Jewish in a Gentile World

Just like Bubbie used to make! Because, well, this is probably the recipe Bubbie used, based on the recipe from Leah Leonard's 1949 book, Jewish Cookery. Potato kugel is commonly available as a mix -- Manischewitz's mix even provides an aluminum pan to cook it in! (https://manischewitz.com/products/potato-kugel-mix/) -- and it's fine. A little salty for my taste without much texture but it's a good, easy side dish. If you want to put in a little more time (not really that much more), you can make your own! Most of the ingredients are things you would already have for Passover or can easily get. This is basically the ingredients for latkes, but baked instead of deep fried! This is more of a side dish than a main course, because it doesn't have much protein. This recipe is not vegan (includes eggs) but can easily be made gluten-free by substituting potato starch for matzah meal, and actually, I like it that way! Ingredients 2 pounds of potatoes (I used yellow potatoes

I had heard about that viral feta and tomato Tik Tok recipe, but I never got around to trying it. I thought it might make a good recipe for Passover with such simple ingredients and technique: a block of feta, a carton of cherry tomatoes, some garlic, some olive oil, a little black pepper, all things I have around the house at Passover. But I missed one of the ingredients: pasta! Not really, a Passover-friendly ingredient! I figured the pasta was just a side dish so I substituted matzah farfel.  But when I put it all together, I realized that the feta and tomato was just supposed to be a sauce, and the pasta was the heart of the recipe. Oops. Back to the old drawing board... I tried it again, this time substituting some zucchini, sliced and quartered, and some chopped nuts for extra protein. I used chopped hazlenuts because that's what I had around the house, and I really liked the way that flavor went with the flavor of the feta.  This recipe requires very little effort (that is c

I recently came across some recipes for icebox cakes made by dipping matzah into coffee instead of using cookies or whatever. When I mentioned it to a friend, she said it sounded like Tiramisu. So I looked into recipes for Tiramisu and... well, that wasn't going to work because you're never going to find Mascarpone certified for Passover and even heavy cream or whipped cream can be hard to find. But I put together something that had a similar texture and tried it out. I left it in the fridge for two hours and it was OK. Then I left it in the fridge overnight and in the morning, it was YUMMY! Since it's vaguely based on Tiramisu, I'm calling it Tiramatzu. The fun thing about recipes like this is, it doesn't require any baking! You just assemble it and put it in the fridge! This is why these things used to be called icebox cakes (an icebox is an old fashioned refrigerator). This recipe doesn't take much effort to make, but it does take a lot of elapsed time, betwe

A friend of mine in college said that Kosher for Passover certification was nonsense. She knew this because her grandfather owned a little corner store and the day before Passover a rabbi would just come in and put stamps on things that said it was Kosher for Passover. Actually, this is not as much nonsense as it sounds like. Milk and eggs do not require any special certification (for Passover or year-round), but for Passover, they need to be purchased before the holiday. But it doesn't matter when you pay the money, it matters when the product was on the shelf and out of the animal and out of the processor's hands. When you buy milk and eggs in the store, you have no way of knowing when they got on the shelf. Unless a trustworthy source like a rabbi comes in before Passover and marks the things that were there at that time! So milk and eggs are easy to get for Passover and are a great source of protein for vegetarians (obviously not vegans). The only problem is, you have to ge

If you don't want to hear the whole story and just want a quick answer, jump down to HERE  (after opening the full text because the link doesn't work in the preview!) . Trope Trainer was a fantastic piece of software to help you learn to read Torah with its traditional cantillation (music), commonly known as Trope (sometimes spelled Trop and sometimes pronounced "trup" to rhyme with "pup"). This software was extremely popular, giving you a wide variety of ways to see and hear things and providing a calendar of Torah readings. It was a miraculous piece of work, replacing the cassette tapes that bar mitzvah students in my time used to learn their Torah portion. For the young folks reading this: cassette tapes are what people used to record and listen to their own music before YouTube, MP3 or even CDs.  So why do I keep referring to this great software in the past tense? Well, Trope Trainer was the work of one man: Thomas Buchler. He wrote the code himself, wi

Late last year, my friend and best taste-teste Rachel offered me some dairy-noodle kugel made by a woman at her synagogue. It was wonderful, and I needed to learn how to make it myself! Once I had made it a few times, got it the way I wanted it, I wondered if it could be made for Passover, replacing the noodles with matzah farfel (basically matzah broken up like bread crumbs). IT WORKED! And it's ridiculously easy! The main problem at this point is finding Passover certified yogurt. I used Greek yogurt in the noodle version (in place of the sour cream in the recipes I was working with), but I've never seen Greek yogurt certified for Passover in a regular grocery store. In the past, I've seen regular Dannon yogurt certified for Passover but I haven't seen it this year and it looks like it won't be available. There may be other Passover certified yogurts available (particularly in grocery stores catering to the kosher consumer), or you can fall  back on the original s