Matzo Brei

Matzo is not something I buy or eat on a regular basis. When we were kids, we would sometimes get it and eat it spread with salted butter. But other than that, it's pretty much been a novelty item to eat at Seder meals.

So when Maddy proposed we make the Matzo Brei, I had to think about whether matzo was even available at the grocery store here. Fortunately, since it's Passover now, there was in fact plenty of matzo to be had. Of course, the first thing I made with it was this. And Claire sampled it with butter and salt and pronounced it good.

 But now it was time to make the Brei. In German, Brei means porridge, and that kind of makes sense here, since you soak the matzo down to a soft mass.

 The recipe is basically a matzo frittata: you beat eggs and milk with salt and plenty of pepper, and then you thrown in your soaked and drained matzo.

 Strangely enough, while I was cooking this recipe, this story popped up on my iPod, so I could fully appreciate the effort that went into my matzo.

 But matzo brei? Not so much effort. Now we're ready to melt the butter. Melissa calls for SIX TABLESPOONS of the stuff. This is probably half that, and it's still pretty darned buttery. (If you're wondering about the little white things, the salted butter here has large salt crystals--yum--that create that effect.)

Your matzo mixture goes in the pan and cooks for a while until it's nice and brown. What's nice is that you can flip it over in quarters, so you don't stress as you might with a frittata.

 I did the caramelized onions on the side because we're a family of caramelized onion fans (Claire said she wanted the whole batch for her dinner). It was a good decision: I liked this better with the onions than with the honey, especially when it's for dinner.

While this recipe seemed weird, we all really liked it. Julia said it was like a German pancake. It's substantial yet fluffy, and I can see taking it over to the sweet side some time. Claire tried it with a variety of toppings, from honey to sriracha, and she said she liked it best with ketchup and caramelized onions. The rest of us stuck pretty much just to the caramelized onions and that was just fine. I made two batches for the four of us (one batch=4 squares of matzo and 4 eggs), and that was just right for everyone but me--I couldn't finish mine.

So I'm glad Maddy picked this recipe and that the store had matzo. I would never have tried the recipe otherwise, and that would have been a shame.