My favorite comment about Wise Sons' Saturday-only deli came from my sister, who wrote on Facebook, "Your grandfather, may he rest in peace, he didn't eat at delis that popped up. He married a balaboosta and SHE cooked for him."

Too true! Growing up, everything at our Passover Seders was made from scratch in my grandmother Fae's kitchen, from the gefilte fish to the brisket to the spongecake. (The exception was Passover brownies, which my 7-year-old self loved to whip up from the box of Manischewitz mix. My grandmother was a true balaboosta--Yiddish for perfect housewife & mother--and she knew how to keep a kid out of her hair when she was busy making chicken soup for 20.)

I had high hopes of finally making my own gefilte fish (chilled fish balls, typically made from carp, pike, and whitefish mixed with onion and matzoh meal and poached in fish stock, a kind of Mitteleuropa quenelle) from scratch this year. My mother even sent me the recipe she'd used, torn out of her well-splattered copy of From My Mother's Kitchen by longtime New York Times writer Mimi Sheraton. Time and deadlines, alas, will preclude this from happening for Monday's Seder, but sometime during the rest of the week, who knows? I could have a carp swimming in my bathtub yet.

Gefilte fish cupcake. Photo: J. Pollack Photography

However, you don't need to make your fish balls to present Stefani Pollack's fabulous (or terrifying) Gefilte Fish Cupcakes from The Cupcake Project. Just buy a jar of fish balls, mash them into a cupcake liner, and top with a big, tempting swirl of...wait! That's not strawberry icing, it's HORSERADISH WHIPPED CREAM! Oh, the horror. As my friend Molly said, just start saving for the kids' therapy now.

Passover, like Thanksgiving, only happens once a year, and so I've found that people really don't need something new and wild on the table, especially during the first two festive Seder nights. (The holiday itself goes on for 8 days, so I can understand that you might want to get a little crazy by the 5th or 6th night.) I can vouch for the deliciousness and complete ease of Gourmet's brisket recipe with one suggestion: Ditch the brisket, get the chuck roast. The weird, webby-stringy texture of brisket has always put me off, along with its tendency to dryness. Moist, slow-cooked chuck roast, by contrast, falls apart in perfectly succulent shreds at the poke of a fork. This is an especially good dish for Passover, because it's easily made ahead of time. In a heavy covered pot, it can keep warm in a slow oven for the time it takes to do the blessings and hide the afikomen.

I used to give myself major tsuris trying to reproduce the perfection that was Grandma Fae's spongecake, until I realized that, tradition aside, what everyone at my table really wanted was flourless chocolate cake, made with good chocolate, finely ground almonds, and lots of eggs whipped to fluffiness. This, plus strawberries, a few macaroons and maybe some jelly rings, is all anyone will have room for.

But what about after the Seder? A few days of leftovers, and then, it's a week of Atkins, with only matzoh and potatoes for starch, since all other kinds of bread and grains are forbidden during the holiday. By day five of crumbling tuna-on-matzoh sandwiches, I can well understand why Robin of Doves & Figs might want to soak her matzoh in wine before frying up a Drunken Passover Grilled Cheese.

And then, you probably want to get out of the house and let someone else do the cooking. If you're not strictly observant of the kosher-for-passover dietary laws, several Bay Area restaurants are doing menus this week inspired by Passover dishes from around the world (if by "around the world" we mean Italy.)

From April 19 through April 26, Delfina will be featuring its annual array of Passover-themed dishes. They're not doing a Seder, just adding a rotating selection of special seasonal items to the regular menu. Selections will change daily, but you can probably count on finding some kind of brisket, fried artichokes (a classic of Roman Jewish cuisine), veal tongue, chef-owner Craig Stoll's family recipe for matzoh ball soup, and an "edible Seder plate" with farm egg salad, charoset (apple-walnut dip) and lamb-shank crostini. (But going to Delfina while forgoing pasta? That would take more willpower than I can muster.)

Maror Cocktail. Photo courtesy of The Sipping Seder

And finally, let's not forget the required drinking. Yes, four glasses of wine are mandated at each Seder, but in between, why stick to Manischewitz (or even Baron Herzog) when you can knock back a beet-and-horseradish Maror cocktail instead? As Irwin Keller writes in his introduction to The Sipping Seder,

The seder asks us to retell the story of the exodus from Egypt as if we had been there in person. It’s hard to imagine enduring generations of slavery and a slew of plagues, only to flee our homes in the dead of night and run straight into the sea with the world’s fiercest army in hot pursuit. If we managed somehow to survive the experience, what would we do when at last we reached safety? Perhaps we lack the fortitude of our ancestors, but we can easily imagine being ready for a good stiff drink. Maybe two.

The six cocktails on the site, each of which corresponds to a ritual item on the Seder plate, are the inventions of Rob Corwin and Danny Jacobs. Even better, they're currently working with Umberto Gibin, co-owner of Perbacco, to debut the cocktails at the downtown restaurant during Passover. (To make your own, try searching out our local Distillery No. 209's kosher-for-passover gin, made with sugarcane instead of grain.

Perbacco will also be continuing its tradition of offering an Italian-style Passover meal cooked by executive chef Staffan Terje with former Square One chef and cookbook author Joyce Goldstein on the 3rd night of Passover, Wed., April 20.

Wise Sons is doing a pop-up Traditional Passover Seder at Coffee Bar Monday, April 18 and Tuesday April 19. Tuesday is sold out but reservations for Monday are still available. Saul's in Berkeley will be hosting a prix fixe Seder dinner on Friday, April 22, while Firefly in San Francisco's Noe Valley will turn its whole menu into a celebration of Passover dishes from April 18-26. Mission Beach Cafe will also offer a Passover dinner on April 25. Palio D'Asti is doing a "What Would Jesus Eat?" Holy Week mash-up from April 18-23, whipping up dishes from Italian Passover and Easter traditions.

And to that, l'chaim!

The last turkey sandwiches and scraps of pumpkin pie are gone, the final breakfast of hot coffee and cold stuffing finished, and suddenly, another holiday is sending you back into the kitchen, this time to fry, fry, fry. Chanukah, the Jewish Festival of Lights, comes early this year, starting the evening of Wednesday, December 1st and ending 8 days later on December 9th.

Last year, I passed along all my must-have tips for latkes, the potato pancakes that are the festive centerpiece of family dinners during this holiday. Now, onto the borscht!

You wouldn't necessarily think, given how many people (Barack Obama included) shudder at the very thought of a beet, that a pot of beet-and-cabbage soup could best a platter of crispy, greasy, fried potatoes slathered in sour cream and applesauce, but I've seen it happen.

Every year at my annual Chanukah party, folks come for the latkes but stay for the borscht. Waiting for the next round of potato pancakes to come out of the frying pan, they drift over to the big pot of magenta soup at the back of the stove, scoop out a bowlful, dollop on the sour cream, and before I know it, they're at my elbow, demanding to know "what is in this soup??"

They don't really believe me when I tell them it's nothing but dowdy root vegetables like turnips and parsnips, dill, a little cider vinegar and a whole bunch of beets and cabbage. Inspired by the dreamy borscht served at the marvelously glamorous, original incarnation of the Russian Tea Room in New York City, my borscht has adapted over the years, to where there's hardly even a recipe to follow.

Onions, leeks, and garlic are sauteed to start with, then followed by a bowlful of whatever could survive a Russian winter, usually a combination of carrots, parsnips, turnips, celery root, and rutabaga, then chopped or grated beets and finely sliced red cabbage, all seasoned with plenty of salt, caraway seed, and a few twigs of sage or thyme. Because I usually make my borscht vegetarian, I add a big can of diced tomatoes (Muir Glen's fire-roasted tomatoes are particularly nice) to give body and a bit of acidity to all that root-vegetable sweetness. Water to make up however much liquid is needed, and then, the crucial splash of red-wine or apple-cider vinegar for tartness. A gentle simmer for 45 minutes or so, an adjustment of salt or vinegar, a hefty stir-in of chopped fresh dill, and the borscht is ready. Like every winter soup, it improves with age, and can be made a day or two ahead of time.

My Polish landlord has promised to have me over for borscht sometime this winter. The red borscht that I know, he says, is a specialty of eastern Poland and Ukraine. In western Poland, however, they make a white borscht with sausage, potatoes, and zur, a tart, cloudy liquid fermented from rye meal and rye-bread crusts. I haven't yet tried this kind, since it sounds like it needs a freezing-cold, months-long Eastern European winter to properly accompany it.

In my Jewish experience, there are two kinds of borscht: the cold kind, made only with beets, that you mix with sour cream to a lurid hot-pinkness and drink from a glass, and the belly-filling winter kind, chock full of cabbage, beets, and root vegetables, served with a dollop of sour cream on top, challah or rye bread on the side.

I generally make mine vegetarian, since I'm usually making borscht for a crowd, but many cooks make theirs with meat, chunks of fatty, tough but flavorful beef cooked on the bone to give body to the broth. A shot of vinegar keeps winter's appetite sharp, although now that everyone's madly pickling, you could add in some naturally fermented sauerkraut juice, perhaps and some sauerkraut, too, or a few diced pickled beets with their juice.

Winter Borscht
It's impossible to make a small amount of borscht. Anyway, why would you want to? It keeps well and can sustain you for days. The amounts listed here are approximate, since the amount of borscht you make should be constrained only by the size of the biggest pot you have.

Serves: 8

Ingredients:
2 tbsp oil or butter
1 large onion, peeled and chopped, and/or 1 large leek, trimmed and chopped
3 to 5 cloves garlic, chopped
2 carrots, chopped
1 parsnip, chopped
1 turnip, chopped
1 rutabaga, chopped (optional)
1 celery root, chopped
3 beets, peeled and chopped or grated
1/2 head of red cabbage, thinly sliced
1 cup cooked small white beans, optional
1 28-oz can diced tomatoes and juice
water as needed
1 - 2 tsp salt, to taste
2 tsp caraway seed
1 tsp dill seed (optional)
1 tsp dried thyme or several branches of fresh thyme or sage
2 tbsp apple-cider or red-wine vinegar, or to taste

Garnish:
1 small bunch fresh dill, minced
Sour cream--the real stuff, with no additives, and definitely NOT "lite" or nonfat. If you truly won't (or can't) bear the full-fatness, use non- or lowfat Greek yogurt instead.

Preparation:
1. Over medium heat, heat oil in a large, heavy soup pot. Reduce heat, add onions, leek, and garlic. Cook, stirring, until softened and translucent but not browned, 5 to 8 minutes.

2. Add chopped carrots, parsnips, turnip, celery root and rutabaga and cook, stirring, until vegetables are slightly softened, 8-10 minutes. Add beets and cabbage and cook for another few minutes.

3. Add salt, caraway, and thyme. Add tomatoes and juice, white beans if using, and enough water to cover vegetables. Add vinegar to taste. Bring to a simmer, then reduce heat to keep soup at a gentle simmer. Partially cover and let cook until vegetables are tender and flavors have blended, about 45 minutes.

4. Adjust salt and vinegar. To serve, top each bowlful with a generous sprinkle of fresh dill and a dollop of sour cream.

Photograph by Stephane von Stephane

Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, begins this year on Wednesday night. This holiday is a bridge stretched between the past and the future. As I understand it, the two-week period between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, or the Day of Atonement, is a time for personal and spiritual clean-up. You look back at everything you did (or failed to do) during the past year, and you make amends: settle your debts, ask for forgiveness, leave old habits behind.

And to help blow the cobwebs out of your brain, and get you up and ready to do what needs to be done, comes the blast of the shofar, or ram's horn. It's a real ram's horn, blown at the end of the day's services, with a sound that's deeply weird and thrilling. It's rare that any experience comes to us unmitigated across the centuries, much less the millennia. Nothing we eat now tastes like it would have two hundred or even a hundred years ago; cooking methods, animal breeds and plant varieties, even ways of measuring ingredients have all changed and evolved, and while old recipes may give us a sense of how previous generations ate, we'll never know exactly what their bread or their apples tasted like.

Sounds, though, might remain true. A ram's horn is a ram's horn, and when it's blown, the tone rings as Biblical as manna, a tradition that reverberates down through some five thousand years. (By the Jewish calender, the upcoming year is 5771.)

As a lunar holiday, the exact date of Rosh Hashanah moves around from year to year, but it usually falls sometime between early and mid-September. The timing is perfect to fulfill the injunction to eat new fruits, part of a holiday tradition of serving sweet foods to guarantee a sweet year.

Honey, too, is always on the menu at Rosh Hashanah, scooped up with apple slices and used to sweeten round domes of raisin-studded challah bread. With the resurgence of interest in beekeeping, and especially in urban beekeeping, now is the time to find out what your neighborhood tastes like, to a bee. I'm always trying out different local honeys, so on my table this year will be Eggman Family's pomegranate-blossom honey (sold at the Saturday Alemany Farmers' Market in San Francisco) next to the "Marin Mix" honey from Marshall's Farm (widely available at many local grocery stores, as well as the Ferry Plaza Farmers' Market and the Marin Farmers' Market.)

You can also drop by Saul's in Berkeley next week for Adventures in the Honey Harvest, a panel discussion and local honey tasting with Helene Marshall of Marshall's Farm Honey, Jen Radtke of Biofuel Oasis, which offers classes in urban beekeeping, and Saul's co-owner and home beekeeper Peter Levitt.

Right now, the farmers' markets are rich with the first fruits of autumn. Peaches, melons, and berries still have their allure, but this week my eyes suddenly noticed the plumpness of green and purple late-harvest figs, the golden swell of Bartlett and Asian pears, the red-striped Gravenstein apples, the first pomegranates, and in particular, the amber-skinned Italian sugar plums and dusky indigo French prune plums. These small, oval plums, harbingers of fall, are nothing like summer's juice-dripping flavor bombs made for slurpy out-of-hand eating; instead, their dense, sugary flesh and tart skins are enhanced by baking.

And this simple plum cake shows them off. It's a great family dessert that can easily double as a lazy morning coffee cake. Cinnamon seems to have a nice affinity with plums, but so does cardamom and anise. Adding a little buckwheat flour gives the cake a pleasant heft and nuttiness; you could also replace the white flour completely with whole-wheat pastry flour, or a wheat-free combination of equal parts oat and barley flours.

Not being a fan of traditional honey cake, an upside-down apple gingerbread has been my go-to holiday dessert for quite a while. But with the long-delayed warmth of summer finally upon us, something a little lighter, with the kiss of the last stone fruits upon it, seems to offer the perfect sweetness for the year to come.

Plum Cake
You could also try this with other fruits, such as sliced peaches, sliced poached quinces, or halved fresh figs.

Makes 1 cake, to serve 8

Ingredients
1/2 cup (8 tbsp) butter, softened
3/4 cup sugar
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla
1/4 tsp ground cardamom (optional)
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/4 cup buckwheat flour
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 cup milk
1/2 cup chopped walnuts or pecans, toasted
24 small Italian plums or 12 French prune plums, halved lengthwise and pitted
1 tbsp sugar mixed with 1/4 tsp cinnamon or 1/4 tsp anise seeds

Preparation

1. Grease and flour a 9" cake pan. Preheat oven to 350F.

2. Cream butter and sugar until fluffy. Beat in egg and vanilla.

3. In a small bowl, sift together flours, cardamom (if using), baking powder, and salt.

4. Stir half of flour mixture into butter. Add milk and stir gently to mix. Add remaining flour and stir until just smooth. Stir in all but 1 tablespoon of the nuts.

5. Spread batter in prepared pan. Arrange plums, skin side up, in concentric circles over batter. Sprinkle with nuts and cinnamon sugar or sugar and anise seeds.

6. Bake for 35 to 40 minutes, until cake is slightly puffed and golden brown. Let cool 10-15 minutes, then release from pan and let cool on a rack.

Adventures in the Honey Harvest will be held at Saul's Restaurant & Deli, 1475 Shattuck Ave., Berkeley, on Sept. 14 from 7-8:30pm. Tickets are $5.

Happy Purim! Yes, today is the Jewish celebration of Purim, a happy little holiday where costumes and drunken revelry are mandated, and rolling from house to house bringing gifts of food and drink is exactly what you're supposed to do. The party is mostly a secular one, a celebration of the bravery and resourcefulness of Queen Esther, favorite of Persia's King Ahasuerus. When Haman, one of the king's advisors, plotted to rid the kingdom of Jews, Esther went to the king, revealed her previously hidden Jewish identity and pleaded for her people to be spared. As a result, Haman got it in the neck instead of the Jews, and persecution was set aside for another day.

So, a fine reason to celebrate. At the synagogue, the story is read from the Book of Esther, and every time Haman is mentioned, noisemakers are cranked to drown out his name. Sometimes the story is acted out, in a goofy pageant called the Purimspiel. Many synagogues or community centers hold a Purim Carnival for kids. Who could resist games like "Throw the Beanbag through Haman's Mouth"? Best of all, of course, are the hamantaschen, cookies made in the shape of Haman's (supposedly) three-cornered hat and filled with a thick, sweet paste of apricots, prunes, or poppy seeds.

Clearly, this is a cookie born in Central Europe, brought over by immigrants raised on the buttery cookies, the poppy seeds, honey, spices and dried fruits found in baking traditions from Vienna to Budapest. What sets hamantaschen apart from, say, thumbprint cookies are their fillings: dense and sticky, full flavored and rich. Called lekvar, these are pastes, not jams, made from dried fruits plumped in juice and water, flavored with citrus and spices. Where jam would boil and run, lekvar stays put.

It's not impossible to find hamantaschen at bakeries around the Bay Area, especially at this time of year. But they're never anywhere near as good as homemade. Too often, the dough is sugar-cookie bland, the filling a thin scrape of rubbery goo. What you want is a fat, buttery-lemony cookie folded around a plump spoonful of rich fruitiness, something almost more mince pie than mere cookie.

Now, it's easy to find canned lekvars in the kosher section of any supermarket. Like so many prepared foods, though, they're often filled with unnecessary junk: high-fructose corn syrup, weird preservatives. Happily, though, making your own is easy, and the taste is well worth the tiny bit of effort put in at the blender.

You will, however, need to make a special trip for the apricot paste. Any shop specializing in Middle Eastern groceries will carry this, essentially a flat brick of lightly sweetened fruit leather. I've only ever seen one brand, made in Syria and wrapped in golden cellophane, with a beautiful blue label painted with bright orange apricots.

While you're there, of course, you can browse for all kinds of other delicious things, like olives, thick yogurt, pink pickled turnips, mint tea, pomegranate molasses, rose-petal jam, baba ghanoush, chunks of halvah ribboned with chocolate, fresh pita bread, crunchy melon seeds, belly-dancing videos, copper pots for making Turkish coffee, sesame candy, and more. I found mine (and all of the above) at Samiramis Imports in the Mission.

Apricot paste in hand, you can divide up the process over a few hours. Make the cookie dough and stash it in the fridge. Make the fillings, apricot first so you can reuse the pot and the blender without needing to wash them, since the darkness of the prune will absorb any remaining apricot stickiness. Roll out the dough, cut the rounds, move them onto cookie sheets and let little hands plop on the filling and pinch the three-cornered triangles. Bake, make tea or pour milk, and celebrate. And then bring a plateful to your neighbors.

Hamantaschen
Both dough and fillings keep well in the refrigerator, so you can roll out and fill just a few cookies at a time. Then again, these are really delicious and fun to eat even for breakfast, since they're not overly rich or sweet. In my experience, even a whole batch doesn't last very long out of the oven.

Makes: about 20 cookies

Ingredients:
8 tbsp (1 stick, 4 oz) butter or margarine
1/2 cup + 2 tbsp sugar
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla
1 1/2 tbsp orange juice
1/2 tsp grated lemon rind
2 cups flour
1 1/4 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
Apricot and/or Prune Lekvar, recipe below

Preparation:
1. Cream butter and sugar until fluffy. Beat in egg, orange juice, and vanilla. In a separate bowl, whisk together flour, baking powder, and salt. Stir flour into butter mixture, mixing gently until just combined. Add lemon zest and stir until dough is smooth.

2. Form into a ball, wrap in plastic wrap or pop into a resealable plastic bag.
Chill in the refrigerator for at least 2 hours or overnight. (Otherwise dough will be too sticky to roll out.) While dough is chilling, making filling(s).

3. Preheat oven to 375 F. Lightly flour a large wooden cutting board or countertop. Because this dough tends to be sticky, it's easiest to roll it out with a sheet of waxed paper between the dough and the rolling pin. This will prevent the dough from sticking and tearing as you roll.

4. Roll out dough into a broad round, as if you're making a thickish sheet of pie dough. It's better to have it on the thicker side, maybe a quarter-inch or so, as the cookies are nicer when they're a little puffy, and also will be easier to fill and pinch if they're not super-skinny.

5. Using a cookie cutter or a drinking glass, stamp out circles of dough. Move the circles onto a cookie sheet, leaving an inch or so between each one. It's important to fill the rounds on the cookie sheet (rather than on the counter top) as they are hard to move without tearing once they're filled. The size is up to you; I usually use a cutter that's about 4 inches across, making a round the size of a smallish hamburger patty.

6. Place a generous tablespoon of filling in the center of each round. Fold the top sides of the circle into the middle and pinch the top into a point. Fold the bottom half up to meet the folded-in sides. Pinch each side to seal, forming a triangle with a patch of filling peeking out from the middle.

7. Bake for 20 minutes or so, until cookies are pale golden brown around the edges. Let cool on a rack. Note that the filling will be super-bubbling hot right out of the oven, so try to give them at least a few minutes' cooling time before you bite into your first one.

Apricot Lekvar

Ingredients:
7 oz apricot paste
1/2 cup water
2 tbsp lemon juice
2 tbsp orange juice
1 tablespoon grated orange zest
1/2 cup golden raisins
2 tbsp sugar or honey, or to taste

Preparation:
Tear apricot paste into bite-sized pieces. Place in a small, heavy saucepan with the rest of the ingredients. Warm over low heat, stirring frequently, until paste is soft and melting and raisins have plumped up, about 10-12 minutes. Let cool for a few minutes, then transfer to a food processor or blender. Puree until smooth. Taste and add more sugar or orange juice, as needed. Store in the refrigerator until needed. (If you have extra, it keeps for a very long time and is excellent on toast.)

Prune Lekvar

Ingredients:
1/2 cup water or orange juice
2 tbsp lemon juice
1 cup pitted prunes
1/2 cup raisins
2 tbsp sugar or honey
1/8 tsp cinnamon

Preparation:
Mix all ingredients together. Put them into the same pot you used for the apricot filling (no need to wash it out), and warm over low heat until prunes and raisins are soft and mushy, about 8-10 minutes. Let cool slightly, then puree. Store in the fridge until needed. Like the apricot filling, it keeps a very long time and tastes divine.

Samiramis Imports, 2990 Mission St at 26th St., San Francisco. (415) 824-6556.