Today in my magic kitchen we are making a delicious salmon spread. This salmon spread is one of my favorite things to serve it as an appetizer at Passover. It’s a perfect substitute for gefilte fish for Seder dinner. In the video that accompanies this recipe, I show how to make cucumber rolls stuffed with the salmon spread. They look like little flowers; perfect for the spring holiday.

You will need to use a long English cucumber to really make it work well. But if you do not have the tools or the patience to serve it that way, you can opt to scoop out the seeds to make little cucumber boats stuffed with the spread. You can use a pastry bag or make your own from a Ziploc to fill the boats.

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.