Cook for two hours

Check out the Joy of Cooking's recipe for Gefilte Fish!! Cook for two hours. Yes, seriously!

I've finally found someone who like gefilte fish. My friend Ellen! She and her family are joining us for Seder. They are also a blended family. She says that she is Jewish, the kids are diluted, and her husband is deluded. Anyway. She likes gefilte fish, so I guess we'll be having it for seder. I like it with enough horseradish. My daughter tells me that I'll eat almost anything with enough horseradish

She's making coconut macaroons dipped in chocolate and the chicken soup with matzoh balls. Yum. I'm going to make merengues. So - Here's the recipe:

2 egg whites - beat slowly until stiff
add 2/3 cup sugar - 1 Tbs at a time
add a pinch of salt
1 t vanilla
1 C chopped pecans (optional at my house - not everyone is a pecan fan and this recipe came from a sister of my - Catholic - grandmother from Enid, Oklahoma
1 C chocolate chips

Preheat oven t 350º. Line a cookie sheet with foil. Drop cookies onto sheet. Place ain the oven and turn off the heat! Leave them in all night.
Do Not Open Oven! (Double underlined and two exclamation points from my grandmother!)

Almost Seder - time to look for the Haggadah

It's almost Seder again. I am trying to figure out what to do with this particular meal. As always I lean to turkey, but seder with just the five of us feels like a ton of bird and not that many eaters. I'd invite the neighbors, but they are all away for spring break. So that leaves me with a big pot of chicken soup.

Which brings me to chicken soup. Again, my mother-in-law gave me the great soup hint of putting a sweet potato in the soup pot. This improves the color and flavor, especially if you are souping a chicken that doesn't bring a lot to the pot. And remember - cook for two hours!

Chicken soup -

Into the pot goes -
1 Whole chicken - skin, bones - the whole meghilla (that's Purim I know - but hey)
2 ribs of celery, cleaned and chopped as small as you would like.
2 whole carrots - ditto
1 peeled sweet potato - cut it in half if you want to fish it out
1 large or two small onions - peeled and diced.
Salt
Cover with water.
Cook for two hours.

Cool and pull out the bones and anything you don't want in the bowls on the table. It's delish. Really.

The first seder - Taj the dog batting clean up

I remember the first Passover, long before any of us were married or thinking of kids. We had seder at the boys apartment on Simpson street - so that would have been Craig and Sam and John. The attendant girlfriends would have been Melinda, why do I think Daryl was there, and me. So two blonde non-jews, two Jewish boys. Craig called his grandmother for her noodle kugel recipe which she reminded him that he couldn't make for Passover because the noodles were flour. He lied and told her that he just wanted to know how to make it. It was delicious - like a bread pudding with noodles insead of day old bread. Yum.

I always think of this as the training seder. From here it was seders at Claire and Bob's (Schiksas come to seder aka the all blonde seder; the seder where Marjorie made it clear where her sexual preferences were), seder with Craig and Melinda after they were married with Craig's mother and father ("Did you count the silver? You should always count the silver.") seders at our home, the sorta seders where Sam was the lone Jew - to last year's Seder in Orlando - the Mickey Mouse Seder.

The menu that first night was turkey, asparagus, some kind of potato I am sure. Craig povided the hagaddah, and we avoided gefilte fish though we had deviled eggs and chicken soup with matzoh balls.

I'm going to promise to put the noodle kugel recipe here. I need to test out my bread pudding theory. The recipe included orange juice and the whole deal was topped off with crushed corn flakes tossed with butter and cinnamon and suger. What's not to like?

Craig's Bubbe's Sweet Kugle Recipe - recreated:

12 ounces wide egg noodles
1/2 to 1 cup raisins (depending on how much you like them!)
1/3 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup orange juice
2 whole eggs
3 egg whites
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp vanilla
1/4 cup oil (plus a bit for the pan)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Oil a 13" X 9" baking dish.

Cook egg noodles according to package directions.

While they are cooking, pour hot water over the raisins to plump them up.

Mix the oil, brown sugar, orange juice, cinnamon, vanilla, eggs and egg whites together. Mix well.

Drain the noodles, put them in the baking dish. Drain the raisins. Add them, too. Stir in the sugar/egg/oj mixture.

Topping:
2 C crushed corn flakes
1/4 C sugar
1 tsp cinnamon
3 TBS melted butter

Mix all ingredients together in a bowl. Srpinkle on top of noodle mixture.

Bake for 40 minutes or until nicely browned and cooked in the center.

Now - this is a recreation and I have not tried it yet, but it seems like all the right ingredients in the right order, with the one cholesteral lowering nod of substituting 3 egg whites for 2 whole eggs although in a big pan like this, a serving of kugel will have about 1/4 of an egg in it anyway if you made it with 4 whole eggs. I'll try it out and update the post if it doesn't seem right.