Recipes for leftovers, Passover edition

April 17, 2012 5:37 PM

I just threw out a lot of food and I don't want to do that next year. Please suggest recipes that will help me use up Passover leftovers. Difficulty level: kosher for Passover.

Every year I host a Seder for Passover and end up with a vat of leftovers. Most of them we manage to eat or freeze over the intervening days but 2 dishes pose a problem: charoset and Israeli salad. The charoset is minced nuts, raisin, and apples. The salad is diced tomatoes, onion, cucumber, and other vegetables, with parsley and mint, and dressed with olive oil and vinegar. Neither dish is cooked, so it's not possible to freeze them.

This year I found a recipe for Charoset muffins made with matzo meal that was pretty good, but I still ended up throwing a lot out. Please suggest other recipes or ideas for using up these leftovers. We keep kosher for Passover, so I can't use regular flour and so forth, and by the time Passover is over the food is not really safe to eat.

posted by bq to food & drink (11 answers total)

We put leftover charoset on our oatmeal, but then (obviously) we don't keep kosher for Passover. Maybe you eat something else breakfasty that charoset would go in/with?
posted by juliapangolin at 5:42 PM on April 17, 2012

Both of those dishes are the sort of thing that could easily be scaled down (fewer apples, less veg, etc). Just make less!
posted by phunniemee at 5:43 PM on April 17, 2012 [2 favorites]

You could probably freeze the charoset and use it as a part of an apple pie filling after Passover. I think it would be great. Not sure about the salad.
posted by fifilaru at 5:44 PM on April 17, 2012

the salad - could it be blended to become soup? either heated or cold.

i know some ashkenazi jews who consider quinoa to be a grass, not a grain, so if this is you, you could put the charoset on quinoa "porridge", which sounds delicious. or cut up even more apples and add it to them, put it in a baking dish and make apple crisp (there is for SURE some sort of matzo-meal crisp recipe floating around on the internet.)
posted by andreapandrea at 5:46 PM on April 17, 2012 [1 favorite]

If you have a blender you use for Passover you could make the salad into gazpacho.

And I hate to keep banging the quinoa-for-Passover drum here, but both dishes could be added to quinoa to make something different--either a hot cereal with milk for the charoset, or a cold salad for the veggies.
posted by needs more cowbell at 5:46 PM on April 17, 2012 [2 favorites]

Are there any neighbors or members of our shul that you could share your excess with? They might appreciate a gift of a little jar of Israeli salad or charoset. This might feel in keeping with the joyous, hospitable nature of the holiday. If you can't get anybody to take yours, you might have some luck asking others at shul what they do with their leftovers. (This reminds me of communities where people garden. Everybody is all trying to get rid of their zucchini at the same time, and folks are always clamoring for new and exciting zucchini recipes.)

As for using it in your home, breakfast could be a boiled egg or two and some charoset.

I have a feeling that people who like scrambled eggs might like some Israeli salad cooked in there. Or as an omelet.

I just foudn this recipe for charoset smoothie. As she said, it's a great excuse to have wine with breakfast.

Lunch could be tuna or other Kosher for Passover fish with a side of Israeli salad.

You don't say if you're Ashkenazi or Sephardic, which makes a difference in what your limitations are. Can you tell us more about what you're already eating during Passover, so we can find ways to blend these dishes into your days and mix them up into new meals?

Are you making all of your charoset and Israeli salad in one batch at the beginning? Because work is permitted on the middle days, I'd suggest making two or three batches instead of one huge one. If you have a house full of guests, you might be able to get some help, but that....depends on your house guests. My googling suggest that keeping charoset around more than a few days isn't a good idea, so maybe you are already making it in batches?

I wouldn't want to freeze Israeli salad, because of the cucumbers. But for the charoset, if you were wanting to bake with it later, you could freeze it because the baking will change the texture of the apples anyway.

I went to a seder with doctors this year and there was lots of joking that next year matzo with Colace will be available. The point was that eating as much fiber as you could get your hands on would help, uh, speed things along.
posted by bilabial at 7:21 PM on April 17, 2012

>Please suggest other recipes or ideas for using up these leftovers.

Invite your gentile friends over and feed the leftovers to them.
posted by thermonuclear.jive.turkey at 7:53 PM on April 17, 2012

I had leftover charoset put in my lunch bag the following week, which disgusted the gentile kids. I didn't think to say it's apples and walnuts.

I think the wine acts as a preservative.
posted by brujita at 10:45 PM on April 17, 2012

I'm a Mormon girl who knows nothing about Kosher cooking, so take everything that follows with a grain of salt.

Have you looked for gluten free recipes? People above have mentioned quinoa, but there are other types of flours that aren't grains. Potato starch and garbanzo flour are two that come to mind but there are probably more. If you do a search for gluten free Passover you might find some things that you could work with. The charoset you mentioned kind of reminded me of some of the gluten free snack bar type things I've seen. This place has a bunch of flours, a lot made out of nuts. You might have some luck there.
posted by TooFewShoes at 2:57 AM on April 18, 2012

Nthing make less. I host Easter every year and keep detailed notes about quantities I make each year and the number of guests served (and if I have a lot of leftovers or not), because as much as I would like to think I remember from year to year, I never do.
posted by sarajane at 9:09 AM on April 18, 2012

For the salad --- add some chiles, more tomatoes, and some cilantro. Bam! Some sort of Israeli-Mexican salsa!
posted by rossination at 10:02 AM on April 18, 2012