Food Friday and odds and ends

This was not such a heavy cooking week. The challah was baked last week and a guest is bringing the vegetable matter.

I decided to make the meatballs extra fancy by making them with caramelized onions.

Who would have thought that something so simple could have such a hauntingly complex flavor. Like lots of the foods that I make, the secret ingredient is time.

Here are the meatballs in their completed state.

I will probably make some sort of a sauce to put over the meatballs when they heat up in the oven. It will probably be some sort of a sweet, savory vinegary smoky variety, that is some form of home made barbeque sauce.

I also made potatoes with lemon and baby spinach.

I am pretending that this is a Greek recipe. For all I know it might be, but I made it based on what was in the fridge.

I am currently cooking up the mix for what will be tonight’s ice cream, apples, ginger and mixed berries sweetened with maple.

As I have mentioned previously, my grief for my mother is expressing itself in indirect ways. Yesterday I felt an intense need to make myself the sort of dress my mother might have worn in the heat of the summer.

A cotton lawn shift in a scroll print. The good noticers among you will notice that I didn’t properly center the print. This is exactly the sort of dress my mother wore in the summers from the mid 1960’s until a couple of summers before she died.

The early versions were sleeveless or were shirt sleeved dresses with tissues hidden away in the cuffs. I don’t think that this style of dress is even particularly flattering on me, but it feels nice to wear a dress like one my mother might have worn.

I am also including a Friday bonus of a really nice shot of a fire escape seen on my way home from Morning Minyan. I like that sharp morning light casting crisp shadows.

Shabbat Shalom!!!

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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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