Today's cooking tally

This cake is baking as I type this. This is my mother's handwriting. She probably scribbled it down as she got the recipe while on the telephone with Mildred Jacobs. Mildred was an outstanding cook and baker. this recipe came from her sister in law who did not use gebrochts, that is, matza broken into liquid during Passover. this cake is made out of few and simple ingredients and is stellar.

Earlier today i baked a slab of salmon that will serve as our lunches during the first two days of the holiday. I roasted lots of vegetables. you see the Brussels sprouts and mushrooms that we will eat the first night of the holiday.

I also roasted tomatoes, and zucchini separately to be added to salad the second night of the holiday.

Another in the simple yet delicious category is this.

I suppose you could call them vegan truffles. If you did my kids would not eat them on principle. One of my kids asked me what they were as I was frantically attempting to arrange a platter of small cakes before Seder. I replied " date doodies". that is what they are called in this household.

They are made out of dates, walnuts ,cocoa and orange peel processed together in the food processor.

You roll them into little balls and then roll the balls in a mixture of shredded coconut and Passover confectioner's sugar ( potato starch and sugar) during the year you can use regular confectioner's sugar. I added a bit of sweet wine. If I had cognac or rum i would have added that instead.

Despite the name they are quite popular around here.

There was other food made as well, a sweet potato kugel and a white potato one. My son did the traditional white potato kugel. he had never made one before. I left him a list of ingredients and a basic list of the tasks involved. I told him to channel my father and my son did fine.

Another batch of these cookies got baked because I had to threaten my son with death if he took one more, and now I don't have to .

There was more cooking done but I am too tired to remember exactly what it was.

More is left to do tomorrow.

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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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