Food Friday–Cooking Dead, and Maya’s Tallit

In our family we often joke that we speak our own dialect of English. our speech is loaded with Spoonerisms, punch lines of ancient jokes, remainders of mispronunciations by our kids and kids I had worked with back in the day when I taught day care. Added to this are bits of Pee Wee’s Playhouse and odd phrases that came out of our childhoods. One cooking term we use often is cooking food “Until Dead”. In normative English, I would say that the food is cooked until crusty and caramelized on the outside.

Because I can’t add large amounts of salt to my food, my husband abhors garlic and we both want to avoid excess fat, the question is how with those restrictions does one add deep flavor to food. One way to do that is to cook the food with dry heat. If you cook food for a long time, uncovered in an oven much of the moisture evaporates and the flavors intensify.

Tonight’s meatballs are more than half vegetable matter by volume. My non vegetable eating son has a told ask don’t tell policy about what is inside the meatballs. He doesn’t ask exactly what is inside. And I don’t tell him directly. if I add barbeque sauce or this sweet and savory mixture…he will eat them. I’m satisfied. The two pounds of ground beef have been joined by a container of mushrooms, several celery stalks and a few carrots all ground in the food processor and then cooked with red wine.The vegetables are wet. The meatballs need a long time to loose that additional moisture. I topped these meat balls with a mixture of mustard and maple syrup. I will add more before I heat them for tonight’s dinner.

I’m also serving kale and barley along with challah. Our guest is bringing dessert.

I even had time to work. I finished off the slip that I’m wearing under my Margaret Dumont dress . I tried the dress on after adding the neck darts and I’m pretty pleased with myself. The dress looks pretty good on. I need to cover the seams insuide of the dress so the sequins caught in the seam allowances are all covered and don’t rip me to shreds. It’s just a matter of adding a long strip of the netting and zig-zagging it in place over the seam.

I also began adding the stars to the organza strips for Maya’s tallit.

This is just the under-layer. of the cosmos. other bits of celestial goodness will be added with machine and hand stitching.

Shabbat Shalom to all!

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...

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

Search This Blog