Food friday- last Chametz edition

My husband had helped his cousin edit a paper so he and his wife took us out to dinner last night as a thank you. They asked us to choose a restaurant. I suppose that they may have expected us to choose one of the many elegant kosher restaurants in the city. 

Those of you who know us well, know that most of our restaurant recommendations start with the words, "Well, it's really ugly but the food is amazing...".  I had eaten twice at Taam Tov in the Diamond District. Taam Tov means "tastes good" in Hebrew and they totally live up to their name. You need to pay attention to their name because there is nothing in that name that implies beauty.

The restaurant is located up three steep flights of steps. There is a tiny elevator you can take. The food is Uzbeki/Bukharian.  I took my daughter there after her semester in China. She was missing Uyghur food. The Uyghurs are a Muslim minority that lives at the western edge of China. The food they eat is really similar to Bukharian food. When I took my daughter she was so happy that her homesickness for China could be satisfied so well.

My husband's cousin and his wife are world travelers. They are not very adventurous about food. I assured them is in many ways similar to Eastern European foods but the spicing is a little more like a cross between Indian and Middle Eastern food. 

Our food arrived. I ordered the vegetable soup with beef pelmeni. Pelmeni are kreplach.  I think that the pelmeni were stuffed not just with beef but also with lamb. I could eat that soup every day for a year and still love it. My husband ordered Georgian pilaf. What's not to like about rice and beef and vegetables beautifully spiced?

We talked and ate and ate.

Today is our last Chametz Shabbat.  We are changing dishes on Sunday because I can have help from the maximum number of people. The theme of tonights dinner was using up stuff.

My older son had given me two botttles of Heinz 57 sauce for my 57th birthday. The last bit of it went into tonight's chicken.

I baked a cake to use up flour.

It's a blood orange spice cake with the last of the cranberries I had frozen at Thanksgiving. It's another faked cake.

My son is visiting with friends tomorrow so he is making bagels to bring along as I type.

We are eating Mexican street corn. There will also be a salad.

I have been getting read for Passover by washing  curtains.

And setting up a new curtain for the kitchen.

My mother's oval linen tablecloth is the background and. It is topped by this sweet piece that comes with its own valance. I have a few pieces similar to this one. I have no idea of the original use. I love the central motif of the chick emerging from the egg. For such a childlike image, the needlework surrounding the little chick and egg is surprisingly sophisticated and is called Italian drawn thread embroidery. 

Aside from the beautiful cut work, and the pretty embroidery to shade the egg shards and the feathers, the sky behind our little chick has been created by making a network from thread. Usually, this sort of handwork is made into very sophisticated designs similar to Florentine brocade work. But someone chose to lavish time on the background of a sweet little chick.

I don't know who made this piece. It was given to me by my friend Yocheved's buddy, Milly. It had belonged to Milly's mother.  Milly is probably well over 95.

I am glad to have this chickie overseeing our Passover cooking.

One of the things about living in the age of the internet is the ability to share experiences with others. One of the Facebook groups I belong to is called Kosher Costco. As one could imagine in these pre-Passover weeks there are many postings. There are some things that I really don't understand though. Lots of people are wondering about the availability of Passover cakes.  Passover begins about two weeks from tonight. If I bought cake today, it will be several weeks old by the time it gets eaten. 

Anyway, lots of you will be heading down the road of Passover prep in the near future. Years ago I had read a commentary on the season that talked about how in the weeks before the High Holidays you do a kind of internal cleaning, and as part of it on Rosh ha Shanah you toss a bit of bread, that symbolizes sin into a body of water. During the preparations for Passover, we clear our homes from all of the bread. Clearly in Judaism bread is a symbol of a kind of sin, of stuff gone wrong.

I see the hard work of the season as something profound, something full of meaning. I don't want to sound all Pollyannaish but there is something just awesome about doing all of that hard physical work (and it is hard) and then sitting at that table and singing those first strains of the melodies.

I grew up in a family where the cooking and cleaning for Passover wasn't women's work. My parents and my sisters and I all worked together to make it happen. We also all sat at the table and chanted the Haggadah together. It wasn't that the women cooked and the men did the Haggadah, both parts, the physical labor, and the ritual were done by all of us. 

 I am having trouble writing what I feel and not sounding obnoxiously preachy. We take pride in running marathons, in our long swims, in Zumba classes that leave us sweaty in pilates classes so hard that we are left shaking.  Passover too is a great physical /spiritual challenge that we do each year. Part of the joy is that hard work to get us there.

Shabbat Shalom!