Fun Playing With Food: More Fun Playing With Passover Food

As I posted earlier today, Fun Playing With Food is featured in today's Taste section of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, with additional content online! Please click here and here to read all about it - and enjoy the re-post below, from April 21, 2008, detailing how I make my potato kugel and sweet farfel puddings.

Fun Playing with Passover Puddings

My mother always made two puddings, or kugels, for Passover. One is sweet. The recipe comes from a cookbook called "Elegant Essen, " which was put out by the East Northport Jewish Center in 1973 as so many churches, synagogues, and civic groups put out cookbooks - by collecting recipes from their members. This recipe is entitled "Pudding - Sweet and Delicious" and is attributed to Eunice Zarett.

The dish consists of 1# Matzo Farfel, which you can see in the pot behind the farfel package, margarine (which is the only box of the stuff I buy all year - and this year, Kosher for Passover stick margarine was nowhere to be found, for reasons explained here), 7 eggs, 1 cup sugar, 1 can apricots in juice or sugar (no corn syrup!), salt, cinnamon (Vietnamese and intense, from Heather's Heat & Flavor), hot water and about 1 cup of cold water.

Start by pouring hot tap water over the farfel. The recipe says to drain it, and mom always drained it pretty promptly. One year, when I was making this, I forgot to drain the farfel. When I finally remembered and looked into the pot - it had absorbed all of the water! I made the pudding anyway, and learned that allowing the farfel to become saturated increases the "puddingness" of the kugel - so I now deliberately leave it for a while before draining (if there is anything left to drain).

Seven Blue Eggs Ready For Beating

Not Margarine Melting

Since there was no KP margarine available anyway, I decided to try a product from the Mustard Seed Market that had no hydrogenated oil, trans fats, or artificial ingredients. It had soybean oil and corn for flavor, so it was not even close to Pasaidich, but I decided to try it anyway. And it was good.

I beat together the eggs, margarine, sugar, salt, cinnamon, and the juice from the can of apricots.

The diced apricots went into the drained farfel, and the egg mixture was then added. The recipe calls for 1.5 cups cold water to also be added here, but since there was still some water left in the farfel after draining, I only used 1 cup.

This was poured into a prepared dish, topped with sprinkled cinnamon and baked.

Sorry - no photos of the hot pudding when served - it just didn't happen! But here is what it looks like - it is delicious to eat hot or cold!

The second pudding is the traditional Potato Kugel. If you look on the internet or Jewish cooking books and magazines, you'll find numerous variations on this dish. But I cannot bring myself to mess with it, it is so perfect as mom made it! Well . . . almost. We do add some hot chile (which my mother, who doesn't like any hot spice, would not approve of!), and we use a better prep method (mom used a blender and we use a food processor) - but this is still mom's kugel.

For 5# of potato (a "double" kugel) - 4 eggs, potato starch, kosher salt, ground pepper and about 4 garden Tabasco peppers from the freezer take a whirl in the Cuisinart.

The potatoes, and some onions, are peeled and grated using the cheese grating wheel of the food processor (or the smallest holes on a box grater, if you don't mind a little knuckle in your kugel):

The grated veggies are combined with the egg mixture, and matzo meal is added a TB or so at a time, until the mixture feels right. It is then poured into a prepared casserole and baked. Again, we didn't get a picture "right out of the oven," but this should give you the idea: