Food Friday - cat nap edition

This morning my walk to shul was accompanied by a sky that looked like it came out of a Tintoretto painting.

On the way home the sky was even more dramatic, and looked like it was generated by a computer.

Today is a Friday of a weird week. My son's friend has been staying with us. His friend was jetlagged. If you had come to my apartment at any point during the last week, at any moment of the day or night, you would have found at least one person asleep and at least one person awake.As I type this two people are sleeping.

Regardless of funky sleep patterns, Shabbat still begins today, so the cooking commenced right after breakfast.

This is what went into our chickens this week. One orange, three Meyer lemons and a pomegranate.

Not pictured are the fennel seeds and the black pepper.

This seems like exactly the right thing to eat in the middle of January. I baked some rice, rye and quinoa in the oven next to the chickens.

The soup I began last night is cooked enough so I can mash the vegetables in my new kitchen toy, a mesh strainer from Pearl River.

I have some matza ball batter that is hanging out in the oven. I plan to plop it into the soup as soon as i finish writing this blog post. The nice thing about making matza balls not on Passover is that I can get funky with the flavors and not ruin anyone's dinner. Passover, one needs to go traditional with the flavors. A seder is all about recreating the past perfectly. Shabbat takes place often enough that the cook is not required to recreate the mythic past.Tonight the matza balls are heavy on the ginger and black pepper but also have lots of smoked hot paprika in them.

While the challot were baking,

I made and baked a winter fruit tart.With apples, Meyer lemons and cranberries and rose water..

I wanted a sandy textured crust so I made it with farina. I have never tried to do that before. Worst comes to worst the crust will crumble and not be the sandy cookie like texture I was hoping for. I have discovered that baking a pie in a rectangular pan means that people who don't like to eat too much dessert ( like the man I married)can feel a bit more in charge of the size of the portions they eat and find that dessert is a less anxiety provoking experience.

This week aside from living in a household of people who nap like cats, I have also been working away on the vintage lace tallit. I realized that my plan A of having the gold silk that backs the lace also serve as the stripe on the reverse of the tallit is a stupid idea. It would have looked fabulous, but the tallit would have slipped and been annoying to wear.

I hate having the underside of a tallit appear blank. To me it always looks cheap to have one decorated side of a tallit and the underside be completely blank. I decided to embroider the backing so when my client wears the tallit the stripes on the to sides of the tallit with interact with one another, like they do on a woven tallit.

So I built up rows of machine embroidery.

Some of the lace from the antique linen is insertion lace, that is both edges are the same. It is meant to be inserted between two pieces of fabric. Some of the lace has a scalloped border . I am cording the outer edge with cold cord, and will trim it and add more cording to the edge to both give it more strength and structire and to give it a stronger visual punch.

This piece is taking a bit longer than I had hoped, but I want to do right by the antique lace. There are not cookie cutter answers. Sometimes the materials tell you what you need to do.

Shabbat Shalom!

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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 ...

sarah in nyc

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