Food Friday- Virtually cooking with friends

Often one hears people saying that they wished they lived in a different era long ago. Frankly, I am awfully happy that I don't live in the good old days but am alive right now. I probably wouldn't have lived past childhood in the good old days. One of those icky infections that plagued my childhood would have done me in.

Aside from better healthcare and good sanitation and indoor plumbing one of the reasons I love being alive in 2016 is the opportunity to virtually connect with friends from long ago and far away.

Yesterday, one of my childhood friends was consulting with the Facebook mind-hive about how to flavor "Kismet" vaguely Middle Eastern cup cakes for a bake sale related to her daughter's performance in the play. People, including me, weighed in with their opinions about how to flavor cupcakes that were middle eastern enough to be thematic but not too weird for the kids who would be purchasing them.

That conversation was still wandering around in my head as I was cooking tonight's dinner. I made chicken. I am hoping to switch my house over to Passover mode at some point during the week so that has been the over riding theme in tonight's meal. There were two wine bottles in the fridge with bits of wine left in them. The chicken was cooked in the wine with mushrooms, juniper berries, celery and mushrooms.

There was tons of juice left in the pan.

I boiled it down (a lot) and added some cider vinegar and some grape molasses until it looked like

this. I poured that syrupy boiled down chicken juice over the chicken and it will add extra flavor to the chicken as it re-heats for our Shabbat dinner.

Our time in California has gotten me obsessed with citrus fruit. My brother in law has the best fruit growing around his house.

I felt like I wanted orange flavored rice to go with our meal. I roasted tangerine sections in the oven and then added them to Basmati rice. The roasted tangerine sections are hauntingly good with complex caramelized flavor. I confess I ate many of them before I added them to the rice.

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Our vegetable tonight is roasted Brussels Sprouts.

So when time came to make dessert, I was thinking both about my conversation yesterday with my friend about Middle Eastern sweets flavors and also about how to clean out my pantry in anticipation of Passover. I have created a non dairy ice cream for tonight that I am thinking is sort of Middle Eastern Garbage Pail. Into a base of coconut milk I added rose water, tangerine peel, orange bitters, cardamon, figs, dried apricots, orange juice, what was left of a bag of dried ginger, cinnamon, shredded coconut, black pepper and finally a bit of coffee left over from breakfast. To sweeten the mixture I used maple syrup, because I want to use it up before Passover. Surprisingly, it's actually delicious. I taste tested the mixture with my super-taster son who suggested we top the ice cream with pomegranate molasses when we serve it. I tried to suggest giving the mixture a name with a pleasant evocation. My son suggested we keep the name Middle Eastern Garbage Pail so there it is, a dessert born of my need to clean out my pantry and inspired by my childhood friend who comes from a long line of fiercely excellent cooks.

Cooking was not ALL I have been doing on this weirdly schizophrenic spring day where the trees are in bloom and it is so cold that most people are wearing down coats.

My neighbor asked me to repair a Torah mantle.One of the side seams had been sewn with nylon thread and had gotten nearly completely undone, both the velvet and the satin lining were undone. They had been sewn with nylon thread and once a couple of stitches came loose the whole thing just let go. It didn't make sense to sew it up by machine. Getting the wooden top under the sewing machine arm is just a bear and a half. So I stitched both the lining and the velvet by hand. I had to sew the velvet from the outside which emphasized the sewn up seam more than I would have liked. To keep the piece from looking lopsided i embroidered in gold over BOTH seams so it looks intentional rather than a cheesy fix..

It works well enough.

It is good to be home. The weather in California is much better than it is here in New Nork. The drinking water here though is far superior. My kids though are here, so water and children tie me to this place.

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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