Boulder A Kosher Wasteland Right Now

Happy Easter and continuation of Passover! We're planning a traditional Easter dinner today, with a beautiful ham from Whole Foods, golden potatoes with caper brown-butter crumbs from Gourmet magazine, and asparagus with balsamic tomatoes from Cooking Light. Since Easter brunch is also traditional but rarely done in the house, I started thinking about how to incorporate and easy one when a rather unorthodox idea for Easter hit me. Thinking about egg dishes, I remembered an old favorite I haven't made for many years, matzo brei, to which I was introduced by the Jewish family of a childhood friend. The basic idea is so simple, essentially a delicious riff on scrambled eggs. As I remember it, you get your raw scrambled eggs ready, then loosely break up an appropriate number of matzo crackers and lightly wet them before incorporating them, more broken up, into the egg mixture. Then just cook much like scrambled eggs, except the matzos will add so much more interest. I might add a bit of diced onion and/or Whole Foods' garlic granules to amp it up.

This idea sent me in search of a box of matzos on Friday, which was not only Good Friday but also the start of Passover that evening. At the Whole Foods on Pearl Street, I found the kosher food section completely bare, and the nice guy stocking an end-cap Passover display with what little they had left said they'd been completely wiped out. Not a matzo cracker to be seen in that store. Onward I went to the Sprouts on Arapahoe, where I wasn't able to locate a kosher section, although it might exist. Seeking help, I asked a stocker if they had matzos, and he drew a complete blank, saying he'd never heard of them (ah, Boulder). But he kindly went in search of a manager for further help, but since he couldn't find one, I struck out there too. In desperation, I moved on to the mammoth Safeway in the Meadows shopping center. There again their kosher section had been completely wiped out. A nice stocker directed me to another display near the bakery, but the only things left there were five pound packages (actually five one pound boxes wrapped together as one) of matzos. For something I haven't made in decades, I wasn't about to buy five pounds of matzos for it. Yesterday, my husband was in the vicinity of the Whole Foods in Superior, where he found a couple of boxes of matzos remaining (noting you had to be at least six feet to see them). Ironically, they were marked as not suitable for Passover, which might be why they were still there, but he fortunately grabbed one since that wasn't a guiding principle for our brunch.

So the moral of the story is that Boulder stores seem to be seriously underestimating the culinary needs of the local Jewish community and/or those of us with interests in exploring a variety of cuisines.