Saturday afternoon, Scott and I picked up my great-aunt Belle and drove out to my cousin's house for my family's Seder dinner. It was Scott's first Seder and Belle's 90th, so she gave him a quick rundown of what expect on the way out there. The Seder dinner was moderately traditional, starting out with a shortened Haggadah gefilte fish and matzo ball soup (the addition of fresh dill made the matzo balls particularly delicious) and then ending with roasted lamb, string beans and matzo kugel.

It was the first time that Scott tasted gefilte fish, and when the verdict was that it wasn't too bad at all. Our gefilte fish was nice looking, but not quite as lovely as the stuff you see above. Thanks for the picture, C(h)ristine!

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!

• Since flour, yeast and baking powder are all outlawed during Passover, making palatable desserts can be something of a challenge. Check out these three recipes from cookbook author Aliza Green that will make the end of your Seder as tasty as the beginning.
  
• Philadelphia City Council is considering legislation that would require that all fast food outlets post the calorie information for their food right on the menu.
  
• Chicken salad started as a way to use up leftovers from the Sunday roaster and became something that represented elegance and continental style. Many argue about the best way to make it, but in the end it comes down to your personal choice.
  
• The challenges of making your kitchen and home kosher for the 10-day Passover holiday.
  
• A tasty, quick and kosher recipe from Suzie Fishbein's Passover by Design cookbook.
  
• Chinatown's favorite Vietnam Restaurant expands into West Philadelphia with Vietnam Cafe.

Yesterday, I asked you guys for some help with a savory matzo kugel (thanks to all who commented and pointed me in the direction of recipes, I do appreciate the help). I want to return the favor by offering one of my very favorite Passover recipes, for charoset. Charoset appears on the Passover menu in order to represent the mortar that the Jews used to build structures during their enslavement.

However dark and unappealing the inspirational source, the resulting dish is delicious. It is a combination of chopped apples, almonds, walnuts, honey, spices and a little wine (or grape juice). You can make a little or a lot, and the leftovers are wonderful with some greek yogurt for breakfast or over a bed of baby greens for lunch. Check out my recipe after the jump, but know that you can adapt it to your own tastes (tossing a handful of raisins in is never a bad idea).

Whatever dessert you end up having for Passover, please avoid those macaroons in the can. At the Passover Seder, we traditionally ask 4 questions. I propose adding a 5th question: Why on all other nights do we eat baked goods that come in bags, boxes, or direct from the oven and on this night we eat baked goods from a can?

Even moving past canned macaroons, I'm not typically a big fan of Passover desserts. These kosher for Passover chocolate cupcakes with chocolate cream cheese frosting, however, are so tasty that I could eat them year round. One of my friends even told me it was the best cupcake she had ever had!

They are extremely rich - almost like fudge - so if you have mini cupcake wrappers, you might consider using those instead of normal-sized ones. You could also make the cupcake recipe in cake format.

The recipe can be found on Cupcake Project.

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!

Pollsters are now looking at how consumer behavior, including eating, affects voter choice. Dr. Pepper is for Republicans, Sprite is for Democrats. Clinton supporters snack on Fig Newtons, McCain fans on stuffed-crust pizza. While some results are weird, others are predictable - Whole Foods is a dead giveaway of liberal orientation.

Cookbook author Susie Fishbein is providing observant Jews with gourmet Passover recipes, including turmeric, tomato and spinach matzoh balls.

**#!*@! souffle! *$*#*!* emulsification! Chefs like to curse in the kitchen. Really.

Eric Asimov talks kosher wine - you don't have to be Jewish to like them.

The Minimalist does Hangtown Fry - eggs, bacon and...oysters.

Cakes masquerading as muffins make breakfast less guilty. Includes a recipe for spicy ginger muffins with currants and toasted pecans.

Food, or lack thereof, in Holocaust concentrations camps is still a taboo subject for survivors, writes Jewish cooking maven Joan Nathan.

Cindy McCain shares her favorite family recipes. Except they were ripped off from the Food Network. A rogue intern is apparently to blame.

This year's Boston Marathon falls in the middle of the Jewish holiday of Passover, where observant Jews remember their ancestor's flight from enslavement in Egypt by not eating leavened foods. "Leavened" food products include bread, pasta, cookies, etc. - runners' favorite carb-loading meals. Can you really run 26.2 miles fueled with nothing but matzoh?

MSNBC has an interesting story about observant Jewish runners and their personal decisions about whether or not to keep kosher during the marathon. One Boston-area rabbi, who describes running as a "spiritual quest," plans to fuel up on potatoes and matzoh. Another runner plans to Passover rules with dry oatmeal on the morning of the race,

Dry oatmeal? I'd rather have matzoh brei, a childhood Passover specialty of eggy fried matzoh, which can be served savory with cheese and veggies, or sweet (my favorite) with maple syrup.

For those of you out there who are beginning to think about getting your kitchens and pantries ready for Passover, be forewarned that you're going to have fewer Manischewitz products to choose from than you have in past years. The company has been in the process of putting a new oven in their one and only baking facility in Newark, NJ and, unfortunately, there were some engineering delays that made them miss the Passover baking window.

The company officials debated whether to stop producing some products altogether for the time being or just make less of them. The decided to temporarily stop production on a few of the less popular matzo products, including Passover Thin Tea Matzo, Yolk Free Egg Matzo, White Grape Matzo, Concord Grape Matzo, Spelt Matzo (unfortunate for observant Jews with wheat allergies) and the beloved cracker-sized Tam Tams.

So, for the Pesach-observant Slashfood readers, you might want to scour the shelves for any boxes of Tam Tams. Because when they're gone, there won't be anymore out there until the end of April.

[via City Room]

• A recipe for a traditional Easter Meringue.
• Cooking lessons from Rome.
• Maine tomatoes are red, ripe, and ready.
• A little history on Chinese-Indian cuisine.
• Which matzo is the best?
• Be careful when handling your Easter chicks.
• A sampling of winters-end red wines you might have not tried yet.
• This week's recipes: Baked Chicken Legs with Tomatoes, Haroset with Dates, Pasta and Chickpea Soup, Passover Fritters, and Ricotta Cheesecake.

Passover begins on Monday at sundown, and Martha Stewart has planned four menus in celebration - a Traditional Seder Dinner, Spring Celebration, Passover Dessert Buffet, and a Passover Brunch.

Even if you aren't planning to prepare kosher food or host a Passover feast yourself, the site is worth checking out anyways as there are a number of absolutely delicious-sounding meal ideas (complete with some pretty fabulous photos) which you could easily incorporate into your own menu planning.

Just a small sampling of her recipes include Gefilte Fish with Fresh Beet Horseradish, (as pictured, above), Grilled Asparagus with Caramelized Shallot Vinaigrette, Matzo Ball Soup, Profiteroles with Caramelized Bananas, and Passion Fruit Mimosas. You can view the full menus via the link below.

(photo credit: MarthaStewart.com, used with permission)

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!

The start of Hanukah is just under two weeks away and there are a lot of food traditions associated with it, as there are with most Jewish holidays. Any holiday that has a food tradition is worth taking note of as far as we're concerned, whether it is one you usually celebrate or not, if for no other reason than to expose yourself to some new food. In the case of A Treasury of Jewish Holiday Baking, the foods probably aren't all that "new" to most of us, but that only makes learning the history behind the recipes more interesting. The author discusses dietary laws, the symbolism of particular foods and how Jewish cooking has been influenced by other cultures. The recipes include NY Style Water Bagels, Traditional Friday Night Challah, Frozen Cheesecake and My Trademark, Most Requested, Absolutely Magnificent Caramel Matzoh Crunch. The instructions, even for the most complex breads and pastries, are easy enough for the the "baking challenged" to follow without problems

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?