Matzah Brie, Passover/Easter dinner, and Dying Eggs!

Happy Passover/Easter/Earth Day/Any other reason to celebrate! Yay!

My big editing job is D-O-N-E DONE! HOORAY! I have a couple tiny things to finish up with it, but the deadline was Sunday night, and I felt like I was back in grad school working on that all weekend.  But now it’s finished and I feel GREAT! Tonight has been ridiculously relaxing after a hectic day at work, and I had no idea how restful it would be to come home and not have editing work to do!  I spent the night making egg salad for dinner, finishing up my nut butter cups for the blogger bake sale high bidder and doing other little chores, but to not have the huge editing project hanging over my head was amazing!

I have a few things I want to post, since I’ve been a bit behind in updating and keeping on top of some of the fun recipes we’ve been trying.  But to celebrate the holiday weekend, you get our Passover/Easter weekend food! 

I splurged and bought lamb from Whole Foods for our Saturday night dinner because Matt and I are huge lamb fans and we don’t usually spend extra money on meat for cooking at home (I dream of a day when I can buy half a cow from a farmer and have a huge freezer to store it all away). 

We had also gotten a bunch of Red Swiss Chard in our CSA box last week and have been trying to think of ways to use it.  I’m usually wary of greens…I have never been a big fan of collard greens or other dark greens when they’re just sautéed or served on their own as a side dish.  But, some things I read online about it made me think maybe I wanted to revisit greens. 

Earlier in the week, we had used the stems from the chard in a soup (recipe to come!), so we washed and chopped the leaves, which are absolutely gorgeous.  I love the bright vibrant colors that you can find in fruits and vegetables. 

I decided to jump right into the experiment and just sauté the chopped chard with some olive oil and garlic…..I was skeptical the whole time.

For the lamb, we trimmed off some fat, crushed a couple pieces of matzah, mixed it with some parsley, and coated the lamb.

We pan fried this for a couple minutes on each side and then threw it in a 400 degree oven until it reached 145 degrees internally (medium rare-ish).  After we pulled it out, we covered it and let it rest while I finished up the greens and our other side dish. 

We served the meat with the sautéed chard and some mashed potatoes (made with some seasoned chicken broth, salt, pepper, and parsley…no dairy!).  The leftover potatoes were made into potato cakes the next night to go with the leftover soup from the earlier meal mentioned above! Leftovers all around!!

The lamb was a little less done than we had planned, but amazing anyway.  Lamb is one of the few meats I can eat when it is this pink.  YUM.  The potatoes were super flavorful and went really well with the meat.  Matt liked the chard and cleaned his plate, but I couldn’t do it…the flavor wasn’t there for me, but I think it really comes down to the texture and temperature of greens cooked like this.  They’re too slimy and soft for me, plus they never seem to be hot…the chard was the last thing to come off the stove for this meal, and yet when I sat down to eat it was already cold…cold and slimy? Not my thing.  But the rest of dinner was so good! And look how pretty it is!

Sunday morning we made one of Matt’s favorites…matzah brie!! (Pronounced “BRY” not “BREE”…there is no yummy gooey cheese involved in this dish, sad to say).  It’s basically french toast made with matzah.  We added lots of cinnamon and dipped it in syrup! Mmmm! We also tried to be somewhat healthy and share an orange, but the orange we had was flavorless and just tasted like slightly orange-flavored water.  Blech.

In the afternoon, I took another quick break from editing to teach Matt some fun things about Easter (I had no time to make Easter baskets for us this year 🙁 booo.)  Matt is horribly disgusted by the smell of vinegar, so we used lemon juice instead…vinegar would have made brighter colors, but no one was gagging at least! The green, blue, yellow, and orange were decently bright, but the pink was super disappointing! I was looking forward to some bright bright pink eggs! The swirly green one is my favorite! 🙂

I look like a monster attacking the camera with my huge hands in this picture, but I had to post it because you can see Santana popping her head up in the background! She wanted to help SO badly!

I hope everyone had a wonderful Easter and Passover!  More recipes and yumminess to come soon!

This entry was posted on Monday, April 13th, 2009 at 9:08 pm and is filed under Family, Fun, Holidays, Life, Matthew, Puppy, Yum. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.