Passover Seder 2011: A Pictorial(ish)

Oh my goodness, has it been a year already? Yes, yes it has!

Just one year ago I was invited to spend the evening with friends and hosts Nancy (from Fun Playing With Food) and her husband Bob as they shared their home, their traditions, and their food during last year's Passover holiday. I was tickled once again to receive an invitation this year to their Passover festivities. Because Passover wasn't on time again this year (because according to Nancy, the holidays are always early or late, they are never on time), the meal fell closer to the end of April this year instead of last year when it was in March.

As with last year's entry, I didn't want to belabor the dishes I had already described so thoroughly the first year I blogged about them (Part 1 Part 2), so today's post will be mostly a pictorial of the meal from beginning to end, with notes interjected from time to time to bring up any interesting facets of the meal. This past Tuesday night, we all gathered in Nancy's kitchen around 6:30 PM to put the final preparations together for the Seder. Some of us chopped, some of us washed, and some of us opened bottles of wine to let them breathe and photographed others' activities (that'd be me).

Diane prepping a delicious fennel, lemon, and pistachio salad.

Bob and Edsel prepping the parsley leaves for the Seder ceremony.

In addition to traditional Kosher for Passover wine, we had lots of regular wine on hand, too.

It is important to begin the Seder ceremony before sundown. Here, Nancy was lighting the candles and singing the first prayer from the Haggadah.

The traditional Seder plate with roasted egg, roasted shank bone, charosis/charoset, two bitter herbs (onion and horseradish), and fresh parsley. Each played a symbolic role in the Seder.

This was a special matzoh flown in from Israel, Shmurah Matzoh. In accordance with tradition, each unleavened wafer was cooked precisely eighteen seconds, not a second more or less.

Nancy's homemade charosis and Bob's homemade horseradish from his garden. I think these two flavors alone are what make me yearn to return year after year.

As part of the Seder tradition, Hillel's Sandwich (Korech/Koreich) was made from two pieces of broken matzoh that had been stuffed with charosis and one of the bitter herbs, either raw onion or horseradish.

Steamed eggs from Aaron Miller's farm.

At the end of the first half of the ceremony, after we've eaten the parsley dipped in salted water, the matzoh, the bitter herbs, and Hillel's Sandwich, we finished by eating one of the steamed eggs that has been drizzled with some of the salted water.

Nancy's homemade gefilte fish made with whitefish, pike, and carp; a special grind that she gets from Mr. Brisket in Cleveland Heights. As odd as it seems, pairing this with the spicy horseradish makes the perfect complement.

Shaved fennel salad with lemon zest and pistachios and dressed in a simple olive oil and lemon juice vinaigrette. So simple and so delicious!

Here was my first course plate. You have to be careful not to fill up too early because there are three more courses coming! And trust me, it's hard because everything was so delicious.

This was our second course: Nancy's homemade matzoh ball soup. If I were sick, this would be exactly what the doctor would order to make me feel better. After the soup, we took a breather to clear the plates and make more room in our stomachs.

Sweet farfel kugel with apricots and Vietnamese cinnamon from Heather's Heat and Flavor. While I always love this dish, everyone agreed that this year's version was simply outstanding. I was even fortunate enough to bring a square home with me for breakfast the next day.

This was a carrot and prune tzimmes with shredded shortribs (also known as flanken). While this was the first time I had eaten a tzimmes for Passover, I remember eating Linda Griffith's amazing version at the last Rosh Hashanah meal I attended. It was amazing to me to see the range of this one dish.

Along with the sweet farfel kugel, Nancy and Bob always serve up a slightly spicy potato kugel as well. While the farfel kugel reminds me of a bread pudding, the potato kugel is a wholly different beast and really was its own thing in term of texture. Absolutely delicious though.

Of course, having a Seder meal at Nancy's house meant that the final savory course of the meal would contain brisket, this particular one from Aaron Miller's farm from grass-fed cows. She also served up a contrasting brisket that had been finished on corn from a different purveyor. It was a treat to get to try and contrast the two styles to see which we liked better. It really fell 50/50 among the guests. Both, however, were tender, juicy, and quite flavorful.

Here was a shot of the third course of tonight's Seder meal, all the usual suspects: brisket with onions, sweet farfel kugel, spicy potato kugel, and carrot and prune tzimmes.

After cleaning off the plates from the savory courses, desserts began making their way to the table. This was a mint cordial, unwrapped. Also available were my major weakness, cherry cordials. I had one of each.

Just like last year, David Leibowitz's chocolate flourless cake, also known as the Idiot-Proof cake, made an appearance.

My final taste of the evening was a slice of the ultra-dense flourless chocolate cake with some of Nancy's homemade creme anglaise. Talk about a rich and decadent way to end an amazing meal!

What had begun as a group of very hungry diners at 6:30 PM had morphed over the next four hours of ceremony, conversation, laughing, and eating into ten very satisfied, tired, and full eaters. With the meal at its conclusion, Nancy finished the Seder by reading the last of the incantations and blessings from the Haggadah. We gathered our coats and leftovers and headed out into the stormy, wet evening. I, for one, never get tired of spending so much time on a single meal. Coming from a non-Jewish household, and even though I'm not particularly religious as an adult, I love being able to see this wonderful culture that seemed so foreign to my childhood.

Even more importantly, I know that whatever Nancy and Bob prepare will be at its peak of flavor. I am so grateful to them both for exposing me to this wonderful alternative to the Christian holiday of Easter (with which I am much more intimately acquainted). While I do admit that at the first Seder I ever attended, there were some items about which I was fairly skeptical (gefilte fish downright scared the crap out of me ... have you ever seen those jars in the Jewish section of the supermarket?), I learned to step outside of my comfort zone and discover a world of new flavors that I now find quite delicious and look forward to every year.

For those celebrating Passover (it is actually a week long holiday), I wish you a very happy and healthy celebration. For those of my gentle readers out there celebrating the Christian holiday of Easter, I wish all of you a happy and healthy holiday, too. As for everybody else, have a great weekend and enjoy it with family and friends sharing good food and great conversation. It's really what makes life so enjoyable.

Passover Seder 2010: A Pictorial

I had the honor and privilege of spending yet another evening at Nancy and Bob's house celebrating this year's Passover Seder with my wonderful friends. Since I wrote at length about my Passover experience last year in a two-part entry, I thought I would pay homage to Nancy and Bob's incredible commitment to providing their guests with an amazing and delicious meal without letting too many words get in the way. If you want to read in-depth descriptions of the food, I encourage you to check out last year's entries. This year, I'm feeling that simpler may be better; there just isn't a need to rehash. Once Nancy has a chance to recover and post a blog entry about her experience, I'll post a link here so that you can get multiple perspectives on this one incredible meal.

Nancy and Bob's Passover Seder table.

Hot peppers from Bob's garden.

Steamed eggs. Creamy and delicious.

Gefilte fish with carrots, flat leaf parsley and Bob's homemade horseradish.

Nancy's homemade Gefilte fish. Words simply fail.

Matzah, Elijah's Cup, Miriam's Cup.

Charosis: Local apples, local honey, Vietnamese cinnamon ... need I say more?

Ceremonial Seder plate.

Haggadah.

Ceremony is starting. Lighting the candles.

Matzah ball soup made with a double stock. Amazing as always.

Light and fluffy even without any leavening.

Roasted cauliflower with garlic.

Sweet apricot matzah farfel with more Vietnamese cinnamon.

Spicy potato kugel made by Bob.

Braised beef brisket with caramelized onions.

My dinner plate. Tremendous flavors!

Homemade flourless chocolate galette and coconut macaroons.

Creme Anglaise.

Final bite of the meal ... dessert.

Italian Sweets at Ninni's Bakery

Just as with Kiflis Bakery in Cuyahoga Falls, I have driven by Ninni's Bakery on East Tallmadge Avenue in Akron hundreds, if not thousands, of times in my life. I don't know why it didn't occur to me to stop in and check them out, but I never did. It wasn't until I found a write-up of the bakery in Laura Taxel's newest edition of Cleveland Ethnic Eats (my write-up of her book is here), that I finally decided to stop in one Saturday and check out what they had to offer.

Between the colors and the marquee, the exterior pretty much says "Italian Bakery":


But it's not until you walk in and see shelf after shelf of freshly made sweet and savory items that you really begin to understand the commitment that the owners put into making these treats available to their customers. I talked with one of the owners and he mentioned that everything is made from scratch and right there on the premises. Ninni's offers such variety, even when talking about a single concept. Ninni's doesn't just offer an Italian style macaroon. They offer six or seven. And many of the treats come in a small size or a large size, so you can fit the treats to the size of your appetite.

While there are a couple of small tables inside the store where you could sit and eat, I felt I would be a little too conspicuous sitting there, photographing and dissecting everything I had bought just moments before. Seeing as it was a gorgeous 75 degree Fahrenheit day, I decided to seek out a park bench to carry out my tasting. I grabbed my boxed up treats from Ninni's and headed out to The Chuckery area of the Cascade Valley Metro Park, just about a ten minute drive from the store. Here I managed to locate the picnic area which was built right next to a lovely stream.

This served as the backdrop for what was to come:


With babbling brook to my backside, I selected a picnic table that had a decent amount of light, sat down, and prepared to get started. Here is a photo of the snacks I brought with me:


First up is the sfogliatelle:


What I sort of already knew and what was definitely confirmed in my experience today is that Italians like contrasts in their foods. Crunchy with tender. Sweet with savory. You get the picture. The exterior of this pastry was very crunchy, almost like crisp phyllo dough. But once you bit into the pastry, it was wonderfully tender and delicious. Studded with the occasional dried fruit, the texture was much like a very moist cake, but with a larger hole structure. The only problem I had with the sfogliatelle was that by the time I was done eating it, I was covered in powdered sugar.

Next up, the Italian powerhouse of pastries, the cannoli:


The shell was perfectly fried; not a smidgen of grease could be found on any of the paper touching it. The filling was a gently sweetened Ricotta cheese that had the occasional chocolate morsel strewn throughout. Once filled, the cannoli were dipped in colored dessicated coconut. This was a wonderfully sweet treat. The shell only broke where you bit into it, thus avoiding the problem of having to hold together a crumbling pastry shell. The little bits of chocolate were nice, and didn't overpower the rest of the flavors. Overall, this was a nice pastry.

Next up, a shot of the homemade torroni:


This was amazing! The mixture of nuts and nougat was so perfectly balanced. You can really taste the hazelnuts, pistachios, and almonds with each bite. The top and bottom of the torroni is actually layered with edible rice paper so that once set, it can be cut and handled with ease. This wasn't a particularly sweet treat, and this may be why I liked it so much. I can totally see myself eating one of these in place of a biscotti with my cappuccino.

Finally, I decided to do a little layout of the various cookies that I had purchased from Ninni's. Quite the impressive spread, if I do say so myself:


I'll go through each one individually. First up, the pignoli macaroon:


All of the macaroons had an almond base to them (since almond flour is used as part of all of the recipes). The pignoli (or pine nut) macaroon was nice because it balanced a more savory item with the sweetness of the underlying macaroon. The pine nuts also added a nice crunch to the creaminess of the cookie. Of all the macaroons, this was probably my favorite.

Next up, the coconut macaroon:


I was worried that the coconut might get lost in the big almond flavor of this cookie. And while the coconut was subtle, you could definitely still taste it. I think by putting the coconut on the outside of the macaroon was a smart move. Not only does it visually identify what kind of cookie it is, the coconut acquires additional flavor by toasting in the oven during baking.

Next up is a pistachio macaroon:


Well, sort of. The bottom part of the cookie is the pistachio macaroon part. The top layer is a simple butter cookie. And while there were no discernible pistachios in the macaroon portion, it had a lovely nutty flavor that reminded me of sitting down with a bowl of freshly shelled pistachios and eating a handful. The butter cookie on top actually worked very well to add another level of dimension to the cookie.

The last macaroon that I tried was the almond macaroon:


This is the only one that I didn't care for all that much. Besides there being almond flour in the base of the cookie base, and slivered almonds on top, this cookie had an over-the-top, almost too much, almond flavor that could've only come from the addition of an almond extract. I don't have a problem with the use of good quality extracts in baking, per se, but this cookie just had too much of it. I literally had to take a break after eating this cookie for about ten minutes because I could taste nothing else except almond. If you like almond flavored sweets, you'll love this. Me? Not so much.

The final cookie I decided to try wasn't a macaroon. It was their fig bar:


This was more of a shortbread style cookie with a fig filling. The fig filling was especially good, tasting of fresh figs and lemon. The slight acidity in the filling worked well against the butteriness of the surrounding cookie. If Fig Newtons tasted like this, I'd be eating them all the time.

After I finished my tasting, I sat there at my picnic bench watching the stream meander along in order to collect my thoughts. While I had my favorites and my not-so-favorites, I want to stress that everything was very good. What amazed me, too, is how FRESH everything tasted. The cookies simply melted in your mouth and the pastries tasted as if they had been made right before I walked into the store. How Ninni's can make such a vast array of cookies, pastries, and breads every day is a thought that even I have a hard time comprehending. I know that while some items will stand up to being frozen and thawed better than others, my more or less random selection method employed today didn't manage to find anything I could identify as such.

I am pleased to have an Italian bakery in Akron that has such high quality and delicious offerings. I'm kicking myself for not checking it out sooner than I did, but I guess I can now tell you, gentle reader, to check them out for yourself. Those with a sweet tooth in your life will thank you.