By Beth J. Harpaz
Associated Press
April 13, 2008 11:07 pm
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NEW YORK — Elaine Bloom’s Passover seder was interrupted one year when several guests had to leave unexpectedly to care for their child. The meal was delayed while another guest took them home.
Bloom figured her main course, salmon fillet, would be inedible. “My salmon was in the oven for over two hours,” said Bloom, a professional organizer with a business called A Place For Everything in Maplewood, N.J.
But the salmon “came out fabulous,” she said. She’d roasted the fish, along with a few other ingredients like wine, butter, garlic, dill and lemon, in an oven bag.
By accident, Bloom discovered that it didn’t matter how long the dish cooked. “If the seder is an hour shorter or an hour longer than you think it will be, it’s fine. Now I make that salmon every year.”
Flexibility, forgiving recipes and advance preparation are the keys to a successful seder - or any other feast where you have numerous guests, multiple courses and you can’t be certain when the food will be served.
This unpredictability is especially true of a seder, the ritual feast held to celebrate the Jewish holiday of Passover. Prayers, songs, games, and a retelling of the Biblical story of Exodus precede a multi-course meal that can include hard-boiled eggs, gefilte fish, matzoh ball soup; a main course of brisket, fish, chicken or lamb; and special desserts like sponge cake and flourless tortes. You can’t predict how long the ceremonial aspects of the meal will take, so you never know when you’ll be sitting down to eat the roast or the fish.
“It’s the hardest meal to orchestrate,” agreed Joan Nathan, a James Beard award winner and author of many cookbooks, including “Jewish Cooking in America.” Nathan expects 40 guests at her seder.
Despite all the work involved in hosting a seder, “for many Jews, it’s the warmest and most meaningful holiday of the year, perhaps the only time that person thinks about what it means or what they want it to mean, to be a Jew here and now.” said the novelist and poet Marge Piercy, who’s just come out with a new book called “Pesach For the Rest of Us: Making the Passover Seder Your Own.” (Pesach is the Hebrew word for Passover.)
Liberation is the theme of the Passover story, and the following tips can help liberate you from the stress of organizing the big meal, whether you’re making a seder or any other feast.
• Make to-do lists and start shopping far in advance. “Go through your menu recipe by recipe and put the shopping list together,” said Sandra Blank, editor of “The Kosher Palette” and “The Kosher Palette II.” “That to me is the most overwhelming part, but you can do that weeks ahead of time.”
Nathan keeps her list stored in the computer, which makes it easy to update the next year. As the big day approaches, she said, “I love crossing things off.”
Don’t forget chores like making place cards, and borrowing or buying a fold-out table, extra chairs or silverware to accommodate your crowd.
• Start cooking well before the big day. “I am a big advocate of things that can be made ahead of time,” said Blank, including soups, main courses, salad dressing, side dishes and desserts.
If you have freezer space, you can make many dishes a week or more beforehand, then freeze and defrost the day before or the day of the seder. Sponge cake “freezes like a dream,” said Nechama Cohen, author of “Enlitened Kosher Cooking.”
Soup can be frozen in a plastic container and defrosted by running the container under hot water until it loosens.
Then flip it over the top of a pot. “Warm and defrost on a very, very low flame,” said Blank. “A thicker soup will burn on the bottom so stir it to keep it moving.”
If you make a roast in advance, slice and cool before freezing. Use bakeware that can go from oven to freezer, then back to the oven for warming, and right on the table for serving, Cohen advised.
• Use cooking techniques that don’t require a lot of last-minute attention to detail. Cohen undercooks her seder entrees a bit so that when they are warming up, they won’t overcook. A recipe with a sauce or gravy can also help “cover up whatever might happen to it,” she added.
Instead of hot vegetable sides, Nathan serves an asparagus salad and a leek salad with a beet puree.
Use a “very low oven, 180 or 200 degrees” to keep chicken or brisket warm until you’re ready to eat it, said Blank. “You want it to be a slow process so nothing will dry out.”
If you’re warming up a pan of hors d’oeuvres or some other side dish, Cohen said it will look fresher if you give it a light coating of nonstick cooking spray and cover with waxed paper rather than tin foil.
• Take shortcuts and don’t do everything yourself.
Take some tasks off your to-do list by asking guests to bring wine, juice for the kids or even flowers for the table.
Nathan actually assigns her guests recipes from her own cookbooks, and she serves the main part of her meal as a buffet.
To make serving and clearing easier, “have a lot of trays around,” said Cohen. “It also really pays to get a wheelcart.” Look for them at flea markets, she added.
Ask kids to help clear dishes, or hire a college student or someone else to help for the evening if you have a really big crowd, said Nathan.
Consider plastic plates from the party store as an alternative to china. (Paper plates won’t work for a seder; they can’t handle sauces and are too easily cut through with a knife.) Observant Jews have separate sets of dishes just for Passover, but no matter what, it can be a challenge to come up with enough plates for all those courses and guests.
The plastic plates are inexpensive and come in many bright colors, which can complement your tablecloth, napkins and table flowers.
Bloom made the switch to plastic for Passover after she walked into her kitchen one year, post-seder, to find “mounds of dirty dishes and pots and pans, because there were lots and lots of courses. I decided right there that I was not going to use regular dishes again.” With plastic, “at the end of each course, you just throw the stuff out.”
Bloom admitted that “it is very bad for the environment. But it’s something I only do once or twice a year.”
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Here is a recipe for sponge cake from Piercy’s book, “Pesach for the Rest of Us: Making the Passover Seder Your Own.” Sponge cake has a tendency to fall, and Piercy admits that she has “never succeeded in getting this cake to the table safely.”
To minimize the risk of collapse, use a tube pan with a removable insert. Invert the pan onto its legs as soon as you take the cake out of the oven and let it cool upside-down. When slicing, use a serrated knife and a sawing motion so you don’t squish the cake.
Serve with fresh berries, whipped cream, ice cream, or haroset (a mixture of fruit, nuts and wine that is part of the seder). And to prevent the cake from drying out, don’t overbeat the eggs or batter.
Potato Flour Sponge Cake
8 egg yolks
2 whole eggs
1 3/4 cups confectioners’ sugar
2 teaspoons lemon juice
Grated rind of 2 lemons
Grated rind of 2 oranges
8 egg whites
7/8 cup sifted potato flour
1/8 teaspoon salt
Preheat the oven to 350 F.
Beat the egg yolks and whole eggs together. Gradually add the sugar, beating until thickened. Stir in the lemon juice and lemon and orange rind.
Beat the egg whites until stiff but not dry. Fold carefully into the sugar mixture.
Sift the potato flour and salt over it and fold in gently.
Turn into a 10-inch tube pan. Bake for 45 minutes. Turn upside down and cool. Be very careful handling the cake as it can easily collapse.
On the Net:
A Place for Everything: www.organizeit.com.
Kosher Palette: www.thekosherpalette.org
Enlitened Kosher Cooking: www.enlitenedkoshercooking.com
Swap bitter greens for the horseradish this Passover
By Julie Wiener
For The Associated Press
For years, horseradish has enjoyed a place of privilege at the seder, the carb- and symbolism-heavy meal that celebrates Passover.
Along with its counterparts on the Passover plate, horseradish helps tell the story of the Jews’ liberation from Egyptian slavery and exodus into the desert: Unleavened, cracker-like matzoh recalls the bread the Israelites hastily made prior to fleeing into the desert. Salt water, in which parsley and eggs are dipped, symbolizes the tears slaves shed.
And horseradish generally is used to represent the bitterness of slavery. But this year, consider adding color to the plate by substituting bitter greens — such as chicory, endive, arugula, and dandelion and mustard greens — for the horseradish.
Bitter greens have always been a common component in seders of the Middle East, says Joan Nathan, author of numerous Jewish cookbooks, including “The Jewish Holiday Cookbook.”
For some Jews this changed as they moved into Eastern Europe, where bitter greens weren’t available in early spring, she says. Of course, Sephardic Jews — who come primarily from North Africa, Southern Europe and the Middle East — never made the switch. But most American Jews are Ashkenazi, or of Eastern European descent, and so the horseradish came with them.
This is changing, in part because bitter greens have become a darling of gourmets regardless of faith and are showing up on restaurant menus and in the produce sections of mainstream grocers.
“What’s nice nowadays is when you go to buy ready-to-eat salad greens, you actually see (a variety of greens) as options,” says Cynthia Sass, a spokeswoman for the American Dietetic Association.
“It used to be just iceberg lettuce and romaine,” she says. “Then slowly spinach was added. Now you see field greens, baby greens, arugula.”
Sarah Kagan, food editor at Epicurious.com (the online site for Gourmet and Bon Appetit magazines), said that in recent years the Sephardic recipes have been among the site’s most popular Passover fare.
“There’s a high level of interest in nontraditional recipes outside the norm of typical Ashkenazi cooking,” she says, noting that last year Bon Appetit featured a Sephardic menu for Passover and this year Epicurious is showcasing an Israeli menu.
Rabbi Elie Abadie, dean of the Jacob E. Safra Institute of Sephardic Studies at Yeshiva University in New York, says most Sephardic Jews living in the West now use escarole and endive for their seders. Those greens often are tempered with romaine lettuce “to make it a little more palatable and yet still taste the bitterness,” he says.
Cooking also tempers most bitter greens, though they still will have bite. They also add a nutritional kick to seders. Sass says greens are low in calories and are good sources of Vitamin A, folate and dietary fiber. Many also are rich in Vitamin K and Vitamin C.
At the seder, Jews traditionally eat the bitter greens in a “Hillel sandwich” with matzoh and charoset, a sweet fruit-and-wine mixture that symbolizes the mortar used to make bricks in the days of Egyptian slavery.
For a modern take, a bitter green salad with roasted pears achieves the same effect on the palate: bitterness tempered by sweet fruit.
Much of this salad can be prepared in advance. The greens can be washed and dried a day ahead, then chilled, wrapped in paper towels in a sealed plastic bag. The pears can be roasted four hours ahead and kept at room temperature.
Bitter Green Salad with Roasted Pears
(Start to finish: 1 hour and 15 minutes, 30 minutes active)
For the salad:
8 firm Bosc pears, peeled, cored and cut lengthwise into 8 wedges
1½ tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 small head chicory
1 small head escarole
1 small head radicchio
1 bunch watercress, coarse stems discarded
1 bunch mizuna, coarse stems discarded
1 small head romaine
For the dressing:
1 tablespoon finely chopped shallot
2½ tablespoons cider vinegar
½ teaspoon honey
¼ teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
¼ cup plus 1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil
Set the oven rack in middle position and preheat oven to 425 F.
Place the pears in a zip-close plastic bag and add the oil. Toss to coat, then arrange the pears in a single layer on a rimmed baking sheet. Season with salt and pepper.
Roast pears, flipping twice, until they are tender and beginning to brown, about 20 to 30 minutes. Cool about 15 minutes.
While the pears roast, tear enough tender chicory and escarole leaves (discard tough ribs) into bite-size pieces to measure 6 cups. Tear enough radicchio, watercress, mizuna and romaine into bite-size pieces to measure 10 cups.
In a large bowl, toss the greens. Set aside.
To make the dressing, in a small bowl whisk together the shallot, vinegar, honey, salt and pepper. In a slow stream, while whisking, add oil. Continue whisking until emulsified.
Just before serving, add the roasted pears to the greens, then drizzle with dressing and toss to coat.
Makes 10 to 12 servings.
(Recipe from Epicurious.com)
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