Working my way out of Egypt

Well, since the Haggadah says that in each generation one needs to see themselves as if they themselves left slavery in Egypt. Today was a slavery day.

I took the easy way out and made the charoset in the food processor. It’s a whole lot easier than 90 minutes of hand chopping( but less emotionally satisfying) I was just too emotionally and physically worn out after my mother’s death to deal with the hand chopping this year.We now have a gallon of charoset in the fridge.
The charoset recipe was developed by my father. It sort of started out with a base of Ashkenazi charoset and is embellished with ideas my father got from reading Maimonides, references to fruits in the Song of Songs and stuff my father liked.

The quantities for everything is lots.

almonds

walnuts

apples

figs ( it’s better to have a few varieties, and they are even better if they are pre-soaked in sweet wine)

dates

raisins

prunes ( not a lot)

apricots ( California is better but Turkish are better than nothing)

dried peaches if you have them ( I didn’t this year)

fresh ginger – lots

cinnamon

whole orange

whole lemon

Sweet kosher wine

honey

Chop everything up until it is a nice rough texture. Add wine , more than you would think and some honey. It’s better if it sits for a few days for the flavors to meld.

I also made a no nut charoset for my nephew. That was the easy part of my day.

The hard part of the day was the soup. It had cooked for a day and a half. It was time to create not the usual peasant soup we eat all year but the refined clear soup my father was so proud to serve on Passover.
I first need to explain that the pot I’m using is big. My son and I reckoned that you could cook a year old child in the pot with no trouble. The pot

would be a bit too small for a two year old. I’m saying this not because I plan to cook a child, but because I want you to get a sense of the volume of soup I am dealing with here.
First I had to mash all of the vegetable matter through a strainer.

All of the pureed gunk gets added back into the soup.
Then you take all of the vegetable matter that is left inside the strainer and put it in a tea towel and squeeze out every bit of liquid. This means that every bit of vegetable goodness is inside a flavorful clear broth.
This makes for really good soup but it is hard on the hands and shoulders.

I then pulled out all the bits of chicken flesh and put them into a bowl. On it’s own the chicken tasted like old rubber bands. I know, because as a kid I used to put all sorts of things in my mouth, including old rubber bands.
I then ground up celery and parsley with some fresh lemon juice and olive oil and made a dressing for the chicken scraps. I flavored it with lots of black pepper and paprika and that was supper 9 along with some soup and some paprika and ginger flavored matza balls.

We now have 11 quarts of soup ready for Seder.My hands look like they have been pickled. I am sore and bone tired.

I think tomorrow I will cook the meat and start thinking about side dishes.

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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