Skip to main content

Food Friday- mending ancient fences edition

Tonight, one of our guests comes one of the branches of the family where there was a long rift. I am delighted that she is joining us. She is a vegetarian so tonight's meal is dairy in her honor.

I decided to make Lokshen mit Kaese, noodles, and cheese. In this case, the noodles were hand rolled black pepper noodles. I didn't do the upper body portion of my morning workout today because I knew that rolling the noodles would more than make up for it.

An old-fashioned way to cut noodles is to roll each sheet of noodles into a roll and then cut the roll with a knife. It speeds up the cutting but then all of the noodles need to be unrolled. Doing all of the tasks involved in noodle making can be tedious. Luckily my younger son was around and he took over the task of noodle unrolling.  His are the ones that are neatly stacked.
After all of the noodles are cut and unrolled they are ready to be boiled. They cook up really quickly in a matter of minutes. You drain the noodles and add some butter into the cooking pot and set the pot on a low heat.

You add the drained noodles back into the pot and then add in lots of a soft curd cheese. This time I used ricotta cheese. Farmer cheese or pot cheese are more traditional but I couldn't find any. Even cottage cheese will do. Your eaters won't complain with cottage cheese, but you will know.

Then you add beaten eggs to the pot. Today I added four. This dish is traditionally flavored with salt and lots of black pepper. I added lots of black pepper and some cayenne pepper. This dish looks bland but it packs a sneaky punch.


I am also serving a giant bowl of dressed arugula that people can embellish with their choice or roasted vegetables.


 There is also a vaguely Middle Eastern chickpea salad that is spiced as one would a taboule.
I also faked a cake.
The batter is flavored with grated clementine peels and juice and the excellent vanilla my daughter brought back from Mexico. I topped the cake with peach slices that macerated in sugar while I assembled the rest of the cake. I plan to cut the cake into squares and serve each slice with some blackberries.


Every time I fake a cake I am grateful for the hours I put in serving as my mother's baking sidekick. My mother would play with cake flavorings, cranking them up or tinkering with them to please her palate but she always followed recipes pretty carefully. What I learned watching my mother is what various cake batter types need to look like and the basic steps you need to take and in which order.

I was planning to make a bundt cake but chatting with my sister as she was preparing her own Shabbat dinner convinced me to make this cake, which is a cousin to the summer fruit cakes my mother used to make in an 8-inch square pan.

I end this with a couple of lovely images for you for Shabbat. the first my son and I saw today in the Costco parking lot.


The concrete structure is being transformed by an artist. m At first I thought that the workmen in the crane were simply using a stencil.


The entire design is being done by hand with a spray gun. It is really impressive.

The other was the view from my window late yesterday afternoon.
Shabbat Shalom!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Connecting with the past

A few months ago I had a craving for my fatherā€™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 fatherā€™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 canā€™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 נוֹ×ØÖøא עֲל֓ילÖøה  God of awesome deeds ( from a yom kippur Liturgical poem) 2)  אוֹ×Ø ×—ÖøדÖøשׁ עַל־צ֓יּוֹן ×ŖÖ¼Öøא֓י×Ø   May You shine a new light on Zion ( from the liturgy) 3)  יÖøאֵ×Ø ×™Ö°×”Ö¹...

מְחַיֵּה הַמֵּ×Ŗ֓ים

  וְנֶאֱמÖøן אַ×ŖÖ¼Öøה לְהַחֲיוֹ×Ŗ מֵ×Ŗ֓ים: בּÖø×Øוּךְ אַ×ŖÖ¼Öøה יְהֹוÖøה מְחַיֵּה הַמֵּ×Ŗ֓ים   You are faithful to restore the dead to life. Blessed are You, Adonoy, Resurrector of the dead. That particular line is recited at every single prayer service every day three times a day, unless you use a Reform or Reconstructionist prayer book . In those liturgies instead of praising God for resurrecting the dead God is praised for  giving life to all.  I am enough of a modern woman, a modern thinker, to not actually believe in the actual resurrection of the dead. I don't actually expect all of the residents of the Workmen's Circle section of  Mount Hebron cemetery in Queens to get up and get back to work at their sewing machines. I don't expect the young children buried here or  the babies buried here to one day get up and frolic. Yet, every single time I get up to lead services I say those words about the reanimating of the dead with every fiber of my being. Yesterday, I e...