The Great Kreplach Kaper

(Obligatory whiny excuse: I was *gonna* post earlier, but internet access is inexplicably down at our house, and my IT department, aka Josh, is away on a biz trip all week. Oh yeah and then I've also been single parenting, and we all know how that goes. Anyway.)

My grandma (who is my sole surviving grandparent at this point) has been in town for the last week or so, and it's been fun hanging out with her, especially watching her get to know Eli better (and meet Isaac). Now, my grandma is not your stereotypical Jewish bubbe--she doesn't particularly like to cook, keep house or knit, was iffy about mothering (my Dad and she had a years-long non-speaking feud for many years, which is now, thankfully, mended), and has generally seemed to prefer to interact with both her grandchildren and great-grandchildren at arm's length. But did I let that stop me from practically forcing her to act like a good bubbe on this trip? Nope. Like a good Jewish granddaughter, I applied much guilt and shamelessly abused my "favorite grandchild" status (which I still am not sure how I ascended to, except that I *did* go visit her in Boca Raton that one time a few years ago while I was in Miami on a business trip) and got her to agree to do a special cooking project with me and Eli. (Isaac was there too, but he won't remember this project. Eli, hopefully, will.)

That's right, gentle readers, I coerced my 80-something year old grandma into spending an afternoon making kreplach. From scratch. Enough kreplach to feed 8 people, no less. (My grandma, my parents, my aunt and uncle, my cousin, Eli and me.)

What is this kreplach, you ask? Well, it's basically Jewish ravioli. You make some dough, you make some filling (in our case, we made both potato/onion and chicken/vegetable), you roll out the dough and cut it into squares, you put the filling in the dough, you seal them and shape them, you boil them (although some sources suggest they might be better fried, but I've never had them that way), you eat them. With schmaltz. What, you don't know what schmaltz is? It's Jewish butter: rendered chicken fat. (And before you go off shrieking "ewwwww!" I suggest you try some. Oh my GOD is it delicious. But then, keep in mind that one of my favorite nasty food indulgences is to surreptitiously eat the drippings out of the pan while I'm basting the Thanksgiving turkey. YMMV.)

I remember my grandma making this dish for me and my brother at my parents house at some point in the misty recesses of time back when we were young teenagers, and I've never forgotten it. In part I'm sure it was memorable because my grandma only visited us on the West Coast every once in a great while, and I don't remember her attempting such large, labor-intensive projects with us very often, but it was also memorable because of the kreplach-making experience itself. It wasn't just the novelty of making something from scratch that appealed to me back then (hell, it's still a novelty for me now, pretty much); it was also the exciting exoticism of an ethnic dish that was rightfully part of my own background, something that had been missing up until now but which I could lay claim to if I wanted (unlike, say, Italian food). So I wanted to see if I could recreate one of my favorite childhood grandma memories, and if possible, pass it on to the next generation too. What can I say...I'm a sucker for family traditions and family history, even if I have to create it myself. (Which I did...my grandma adamantly did not remember having made kreplach for me before, nor did she exactly have a from-scratch kreplach recipe ready-to-hand--she wanted to use pre-made wonton skins. We had to look up the dough recipe and sort of made up the filling as we went along. But once we got rolling, she remembered how to do it just fine.)

And you know what? We had a great time making kreplach, my grandma, my aunt Janis (her youngest daughter), Eli and me. There was banter, there were stories about bygone days, there were pointers on technique, there were language lessons (e.g. singular=krepel, plural=kreplach). Eli had a terrific time cracking eggs, adding flour, kneading dough and pinching kreplach. They came out great and half of them got devoured right out of the pot before we even sat down to our official dinner. Even Eli, a.k.a. "the pickiest kid in the world", ate a ton of them. (He liked them best "juicy"...i.e. with lots of schmaltz drizzled on top. That's my boy.) In my official role as family historian, I took lots of video and pictures (I'll try to post some when I get my internet access back). I also took copious recipe notes so that I can someday replicate the process even if my grandma isn't there. I'm trying to come up with some "excuse" of a holiday or other event, a once-a-year justifiable occasion where I can regularly make kreplach, just so I don't forget how. (Labor Day maybe?) Because the whole experience was delightfully filling, in more ways than one.

Thanks, grandma!

UPDATED (because my internet access is back!): Here's a picture of my grandma and Eli making the chicken & vegetable kreplach.

^ The dough has been rolled and cut into squares, and they're in the midst of filling the squares and shaping them into kreplach. You can see the typical finished kreplach shape over on the side of the board near Eli.