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Last year we decided to expand our repertoire of Passover foods for the Seder. It's not that we disliked Aunt Rachel's chicken matzoh ball soup, but we wanted to add some more spice and excitement in the menu! Enter Jennifer Abadi's Too Good to Passover cookbook. I had taken a few classes from her in the past and knew that not only would the food be amazing, but also that the instructions would be super clear and the ingredients wouldn't be impossible crazy hard to find.
I'll talk about the food in a bit, but I first want to explain why this cookbook is way MORE than just a bunch of recipes. It's filled with Sephardic and Judeo-Arabic history that I, as an Ashkenazi Jew, knew NOTHING about. There are over 20 chapters, each dedicated to a specific country or territory in Africa, Asia and Europe. Each chapter starts with a map and details about the area's culture and cuisine...and (this is one of my favorite parts) interviews with people from those regions. Some of them are older and lived through wars, such as Deanna from Greece, who talked wine being in the bathroom, and others are young, like Beejhy, who, as an Ethiopian Jew, who said that the actual slaugthering a lamb was an integral part of their Seder.
So now, the food. There are lots of ways to find recipes. First, Each country/region has it’s own passover seder foods - even a speciic seder plate., many of which Jennifer illustrated herself. I love seeing how all the recipes contained local ingredients. For example, in Algeria the Haroset has bosc pears, in Iraq it has date syrup and pischios, and in Yemen it’s Pomegranite and toasted sesame seeds. You can find the recipes either by reading the regional chapter OR by alphabetical or categorical order. I tried so many things. My family’s fav was an Italian “lasgana” made of matzohs, a Ladino Egg-lemon soup, an Indian Cauliflower dish, a Greek Spanikoita (meat pie) to die for.
I’m including photos from the book so you can see how the book is laid out and how interesting it is. This book brought new life to our Seder, as the food opened our eyes to our disasporic heritage. I can’t wait for Passover again this year!
- Paperback: 709 pages
- Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform; 1 edition (January 2, 2018)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1977739717
- ISBN-13: 978-1977739711
- Product Dimensions: 7 x 1.6 x 10 inches
- Shipping Weight: 3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
- Average Customer Review: 12 customer reviews
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Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#858,204 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #310 in Middle Eastern Cooking, Food & Wine
- #272 in Kosher Cooking (Books)
- #152872 in Textbooks
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