Shavout, coming seven weeks after Passover, is the holiday that celebrates the giving of the Torah on Mt. Sinai. It starts tonight and I have spent the last few days cooking up a storm. It is traditional to eat dairy meals on Shavout so it is nice to be making different things than I usually make for holidays when I generally serve meat.
If you mention Shavout to my five year old son the first thing he says (in a very excited voice, of course) is “blintzes!” These delicious sweet cheese filled crepes are a great treat. I make them only once a year, for Shavout, so he eagerly looks forward to them.

Now this being a parve (dairy-free) blog I am not going to post a recipe for dairy filled blintzes (although if you are looking for some truly decadent dairy-free alternatives to the traditional Shavout cheesecakes I highly recommend this cherry ginger or chocolate mint cheesecake). I mention blintzes here because too often I have been served potentially delicious blintzes that have been ruined by topping them with canned cherry pie filling. And that is something I want to try to fix. The artificial flavor, color and sticky sweetness of the pie filling is all that I can taste and that makes the blintzes significantly less delicious than they could be. But here is the thing. It takes just a minute or two to make a fresh sauce for blintzes that takes them from tasty to outstanding. I know that with all holiday prep time is at a premium, but trust me when I say that this is not the place to cut corners. Frozen blintzes will even do in a pinch, and the addition of a homemade sauce will make them taste homemade.

I pretty much like all fruit sauces as toppings for my blintzes, and I often make an assortment for people to choose from, but if I had to pick I would say my two favorite sauces are sour cherry and blueberry lemon. These sauces are fantastic on top of everything from ice cream to pound cake to pancakes to a simple bowl of yogurt so even if you are not making blintzes it is worth it to make the sauces to use on pretty much anything else.