Passover Recap

Dishes listed in order of appearance:

• R.W. Knudsen 100% Concord Grape Juice: A big hit with the Little One. We may have to ration her consumption.
• 2007 Vidal-Fleury Cotes du Rhone: An amazingly complex wine for only $14. Still has some tannins to it, so it could probably stand another year or two of bottle aging.
• Freshly prepared horseradish: Nose-tingling. It will be making an appearance of my matzah brei some time this week, and several other dishes in the weeks to come.
• Haroset: Best haroset ever, by acclimation. None of us could stop eating it. Recipe in one of the earlier entries.
• Tangerine, olive and fennel salad: Working in those non-traditional seder plate components. Very simple: peeled, de-pithed segments of four tangerines; about twenty cracked green olives brined with lemon and hot peppers (Ziyad brand--you can get them in large jars at al-Ahram), pitted; a bulb of fresh fennel cut into matchsticks. Mix them all together and dress at the last minute with olive oil. Tasty--would have gone well with fish (but Hot Librarian convinced me to take baked haddock off the menu, on the correct assumption that we would have too much food).
• Matzah Ball Soup: Best ever. See the recipe in an earlier entry for the soup itself. For the matzah balls, follow this Smitten Kitchen recipe recommended to me by my mother. Sorry, ma: My chicken soup is now better than yours, though I can't take full credit for it. The Goransson Farms rutabagas, that I suspect had spent the colder days of winter in the ground sweetening up in preparation, imparted a dark orange hue to the stock and a luscious flavor.

From this point forward, both LO and HL had managed to fill themselves up with haroset, salad, and matzah ball soup, so all opinions are solely mine.

Roasted lamb shoulder: I love Southpaw Farms lamb. If you can find a lamb purveyor whose lambs are solely milk and grass fed, and slaughtered when they're still young and tender, you can duplicate this. Otherwise, sorry. It starts with a bone-in shoulder. Because the lamb is young, it's relatively small--about two and a quarter pounds. Then brine and rub with the spice mixture as I described in an earlier entry, and let it sit in the refrigerator at least four hours. Preheat you oven to 375 (350 in the case of my hot-running oven). Put the shoulder in a small roasting pan, covered with aluminum foil. Put in the oven for 30 minutes. Then remove the foil, rub the shoulder all over with olive oil, and put back in the oven for an hour and 15 minutes. Let rest. We probably let it rest too long because we had only just started reading the seder when it came out of the oven. Even so, best lamb ever.
• Salade aux fines herbes: This was simple. A package of pre-washed mache from Whole Foods. Whatever herbs I could grab there yesterday morning--tarragon, parsley, chives--and also the fennel fronds left over from the other salad. Season with salt, and dress with a standard shallot and dijon vinaigrette. Went very nicely with the lamb.

HL and OL returned to the festive meal in time for the dessert, for which I can take no credit (except for having ordered it), a flourless chocolate-almond-raspberry torte from Standard Baking Company. It was good. Even I, without much of a sweet tooth, had a generous slice.