Skip to main content

Food Friday–Thinking about Thanksgiving

First take a moment to admire these perfect looking challot.

SAM_1398

I was not responsible for their beautiful four strand braids. My older son was. For this, I thank all of you who pay taxes in New York state. These beautiful braids were brought to you thanks to the many years of Occupational Therapy that my son was mandated to have by the state. The fact that he can also button his shirts and write  are also due to the wonderful therapists who worked with him.

 

I am also forever grateful to Maureen Galvin, the special educator who identified my son as someone who needed O.T. help back when he was four years old.

My friend Jacqui insists that she would be satisfied with a Shabbat dinner consisted only of my challah. But she is not eating this meal ( but her son will be a guest tonight). others of us think that a good Shabbat dinner needs more than just challah.

We will be having a two day soup. The matza ball dough is in the fridge and the matza balls will simmer in this tomato and chicken bone soup. This is a highly unrefined soup complete with bones that will melt in your mouth.

SAM_1405

We can all pretend that we still live in the shtetle when we eat this soup.

I made a batch of idiot chicken with herbes de Provence and lemon juice.  I also made some spicy eggplant.

SAM_1401

Marinated vegetables. If I stir the vegetables every time I walk past them they will be perfect by the time we eat.

SAM_1399

I’m also planning for Thanksgiving. One of the guests where we are going for Thanksgiving is a vegan. I am plotting about how to make a pumpkin pie without eggs.  I have already mastered a pretty decent pie crust.

SAM_1403So I made a sweet potato pudding  ( we can also call this a kugel) as a side dish for a dry run  for the pumpkin pie. I thought that a starch…like corn starch could stand in for the egg.  I hadn’t any on hand so substituted  white flour.

I realized today that although I write about food and cooking a whole lot…this is probably not the best blog to just find a recipe and follow it. I realize that this is a bit more like cooking with your mother, where by hanging around you slowly get all of the facets that make a dish really good.  This is how my kids have learned how to cook. ( Even the one who claims to have minimal interest in food can produce a meal.)

So here is today’s bit of cooking wisdom. Bake bread with…

SAM_1397

It’s a high gluten high quality flour. If you can find their bread flour, so much the better.  You can find it at Whole Foods in the neighborhood but it is insanely expensive. A trip to a suburban Walmart meant that I got to bring home this treasure. It’s now half gone.

 

Shabbat Shalom!!!

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

I love hearing from my readers. I moderate comments to weed out bots.It may take a little while for your comment to appear.

Popular posts from this blog

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...
1 comment
Read more

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...
8 comments
Read more

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 ...
2 comments
Read more