Grating for Farfel Muffins

This afternoon, I made my mother's signature seder side dish: Vegetable farfel muffins. (Farfel is mashed up matzah you can buy in a box in the store.) As a child, I used to beg to help her make these. "Sure," she'd say, "you can grate the carrots." No fool, my mother. I grated so many carrots that today, while grating, I reflected that nothing says "Passover" to me quite like grating. Which is all well in good when it comes to my childhood memories, but for my adult cooking I wish I knew more about actually making the muffins. There's a lot of draining that has to happen, but, since I never saw my mom actually draining any of the ingredients, I had no idea of the consistency I should have been striving for. Plus, there were egg whites. Who knew? I mean, my mom always said they were a hassle to make, but I never would have guessed the hassle-factor reached the level of stiff egg whites. All this to say the muffins taste pretty good, but they look all wrong. No doubt it will take me at least ten years of making them and letting my kids do the grating to get them right, if I'm lucky.