Finally–Food Friday again

It was so comforting to be fed by people who love us. They showed their love by cooking LOTS of food.

It does feel nice though to do my own cooking today. I went to Costco with my neighbor Lorraine earlier today. My parents lived far from the closest kosher butcher. Getting meat needed forethought. I remember one Friday letting my parents know that I was going to walk the six blacks to the butcher to buy meat. It seemed unthinkable to my parents that one could buy meat so close to the time that one was going to be eating it.

I think that I have internalized the patterns of my parents’ home and usually buy meat far in advance. But today Lorraine and I went to Costco to buy the food that I would be cooking tonight. I bought two rolled roasts. I dry rubbed them with spices ( cinnamon, ginger, cloves, corriander and black pepper) and then cooked the meat at 350 until cooked. After the meat cooled I sliced it. I made a marinade to moisten the meat as it wars up for Shabbat ( olive oil, maple syrup and mustard).

When my older son was little he used to call beef, “beep”. So here you see our beep, about to go into the oven for Shabbat.

Today is cold. I guess in January we would think of it as a warm day, but for the moment it is cold. You need warm food to put in your belly on a cold day. all summer I have been making a vaguely Chinese cabbage salad ( shredded cabbage and carrots with sesame oil and rice vinegar) that is truly addictive.

Today I made a cooked version of the same salad. While the meat was cooking I put olive oil in the bottom of one of my pink roasting pans. Yes, you can make it in a pan that isn’t a pink enamel wear pan from the 1940’s. I sliced an onion finely and also added a large box of white mushrooms that I had sliced. I let that all cook down for a while. Then I shredded most of a head of cabbage and some rice vinegar. I baked the cabbage in the oven until most of the moisture in the pan cooked away. It was pretty wet for a long time.

The end result looks kind of ugly but it is really delicious. My daughter and I will probably add a dose of hot sesame oil to our cabbage. My husband isn’t a fan of heat in his food and will leave it out. My youngest isn’t a fan of vegetables in his food and won’t touch it at all.

I retrieved out challah from our neighbor’s freezer. Some of the cakes that were lovingly made for us will be our dessert. So this is our post Shiva Shabbat dinner.

Comments

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...

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...

sarah in nyc

Search This Blog