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!

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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...

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sarah in nyc

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