Jew Food Extravaganza

Dear Turkey,

Wow! That was one amazing gingerbread project. Good thing your boyfriend is a masterbaker.

Ahem.
In honor of Hanukkah (or however you spell it), my husband put on his honorary gastronomical-Jew yarmulke and helped me make some of our favorite Jewish dishes. Rather, he did most of the work and I read him the directions from our cookbook while I played with our baby.

Actually, I finished making two of the things yesterday, which was a very special day for me: it was the first day since I became a mom that I had eight hours ALL TO MYSELF. That's right: no work, baby at daycare. It was a productive day, and I was glad to have it, but I was already grateful to have a job by about hour six. I could go on, but I'm sure your half of our audience doesn't want me turning this into a mommy blog.

Normally, I would make a different post for each of these dishes. But today I'm just going to get it all out of my system a la you.

First, matzo ball soup.
We usually do something like this: cut up an onion and some celery and sautee it, then add two boxes of broth, some carrots, a sweet potato, a zucchini, and whatever else. Cook it until it's just done, then puree it. Then throw in some spinach and tomatoes.
For the matzo balls, I use the recipe on the back of the matzo meal container, or, if I can't find that, the matzo meal mix (they pretty much the same). As per my family tradition, I cook the matzo balls separately  not in the soup (this is so that at Passover, vegetarians can add the balls to their soup without them being contaminated with meat).

delicious soup; so many things I could say about cooking the balls:

Second, mushrooms and barley. On that subject, let me share three fundamental rules of Jewish cooking:
1) Barley is actually pasta
2) "If it's brown it's cooking; if it's black it's done"
3) Use lard. If you can't, use butter. I break this rule and use olive oil all the time and my Jew food is delicious. Sorry, Grandma.
So, you sautee some onions and mushrooms in some oil, salt, pepper, garlic powder, and paprika (fundamental Jewish spices). Then you add a box of broth and one bag of "barley" -- and boil it until the barley is done (aka black -- just kidding). Then I put it in a baking dish and put some more Jew spices on top and bake it for a few minutes.

Finally, I tried something new:

the dough

the filling

before

after

And one more thing:

if you put a hot baking stone on your cutting board you can  find out that there is a design on the bottom

I moss you,
Tofu