Fish Soup with Matzo Balls and Aioli from The Covenant Kitchen: Food and Wine for the New Jewish Table Hardcover – March 3, 2015 by Jeff Morgan

Fish Soup with Matzo Balls and Aioli | Excerpted from The Covenant Kitchen by Jeff and Jodie Morgan

We love fish soup. One long-ago Passover, we suddenly wondered, “Why don’t we make matzo ball soup with fish stock instead of chicken stock?” This saffron-colored variation on a traditional theme has now become our standard.

You’ll probably want to double the ingredients for Passover (and remember to use the Passover recipe for the aioli, with lemon juice instead of mustard), but you don’t need to wait for the holiday to enjoy this lovely dish. It’s not hard to make and will provide lots of pleasure for you and your dining companions at any time of the year. (You can also enjoy it without the matzo balls.)

The list of ingredients may seem long, but most of them are simply thrown in the pot, boiled, and then strained. You will also need to purchase a 3-to 4-pound ocean fish. (Remember that kosher fish must have fins and scales.) If you are using the fish head, don’t bother removing the gills, as some cookbooks traditionally advise. Contrary to popular belief, we haven’t found they add any bitterness.

Both the matzo balls and soup are best made a day in advance—or at least the morning before you serve them. First make the matzo balls. They need to be chilled for about 3 hours prior to cooking or the mix will not harden enough to form balls. Make the fish soup when the matzo balls are chilling in the refrigerator. For ease of presentation, we have kept the recipe for the soup and the matzo balls separate.

Aioli, or garlic mayonnaise, adds richness. It is added to the broth when serving. Diners can just mix it into the liquid themselves. No more than 5 or 10 minutes are required to whip up an aioli from scratch. Make it in advance and refrigerate for up to 3 days.

From a wine-drinking perspective, the French would most likely enjoy this soup with a glass of dry rosé. (We have enjoyed countless fish soups in southern France paired with crisp, chilled local rosés. It’s a tradition.) Other fine options would include any racy, dry white wine such as Sauvignon Blanc, Chenin Blanc, or Chardonnay.

Soup | Serves 6 as a first course

2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
2 onions, sliced
3 carrots, coarsely chopped
3 celery stalks, coarsely chopped
One 3-to 4-pound saltwater fish (with or without head), such as cod, flounder, salmon, or halibut, scaled and gutted
½ teaspoon dried thyme
1 bay leaf
2 to 4 sprigs flat-leaf parsley
1 large head garlic, halved
2 tablespoons tomato paste
2.5 pounds fresh tomatoes, chopped, or 1 can (28 ounces) whole Italian plum tomatoes, chopped, with juice
1 teaspoon saffron threads
¼ teaspoon cayenne pepper
1 large potato, peeled and coarsely chopped
1 teaspoon sea salt
1½ cups Aioli, for serving
Freshly ground pepper

Make the matzo balls (see below) and refrigerate while you make the soup.

To make the soup, in a large saucepan or a soup pot, heat the olive oil over medium heat. Add the onions, carrots, and celery and sauté until tender, about 5 minutes. Add the fish (cut in pieces, if necessary, to fit into the pot) and cook, turning frequently, until the flesh begins to fall off the bones, about 10 minutes.

Add the thyme, bay leaf, parsley, garlic, tomato paste, tomatoes, saffron, cayenne, potato, and salt. Add enough water to cover the contents. Bring to a boil, reduce the heat to medium, and simmer, covered, until the potato is tender, about 45 minutes.

Let the soup cool for about 15 minutes. Working in batches if necessary, in a blender or food processor, coarsely pulse the fish soup. Strain the puree through a fine-mesh sieve or colander into a large bowl or pot, forcing the liquid through by pressing on the solids with the back of a large spoon or—even better—the bottom of a (pareve) coffee mug. Discard all the sol­ids. Strain the soup one more time through a fine-mesh sieve into a large pot to remove as many remaining solids as possible.

To serve, add the cooked matzo balls to the soup that is now in a large pot and reheat over medium-high heat. When the soup starts to bubble, reduce the heat to medium, cover, and continue to heat until the matzo balls are hot throughout, about 10 minutes. Ladle the soup with one or two matzo balls per serving into individual soup bowls. You or your dinner guests can add a dollop or two of aioli to the broth in each bowl. Season with pepper to taste.

Matzo Balls | makes 10 to 15 matzo balls

4 eggs
¼ cup extra virgin olive oil
¼ cup water
1 cup matzo meal
2 cloves garlic, minced
2 tablespoons minced fresh cilantro
1 teaspoon salt
Freshly ground pepper

In a large bowl, combine the eggs, olive oil, water, matzo meal, garlic, cilan­tro, and salt. Add a few grinds of pepper. Using a whisk or wooden spoon, gently mix to incorporate all the ingredients. Cover and refrigerate for at least 3 hours or overnight.

When the matzo mix is firm to the touch, remove it from the refrigerator and shape it into 10 to 15 balls the size of Ping-Pong balls. Rinse your hands with cold water now and then to prevent sticking. Lay the matzo balls out on a flat surface coated with wax paper.

Fill a large skillet halfway with lightly salted water and bring to a boil over high heat. Use a large spoon to gently lay the matzo balls in a single layer into the water. They should not be stacked on top of each other. Cover the pan and reduce the heat to medium-low. Cook until the matzo balls have expanded and are firm to the touch, 45 to 50 minutes. Use immediately or let cool and refrigerate for up to 3 days.

Potato Patties Stuffed with Spiced Minced Meat from Jewish Soul Food: From Minsk to Marrakesh, More Than 100 Unforgettable Dishes Updated for Today's KitchenOct 28, 2014 by Janna Gur Hardcover

BISTIL | Potato Patties Stuffed with Spiced Minced Meat | Excerpted from Jewish Soul Food by Janna Gur

This dish of golden mashed potato patties stuffed with aromatics tastes even better than it sounds. It is common among Jewish Libyan families to serve bistil at the Seder table. Be warned: Bistil taste and smell so good when coming out of the pan that there is a risk they will be gone before the guests arrive.

Makes 20 bistil; serves 8 to 10

For the filling

2 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 onion, chopped
1 pound (1/2 kg) beef shoulder or brisket in one piece
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
2 allspice berries
2 bay leaves
1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg

For the shell

2.5 pounds (about 1 kg) russet potatoes, unpeeled
1 teaspoon white pepper
1 teaspoon ground turmeric
3 egg yolks
Salt
1 teaspoon ras el hanout or baharat spice mix

For frying

1/2 cup unbleached all-purpose flour (or potato starch for Passover)
2 eggs, lightly beaten
Vegetable oil

1. Prepare the filling: Heat the vegetable oil in a pan over medium heat. Add the onion and sauté for 7 to 8 minutes, until golden. Add the meat and brown on all sides. Add the salt, black pepper, allspice, bay leaves, and nutmeg and cook for a few more minutes.

2. Add water to cover and bring to a boil. Cover the pan, lower the heat, and simmer for about 1 1/2 hours, until the meat is tender. Remove the meat and onion from the pan to cool.

3. Grind the seasoned meat and onion in a meat grinder or finely chop with a large sharp knife. Set aside.

4. Prepare the shell: Meanwhile, bring the potatoes to a boil in plenty of salted water. Cook until fork tender (about 30 minutes after the water comes to a boil). Drain and cool.

5. Peel the potatoes and place in a bowl. Mash with a potato masher or a fork; do not use a food processor. Add the white pepper, turmeric, egg yolks, salt, and ras el hanout and mix until just blended—be careful, because overmix­ing will hurt the texture.

6. Shape, fill, and fry: Wet your hands or rub them with oil and form the potato mixture into balls 2 inches (5 cm) in diameter, snuggling them in the palm of your hand. Flatten them slightly. Place 1 tablespoon of the filling in the center of each patty and pinch over so the filling is completely covered with mashed potatoes and you have formed an oblong patty.

7. Prepare two plates: one with the flour and one with the beaten eggs. Dip the patties in the flour, then in the beaten eggs.

8. Heat the vegetable oil in a large wide pan (the oil should come halfway up the sides of the patties). Working in batches, fry the patties for 2 to 3 minutes on each side until lightly golden. Transfer to a paper towel–lined plate.

9. Serve immediately or keep in a 300°F (150°C) oven until ready to serve. Serve hot or at room temperature.

Variation: Instead of using the spice mix (baharat or ras el hanout), use a dash each of black pepper, allspice, cumin, nutmeg, and cinnamon.

Scaling Restaurant Reviews from Mark Twain to Pete Wells

Today, New York Times restaurant critic Pete Wells published a punishing takedown of Guy Fieri's Guy's American Kitchen and Bar in Times Square, written entirely in scathing, sarcastic questions. Such as:

How did nachos, one of the hardest dishes in the American canon to mess up, turn out so deeply unlovable?

By the way, would you let our server know that when we asked for chai, he brought us a cup of hot water?

When you hung that sign by the entrance that says, WELCOME TO FLAVOR TOWN!, were you just messing with our heads?

Ouch. But Wells isn't the only critic with a sharp pen and some axes to grind--the complete and utter takedown of a restaurant, the art of dropping a goose egg, has a long and proud tradition. Here are the best in recent (and not-so-recent) memory, split up by genre:

The Fish in a Barrel


Restaurant critics generally hem and haw, claiming to enter a dismal restaurant with a Pollyannaish hope that maybe, just maybe, this meal won't be as bad as they fear, but Pete Wells knew that Guy Fieri's midtown circus was going to be a disaster going in. The Fish in a Barrel, then, is almost purely an exercise in rhetorical abuse, written for the entertainment of the discerning reader.

Jay Rayner, the critic for the British newspaper the Observer, is one of the most inventively nasty critics out there, and his review of Abracadabra, a ridiculous London restaurant, is a prime example of FiaB reviewing. Here's how it begins:

Abracadabra isn't so much a restaurant as a random sequence of events. I could describe it as bad - and believe me, the food is, in a very special way - but that really doesn't do the experience justice.

And you can imagine how it goes from there. (Okay, here's a taste: "The burger is dry and black. It costs 18 pounds. I mourn the cow.")

Frank Bruni, the NYT critic of the mid-2000s, wasn't one to pull any punches, either. His famously harsh review of the Fish in a Barrel restaurant Ninja began with this bang:

Confusing the point of a restaurant with the mission of a "Saturday Night Live" skit, Ninja New York deposits you in a kooky, dreary subterranean labyrinth that seems better suited to coal mining than to supping.

and ended with a withering dismissal:

For a toddler with a trust fund and a yen for udon and maki, Ninja might be a valid alternative to the Jekyll and Hyde restaurant. For just about anybody else it's nonsensical, and its climactic illusion may well be a disappearing act.

The Baffling Popularity

A somewhat more useful type of review, if you believe that journalism should serve the public interest, is the baffled takedown of a restaurant that everyone seems to like. The New York Post's proudly curmudgeonly Steve Cuozzo is a master of the genre, and his pan of Shake Shack (well, mostly its lines) is a prime example. Like Wells at Guy Fieri's, Cuozzo is crankily astonished:

What compels New Yorkers to stand in Soviet-style, multiple lines under a broiling sun to procure a hamburger that's an also-ran at best?

What's the appeal of tiny beef patties most customers consume in five minutes, thanks to their famished state after waiting longer than they would at an airport?

How masochistic are New Yorkers that they'll go even after seeing live Web-cam images of the snaking queue that awaits them?

Unsurprisingly, he does not find a good answer to any of those questions. These kinds of goose eggs have room for mercy, as with Sam Sifton's Disappointed Father review of Eddie Huang's Xiao Ye. Sifton wanted to be impressed, but ended up dishing out faint praise:


As it stands, though, Xiao Ye is an artful misfire: the sort of place that, as Mr. Huang sadly appears to desire it to be, is really only best when the customers are a little drunk, a little high, maybe both and in any event extremely hungry.

And some less-faint zingers:

Cabbage said to have been steamed with garlic and chilies, then drizzled with lardo, tastes of cardboard and water, a school-lunch nightmare that is hard to shake. There are punishingly salty, barely pickled cucumbers. A beef rib braised into pale, flabby submission in a mixture of ginger beer, chilies and tomatoes might have been made by your college roommate in a borrowed Crock-Pot one night over winter break, then discarded in favor of Greek pizza from that place out by the discount liquor store.

But perhaps the most famous, baffled, and baffling destruction of a popular restaurant came last year, from GQ's food critic Alan Richman.

He started out by heaping praise on the modern Quebecois diner food at M. Wells, but things soon spiraled out of control, with the review turning into a defense of his own critical objectivity, an account of another dinner marred by extremely slow service, and then, out of left field, an accusation of sexual harassment. In three short pages, he turns from being "happily stunned by a gargantuan meat-loaf sandwich stabbed through its heart with a serrated knife" to "I do not forgive the people at M. Wells for what they have said. I wish there were some way they would not get away with it. I'm pretty certain they will, and I will always be sorry for that." It might not be all that helpful for the average customer, but it's certainly one for the history books.

Epater la Bourgeoisie

This could be considered something like shooting fish in a golden barrel, but the added sticker shock of eating $50 glop adds a special gleam to the reviewer's pitchforks. A.A. Gill, writing for Vanity Fair, seems to have an appetite for skewering golden calves--it's hard to pick a favorite quote from his piledriver to Jean-Georges Vongerichten's nouveau-Chinese restaurant 66, but here are a few gems:

Having treated you at the door like social scurvy with contagious halitosis, the staff subtly changes demeanor once you're inside. They treat you like deaf cretins with learning difficulties.

Every city with a Zagat needs to have a ridiculously overpriced, underdesigned, absurdly smug, dark diner, staffed by humorless snots who think they're gastronomy consultants and mongers of chic, so that we can point and laugh and say, "Oy, it's only dinner"--think of it as a sort of edible self-help group-therapy thing.

Hard to top, but Jay Rayner can hold his own at an oligarch axing, as in his review of Novikov, a London restaurant opened earlier this year by a Muscovite restauranteur:

This is generally very, very bad: prices that knock the wind out of you and moments of cooking so cack-handed, so foul, so astoundingly grim you want to congratulate the kitchen on its incompetence.

And so my advice to you. Don't go to Novikov. Keep not going. Keep not going a lot. In a city with a talent for opening hateful and tasteless restaurants, Novikov marks a special new low. That's its real achievement.

Some épater-ing, though, is best done not with bluster, but with an endless barrage of understated barbs, like this authoritative 1982 destruction of a restaurant called Regine's from the *NYT'*s Mimi Sheraton:

In six years of reviewing, we have never come across service and food that have been so consistently poor as that found at Regine's, the well-known Park Avenue discotheque and restaurant.
But she didn't just wave a pan-wand over the whole proceedings. Sheraton got granular, quoting a pompous server:

When we complained of slow service, an unshaven captain said: ''Well, madame, if you knew how to order properly from a captain instead of from waiters, perhaps you would get things promptly.''

And closing out with a whipcrack dessert critique:

The most depressing dessert was puff pastry with unripe strawberries. The pastry looked like flaked wet Uneeda Biscuits and the minted cream tasted like toothpaste.

Hachi machi, is that harsh.

The Continental Hack-Fest

The worst review of all time, however, is staggering not only in its sly meanness, but in its scope: in his 1880 travelogue A Tramp Abroad, Mark Twain took it upon himself to discourage readers from ever eating any food in all of Europe, period. It's worth reading in full, if you get a chance, but here are a few strokes of Twain's broad brush:

After a few months' acquaintance with European "coffee," one's mind weakens, and his faith with it, and he begins to wonder if the rich beverage of home, with its clotted layer of yellow cream on top of it, is not a mere dream, after all, and a thing which never existed.

Next comes the European bread--fair enough, good enough, after a fashion, but cold; cold and tough, and unsympathetic; and never any change, never any variety--always the same tiresome thing.

Next, the butter--the sham and tasteless butter; no salt in it, and made of goodness knows what.

There is here and there an American who will say he can remember rising from a European table d'hote perfectly satisfied; but we must not overlook the fact that there is also here and there an American who will lie.

Fish Frikadel (Fish Cakes) by the Bard of Bat Yam, Gourmet of Zion

Fish Frikadel (Fish Cakes)
Come rain or sunshine fish frikadel served with dhal and or ‘gesmoorde’ tomato is our favourite meal on a Monday in our household. ‘Gesmoorde’ tomato is made similarly to marinara sauce.


Fish Frikadel

Ingredients:
500g hake fillets or 3 tins tuna chunks, in brine, drained
2 slices of bread (preferably a couple of days old)
1 tablespoon cooking oil
1 medium onion, chopped
1/2 teaspoon garlic
1 medium tomato, chopped
1 teaspoon jeera/cumin powder
1 & 1/2 teaspoons leaf masala (curry powder)
1/2 teaspoon borrie/tumeric
1 tablespoon lemon juice
Salt to taste
Handful chopped parsley
1 medium egg
Cooking oil for shallow frying

Method:
Boil hake in enough water to cover for 5 – 10 minutes. Drain well and flake. If you using tin tuna, drain well before using.
Soak the bread in water for 10 minutes squeeze out all the water. Meanwhile, heat the oil in a saucepan, add the chopped onion. Braise until golden brown. Add tomato, garlic, lemon juice and spices, cook 5 minutes until all the spices are combined. Combine the fish, bread, spices with the rest of the ingredients. Shape into flat fish cakes. Shallow fry in medium to hot oil until brown, about 5 minutes on each side. Serve with white rice, dhal or gesmoorde tomato. Makes about 10 fish cakes 

Lamb Karahi Curry by the Bard of Bat Yam, Gourmet of Zion

This is my take on the karahi curry. Karahi is a garlic and ginger infused curry with a thick sauce. It is full of flavour. Karahi originates from the Indian subcontinent, the name comes from the dish it’s traditionally prepared in, karahi or wok. Here I’ve used one of my normal cooking pots.

You can add more or omit the chillies to your taste. The plain yoghurt neutralises the intense spiciness in the dish. Serve with dhai, naan bread or roti.

Lamb Karahi Curry

Ingredients:
1 kg lamb, cut to bite size pieces
2 tsp garlic roughly chopped
2 tsp ginger roughly chopped
1/4 cup vegetable oil
3 large tomatoes thinly sliced
3 large onions thinly sliced
2 heaped tsp roasted / leaf masala
1 tsp chilli powder
1 tsp salt
4 tbsp greek yoghurt
2 tsp garam masala
1 tsp turmeric powder
1 tsp cumin seeds
2 green chillies slit lengthwise (optional)
1 tbsp chopped coriander
Lemon slices for garnish

Method:
Warm a pot on high heat
Add lamb pieces
Onions
Tomatoes
Add all the dry spices and salt
Turn heat on slow and slow cook until meat is tender stirring often. About 30-40 minutes.
Add very little water.

Add oil into another pot.
When oil is hot add chopped / crushed garlic, ginger and green chillies.
Add cooked meat to the garlic, ginger and chillies and cook a further 5 minutes, stirring all the time.
Add Greek yoghurt, stir well and cook 10 minutes.
Garnish with fresh chopped coriander and slices of lemon.