Food Friday- Signs of Fall

I grew up just south of Boston, about an hour north of the cranberry bogs of the Northern Cape. One of the real signs of fall, aside from the crunch of leaves as I walked home from the train station was the new crop of cranberries. Each Friday, my mother would transform a bag of cranberries into a jar of whole cranberry sauce. The sauce would accompany the Shabbat chicken. But during the week, I would eat those cranberries on everything. I love that sweet-tart taste. You could say, that as a child I had a crush on cranberries. Ocean Spray ran a tourist attraction called "Cranberry World" in Carver, Massachusetts. I really wanted to go. My parents never took us. My husband though, made me a very happy woman. He took me to "Cranberry World". I got to soak up all of that cranberry goodness.

When I was little, my mother used to buy jars of Ocean- Spray orange - cranberry relish. I loved the deep magenta color. And there again was that intense sweet tart taste that almost set your teeth on edge. The sour taste of the cranberries was the perfect foil to the greasiness of the chicken.

In my pre-food processor day I had made cranberry relish by chopping oranges and cranberries in my mother's big old wooden bowl. The cranberries though have an unfortunate tendency to jump out of the bowl when chopped. It's a satisfying job, but messy. Now that I have a food processor, making this treat from my childhood is really easy.

Cranberry Orange Relish
Wash a bag of cranberries
Wash a navel orange and cut into 1/4
Put both into the food processor with a chopping blade.

Process until chopped to your liking. Add sugar to taste. I like it on the tart side. You may not.That's it.

If you are a little kid then you may enjoy taking a bite of the relish and then drinking water. The water will taste awful. Repeat until bored.

The other harbingers of fall are the hard winter squashes and pomegranates. As I type this, a squash is cooking in my oven. The cooked squash is perfect with cranberries.
We used to buy or vegetables from Mr. Anastos. He used to have massive Hubbard Squashes the size of a VW beetle for sale. He would hack off sections for customers. I always wondered what that alien looking squash would taste like. My mother didn't like Hubbards, so we never had any.

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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