It's a good think that I can fake things

I usually don't do much dessert baking. But commercial Passover baked goods, are for the most part, dismal. Besides, how could we do Passover with my mother without serving the flourless chocolate nut torte?? That cake came together fairly well.

flourless chocolate nut torte

One of the nice things about having Passover in my house is that I can choose the menu. The thick asparagus my father adored, is not on the menu. Neither is the boiled broccoli. My mother makes a wine-nut cake that always tasted a bit musty to me. So that to is not being served. No banana cake either, because I hate the taste of cooked bananas.

I decided to make an orange walnut cake from Claudia Roden's The Book of Jewish Food. She is a really smart woman and a great cookbook writer. I made the cake which involved ground almond and chopped walnuts, the rind and juice of an orange, and lots of eggs. I don't know if my oven's temperature is miscalibrated, but after I took the cake out of the oven and turned it over...it all fell out on the counter.

I had too much invested in that cake to dump it. So I patted it all into an oiled rectangular baking pan, drrizzled melted chocolate over the whole thing and returned it to the oven for an other baking session. After it looked solid, I scored it into diamonds and today put those diamonds into the ultimate baker's cheat, little fluted paper cups. If you don't tell my guests that I wasn't starting out to bake cute little cookies, they won't know.

Chag Kasher V'Sameach to all who celebrate. And thanks for coming along on the journey for those of you who don't.

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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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