Food Friday--magical thinking edition

This has been a week full of worry. A dear college friend had brain surgery. Another dear friend lost her father and yet another friend has had to put her mother into hospice care. My reaction to all of this worry was kind of primitive. .I have been doing lots of cooking for my family and for others and doing all of it with a great deal of intent and good wishes for my friends.

I baked bread for a family who is going through a medical crisis.

I promise the breads looked much better after being baked. I neglected to take photos post baking. Home baked bread is not a cure for cancer but it does taste good.

I delivered the bread and it was cold and grey and rainy.

Despite the gloom, I could see the swelling buds on the trees on my walk home. At some point, it will be spring.

I know the internet is full of people posting pretty photos of their plates of food. I nearly always serve family-style. I prefer to let people decide how much of each dish they want to eat and serve themselves.

Last night I made a vaguely Asian noodle soup. I had chopped up a bunch of watercress and nori so each person could top their bowl of soup as they wished.

I thought my soup looked like something someone might post on Instagram.

Today the sky was hard and cold and bright.

It was a challah baking week. The cold is making my dough rise slowly.

We will have dense loaves this week.

My parents used to serve us the same Shabbat dinner week after week. Whole chickens were cooked in bulk ( a dozen or so at a time) and topped with seasoned salt. During the winter we ate chicken soup that had been made early in the fall in a giant vat and put into containers that were stored in the freezer. Our carb was either barley or kasha both were made in a giant vat and then put in the freezer in meal sized plastic containers.

Each Shabbat my parents pulled what they needed for that Shabbat out of the freezer. My mother had excellent spacial skills and got an astonishing amount of food into our regular sized freezer. My father was really proud of the kasha that he made. It was really good, nevertheless, I rarely make it.

Kasha on it's own is a bit dreary. Varnishkes,or bow-tie noodles lighten the dense buckwheat.

Kasha is usually made with onions. My husband loathes onions. My kids adore onions. I love my husband and my kids. I turned a bag of onions

into caramelized onions.

Four pounds of onions will yield a soup-bowl of yummy rich tasting onions. Mostly what this takes is time. It always takes double the amount of time you expect it to.

Our challot are baked.

Each strand has been filled with some of the following goodies (candied orange peel, cocoa, date jam, vanilla, allspice) and rolled up before braiding.

We are eating beef,

London broils rubbed with ground coffee and spices and then topped with a sweet/sour/spicy/ smokey sauce that will keep the meat from drying out while it is warming.

As I sad before, food won't cure cancer. But I hope that the people gathered around our table tonight will feel loved even if they are going through hard times.

Shabbat Shalom!

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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