This is Mama Miche and today in My Magic Kitchen: Kitchen Sink Salad with Creamy Avocado Dressing!

The creamy avocado dressing is the star of any salad it tops. I love making it fresh and it’s perfect when you’re doing a fridge purge and need to use the avocados. We started keeping our avocados in water in the fridge and it’s the best hack to keep avocados fresh in the fridge for a month! I was constantly throwing out avocados and let’s face it, food is way too expensive to throw out. We all have some waste but we do our best to use what we buy and not waste food or money.

Today in the magic kitchen we are making a staple found in many Jewish holiday meals - Kugel!

Kugels come in many varieties. If you are of the Hebrew persuasion, you probably have had a couple of different kinds in your day. If you’re not a MOTT (member of the Tribe) you might be asking, “What is a Kugel?” By definition (in Jewish cooking) it’s a dish that can be described as a sweet or savory pudding of noodles or potatoes.

In today’s Jewish kitchens, we use a lot of different vegetables for the savory kugels. During Passover, we can’t eat noodles so we stick with vegetables, which tend to be more savory than sweet, except for the carrot. Carrot-based kugels can be made with cinnamon and maple syrup and are quite tasty as well. Carrots, zucchini, and cauliflower have become popular base ingredients for this Passover mainstay.

Do you remember the series of chicken soup for the soul books? I read a couple of them; they were sweet and cute little vignettes meant to make you feel like you’d had a bowl of chicken soup. Chicken soup is also known in some circles as Jewish penicillin. Every nice Jewish girl, and even every not-so-nice Jewish girl like me, has a recipe for chicken soup that they most likely got from their mother or grandmother. Like everything else she cooked, If there was a written recipe of my Momster’s soup, I have never seen it. And no matter who handed the recipe down in a family tree, even someone else’s family recipe, chicken soup and its Pesach sister, matzo ball soup is a staple of Jewish soul food. The ingredients marry in a way that makes anyone sick with any malady, from a cold to heartbreak, feel better after the first sip of broth.

The ultimate comfort food. It is an entire meal in one tray of yummy goodness. All the food groups are represented and necessary to make one feel fabulously full and satisfied. It’s actually also quite easy to make and assemble. There are shortcuts you can make without skimping on flavor. And there are so many variations in ingredients that you can use. You can substitute traditional lasagna noodles with sliced zucchini, or squash, or any number of traditional noodle substitutions A creamy white vegetable lasagna or a chicken Alfredo lasagna are a couple of different options we can explain another time, in another video, but in this video, the old school lasagna that most of us know and love is the star.

If you have seen my recipe and video for my “Momster’s Classic Marinara Sauce” then you will notice that this recipe is similar, but if you haven’t seen it, fear not because all you need to know to make a delicious and easy meat sauce is right here.

It’s a beautiful thing unto itself and it’s the beginning of so many other recipes to build on. This is not a traditionally Italian approach. It’s traditionally my Jewish Momster’s approach combined with years of making it myself. Having developed the twice stolen spice makes every Italian dish I make even better.