On the road...to Passover

 

The contents of this pot, after twop days of simmering and several hours of straining and squeezing all of the goodness out of a whole bunch of large root vegetables and 20lbs of chicken bones is now 5 1/2 gallons of beautiful soup.

 

Seven quarts or perhaps nine are now residing in our building's freezer in the basement. My husband moved the soup to the basement so I am not 100% sure how many are now out of my kitchen.

Tow of our guests are vegetarian. I needed to make a main dish for them. 

Perhpas it was memories of old vegetarian recipes from the 1940s that came bubbling up out of the musty corners of my brain but I thought that a nut loaf would be the perfect main dish.

I looked at a whole bunch of recipes. many weren't suitable for Passover because they were made with lentils or rice or other beans.  Many of the recipes used lots of cheese. That probably was yummy but I couldn't serve that at a meat meal.

Several of the recipes called for lots of mushrooms, onions and nuts. Some of the recipes called for toasting the nuts.

So I sliced up a bag of onions and cooked down the onions until they were on the road to be caramelized. I then added in a large box of mushrooms and cooked that down with the only Kosher for Passover wine we now have open, that old standby Manischewitz. Of course I would have preferred using a fancier wine but what can you do? There were spices involved, smoked paprika, black pepper, salt, fennel seeds, allspice.  I added some matzah farfel and potato starch to the vegetable mixture as well as some eggs and a mix of toasted walnuts and pecans.It smelled great while cooking.

My husband took a look at the finished loaf and asked me if I followed a recipe. Hmm... that is a hard question to answer. I looked at recipes, lots of them, but didn't follow any of them. 

I cut the loaf in half and wrapped up each half and stuck it away in the fridge. I took a nibble. it isn't bad but it does need some sort of tomato-ey ketchup-ey sauce to put over the loaf as it warms up for serving.

This is what happens when two youngest children marry one another.  When my husband and I got married a co-worker gave us two pot holders as a wedding gift. (She wasn't invited to the wedding so this was a lovely and generous gesture.) One of the potholders was made to look like a realistic frog and the other was a giraffe.

We LOVED those pot holders. Our kids were entertained by those potholders as babies and both Froggie and Giraffey and their silly voices pulled our kids away from tantrum-land more times than I can count. 

This is what the pot holders looked like when I brought them home from the store.  My husband commented that they reminded him so much of Froggie and Giraffey and suggested that I could make them resemble Froggie. We are both really busy right now. But this was an important task. After a bit of discussion, (Googly eyes would be better but would melt in use.) and a bit of consulting with one another these are our new pot holders.

They make me laugh when I open the pot holder drawer.

As I type this I have four briskets in the oven. I wanted to coat the meat with something resembling ketchup. We all know that Heinz is the gold standard for ketchup. It has the perfect balance of flavors.  When I was a kid I loved ketchup beyond nearly all other flavors. I would have been happy to eat a bowl of ketchup as soup. Passover was always disappointing.The kosher for passover Rokeach or Glicks or Manischewitz ketchup was always terrible. it was always far too sweet and lacked the complexity of flavorpresent in a bottle of Heinz.

Last year Heinz sold bottles of kosher for Passover ketchup. Of course I bought a bottle. It was awful-- just one note of sweet with none of that perfect balance of sweetness, acidity, saltiness and dark mellow spices . Over the past couple of years I have played with creating my own ketchup using a base of tomato paste. Today I made a batch to cover my briskets.

It wasn't bad. What did I add to the can of tomato paste? brown sugar, cider vinegar, water to thin the mixture down to the right consistency, allspice, ginger, black pepper, red pepper flakes and some freshly squeezed lime juice. If I had a jar of ground cloves I would have added a few shakes but alas I don't. My faked ketchup was far superior to the Heinz kosher for Passover  monstrosity. It isn't quite Heinz, but a good substitute. I can't share the amounts that I used because I was just winging the whole process. I highly suggest that you do the same because probably whatever you come up with in your own bowl adding note of sweet and heat, acid and dark spiced will be better than bad from the store kosher for Passover ketchup. 

Spring continues its march into our lives here in New York. I loved that this tree had both the dried autumn leaves as well as this year's new buds.

The tulips we planted in front of our building keep putting on a show.