Chanie Apfelbaum’s Pesach Recipe Ideas and Prep Tips

The countdown is officially on until Pesach — don’t let this scare you! With this week’s episode from Chanie Apfelbaum of Busy in Brooklyn, we are getting you ready with excitement and ease so you really look forward to the prep in a new way. Ultimately, as women, we are the core of our homes and our energy is everything! We deserve to have fun, feel good and make super delicious food that doesn’t have one million steps to it.

Here, a roundup of Chanie’s expert tips from the episode. Let us know what you try in the comments!

The Mindset

“You don’t have to go crazy on a holiday like Pesach. Having the essentials and keeping things simple is the way to go,” Chanie shares. As someone who grew up with Chabad minhagim, her family had to keep it simple. They only used kosher salt to season — nothing extra. They didn’t use garlic either because it’s grown next to wheat fields. Some families don’t use oil — only shmaltz. They didn’t even use sugar — her mother would turn sugar into simple syrup by boiling and straining and use that as a sweetener.

That being said, Chanie grew up loving the holiday and looking forward to the unique things her mother would make just at this time. “She didn’t change things year after year,” Chanie shares.

Recipe Ideas

Overall, Chanie recommends roasting over stovetop cooking due to ease and retention of flavor. When you put something like beets in a pot with water for example, all the sweetness and the flavor of the beets goes into the water, but if you wrap your beets in foil and roast them in the oven, you’re concentrating the flavor of the beets. They become sweeter, taste more like themselves and they don’t get waterlogged.

You can do this with all vegetables and fruits — even making applesauce this way instead of standing over the stove.

• First, she references chremslach which you can make traditionally or the Busy in Brooklyn way.

• She also gave eggs a unique twist — sauté onions with chopped up hardboiled eggs. Then add a raw eggs and scramble it all together. It’s a recipe her bubbe made and mother continued when she was younger.

• Faux chopped liver — you take a lot of eggs and mix it with walnuts and sautéed onions.

• To think more outside of the box, swap some of your recipes with potatoes for plantains like in a shepherd’s pie (her complete recipe here!)
  
• Try tostones — these are green plantains which are fried twice and then topped with ceviche or pulled beef, avocado and pickled onions. She also has a great one on the site for savory plantain tortillas!
  
• Doctor up your potatoes — roast a sweet potato in the oven at 400 degrees for about an hour until it starts to ooze and get crispy, she explains. If your minhag is to peel vegetables, wrap the potato in tinfoil after peeling so it doesn’t dry out. Bonus— turn this into soup by scooping out the flesh and adding it to a pot!
  
• Similarly, you can do this with a butternut squash. Butternut squash are notoriously hard to cut so if you wrap one in foil and roast for an hour — rotating a bit throughout the process so it cooks evenly, you can just scoop it out at the end. Add it to a pot with sauteed onions, ginger, garlic and apples (roasted or not beforehand) and it’s absolutely delicious!
  
• Further, you can turn that butternut squash into a pie. She has a recipe for this in Totally Kosher where you don’t even need any additional sweetener because of the natural caramelization and sweetness that comes out when you roast. Roast until the squash is really blistered and then mix the inside with coconut milk, cinnamon and eggs and voila! Deliciousness that’s natural and healthy.
  
• Let’s talk store-bought sauces. Instead of buying the duck sauce or soy sauce, skip it and trade in for something more natural instead. Soy sauce can be replaced with coconut aminos and you can make your own duck sauce! Just mix apricot jam (the natural kind) with garlic, ginger, lemon juice or vinegar and some chili pepper.
  
• You can make your own mayo too. “It’s the easiest thing to make!” Chanie shares. Here’s a reel where she shows you exactly how to do it. When you’re done, you can doctor it up with things like garlic, leftover horseradish from the seder, herbs, etc. You’ll have so many different variations! It can last you about a week in the fridge.
  
• When it comes to dairy, you can also have some fun. Swap regular noodles for zoodles or peel the white strips off a zucchini and use them like lasagna noodles. You can also make delicious eggplant parmesan — cut the eggplant in half length-wise and put it under the broiler for 20 minutes with the skin side up. Then stuff it with marinara and cheese. “No carbs, no frying, melty and so delicious!”
  
• Confit life — garlic confit is everywhere these days — and for good reason! Put garlic cloves with olive oil in the oven for about an hour until they get caramelized and buttery soft. You can spread it on matzah, mash and spread it over chicken or a roast and just add salt and pepper for maximum deliciousness. Add leeks, tomatoes or herbs like rosemary and thyme to mix it up — or try her jalapeño, date and garlic confit! Adding leftover confit to a salad dressing for a hint of sweetness and caramelization afterward is another great idea.

Dessert

Move over boxed mixes! These ideas will have your mouth watering and are super simple and healthier than traditional Pesach desserts — they deserved their own category in the recipe section. Plus, with egg prices soaring, these are all egg-free.

• Date barks — basically, you smash dates down next to each other so they’re flat and then top with nut butter, melted chocolate and any toppings like shaved coconut, pomegranate seeds, additional nuts, salt, etc. It’s a huge trend right now so recipes abound and you can personalize based on your own flavor profile.
  
• Banana ice cream — recipe on her site!
  
• Simple sorbets
  
• Shaved fruit — shave fruit on a mandolin, make a big mound, drizzle with honey and you’re done!
  
• Homemade nutella — this for sure is going to be the star of my Pesach show. Just roast hazelnuts in the oven, then take the skins off with a kitchen towel. While still warm, put them into a food processor and let it go until you have nut butter — you made need to scrape down a few times. Then, add in chocolate chips which will melt because the nuts are warm, add a splash of vanilla and pinch of salt and you’re done! Perfect for date bark, on top of fruit, matzah or anything else you can think of!
  
• Mousse made with coconut milk and chocolate (so many recipes out there!)

Leftovers

Sometimes, you have just a little bit of something left— you don’t want to waste it but have no idea how to use it — some ideas here!

• Dips — smother them on a salmon or chicken as a seasoning or marinade.
  
• Brisket — turn leftover brisket or meat into shepherd’s pie or tacos — that way, people don’t need as much!

The Prep

Here, some tips to make your entire prep process much easier — because we all want things streamlined!

• Mince a whole bunch of garlic at once in the food processor so you’re not doing it five times — then take from the jar as needed. Similarly, spend 10 minutes cutting all your onions, or one make one big batch of sautéed onions, so you have them ready ahead of time for use.
  
• To minimize cleaning with the food processor, slide a sheet of parchment paper right under the lid so only the bottom gets dirty.
  
• Use real sheet pans, not disposable ones. While this may seem like more work, the real caramelization from the veggie roasting comes when you have the real deal.
  
• Bonus — invest in some larger sheet trays. The caramelization can’t happen when veggies are crowding the pan. Getting a 3/4 sheet tray instead of the half size will give you extra room and have you taking up a wider space that your oven already offers!

Meal Planning

Don’t overthink it! That’s number one. At a restaurant, for example, Chanie shares, you usually do an appetizer, main and dessert. That’s it. You don’t need 30 dips or salads on course one — one big salad is nice. Keep your meal to a protein, carb and vegetable, add a dessert at the end and you’re good to go. Especially in chuz l’aretz this year with first days being three days, we’ve got to keep it more simple.

• For a third day meal (or any Shabbos lunch idea) try a board! You can do a baked potato board with things like sour cream, salsa and pickled jalapenos (or things that you can find or make K for P) and all you really need to do is bake some potatoes to prep.
  
• Try tacos with jicama or the plantains linked above. Fancy restaurants will use jicama now because they are very wide. Slice it on a mandolin thinly and that becomes the taco shell. Put ceviche in there or pulled salmon and you’re good to go.
  
• Try egg crepes, noodle crepes or a blintz board for Pesach building ideas.
  
• Build your own poke bowl with cauliflower rice or quinoa — you can also build your own quinoa sushi!
  
• Since the seder is more formal, you can start with her homemade gefilte fish recipe — in Totally Kosher! This was the exact recipe her mother used to make on Pesach and comes from the Lubvaticher Rebbe’s wife, Rebbetzin Chaya Mushka. Start the meal with fish, maybe a grated beet salad. You can do cucumber salad and ratatouille or her mother’s vinaigrette which was boiled beets, carrots, potatoes and red onions mixed together.
  
• If you want to do something heimish, you can start with a scoop of egg salad or the mock chopped liver.
  
• Then, chicken soup is always a classic and you can use egg noodles in it.
  
• Since we don’t usually roast meat on Pesach, Chanie has a recipe for braised leek chicken in Milennial Kosher, plus there are a bunch of stovetop roast ideas which are a good go-to.

The most important tip? FIND THE JOY! You want to feel good going into Pesach, you want your kids to see you happy and you want to have delicious food that you also love! Even if you’re the only one eating it, you are also a person and deserve to be happy so treat yourself and enjoy all the delicious things you’re cooking up.

Wishing everyone a beautiful Pesach!