Food Friday - cooking while cranky edition

Our washing machine has developed a drip. The repairman was scheduled to come today--any time from noon until 5. It's Friday, of course I have nothing else to do!...I agreed to the timing. 

Yesterday I got a call from the repairman saying he planned to show up at 1:00. I can do that but I had plans to meet a friend for lunch, Shabbat dinner needed to get cooked . My son is usually a good sport about working around my schedule but he had a commitment. 

My friend was willing to have lunch at home with me but aside from the food I was cooking for Shabbat, the larders were pretty bare. I got up early, got the chicken going, Cleared out all the stuff around the washing machine and got a workout in. I showered and got a load of laundry in the washing machine before the repairman came. 

I then got a call from the repairman. He was coming an hour early. Great! but there was a load of wash going in the machine he was supposed to fix. I had adjusted my schedule to fit the 1:00 pm timing but could move things around to fit the earlier arrival time.

I decided to get dessert into the oven.

I got another call from the repairman. He was downstairs. Great! but he was downstairs from my husband's office in Chelsea. The repairman does not repair on the Upper West Side, that is someone else's job. My repair has to be rescheduled.  I moved all of the brooms and mops back to their hiding places around the washing machine.

The biscotti are on their first baking. My friend arrives.  We hang out and eat, not quite lunch, home baked pumpernickel bread, cheese and drink hard cider and biscotti ends.

My washing machine still drips on the floor. I saw my friend. We ate and hung out and most of dinner is cooked.
We are eating chicken with Zaatar.
Mario Batali's chocolate biscotti is the basis for my biscotti.  I had about 6 egg yolks left over from last week's meringues.  I added either 1 or two  whole eggs.
These are the dry ingredients. I think that chocolate is always vastly improved with spices so I added, cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, black pepper and cayenne pepper.
You combine the wet and the dry ingredients. There are some batters that are beautiful. Mixing them is a pleasure. The biscotti dough is frankly kind of gross.  I always forget just how gross it is. But I made sure to add lots of cut up chocolate
and almonds


Every time I bake biscotti I am grateful from my years making mud pies in the back yard or up the block with my friends in their back yard.You mush the sandy mix together with your hands and force it to become a few lumpy snakes.


My friend and I ate our bread and cheese and drank our hard cider while I fretted that perhaps I had gone  too far off the book with the biscotti ( the dough was so dry I added some orange juice, was it to much? had I wrecked it?) and perhaps I had a disaster baking in the oven.

I sliced up the ugly lumpy loaves of chocolate and re-baked the slices, and amazingly

the biscotti were fine, actually, better than fine. 

I might be able to get a couple of minutes of sewing in before Shabbat.

And for your viewing pleasure the stress dress I made the other day when my sewing was going badly. Made out of  two black and white scuba knits.

Shabbat Shalom!!!

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