Cooking the Chronicle – Apr 4
I hope you all had a beautiful Pesach! Ours was wonderful, the incredibly generous Rabbi Mark Goodman hosted us (yes, all five of us, infants included) for the first night and we hosted the second night for a few families in the neighborhood with small children. A fun time was had by all.
After the intense seders wind down, we set all sights on chol hamoed! It’s the best part of the holiday, in my opinion, because the grownups are off work, the kids are off school, and we can go on little adventures and see friends. A nice break from the busy rush of day-to-day life.
At our house, we spend chol hamoed eating lots and lots of egg salad, tuna salad, matzah pizza, and mediocre Pesach candy. I felt like when Jessica Grann published this week’s recipe (“Matzah grilled cheese,” Apr 4), she was speaking directly to me and the other parents across WhatsApp and group chats who are all brainstorming what to serve their kids through the many meals of this holiday. Although this recipe came out the week before Pesach, I couldn’t bring myself to make it early knowing by the middle of the week we would be scrambling for things to eat.
Our daughter loved this recipe, despite not eating regular grilled cheese on bread. It was a slam dunk and she ate two whole sandwiches, along with helping mix the cheese and stuff it inside the wet matzah. Hysterically, her favorite part of the recipe was when you get the matzah wet. Toddler humor—I’ll never quite understand!
I spent a long time reading Grann’s recipe and trying to visualize her folding directions. My brain would simply not compute how this worked. This is the type of recipe that would definitely benefit from video instruction. But then I remembered the viral folded stuffed quesadilla sandwich videos that took Instagram by storm probably a decade ago then Buzzfeed launched Tasty. And it clicked! But cutting a slit in the matzah, you can add filling to each quadrant and fold it into a neat little square package.
Don’t skip the egg for binding. You don’t notice it as you are eating the sandwich, but without it the cheese mixture is too loose and the sandwich doesn’t stay together as well.
We are definitely keeping these in our Pesach recipe round up. You could take this in any direction you imaging… use fancier cheese, add a slice of tomato and spinach, or use meat and Grann suggests. Like a Pesach arayes! Yum, let’s definitely do that next year.
