Editor’s Note: This week, many of us will be getting the house ready for Passover and shopping for chametz-free ingredients for the holiday. Take a look at the suggestions below for items to add to your grocery list!

There are lots of sederiffic Passover recipes online, but it’s not seder that’s hard about Passover for those that observe the dietary rules: it’s the rest of the week. Two things I’m always short of are ideas for lunchboxes and ideas for midweek dinners.

Here are a few of the solutions that have gotten my family fed:

My lunchbox: Romaine lettuce with tuna and hard cooked eggs, drizzled with olive oil, balsamic vinegar and salt. This actually gets better if it sits at room temperature for a few hours before eating. Olives, tomatoes, carrots, cold boiled potato cubes, etc. also very good mixed in.

If I have a microwave at work, I like to take a bowl of raw broccoli and cauliflower florets and baby carrots and microwave it until they are just tender, and then add a slice of cheese and wait until the heat of the veggies melts the cheese, mix and eat.

Kids lunchboxes are much harder. Virtually everything my kids typically take for lunch during the regular year is chametz (prohibited during the holiday). Apple slices and carrot sticks are the exception. I wind up packing a lot of yogurts and farfel granola. Cheese sandwiches made on matzo inevitably wind up as farfel in the backpack anyhow.

Their favorite lunches during Passover, though, are the leftovers from dinner the night before. And one of the best is Passover Spaetzl.

Passover Spaetzl

Ingredients:

2 eggs

1 TBS oil

¼ cup chicken soup (if meal is fleishig) or milk (if meal is dairy)

1 cup Passover cake meal

¼ cup potato starch

1/2 tsp salt

1/2 TBS sugar

½ tsp baking powder

Big pot of boiling water

Some kind of sauce or soup or gravy

Directions:

Mix the wet stuff until blended smooth. Add the dry ingredients and mix until smooth, adding extra soup or water if needed to get to pudding-like consistency. Let sit 15 minutes, then check to see how firm it is and add additional liquid if necessary.

Scoop up a spoonful and drop into boiling water. Simmer three minutes and remove from water with slotted spoon. Taste test and adjust batter if needed (salt? sugar? too thick? too thin?).

If the batter is thin like pancake batter, you will get long thin squiggles of spaetzl. If the batter is thick like pudding, you get gnocchi-like little dumplings. If it is thick like hummus, you get something close to matzo balls.

When you have it the way you like it, drop spoonfuls into the water and simmer until they all float (about three minutes). Do not crowd the pot. Remove them from the water with a slotted spoon and put them into the warm sauce while you do the next batch.

If you do not have good sauce, you can use any kind of leftover gravy or soup or just sauteed mushrooms and onions in wine.

If you’re having a dairy meal, use water or milk instead of the chicken broth, and serve it with marinara, butter & parmesan, melted cheese sauce or anything else you enjoy on pasta.

Here’s my favorite (fleishig) sauce recipe:

In a hot skillet, brown some ground meat. When it is browned, push the meat out to the edges of the pan. Add 1 can tomato paste in the center of the pan, and spread it to a thin layer. Leave it sit there until it just starts to caramelize (turn brown) a little. Add a splash of sweet wine, then stir and scrape until all the meat is mixed into it and nothing is stuck to the pan. Add ½ cup water and stir a bit more. Season to taste.

Give me a few good ideas: What gets your family through the holiday in a festive mood?

(Mini banana muffins, get it?)

This recipe was adapted from the Rochester Hadassah Cookbook, one of the great kosher cookbooks. But if you look for it there, it’s called “Banana Chocolate Chip Bars,” submitted by Tillie Levinson. Those bars are my mom’s go-to recipe for a fleishig holiday meal. Chances are, if she’s serving chicken for dinner, she’ll be serving banana chip bars for dessert. If she doesn’t, we’ll all be looking wistfully at the dessert plate. My mom’s generous distribution of Tillie’s banana bars to family, friends, anyone new to the area or in need of a little extra care always ensured the love was well-distributed.

As much as I love this recipe as it was originally written, what my daughter asked for the other day was banana nut muffins. So I took the same base batter, left out the chocolate chips, added nuts, oats and wheat germ and poured it into mini muffin cups. Voila: nano muffins! There’s no reason you couldn’t use nuts and chocolate chips. Both. Oooh. . .  If you need to bake nut-free, leave out the pecans and the ground almonds. They weren’t there in the first place, and the recipe was still awesome.

A note on safety ( and I am serious about this): If you, like me, like to peel and freeze your bananas once they start getting brown, you have to thaw them at least a little before putting them in the mixer, or you get greased ballistic missiles screaming out of the batter at high speeds.

Another note of caution: many chocolate chips contain dairy products. If you are serving people who observe the Kashrut laws and want to make this a 100% nondairy item, read the package carefully. Chocolate chips that say pareve with a hechsher are best.

The recipe:

• 1 egg
• 1/3 cup vegetable oil
• 1/3 cup shortening or pareve margarine (or butter if you don’t care about dairy)
• 2/3 cup white sugar
• 2/3 cup brown sugar
• 1 cup mashed banana (about 2 bananas, AT LEAST PARTIALLY THAWED if frozen. Fresh would be fine.)
• ½ tsp salt
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 2 tsp baking powder
• ¼ cup ground almond meal
• 1 TBS rolled oats
• 1 TBS wheat germ
• 2 cups flour
• 1 cup chopped pecans or chocolate chips or a mixture of both

Place egg, oil, shortening, sugars, banana, salt and vanilla in a large bowl and beat well at high speed until light and fluffy. In a separate bowl, mix baking powder, almond meal, rolled oats, wheat germ and flour. Add to egg/banana mixture and beat just until combined. Add chocolate chips and/or nuts and stir. Pour into a greased 9×13 baking pan or mini muffin tins.

Bake at 350° until golden brown. Time will depend on the size of your pan or muffin cups. A 9×13 pan takes 20-25 minutes, and mini muffin pan less than 10—watch them so they don’t overcook. This is a forgiving recipe; as long as the center is fully set, it’s good (i.e., the center should not be jiggly when pan is shaken). My mom likes to watch for the moment when the cake just starts to pull away from the edge of the pan.

If you’re making bars, let the pan cool completely before cutting them. These freeze beautifully if you are making them ahead, and frozen bars are easier to cut and somewhat slower to disappear out of the freezer than warm ones left unattended on the counter.

On a Jewish blog like this, you could have a whole forum just on chicken soup and matzo balls. No matter what one cook says, everyone else has an opinion. The debate is part of the fun—there is no authoritative answer, but a whole lot of traditions and regional variations. Here’s how I make mine:

Chicken soup: If you can find them, buy chicken necks, backs and wings—these have loads of gelatin and will make a nice broth. Don’t bother boiling anything with a lot of meat on it; it’s the bones and skin that make the soup. If you can only get a whole chicken in eight parts, pull most of the meat off first and refrigerate that for later, and then boil just the carcass. Start the skin and bones in cold water and a little salt. Simmer it very slowly for a really long time. It’s edible in about a half hour, better in a whole hour, and heavenly after about six hours. For me, the easiest thing is to stick it in a slow oven (just under 200 degrees) for six hours. Water should just barely be bubbling.

About 20 minutes before you want to serve the soup, sauté, or steam some chopped onions, carrots, parsnips and celery and add them to the soup. If you want more meat in your soup, cut the meat you stripped from the bones into bite sized pieces, and then poach it lightly in the broth for about 20 minutes near the end. Add any other seasonings you like (parsley, sage, thyme, pepper, more salt etc.) at this point. Taste and adjust before serving.

MEANWHILE (and this is the important part), make the matzo balls:

• 2 eggs
• 2 tbps oil
• 1 tsp salt
• 2 tbsp water or stock
• 1/2 cup matzo meal

In a small bowl beat the eggs with the oil until really well blended. Then add the salt and water (or some of the cooled stock if you’ve got it). Beat it all smooth before adding the matzo meal. (This matters—the texture will be markedly different if you just dump it all in a bowl and stir. Blend the wet stuff thoroughly before the dry goes in.)

Stir really well, cover, put it in the fridge and let it sit AT LEAST 15 minutes. Meanwhile, start boiling a large pot full of salted water and make sure you know where the lid is—you’ll need it. When the matzoh mixture has chilled for at least 15 minutes, start rolling it into walnut-sized balls. I use a small cookie scoop to measure them out, and then get my hands wet and hand roll them until they are smooth. Then drop them into the boiling water (note—drop each one in as you roll it and move quickly so they all hit the water within a short time—don’t try to roll them all out first and then put them in—the early ones will dry out too much). Reduce heat to a very low simmer, put the lid on and simmer for about 20 minutes. Think of it as poaching an egg, not boiling pasta. The lid is important because a matzo ball is partly a steamed dumpling.

When they are done, serve them floating in your soup.

If this is your first time making homemade matzo balls, don’t be surprised if they turn out too heavy or too loose; the only way to learn the exact measurements is to make a few batches. Pretty soon you’ll know when the mixture “feels right” during the rolling stage. If it’s too dense, it needs a little more water or they come out like lead. If it’s too wet (or the water isn’t boiling) they will fall apart and you’ll get mush. So add some more meal. If you make them too grandiose in size, it’s hard to get them to cook all the way through and you get dry bits in the middle. If the water is boiling too hard, the egg cooks hard before the matzo meal can fluff up, and you get golf balls. (Sounds like I’ve made all of the above mistakes, right?)

There is a reason the bragging rights for perfect fluffy matzo balls exclusively belong to experienced cooks like Grandmas. New cooks can make decent ones, however, especially with all of the above tips—and every reasonably decent matzo ball should be appreciated as a minor miracle. They are heavenly delicious, economical and filling. Serve these as a first course, and the main course will stretch a whole lot farther.