Food Friday and a hodge podge of other stuff

While there are many mitzvot that I do well I am terrible at counting the Omer. Each year on the second night of Seder my husband looks forward to counting the omer because it is the one time we know we always count it.

Although this year I have continued our family tradition of forgetting to count each day, our maror plant is still thriving.

I am using the maror to mark our time from Pesach to Shavuot.

When I made my father's chicken soup for Pesach one of my readers commented about how much she detests turnips, one of the ingredients in our soup. I agreed with her that turnips on their own can be really dreary. We subscribe to Misfits Market. When you subscribe to Misfits you get a box of random organic fruits and vegetables. I get a box every other week. This week's box included two turnips.

I cooked tonight's chicken on a bed of shredded turnips and parsnips and onion. I added thinned down amba ( pickled mango paste) to the pan. The shredded vegetables were so good, my son and I kept stealing them from the pan until we forced ourselves to stop snitching. The amba and the chicken juice transform the worst qualities of the turnip into something really delicious.

It was my birthday earlier in the week and my youngest gave me this excellent gift.

It got a good workout today chopping all of our now roasted vegetables.

I played around with the braiding patterns on our challot, for no particular reason.

I did a little work on the tallit. I needed an aide so I could sew a ribbon in a straight line. If I were a different sort of a person, I would measure and pin the ribbon in place. I hate using pins. I usually forget about a few...but those pins come to find the soles of my feet when I am least expecting it. So if I can accomplish a task without the use of pins it makes me happier.

Instead, I did this.

My needle package was the perfect spacer.

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מְחַיֵּה הַמֵּתִים

וְנֶאֱמָן אַתָּה לְהַחֲיוֹת מֵתִים: בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה יְהֹוָה מְחַיֵּה הַמֵּתִים 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...

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...

Food friday - your grandmother's food processor

My grandmother bought my mother this wooden bowl and a chopping knife, known in Yiddish as a hock-messer, soon after my parents got married. Yes, she also got them a dairy set as well. these wooden bowls and chopping knives were a big part of food prep when I was growing up. meatloaf and meat balls were mixed in this bowl. Chopped liver was made in this bowl as well. Sundays we often made chicken salad for lunch made out of chicken left over from Shabbat chopped with vegetables and mayo. That too, was made in this bowl. When I was in college my parents got their first food processor and the chopping bowls were not used as much. Several years ago, my father asked if i would like the bowls and the hock-messers. I was happy to have them. I like the sheer physicality of chopping up a big bowl of stuff into teeny pieces. While the wooden bowls have stood up well to the years of use, the hock-messers had not. The bladed which were bolted into their handles, wobbled. The blades wouldn't ...

sarah in nyc

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