Cooking for Passover

Passover* starts this Saturday night. For the first time in my life, my mother is not going to be cooking for the holiday. She and my father will be driving home from Florida this weekend, which is great because we'll soon be able to see them again in person, but that leaves the cooking to me. Last year we did a virtual seder, and she and my father cooked and delivered care packages with everything we needed so that we could all gather over Zoom. But this year, we'll have a very small seder -- just the three of us and my brother and sister-in-law. The weather is supposed to be lovely on Saturday, so we'll be able to sit outside. And because there will be so few of us, I'm not planning a huge, elaborate menu. It's Thursday, so I'm linking up with Carole to share three Passover recipes.

1. Charoset
Charoset is a symbolic food that is put on the seder plate for the Passover dinner. It is meant to represent the mortar used by the enslaved Jews in Egypt, and though it represents suffering, it's quite delicious. You can find numerous recipes online, there really is no "official" way to make it, and a lot of it is done by taste. The ingredients are simple: apples (something crisp and flavorful, like Honeycrisp), walnuts, cinnamon, and wine. You chop the apples and walnuts (which I like to toast in a pan first) and then mix them together with the cinnamon and wine to taste. The wine that I usually use is Manischewitz Concord Grape, which is a bit like alcoholic cough syrup and, in my opinion, is only good for this use. You can easily substitute any red wine or even concord grape juice. I once made a batch of charoset with apple juice when I was pregnant, and that worked, too. It's pretty hard to go wrong on this!

2. Brisket
You might be familiar with brisket in the context of BBQ, but in my family, we've always cooked it the "traditional" way for Passover: slowly, for many hours, in liquid with onions, carrots, and celery. We get the brisket from the market trimmed of some of the fat, but not all (you want a bit left on to keep the meat moist). I season it a bit with salt and pepper and put it in a large pan, then cover it with broth and the sliced veggies. I cover the pan with foil and put it in the oven at about 325F for several hours, until it's just starting to get fork tender. At that point, I remove it from the oven and slice it, against the grain, into pieces about 1/2 an inch thick. I return the slices to the pan with the broth (adding more liquid if needed) and veggies and cook it for another hour or two. Cooking times can vary and depend on the amount of meat, so you want to make sure you have plenty of time for it to cook. I often make a brisket a day or two ahead of time and reheat it for a holiday meal to ensure it's had enough time in the oven -- it's cooked enough when you can break it apart with just a fork.

3. A Flourless Chocolate Dessert
There are many restrictions on what can be eaten during Passover, but the simple rule is that nothing is permitted that can rise or leaven. This means no flour or other wheat products unless they're kosher for Passover, which means matzah or made from matzah (like matzah meal, which is ground-up matzah). So any sort of cake or baked good that uses flour is out. My mother typically serves a flourless chocolate cake that she gets from Whole Foods, and Rainbow and I contemplated baking one, but in looking through other recipes online, I came across this one for flourless fudge cookies. We'll be trying these for the first time this year, so I can't vouch for how good they are, but they look good and pretty easy to me. A bonus is that these aren't really Passover cookies -- they're more of a gluten-free recipe that just happens to be kosher for Passover! I'll let you know how ours turn out.

* By the way, if you are not Jewish, you might not think you know anything about Passover other than it's the time for eating matzah. But if you've ever watched The Ten Commandments, which always seems to air on network TV around Easter, then you know the Passover story, even if you don't know the details of how it's observed.