Photo by Flickr user Yucca2k6, used under Creative Common license.
For a Passover seder last week, I was charged with bringing the charoset. I decided to make a batch in the Sephardi style with Israeli influences to compliment the traditional Ashkenazi version I’ve made and eaten since I was a kid.
Charoset is one of the symbolic foods on the seder plate. Whatever your ethnic take on it, it represents the mortar that enslaved Israelites slathered on bricks under the Egyptian sun.
My Middle Eastern melange of dried fruits, nuts, orange zest, and spices received about 100 times as many comments as the familiar Old World mixture of apples and nuts. It also drew an emphatic email request for the recipe, comparing the sweet paste to a certain highly addictive drug. Here is what I wrote up–stat–for the fellow seder guest.
So, just in time for Easter, I figured I would post it here. We still have a few days of Passover left (it ends at sundown on Tuesday, April 2) and it’s never too early to plan your fix for next year. (Recipe after the jump) Continue reading
Rhea Kennedy Morgenstern, writer 