Back to our regularly scheduled programming...

Friday, what I really wanted to do was sleep all day after putting all the Passover STUFF away with my husband and kids Thursday night. Instead of napping or having a spa day, I was baking challah. Forgive me, there are no photos.

Monday, I made our first Post-Passover weekday loaf.

For those of you who care, I ground up some barley and added it to the dough. The crust was delightfully shattery. My husband asked me if I knew why the crust was so good. It may have been a long second rise.

Yesterday I needed to eat lunch.

I cut a slice of bread, and topped it with sliced tomatoes Herbes de Provence and lots of black pepper and topped the whole thing with lots of shredded mozzarella cheese.

I popped the whole thing in the nuker, and then that was my lunch.

It was delicious. If my friend Miriam were still alive I would have sent her the photo and we would have reminisced about the English muffin pizzas we both ate and made hundreds of times during our youth.

If you didn't grow up in the 1960s and 70's and English muffin pizza is English muffin covered with ketchup and whatever bland white cheese your mother had bought from the supermarket. In those days it was probably Muenster cheese. If you still didn't own a toaster oven, you baked your English muffin pizza in the regular oven on a baking sheet. Even with sub-par cheese and ketchup it was a pretty good lunch.

Making this satisfying lunch with home made bread and real tomatoes is extra lovely. Miriam might have made fun of me a little bit for going a little fancy on this lunch time classic. I miss having that conversation with Miriam. So I had that conversation in my head and now have shared it with you.

Spring has actually arrived in this neck of the woods.

But Now that Passover is over I have gotten back to my non-cooking work. Two tallit stripes are painted and are still wet.

Comments

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

Search This Blog