Dinner for all five of us

Tonight is a special night. Tonight all five of us will be sitting at our Shabbat table. Our older son is home from Amarillo for the weekend. It feels really wonderful to have all of us together.

Our younger son asked me if i could make him a cross body bag to hold his phone, epi-pen and wallet. I had tried last week but the physics of construction completely overwhelmed me and I just couldn't figure it out.

Yesterday I sat down to try again and this time I was able to come up with what I described to my son as a first draft for the bag to hold his essentials as he goes out and about.

The bag is made out of denim and is topstitched with orange thread that showed up in stash from a friend's dead mother or grandmother. The front pocket has room to hold a standard men's well stuffed bifold wallet. There is ample room for both a large phone and an Epi-pen in the main pocket.. The next iteration of the bag will be made in fabric that my son chooses and may be lined or made out of a waterproof fabric. I would like to add a clip for house keys as well.

Tonight's dinner has been made with thoughts of the New Year. Each fall when I see damson plums I think about my Berlin born friends and how they made their plum tarts each Rosh HaShanaha as if the baking and eating of the tart would somehow magically return them to Berlin of 1925 with all of their beloved family and friends celebrating the holiday untouched by the Shoah.

Every year I make my own version of their beloved plum tarts. Some years it is more of the classic tart with the muerbe teig crust. This year I made up a simple four egg cake baked in a rectangular pan.

No, this isn't the recipe from the New York Times that nearly every person on the Upper West Side seems to make. I cut up two plastic boxes of plums and let the plums soak in a mixture of brown sugar, juice of half a lime, a cardamom pod and a dusting of tapioca while I mixed up the cake batter. I was feeling a little lazy so I didn't separate the four eggs and beat them with a mixture of less than a cup of white sugar and about half a cup of brown sugar. For the fat and moisture I used about a cup of coconut based heavy cream and about two cups of flour.I added lime zest, vanilla, a tsk of baking powder and a pinch of salt.

I added the batter to the pan and then topped with the sliced plums

I had a bit of crumbled sweet graham cracker like crumbs that i added to the top of the cake. I thought about how my dear friends Shawna would have arranged the plums elegantly in rows, but as I said before, I was feeling a bit lazy so I just plopped the plums higgledy- piggledy over the dough. The cake was baked at 350 until it was done. we will have some tonight and some on the first night of the holiday.

One of my old Jewish cookbooks has a category of food they call Grandmother's Puddings. That is dishes that fall somewhere between being cakes and kugels. Someone's bubbie in the old country certainly could have made this , with apples in the late fall, peaches or berries in the summer and of course plums for the High Holiday season.

I can't magically return us all to Germany or Austria of the 1920s. I can't bring Herta, or Ida, Sitta or Fanny back to life but I can think about them as I make and eat plum tarts each Rosh HaShanah.

Last night I made one of the best zucchini dishes I have ever put into my mouth. I thin sliced zucchini and coated it with oil and then topped it with a spice mix my son brought home from his trip to New Orleans. I made the zucchini for a dairy meal so I used a large sheet pan so everything got really crispy.

I don't have a big sheet pan for meat meals so it is now looking pallid and pale. perhaps by dinnertime it will improve. A girl can hope.

We are eating brisket tonight. Sorry no photos, but the flavor is Rosh HaShanah inspired. It is cooked in a marinade of mustard, apple butter, silan , a bit of honey and smoke flavoring.

This week's recordings are looking towards Rosh HaShanah.

Shabbat Shalom--hoping beyond hope that this Shabbat will indeed bring peace.

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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