Food Friday- Pi Day Edition

Purim begins Saturday night, but today is Pi Day. In celebration I made two pies. The main dish pie was a bit of a challenge negotiating between the various vegetable likes and dislikes among tonight’s eaters. One hates broccoli, the other detests spinach, a third hates onions. I made a mushroom pie with some very sautéed mushrooms.

For me Purim marks a culinary break between winter foods and spring foods. Right after Purim oranges become dry and gross. Spring fruits and vegetables begin to appear in the stores. This seemed like the last moment in the season to eat pumpkin pie.

But as much as one loves pie, you can’t live on that alone. So we have another iteration of last week’s potatoes cooked in chicken fat and chicken juice.

I also made sweet and spicy meat balls. The heat comes from an African peanut based spice mix that packs a whole lot of heat. There is the merest buzz of heat in these meatballs and the sweet comes by way of berry jam. This is a slightly more cosmopolitan version of chafing dish meat balls with grape jelly.

The light was really pretty during this morning’s work out. I stopped my work out a couple of times to take photos.

This masonry fan is one of my favorite elements of my view.

It’s a very small part of the view,

never the less, it always gives me pleasure.

The angle of the sun created a wonderful shadow of the water tank across the street.

That blue sky was short lived. I’m glad I got to capture it.

Shabbat Shalom and Happy Purim!!!

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

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