Leftover Passover

Last night's Seder left me with a lot of leftovers. I make no claims at being the world's foremost scholar on Jewish tradition (a shock to most of you, I know) but I'm of the understanding that some Jews celebrate Passover with two meals on the first night and the second night of Passover. Some celebrate only the first night. Given that I enjoy nothing more than a reason to make something particular for dinner I opted to follow the former method of Jewish Passover celebration.



I roasted a half chicken with some horseradish and paprika. I did this because these are ingredients that in my admittedly ignorant view view are appropriate for a Passover Seder. Also a part of any leftover Seder dinner: the remaining roasted potatoes and spring onions with mushrooms from the night before.

The result was the most intensely brown dinner you could possibly imagine. Even Paula Deen couldn't conjure up a dinner quite this brown.



There was plenty of chopped liver left over from last night but I served up some leftover charoset instead. The chopped liver mysteriously and unfortunately slipped out of my hand when I tried to plate it up. I bobbled it for a few seconds and it landed right in the trash! Can you believe it? Some luck I have! What are the odds?



I made the charoset with red wine, raisins, Granny Smith apples, cinnamon, pecans, and pistachios with just a little of this delicious honey form New York.

I only had 20 minutes to prepare dinner tonight. I generally heat the oven up really hot then throw dinner in, turn the oven off, and go pick up Jen from the train station. I've become a master of this cooking method over the past few months.

To wrap up we had a little leftover matzoh crunch. Seeing that I made enough for sixty people I think we're going to be eating this treat nightly.

Perhaps we'll still be "enjoying it" by the time Rosh Hashanah rolls around.

L'Chaim!

Pesach It To Me

It seems that Passover always comes during an immensely busy time for me at work. Last year's Seder came during a big project at work and consisted largely of store bought items since I only had 45 minutes (including my drive home) to prepare the feast.

This year was a comparative luxury with an hour and a half to prepare for dinner! This is more time than I generally have so I used the first half hour to completely clean the kitchen from our lamb and pastry mess of the weekend.



For starters I made this plate of chopped liver which I served with Rick's Picks Phat Beets, cornichons, and sliced shallots. This alone may have constituted a pretty good dinner.

I've gotta say that I'm not really a huge fan of chopped liver. Every time I eat it I grow a deeper understanding of the expression, "What am I chopped liver?"



I also made some hard boiled eggs to go along with the plate. This is one of Jen's least favorite food items in the entire world so I knew I was on my own with these guys. My excitement for hard boiled eggs, while enormous in comparison to Jen's, is still a bit on the low side. Still, it's tradition, and you can't argue with tradition. You can, however, eat a mess of cornichons, and pickled beets.

The smoked sable also took a bit of the edge off. I also broke up some matzoh to serve with this Jewish meze platter. Overall I think next year we should maybe try to traditionalize foods that we actually enjoy to have a more favorable experience.

I also realized that I could have simply made a giant bowl of charoset and Jen would have been just as happy.



For the main course I ground up some pistachios and layered some fresh horseradish on these salmon fillets. I roasted them in the oven along with some paprika and garlic coated new potatoes. I also sweated some spring onions with baby portobello mushrooms.



Last year we had Manischewitz and I can't classify it as anything other than a terrible mistake. This year I opted to go with something local to New York and not a sickeningly sweet wine: He'Brew: The Chosen Beer.



Yesterday I made this matzoh crunch which is one of my all time favorite desserts. I coated one with sliced pecans and left one natural. We enjoyed this with some non-traditional lemon zinger tea. We also wondered if there were any traditional Passover movies like A Christmas Story. After not discovering any we opted to create our own: Love and Death.

L'Chaim!

Them Bones

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Tonight's dinner started out with this: a gelatinous cube of leftover osso bucco. Looking at this in the pan I wondered if the plans I'd concocted earlier in the day would pan out as well as I'd expected. Normally my day-after plan for osso bucco is to turn it into a delicious pasta with truffle oil. This, while delicious, has gotten old over the last decade. Tonight I decided to do something a little different.

I was taking an awful risk. This had better work.



I started off with a Spring Fling Ale from Blue Point Brewing Company on Long Island. Earlier in the day I'd asked Jen to make a batch of sour cream pastry dough which she did superbly. You can see the flour from the dough I'd just rolled out clumsily tracked all over my beer glass.



I'd cooked the osso bucco down with the bones in the pan to get every bit of flavor out of them. When I went to remove them from the pan to add them to the bottom of the pastry crust I'd just baked I thought it a shame. Instead I decided to use these fantastic bones as a weird inter-pastry garnish. While Jen found this to be a little off-putting I was quite pleased with the end result.

As someone who was once responsible for baking and pastry production in a Five Star Diamond Awarded restaurant you would think that I would use a little more care in my arrangement of this pastry crust. I'm not sure at what point it was but sometime (roughly 8-to-10 years ago) I decided I was done with taking any sort of care in my pastry crust. I also decided, after years of having knife skills beaten into me, that I was not going to spend any amount of time making careful measured knife cuts that are referred to with French terminology.

No, I'm no longer a slave to "precision" and "nice appearence." The pastry crust was perfectly made, tender and flaky, and held together beautifully even as the vessel for a hearty veal stew. Who cares if it looks like it was inexpertly pieced together by a three-year-old? Not me!

I'm comfortable enough in my ability to perform these tasks properly that I can celebrate this vacation from tedium and not have to take any care in my technique so long as the taste is delicious.

It's so good to be free of the brunoise.

Osso Beaucoup

If Weather.com is to be believed it was 37 degrees this morning. If my ability to not wear a jacket and walk to the store and actually sweat a little is to be believed I'm guessing it was closer to 57 degrees this morning. I was a little worried that tonight's dinner plans (which involved running the oven for three to four hours) may be ill advised.

Once a year I like to make Osso Bucco. In our old apartment, even in the dead of winter when this dish is best served, this was often a bad move that lead to us having to open all our windows and still sweating for the rest of the evening. This year I had waited way too long in the season for this dish. In preparation I opened all the windows in our new apartment only to find that after two hours I had lost feeling in my fingers.

Apparently our new apartment has this new technology known as ventilation. This means that we don't have to stop using our oven between April and Novemeber.



An avocado was enjoying its retirement on our counter and was days away from joining the big guacamole bowl in the sky. I took advantage of this situation and turned it into this salad using some baby heirloom tomatoes, beet greens, red leaf, watercress, lemon, and olive oil.



For bread we enjoyed a little sourdough with this Fromage D'Affinois. Don't feel intimidated if you're not into cheese. Put simply this is cheese from Affinois. See? Learning about cheese is easy!



Jen received this bottle of Covey Run as a gift. Don't feel intimidated if you're not into wine. Put simply this is just a pair of birds and their young, or a small flock, that are running! See? Learning about wine is easy too!



As an accompaniment for the final course I made potato and sweet potato fries. The restaurant I used to watch at served brabant potatoes as an accompaniment for osso bucco. While delicious they're quite wasteful as they involve throwing away about 30% of the potato. I much prefer this less precise version which also requires less butter and less fuss. I find the dicing of any vegetable these days to be more of an annoyance than anything else.



I had a vision of doing something to put a spin on classic osso bucco but in the end I just did it the same way I always do it. It's hard to veer too much from tradition in these dishes I do once a year. I could have went heavier with the root vegetables if I'd taken the care to actually make this while it was cold out. However, since I was running out of time I just went ahead and made it Plain Jane style.

Now that that's cleared out of the freezer it's time to roll full speed into Spring. Unfortunately it's a little too early for any of the necessary vegetables to really be ready.

And with Spring approaching I'm reminded of the fact that we have not locked on to any local farm share at all. Most of the farm shares where we live now cost about as much per year as it would to purchase an iPhone for every man, woman, and child in the state of New York.

If anyone has any leads on a reasonably priced farm share please drop us a line. We'll cook a vegetable dish and name it after you!

March Into Spring Into March

Ah, Spring. It's such a great season for cooking. It's totally my fourth favorite season for cooking! No exaggerating!



And what better to ring in spring than some hearty root vegetables like these beets? Along with some "gourmet" tomatoes (I believe they're called "gourmet" because some of them are not simply red) some Mt. Vikos Feta, watercress, red leaf, and beet greens it made for a fantastic first course.



We enjoyed this meal with some Karma Vista Merlot which we purchased on our trip to Michigan last summer and which was thoughtfully transported to New York by Jen's father this past November.



What better to celebrate the coming of Spring than these wonderful spring onions? I'd intended to grill them but the pouring rain and cold prevented me from doing any outdoor cooking this evening. Instead I roasted them in the oven and served them with some balsamic glaze.



For the final course ia d fakd akldj; klfadj;ladkj;lak,amdnalkdnadnf

Oh, sorry about that. I got so bored by the dinner course that I fell asleep right on my keyboard! For the final course I roasted a half chicken with some rosemary and some roasted red bliss potatoes. Yup. That's about it. Not breaking any major culinary ground here.

For tomorrow's dinner I'm going to balance this boring dinner out by cutting open a rattlesnake and eating its still beating heart. Nothing says spring like beating rattlesnake hearts!