Skip to main content

Food Friday

One of the nice things about being an adult is that you get to cook the things you feel like eating.

 

When I looked in our fridge to figure out how to flavor this Shabbat’s chicken I spotted half a cabbage. I decided to make stuffed cabbage flavored chicken.

 

SAM_2374

I shredded the cabbage and put it in the bottom of the roasting pan. I topped the cabbage with the chicken and added a couple of cans of diced tomatoes and spiced as I do stuffed cabbage with cinnamon, allspice paprika, ginger, brown sugar  black pepper and sour salt and raisins. SAM_2377

By the time the chicken was done the pan was filled with lots of watery looking juice. I asked my son to cook it down until it was somewhere between the viscosity of maple syrup and honey. My son was happy to comply.  He had initially suggested adding something like couscous to absorb the liquid.  he’s right, it would have worked, but I wanted the meat liquids to be thick and syrupy, and not at all starchy. My son  seems to be my child. He was fascinated by the process of thickening the cooking juices and how the flavors get concentrated. I love cooking with him.We added the chicken back into the thickened chicken juice and it ought to be delicious.

 

I still haven’t made tonight’s salad but asparagus and carrots and amba will be involved.

 

My birthday was a few weeks ago and my husband took me out for a fancy Indian lunch. The food was really elegant refined and quite delicious. dessert was three small cubes of ice cream. Two of the flavors were forgettable ( mango and strawberry). One of those cubes has been haunting me, cardamom ice cream.

I realized that if I steeped cardamom pods in coconut milk and sugar on a low heat for a while I could infuse the coconut milk with the cardamom flavor.

SAM_2380

I cheated and added a few shakes of ground cardamom.

After a couple of hours of steeping, I ran the mixture through the blender and now it’s churning away in the food processor. I think I will top the results with Old Krupnick, the Polish honey liquor . I just snitched a taste from the ice cream maker. Wow! There isn’t very much but it’s incredible.

 

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

מְחַיֵּה הַמֵּתִים

  וְנֶאֱמָן אַתָּה לְהַחֲיוֹת מֵתִים: בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה יְהֹוָה מְחַיֵּה הַמֵּתִים   You are faithful to restore the dead to life. Blessed are You, Adonoy, Resurrector of the dead. That particular line is recited at every single prayer service every day three times a day, unless you use a Reform or Reconstructionist prayer book . In those liturgies instead of praising God for resurrecting the dead God is praised for  giving life to all.  I am enough of a modern woman, a modern thinker, to not actually believe in the actual resurrection of the dead. I don't actually expect all of the residents of the Workmen's Circle section of  Mount Hebron cemetery in Queens to get up and get back to work at their sewing machines. I don't expect the young children buried here or  the babies buried here to one day get up and frolic. Yet, every single time I get up to lead services I say those words about the reanimating of the dead with every fiber of my being. Yesterday, I e...
2 comments
Read more

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...
3 comments
Read more

Food friday - your grandmother's food processor

My grandmother bought my mother this wooden bowl and a chopping knife, known in Yiddish as a hock-messer, soon after my parents got married. Yes, she also got them a dairy set as well. these wooden bowls and chopping knives were a big part of food prep when I was growing up. meatloaf and meat balls were mixed in this bowl. Chopped liver was made in this bowl as well. Sundays we often made chicken salad for lunch made out of chicken left over from Shabbat chopped with vegetables and mayo. That too, was made in this bowl. When I was in college my parents got their first food processor and the chopping bowls were not used as much. Several years ago, my father asked if i would like the bowls and the hock-messers. I was happy to have them. I like the sheer physicality of chopping up a big bowl of stuff into teeny pieces. While the wooden bowls have stood up well to the years of use, the hock-messers had not. The bladed which were bolted into their handles, wobbled. The blades wouldn't ...
9 comments
Read more