Some Food for food Friday

This is the cake we serve for the first night of seder. It’s a flourless chocolate nut cake. You are supposed to be impressed by how tall the cake is. Soon I will take it out of the pan, wrap it up and put it in the freezer.

My son made a potato kugel for dinner, actually it was supposed to be mashed potatoes but I told him to leave too much of the cooking water in the pot. So with the addition of a bit of matza meal and some eggs it’s a kugel. Because the fat we used in the kugel is olive oil rather than chicken fat and the potatoes were boiled rather than grated raw it’s very white and reminds me of what I used to think of as Goyish potatoes when I was a little kid. Jewish potatoes were usually grey and chunky and cooked with lots of chicken fat. Goyish potatoes were white and cooked in butter and were very smooth. Both were good, but not at all the same thing.

I also added a vinegar brine to the chicken I had pulled out of the soup. I think that it will taste good but it’s really ugly. I haven’t figured out a presentation that does not make the chicken look like the dregs of an industrial dish machine. I hope I figure out something clever before we eat. If I don’t, I guess I will just call the dish Industrial Waste Chicken and hope for the best.

We had a lovely late season snow this week and I took photos of the snow and other bits of my view that caught my eye. but was too preoccupied to post, so now I am posting some cool images from my living room window. I was unable to capture the image of the crescent moon snugged under the cornice of one of the buildings on the next block.

Earlier this week the early morning light hit the one way sign across the street in such a way that it glowed blue. It looked so cool.

These are two early morning shots of the snow.On Broadway the snow does not last long.

The streetlights and the lights from the apartments reflect off of the falling snow so you get a very dramatic glow.

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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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