Heading to Shavuot

Although the Torah commands us to count the Omer, the fifty days between Passover and Shavuot I have never ever managed to actually count all of the days. My husband jokes that we always get the first day right ( because it takes place during the second seder). This year I did better than I do most years because one of my Facebook friends has posted the day of the Omer (most days).

Although I am lax about counting the Omer, I am pretty stringent about serving dairy on Shavuot. My elementary school teachers told me that the reason we eat dairy is that in anticipation of receiving the Torah the Jews knew there would be rules about which meat is Ok to eat and which is not acceptable. In order not to break any of the rules they ate dairy while awaiting the Torah.

Even as a kid I knew there was something just a bit hinky about the logic in that explanation. a couple of years ago my friend Debbie, always a great source of wisdom explained to me that in Eastern Europe dairy animals calved around Passover and would be weaned before Shavuot. Milk was plentiful and cheap. it made a whole lot of sense to eat dairy for this holiday.

Even with the hinky reasoning I adore eating the traditional dairy Shavuot foods.

I have been pulling out this card with Adele's recipe since the early 1980's. I made the bletlach, the pancakes yesterday.

Today I planned to fill and fry the blintzes. This is more or less what went into the filling. I left out the cottage cheese, added an egg some sugar, salt, vanilla and some chopped candied orange peels.

I had unfortunately undercooked several of the bletlach so many of them tore and were unusable.

I thought about my mother. I thought that if my mother were in an identical situation she would start cursing. Although I generally do far more cursing than my mother did, I didn't curse as bletle after bletle tore. I had just a few blintzes made and a big bowl full of blintz filling.

This was just one layer of blintzes, I think I made about 30 blintzes altogether, this was quite short of my goal.

I thought about a recipe from the Charleston, South Carolina synagogue cookbook for a blintz souffle that was made out of blintz filling between two layers of batter. I thought about the lump of noodle dough I had in the fridge waiting to be turned into Cholesteral Death Kugel.

I rolled out two thin layers of noodle dough. I lined a baking pan with one of the big noodles. I topped the noodle with the rest of the blintz filling and topped the cheese with some frozen berries. I then topped the whole thing with the second noodle and baked this vaguely Eastern European hybrid of a kugel and a lasagna.

While this was sort of an invention of desperation, I am sure that someone's Bubbie made such a dish and I am sure that this was the traditional Shavuot dish back in some shtetle. I find that if make up a plausible name for a made up dish my guests eat it more eagerly. I am open to your suggestions.

Earlier today I went out to buy food. it was raining but the plants put out on the sidewalk by the local florist and the plants planted in front of some of the buildings in the neighborhood looked beautiful in the rain.

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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