An experimental Shabbat

Tonight’s challah started out looking like this. It began with the wet, loose bread dough I had put into the fridge a few days ago. I had already made at least one big loaf out of a large chunk of this sloppy looking mixture on Wednesday.

I guess this is more or less sour dough. It smells fermented. This photograph actually shows the most photogenic part of the mass/mess that had been hanging out in a stainless steel bowl on the bottom shelf of my fridge.

I made essentially the same challah dough I usually make. The texture felt different than my usual commercially yeast risen dough. It felt a bit more fragile and less robust. I thought I had about a 50% chance of the dough actually rising and was willing to take the risk.

The dough did rise, but it took longer than usual.

I made a test roll for me to taste.

It’s a more delicate bread than the usual. I would do this again.

My friend Alan Divak has been doing lots of sour dough challah baking in the past several months. He is a much more scientific and careful cook than I am. Alan’s sour dough challah is carefully coddled and is really delicious. I think that if I continue this endeavor, sour dough risen challah mine will be the equivalent of my childhood neighbors who were part of a giant family of either nine or eleven kids. Those kids were all just slightly neglected and dirty but were feisty and strong and were all terrific athletes.

There will be three guys under the age of thirty at our table tonight so we are serving beef in two varieties. coffee rubbed beef made with these spices.

Looking at these two slabs of beef side by side in my pink enameled pan they reminded me of two ladies awaiting their massages.

I massaged the spices into the meat.

And then post cooking and cooling I was able to slice up the meat.And here is the beef awaiting re-heating for Shabbat.

I also made Ethiopian spiced meat balls. They look like meat balls, no need for photos.They do have a great spicy buzz to them.

I had experimented with making pumpkin noodles earlier this week and ended up with a massive lump of noodle dough.I made cold sesame pumpkin noodles with kale for tonight.The noodles were extra floppy and needed to rest on the kitchen table for a few hours before being sliced up.

I also made a big rectangular cranberry chocolate pie.

I had thought that would use coconut oil for the oil in the crust. Let’s put it this way, the results were not at all what I expected, so I punted and turned the pie crust into something more of a cookie dough crust. My frantic solutions to the disaster will not be recorded here. I am going to pretend to my guests that this Plan B was my goal all along.

This pie will of course be dusted with powdered sugar before being cut into squares for serving. One of our guests is someone who was taught the refinements of an elegant table even more carefully than I was.

Well this is starting to look like the perfect fall meal with meat, cranberries and pumpkin all making an appearance.

Shabbat Shalom!

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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