Skip to main content

Some pre-Yom Kippur random thoughts

Getting ready for a day where we abstain from food requires a whole lot of food prep.

Yesterday I got ready to make Cholesterol Death Kugel. (If you need to make it right now you can find the recipe if you click on the word Kugel on the tags on the right)

The kugel is made with dairy. If you can’t eat dairy take your lactaid pills before you eat it. There are no substitutions in this case. SAM_5277
I decided to make the noodles from scratch. here is my dough resting under glass.
SAM_5276
Will any of our guests actually notice that they are eating noodles that worked my upper body to it’s limit? Probably not. They may notice that the kugel tastes like love, and that may in fact be enough.
SAM_5278
I have used the kugel pan to weigh down the gravlax which is brining away on the bottom of the fridge. Before Neila I will slice the fish into paper thin slices. I assume that I will be slicing the fish with a very tiny brain so I have already sliced up most of the other vegetables. I don’t want to slice up my fingers into paper thin slices.

I have been listening to appropriate music as I have been working away. I love this video. The sauces for the fish are made ( cucumber-dill and a honey mustard).
My friends who want to especially here a woman’s  voice singing the High Holiday liturgy may appreciate this.
The food for tonight ( chicken and tzimms  and a challah) has been pulled out of the freezer. I just started making dessert, some sort of a plum and lemon cake sort of a thing. I can tell you exactly what I have made once it is done.

The cake in formation turned into what my son now calls "wet cake", this time in a Meyer lemon and plum version and topped with syrup made from the macerating plums and the lemons that I boiled in simple syrup,My son is a fan of wet cake.

So my day before fasting is spent worrying about and preparing massive amounts of food.

There is a new building in my neighborhood which is in many ways really ugly. It does though at certain hours of the day do something quite spectacular to my friends Josh and Claudia’s building.
SAM_5281
Take that as your pre-Yom Kippur metaphor for  the good possible in even the worst of us.
גמר טוב

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

מְחַיֵּה הַמֵּתִים

  וְנֶאֱמָן אַתָּה לְהַחֲיוֹת מֵתִים: בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה יְהֹוָה מְחַיֵּה הַמֵּתִים   You are faithful to restore the dead to life. Blessed are You, Adonoy, Resurrector of the dead. That particular line is recited at every single prayer service every day three times a day, unless you use a Reform or Reconstructionist prayer book . In those liturgies instead of praising God for resurrecting the dead God is praised for  giving life to all.  I am enough of a modern woman, a modern thinker, to not actually believe in the actual resurrection of the dead. I don't actually expect all of the residents of the Workmen's Circle section of  Mount Hebron cemetery in Queens to get up and get back to work at their sewing machines. I don't expect the young children buried here or  the babies buried here to one day get up and frolic. Yet, every single time I get up to lead services I say those words about the reanimating of the dead with every fiber of my being. Yesterday, I e...

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...

Food friday - your grandmother's food processor

My grandmother bought my mother this wooden bowl and a chopping knife, known in Yiddish as a hock-messer, soon after my parents got married. Yes, she also got them a dairy set as well. these wooden bowls and chopping knives were a big part of food prep when I was growing up. meatloaf and meat balls were mixed in this bowl. Chopped liver was made in this bowl as well. Sundays we often made chicken salad for lunch made out of chicken left over from Shabbat chopped with vegetables and mayo. That too, was made in this bowl. When I was in college my parents got their first food processor and the chopping bowls were not used as much. Several years ago, my father asked if i would like the bowls and the hock-messers. I was happy to have them. I like the sheer physicality of chopping up a big bowl of stuff into teeny pieces. While the wooden bowls have stood up well to the years of use, the hock-messers had not. The bladed which were bolted into their handles, wobbled. The blades wouldn't ...