Food Friday- Cooking for the People I Love

My husband detests the taste of raw onion. I'm making Moroccan meat balls for Shabbat dinner. But because I love him, I'm pre-cooking the onions before they get mixed into the meat mixture.

Onions and celery cooked into submission

Our daughter comes home for spring break. Before my kids come home from being away I always ask them what they want for their first meal. My daughter requested Moroccan meat balls. I am happy to comply with her wishes.

While I was thinking about this welcome home meal, I recalled my daughter and older son watching me make one of their favorite side dishes, caramelized onions. There is something very sweet about having your kids hanging out by your elbows impatiently waiting for a dish to be finished.

To make the onions-

Shred a 3 lb bag of onions. This is one of the moments when I think about Laurie Colwin's line about wanting to marry her food processor.

Heat olive oil in the bottom of a heavy bottomed pot. Put shredded onions in the pot. They may not all fit at once. So you can add a second batch after the first has cooked down some.As onions begin to soften add a glug of booze. It really doesn't matter what you add, wine, vodka, whiskey, gin they all work well. The booze adds a bit of flavor. It also adds a bit of sugar to the onions and helped the carmelization.

Add salt. I added 1 tsp for the 3 lbs of onions. Add sugar. I added 1 tsp. add a glug of vinegar. Keep cooking while stirring occasionally. Smokey-Joe's cafe, a kosher ribs restaurant in Teaneck , N.J. serves a version of caramelized onions that is as sweet as grape jelly. You want a bit of sweetness but you don't want your tongue bathed in cane sugar.

At this point you don't have to tend the pot very carefully . Go check your email, or put the wash in the dryer, fold a bit of laundry but check the onions every once in a while. When the volume of onions has been reduced by half, you may want to lower the heat. Check to see that the onions are not burning. At this point your kids may ask if the onions are done. They are good at this point, but they are not done.

I usually have my tea kettle nearby. Drizzle in a bit of water to keep the onions from burning. If there are charred bits at the bottom of the pot, scrape them away with a metal spoon and add water until they burned stuff is incorporated into the onions. The onions are now golden. Your kids will beg for a taste. The onions are still not done, despite their aroma being intoxicating.

Hold your kids off and now you need to fuss with that pot of onions, stirring and scraping until the onions are brown. The onions, are at this point, the texture of porridge and brown. Now you can give your kids some of the onions, reminding them that we are saving the rest for dinner.

Carmelized onions, 3lbs of onions cooked down to about 1/4 of their starting volume

What else am I serving??? I have some turkey necks. I'm thinking about cooking them with polenta. We will have a green salad and for dessert... maybe orange segments in syrup.

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...

A Passover loss

My parents bought this tablecloth during their 1955 visit to Israel. It is made out of linen from the first post 1948 flax harvest. The linen is heavy and almost crude. The embroidery is very fine. We used this cloth every Passover until the center wore thin. You can see the cloth on the table in the background of this photo of my parents and nephew My Aunt Sheva bought my mother a replacement cloth. The replacement cloth is made out of a cotton poly blend. The embroidery is crude and the colors not nearly as nice. The old cloth hung in our basement. We used the new cloth and remembered the much nicer original cloth. I loved that my aunt wanted to replace the cloth, I just hated the replacement because it was so much less than while evoking the beauty of the original. After my father died my mother sat me down and with great ceremony gave me all of her best tablecloths. She also gave me the worn Passover cloth and suggested that I could mend it. I did. Year after year ...

sarah in nyc

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