For this Depanneur Drop-In, siblings Sean and Sara Udow will be joining Sarah Kidd for a culinary trip back to their roots, recreating a traditional Jewish Friday night supper with some flare.

Roast chicken legs with in-the-pan potatoes
A take on our grandmother’s Friday night roast chicken. She would roast the chicken in a pot with onions and potatoes, and the potatoes would soften to just the right fluffy, creamy texture and take on the comforting flavors of chicken fat. Don’t tell Bubby, but we will break with tradition and give our chicken a bit of a herbaceousness by seasoning it with sage, rosemary and thyme.

Kasha with ‘Varnishkes’
Kasha, a buckwheat grain, with ‘Varnishkes’ (shell or bowtie noodles) was always and remains a staple of my grandmother’s and now our mother’s traditional Shabbat dinner. The key to a good kasha one that is ubiquitous in most of our grandmother’s old-country recipes: onions. These are fried low and slow until they become deeply caramelized, and seasoned with good portions of salt and pepper. Many people use bowtie noodles for this dish, but we always ate it with shells. This truly is an old-school dish, as it combines two starches in one dish, but for the vegetarians (and mushroom lovers) out there, we will also be adding mushrooms to our Kasha with Varnishkes. *note – this dish contains egg. The kasha doesn’t come out right without an egg.

Beet Slaw
Bubby never made beet slaw, but then again, she never served a real vegetable with dinner beyond the carrot that came in chicken soup. We chose beets because they are a good winter vegetable (and although March 17 is close to spring, nothing green will have yet grown in Canada) and because beets are also an old-country vegetable. This beet slaw will be seasoned with horseradish – a play on the beet-horseradish condiment traditionally eaten on the Jewish holiday of Passover.

$15 per person (includes roast chicken with potatoes, kasha with varnishkes and beet salad).

$14 for vegetarians (includes kasha with varnishkes and roast mushrooms and beet salad)

The Udows have generously decided to donate the proceeds of this event to Newcomer Kitchen, a nonprofit organization that invites newly-arrived Syrian refugee women to cook a weekly meal in the Dep’s kitchen. For more information about Newcomer Kitchen, check out this link: https://thedepanneur.ca/newcomerkitchen/

Brother and sister duo Sean and Sara Udow grew up in Winnipeg with good food. Passed down from generations, the Udow siblings have learned how to eat with gusto, cook with passion and host a dinner party or two. Sara, a community and urban planner has always been interested in how food can bring people together – whether around a campfire, dinner table or a community garden. Sean, a neurologist, believes that food can affect the brain and that a diet must not only be balanced and nutritional, but also exciting enough to activate gustatory centres of the nervous system.

Learn more about our Drop-In Dinners
http://thedepanneur.ca/drop-in-dinner