E. Dwass

Nothing says Passover like a bowl of homemade chicken soup with matzo balls. For the seder feasts, that's the way to go. But what about lunch on, say, day four of the week-long holiday? By that time, the idea of yet another matzo sandwich starts to get old. We wondered if some of the fresh spins on matzo ball soup -- including whole grain mixes -- might be a welcome addition.

By the way, if you're planning to stock up on kosher for Passover foods, now's the time to hit the stores. This year Passover begins on the evening of March 25 and, typically, shelves get pretty bare before the holiday even starts.

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E. Dwass

With Passover less than a month away, it's appropriate to ponder the holiday's traditional four questions and to ask a fifth: Why is the Hancock Park Ralphs different from all other Ralphs?

For starters, there's a mashgiach on site, something not offered in most grocery stores. A different kind of security guard, the mashgiach is a specially trained observant Jew who is there to make sure everything in the store's recently opened kosher section is, well, really kosher.

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Petrossian Restaurant & Boutique

Giselle Wellman's latke-esque holiday potato pancake with caviar

Sure, there's fun to be had cooking your own deep fried holiday foods. But sustaining this ritual for a celebration that spans eight nights? Not so appealing. Most households tend to max out at one, maybe two, latke frying sessions, since ventilation methods can only be so effective. And besides, no matter how much a Joan Nathan video demo might make you swoon or a clip that might utterly baffle your grandmother, best to not go overboard on the fried potatoes pancakes anyway.

If you must indulge regularly, or even have just one latke meal, do so wisely. Here are a few places to eat latkes in Los Angeles over the few remaining days and nights of Hanukkah, which concludes Saturday night, Dec.15th. Oddly enough, whether or not a traditional Jewish deli proves to be a good potato pancake source can be a matter of dreidel spinner's luck.

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Flickr/slgc

Latkes

Hanukkah is upon us, with its gift-giving, candle-lighting and most importantly -- a focus on eating fried food. For European Jews, that fried food is the latke. It's a time-honored dish and one that's tied to family memories and childhood.

When it comes to making your own, you can pour over Joan Nathan's recipes or spent some time jotting down tips from your bubbie. Thanks to the beauty of You Tube, you can also now take a less family-friendly route and get your tips from Bubala, Please. (Which is NSFW.)

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E. Dwass

Most Jewish holidays are associated with special foods. Hanukkah, also known as the Festival of Lights, is no exception. Taking center stage during the eight-day celebration, which starts this Saturday evening, are latkes, which is the Yiddish word for pancakes.

The holiday commemorates religious liberty. One of its key symbols is a small container of oil that miraculously lasted for eight days, allowing the holy Temple to be purified. Which explains why we light Hanukkah candles in a menorah and, equally important, use buckets of oil to fry fritters.

"Everybody has all these weird configurations of latkes," acclaimed cookbook author Joan Nathan told us the other day. "I love putting celery root, apples and potatoes together, that's a really good latke. But at the end of the day, I think people like potato latkes the best."

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Gabe Lane

Suzanne Tracht, Alex Reznik, Mollie Pier, Evan Kleiman, Susan Feniger, Kajsa Alger, Eric Greenspan

In 1989, Mollie Pier founded Project Chicken Soup with the intention of delivering wholesome, kosher meals to people living with HIV/AIDS and other serious illnesses. Last weekend, Pier was honored for her decades-long dedication to that cause at a heart-warming awards brunch at Temple Beth Am near Beverly Hills. Many of L.A.'s most prominent chefs with connections to the Jewish community lent their talents to the cause.

The brunch, which was attended by more than 200 people and raised more than $20,000, helped crystallize the idea that food builds community and nourishes us in ways more than the obvious.

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E. Dwass

Comic Seth Front

While many comics get their material from headlines, L.A. comedian Seth Front draws his inspiration from another source: deli menus. For the past two years, Front has crisscrossed the country giving talks on the culinary history of American Jews of Eastern European descent, using delicatessen foods as markers. From immigrant pushcarts on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the 1880s, to hip new venues, Front traces the journey of beloved foods like knishes, pastrami and latkes.

Last weekend, Front was on his home turf, at Congregation Or Ami in Calabasas, where the big crowd ate up his combo platter of humor and history. And afterwards, appropriately, they noshed at Canter's Deli truck, which Front describes as "a pushcart of the 21st century."

The son of a reform rabbi, Front, who previously worked in the film industry, says he had an epiphany "at a place where good things always happen to Jews. A Chinese restaurant."

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N. Galuten

Langer's Pastrami Sandwich

This week we're launching a new series called Food of the Moment which devotes itself to an ingredient or dish currently experiencing an boom at local eateries. We'll then eat it, dissect it, discuss it -- and tell you where you can get some.

In a Slate piece back in September, Rachel Levin chronicled what she described as the nation's first "pastrami summit" -- an event that seemed less bacchanalian and more scholarly than you might expect -- inside a Jewish Community Center in Berkeley, attended by some of the Bay's top abattoir experts. According to Levin, these were the New Pastramians, "deli artisans who brine/pickle/cure/smoke/hand-slice their-own-everything; serve only humanely raised, hormone-free meat; and could care less about kosher."

Of course, Berkeley isn't the only place where pastrami is experiencing a renaissance. In Los Angeles, Jon Shook and Vinny Dotolo served smoked foie gras with pastrami spices (before the ban) at Animal, while DIY meat gurus Chris Phelps and Zak Walters occasionally serve house-made pastrami and eggs as a brunch special at Salt's Cure. And The Oinkster in Eagle Rock practically revolves around chef Andre Guerrero's applewood-smoked take on L.A.-style fast-food pastrami (shaved wafer thin).

But these guys aren't alone: as sanctified as the classic Jewish deli menu is, a greater share of chefs are taking the smoked and spiced formula of pastrami and giving it their own spin. While we love our Langer's as much as the next fresser, here are some of the most prominent "new pastrami" purveyors in Los Angeles.

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E. Dwass

Leek & Sweet Potato Quiche

With Labor Day a distant memory, it's time to think ahead. We don't want to stress you out, but if you're hosting a Yom Kippur break-the-fast, it's time to start planning. (This year, break-the-fast is the evening of Sept. 26.)

A break-the-fast gathering can be especially challenging to put together. For starters, there's often a big crowd. And a lot of your guests will be starving, because they've been fasting for as long as 25 hours, in keeping with Judaism's most solemn day of the year.

But the biggest challenge of Yom Kippur, also known as the Day of Atonement, is that traditionally you don't do any work that day, instead spending many hours in synagogue. This means that everything has to be prepared ahead of time. When guests arrive after sundown, no one wants to stand around and watch you cook (insert joke here about your hungry relatives).

We've got five words of advice: Your freezer is your friend.

"The only thing I find that doesn't freeze well are pastas and potatoes," says Leah Schapira, co-founder of the recipe-sharing site CookKosher.com and author of Fresh and Easy Kosher Cooking: Ordinary Ingredients -- Extraordinary Meals. (But she points out that orzo pasta dishes are an exception to that rule, as are potatoes in a blintz or knish.)

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Amy Silverstein

Fresh Brothers matzah pizza

For people who have been observing Passover since Friday night, right about now you might be experiencing signs of pizza withdrawal. Fear not. Fresh Brothers Pizza has a fix for you --- a special matzah pizza, available until the holiday ends Saturday night. (We'll digress for a moment to note how many spellings there are for the traditional unleavened Passover bread substitute --- matzah, matza, matzo, matzoh, plural matzot...)

"When you keep Passover, it's difficult to eat out. We always end up eating in or bringing lunch to work. So now, those who like to eat out can still do it during the week of Pesach," says Fresh Brothers founder Adam Goldberg, who runs the company along with his brother Michael. (Third brother, Scott, a restaurateur in Chicago, develops the chain's recipes.)

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