Passover starts Saturday night, the holiday during which Jews give up all leavened products for a period of 7 or 8 days. Instead, we eat matzo. Stacks and stacks of matzo. However, until I saw this picture, I never really thought about how beautiful such a basic food item could be. Thanks Ohad*, for the lovely image!

Passover, the holiday that lasts for a week and requires that observant Jews give up any leavened bread/grain product for the duration, starts this Saturday. My extended family isn't particularly observant, so while we're having a Seder dinner (the traditional Passover meal that includes a lengthy service called the Haggadah) we're cutting the Haggadah section of the meal down to a manageable five minutes.

The one place where we aren't breaking from tradition is that the actual meal will be Kosher, with no leavened dishes on the table. For the first time ever, I've been assigned a dish to bring (I guess my cousins figure that since I'm nearly 29, I can handle it). They asked me to bring a savory matzo kugel (pudding). I've made noodles kugels and sweet matzo kugels in the past, but I've never made exactly the thing that I've been asked to create.

So Slashfood readers, I need your help. Point me in the direction of your favorite savory matzo kugel recipes! If you have a family recipe that you are willing to share, pop it into the comments section. My family and I thank you!

As a veteran of many a barbeque competition, I've seen all kinds of weird cookers ranging from offset smokers made from repurposed propane tanks to contraptions cobbled together from stacks of 50-gallon drums. But I've never seen anything like the device pictured here.

This converted school bus has never seen pound one of pork, largely because it was designed to bake matzos for Passover. It's the invention of Rabbi Aaron Winternitz, leader of Congregation Mivtzar Hatorah in Spring Valley, N.Y. The inside of the bus is one gigantic oven, which Rabbi Winternitz had used to churn out 100 pounds of matzos for each of the past three Passovers.

The rabbi may not get to bake matzos this year because his makeshift bakery was shut down by a local building inspector after a neighbor complained of smoke late last Friday night. If Winternitz provides engineer's plans and switches from using gas to wood he may just be able to fire his contraption up in time for Passover. As any 'cuemaster worth his grease-stained overalls will tell you, wood's the way to go. Gas oven, feh!

My real Jewish friends are off tonight having a "Break Passover" party, a little "celebration" where they're going to indulge in all those foods they couldn't eat for eight days - yeasted breads, cakes, pretty much anything that contains wheat, all of which were replaced during the Passover holiday with matzo.

Since the holiday is over, there might be a lot of leftover matzo. Sure, eating it at three meals for eight days, one might get sick of the hard, cracker-like flatbread, but no one ever gets sick of matzo ball soup. How could they? Matzo ball soup doesn't cause sickness, it cures it. It's known as Jewish penicillin, great for anytime of the year.

Looking for a tasty treat to make during Passover? Look no further than David Lebovitz's blog. The blogosphere's favorite chocolatier has posted an easy and delicious-looking recipe for Caramelized Matzoh Crunch topped with - what else - chocolate. Even if you don't normally celebrate Passover, you have surely noticed the influx of crispy matzoh in your local grocery store. It makes an excellent crispy base for these treats, which are topped with a simple toffee layer and coated in melted chocolate and slivered almonds. David offers several potential variations with his recipe, if dark chocolate and almonds aren't your favorite. White chocolate and pistachios, anyone?

We already know that there are a lot of "commandments" that govern the Jewish holiday of Passover, which will be starting tomorrow evening. Many of are strict dietary rules. The first two nights of Passover are the most important because Jews hold a religious service in their homes with friends and family around the dinner table called the Seder. The Seder is a time when the Passover story is told from a book called the haggadah, and explains why the holiday even exists.

The word "seder" means "order," indicating that there is an "order" in which 15 things, or steps, take place. If you didn't figure it out by now, the Seder dinner can take a very long time. There are very detailed steps that include blessings, hand washings, asking of questions and recitals of answers, and storytelling.

With the restriction on leavened bread and most grains during the eight days of passover, foods like toast and cereals won't do for breakfast. Matzo brei is basically a matzo and egg scramble, for which Stefania already gave us a basic recipe. However, matzoh brei can get as interesting as any vegetable-filled omelette, especially now withe farmers' markets offering spring produce.

For two servings, break one sheet of matzo into bite size pieces and soak in hot water to soften them. Saute chopped vegetables of your choosing in a small amount of olive oil  – I used scallions, yellow onions, tomatoes, bell peppers, and chopped garlic. Lightly beat four eggs, stir the softened matzo pieces into the eggs, then add to the vegetables in the pan.

Some people leave the egg/matzo mixture in the pan over a low heat to set like a frittata or an omelette. However, I prefer to scramble everything together – but I think that’s less of a taste preference and more of my hyperactive inability to leave anything to cook on its own.

At the very end, I added avocadoes, just so they would maintain their cool creaminess (avocadoes can become bitter when cooked).

Let's talk about Passover.

First off, technically, I'm not Jewish. However, you might as well call me Sarah J. Gimstein. I spent much of my childhood in a suburb that had a fairly big Jewish population, so most of my friends were Jewish. While my own mother never made matzo ball soup for me at home, I certainly got my fair share of matzo (oh, how I loved matzo smeared with butter) and latkes at friends' houses after school and on the weekends. And holidays? I knew all about the holidays when I would enviously wonder what my Jewish friends were doing on "their" holidays, absent from school. Lucky!