Food Friday–New! different!!!!

Sometimes as I write these posts I think about how often I cook variations on the same theme. I wonder if it’s boring for you to see yet another photo of challah or of chicken or meat balls cooked dead.

This week, I made something new, at least new for me.

I figure that you are smart enough to figure out which vegetables are in the bowl. I didn’t cook the cauliflower though, I made an old fashioned marinade and poured it over. When I pass the bowl I stir the bottom vegetables to the top. I didn’t follow a recipe but this is inspired in equal parts from my older Jewish cookbooks from the 1930’s and 40’s and from Claudia Roden’s excellent chapter on Sephardi vegetable cooking in her terrific book “Jewish Cooking'”.

I love that these vegetables are both Eastern European and Middle Eastern.

This is a really old fashioned way to prepare vegetables. You can use essentially the same marinade to pickle fish. Clearly you can change the spices to suit your taste or use a fancier vinegar than the plain white.

Marinade

1 c white vinegar

a couple of tablespoons of sugar

1 tsp salt

cloves, coriander, black pepper, a bay leaf if you have it ( I didn’t) caraway , if you have it, ( I did)

boil marinade until the sugar is complety dissolved

pour over cut up hard vegetables

stir occasionally

serve several hours or a day later.

Our main dish for tonight is chicken cooked with fennel,celery onions. Meyer lemons, Arak and a Russian spice mixture that our guests bought us last year. I don’t know what is in the mixture, because I don’t read Russian but it’s khaki green and smells earthy. I think that there is a fair amount of sage and thyme in the mix. It’s quite wonderful.

I made a pan of jasmine rice with cardamom. I also made yet another spicy stewed eggplant in tomato.

I also made two of these.

I love the round pies floating over the circles on my table cloth.

They are something between a pie and a tart. I made an oil crust scented with orange blossom water. The crust is lined with canned apricot pie filling that I had bought a while ago when I was trying to make apricot ice cream. I was hoping for that wonderful tart taste you get from California apricots. Unfortunately the canned stuff captured the flowery fragrance of apricots but not that tart kick. I cheated /adapted and added some lemon juice. I sliced the apples in the food processor. I suppose if I were a more refined cook I would have peeled the apples. I like the red color and I hate peeling apples.

As I was making the pie/tarts my older son asked if I had thought to add cinnamon. I answered my son in a snotty way, because I don’t think it is possible to cook apples without cinnamon. I also then apologized to my son. I also added some ginger booze to both the crust and the filling.

What I did not add to the pie/tarts is nuts. Pecans would have been wonderful, but my nut allergic nephew will be eating one of the pie/tarts tomorrow so I left them out.

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

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