as a street cry. The earliest written record of the term “hot cross buns” was in Poor Robin’s Almanack for 1733, which noted:

Good Friday come this month, the old woman runs
With one or two a penny hot cross buns.

The fruit-studded sweet buns have become connected to Good Friday – more on this later – but it wasn’t always so.

An ancient custom?

Many scholars think the custom of baking buns and decorating them with a cross is much older. Archeologists found two small, burned loaves marked with crosses in the ruins of the Roman city of Herculaneum, destroyed by the same volcano that destroyed Pompei.

Pagan Saxons honored Eostre, the goddess of spring (and source of the word Easter) with loaves marked with crosses. They may have symbolized the four stages of the moon or the four seasons.

But as food historian Ivan Day says in a long article about hot cross buns, “The trouble with any folk food, any traditional food, is that no-one tended to write about them in the very early period.”

A symbol of the crucifixion

Christianity naturally adopted hot cross buns to symobolize the crucifixion of Jesus, along with numerous superstitions. In days of yore, people believed a bun baked on Good Friday would never go moldy. A bun hung in the kitchen would maintain safety in the home, and maybe even improve the quality of the baking done in it. Burying a hot cross bun in a pile of corn would keep away vermin.

An early Christian myth deals with St. Clare of Assisi and Pope Gregory IX.  The pope had come to Assisi for the canonization of St. Francis in 1228. Sister Clare invited him to share her humble meal of stale bread, and when she blessed it, a cross miraculously appeared on the loaf.

The world’s oldest bun

In 2010, the website World Amazing Records published the story of Nancy Titman, then 91, who claimed to have the world’s oldest hot cross bun. The bun, which has March 1821 on its base, was made in the London bakery of Nancy’s great-great-great-grandfather, William Skinner.

Nancy, from in northern England, said, “It’s a relic which has been passed down through the family. My mum said our ancestors worked in a baker’s shop and they believed buns baked on Good Friday didn’t go mouldy.

“It is rock hard and the currants have disintegrated but you can tell it’s a hot cross bun and you can still see the shape of the cross.”

A pub in London’s East End called The Widow’s Son has a connection to hot cross buns. The story is that a widow once lived on the site. Her only son a sailor who was due to return on Good Friday and asked his mother to bake him some hot cross buns.

He never returned, but every Good Friday, his mother had a new bun waiting, which she added to her collection from previous years. When she died, the buns were found hanging from a beam in her cottage. This story has been preserved by the landlords of the pub that replaced the cottage in 1848. Every year British sailors gather at the pub to eat hot cross buns, drink beer and have a good time.

An Elizabethan connection

In her book on English baking, Elizabeth David says Queen Elizabeth I cemented the connection between hot cross buns and Good Friday by forbidding bakeries to make any spiced bread “except it be at burials, or on Friday before Easter, or at Christmas.”

In the old days, the cross was marked with knife slashes in the dough before it was baked. Today it’s common for the cross to be made of icing.

Although their popularity peaks before Easter, fruit-studded hot cross buns are sold in Britain year-round – in a variety of flavors, no less – and have become one of the country’s most popular baked goods.

This recipe comes from the Fleischmann’sYeast Best-Ever Breads cookbook. The buns are lightly spiced, tender and full of dried fruits.

The recipe calls for a cup of chopped dates. I thought I had enough dates on hand, but I discovered someone else in the household had gotten to them and I only had a quarter-cup. I made up the difference with golden raisins and dried cranberries, and the buns were terrific!

This was my first time making this recipe, and as you can see from the photo, I wasn’t very adept at making the sign of the cross. (I don’t think that has anything to do with my being Jewish!)

You need to make the icing thicker than you would if making a glaze – and wait till the buns are completely cool before making the crosses. If you have a pastry bag or another method of piping it on, that will give you better results. It also might help to cut a cross into each bun before you bake them.

This recipe makes 18 buns.

It’s not Passover without matzoh balls!

April 6, 2014 by Leave a Comment

It usually happens in early- to mid-March. I’m in my local supermarket, quietly doing my normal shopping, and there it is—a display of Passover foods. Immediately my heart starts to beat a little faster and I feel an impending sense of doom.

Why should the anticipation of Passover—one of the most joyous celebrations in the Hebrew calendar and a time for family togetherness second only to Thanksgiving—cause me such tzuris (a great Yiddish term meaning troubles or woes)?

I’ll tell you why: For those of us who keep kosher, Passover is a whole other dimension!

Eat matzoh for seven days!

It all starts with the Book of Exodus 12:15: Seven days shall you eat flatbread. The very first day you shall expunge leaven from your houses, for whosoever eats leavened bread, that person shall be cut off from Israel from the first day to the seventh day.

From this simple command we developed a system of religious practices that include:

  • cleaning your house thoroughly, from top to bottom, to rid it of anything that might contain any trace of anything leavened.
  • making sure any packaged or processed foods are not only kosher but “certified kosher-for-Passover,” with no ingredients that are leavened or that could become leavened.
  • packing away all the dishes, silverware, pots and pans and small appliances you use all year round and replacing them with “Passover” dishes and utensils that you use only during the eight-day festival (it’s still seven days in Israel, eight days everywhere else). Often these are stored in the basement or garage and the changeover involves much schlepping. And when you keep kosher, you need separate sets of everything for milk and meat. Unless you go vegetarian, this means two sets of Passover dishes, utensils and pots.

Those of us who host the festive seder meal on one or both of the first two nights of Passover usually have many guests, requiring a mammoth amount of cooking. But the cooking can’t start until all the “regular” dishes have been put away and the Passover dishes brought out.

Spring cleaning on steroids

And we can’t bring out the Passover dishes until we’ve thoroughly cleaned every room where we’ve had food during the year. In the kitchen, we have to scour every nook and cranny, including the refrigerator, freezer, oven, stovetop, microwave, cabinets and countertops. It’s spring cleaning on steroids! Once the kitchen is “kashered” (made kosher) for Passover, we can no longer eat “regular” food there, so we have to carefully plan our menus for the week leading up to the holiday. Although fruits and vegetables, kosher meat, fish, eggs and many dairy products do not require special Passover certification, it still takes effort to keep the “Passover” separate from the “regular.”

So there’s no cooking and freezing for the big meal weeks in advance like we can do for other holidays. Usually the kitchen isn’t Passover-ready until a day or two before the holiday starts, and then there’s a frenzy of cooking and baking in the few days leading up to the seder.

As I write this, my stomach starts to clench, along with my jaw.

Even in households where the husband is super-supportive, the wife is the chief executive officer of Passover prep, making the to-do lists and issuing orders to anyone else unfortunate enough to live there. Most of us women start the holiday exhausted.

Many years ago I worked for a hospice that served an interfaith population and was encouraging “cultural competency” among the staff. As Passover approached, I wrote a piece for the employee newsletter about what the care staff might expect to see in a Jewish home as Passover approached.

The staff rabbi thought it was funny because it showed such a female perspective. I wrote about cleaning and food, nothing about the wonderful spiritual aspects of the holiday. “Hmph,” I thought, “only the men have the luxury to think about the spiritual aspects of this holiday!” And furthermore, I thought, his wife was probably as overwhelmed as I was!

A time to celebrate at last!

But once the food has been cooked and the family and friends gather around the festive table, we are able to relax. Then Passover changes from a dire burden to my favorite holiday of the year. Then I can enjoy the seder, which is a retelling of the reason for the festival: We were slaves in Egypt, and God brought us forth with a strong hand and an outstretched arm, and now we are free.

The quintessential Passover food, besides matzoh itself, is matzoh balls, also known as knaydlach (just one is a knaydl)—which is Yiddish so you can spell it any way you want in English: knaidlach, kneydlach, kneidlach. They are so good we eat them year-round, something that can be said about very few kosher-for-Passover foods.

Here is my recipe for matzoh balls, but let me give you a caveat. You need to get a feel for the mixture before you let it rest. It can’t be too loose or your matzoh balls will fall apart. It can’t be too hard, or your matzoh balls will be rubbery instead of fluffy.

If the mixture seems a little too soupy after you’ve added the matzoh meal, sprinkle in a few teaspoons more, but realize that the mixture will thicken quite a bit as it rests. When you first make up the mixture, it should not be stiff enough to form balls.

I recommend starting with the stated amounts for the ingredients. When you’ve made matzoh balls a few times, you’ll be able to tell if the consistency feels right or needs adjustment.

One more note: rendered chicken fat makes the best matzoh balls, but I realize that few of us have chicken fat on hand these days. You can use solid vegetable shortening or margarine instead.

You can make the matzoh balls any size you like. I like them large, one per person, and this recipe will make about eight large balls. If you want to serve two per person, just make them smaller.

This recipe can easily be halved if there are just a few of you, or doubled to serve a crowd.

Enjoy the matzoh balls in a steaming bowl of chicken soup. (The photo with the recipe is by Hot Hungarian Chef via Flickr Creative Commons.)