Kevin's Watch

Chick-Fil-A

Chicken nuggets and mac & cheese.
Iced vanilla coffee.

Leftovers for lunch tomorrow.

As a classified substitute for two school districts who doesn't get leave or benefits, I was sad to not support local establishments during The Great American Take-out event yesterday. I decided to make a low carb-ish panang tofu over daikon rice to try to mimic one of my favorite Thai meals. I made the panang, while SD did the daikon rice.

It wasn't as good as Bai Tong's, but it was acceptable.


Panang tofu simmering away


Daikon rice


A serving of panang over the "rice"

First night of Passover tonight. It's only the three of us, due to Stay Home, Stay Safe. So, we'll have planned overs to last the entire holiday.

Prior to seder itself:
Homemade chopped liver with tam tams

Seder service:
Wine
Romaine lettuce and salt water
Shmura matzah
White horseradish
Homemade Sefardic charoset

Seder meal:
Eggs in salt water
Gefilte fish with white horseradish
Homemade Matzah ball soup
Good Eats Roast Turkey (it's been dry brining since Saturday)
Homemade gravy (I hope. Depends on how well a roux will work with cake meal)
Homemade garlic mashed potatoes
Asparagus

After seder sweet:
Homemade Matzah Caramel Crunch

Menolly wrote: Homemade Matzah Caramel Crunch

Do you have a favorite recipe? I usually gravitate towards the savory where matzohs are concerned, but I want to try my hand at this one this year.

OK. Let's see if this will work...


I hope you can read my well loved and stained recipe.

As noted on the recipe, I usually make a half sheet pan's worth, so I double the recipe. Yes, that means I use a full pound of butter. But for one, the recipe as written will work well.

Not noted above is some additional tweaking:

I use vanilla extract I make in my Instant Pot with potato vodka. This meets my own weird standard for keeping Pesach. Be sure to take the boiling caramel off the heat before adding the vanilla extract. The caramel tends to foam up a little when added.

This year I didn't see kosher for Passover white chocolate chips, so I used more of the chocolate chips. In fact, for the half sheet pan's worth, I used two 12 oz. bags of chocolate chips.

Since I didn't have the white chocolate to decorate the top, while I still put the nuts to cook in the caramel and baked it all together in the oven, I added additional sliced almonds on top, along with the finishing touch of kosher salt.

If you make this, I hope you enjoy!


Matzah Caramel Crunch uncut.


The first bar sliced to show the layers.


An individual treat.

I can't emphasize enough how good this stuff is.

That looks amazing - thanks for sharing your recipe.

I do not have an oven, so I will be forced to improvise a bit. I think I can make it work. It may be more along the line of matzoh toffee with a chocolate coating.

If I survive this current disaster with my finances somewhat intact, the first thing I'm going to buy is a toaster oven.

In the meantime, if you have access to a cardboard box (paper case, wine case), foil, a couple coat hangers and pie tins, and have an outdoor place suitable for grilling, consider making a box oven.

Will a solar oven reach 350, SD?

My landlord would freak out if I tried that - terrified of fire. (With good reason - a previous tenant nearly burned the place down.)

I think I can make it work if I add the matzoh pieces when the butter/sugar mix starts to caramelize, then melt the chocolate over the top after it cools.

Won't be quite the same, but it's more incentive to buy a toaster oven so I can do it the proper way next year.

Do let us know how it comes out!

So, here's tonight's dinner plate, seder redux.


Turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy made from drippings with a roux of butter and matzah cake meal, sefardic charoset, and steamed asparagus.

Here are the individual components of the seder meal, other than the matzah caramel crunch shown above. I forgot to get a photo of my matzah ball soup.


Homemade chopped liver and Tam Tams


Good Eats Roast Turkey. Yes, the turkey was cooked to safe temperature per my Thermoscan. If one waits until the pop up guage comes up, the bird would have been dried out and overcooked.


Sefardic charoset, which consists of Craisins, dates, and dried apricots simmered in wine with ground cinnamon and cloves. Finished with chopped sliced almonds which were lightly toasted. An optional touch is to add a splash of orange blossom water after it is all mixed together, but I didn't want to send SD all over town looking for it. Turns out he says that is easily found in the mixer section at grocery stores. Who knew?

We enjoyed the charoset in place of cranberry sauce, as well as during the reading of the Haggadah. So, next year I'll know to ask for the orange blossom water, if I don't shop it up myself.

After dinner last night, Dam-sel said to me, "When you cook, you're dangerous." Said because the past two dinners were thoroughly enjoyed, and not low carb in the slightest.

Tonight is going to be matzah ball soup with some turkey pieces added and salad. I'll try to remember to snap a photo this time.

Menolly wrote:Do let us know how it comes out!

Will do! I don't currently have enough sugar to attempt it, and grocery store lines are too long to brave for one ingredient - I acquired both matzohs and eggs last week, and was hoping to avoid shopping for a couple of weeks - so I may have to make it a little late. Finding Passover-compliant chocolate would have been an iffy mission anyway - it looks like I'd be better off ordering online, but it still won't arrive on time.

Maybe I should just wait until next year, but it looks so good.

Even though it's Passover, tonight's dinner was CORN. But, acceptable CORN for Pesach, as I mean Clean Out (the) Refrigerator Night. We did matzah ball soup, salad, and chopped liver with Tam Tams.
And I finally remembered to photograph my matzah ball soup!


Since I made my matzah ball soup with homemade Instant Pot bone broth, it gelatinized when I refrigerated it. This is straight in to the pot from the storage container.


Extremely low heat to start melting the gelatin.


There we go.
It's soup!


Dinner tonight:
Matzah ball soup
Tossed salad
Homemade chopped liver with Tam Tams


A serving of soup.


Tonight's Passover dessert, and low carb-ish to boot!
Chocolate egg cream made with kosher for Passover sugar-free U-bet chocolate syrup, heavy cream, and seltzer.

Since there was (were?) only three of us at our seder, the three round shmura matzah we received via Chabad of Kirkland was more than enough. The half of the middle matzah which is broken for the afikomen was more than enough to see us through the seder.

Seeing the two rounds, I decided they would be perfect as two pizzas for the three of us for dinner.


The two shmura matzah rounds.


Brushed with pizza sauce.


The cheeses.


The toppings before baking.


The two cooked pies.


The cooked pies cut.


A slice.
We each had four.


It came out really well.

No photos tonight...

Tonight's Easter dinner was Coca-Cola glazed ham, mashed potato pancakes (dredged in matzah meal for crunchiness), and steamed broccoli.

Tonight's Pesadik dinner was homemade matzah brei. I prefer scrambled rather than pancake style.


I don't soak my matzah in water and then squeeze it. Instead, I treat it the same as I treat matzah boards for matzah pizza, i.e., I pass the whole board quickly under running cold tap water, let the excess water drip off, and then break it in to my seasoned scrambled raw eggs. The matzah then gets tossed with the egg mixture, and sits like that for about 7 to 10 minutes.


Caramelized onions are tossed with the matzah and egg mixture, and then put in to schmaltz or ghee and olive oil in the pan to fry.


Saute until browned to one's liking. One can let it sit on one side, and then flip the entire thing over to make it pancake style, or occasionally toss it to make it scrambled, which I prefer.


Here is a serving, topped with sugar free Apple sauce.

I prefer scrambled too! Have you tried using garlic-infused olive oil? It works great with egg & onion matzohs. (Which I make off-season because they aren't usually Passover-friendly.)

I haven't, Sorus. Usually because I don't plan far enough ahead to infuse the olive oil. But it sounds like an excellent option!