Blue Ribbon Archives

How To Make Your Own Matzoh

Moses had the burning bush which talked to him and told him to free the Jews from slavery and to lead them out of Egypt; I had a burning piece of matzoh. My burning piece of matzoh didn’t talk to me or tell me to do anything, but it did fill my apartment with so much smoke I had to open all of the windows during a rainstorm. If I were superstitious, I might wonder if this burning matzoh was punishment for my non-seder at Five Guys Burgers the night before where, instead of dipping bitter herbs into salted water, I dipped French fries into ketchup. Regardless, this was my first attempt at making matzoh and it all happened because of a mysterious package that arrived earlier in the day.

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Blue Ribbon’s Spiced Matzoh

As a Jew who grew up pretty Jewy (a Bar Mitzvah, Passover seders, an original last name of Rothenberg (changed by my grandparents)), I never got very excited about matzoh. Sure, come April, the inevitable boxes would show up at the store and my mom would by some and we’d spread it with butter (a memory I hadn’t remembered until I wrote this sentence, but now that I remember it, it is a nice taste memory). For those who’ve never experienced matzoh, imagine if cardboard and bread had a baby–that’s matzoh. It’s stiff, it’s crackery, it’s often pretty flavorless. Who gets excited about matzoh?

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Bone Marrow at Blue Ribbon

When people ask me, “How do you come up with stuff for your blog all the time?” I have a ready-made answer: “Camera.”

“Camera?”

“Yes,” I say. “I try to carry a camera everywhere I go” (sometimes at my own peril) “and then if I eat something notable or I stumble into somewhere notable I can take pictures and write about it later.”

Such was the case last night when I went with Diana to Blue Ribbon in the West Village. I’d been there before, I wrote about it way back when and it seemed like this would be an unbloggable experience. But then I recalled the passage in Phoebe Damrosch’s “Service Included” where she and her Per Se co-workers seek out the best bone marrow in New York and find it at Blue Ribbon.

“Diana!” I yelled, after sitting at our table. “We have to get the bone marrow.”

“Bone marrow?”

“Yes,” I continued. “It’ll make a great post and plus I hear it’s fantastic.”

“Ok,” she said. “As long as you’re paying.”

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