Cooking in the middle of life

There are times when I write these Food Friday cooking and baking posts that I feel like it is just a higher tech version of the phone calls my mother had with Marilyn, or Temmi, or Mildred or Rissy. Some of those phone calls were made with the purpose of getting a particular recipe, but more often than not the recipe would emerge during a call that was about life. It was an era when people spent lots of time on the phone while they were ironing or cooking or cleaning.

I thought about my mother's friends as I put together today's challah dough.

There are lots of ways to form challah. Today I decided to roll each loaf out into a large rectangle

roll the flattened dough into a tight roll

Cut the rolls in two

and then pull each strand until it was long.

Then I began to braid each strand.

There are lots of perfectly lovely ways to form a challah. Rolling the dough out with a rolling pin and then tightly rolling the flattened dough up into a jelly roll just makes for a really beautifully textured loaf. It isn't quite the fully defined layers of a croissant but the dough is layered never the less and makes for pleasanter eating.

The meat porion of our meal has been flavored by gifts from two of my kids. My son had visited new Orleans a few weeks ago and brought back a grilling sauce and a spice mix.

I have no idea what they taste like. It will be a surprise.

My husband mentioned that we had too many partial bottles of wine in the fridge door, so I made a sauce for the meat balls out of wine thickend with tapioca starch, a blueberry hot pepper sauce my son had given us a while back some liquid smoke and a bit of the coffee infused maple syrup my daughter gave me for Chanukah.

Chances are it will work well enough. I still have to make the vegetable portion of our meal.

And now, a new topic. These spectacular blooms are on the median strip right in the middle of Broadway

Traffic is zooming north and south on either side of this little bit of beautiful.

I left this bit of the 80s behind in the thrift store. It reminded me of my late mother in law.

I have begun the mending of this tallit for a friend.

This is a wonderful video about an exhibit about the House of Worth in Paris. A wonderful half hour filled with wonderful eye candy.

I hope, as I do each week that this Shabbat brings us peace, especially for the hostages.

A georgeous setting of a prayerful poem hoping for peace.

For your Shabbat pleasure...

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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...

Connecting with the past

A few months ago I had a craving for my father’s chicken fricassee. If my father were still alive I would have called him up and he would have talked me through the process of making it. My father is no longer alive so I turned to my cookbooks and the recipes I found for chicken fricassee were nothing at all like the stew of chicken necks, gizzards and wings in a watery sweet and sour tomato sauce that I enjoyed as a kid. I assumed that the dish was an invention of my father’s. I then attempted to replicate the dish from my memory of it and failed. A couple of weeks ago I saw an article on the internet, and I can’t remember where, that talked about Jewish fricassee and it sounded an awful lot like the dish I was hankering after. This afternoon I went to the butcher and picked up all of the chicken elements of the dish, a couple of packages each of wings, necks and gizzards. My father never cooked directly from a cook book. He used to re...

The light themed tallit has been shipped!!!

I had begun speaking to Sarah about making her a tallit in the middle of August. It took a few weeks to nail down the design. For Sarah it would have been ideal if the tallit were completed in time for her to wear it on Rosh HaShanah., the beginning of her year as senior rabbi of her congregation. For me, in an ideal world, given the realities of preparing for the High Holidays I would have finished this tallit in the weeks after Sukkot. So we compromised and I shipped off the tallit last night. I would have prefered to have more time but I got the job done in time. This tallit was made to mark Sarah's rise to the position of senior rabbi but it was also a reaction to this year of darkness. She chose a selection of verses about light to be part of her tallit. 1) אֵל נוֹרָא עֲלִילָה God of awesome deeds ( from a yom kippur Liturgical poem) 2) אוֹר חָדָשׁ עַל־צִיּוֹן תָּאִיר May You shine a new light on Zion ( from the liturgy) 3) יָאֵר יְהֹ...

sarah in nyc

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