There are a million ways to make chicken soup with matzo balls but this is the family recipe. It takes awhile up front to prepare, and you have to let it sit overnight, but it’s well worth it. I even got some enchiladas out of all the chicken I had left over on the first night.

Making the matzo balls was tough because I was on a conference call. There is no way to get the stuff off your hands when you’re holding a phone, and it’s hard to explain giant splashing noises every few minutes. I will have to let everyone at work know that I moonlight at a dunk tank.

This was probably the first time in my life I had homemade matzo ball soup not for a holiday with family. While no meal is the same without hilarious consequence bets and absurd stories, these things had no effect on the taste of the soup. It was probably a quieter meal though.

Recipe is below the pics for anyone interested.

Matzo ball soup

2  3½ pound chickens
10-12 full carrots, chopped
2 hearts of celery, chopped
2 medium/large onions, chopped
5 parsnips, chopped
3 turnips, chopped
4 chicken bouillon cubes
Dill

1. Wash chickens and put in a giant ass pot. Fill with water so chickens are more than covered
2. Add all chopped vegetables
3. Bring to boil, add 2 bouillon cubes, then reduce heat and simmer for two hours. With 30 minutes left, add 1-2 bouillon cubes and stir. With 10-15 minutes left, submerge the dill in the soup.
4. Remove the chickens from the pot and pull off the meat – throw away bones and skin
5. Strain the broth, then pour into containers. Add vegetables, some chicken and refrigerate.
6. The next day, skim the fat off the top off each container and save.

Matzo balls

2 tablespoons oil or 2 tablespoons skimmed fat from the soup
2 eggs, slightly beaten
1/2 cup Manischewitz Matzo Meal
1 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons soup stock or water

Mix fat and eggs together. Mix and add Manischewitz matzo meal and salt. When well blended, add soup stock or water. Cover mixing bowl and place in refrigerator for at least twenty minutes. Using a two or three quart size pot, bring salted water to a brisk boil. Reduce flame and drop balls from above into  the slightly bubbling water. Cover pot and let cook 30-40 minutes. Have soup at room temperature, or warmer, and remove matzo balls from water to soup pot. When ready to serve, allow soup to simmer for about 5 minutes. Recipe makes about 5 matzo balls.

Unlike my other food posts, I can’t/won’t post the recipe here. It is a family secret from my grandmother and if I were to reveal it, Evan’s House of Ribs would never take off when I retire. Side note: most grandmas give you cookie or soup recipes…my mom’s mom gave us pork baby back ribs. As a Jewish grandma, she was ahead of her time. But I digress.

The ribs take almost four hours to make, so you have to be very sure that you have time and hungry co-gluttons before you begin. The end result is very worth it.

The abbreviated recipe is:

• Buy pork baby back ribs
• Cook for two hours
• Add the sauce
• Cook for two more hours
• Seek medical attention

Despite having these many times in my life (including every year for my birthday), I had never made them before. Fortunately, they came out great. They continued to be great as I ate them every day while I was snowed in. Thanks to everyone who helped with the recipe, photography, and eating (they make a good bribe to people who help you shovel).

My tool of the trade is the Delonghi Indoor Grill. This was one of the best Christmas presents I’ve ever gotten from my dad, which is all the more remarkable because I’m Jewish and he considers himself Buddhist. It’s not the model pictured to the left but very close. They are a pain to clean but I highly recommend them.

So, I decided to make a steak rub. This recipe comes courtesy of the OChef website. I have no idea what their deal is but Google sent me their way. It’s a lot of ingredients but very easy to make and it stores well:

2 Tbsp paprika, preferably Hungarian
2 Tbsp chile powder, preferably Gebhardt
1 to 2 tsp cayenne pepper (optional)
2 Tbsp granulated garlic or garlic powder
2 Tbsp light or dark brown sugar
1 Tbsp ground cumin
1 Tbsp dry mustard, preferably Colman’s
1 tsp ground sage
1 tsp dried oregano
1/4 cup salt
1 Tbsp freshly ground black pepper

Mix it all together and you’re good to go. This goes very well with strip/shell steaks – for a handy cow-shaped diagram of which cut is which go here.

Everything came out great – and the Delonghi makes some mean grill marks for an indoor electric. The rub has an incredible taste – very rich flavor without being too spicy.

Here are the results of my work…slightly before they were inhaled. I do not recommend making salad or sweet potatoes on the grill.

Crispin Porter + Bogusky, the ad agency behind notable (and creepy) ad campaigns like the BK King, has been hired to make vegetables sexy again. Well, not again. The last time they were sexy was probably when some prehistoric family was starving and hunting lettuce. But I digress.

The basic premise was that junk food doesn’t just succeed because of taste (or fat, or sugar…), but it’s got billions of dollars of marketing science behind it. This is not something that most unbranded products, let alone vegetables, can claim. Sure, you have the “Got Milk?” and “The Other White Meat” campaign, but you don’t see a lot of high-impact commercials for radishes.

The above packages represent what Marketing could do to that humble, everyday snack – baby carrots. For me, all it

takes to buy carrots is an accompanying three pounds of hummus. That said, the above designs are pretty cool. The one on the left reminds me of pop chips.

Goes to show you how much creativity can make a difference in our perception of things. Now if only more vegetables tasted good.

(h/t Daily Dish)

That weekend will probably best be remembered for Pop losing his wallet and the 15-person, 3-hour manhunt that ensued which involved the police, casino security, and a darkened tennis court (FYI-the wallet was in his shoe).

While not partaking in the wallet clusterfark, I made some kind of comment praising toaster ovens for all of their utility and general awesomeness. One thing led to another, and we discovered that all of the Jews in our family had toaster ovens growing up, but the several Catholic significant others had toasters.

Some quick followup work has led me to believe that this trend is completely consistent throughout America (based on a sample size of ~25). Why is this?

All I can think of is that Catholics praise toasters for their simplicity and sense of purpose, while Jews appreciate that a toaster oven has numerous potential settings, which can lead to error and thus something to complain about. But it could probably be something else too.

As a toaster oven-owning Jew, I’m interested in what you own and your reasoning for it – feel free to leave it in the comments. Anyway, this all came to light because of a cooking article I saw on Kitchn.com – 10 good uses for your toaster oven. Enjoy:

1. Warm plates before serving. Many large ovens only go down to 200°F which can be too high. A counter-top oven goes lower. I like heating plates for 5 minutes at 170°F.
2. Toast nuts. Arrange in a single layer on included pan or a sheet of aluminum foil. 350°F for 10-15 minutes, agitating to turn nuts every 5 minutes.
3. Make small batches of cookies, muffins, individual cakes
4. Cook side dishes (like stuffing) while the main oven is occupied with something bigger (the turkey).
5. Roast small batches of meat: a whole roaster chicken, quartered, fits easily, as does a pork tenderloin, a few pounds of ribs, etc.
6. Re-heat left-overs.
7. Defrost frozen ingredients.
8. Bake potatoes.
9. Melt cheese on top of French Onion Soup.
10. Anything you’d use the broiler for with the added bonus of using less energy and having more control: your broiled food will be at counter-height with a see-through window.

While NY pizza is far better than any other, within the city there are dozens of varieties, crust thicknesses, flavors, etc. HEven the names are diverse – there are at least 12 “Original Ray’s” pizzas.

One blogger has sought to settle this fight by eating at every pizzeria in NYC and writing about them all. He is comparing only plain slices, so the analysis will focus on core slice integrity, and not topping flavor. Given the turnover of pizza shops, this could be a downright Sisyphean task..but a fun one nonetheless.

I was inspired to post about this because we have an annual family outing to John’s Pizzeria, on Bleecker Street. As I wrote about once before, every year my mom and aunt do the Avon Walk for Breast Cancer. We always end the walk celebration with a visit to John’s where the pizza is amazing and they don’t do slices.

Our waiter put one wrong topping on my pie and ended up giving me an entire new one for free. I have now had eight slices in less than 24 hours so I am currently focused on both pizza and survival. Anyway, I wish Colin of Slice Harvester the best of luck on his quest and hope I can aspire to such a thing one day.

Consumerist (a terrific consumer blog that’s part of the Gawker network) started this awhile back with their “Picture vs. Reality” series. Here’s an example (KFC’s mashed potato bowl):

A new blog has started specifically to address this pressing issue: Food In Real Life. With each post, they compare the packaging to the actual product, as well as rate the taste. Most of the posts seem to be about frozen food, as opposed to fast food.

For entertainment’s sake, it would probably be better to focus on big disparities between packaging and product, but I give the blogger credit for being honest and giving positive ratings where they’re due. Here’s a sample – this is the Culver’s ButterBurger with Cheese. Sounds appetizing even without the pictures.

Here is just one example of taking Domino’s…

And making Dao Mi Noh Chow Mein.