Eating love and things that make me happy

One of the constants in my life is using the making of food to express emotion. The "tag team" bread

so often made in our home, started by one of us,

kneaded, by another, shaped by another

and baked by a third person often functions as a wordless conversation between me and my boys. When we sit down to eat the bread,we will often discuss the various attributes of the loaf and discuss what each of us added to the process.

Last Friday was our friend Mike's birthday. We wanted to be sure that he knew how fond we are of him. I made an ice cream cake (pomegranate ginger ice cream studded with bits of candied orange) and decorated it.

Yes, he got the message.

While I often express my feelings in edible form as the people who sit at our table --I hope-- recognize it isn't often that I am on the receiving end of such messages.

This past Sunday we were invited to the home of dear friends. We used to spend lots of time together but life and work and lots of obligations means that we can't spend as much time together as we would like. Our friends invited lots of people that they love for Sunday's feast.

Our friend Ira served brisket that he had smoked. My older son asked for the recipe.

It's three pages of directions and takes two weeks. When I arrived to the party Ira was slicing up one of the briskets in the kitchen. After I gave Ira a hug he plopped a tiny bit of brisket into my mouth. It was condensed essence of meat. I slowly chewed that bit of meat and tasted all of the love and care that went into it.

When I read Ira's directions it made me realize how much he loved all of us to take so long and to take so much care to feed us.( of course this includes all of the many, many dishes made by Patti)

We brought some meat home for our youngest who had to work. I watched him eat his smoked meat with a thoughtful intensity. He too was tasting all of that love.

I want to end this post with a few things that delight me.

Both my husband and I misread this Iowa licence plate and thought it says "Froom", religious in Yiddish.

I love how the table runner my daughter bought in China for my parents looks so great with a table cloth I made a few years ago. It is somehow so Chinese to combine prints if the colors go together.

The other day the clouds looked like they came from the opening credits of The Simpsons.

I have a pretty low threshold for amusement.

I finally remembered to take a photo of a slice of challah where each strand is rolled with spices.

Flowers peeking behind a wrought iron fence a couple of blocks from my house.

Comments

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...

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...

sarah in nyc

Search This Blog