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!