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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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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