Food Friday–Guest Edition

Our dear friend Marcia invited us for Shabbat dinner.  It’s been a hard week.  Marcia figured that it would be and invited us, and our house guest for dinner.  When we eat together it is always a bit of a pot luck. Marcia is doing most of the meal.

 

I’m bringing flanken ribs.  It’s my youngest’s last Shabbat at home before he goes back to school. I mixed pomegranate molasses, mustard, tamarind paste, liquid smoke and balsamic vinegar in a bwol and rolled each piece of meat in the sauce before cooking it. When I heat the heat up I will put more sauce over the meat.  I expect no left overs.

I am also in charge of dessert. Marcia’s husband loves chocolate. So I made a chocolate custard spiked with ground coffee that I then put into the ice cream maker.  Here are the dry ingredients in the pot.

Here is an action shot of me pouring coconut milk into the dry ingredients ( cocoa, sugar, cornstarch and a pinch of salt)

Yes that IS a gorilla  in my whisk. The whisk was a gift from my sister. The gorilla is not necessary for making a good custard, but a whisk keeps lumps to a minimum.

I also added some pecans to the mix and some dried cranberries along with some shavings of really good bittersweet chocolate. After the mixture reached a boil I turned it off and then put it into the ice cream maker.

 

I also made some ginger parve ice cream. You are looking at LOTS of minced ginger, maybe two inches of a fat root well minced, about a teaspoon of fresh orange rind, a cup of sugar, a can of coconut milk, half a can of water, a pinch of salt, lots of ground ginger, a shot of ginger brandy, and some vanilla. I simmered the mixture for about an hour to extract maximum ginger taste and then added two tablespoons of cornstarch. ( I did a corn starch slurry with the hot liquid before adding the starch to the pot.)The mixture got heated to just boiling and then it went into the ice cream maker which had been well cleaned out by my older son.

 

After doing time in the ice cream maker it looked like this.The ginger flavor emerges twice as you eat the ice cream, at first gently and then you get an extra hit of gingery goodness.

having my son around to help means that I can work on one of the next tallitot on my plate.

 

 

This chunk of lettering is done.

I also machine embroidered ribbon for some of the stripes. There is a LOT of this .

I have to press the ribbons after Shabbat. The blue and silver work is for a set of two similar but not identical tallitot for a set of similar but not identical twins. They both want their tallitot to be visually simple. There are lots of pieces of prep work I need to do before I get down to actual construction. This will be a working weekend. Hopefully I can post more progress soon.

 

Shabbat Shalom!!!