Thursday, April 9, 2009

Getting our Seder On

I got home tonight with 45 minutes to do one thing: make a loosely Passover Seder-themed dinner. Luckily I had most of the necessary ingredients on hand. I picked up the remainder on the way home from work and, with a little cheating, managed to throw together a pretty fun Passover dinner while we enjoyed other Jewish traditions such as watching the Islanders/Penguins game on MSG.



I picked up some Manischewitz which is a boon seeing that it was only $4.99 for one of my favorite grape varietals: the concord grape. Not just a little concord grape but a minimum of 51% of concord grape! That is a commitment to quality that most wines are, quite frankly, afraid to make. We "enjoyed" the wine with some matzoh crackers, the first time I've had matzoh that weren't the standard head-sized ones. They were not leavened which symbolizes how I had to rush home from New Jersey and did not have time to let the dough rise.



After that I made a charoset-inspired salad for two reasons: 1) I didn't have the time or all of the ingredients to make charoset and 2) I didn't have a spare pan to make it in either. The salad had horseradish (more Seder-themed than charoset-themed). I was extremely skeptical about this combination but I must say the salad was one of the best I've made in a while. The combination of these ingredients was fantastic. I would say this salad was a mitzvah!



We also had some matzoh ball soup. This I did not make (because I'm a cheater). I bought it already prepared because, again, I only had 45 minutes to get this feast together and still leave time to read from the Haggadah!



I got some already prepared brisket (again, I only had 45 minutes) and I boiled some potatoes and threw together a quick carrot tzimmes (using my Bubbie's recipe, of course) with some baby carrots I had in the crisper.



For dessert we had Poppy Hamantashen from Lilly's (their website is apparently not functional at the time of writing this). Jen was skeptical of these cookies because, for some reason, she doesn't like cookies that look like this. I think maybe she might be clinically insane. Maybe it was the Manischewitz talking but I thought the cookies were delicious! I guess four cups of Manischewitz will do that to you.

Comes to pass that four cups of wine is some sort of Passover tradition! Who knew? I guess that tradition was started because Manischewitz tastes just like delicious, sugary grape juice.

Mazel tav!

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