Difficulty Level Easy

A Serious Man is surely typical of a Coen brothers film in that it is unlike anything else they have made.The humour is so black that you feel guilty laughing as troubles pile up on the blameless and hapless lead character, Larry. I kept thinking, that's a lot of tsouris, but how can you not laugh when Larry is in his divorce lawyer's office and he takes an emergency call from his son, only the emergency is that the son can't get "F Troop" on the tv because the antenna is misaligned.

Aside from Fiddler on the Roof, this has to be the most Jewish film I've ever seen, so I knew that food had to be involved, specifically chicken soup with matzo balls, and I wasn't disappointed. The scene at the dining table of Larry's awful wife and horrible children slurping up their chicken soup was hilarious in an entirely repellant way.

I've made tons of chicken soup in my life, but I've never made matzo balls, I usually leave that to my mother-in-law. After the first taste of these matzo balls, my husband suggested that I make the matzo balls for Passover rather than his mother. Not touching that with a barge pole. These were really wonderful, the lightest matzo balls I've ever had. I didn't have any chicken fat or margarine, so I used butter, but that is strictly not kosher.

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