Food Friday–after a hard week

The news from Israel was especially distressing this week. I knew one of the men who was murdered. He went to the same Jewish day school that I attended. His younger brother was in my class. The images of the bloodied tallitot and t’fillin were interspersed in my head with images of him playing basketball with his classmates.

Shabbat comes very week. The regularity of those rituals is often healing. My synagogue has a monthly Friday where they match guests to hosts. Tonight we are hosting a dear friend who we have known for ages. We are also hosting a family we have never met before. They have two teenaged boys which I assume means two giant appetites.

I decided to make curried chicken. I pretended that I was an Indian grandma and mixed up my own curry powder. I decided that my curry powder would consist of lots of turmeric plus flavors that I love. So this curry includes, cinnamon, ginger, cardamom,coriander, cumin, black pepper , cayenne and smoked paprika.

I massaged the curry into the chicken and added some cut up dates to the pans.

The chickens were big healthy chickens so I needed two pans.

After the chicken cooled I cut it up and then added more cut up dates to the pan. The chicken is going to hang out for a long time in the oven between candle lighting, when Shabbat starts and dinner. I am expecting the dates to melt into the chicken.

I started the soup last night. it’s a bone soup with beef and chicken bones and a whole lot of vegetables.

I will add some multi-culti –sort –of- matza- balls made out of arepa flour to the soup. ( Make matza balls but substitute arepa flour for the matza meal. The corn flour is a nice change from the usual and has a good texture, unlike my past bad experiment substituting white flour for the matza meal)

One of my mother’s baking standards was mandlebroit, which is the Eastern European equivalent of biscotti. I have never made mandlebroit before, but I used to watch my mother bake it –often. I guess that is the baking equivalent of “ I’m not a doctor but I play one on TV.”

I did something one ought not to do, and I combined two recipes, one for chocolate biscotti from my box of cocoa and one for mandlebroit from the Sydney, Nova Scotia cookbook and made chocolate mandlebroit. Considering that I hadn’t made either recipe before it was a possibly really stupid thing to do.

Either I’m lucky or I have enough baking experience under my belt or mandlebroit are forgiving.

But they came out fine, actually better than fine. They are crunchy and not too sweet. a nice thing for grown up tastes.

The main dessert will be brought by our dear friend. My mother never served one cake for dessert. A cake had to be served with a plate of cookies to keep it company. You can tell that I am not really an elegant hostess because there is only one variety of cookie.

My guests are welcome to file their complaints.

Shabbat Shalom! With hopes and wishes for

שלום ושלוה

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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