The hard part is over

The matza balls got made.
So did the iconic no-gebrochts chocolate cake. There is a tradition to not use matza in cooking- in ways that it will become wet. People who follow that tradition call matza that is used in cooking or baking or broken up into soup Ge-brochts- or broken. My family doesn't follow that tradition but we do make a very excellent no gebrochts chocolate cake. Here you see it hanging out upside down to maintain it's height.

It released beautifully from the pan. My mother would have been pleased. Other years the top had broken so I had to camouflage the ugly with chocolate custard and fresh strawberries. This year I could serve the cake unadorned.

This is the recipe for the cake.

Mrs. Mael's No Gebruchts Chocolate Cake

preheat oven to 325

9 eggs separated

beat yolks with one cup sugar until thick and the color of butter

stir in 8 oz melted bittersweet chocolate

stir in 2 cups chopped walnuts

beat egg whites until stiff ( if you add a pinch of salt they will beat up better)

gently fold egg whites into chocolate /nut egg yolk mixture

pour into a tube pan and bake for an hour

invert pan until cooled and remove cake to plate

We made lots of meringues. A bit of yolk got into the egg whites while we were separating the eggs. If I were a different sort of cook I would have ditched the whole batch, instead we improvised and baked them in forms. We added candied orange peels and bittersweet chocolate to some,

and just the chocolate to the ones we made in the lined muffin tins. No one complained.

With so many egg yolks left over, I decided to make a batch of noodles. They sat in the fridge until today, tightly wrapped in plastic wrap.

This is what I had for lunch, noodles with carrots, fennel and cheese.

These are pretty credible noodles.

I poured the egg yolks into the food processor- there may have been 10, but you really don't need to make that big a batch. I then added equal amounts of potato starch and tapioca flour and added more of the two dry ingredients until the mixture came together into a ball. The noodle dough ball sat in the fridge for a few days, but an hour should be fine.

When I want to roll out noodles I dust a linen tea towel (any smooth woven cloth will do) with potato starch and also dust my rolling pin with the starch before rolling out. Then roll a small golfball sized bit of the dough as thin as you can. It's a breakier dough than a regular noodle dough. You probably can't do a filled noodle like kreplach with this dough.

Once the dough is rolled out cut it into thin slices, then you can boil it like a regular noodle.

Another bit went into our soup tonight.

I made this jellyroll

from this cookbook

It came out soggy but really delicious. I may have underbaked it. The directions for how to unmold the cake and roll it up are brief but really good. I filled the cake with pomegranate jelly

Our maror top continues to grow. this afternoon it was just shy of 20 inches tall.

It also has three blossoms.

Our apartment is usually so terrible for plants. It's exciting to see something, anything, grow here.

Over the past several weeks my dear friend Racheley has been posting wonderful photos of flowers growing wild in her neighborhood in Israel. I thought of her as I took photos outside our local plant shop.

If you ignore the truck in the background you can pretend that you

are in a lush forest.

Moadim L'Simcha!

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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