‘Tis the Season: A Kemach Torah Passover Digest

First things first: The 2012 Passover Guide is proving to be enormously popular, at least by the standards of a niche blog like this one. The hit count on March 30th, the day it was published, was more than three times the previous record hit count for a single day. Thanks to everyone who shared it through Facebook, Google+ and word of mouth, and please keep spreading the word!* Please treat the comments section of this post as the new suggestion box for additions to the 2013 Guide.

Now that we’re in the final week of preparations, I thought it would be a good time to present some relevant posts you might have missed last year.

1. Who Knows Three? An explanation, a bit on the technical side, of why we have three matzot on the modern seder plate.
2. A Question of Seasonality. Addressing the oddity of charoset, which is usually made with apples even though they’re a fall crop and Passover is a spring holiday. Read the comments section.
3. The Curious Case of Matzah Ashirah. How egg matzah is highly problematic for reasons that make no sense.
4. Carrot “consommé” (vegan). Not necessarily a Passover recipe, but if you read the Guide (just follow the first link in this article) you’ll see that that’s exactly the point.

So much for old business. Now, how about that Passover-hekhshered ice cream? No? And you don’t have a dedicated ice cream maker for Passover? No problem.

Shavua tov!

* I don’t make money off of this blog or anything. I just want to make Passover better.

Stock-free bean soup

Time to start answering the question from my first CSA post: What exactly does one do with broccoli rabe? For that matter, what is it? How do you even say it?

<nerdy stuff>The first thing worth knowing about Broccoli rabe—rhymes with “bob,” also spelled “raab”‘ or “raap,” otherwise known as broccoletti, broccoli di rape (pronounced RAH-peh, for Pete’s sake) and rapini—is that it’s not broccoli. Broccoli is a cultivar of the species Brassica oleracea that’s been selectively bred to produce clusters of edible flower buds on an edible stem. (Other B. oleracea varieties include cauliflower, head cabbage, collards, kale, Brussels sprouts, kohlrabi and kai-lan.) Broccoli rabe belongs to a cousin species, Brassica rapa, which also includes turnips. In fact, the two plants are so similar genetically that you could say broccoli rabe is a turnip that’s been bred specifically for its leaves, or that a turnip is broccoli rabe bred for its storage root. You could spend a lifetime eating the stuff and never have to know any of this, other than the bit about pronunciation.</nerdy stuff>

Where was I?

Carrot “consommé”

I don’t know whether it’s auspicious or inauspicious to start a Jewish food blog right before Pesach. This is a food-driven time of year for Jews, when virtually all foodstuffs used during the year have to be destroyed, or at least stored away and (perhaps nominally) sold to someone who isn’t Jewish. The food we do eat can get . . . interesting. American kosher consumers have an unfortunate habit of trying to eat all the things they would normally eat, modified to be appropriate for Pesach.

Just so we’re clear, “appropriate for Pesach” means:

• Other than matzah, you can forget about anything made from wheat, barley, oats, rye or spelt, or from any of their byproducts. This may sound daunting, but trust me, it’s dauntinger than that. Did it occur to you that conventional white vinegar isn’t allowed, since it’s usually fermented from grain alcohol? Don’t you wonder what else didn’t occur to you?
• Ashkenazim are also expected not to eat kitniyot, a category of grains and vaguely grain-like foods that cannot become chametz by themselves, but for various historical reasons have been avoided during the holiday. Corn and soybeans, which show up in more foods than most people would ever imagine, are among the foods considered to be kitniyot.

Believe it or not, unleavened breakfast rolls made from ground up matzah instead of flour are pretty horrible. (Oh, you believed it immediately? Never mind.) Our philosophy of Pesach food is to eat only things we would willingly eat at other times of year. Enter the carrot consommé, which is not really a consommé at all, and which I learned how to make from an e-mail my mother sent me in 2005; she got it from the New York Times Passover Cookbook, and apparently it’s Charlie Trotter’s recipe. We served this with matzo balls to ten people at our seder last year. Only one of the guests was a vegetarian, but nobody missed the presence of chicken broth. It couldn’t be simpler to make.

Ingredients

• 4 lbs carrots, washed but not peeled
• 1 large white onion, unpeeled, with the root end trimmed
• 2 whole cloves
• 2 inches fresh ginger, rinsed and split in half lengthwise
• 2 ribs celery
• 2 bay leaves
• 5 black peppercorns
• 2 sprigs thyme
• 3 quarts water
  

Instructions

1. Place all the ingredients in a large stock pot and bring to a boil. Cover, reduce heat, and simmer for three hours. Turn off the heat and let cool for one hour.
2. Strain all vegetables and spices from the soup and discard. (I left in the cloud of floating thyme leaves. They were pretty.)
3. Add salt a bit at a time until the broth tastes the way you want it to. (My mother thinks it tastes great even without the salt, but I think it tastes like weak vegetable tea. Such is taste.) You can also add ground black pepper; I added hot Hungarian paprika to my own bowl.