This isn’t how I had intended this dish to turn out, but it still ended up being pretty good. I was trying to figure out how to use matzah meal to make a pasta (other than gnocchi), plus I had a huge bunch of dandelion greens from the Union Square Greenmarket, so this is what I did.

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Note: Last year I wrote a detailed post about how I cook Kosher for Passover, or K for P as I call it. Click here if you care about such things.

Bananas in sour cream was a Passover breakfast staple for me growing up. There’s something intriguing about the sweet banana with the creamy… um, sour-ness of the sour cream. I was trying to think of a way to make it a little more upscale, and originally I was just going to caramelize the bananas in sugar. Then I remembered the free bottles of POM Wonderful pomegranate juice I had recently received (I’ll be blogging about that soon) and I knew I had to use the juice with the bananas.

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We have managed to obtain an advanced copy of Spiced, pastry chef Dalia Jurgensen’s new book about “What Really Goes On in the Kitchen,” and we want to give it away to YOU! All you have to do is leave a comment on this article with the name of your favorite restaurant, and a winner will be chosen at random. Make sure you include your first name in the comment, so that if you win we can contact you. The contest is only open to people living within the United States, we will pay for shipping, and all comments must be received by 11:59pm on Saturday, April 18th. Please bear in mind that this is an advance, uncorrected proof, courtesy of Penguin Publishers.

Good luck to all of you, we look forward to reading about your favorite restaurants!
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Note: Last year I wrote a detailed post about how I cook Kosher for Passover, or K for P as I call it. Click here if you care about such things.

Even before Passover began, I was thinking about how I hadn’t cooked anything elaborate in a while. A few months ago I started saving the stems from shitakes I had cooked with — I was keeping them in a plastic sandwich bag in my freezer. I had always heard that you could make a good stock with them, though I was a little skeptical about using them. So when it came time to make a soup for my gussied up matzah balls, I pulled the stems out and set to work.

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I had a craving for stir fried noodles one night and good thing I always have a bag of fresh Chinese noodles, eggs and Chinese sausages in the fridge. You can find fresh Chinese noodles pretty easily in Chinatown. They sell them in bags and in different varieties round, thin, thick, flat… For $1.29 a bag, its about 4 servings. So I decided to make a stir fried noodles with Chinese sausages and I’ll use oyster sauce to flavor it but I also wanted some greens in it. Went to Trader Joe’s after work and saw a bag of snow peas. Haven’t had snow peas in a long time and never cooked snow peas before.
This was quick and easy. Basically boil a pot of water for the noodles, it shouldn’t take too long since its fresh. Cut up the sausages, scramble couple eggs and maybe throw in garlic/onion if you got some. Heat up a pan and stir fry everything except for the noodles and eggs. When the snow peas and sausages are almost done throw in the noodles and give it a good stir. At this point I added some baby spinach as well, these cook fast! Now add some oyster sauce, as much as you like. I also added some hoisin sauce to it. After everything gets coated with the oyster sauce, make a well in the center and pour in the eggs. Leave it alone for few minutes to let the bottom solidify. Now stir the eggs to make scrambled eggs and once you have enough chunks of eggs, mix it together with the noodles. Done.
I never tried added hoisin sauce to noodles before and I found, surprisingly, it gave the dish some twang. Good.