Skip to main content

Food Friday–Post Thanksgiving edition

There are many glorious things about being a guest instead of a host of Thanksgiving. We ate a pretty spectacular meal yesterday at my dear friend’s home. We came home to a clean house.

What we don’t have is left overs. My youngest is home from college and is starved for meat. I decided to satisfy this need ( Although I assume that yesterday’s consumption of vast amounts of brisket and turkey put something of a dent in his meat debt.)

Tonight’s dinner features a veritable Pu-Pu platter of beef. We have it in sliced London broil form with a smoky ,vinegary home made barbecue sauce.

SAM_5629

We also have ribs.

SAM_5627

There are also some kofta which are not pictured.  I assume that after dinner there might be a couple of scraps of meat left, but then again, perhaps not.

The Thanksgiving flavors of pumpkin and maple syrup and cranberry for me are as much part of the fall season as leaves turning color. My daughter is particularly fond of pumpkin.

The Pilgrims used to serve the pies as part of the main course. I made this

SAM_5628

kind of a hybrid pumpkin pie/kugel/pudding to serve as our starch for tonight’s dinner. It’s not quite as sweet as a dessert pie and I strewed bulgher wheat on the bottom of the pan to serve as a crude crust. It’s spiced like a typical New England pumpkin pie. A homely dish for the season.

I also made another batch of cranberry chocolate tarts.

SAM_5632

A cookie crust is topped with chocolate and then cranberries and sugar. This is one of my favorite flavor combinations and the color is amazing.

A cabbage salad still needs to be made. No, there are no salad fairies who will make the salad while I nap, but a girl can dream.

 

I am looking forward to our full table tonight and am still thinking about the very full table I sat at yesterday that was filled with love and beautiful dishes and beautiful food.

 

Shabbat Shalom!

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 ...