Just a little bit of extra drama

Preparing for Passover is always a physical challenge. Changing the house over, cleaning the house, getting food for 20 dinners to fit into a not very large fridge...

This year came with some additional challenges. My older son who is usually my partner in my Passover prep labors has a full-time job and has to be up by 5:30 am and has to go to sleep early. I miss both the actual help and the companionable company while working like crazy.

Getting all of the prep done on my own is doable although less enjoyable without the company of my usual partner in this endeavor. The real challenge this year has been our fridge which has been behaving like a cranky adolescent working only in spurts and only when it feels like it and never up to full capacity. To be honest none of my three kids were ever behaviorally as awful as my fridge.

Last week after the repairman had left I thought the fridge was back to its usual well-behaved self. I went to Moishe's in Brooklyn (expansive, not expensive) with my neighbor and filled my pristine freezer with meat.

Saturday night we switched over the house to Passover mode. I put the chicken soup up to simmer before I went to sleep.

I woke up Sunday morning opened up my beautiful clean freezer and found the bottom of the freezer covered in beef blood. It really did look like a murder scene.

I cooked all of the meat and asked my across the hall neighbor to store my cooked meat in her freezer.

Thanks to friends, I have Passover food both raw and cooked stashed away all over my building. No, this is not fun.

I kept my soup simmering away from Saturday night until yesterday because I just couldn't figure out where to stash it.

After finding a spot to store the strained soup (in the freezer in the basement)0 i worked on straining and re-straining the soup. We have just under five gallons of soup lined up in the basement freezer that my husband had scrubbed down and lined in anticipation of the soup.

In the virtually cooking together department, my friend Miriam, whose mother and my mother go way back, discussed making candied orange peel

Usually by this time of year oranges are nasty. But I have been buying beautiful oranges with lovely thick lush peels. I have been candying the citrus peels left over from cooking.

They are so delicious ( boil peels with equal amounts of sugar and water, boil until the peels are translucent, lay out to dry and then coat with sugar)

I realized last night that the jellied fruit slices are attempting to capture what candied citrus peels are.

My husband suggested that we do a head to head taste test. He and my son in law are giant fans of both jelly fruit slices and canned jellied cranberry sauce. Both are men with exceptionally good taste, with the same glaring exceptions.

The business with my fridge has left me both frantic and depressed. I did get a call this morning that cheered me up. The repairman will be returning on Friday with a new compressor for our fridge. Hopefully, we can serve Seder dinner without running all over our building to retrieve all of the elements of our meal. i have already put together a spreadsheet for where all of the elements of the meal are hiding.

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

Search This Blog