Changua

It's funny because it's true

Every now and again you stumble across a recipe that seems so simple and easy that it seems like it's legitimately suspicious. For instance, if a Tasty™ video starts off with them flattening a slice of white bread, I'm pretty sure it's going to end up with me going on a cross-country road trip to find the person who stole my identity. That said, sometimes delicious food is just simple. This is especially true of old cultural recipes passed down over generations. Most cultures have had some good times and some bad, and if a recipe has lasted throughout both, there's a decent chance that it's going to taste good, and that it's something you could reasonably whip up while on the run from various dangers like neighboring tribes, wild beasts, or slowly dying of dysentery. Notable exceptions are pretty much any traditional British or Australian foods, as these were developed as pranks for unsuspecting tourists.


Ingredients:

2 cups Milk
1.5 cups Water
4 Eggs (Chicken eggs for preference. You know, the things we all think of when somebody says "Eggs." Though I guess you could really use whatever bird eggs you have handy in a pinch. So if you're a creepy bird enthusiast you might have some options)
3 Green Onions
1/2 cup Cilantro
1/4 tsp Black Pepper
Salt

Changua is a traditional Columbian soup that's allegedly been passed down generation to generation amongst the native peoples of the Andes for...pretty much ever. It's typically eaten for breakfast, often on weekends, and is thought to be a pretty decent hangover cure, so it's easy to see why it has remained popular. The fact that it takes like 5 minutes to make and is super tasty doesn't hurt either. That said, the first thing you're going to do here is casually glorp together your milk and water in a pot along with your black pepper and a big pinch of salt. The kind of pinch that a professional athlete or circus performer might have. Add it in with your milk and water and crank up the heat. While you're waiting for that to boil, chop up your green onions and your cilantro. This should take you about a minute, which means you only have about 150 minutes left to go for your pot to boil. Or you can just get busy. Scientific research has shown that being too busy to deal with it can cause your food to heat up almost immediately. Once you've got your pot boiling, it's time to drop in your eggs like little paratroopers plummeting to their untimely egg deaths. So crack each egg into a bowl or cup and then gently pour it in to the boiling liquid. Don't rush or drop them from too high or else you'll end up with scrambled eggs inside of your soup. And probably some burns around your face and hands.

Here we see the noble egg, playing dead to try and evade
the deadly predators native to its environment.

Once all of your eggs are cooking in the liquid, cover the pot. Let them continue to poach for 4-5 minutes, depending on how well-done you like your eggs. Use this time to prep your bowls. That sounds intense. Divide up your chopped onions and cilantro evenly between 4 bowls. That's all you actually need to do. Prep accomplished. Once your eggs are cooked to your liking, turn off the heat under your pot. Using a spoon, strainer, or your bare hands and grit that defy concerns like utensils, hygiene, and second degree burns, put one egg in the bottom of each of your bowls. Then top them off with your milky soup and enjoy! Traditionally, this soup is served with bread, or sometimes topped with more cilantro. You can totally do that if you'd like. Personally, I like some heat, so I added in a bit of sriracha straight in my broth. That's part of the fun of traditional recipes. They've been passed down for forever, and different people have totally developed their own versions over the centuries/millennia. As long as the core of the recipe is right and the food tastes good, there's not really a wrong way to do it. Unless you have dysentery. Then there's totally a wrong way to do it. Enjoy!

Yogurt Muesli

I grabbed this hipster cat picture for the muesli pun, but
it's honestly pretty adorable. 

Breakfast times are serious times. They say it's the most important meal of the day. Who this mysterious "they" are, and why they're so deep in the pockets of the French Toast industry has yet to be uncovered by Wikileaks. But unless you want to hear your friends and coworkers constantly lecture you about how terrible it is to skip breakfast, you'd better give in and start eating it. And making sure that you're eating something at least plausibly healthy, or else you're still in for idiots talking to you about your food choices. Isn't peer pressure fun? The problem here, aside from everything, is that while many breakfast foods are undeniably delicious, none of the good ones seem quick or simple to make. You can't roll out of bed 5 minutes before you have to leave for work and make pancakes, fresh squeezed orange juice, and an omlette. So we're faced with the burden of finding tasty, healthy-ish food that we can just grab and go in the morning. Which brings us to muesli.

Ingredients:

1/2 cup Steel Cut Oats
1/4 cup Greek Yogurt
1/4 cup Walnuts
1 TBSP Orange Juice
1/4 tsp Honey
Assorted Berries

The first thing you're going to have to deal with when contemplating muesli is its dumb name. Based on some cursory internet research, there seem to be two schools of thought on how to pronounce it. Thre's team "stupid hipster name for a cat "(Mewsly), and team "describing someone who looks kind of like Bullwinkle" (Moosely). Which of these pronunciations is right? I stopped caring like a week before I even thought about making this. On to the actual food. The goal here is to prep this the night before, so you can just grab it and munch in the morning super quickly. Normally I'm not a fan of this sort of devil's math where you sacrifice free time at night for free time in the morning. But this stuff takes like a minute to put together, so it's actually pretty worth it. Mix your oats, yogurt, honey, and orange juice together in a container with a lid. In another container, crush up your walnuts and toss in some berries. Don't worry about crushing up your walnuts, because it's super easy. Walnuts are the cowards of the nut world, and they tend to crumble at the first sign of trouble, as opposed to better organized nuts such as almonds or pistachios. The point is, take your two containers and shove them in your fridge. This entire process should have taken you about 2 minutes. Then go do whatever it is you do at night. Sleep. Drink the blood of innocent. Whatever. The less I know the better.

Frozen berries make this even faster and
easier. You're welcome.

When you wake up in the morning, and the alarm gives out a warning, and you don't think you'll ever make it on time, you'll be grateful for the 2 minutes of work you put in last night. Because you pretty much did all of the work last night, and it wasn't even much work. Just grab your walnuts and berries, toss them in with your yogurt and oats, and consume. You don't even have to mix them together if you want to just go at it parfait style. Whatever floats your muesli boat. It's pretty simple. It's also pretty tasty, healthy, and technically food. Kind of everything you need to consume to not have to listen to the guy from mail room going on for 25 minutes about the health benefits of chia, or his acai bowls, or whatever other absurd fads that nonsense people with no sense of personal boundaries are into these days. Probably yak's milk mixed with powdered horseradish and chamomile tea. You laugh, but it's only a matter of time before internet hipsters are doing that. Anyhow, enjoy your morningtime food and freedom.

Jalapeño Cheddar Bicuits

I've found that the freshest dairy products are bought in alleys

The first thing that you think about when you buy cheese out of the back of a van is safety. How recently was this van serviced? Was the air conditioning on when it drove down from Wisconsin? Is there a Cheese Mafia, and if so does this make me their customer, business partner, or rival? But let me start at the beginning. A guy called the restaurant where I'm working looking to sell some cheese, and gave shockingly few details about where it had come from, who he was, or why he was peddling mystery cheese in the first place. Eventually it was learned that he worked at a new dairy up in Wisconsin that had overproduced for an order, and so he was looking for people to buy some of his discounted sketchy cheese out of the back of his van. Naturally, I jumped at the opportunity. The restaurant bought a fair amount of cheese, and I got some for myself. Then, as suddenly as it had appeared in my life, the cheese van drove off in to the night, leaving me with nothing but a weird story, fond memories, and 9 pounds of discounted cheddar cheese. Which brings us to biscuits.

Ingredients:

2 cups Whole Wheat Flour (I'm doing a whole wheat thing right now, so I used whole wheat flour. If you want to switch it out for regular flour, go ahead)
3/4 cup Grated Cheddar Cheese
1 cup Buttermilk
3/4 stick of Butter (This is 6 TBSP, for you math/unit conversion nerds out there)
2 Pickled Jalapeños 
3 tsp Baking Powder
1/2 tsp Baking Soda
An average adult human's pinch of Salt

So the first thing you're going to want to do, after having bought the rest of your ingredients out of the backs of whatever vans are available in your neighborhood, is to have a long family history of biscuit-making to rely on. If, like me, the closest your family ever came to biscuits was to have had a conversation with someone from Alabama or Georgia (The longest conversation on record in Georgia and Alabama without somebody mentioning biscuits in some way was 5 minutes and 47 seconds, at a funeral in 1937), you may have to fake it a little bit. In any event, take your flour and whisk in your baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Then take your jalapeños and chop them down to size. You're looking for a pretty fine cut on these. You want them to flavor the biscuits throughout, but you're not looking for people to be biting in to giant chunks of jalapeño. That's how friendships are ruined. Take your butter, grate it in to your flour, and work it in until it forms in to little pea-sized globules. It's important that your butter doesn't melt if you want light flaky biscuits instead of dense lumps of sadness. If, like me, you've been cursed with absurdly warm hands, don't be afraid to take a break and stick your flour and butter in the freezer to cool off.

Yes, I made these today. And no, there aren't any left

Once you've got your buttery flour globules all set, add in your cheese, jalapeños, and buttermilk, and very gently stir to combine. You don't want to overwork your dough, or else you'll form a bunch of gluten, melt your butter, and end up sad and alone at the company picnic like last year (for the sake of this example I'm assuming you don't live in the midwest, where picnicking would be a challenge since its still snowing despite technically being mid-April). If you have things like a traditional biscuit cutter and a biscuit pan that your family has passed down since they were originally forged on the Mayflower, good for you. I don't have any of those things, except for the unwarranted sense of puritanical entitlement, so I'm making drop biscuits, so named because you just splorp a spoon in to your dough and drop it on to your pan. Do your best to get your biscuits close together and equally sized. If you're smarter than I was you'll push down lightly with your thumb in the middle of each biscuit so that they rise evenly and you don't end up with a dome on top of each one. Either way, shove those suckers in to a 450 degree oven for about 15 minutes, then take them out and try not to burn your hands and mouth when you refuse to wait for them to cool down and shove them in to your face. You can totally add some butter on top if you can find any before your friends and family (or you. Just you) devours them all. Enjoy!

Shakshuka

From these humble beginnings, great stains will be made

Everybody loves breakfast for dinner. Sure, the only person that I interviewed about this was myself, but if the internet has taught me anything (and I'm fairly sure it hasn't) it's that it only matters that a study was done. Not who performed it, who funded it, or whether it was done competently. The point is that I want to eat french toast while I sit on my couch and watch Netflix. But I can't, because I'll get sugar and syrup on my couch, and then when I have company I'll need to make up some excuse about how a friend brought their kid over, and he wrecked my couch. It's too much effort. Fortunately, Shakshuka exists. It's got poached eggs, which gives it that breakfasty feeling, but it's super savory and delicious which makes it socially acceptable as a dinner. So when I have friends over who ask me about the stains on the couch, I won't have to make up a fictional child to cover for it.

Ingredients

6 Eggs
3 large Tomatoes
2 Red Peppers
1 Jalapeño Pepper
1 standard-issue Onion
4 cloves Garlic
1 tsp Cumin
1 tsp Smoked Paprika
1/4 tsp Black Pepper
1/4 tsp Cayenne Pepper
Olive Oil
Salt

Shakshuka is essentially eggs poached in a spicy tomato and red pepper sauce. The key is to let the peppers and tomatoes cook down until they kind of start disintegrating into each other. The first step is to dice up your onion and toss it in a pan with some oil and an average-sized human's pinch of salt over medium-low heat. Let it cook for about 2 minutes, and just when it starts getting a little bit of color toss in your diced peppers, red and jalapeño, along with another pinch of salt. Now it's time to dice up your tomatoes. It's worth mentioning that with a super sharp knife, dicing up tomatoes is easy. With whatever blunt object you're likely calling a knife these days, not so much. Tomatoes have a fairly thick skin, and soft goopy insides, kind of like people. So if you're pushing down with a dull knife, you've got a good chance of just crushing everything. Possible fixes for this are to sharpen your stupid knives, peel your tomatoes, or not worry too much about it because who cares when we're making a sauce with them anyway? Whatever you decide, dice up your tomatoes, and choppity chop up your garlic. You're adding in the garlic first, but once it's in the pan you'll be moving a little quicker, so it's best to have your tomatoes ready ahead of time.

That's one messy hot plate of deliciousness

Once your peppers start going soft, add in your garlic along with your cumin, paprika, black pepper, and cayenne. Stir that mess together and let the flavors get to know each other for about a minute before dumping in your tomatoes along with another pinch of salt. Tomatoes are a little more shy, so they'll need some time to come out of their shells and get to know everybody at the party. So bring your mix up to a boil before covering it and turning the heat down to low. Let that all cook down for 20-30 minutes, until everything starts to look saucy and delicious, and your tomatoes have really broken down. If they're weeping in a corner somewhere, you're probably ready. Don't worry, it's for their own good. Now, like dollar-store philosophers, it's time for us to contemplate eggs. Take a spoon and make small divots in the surface of your sauce. Crack an egg in to each depression and then, if you like things more delicious and flavorful, add a little bit of salt and black pepper on top of each egg. Cover your mixture again, and let it all cook for about 12 minutes, depending on how well done you like your eggs. Remember that they're sitting in a hot sauce, so turn it off when they're still a little underdone, because they'll keep cooking. If you take them off when they're actually ready, they may end up totally overcooked by the time you, I don't know, take pictures of them for your blog. You know, hypothetically. Then just grab a fork, spoon, flatbread or other implement of destruction and go to town on it. Enjoy!

Frittata

I didn't have a "before picture," so here. Enjoy this awesome
surplus castle picture from my trip to Ireland. You're welcome

Legend has it that the Frittata was invented in the days of yore by esteemed chef and and disgraced mime William H. Frittata. The story tells that he desperately wanted a delicious food he could carry with him and eat on the go, so he ordered a pizza. But he was cheap, and refused to tip the delivery guy, who got pissed, took the pizza for himself, and stole all of Frittata's flour so he couldn't make some himself. He told anybody who'd listen it was the "salting the earth of Carthage" of pizza delivery. Not many people listened, and those who did regretted it. The moral of the story is, don't stiff the delivery guy, or your pizza might be made out of eggs.

Ingredients:

4 standard issue Eggs
8 oz. Italian Sausage
5 oz. Crimini Mushrooms
1 Bell Pepper
1/2 an Onion (It's often hard to find half an onion. But if you track one down you're in luck, because they usually travel in pairs)
1 TBSP Olive Oil
An unspecified amount of Salt
An unspecified amount of Black Pepper
A skillet you can stick in the oven. (Yes, technically you can stick any skillet in the oven, but you want one you can stick in the oven, while the oven is on, without any damage to your health or security deposit) 
Optional extras! Maybe! If you feel like it!

If, like me, you have access to fancy and wonderful kitchen equipment as a fringe benefit of your menial existence of perpetual unemployment, you're in luck! Or, at least, you're in luck in this one specific regard! Just slap a ring mold on a flat-top, fill it up with oil, sausage, and veggies, season it, add in the beaten eggs, wait for it to set, remove the mold, flip that sucker, and you're done! For the "rest of the people out there," with their "gainful, and often even fulfilling employment," we're gonna have to make do with the pots, pans, and stovetops that god gave us. So the first thing you're gonna need to do is chop your onions, peppers, mushrooms, and sausage into bits. Don't go all crazy with it. Large recognizable chunks are fine. Think "pizza toppings," not "hide the evidence." Heat up your oil in a smallish skillet and toss all that nonsense in there along with an average-sized human's pinch of salt and pepper. Saute` it over medium heat for about 5 minutes. During that 5 minutes, beat your eggs mercilessly, like the cruel egg-overlord you lie about being on your resume. Add a very small human's pinch of salt in with your eggs right before your drop them in the pan. By the way, spoiler alert, you're gonna drop the eggs in the pan.

Just think: none of this would be possible without some guy
randomly trying to eat that thing that popped out of a chicken 

Drop the eggs in the pan. They should kind of fill in the crevasses between all of your bits of veggie and sausage. Now comes the tricky part, because eggs have this fun tendency to overcook. And thanks to the stupid laws of stupid thermodynamics, they're technically still cooking once you take them off the fire. Because they're jerks. So when your eggs are starting to set up around the sides, but are still runny in the middle, throw the pan under your oven's broiler. Let it go for about a minute, just to crisp up on top. Take it out of the oven, and say a prayer to any god or sports team that you didn't keep it in there too long. Dump that sucker out on to a plate, and enjoy your awesome weird cross between a pizza and an omelet. Optional extras/substitutions include milk added into the eggs, all sorts of cheeses added on top, and pretty much any vegetable you can chop up into bits. Which is all of them. Because vegetables suck at avoiding knives.

Blueberry Muffins

I prefer wild blueberries over the ones you see in zoos

It was a rainy and dreary morning, so I made muffins. I feel like that needs some explanation, so this one time I'm going to fight my natural impulse to drop a ridiculous statement and just walk away. Or possibly more times, to be determined as I feel like it. The point is, we in the LA part of the world experienced an uncommon phenomenon known as, and I believe I'm spelling this ethnic word correctly, "weather." This made me vaguely nostalgic for my distant homeland, which made me think of all the other things I'm missing that I don't have easy access to here. Like bars that are open late, the ability to go to the bank on Sunday (Well, you can go, but you'll be the only one there), and of course Dunkin' Donuts. I used to get their Blueberry Muffins all the time. And I figure that if a minimum wage employee working for a faceless corporation can pretend to have baked delicious muffins that obviously came from a factory, I, a zero wage employee of cooking crap and writing about it, can totally actually bake delicious Blueberry Muffins from scratch. That totally makes sense.

Ingredients:

1.5 Cups All Purpose Flour
1 Cup Sugar
10 oz. Blueberries
1/2 Cup Butter
1/3 Cup Milk
2 standard-issue Eggs
The Zest from 1 Lemon
The Juice from 1/2 a Lemon (The astute observers among you may have noticed that this leaves you with half of a zested lemon for which you have no use. Fortunately, I have expert advice on the matter: Deal with it.)
2 tsp Baking Powder
1 tsp Vanilla Extract
1 Average Sized Human's Pinch of Salt
Another 1 TBSP of Sugar
1 Small Person's Pinch of Nutmeg

The first thing you're gonna need to do is let your butter come to room temperature. This is gonna take, at a rough estimate, about 2 presidential terms, so prepare some snacks and activities. Maybe bring a sweater of pair up with somebody to make the time pass faster. Pretty much the same rules your 3rd grade teacher gave you on a class field trip apply. Once your butter is nice and room-temperatury, it's time for  the fun part, and by "fun" I mean "whisking until your arm tries to fall off out of spite." Pretty much, you're going to add your cup of sugar in with your butter, and whisk it until it gets an almost fluffy consistency. This is the part where you're really gonna feel the pain if you punked out and only waited 1 presidential term for your butter to warm up. Anyway, once your butter and sugar are together, whisk in your eggs, one at a time (this gives your second egg a chance to watch his fate, and the fear that he develops releases chemicals throughout his egg body that are delicious), followed by your vanilla, lemon juice, and milk. Grab a second bowl from your magic bowl cupboard that has a never-ending supply of bowls, and mix together your flour, baking powder, and salt. This is a good point to get you to start freaking out about the "muffin method," which sounds like the name of a terrible DJ for kids parties. His slogan would be "your ex will gloat about this for years." Pretty much, if you mix flour with any liquid it starts to form more and more gluten, because flour is a jerk. All that gluten will make your baked goods super bready. Which is awesome for bread. Not so much for muffins. So you want to minimize the mixing as much as you can.

Adorable muffin-cups added to show adorable bad-assery 

Add your wet mess of a bowl into your dry floury bowl and mix it for less time than you think you should. The consensus of the internet is about 10 seconds, and the internet directly stole that from Alton Brown. Make sure to nervously watch a clock the entire time you're stirring because of paranoia induced by this paragraph. Now add in your blueberries, and neurotically stir a couple more times, until they're just barely incorporated (Pro-tip: if, like me, you don't live somewhere where magical berry bushes of deliciousness provide fresh berries at reasonable prices year round, and you're using frozen berries, keep them in the freezer until the very last second. Otherwise they'll make everything purple. They might anyway. If you're using fresh berries, toss them in some flour before you mix them into your batter to help keep them from just sinking to the bottom and disappointing us all, like every politician ever). Scoop that goop into a muffin tin, and throw it in a 375 degree oven for 20-25 minutes. 20 seconds after you put your muffins in the oven, frantically run back and take them out because you realized you forgot to add the topping on. Mix your lemon zest, nutmeg, and tablespoon of sugar together, and sprinkle some on top of each fledgling muffin. Then throw them back in the oven for another 19.6-24.6 minutes. And that's all there is to delicious muffins. And you didn't even get paid minimum wage! You didn't get paid anything!

Breakfast Omelette

This picture comes off kind of dickish. It's like "hey, I can
totally afford to pay a stupid price for fancy eggs. You?"

They say that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. I don't know if that's true or not. It sounds plausible, but then again, it could just be more propaganda from the powerful D.C. Egg Lobby. Regardless, it seems prudent to know how to make it just in case. And nothing says breakfast like a classic Omelette. Or possibly homemade hangover cures and lots of prayer. It depends on what kind of night you're waking up from. Either way, things are looking up.

Ingredients:

3 Eggs
4 Green Onions
1 oz. Cheddar Cheese
1 oz. Smoked Gouda
1/2 TBSP Butter
1/2 tsp Salt
1/4 tsp Black Pepper

There are a lot of different things you can do with an omelette. You can go as simple, or as over the top and extreme as your imagination can handle. This is a recipe for a basic, awesome, Cheese Omelette, but if you have the desire to get more intense with it, just remember one key rule. If you want it to be cooked, cook it before you throw it in the omelette. That holds true regardless of whether you're adding in onions and peppers, tomatoes, hash browns, steak, or anything else. It won't have the time it needs to cook with the eggs, so cook it first, and add it in when you make your omelette later. Which, coincidentally, is when you can thank me for this awesome tip that will save you heartbroken trips to iHop. You're eventually welcome.

The first thing you're gonna need to do is get all of your goddamn ducks in a row. Metaphorically speaking (If for whatever weird reason you want to literally get ducks in a row, try this). Normally I'm a fan of prepping things as you need them, but eggs go from undercooked to overcooked faster than fella can fail to produce a folksy metaphor. So chop your Green Onions, portion out your cheeses and your butter, and beat your eggs together with your Salt and Pepper until they all form a tightly knit support group that gets together for drinks every other Wednesday night (Protip that I'm fairly certain I've mentioned before in other recipes: for best results, first remove eggs from their shells).

Melt your butter in a skillet over medium heat, and then dump in your egg mixture. Swirl the pan around like a pansy so that your eggs evenly coat the bottom. And also to let people know you may or may not be a pansy. When there's still raw egg on top, but not enough for it to run when you shake the pan, add in your extras. In our case, those are the cheeses, and all but a pinch of the Green Onions. Let the cheese melt slightly, and use a spatula to ease up the edges of the omelette slightly. Now comes the fun part, and by

Gooeyness added to induce drool

"fun" I mean "Oh god, we're gonna mess it up, oh god oh crap." Take your spatula and fold up 1/3 of the omelette. Then take your pan, and slide the omelette onto a plate, starting with the unfolded bit. As it slides out, fold the omelette over itself, and you'll end up with a perfectly tri-folded omelette. Get it wrong and you'll end up with a plate of shame and disappointment. Which will still taste pretty awesome, but it'll be ugly. Like democracy! Top it with your remaining Green Onions, and enjoy. Cheap, fast, relatively easy, and delicious. Sounds like breakfast to me.

Fried Matzah (Matzah Brei)

It feels nice to be back in civilization, where I can get
Vidalia onions. When do I have to go back to LA again?

Passover. It's a magical time of year when Jews celebrate having been redeemed from bondage (not the fun kind), by severely limiting what they can do or eat for a week. Matzah abounds, as do jokes about how terrible and/or constipation-inducing matzah is. But matzah doesn't have to be so sad and nauseating. With a little bit of work and a whole lot of butter, we can make these flat tasteless crackers into something awesome. Hopefully.

Ingredients:

12 standard sheets of Matzah

4 whole Eggs

1/2 of an Onion

3.5 TBSP Butter

1 tsp and one human pinch of Salt

1/4 tsp Black Pepper

The first step is to be either Jewish enough, or curious enough, for this awesome recipe to be relevant for you. Once you take care of that, it's time to crush some matzah. And when I say "crush," I mean "take it in your hands, place it over a colander, and squeeze until it (the matzah) is in smallish bits, and you have a deep feeling of satisfaction. Like you're a mighty hunter who just brought down a stag, and not some schlub caressing his matzah.

The next step is to beat your eggs until they lose all hope that this time will be different and you've changed. Once you see the joy for life go out of their little egg eyes, add in a teaspoon of the Salt and all of the Pepper, and stir to combine. Take half a tablespoon of Butter, and melt it over medium-high heat. Dice your onion and add it in to your hot butter. Add in an average human's pinch of salt, and sauté for about 6 minutes, until the onion starts to brown. Turn the heat off, and add your buttery onions in with your matzah. Combine with the salty peppery eggs, and mush it all into a kind of gross matzah glop.

Heat 1.5 tablespoons of your butter over medium-high heat in a 10-inch skillet. Or in a differently sized skillet, because maybe you either don't have a 10-inch one, or you're needlessly rebellious and like having an awkward number of batches for your fried matzah. Add in half of your glop, and press it down into a thick pancake. You should hear a nice sizzle when you do this. If you don't hear it, either your butter is too cool, you're suffering from Passover Deafness which is totally a thing I didn't just make up, or you put your glop in the wrong pan. Get your crap together, and make it happen. Let it cook on one side for about 5 minutes, until is gets crispy, brown, and awesome.

Not pictured: the hangover that this is curing

Now comes the flipping, which is more complicated than it seems. You've got a giant, dense, partially cooked glob of matzah gunk. You can try to just flip it like a pancake. Especially if you like ugly broken foodstuffs and grease burns. Or you can give up on being one of the cool kids, cut it into 4 sad surrender-bits, and flip each of them individually while weeping over your lost self-respect. I'm partial to sliding the entire thing out of the pan and on to a plate, and the flipping that plate over on to the pan. Ideally without breaking the plate and getting plate shards in your food, but you win some and you lose some. Regardless of the relative sadness or awesomeness of your flipping method, cook it another 5-ish minutes, until your b-side is equally awesome, crispy, and brown. Repeat the whole process with the rest of your butter and glop, and enjoy! For 8 days! 8. Long. Days.