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

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 ...