Despite the recent scarcity of posts on this blog, I’ve actually done a whole lot of cooking. Ask the right person, and you’ll confirm the crazy pace at which I’ve stewed, sautéed, casseroled, gratin-ed, mashed, souped, fried, baked, sugared, simmered and sauced my way through breakfast, lunch and dinner these past few weeks. And it’s something I don’t mind at all, of course. Cooking, as far-fetched as this may seem, gives me time to pause. In the kitchen, under a cloud of flour or behind the steady hiss of pots and pans, I have a chance to breathe. That’s why, no matter how tired or busy I am, I will always try to cook. Even if it means just scrambling an egg, I remain faithful to cooking as much as I can because of the fulfillment it gives. (A perfectly scrambled, fluffy egg the cheery color of sunshine is a beautiful thing!)

This past weekend, though, I found myself with a different kind of culinary faithfulness: I was in a Jewish kitchen, helping to make kosher Passover desserts. Now, that’s a sentence I never thought I’d write!

I can’t tell you much about the intricacies of keeping kosher for Passover. I was baptized Protestant and schooled Catholic, and though the exposure to two religions primed me for learning about a third one, I didn’t think I could wrap my curly brain around what the holiday meant, how it started and the symbols and rituals associated with it.

So, I asked the one question that made sense to me: What can be cooked? And the answer was: anything without wheat and leavening. In my effort to understand this, because I’ve never baked with anything else but flour in all its wheat-y glory, I found out about the culinary possibilities of matzos (a cracker-like flatbread), matzo meal (matzos ground into powder), potato starch (a substitute for white flour) and kosher chocolate chips!

Putting theory into practice, I was tasked to help make the Carmel Chocolate Matzo Crunch.

It involved lining a cookie sheet with matzos…

…cooking brown sugar and butter into toffee on the stove…

…pouring the sweet mixture and spreading it over the matzos (note to self: Do not use a cheap rubber spatula while doing this. No matter how much you convince it not to, the spatula WILL melt!)…

…baking the layered treat in the oven until the toffee bubbled…

…sprinkling the top with chocolate chips while hot…

…and spreading the chocolate over the whole thing in fun swirls once it melted.

The result was this divine toffeecrunchychocolatey dream that was broken into pieces once cool. I couldn’t eat just one. It was so good that it was ironically sinful.

With a plate full of toffee, fudge-iced brownies made with potato starch, macaroons and fruit, I remembered my own sweet memories of food eaten during Holy Week back home in the Philippines. My friend Ross had a Ilokana grandmother named Lola (Grandma) Rose who would make binanlay, which were rice cakes cooked in banana leaves and topped with thick panucha (a brown sugar syrup that tasted much like the one that topped the matzos) and latik (fried coconut milk bits). Getting those sticky things out of the steamed leaves was tricky and took forever (you had to peel the leaves away almost fiber by fiber!), which I always thought was so apt for all the suffering one’s supposed to do during Lent—you had to go through so much to get to the divine sweet stuff!

So now, I can say I’ve kind of cooked kosher. I never thought that I would in my life in the kitchen. But the fact that I can now write about it makes me appreciate the way food brings people together, and how despite all our religious differences, we all believe…in toffee.

Thank you to Jason for being especially helpful and patient with all my questions, and for thinking I’m only a little bit strange for wanting to snap pictures during the entire thing. Congratulations again on your new sweet little bundle of joy. Mazel tov!