Food Friday- fall edition

My parents used to create Shabbat dinner in bulk food units.One week they would make a vat of barley with mushrooms. Another week they would make a brace of chickens. Yet another week would be challah week and they would make a dozen or so challot. One of those food units was our favorite, kasha. Each Friday they would pull out that week’s meal from the freezer.

I associate kasha so completely with my father that I rarely make it.

For a while my father alternated making kasha with varnishkes, or bowtie noodles and noodle free. He noticed that the kasha made with varnishkes always got finished. After that, out kasha always came with bow ties.

Kasha making is not difficult. you can make it like my father used to and just follow the recipe on the Wolff’s kasha box.

Like all peasanty recipes it is flexible. This time I forgot to add sautéed onions and mushrooms. We will live without them. Before I serve the kasha I will pour out some of the chicken juices from the warming pan into the kasha. It will make it extra yummy.

We are also eating chicken with sumac and I believe a kale salad. We have some spiced cocoa meringues that I had made for my sister last Friday that will serve as dessert.

There is still a bit of autumn color here on the Upper West Side.

This little maple tree is in my building’s courtyard. it replaces a tree that was blown over during Hurricane Sandy. Our building bought a teeny sapling to replaced the felled tree. It’s pretty astonishing how quickly a maple can grow.

And back to the 1920’s dress ( I changed the topic in case you didn’t notice.) I removed the gathers and re-sewed the dress without them.

Those side extensions, with the help of our friend gravity settle into graceful drapes.

Those drapes work better fro my shape than the gathers.

I still feel a little like June Cleaver in this dress. I have to remind myself that I’m being ironic, but given that it was a challah baking day and I have spent lots of time wearing an apron…it’s hard not to feel like I really am a post WWII housewife.

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

Search This Blog