Skip to main content

Food Friday- Zei gezunt edition

A cousin we all love a whole lot has just moved to New York for grad school we are delighted that she will be nearby and even happier that she is joining us this Shabbat.

Our larders were pretty bare. it was time to make a trip to Costco. I made the trek yesterday. One of my favorite thing about living here in New York is how instead of just living with " my own kind" I am cheek by jowl with all sorts of people. 

Part of that joy of cheek by jowl-hood is in the foods we eat. A Jamaican born babysitter once brought home a fruit from home that she bought from one of the pushcart fruit guys on the street. She called it Genep and it is a variety of citrus, it's about the size of a cherry with a big seed and not much fruit. We buy it every year when it is in season. We turn dried hibiscus blossoms into tea in the summer. My kids used to have me buy yogurt in sabor Latino. The shea butter sold in tubs at the cola dollar store keeps our skin soft. Spicy pastes from Korea and China and Latin America keep our food tasting lively.

Each time you go to Costco, there are employees at the door checking the items on your receipt against the items in your cart. As the young man with dreds was going throughmy cart, I casually said  I have a whole lot of Kosher meat in there."  He marked my recipt, turned to me and said "Zei Gezunt!". Every time we used to say goodbye to my grandmother we used to exchange our Zei Gezunt's, Go in good health.  i was just so touched.


So our gezunte Shabbat dinner includes, chicken with lime and  cayenne, made by my son.
This was a challah baking week. There are no photos this week .

I made roasted Brussels sprouts. Most of us like them with a bit of char on them.
My husband does not so we set aside some char-free ones for him.




I was so happy that our cousin was coming for Shabbat so I baked a cake.

It's a citrus cake, orange and lime with a layer of brown sugar and lime filling inside and then drizzled with a lime and brown sugar syrup. The cake itself is a 3 egg cake, faked and baked in an 9x13 pan, cut and sandwiched with the vaguely jam-like  filling. It's really tart and should be a nice finish to tonight's dinner.


Shabbat Shalom!

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

I love hearing from my readers. I moderate comments to weed out bots.It may take a little while for your comment to appear.

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...
1 comment
Read more

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...
8 comments
Read more

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 ...
2 comments
Read more