Matzo (also spelled matzoh or matza) is crisp dried bread with no leavening agent.
A traditional Jewish food, it can be eaten all year round. It's particularly important to the Passover holiday. Matzo supposedly originated because the Jewish slaves didn’t have time to allow their bread to rise before fleeing Egypt; they baked it flat to take with them.
Matzo usually comes in large sheets, but is also made into smaller crackers and ground up into meal, to use as breading or make into matzo balls for soup.
What is the traditional Passover meal?
What is the traditional Passover meal?
Passover is a week-long celebration commemorating the escape of Jews from Egypt. It’s a holiday filled with very specific food traditions and restrictions.
During Passover, nothing leavened can be eaten -- so no bread, pastry, or even cereals. Some also avoid all grains that could be fermented, a list that includes barley, oats, rye, spelt or wheat.
Many Jews keep kosher during Passover even if they don’t the rest of the year. That means purchasing specially prepared meat products, avoiding the mixing of meat and milk, and forgoing pork and shellfish.
The seder meal is the center of the Passover celebration. It occurs the first night of the week-long celebration. It’s a service and a meal combined, with readings and prayers to go along with symbolic foods.
The traditional seder plate consists of six items, each with a particular meaning:
Maror and chazeret – both bitter herbs, usually horseradish and romaine lettuce, meant to represent the bitterness of slavery.
Charoset – a mixture of apples, honey, nuts and wine, which represents the mortar between the bricks of the temples the Jews built.
Karpas – a plain vegetable dipped in salt water. The vegetable represents the plain food eaten by Jewish slaves. The salt water symbolizes their tears.
Z'roa – a lamb shank bone, representing the sacrifice made immediately before leaving Egypt.
Beitzah – a roasted egg, for the offerings left at the Temple of Jerusalem.
The seder also involves a large meal. This can really be anything, but often it includes a braised meat like brisket, matzo ball soup and vegetable dishes.
One of the oldest fruits known to man, the pomegranate is the fruit of a small tree native to grasslands stretching from the Middle East all the way to the Himalayas and south to India. With a tough, red skin, the pomegranate is prized for its edible seeds, called arils, which have a sweet and sour taste.
The name pomegranate is derived from the Latin for apple "pomum" (apple) and "granatus" (seeded). Pomegranate recipes abound in the cuisines of many Middle Eastern and South Asian cultures. Whether stirred into sauces and chutneys, juiced and blended into drinks or baked and formed into sweets and desserts, pomegranates are one of the few bright and sweet fruits of winter.
Pomegranates are good sources of vitamin C and potassium. Recent studies have shown that pomegranates contain high levels of punicalagins, compounds that could act as antioxidants in the body.
Recipe: Pomegranate, Persimmon And Pecan Salad
Recipe: Sliced Oranges With Pomegranate Caramelized Walnuts
Place the pomegranate down on its stem end; the blossom end with have a small opening.
Cut firmly down along one of the 6 hexagonal ribs; hitting the rib cuts the flesh and not the seeds.
Hold the fruit down firmly and move your fingers away from the bottom; the juice is very dark red and stains almost everything.
Remove the split fruit to a bowl of water immediately to prevent staining of fingers and cutting boards.
Holding the cut side down over the bowl of water, tap it firmly with a spoon. The seeds will fall out and sink to the bottom; the inedible pith will float to the surface.
Alternatively, peel the skin off the fruit in the bowl of water. Either method works well to extract the sweet, juicy kernels.
Like couscous, so-called Israeli couscous are small, round, pasta-like granules made from semolina and wheat flour.
While the Israeli company Osem claims to have "invented" Israeli couscous in the 1950s, it is simply a marketing term for what was known previously as North African berkukes or Palestinian matfoul and popular in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon.
Unlike familiar small, yellow semolina-based North African couscous, Israeli couscous (which is sometimes called pearl couscous) is twice as big and is toasted rather than dried. This gives it a nutty flavor and a sturdy composition that gives it a chewy bite and makes it stand up to sauce.
Israeli couscous can be used in salads, soups or as a base for chicken or fish. It works well when prepared like a rice pilaf.
Stevia is a sugar substitute. Made from South and Central American herbs and shrubs, whose leaves have up to 45 times more sweetness than table sugar, stevia has been used for centuries to sweeten yerba mate.
Since the 1970s, the Japanese have been the largest consumers of stevia in the world, and it can also be found throughout Asia, South America and Israel.
Because of health and safety concerns, the U.S. banned stevia in the early 1990s but It was approved as a food additive by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration at the end of 2008. It is currently banned in the E.U., Singapore and Hong Kong pending more research.
