Food Friday–Frigid Spring edition

This morning at services some of us were in down coats. Some of us were wearing spring coats with sweaters and scarves. One of my friends was complaining about the April chill and Marty responded with these lines from Robert Frost.

The sun was warm but the wind was chill.
You know how it is with an April day
When the sun is out and the wind is still,
You’re one month on in the middle of May.
But if you so much as dare to speak,
A cloud comes over the sunlit arch,
A wind comes off a frozen peak,
And you’re two months back in the middle of March.

It’s very nice to daven each morning with an English professor. Even without today’s perfect lines of poetry Marty makes morning minyan into something quite wonderful.

My son offered to make the chicken and the ribs for tonight’s dinner. I have not taken photos of his handiwork. I do want to say that the house smelled so good that I ought to have charged people to stand in the hallway and inhale. I probably could have covered the costs of my youngest son’s meal plan in college before the meat was finished cooking.

Given that so much of my time was freed up I decided to concentrate on dessert.

I decided to make a pear sorbet. I roughly chopped the pears and put them in a pot along with

the zest from one lemon which I chopped up before tossing into the pot.

I thought about which flavors are buddies with pears. I Think that aside from lemon, pears play well with ginger. So I chopped some up.

A parve ice cream also needs a bit of fat in it. Usually I use olive oil. This time I used a heaping tablespoon of coconut oil.

I also added some sugar.

I then simmered everything until the pears were soft. I added a few lavender buds because they would add a bit of mystery to the flavor.

Towards the end of the cooking I added a tablespoon of potato starch. I still had some left over from Passover, but cornstarch would work fine. I just want to finish the can of potato starch before next Passover.

After the starch had boiled for a bit I let it cool and put everything into the food processor. I suppose I could have just smashed everything through a strainer if I were in the mood to do that.

I then put the pureed mixture in the ice cream maker.

Depending on the light the pear mixture either looks like a lively light chartreuse or like snot. It is hard when a food looks distressingly like snot. I plan to serve the sorbet with fresh raspberries.

One of our guests is bringing salad and cardamom scented rice just finished cooking. We are all set for Shabbat.

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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