Passover Dinner

For those of you who don't know, on Passover you can't eat any leavened food. This includes any food made with flour that isn't prepared in a special way to ensure that it doesn't rise at all (that's why matzo is perferated like a cars cracker). There's all sorts of other categories of things you can't eat--legumes, for example--but generally if I can stick to unleavened food for the whole holiday, I'm happy.

So preparing food for Passover--even if you, like us, don't keep Kosher for Passover--is a bit different. On the non-carb side of things, my mom made her incredible brisket (made with gluten-free beer for my cousins who are ceoliac) and roast chickens. Plus some delicious roasted potatoes, carrots, and parsnips (which are, I suppose, carbs, but you get the picture).

I was in charge of the carbs--just like at Thanksgiving. I made two of my favorite Passover dishes, matzo brei and noodle kugel.

Matzo brei is sort of like French toast meets omelet meets matzo. The problem with it is, generally, you're supposed to fry it up right away, and we didn't want to be standing in the kitchen, cooking last minute. So I found this recipe (in one of our cook books) for overnight, baked matzo brei. Basically it's like a matzo-based pain perdu (or bread pudding). You soak pieces of matzo in a cream and egg mixture overnight, then bake it off during the day, and just warm it before eating (it's good cold too, but for dinner we warmed it.) For this particular recipe, I also sauteed some apples in a light caramel sauce and baked them right on top of the matzo brei. It was delicious, especially with a dollop of sour cream on top.

The other carb of the night was noodle kugel. This is just a baked noodle casserole made with Passover egg noodles (which I love and eat all year). The recipe for this was from the same cookbook as the matzo brei and was just as delicious. The noodles were baked in a cheese-y and ever so slightly sweet mixture and topped with a cornflake and cinnimon sugar topping. And like the matzo brei, we baked this earlier in the day and just warmed it up for dinner. Yum!

I also made two fantastic cakes and some cookies, but you'll have to wait for to see them because I've got to run.