Hamine Eggs, for Grandma Olga

We had been planning since last Passover to post this recipe around now, reasoning that you'd be most interested in Seder recipe ideas right before the big day. Now that it's finally posting time, we want to dedicate this post to Hannah's Grandma Olga, an amazing cook and a fabulous lady who passed away earlier this month. While she never used the internet and thus never read the blog, she has been such an inspiration for our work: Grandma Olga was all about making things from scratch with the best produce she could find, and her recipes are behind many of our posts, like date charoset, mjeddra and fried eggplant. We feel so lucky to have inherited her recipe journal, a 1964 date book packed with her own handwritten recipes, recipe cards from relatives, recipes clipped from the newspaper, recipes from the back of a Quaker Oats box. There is no time of the year I associate with Grandma Olga more so than Passover, when she would to make jars of her famous date charoset for all the households in our family, lemony-minty hamud that perfumed the whole house, and perfectly-tanned hamine eggs. So Grandma Olga, this one's for you.

Hard-boiled eggs are a traditional fixture on the Passover Seder plate. The Syrian-Jewish version, hamine eggs, involves slowly cooking the eggs overnight with onion skins and coffee grounds, which turns the flesh a beautiful tan color. Last year, we started to make hamine eggs for Passover and realized that while we had plenty of onion skins, the tiny bag of 2-year-old coffee in the freezer had vanished. We did, however, have a box of lapsang souchong tea bags and decided to try them instead. Lapsang souchong is a smoked black tea with an amazing flavor, and our finished eggs were deliciously rich and smoky. Throw these on your Seder plate and everyone will be hooked!

This does take a while, but nearly all of the time is inactive and you can either do this overnight or try it in a Crock-Pot if you don't feel like being confined to your house for 6-8 hours.

12 eggs
Skins from 3-5 onions
10 Lapsang Souchong tea bags
1 teaspoon canola oil

Place eggs in a large saucepan and cover with cold water. Add the onion skins, tea bags and oil and bring to a boil, then reduce heat to very low. Simmer, partially covered, for 6-8 hours. Any cracks in the eggshells will create beautiful dark veins on the egg whites. Drain the eggs, discard the tea bags and onion skins, and peel the eggs once they've cooled.

Triple Almond Cookies

Over the summer we got pretty obsessed with these cookies. While we definitely don't follow the Primal Blueprint diet, we were intrigued by the idea of cookies with no flour and no sugar. So we made them no less than twenty times, tried out numerous variations, and got the thumbs-up from both gluten-free friends and consumers of regular cookies before we decided it was time to blog our version. We were going to wait until Passover, but these cookies are too good to be relegated to the "Passover dessert" category (keep them in mind when that time of year rolls around, though). These cookies have three almond sources--almond meal, slivered almonds and almond extract--with maple and warm spices singing backup. They're addictive and macaroon-like and disappear VERY quickly!

We tried both almond flour and almond meal and have found that we like almond meal better (it's a little coarser, so the texture is more complex). East Bay readers, you can get almond meal in the refrigerated section in the bulk aisle at the Berkeley Bowl, in the case with the pasta dough.

Modified from This Primal Life

1 and 1/4 cups almond meal
1/2 cup slivered almonds
1/8 teaspoon baking soda
1/8 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon cardamom
5 tablespoons melted unsalted butter (or coconut oil!)
3 tablespoons maple syrup
2 teaspoons almond extract

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. In a large bowl, combine almond meal, slivered almonds, baking soda, salt, cinnamon and cardamom. Mix together melted butter, maple syrup and almond extract and add to the dry ingredients, stirring well to combine. Drop tablespoonfuls of dough onto a parchment-lined cookie sheet. Bake on the top rack of your oven for 10 minutes, until the bottoms start to brown, and then transfer to a wire rack--they may not seem done when they come out, but they will firm as they cool and develop an amazing chewy texture. Let sit for 15-20 minutes before you EAT. THEM. ALL.

Date and Ginger Charoset

Another Passover, another bowl of apple-based charoset? Not around here! Syrian charoset is a sweet, gorgeous paste of dates and wine, and we've spiced up Hannah's grandma's recipe with a little ginger juice. If you have some left after your Seder (not likely!), it's fantastic for breakfast, either slathered on matzah with whipped cream cheese or stirred into a bowl of yogurt.

Hope you all have an awesome holiday, and just a reminder: kale is kosher for Passover!

1 lb dates, pitted
1-inch hunk of ginger
2 and 1/2 tablespoons of sweet red wine (Manischewitz Concord Grape being the gold standard)
3/4 teaspoon cinnamon
2 tablespoons chopped walnuts (optional)

Place the dates in a saucepan with water to cover, bring to a boil, and simmer until dates are soft, about 30 minutes. Meanwhile, grate the ginger and squeeze over a bowl to extract the juice; discard the pulp. Drain the dates, transfer to a food processor, and add the ginger juice, wine and cinnamon and process until very smooth. (If you're finicky and/or retired, you can also push it through a strainer to remove any fibrous bits of date skin). Top with chopped walnuts and serve.

Carob-Coconut Fudge

Tu B'Shevat is upon us, which in our household means: bring on the carob! (Eh, who are we kidding--every day is bring on the carob day around here). This easy, addictive fudge also incorporates two other things that grow on trees (and are thus suitable celebratory food for this holiday): almonds, another traditional Tu B'Shevat food, and shredded coconut.

The way we've made it, this fudge has a lot of texture. If you want a smoother fudge, you could pulse the coconut in a food processor to achieve a finer consistency.

1/2 cup agave nectar
3/4 cup almond butter
1/2 cup carob powder
2 cups shredded unsweetened coconut

optional:
1/2 cup chopped almonds
1/2 cup carob chips (or chocolate chips)

In a large mixing bowl, combine the carob powder and shredded coconut and mix well. Add in the almond butter, agave nectar and optional goodies and stir well to combine. Press the mixture into a pie pan or glass baking dish, flattening to about an inch. Cover and freeze until thoroughly chilled, then cut into squares or use cookie cutters for whatever festive shape you desire.

Scallion Latkes

Happy Chanukah, blogosphere! To celebrate the first night of the festival of lights, here is our latke recipe, with enough oil to light up your whole block. Some latke recipes use flour as a binder; ours uses the natural starch in the potatoes, so it's gluten-free. If you feel you need to add more binder, we suggest potato flour.

Because we'll be eating latkes a lot this week, it's important to mix it up and go beyond the traditional sour cream and applesauce topping options. We dolloped ours with guacamole and some Vicky Day's raspberry-red currant preserves (not in the same bite--our weird food combinations have limits). These preserves are made by our friend and guest blogger Honor's family with fruit grown on their farm in Vermont. So far I've only tried this flavor of preserves--the tart currants and the flavorful raspberries are delicious with latkes, atop a Camembert-slathered slice of bread, with peanut butter and plenty of other combinations I haven't yet tried (I want to make some rugelach before the jar runs out). Their preserves do have refined cane sugar, but they also make a blackcurrant maple syrup, with a sweet-tartness that I'm excited to try in a marinade or salad dressing.

And obviously, we served this with a side of brussels sprouts, stir-fried with Tokyo turnip tops...perhaps it's time to change our name to I Heart Brussels Sprouts.


The Essentials:

2 pounds Yukon Gold Potatoes, scrubbed but not peeled
1 onion
4-6 scallions, minced
2 eggs
salt and pepper to taste
1/4 cup potato flour (optional)
hella peanut oil (we stopped keeping track, but you should have at least 1 cup on hand)

More Stuff to Throw In:

a small bunch chopped cilantro, chives or parsley
3 cloves minced garlic
1 tablespoon smoked spanish paprika
3 dried red chiles, minced well or ground roughly

Grate your potatoes and onion and place them in a cloth towel and wring out as much liquid as you can -- catch the liquid in a bowl. Let the potato juice sit for a few minutes, then pour the liquid from the bowl, saving the potato starch that has collected in the bottom. Write your initials in it with a fork. Well done.

Mix the potato starch, potatoes and onions with the rest of the ingredients, except the oil. Heat a large cast-iron frying pan over medium-high heat with about two tablespoons of the oil. When the oil is hot (but never smoking) add spoonfuls of batter, pressing them flat with your spoon. When the bottom is crispy and brown, flip to the other side and fry until golden. Refresh the peanut oil as needed, usually before each new batch. (Don't even try to use olive oil or another low-heat but healthy-sounding alternative. You'll be sorry when the smoke alarm goes off.) Drain on brown paper bags or paper towels.

Serves about 5 moderately hungry people, if you don't eat them all before dinner.

Caramelized Leeks with Roasted Tomatoes and Pomegranate

This dish was created for a Rosh Hashanah gathering. Leeks and pomegranates are both symbolic foods traditionally eaten for the Jewish New Year, and while tomatoes aren't an official symbolic food, they are (1) round, and can thus be used in lieu of more traditional apples to symbolize the roundness of the year, (2) linguistically tied to apples in Italian and (3) still abundant and delicious. The inspiration for this dish is a simpler leek-and-tomato mezze dish my father always makes for Rosh Hashanah; I've cooked the leeks longer, roasted the tomatoes instead of frying them, and added pomegranate seeds, pomegranate molasses and lemon zest.

The Symbolic Props

3 tablespoons olive oil
2 whole large tomatoes (I used Black Prince)
2 large leeks, rinsed and bottom part sliced thinly
Salt and pepper to taste
2 tablespoons pomegranate molasses
zest of 1/2 a lemon
seeds from 1/2 a pomegranate
minced parsley for the top

The Method

Preheat oven to 300. Coat the whole tomatoes in one tablespoon of the olive oil, place on a cookie sheet and roast in the oven for 1 and a half to 2 hours.

Meanwhile, heat the remaining two tablespoons of olive oil in a cast-iron skillet. Add leeks, salt and pepper. Saute leeks slowly over medium-high heat, stirring so they don't burn to the bottom, for 30-45 minutes, adding more olive oil if needed. They'll slowly start to wither and brown--I took mine off after 30 minutes because I had to get out of the house ASAP, but they could have gone for longer.

When leeks and tomatoes are done, roughly chop tomatoes and add to a serving bowl with the leeks. Stir in pomegranate molasses and lemon zest and taste for salt and pepper. Top with parsley and pomegranate seeds.