The Jewish Holiday of Passover is coming up and many of you are seeing boxes of matzos piled somewhere in a more visible location than usual in your grocery store.

The truth is, matzos are sold year round in most stores and despite having only two ingredients they are as delicious as any plain crackers, made in a clean controlled environment by the guys who wash their hands and don’t masturbate on Saturdays (maybe not at all, but not on Saturdays for sure).

I wrote before how my Dad went to buy matzos at the only remaining synagogue in our city and we ate them for the rest of the year. Now that synagogue looks like this (photos taken from here):

There is no reason why you, my non-Jewish readers, should be deprived of matzos and tasty things you can make out of them. By the way, the alternate title of this post was “What would Jesus eat?”, because Jesus was Jewish, he celebrated Passover and ate matzos.

In this post you will learn how to make a matzo omelet, or matzo-brei or, as we call it, matzo-babka. For this recipe you will need 3-4 sheets of matzos, 2 eggs, pinch of salt and a small amount of butter.

Boil some water, you will need less than a cup. Break matzo in small pieces, it crumbles and breaks easily. Don’t try to pulverize it, just break it up.

Pour some hot water over it, just enough to soften up the matzo pieces so they are not crunchy. All the water should ideally soak in, so don’t pour too much, there shouldn’t be any standing water on the bottom of the bowl, toss the matzos until all the water is absorbed. Let it sit for a few minutes.
Mix up a couple of eggs with a fork.

Pour of the matzos and mix, add salt to taste.

Melt a tablespoon of butter in the skillet. Pour the mixture into the skillet, spread it out evenly and cover.

Cook on medium-low for 4-5 minutes. Now if you think you are the next Food Network star you can try to flip the whole thing, I just cut it in four pieces with a spatula and flip each piece individually.

Cook for another 3-4 minutes uncovered, for the first few times (and I know there will be many more) keep an eye on the babka to make sure it doesn’t burn.
You can serve it as savory dish, side dish or breakfast…

…but it also tastes great with honey, syrup and jelly.

There are multiple other recipes with onions, mushrooms and other additions, but just like the matzos are made only with flour and water, I don’t feel anything else is necessary here. It’s hard to improve on perfection.
Matzos can stay on your counter forever, or close to it. They might get a little stale but I guarantee you will eat the whole box before it ever happens. They are good in soups, or as a snack and in always popular with women matzo-babka.

Enjoy!

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Og1pdFGMUMg

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Due to my bad memory I now have to write down the things that grind my gear-skiy, which grinds my gear-skiy even more. So lets just get to this month’s edition:

Any business with the words “granny” or “grandma” in the name should immediately be shut down by authorities for not passing the “stress test”. There is some mortgage company whose radio commercials start with the words “Kids? Granny!”. This is one granny I can’t wait to see dead.

People who list every ingredient in their meal adding the word “organic” to  it, something like “I got two slices of organic whole grain hand-ground bread, one half of an organic free-roaming hormone-less  chicken breast on top, with an organic home-grown tomato and topped it off with an organic, non-GM slow-mixed dressing”. Makes me wanna eat something with a good helping of fertilizer and die.

White people who accentuate their super-correct pronunciation of Spanish words and names. Something like “Viarrrragosssssssa“. Concentrate on the other 4 Spanish words you know: taco, burrrrrrrito, cerveza and “¡Yo quiero Taco Bell!“.

Have you ever walked into a grocery store to the smell you imagine to be the smell of hell, where the combination of fire, brimstone and sinners being fried produce a distinct unbearable stench? Then you have witnessed a food demonstrator who can’t cook. It’s hard to believe what one (old) person with an electric skillet can do to stink up a store the size of a football field. This doesn’t apply to food-sampling people at Costco who only demonstrate the foods with pleasantly delicious smells.

Have you seen these electronic billboards along the highway that seem to change every 30 seconds? Sometimes it takes me 3 days to get the whole ad; most of the time I catch the beginning, middle or the end of the display in random order, not that it matters – most of them are for either Dane or David Cook (I’ll have to drive by few more times to see which one for sure). By the way, if you paid for tickets to see Dane Cook, I don’t mind losing you as a reader.

People who put bible verse numbers on their license plates. Let me get my pocket reference bible out to find out which verse you are quoting – about the “eye for an eye” (EX 21:23-27) or about not eating pork (Leviticus 11:7-8). How about just sticking with generic state-issued numbers or something less cryptic like:

And now, since we are on the photo portion of this post, here are a few more:

If you visit The Pitch’s website, this picture is probably very familiar to you, it was their illustration to the article about people who overcame the rickets.

Lastly, I am a big fan of all things multitasking, like this new supplement which can help you eliminate two opposite conditions – constipation and diarrhea, not to mention urgency. To that I say: genius! Next in the pipeline: drugs that simultaneously cure baldness and excessive hair growth, reduce and increase appetite, and always popular supplement to treat insomnia and help you stay awake at the same time.

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It is true that anywhere in the world when people who may not even speak English find out that you are from Kansas, they smile and say something about the Wizard of Oz. And just like L. Frank Baum made Kansas known worldwide, some marketing genius made Wamego, KS a worthwhile side trip for anyone passing through the state.
Wamego is located near Manhattan, KS and close enough to I-70 to make a detour. It doesn’t have any discernible claim to the Oz fame, except for actually being in Kansas.

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The shortest route from Kansas City to Memphis is via Springfield, MO and rural Arkansas where highway is controlled by the roaming gangs of deer who stand around the road contemplating if they will let you live. I wouldn’t recommend driving there in the dark.

I didn’t want to go to Memphis. Even though I learned English trying to sing along with Elvis (and that’s why people often ask me if I am from Tupelo),  I didn’t feel the need to visit his house and other Memphis attractions didn’t really seem worthy of a fairly boring 8-hour drive. Usually we try to see things along the way, but there wasn’t much to see and the only memorable item was a town called Cabool, mostly because of how out-of-place the name seemed somewhere in rural Missouri.

Memphis turned out to be a fun place for a weekend trip, with enough things to keep you busy for a few days.

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Apparently Just Plain Folks make their home in Williamsburg, KS.

Them are the folks who know who is to blame for the 9/11.

Other than the classified information the folks possess a building built in the year 188…

…a combination Tavern/City Hall…

…a weapon of mass destruction…

…a city park…

… a nondescript building…

…a front-yard antique car display…

…a dilapidated elevator…

…and possibly a cafe…

…adorned with rim-art.

Next to Williamsburg is a so-called ghost town of Silkville, KS,

of which I was able to locate this building,

next to a huge stump of possibly a Russian Mulberry tree used to grow silk-worms.

If you are one of them plain folks, there is some room for you in Williamsburg.

Move in and start donating your junk for the playground construction.

And now we dance:

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IisjOLsrbK8

Edit: I am being told that the Guy & Mae’s Tavern is a wonder of Kansas cuisine and has unbelievably awesome ribs.

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