Skip to main content

Post Passover Food Friday

With lots of help from my husband and my youngest, all of the Passover dishes are now back in their various hiding places.  When you live in an apartment, Passover dish storage is not the simple matter of boxes in an attic, basement or garage. rather it takes some real cleverness to hide all of the Passover stuff away. By the time we were done, the really good neighborhood pizza place, was closed so we settled for mediocre bagels instead.

100_1428
In thinking about tonight’s Shabbat dinner, I thought that it would be nice to have some fish after all of the met we were eating during Passover. I started the challah and was happy to be back kneading a nice gluten-ey bread dough. The challah is now doing it’s second rise and I will bake it soon.

Making the challah today, a weird thing happened. As a cook who cooks kosher, I always break eggs into a cup one by one, before adding them to anything, to be sure that they don't have any blood spots. In 40 or so years of cooking, I don't think I have ever cracked an egg and found it bloody. ( I do remember my mother finding an unhatched chick in an egg when I was a kid. That was really gross.) I do the cracking into a cup thing anyway.  Today, the fifth egg I cracked open for the challah was indeed bloody. I'm really glad that I do the egg checking as a matter of course.

  My youngest is not much of a vegetable eater. We are sort of amazed that he is at all healthy given how free from vegetable matter his diet is.  I made a big mess of mashed cauliflower and spring potatoes. I boiled each until soft, mashed with a big spoon and then whipped with  lots of buttermilk and some butter, salt and pepper.  I’m serving peas and salmon with the mashed white stuff. This meal reminds me of what my mother used to serve on July 4th. It’s almost exotically American. I realize that most of the meals that I make are Eastern European, Middle Eastern  or vaguely Asian
in their main culinary influence. this meal could have come out of my mother’s red and white checked Betty Crocker cookbook ( excepting the challah, of course)

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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 ...