חסל סדור פסח

Getting the Sedarim put together this year was, to put it mildly, something of a challenge. I was grateful to have use of the basement fridge. But having to run down seven flights to get that one thing that had been forgotten was less than ideal.

As promised the fridge repair guy did arrive, not in the morning as requested, but at 4pm. He announced as soon as he walked in that it would be a job that would take several hours. During his time working there were times we had no access to the kitchen.

Our seder was called for 7:00. Candle lighting was at 7. I lit candles as the repairman was just finishing up. (He had replaced all of the internal working bits of the fridge.) Fortunately, our guest came a little late so I had time to get dressed and slap on some lipstick.
Our maror this year was pretty spectacular. here is a glamor shot of the top.

The root was large enough to use as a weapon.

I spent the first half of seder kind of stunned. Amazingly everything looked lovely and if you didn't know about all of the drama you might think it was an ordinary year.

I had a few baking disasters including these pignoli cookies.

I had made with homemade marzipan, and this year I did blanch and peel all of the almonds. I cut up the melted cookies, put them out on our tray of cookies and called them pignoli shards.

A sponge cake that I baked in a thin layer and had planned to serve stacked with layers of chocolate custard and fresh strawberries failed in several ways, too many to mention here. But I remembered a recipe from a New Orleans cookbook my husband bought me about thirty years ago. One of the desserts in that book was called Russian cake and it was made out of mixed bits of old cake and custard, jammed into a plastic wrapped bowl, doused with sugar syrup and then weighted with a plate and set in the fridge for a while and unmolded.

Amazingly, the Russian cake worked. Decorated with fresh strawberries it even looked like a cake one might want to serve beloved guests as opposed to a failed sponge cake and some chocolate custard and orange scented sugar syrup and a few strawberries.

Dipping the apricot almond balls in melted chocolate was both glamorous and delicious.

We read Who Knows One passing a copy of the poem around the table first night.

Nearly all of the napkins are now ironed.

One of the tablecloths is ironed and the other is at the cleaners.

This is our supper tonight.

Breaded eggplant serves as the crust and fresh tomatoes and peppers are under a blanket of cheese.

Having a working fridge is a nice thing.

Comments

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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