Kreplach!

Every Fall I get nostalgic for Jewish food as soon as the weather turns. I think it's because there are SO many jewish holidays right at the beginning of the Fall, so I associate the Fall with Jewish greasy foods. And as I've said before, I'm a food jew- I have no interest in celebrating jewish holidays per se, but I LOVE some traditional jewish foods, and occasionally end up eating them around that holiday season. Especially around Rosh Hashana season. Also in the Fall I get the hankering to cook a lot of soup and other foods and freeze them. I think this might be an evolutionary instinct to hoard food for the winter or something.

Last Fall I attempted to make cholent and vegetarian kishke. I used my mom's recipe for cholent and a recipe I found on imamother.com for the kishke. The Cholent turned out..well, just like my mom makes it, terrible. The Kishka was even worse. I had one bowl of cholent and kishka and the rest ended up in the trash.

It's been getting colder the past few weeks, and I've been getting that familiar hankering for jewish food. So this year I decided to try to make Kreplach soup. My mother never made kreplach at home, but every time we went to visit my grandparents in Florida growing up (so about once a year) we had kreplach soup. Kreplach is basically jewish wontons or jewish ravioli- the meat is flavored differently than wontons or ravioli, but essentially it's a bit of meat wrapped in dough. When my Savta (grandmother) died in 2007 some people tried to look around her house for recipes, but if she had any written down it was in polish (which no one else could read) or she just never wrote down her recipes, because we couldn't find any. So I thought her kreplach recipe (and her amazing rugaluch recipe) was basically gone forever.

But I found a kreplach recipe online so this weekend I decided to make them! A few weeks ago we had dinner with some other OTDers who live near us, and I mentioned my kreplach hankering, and one of them mentioned they used wonton skins instead of making their own dough. Which sounded genius to me, cause the dough making part seemed like the hardest part of kreplach.

So on saturday morning, B and I went and found a local asian grocery store, and got a whole bunch of wonton skins (and also asian candy and noodles and lots of meat that was mysteriously $1-$2 cheaper than the meat they sell at the regular grocery store, and a lot better looking).

And then I made some kreplach!

Last weekend I had made a huge pot of chicken soup using In The Pink's Recipe and froze about 2 gallons of chicken broth:

Soup right after it went in the pot


Soup after cooking a while

This week I made about 100 kreplach, froze most of them (you freeze them uncooked on a flat tray and then take them off the flat tray when they are frozen to put in ziplock bags) using the epicurious beef recipe and wonton skins.


Uncooked Kreplach, some shaped into wontons

Then we took about 8 of the kreplach and boiled it (gently) in the chicken broth from last week for about 10 minutes


I would have taken a picture of kreplach in a bowl of soup, but I ate it too quickly.

Definitely a winning recipe, and so happy I have around 80 kreplach still in the freezer! They taste almost exactly like my grandmother's, and it was awesome to have authentic tasting kreplach for the first time in probably over a decade!

Next year (or possibly even later this Fall) maybe I'll make yerushalmi kugel. I've tried to make it before, but it just wasn't greasy enough.