Food Friday- cooking for folks who love food

Tonight's dinner guests are foodies of the highest order. Our friend Alan is probably the only one of our guests that I will ask to bring challah. Amy and Alan force me to up my cooking game.

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When I began making tonight's chicken I pulled out a selection of red spices.

The tag line "cooking with the reds" popped into my head. I think it sounded like a Revlon ad from the 1980's.

here is the chicken duly massaged with the red spices and waiting to be put into the oven.

Raw chicken is never appetizing, not even when covered with red spices.

Cooked though is a different story. The house smelled amazing as the chicken cooked.

Now for the roasted section of the dinner. A spicy eggplant to be served as part of the mezze course, and

tomatoes that will be added to the salad,

Dessert is a two part deal that includes a sorbet that started out with intentions to be pomegranate fig but seems to be the flavor that we call "Middle Eastern Garbage Pail " with pomegrante molasses, figs, dates, walnuts carob syrup, silan, brown sugar, coconut, dates cardomon and allspice, orange bitters and coffee.

This recipe showed up in my Facebook feed. I don't have the major ingredient, confectioner's sugar. But why should that stop me? I thought that a dry slightly bitter cookie would be perfect to go with the deeply flavored sorbet. I plan to serve the sorbet with fresh pomegranate seeds.

As I plated the cookies I thought about how my mother would have appreciated the fact that I used an actual hand knit doily under the cookies and served them on this silver plate. Thinking about my mother I put all of the ugly cookies on the bottom of the stack.

Shabbat Shalom!

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מְחַיֵּה הַמֵּתִים

וְנֶאֱמָן אַתָּה לְהַחֲיוֹת מֵתִים: בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה יְהֹוָה מְחַיֵּה הַמֵּתִים You are faithful to restore the dead to life. Blessed are You, Adonoy, Resurrector of the dead. That particular line is recited at every single prayer service every day three times a day, unless you use a Reform or Reconstructionist prayer book . In those liturgies instead of praising God for resurrecting the dead God is praised for giving life to all. I am enough of a modern woman, a modern thinker, to not actually believe in the actual resurrection of the dead. I don't actually expect all of the residents of the Workmen's Circle section of Mount Hebron cemetery in Queens to get up and get back to work at their sewing machines. I don't expect the young children buried here or the babies buried here to one day get up and frolic. Yet, every single time I get up to lead services I say those words about the reanimating of the dead with every fiber of my being. Yesterday, I e...

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