Homemade horseradish for Passover

Yes, it's blurry. No, it's not your eyes. My apologies. The good camera was, well, lost in the mess on my desk. Sigh.

For Thanksgiving, it's the cranberries. For Hanukkah, it's the applesauce. For Passover? The horseradish.

As always, yes, it's easier to buy it in a jar. But it doesn't even come close. And while most of mine found its way onto gefilte fish or spread over matzo, you can use it for pretty much anything.

A warning, though: It's strong. Strong, I tell you. And pungent. Hard to mistake for anything else, that's for sure.

Homemade Horseradish for Passover (a recipe written in my own hand several years ago on a piece of notepaper, which means I have no idea where it came from; my apologies to whomever I'm not giving appropriate credit)

4 ounces fresh horseradish, peeled*
1 8.25 ounce can of sliced beets
2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons sugar

*A note about fresh horseradish: For one thing, it can be hard to find at all. Some supermarkets carry it; others don't. You may have to ask around. For another, make sure it's good and fresh. Sniff it; it should not quite knock you over. The stuff I made this year? Well, frankly, it sucked. And that was because the horesradish root I bought was woody through the middle, and the stuff simply had gone well past its prime. It was, however, the only bit of horseradish in the store, and so I'd caved and bought it, rather than drag my tuchus over to another store. Next time? The tuchus will be dragged.

1. Grate horseradish; I do it in my food processor.

2. Drain liquid from beets, reserving 3 tablespoons. Coarsely chop beets. (Not necessary if you end up using a food processor, as I do, on the whole mess in the end. See #4.

3. Put beets, beet juice, lemon juice, salt, and sugar into bowl and mix.

4. Stir into horseradish. If you like relatively large chunks of horseradish, you're done here. I don't. I like mine to be not quite as pureed as the stuff in the jars, but a lot more finely ground than a quick pulse through the grater provides. So once I've stirred everything together, I throw it into the food processor and pulse away until it's just the right consistency.

5. Cover and let stand at least an hour, so that the flavors get a chance to meld and deepen. Trust me; it needs that hour.

Serve with...whatever you normally serve horseradish with.

It is like nothing else.

(Yes, I'm done with Passover recipes now. I promise. Mostly because by the time I do my next recipe, I'll be done with Passover itself! Hope you and yours enjoy your holiday, whichever one you celebrate, with smiles and laughter and--of course--excellent food.)

Banana-nut kugel for Passover

So here's the problem with sharing recipes for a holiday like Passover (Pesach) ahead of time: While I don't keep anything even resembling kosher during the bulk of the year, I do try to do something vaguely resembling kosher for Passover during those particular eight days. (It's my version of kosher for Passover, and it involves--essentially--my cleaning out our kitchen cabinets and putting all the chametz into our pantry where N can get to the things he can prepare for himself and the rest of us can ignore them entirely.) There's lots of stuff I don't do, but what I do do...well, I like to actually do that little bit "right." So I don't open the matzo or any of the other Passover staples until the last possible moment, generally the day of the first seder, when I'm preparing the meal. Which means that I also can't/won't make a dish several days ahead of time, photograph it for this blog, and freeze it to serve at my seder. Nor do I want to open my slated-for-Passover ingredients to use only a small amount of them, then throw the rest out.

And so, you get a stock photo of bananas, instead of a shot of what is seriously one of my and Em's favorite dishes, Passover or no. (I'll be making it not only during the eight days, but several times in the weeks and months after--no prohibition about using Passover foods after Passover.) But take our word for it: This is good stuff. I serve it as a side dish, but it verges on being dessert. And you definitely don't need to be Jewish to enjoy it.

Banana-Nut Kugel (adapted from a 1992 recipe my mom got off of her Prodigy--remember them? if you do, you're old like me--Food and Wine Club mailing list)

3 cups matzo farfel (or just take a few sheets of matzo and crumble 'em up, which is what I generally do, since farfel is just crumbled up matzo but costs like four times as much per ounce)
4 eggs
1/2 teaspoon salt
6 tablespoons sugar
1/4 cup melted butter
2 medium unripe bananas, sliced
1/2 cup chopped nuts (I usually go with walnuts for this one, but pecans work, too; though I'm usually an almond fan, I don't think they'd work so well here)

1. Preheat oven to 350.

2. Put farfel in colander; run cold water over farfel; drain immediately. What you want is farfel that's moist, but not overly soggy.

3. In a separate bowl, beat eggs with salt, sugar, and melted butter.

4. Add farfel and mix to coat.

5. Grease a baking dish. The recipe recommends a 1-1/2 quart dish; I just whichever one is clean and isn't too big for the job.

6. Spoon half the farfel mixture into a layer in the dish. Place sliced bananas over the mixture, then sprinkle nuts over the bananas.

7. Cover the bananas and nuts with the rest of the farfel mixture.

8. Bake uncovered at 350 for approximately 45 minutes, until set and lightly browned on top.

Incredible. Seriously. Try it.

(And, hey...While I'm not by any stretch of the imagination The Jew To Go To for information about my religion, I'm happy to try to answer any questions you might have about the various rituals and such around Passover. It's one of my favorite holidays--and yes, that's mostly because it's all about trying out and using recipes you pretty much ignore the rest of the year.)

Prepping for Passover: Matzo

From Wikimedia Commons: Photo taken on April 12, 2006 by Yoninah.

So let's get this out of the way right up front: If you're Jewish and you keep kosher for Passover, this is an almost completely useless recipe. Because, clearly, you can't make matzo in advance of Passover and eat it during Passover and have it be anything even vaguely kosher. Trying to make it during Passover, even, is flirting with disaster; I mean, where would you get the KP flour in the first place? You certainly can't just use your local store brand. And even if you found the right kind of flour, there's so much halakhah associated with matzo...It's just not worth it.

No. This recipe is meant for fun and education only, something for Jews and non-Jews alike to do with their kids in the weeks leading up to the holiday, so you can discuss what making matzo is all about, what its meaning is, why it's eaten during these particular eight days.

Not that I've actually done that this year, mind you--as you'll notice from the lack of photos in my kitchen accompanying this recipe. But I have an excuse! It's not a good one, but it's an excuse. See, my kids' religious school took them on a field trip last weekend to the Model Matzo Bakery in Westwood, where they did all that--talked about the meaning of the holiday, made their own matzo, ate it, complained about not having anything to put on it, complained about it being burnt at the edges, complained about how this friend got a bigger piece and that friend's one wasn't burnt as much...never mind that they didn't like the way it tasted in the first place.

Perhaps you can see why I'm not all that jazzed about the idea of doing that all over again in my house this year, yes?

Still, it was actually a really fun trip, and tasting 'home-made' matzo got me excited about the upcoming holiday and all my only-at-this-time-of-year recipes, some of which I'll share with you over the next few weeks.

But to do that, I figured, I should start with the basics. And when it comes to Passover, it doesn't get any more basic than this.

Matzo/Matzoh/Matza/Matzah

1 part cold water
3 parts flour

Aaaaaaand...that's it on the ingredients, ladies and gents. You will, however, want to have a rolling pin and some kind of dough-poking implement (a fork will do the trick) on hand. Plus something to bake the matzo on; see instruction number seven.

Here's the quick and dirty on what to do:

1. Turn on your oven; you want it at as high a temperature as you can get it without it being on broil. (Actually, what you really want is a matzo oven, which is something like a brick pizza oven. But I'm assuming that you don't have one of those any more than I do, so let's go with the highest-temp-you-can-get concept and leave it at that.)

A note: If you want to do this as authentically as you can, you need to do this oven-preheating way in advance. You don't want to have to wait any time at all during the actual process for the oven to heat up, since "real" matzo needs to be made and fully cooked within 18 minutes from the time you add the ingredients together. Why 18 minutes? Supposedly, 18 minutes is the amount of time it takes for bread to start to rise. Thus, you'll want to have everything you need on hand (including a timer that you'll set when the time comes), get your work area prepped ahead of time, and make sure the oven has heated to its top temperature. In other words, you'll need to work quickly.

2. Combine cold water and flour; start your timer, as soon as you pour the water into the bowl.

3. Mix the water and flour until combined, and knead the resulting dough into a ball.

4. Pull off a piece of the dough and roll out on a lightly floured surface into as thin a circle as possible. (It doesn't need to be a perfect circle; you don't have time for perfection! You're a slave escaping Egypt, remember?)

5. Poke holes into the dough with the fork. This is to prevent the dough from rising. If it could. Which it can't, since there's no yeast, and not enough time. But, still...poke. Just in case. (Makes sense to me. But then again, I'm an obsessive-compulsive. So, you know. Grain of salt.)

6. Keep rolling out matzos until about 12 to 14 minutes have passed, at which point you'll want to throw whatever you've made into the oven.

7. The recipe I found says you should bake them for two to three minutes, but my oven seems to take at least four. They also say you should bake them on "baking tiles." If you have a pizza stone, that would do the trick. But if you're like me, it's parchment paper on cookie sheets.

8. When your set-for-18-minutes timer goes off, pull 'em out of the oven--cooked or uncooked. Let cool for a few minutes, then give 'em a taste.

Mmmm. Nothing like hard, tasteless sheets of flour-paste, eh? Well, if that's how you feel, you've got it all wrong, people. Matzo is the World's Greatest Butter-and-Salt Delivery System. Or spread some peanut butter on it. Maybe some egg salad? A little tuna? Tuna and cheese, popped back into the probably still-warm oven so that you get a matzo tuna melt?

The possibilities are endless.

Ah, matzo. Dayenu.

Mrs. Goldberg's Cookies

These are the cookies of my childhood. The cookies Grandma made. The cookies she always called "Mrs. Goldberg's cookies," (which I find adorably charming now, that she felt we need to use a respectful moniker for the cookbook writer, Molly Goldberg) or "thumbprint cookies," but which are, in the book they come from, called simply "Jelly Cookies."

These are the cookies I've always made, too. They are the cookies I'm known for. They are the cookies my friends used to ask me to make for special occasions. Our old roommate, M, once asked me to make several dozen for a fundraiser at a theater he was managing; he came home that night to tell me that Ben Vereen and John Ritter had both raved about my cookies.

Really, I don't have to go any further now, do I? You're sold, right?

They're also the very first cookies Em and N made, too, since I made it a point to use their tiny little thumbs to make the impressions when I'd bake these when they were babies. (I actually have a shot of Em 'helping' me make these when she was maybe a year old; if I can find it and scan it, I'll add it here.)

I will say, however, that I'm not really sure how these are "Jewish" cookies. But there they are, on page 133 of my copy of The Molly Goldberg Jewish Cookbook. Actually, it's my third copy of this cookbook. Because it gets used so often, and the copies I've always had were so old...they tend to fall apart.

I love that I have cookbooks I use so often they fall apart. Something in my wannabe-happy-homemaker's heart finds that indescribably wonderful.

And with that, I give you:

Mrs. Goldberg's Cookies

[A note: There is, in my opinion, never a reason to make only a small number of these. They're full of butter and sugar, and you can't even try to pretend that you're being virtuous when you eat them. And so, I pretty much always triple the recipe in the cookbook. Thus, I'm giving you, here, the tripled recipe. Feel free to scale back down to the original if you want. But you'll regret it. Don't say I didn't warn you.]

3/4 pound butter
1 cup sugar
3 egg yolks
3 cups sifted flour (Side note: Does anyone sift anymore? Molly says to sift, but I never do it. Does it make a difference?)
1/4 tsp salt (The original recipe calls for 1/8 tsp, so this isn't tripled. But I tend to only have salted butter on hand, so I probably don't even need to go up to 1/4 tsp.)
3 tsp vanilla
1-1/2 tsp orange extract
One or more of your favorite fruit-flavored jams or jellies (We tend toward the Grandma-traditional apricot, but eschew her choice of grape for something like boysenberry, most times)

1. Prepare cookie sheets with parchment paper. (I know. We're obsessed here at NTMC with parchment paper for baking. Trust us. It's for a reason.) Preheat oven to 325 F.

2. Cream butter and sugar together until light. (I do all of this in my Kitchen Maid stand mixer, by the way. But before I had one, I just let the butter get reallllllly soft and did it with a fork. Gave me some muscles, I tell you.)

3. Add egg yolks; beat well.

4. Add flour and salt; mix well.

5. Add vanilla and orange extract; mix well.

6. Shape dough into walnut-sized balls. Using your thumb, make a slight depression in each cookie; fill with jelly. (The book says about a half teaspoon per cookie, but I just eyeball it. As you can see above, that sometimes means they get a little sloppy. I like my cookies sloppy.)

7. Bake for about 15 minutes, or until "delicately browned." (God, I love Molly.) As you can see above, I underbaked the batch I photographed. Whoops. They were still awesome. There's something about the orange extract that makes these cookies taste like...well, like childhood. OK. My childhood. But still.

-------
By the way, I just wanted to let you guys know--OK, I wanted to brag to you guys--that I've added the extra vodka and the simple syrup to my limoncello, so that it is now in its second phase, and that on our anniversary (March 17; yes, the two Jews got hitched on St. Patrick's day, and even signed our ketubah in green ink) we will be breaking it out for a first glass. A little early, true, so I'll let the rest sit for a week or two more, but still.

I can't wait. I'll brag more then.

Brisket ala TC

Before I go any further, I just have to say: Dude. Come on. You're impressed, right? Even I was impressed with how pretty this came out tonight!

And it tasted even better.

******************

Because I'm a Jew, I make brisket. I can't explain it; I have no idea how this love affair came to be, why this particular cut of meat made the cut, why it has persisted through the generations. All I know is that my grandmother made brisket, my mother made brisket, and I make brisket. So it is, and so it shall always be.

But if you think that means I'm about to reveal to you some family recipe that traveled over from the Old Country (Poland, Russia, Germany, you name it; we are Ashkenazim, hear us roar), you're about to be sorely disappointed. I mean, nu? Who writes down a brisket recipe? You buy some brisket from the butcha, you bring it home, you make it. Vat's to write about?

And so I've pretty much gone it on my own. I mean, I must have called my mom the first time I decided to make a brisket, and I'm sure she gave me some tips. And, of course, there are the meat recipes in the Molly Goldberg Jewish Cookbook, of which I'm on my third copy right now. (This is the one I have at the moment, but the pages are dangerously yellowed, and the binding is starting to loosen, because I use it that often, and it is, after all, approximately 55 years old. No, that's not an exaggeration.) Still, none of these are the source of The Recipe. Because there is no The Recipe.

But I digress. Here's how I make it, with some ideas for how you can make it your own.

Brisket ala TC

Ingredients:

Brisket (How much? The piece at left was about a pound and a half; when I make it for one or another of the holidays at which we will have company, I generally go for four or five pounds of meat. Oh, and even at your local supermarket, you may have to ask the guy behind the meat counter for a brisket; I find they usually have a cut or two available, but they're not always out in the meat display case.)

Oil (Canola, olive, whatever)

Kosher salt

Pepper

Garlic powder (optional)

Onion (chopped)

Carrots (I've gotten lazy and tend to get the already peeled baby carrots for these sorts of recipes, so I can just throw them in. Does it make you judge me less if I swear that they're organic? I didn't think so.)

Broth or wine or water (You're going to braise the meat, and so you'll need liquid. Even though it's beef, I tend to use chicken broth, because I almost always have some in my freezer, remnants of the most recent pot of chicken soup with matzo balls. You can, however, use beef broth or even beef bouillon cubes, though in the latter case I'd go easy when you salt the meat. Or you can even use wine, though that will change the taste significantly; red probably works better than white, but feel free to experiment. And, to be honest, the world will not come to an end if you just braise it in water. Just be sure to season more liberally as you go.)

Ginger (fresh or powdered, optional)

Honey (optional)

Other veggies (optional; I added peas tonight because neither Baroy nor Em likes cooked carrots, and I wanted them to have some kind of veggies, but it's not a necessity; Molly Goldberg suggests adding chunks of sweet potato alongside the carrots, but I've never actually done that.)

Instructions:

In a dutch oven or similarly wide, deep pan, heat a couple of tablespoons of oil. Season meat with salt, pepper, garlic powder (or not), then add to pan and brown on both sides, about three or four minutes per side. (See photo above; I'd have liked that to be slightly more browned, actually.)

When meat is almost fully browned, add onions and saute until slightly translucent. (A real chef would probably suggest you remove the meat for this, but I just kind of shove the meat over and go on with my life. Did I mention The Lazy?) Then, add carrots and saute along with the onions for just another minute or so.

Add broth/wine/water/whatever. How much? I was afraid you'd ask. I haven't a clue. I add enough so that the liquid climbs to about halfway to two-thirds up the side of the piece of meat I'm cooking. I don't know if that's the official amount of liquid for braising, but it's what I do.

Cover the pot and let cook for a while. A pretty long while. This little brisket cooked for close to two hours; a four-pounder should probably be left to braise for three or more.

BUT. About halfway through the cooking, I will start tasting and then adding stuff to the liquid if it doesn't quite excite me. Tonight, I added a little bit of powdered ginger, just to give it a little zing. When I make brisket for Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, I always add a few tablespoons of honey because honey is pretty ubiquitous on Rosh Hashanah. (It's the whole "have a sweet new year" thing.) And I sometimes add it on Passover as well, even if "have a sweet escape from slavery" doesn't quite have the same ring to it.

Once the braising liquid tastes 'right' to me, I generally turn the meat over, put the cover back on the pot, and leave it alone for the rest of the time it's cooking. Of course, if you're doing as I did and totally ruining the whole traditional-Jewish-dish thing by adding peas (not that Jews have anything against peas, mind you, just that I've never really seen them added to brisket before), you'll want to do that just five or so minutes before you serve the dish, so that they don't get mushy. Nothing worse than mushy peas, if you ask me. Not that you did.

There you have it. (And by you, I mean Kristen, who specifically requested this recipe.) When I make brisket just for the sake of brisket, I always make rice to serve it over, because that sauce? Is to die for. But mashed potatoes would work well, too. Or egg noodles. Or biscuits. Or whatever your little heart desires. Brisket is easy that way.

Jewish penicillin (aka Chicken soup with matzo balls)

"I don't know why," my friend's son, Joey, said to me the other night, when he arrived at my house for a sleepover with N, wiggling with delight when he smelled the soup cooking on the stove, "but I love Jewish food!"

Chicken soup with matzo balls goes so far beyond Jewish food, though. It's comfort food, too. And if you'll allow me to depart from my usual steadfast belief in peer-reviewed studies for just a moment, it's downright medicinal. (And I'm not the only one who says so.) I'll never forget my junior year in college in snowbound Schenectady, New York, sitting in a classroom trying to study for finals despite a fever and sinus pressure I thought would make my head explode, and smelling...I swear, I smelled it like there was a pot right in front of me...my mother's chicken soup with matzo balls. (Yes, even though it was pure hallucination, I knew there were matzo balls in it. There are always matzo balls in it.) Afterwards? I felt better. Seriously.

Joey's mom, my friend A, prone to bronchitis and other wintertime infections, will undoubtedly back me up on the curative powers of my soup; I've made her more than one batch in my time for just that purpose.

But wait. There's more.

Both my kids graduated from baby foods to soft foods via matzo balls scooped out of the soup. Em has more than once requested chicken soup with matzo balls as her special birthday dinner...despite her birthday being in late August. When we head up to Big Bear with "the gang" for our annual four-family trip next weekend (eight adults; ten kids under the age of 13; more fun than you can shake a sled at), I will be expected to bring my enormous 15-quart pot with me, and soup will be one of my culinary contributions. (I'll have to add extra turnips and parsnips, or A and I will fight over them.)

But, really, I doubt I needed to sing this soup's praises for quite this long. I'm guessing--especially if you've ever had a bowl of the "real thing"--that I had you at "matzo balls."

Chicken soup with matzo balls: A recipe in two parts

Part 1: Chicken soup

None of these amounts are set in stone; this is very much a go-your-own-way kind of recipe. But I'll give you the approximate amounts I use.

• chicken (for a big batch in my 15-quart pot, I use either two whole chickens, or one whole chicken plus as many additional parts as I can find, depending on what's on sale)
• carrots (I'll come clean and admit I've gotten lazy over the years, and so I usually just throw in a couple of handfuls of those already-peeled baby carrots, rather than peeling and chopping my own; if you go the peel-and-chop way, I'd use about a pound of carrots)
  
• onions (one large or two medium)
• turnips (one if you're not a turnip fan; more if you are)
• parsnips (see turnips)
• celery (the leafiest bunch of celery you can find; that's where the flavor is, soup-wise)
• dill (one bunch)
• parsley (one bunch)
• kosher salt (to taste)

1. Clean the chicken: Keep neck, pupik, any other hard stuff; get rid of liver, fat, kidneys and membranes. Run water through until clean.

2. My mother's method of making this soup--and she's the one who taught me--is to run cold water into the pot, bring it to a boil, then add the chicken. I, on the other hand, find that too much water makes it impossible to get a really chicken-y soup. So instead, I put in as much chicken as I have, then add water to about an inch above. (This level will rise as you add the various veggies; make sure you don't start the soup with water anywhere near the top of your pot. Mine is generally between the half and two-thirds point. It's why you need a really big pot if you want to make a lot of soup. My pot? Makes a LOT of soup.) I then bring the water to a boil with the chicken already in the pot, and skim the foam that arises. (No, I don't want to know what that foam is or where it comes from.)

3. Again, my mother and I differ here. She has you next wash the dill and parsley and tie them together before throwing them into the pot; makes it easier to remove them later on. I find that no matter what I tie them with, they always fall apart, and then I'm fishing around for a string in the soup. I just wash them and throw them in, and my soup is full of green bits, and sometimes my kids complain, but most of the time they ignore it. So my instruction would be just to wash the dill and parsley, and toss 'em in the pot.

4. Peel and chop carrots (if you need to); peel and chop turnips and parsnips. Use leaves from celery, plus some of the stalks as well, cut into pieces. Take skin off of onion, but leave whole. Add to soup.

5. Boil over very low heat (you barely want it to bubble) for several hours. Taste as you go, adding whatever is needed, usually salt.* Once it's done, and if the whole chicken-fat thing bugs you, you can let it cool overnight and then skim the fat off in the morning before adding the matzo balls. But me? Not a chance.

*OK. Sometimes, for whatever reason, the soup never gets chicken-y enough. The world will not end if you add a couple of bouillon cubes or whatever to boost it along. Not that I have ever done that. No way, no how. Except for, um, pretty much every time when I first started making my own soup; about a third of the time now that I have the proportions down a little better. If I don't have five or six hours to simmer it, though? I almost always need to add a little somethingsomething.

Part 2: Matzo balls

Get ready, folks: Your cholesterol is about to go up 30 or 40 points just by READING this recipe. Don't say I didn't warn you. Oh, and also? My mother's recipe is for half this amount, and if you have a smallish pot or make just one chicken's worth of soup, you might want to halve it, too. But I don't think I've ever made that few matzo balls; the natives would revolt if I tried. So I'm giving it to you the way I make it most of the time. Sometimes, I'll up this by 50% again!

• 8 eggs
• 10 tablespoons oil (I use canola)
• 2 teaspoons kosher salt (or just eyeball it, which is what I do)
• 1 cup warm water
  
• 2-3 cups matzo meal (very approximate; see instructions)

1. Beat eggs and oil together well.

2. Add water; mix again.

3. Add salt; stir.

4. Stir in matzo meal. How much? It's really an eye thing. What you want is to form a batter that is no longer watery, but isn't too thick.

(See this? This is too soupy. It needs more matzo meal.)







Now, this? Is perfect. It's not a leaden lump at the bottom of the bowl; it'll flow, slowly, like lava, if you tilt the bowl. But it still has a little 'shape' to it.

5. Place batter in refrigerator for several hours. It needs to chill well in order for the batter to firm up properly.

6. About half an hour to an hour before you want to serve the soup, it's time to make the matzo balls. You do this the old-fashioned way...by rolling them with your hands. To keep the sticky batter from sticking to your hands, you'll want to wet them (your hands, not the balls) frequently with cold water. Drop each matzo ball into the soup as you make it; if there's room, they will sink into the soup, then rise to the top as they cook. Oftentimes, though, there's not enough room for all of them to do this (at least not in my crowded-with-veggies-and-chicken pot!) and you'll need to occasionally stir the soup around so that the matzo balls roll over and get a chance to absorb the soup on all sides.

And that is it! (Are you happy now, Green? Me, too.)

Mandelbrot (No, not the mathematician)

In what is apparently, though inadvertently, an ethnic cookie bakeoff between me and Niksmom (are you dying to try her krumkake as much as I am?), I present to you what may well be my favorite Jewish dessert.

You call them biscotti. But we? We call them mandelbrot, which literally means almond (mandel) bread (brot). Are they the same thing? Oy, if I had the time to research that, I'd be a rich woman. (OK, not really. Unless some ridiculously rich person was just dying to know the answer, and too lazy to Google.) So instead, let me put it this way. They sure taste a lot alike.*

Anyway. The best thing about mandelbrot, from a Kosher perspective, is that they are naturally pareve. (Pareve means neutral--made with neither meat or dairy or their derivatives. Somewhat confusingly, eggs are not considered dairy when you're talking Kosher, so the fact that these have eggs does not make them dairy.)

When I say they're 'naturally' pareve, I mean that you don't have to mess with the original recipe to omit butter or milk in order to serve them with a meat meal. They are perfect just the way they are. And while I don't keep Kosher myself, I have friends who do, and I attend potlucks at a temple where Kosher laws need to be obeyed. Knowing that bringing mandelbrot will never be a problem, no matter what is being served? Priceless.

They fact that they are simply delicious? Priceless-er.

Mandelbrot (from my mother's recipe box to my own, though I'm guessing this one came from further up the family tree)

3 eggs
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup oil (use a neutral one, like canola)
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
2 1/2 cups flour
1/2 cup ground almonds (I ground the whole almonds shown here in my food processor)

Preheat oven to 350.

Mix the first four ingredients in a large bowl, starting with the sugar, then add the last two (dry) ingredients a little at a time, until wet.

Prepare two cookie sheets. (My mother's instruction is to grease them. I would be literally lost, baking-wise, without parchment paper to line my cookie sheets. Parchment can be hard to find in the grocery store--only one of the two big-name grocery stores around here carries it--and that surprises me, because whereas I used to burn stuff ALL THE TIME, I now pretty much never burn anything I'm baking. Miracle stuff, I tell you. Miracle stuff. But, hey. Do whatever you want. I'm just sayin'...if the mondel burns, don't come crying to me.)

Wet your hands with cold water, and divide the dough (it's STICKY) into four parts. Keep wetting your hands as needed as you spread the dough out into thin 'loaves,' two on each cookie sheet.

Bake the loaves at 350 for about 25 minutes. They should be, as my mother instructs, "quite golden" when you take them out.

But wait. Not so fast. Take them out one tray at a time, because you need to cut the loaves while they're still soft, and this dough hardens quickly once it's out of the oven.

Slice each loaf into strips. (For some reason, I always do them on an angle, almost like they're little London broils. I have no idea why, except that it's the way my mom did them. I think. And if not, it's because that's the way I think my mom did them.) Now bring out the other tray, and slice those loaves.

Turn each strip onto one side, then return the tray to the oven, toasting the mandelbrot for about 10 minutes.

Remove, and let cool. Eat. And eat. And eat.

These are really mild tasting, but unbearably delicious. So delicious, in fact, that even though this recipe makes probably upwards of three dozen 'brot,' I often double it. I bring them as hostess gifts to holiday parties, potlucks, etc. They're somehow just a squidge classier in feel than regular old cookies, and yet they're even easier to make, in my opinion. Win win!

*Hey, does anyone out there have a homemade biscotti recipe they'd be willing to dig out? We could probably settle this by comparing recipes, methinks. Or we could have a mandelbrot/biscotti taste test. Yeah! That's the ticket...The ticket to obesity, I mean.