Food Friday- mending ancient fences edition

Tonight, one of our guests comes one of the branches of the family where there was a long rift. I am delighted that she is joining us. She is a vegetarian so tonight's meal is dairy in her honor.

I decided to make Lokshen mit Kaese, noodles, and cheese. In this case, the noodles were hand rolled black pepper noodles. I didn't do the upper body portion of my morning workout today because I knew that rolling the noodles would more than make up for it.

An old-fashioned way to cut noodles is to roll each sheet of noodles into a roll and then cut the roll with a knife. It speeds up the cutting but then all of the noodles need to be unrolled. Doing all of the tasks involved in noodle making can be tedious. Luckily my younger son was around and he took over the task of noodle unrolling. His are the ones that are neatly stacked.

After all of the noodles are cut and unrolled they are ready to be boiled. They cook up really quickly in a matter of minutes. You drain the noodles and add some butter into the cooking pot and set the pot on a low heat.

You add the drained noodles back into the pot and then add in lots of a soft curd cheese. This time I used ricotta cheese. Farmer cheese or pot cheese are more traditional but I couldn't find any. Even cottage cheese will do. Your eaters won't complain with cottage cheese, but you will know.

Then you add beaten eggs to the pot. Today I added four. This dish is traditionally flavored with salt and lots of black pepper. I added lots of black pepper and some cayenne pepper. This dish looks bland but it packs a sneaky punch.

I am also serving a giant bowl of dressed arugula that people can embellish with their choice or roasted vegetables.

There is also a vaguely Middle Eastern chickpea salad that is spiced as one would a taboule.

I also faked a cake.

The batter is flavored with grated clementine peels and juice and the excellent vanilla my daughter brought back from Mexico. I topped the cake with peach slices that macerated in sugar while I assembled the rest of the cake. I plan to cut the cake into squares and serve each slice with some blackberries.

Every time I fake a cake I am grateful for the hours I put in serving as my mother's baking sidekick. My mother would play with cake flavorings, cranking them up or tinkering with them to please her palate but she always followed recipes pretty carefully. What I learned watching my mother is what various cake batter types need to look like and the basic steps you need to take and in which order.

I was planning to make a bundt cake but chatting with my sister as she was preparing her own Shabbat dinner convinced me to make this cake, which is a cousin to the summer fruit cakes my mother used to make in an 8-inch square pan.

I end this with a couple of lovely images for you for Shabbat. the first my son and I saw today in the Costco parking lot.