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Post Passover Food Friday

With lots of help from my husband and my youngest, all of the Passover dishes are now back in their various hiding places.  When you live in an apartment, Passover dish storage is not the simple matter of boxes in an attic, basement or garage. rather it takes some real cleverness to hide all of the Passover stuff away. By the time we were done, the really good neighborhood pizza place, was closed so we settled for mediocre bagels instead.

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In thinking about tonightā€™s Shabbat dinner, I thought that it would be nice to have some fish after all of the met we were eating during Passover. I started the challah and was happy to be back kneading a nice gluten-ey bread dough. The challah is now doing itā€™s second rise and I will bake it soon.

Making the challah today, a weird thing happened. As a cook who cooks kosher, I always break eggs into a cup one by one, before adding them to anything, to be sure that they don't have any blood spots. In 40 or so years of cooking, I don't think I have ever cracked an egg and found it bloody. ( I do remember my mother finding an unhatched chick in an egg when I was a kid. That was really gross.) I do the cracking into a cup thing anyway.  Today, the fifth egg I cracked open for the challah was indeed bloody. I'm really glad that I do the egg checking as a matter of course.

  My youngest is not much of a vegetable eater. We are sort of amazed that he is at all healthy given how free from vegetable matter his diet is.  I made a big mess of mashed cauliflower and spring potatoes. I boiled each until soft, mashed with a big spoon and then whipped with  lots of buttermilk and some butter, salt and pepper.  Iā€™m serving peas and salmon with the mashed white stuff. This meal reminds me of what my mother used to serve on July 4th. Itā€™s almost exotically American. I realize that most of the meals that I make are Eastern European, Middle Eastern  or vaguely Asian
in their main culinary influence. this meal could have come out of my motherā€™s red and white checked Betty Crocker cookbook ( excepting the challah, of course)

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