Food Friday and other stuff

I will begin with the other stuff.
Other stuff #1
Yesterday we rented a car and drove to pick up kid # 3 from college.

His school is about an hour and a half away. We started out journey in great spirits.
But,

most of our trip was like this.

Door to door it was eight hours including packing up the car and a stop for dinner. Having child # 3 home is a pleasure. He is even doing his own laundry.
Other Stuff #2
I had purchased a soft as a cloud cashmere v-necked sweater at a thrift. The color on it’s own is just plain evil on me and on my daughter.
I turned it into a cardigan.
This is how I did it in case you forgot.
1.Fold the sweater in 1/2

Be sure to align the side seams. If you peek inside the sweater you can line those seams up perfectly.

If you like to do things in a complicated way you can do lots of measuring from the side seams and use a billion pins. If you have a flat surface and live in a place with gravity just put the sweater down and align the side seams and that will help you find the center front.
2. Since I live in a place with gravity, I found the center front of my sweater folded the sweater along the center line and cut.

3. Now you have a sweater with raw edges that need to be covered. I have often crocheted over the raw edge. This time I decided to use a lace overlay.
This is the lace that I used.

It’s left over from a dress I made before Passover. The rich color will make the oatmeal color of the sweater look less sickly on me.

I added a maroon velvet ribbon to tie the sweater.

Yes, there are other ways you could do this. you are probably smart enough to do this on your own. It’s ok to mess up along the way.

And now for the food.
Child # 3 has been missing meat. I promised I would make some for tonight. I made two London broils. I actually know very little about cuts of meat. I tend to think of meat in big categories...I think of most meat as “Hunk O Beef”. The two London broils are twosmall hunks o beef.
Beef needs a spice rub.

This is what I used. The I mixed it with a fork.

The red is paprika and sumac.
I baked those hunks o beef until they were done.

It was time to make a sauce for the beef. I poured most of this bottle into the cooking pan.

Why did I choose this wine? Because this is the least expensive bottle on the shelf. ( I have been know to cook with really fancy booze.--a shot of single malt can do wonderful things to a stew, but it makes my husband unhappy. Today I actually checked prices on the internet before I cracked open the bottle.)
I let the wine sit on the cooked on good stuff in the pan to loosen all of the cooked on bits, the same way you put water in a pan to soak off the cooked on bits before you wash the pan.

I added mustard, it adds flavor and is a great thickener.

I turned the heat u under the pan and let it simmer away.
I thought that the mixture needed a few more flavor components so I added

and a lump of brown sugar. I cooked the mixture down until it had reduced by about half.
By this time the meat had cooled enough to slice.

I sliced up both hunks of beef and put them back into the gravy filled cooking pan.

My older son had baked the challah last week and made some rice. I will make a salad. There have been too many restaurant meals this week so we are skipping dessert. None of us is in the mood.

Shabbat Shalom! and happy eating.

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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