SOME THINGS JUST TAKE TIME

It’s never too late to get organized. Just before Passover 2025, I inserted my printed and handwritten food and water-stained Passover recipes into plastic sleeves, sorted them, and put them in a binder. It only took me 50 years to get to it!

The thought came to me when I pulled out an orange binder prepared by our dearly departed cousin Frane Grossman, z”l. For more on Frane, see my blog post, I LOOK FORWARD TO TUESDAYS AND WEDNESDAYS, dated August 11. 2020, at sharonmarkcohen.com. Those tried and true recipes that Frane gifted me include several from her family, including a couple from her grandmother Celia. Celia was my father-in-law’s aunt who lived in Virginia, and I can guarantee he never tasted her recipes that we now have in our possession.

It was after Passover that I continued my mission to organize our favorite Passover recipes and take photos of others we have delighted in from about half a dozen treasured Passover recipe books. My go-to holiday cookbook is still The Complete Passover Cookbook: Delectable Recipes - Strictly Kosher for Passover and the Year ‘Round by Frances R. AvRutick, which Aunt Fannie gifted to me in 1981.

Aunt Fannie attended all our family’s seders and Thanksgiving dinners until her passing in 1993. Once, when I mentioned that she was invited to our house, she said, “Where else would I be? I’ve been coming to your mother’s for 50 years.” She knew that it was a given that she would be at our house when I took over the hosting.

After taking photos of our favorite Passover recipes from cookbooks and commercial company handouts, I made a “Passover Recipes” album on my iPhone. After adding the picture of each recipe to my phone, I printed them to store in a binder. Now, there are multiple ways to keep track of those delectable recipes we enjoy each year on Passover, without needing to flip through a collection of cookbooks and handouts from the food companies.

My favorite breakfast treat from AvRutick’s book is the Farfel Breakfast Cereal:

On that page, you can see that I penciled in the additional use of 1 tsp. of cinnamon and walnuts. I also sometimes add dried cranberries if I have them on hand.

My mother’s salty latkes, alternating with my mother-in-law’s recipe for sweet latkes, give us a burst of nostalgia for some breakfasts or lunches throughout the holiday. See MAXWELL HOUSE HAGGADAHS AND LATKES THROUGHOUT THE GENERATIONS, dated April 28, 2020, at sharonmarkcohen.com. Of course, we can’t forget the Matzoh Brei.

The Matzoh Brei is my mother’s recipe that I hand-recorded. Our family preference for matzoh is Shmura matzos for the seders and Horowitz-Margareten for dishes such as matzoh brei.

Aunt Fannie’s trusted sponge cake recipe is also from AvRutick’s collection:

I make several sponge cakes every Passover. Since I penciled in “1994,” that must be when I took over making the sponge cakes on Passover. I am guessing that Aunt Fannie was well enough on Passover 1993, before her passing in October that year, to make her usual contribution of sponge cake, with banana cake for Arnee, to bring to the seders as she did throughout the years. Wow, I’ve been baking Passover sponge cakes for over 30 years. I should have started a business.

Lieber’s company handouts have been a welcome addition in recent years. We have tremendously enjoyed several of the recipes. You will note my comments on the desirability of several recipes and the year I started trying some of them.

For that recipe, rather than have the butcher cut the chicken into small chunks, which our son Moss stood over the fire endlessly manning in 2023, I adapted by having the butcher cut the chicken into small stir-fry pieces, which our son Judd found much easier to handle when he did the job in 2025. While I don’t recall if we made that dish in 2024, if we did, the boys probably helped me toil with it.

Now that our children know how to cook in their kitchens (a well-kept secret after the fun King’s Cooking Studio lessons as children and offering them to assist me over the years in cake preparations), I’ve wised up and have them help in mine.

When people complain that there’s nothing to eat on Passover, it gives me a laugh. It’s my favorite holiday, filled with a week of cooking and eating many dishes we crave. The kugels (baked casseroles), my oh my, the luscious kugels, fruit, vegetable, too many to pick from and post. I don’t use noodles (not even the kosher for Passover pasta) on Passover. I use recipes that don’t call for pasta, and they’re scrumptious. Just ask my husband for his unbiased opinion.

Not every dish makes it to the seder table. One favorite I saved for Friday night Shabbos dinner was my mother’s recipe for Potato Latkes (potato pancakes). I still have the original, stained recipe of the Passover version, which differs from the Hanukkah latkes, which use hand-grated raw potatoes. Many decades ago, I handwrote the recipe as my mother told it to me from memory. Finally, I’m putting the printed recipe into a plastic sleeve in my Passover recipe notebook. No worries, I’m saving all the originals in the sleeves.

I hand-wrote my mother’s recipe for Potato Latkes and stained the recipe over the years of using it before putting it into a binder.

One thing not to be discussed, especially this year with the cost of eggs, is the more than 12 dozen used during the eight days of Passover. On second thought, now that I brought it up, with Easter falling out around the same time, the Easter egg hunts and dying of eggs were equally expensive. Now that the holidays have passed, the prices of eggs have somehow come down. They’re still quite costly, but nowhere near the prices at the time of year with the highest volume of usage.

While many people cook in advance, it’s not my MO. I generally start cooking and baking the morning of the meal, except for the coveted Weequahic salad. That health salad recipe from the well-known and much missed Weequahic Diner in Philip Roth’s acclaimed Newark, New Jersey, has to marinate.

This year, one guest questioned how I can time all the recipes. He has no idea of the balancing act that comes into play, and what doing it all in one day requires, including cooking soups, preparing the main courses (I generally make more than one), making all the trimmings (when I say “all,” I mean “many”), and baking the cakes. If you’ve eaten at my house, you know. I am not “into” leftovers.

Please post in the comments section below or email me with your favorite Passover recipes and thoughts on mine. It’s always great to hear from my fans.

Just like our trip to Alaska to finally complete a visit to all 50 United States during our 50 years of marriage, it only took 50 years to compile our favorite Passover recipes. For more on that much-anticipated trip, see next week’s blog post. While some things may have taken 50 years, when they happened, they triggered a tremendous feeling of accomplishment.