Getting ready for the last gasp of the holiday

Getting ready for the last Yom Tov bit of the holiday has provided me with some frustrations and some real pleasures.

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First two bits of frustrations.

Frustration bit number one

Eliana wanted white lightning bolts on the underside of her tallit. I started out making two bad lightning bolts couching silver thread to the tallit with many rows of zig zagging. I have spent a couple pf hours picking out the stitching and not cursing.

This is a much improved lightning bolt. It's easier to construct. After the holiday I will make more of them. I think I have picked out every stitch of my failed attempts.

Frustration Two

We have been invited to dinner tomorrow night and lunch on Shabbat. I had planned to make a batch of meringues and an orange version of the cranberry chocolate tarts I had made for seder. In thinking about this dessert combination I had thought that I could be clever and put the egg yolks into the nut crust. The yolks and the whites could all be used up evenly with no waste.

For some inane reason I had trouble remembering which bowl got the whites and which the yolks so I ended up with a really eggy crust. The tangerines I had purchased to roast to top the tart were not flavorful enough, not enough in terms of quantity and I had sort of burned them. So I ran some dried apricots and orange juice through the food processor and ended up with this

And now for two pleasure of the last couple of days. Both are food related and related to the wonders of the internet

Pleasure 1

When my sister came for Passover she brought a manila envelope in which my mother had collected recipes. Lots of the recipes were cut out of newspapers. Some were recipes for dishes my mother had eaten at my older sister's house. There were though a couple of real treasures. This was one.

This is the original of my mother's matza ball recipe. the recipe was written out by the ever elegant Marilyn Katz who looked in those days like a Jewish version of Mary Tyler Moore in her Laura Petrie years.The recipe came from her mother in law, Celia, or in the correct form in the early 1960's Mrs. Isadore Katz.

Yesterday I shared these images in Facebook and had a wonderful exchange with Marilyn's daughter who had no idea how essential this recipe is for my family. There is no Pesach without these kneidlach.

Pleasure 2

I know, it is the same tart that is a series of fixes for various fails. However, it is also the result with a conversation with a cousin. My cousin Nancy lives in Florida. She loved the idea of my cranberry tart, and decided to make a variation of it using not cranberries but a citrus fruit similar to kumquat. As we chatted back and forth about making this, I realized that her branch of the family and mine have not cooked together since 1922.Nancy pinpointed that to October of 1922 when her grandmother, my great Aunt died in childbirth. I look forward to many other opportunities to cook virtually and actually with my cousin Nancy.

I love how my blog and Facebook have helped to span generations and and great distance so that friends and relatives can cook together, and prepare for the holidays together even though they are far away from one another.

Chag sameach!

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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