cooking

tonight I am going to a passover seder. here is my favorite charoset recipe (from memory):

1 apple
1 lemon
.25 cups pine nuts
.5 cups walnuts
.5 cups ground almonds
.5 cups sugar
1 hard boiled egg
cinnamon to taste

chop everything that can be chopped into small pieces (a food processor works well) and mix together. oh, and obviously remove things like seeds, but leave the lemon peel.

I'm not really sure where the recipe originated. I got it from a packet on passover that included "charosets around the world" that my sunday school passed out in 2nd grade. each kid in the class made 1 recipe and then we had a big communal seder where we got to try them all. this one was "north african" and it was by far the best.

why don't I make charoset more? I guess it's not that great a topping for anything but matzah, but I could eat large quantities of it plain. in fact, I did for breakfast today.

I also made a sephardic charoset recipe out of the NYTimes. It had McIntosh apples, pecans, almonds, wine, and dried dates. I had to go to 3 different stores to find dried dates, and they cost $7 for 10 ounces! and then they were too tough to be cut up in the food processor, so I had to chop by hand. all in all, too labor intensive & expensive to justify the good, but not great final product. still I am going to heavily market this recipe tonight at dinner, because the more they eat of this, the more north african charoset for me. also, it does taste better after a night in the fridge, as my breakfast this morning confirmed.

by the way, my cousins wanted me to make challah for passover. I make fantastic challah, but I had to remind them that despite being a very jewish food, it doesn't really fit in with the whole "unleavened bread" theme of the evening.

and here's what I really wanted to make: torta divina. This tastes really really good, and it's surprisingly easy to make. (the hardest part was not spilling water when I was pouring some into the casserole dish I used as an improvised "bain marie.") The best part is that it's kosher without trying too hard. there aren't any awkward substitutions of matzoh meal or potato starch or other ingredients that are only used because the first choice is not available.

the hosting cousins have not tried this dessert yet, so they declined to have me prepare it. When I make it for my uncle's birthday in 2 weeks, they will realize that they missed out.