Food Friday- Food Processor Edition

I often like doing things the old fashioned way, I don’t use a bread machine, I knead my bread by hand. I hand knead and hand roll noodles. Most of my cooking is of the slow variety.

There are times, and the short winter Fridays are a prime example of those times when a bit of cooking technology is a life saver.

Tonight's dinner has been brought to my family through both a food processor and a microwave oven. Yes, my challah was made exactly the same way it might have 75 years ago. ( Read the passive voice here as me doing the making there were only dishwashing elves today)

I made my older sons one of his favorite dishes, caramelized onions. This soup bowl, that is only half full is one full bag of onions. Slicing them in the food processor made the job much easier, but I must admit that I was weeping from the onion fumes.

I also pureed two more onions, thee parsnips and three large carrots and a box of mushrooms that went into tonight’s two pounds of chopped meat. After chopping up the vegetables they went into the microwave for 8 minutes to cook. The volume of cooked vegetables is larger than the volume of meat. When I re heat the meat balls I will make a smoky-sweet sauce to pour over them. My youngest will then eat his meat and vegetable balls.

I’m also making a cabbage salad. The salad is essentially cold sesame noodles with cabbage standing in for the noodles. Again, both the microwave and the food processor will make this salad a quick job.

I do realize that my knife skills are less wonderful than they were in my pre- food processor days. I suppose if I end up having to live off the grid or if I end up doing most of my cooking without power I will regain those skills again in not too much time. Meanwhile these tools mean that I can prepare Shabbat dinner on a winter Friday and so a bit of other work as well.

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