TV dinners

 There is so much that is simply depressing about the prospect of observing Rosh HaShanah mostly by way of a computer screen. I have been thinking about ways to make this holiday less depressing for me and for my family. Last week I hit on the idea of cooking the foods that I normally do for Rosh HaShanah and it the amounts that I normally cook. I thought that it would be pretty wonderful if our usual Zoom Shabbat cohort not only joined us virtually but also was eating the same foods that we were.

I made a batch of small round challot on Friday.  They are all safely squirreled away in a freezer.

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Today I decided to tackle the tzimmes. I had assembled most of the meat and the vegetables when I realized that it might be a nice idea to actually check the recipe my mother gave me over the phone about thirty years ago.

I had jotted it down in the flyleaf of The Settlement Cookbook. This cookbook was my mother-in-law's.

I don't think she ever used it. I had loved my mother's copy ever since I could remember. I was delighted when my mother-in-law offered to give her copy to me.  This is one of my favorite cookbooks in my collection. If you want to make an old-timey anything you will find a decent recipe here. I was always particularly fond of the chapters on invalid cookery.

I asked my mother how she made tzimmes perhaps when I didn't even have any children or perhaps when I only had one baby. I remember that my mother's directions unspooled in a long and looping way. I jotted down just enough to help me remember.

Even when I wrote this down I knew that the amounts for the meat were crazily insufficient. The correct amount of meat is lots. Today I put in about six pounds of meat. If I had had more hiding in my freezer I would have added that as well.

The carrots three carrots I used were big enough to stun a potential mugger. I  added parsnip to my tzimmes ( four). I didn't use white potatoes because my son-in-law is allergic to them. I wasn't able to shop in our local grocery store that sells batata or yucca so I just left it out. Mt scrawls didn't include the lima beans but I put some in today.

You brown the minced onion and then brown the meat int he onion while I cut up the vegetables and added them to the pot. 

My mother did a long cook on top of the stove followed by a long cook in the oven. I put the pan in the oven ( covered) as soon as all of the ingredients are in the pot.

I cooked the tzimmes at 300 covered until the meat and vegetables were soft and then cooked uncovered for another hour or so so the juices would evaporate.

Eventually, the tzimmes looked like this.

For me, tzimmes tastes like fall.

Each member of our cohort gets one quart of tzimmes, including us.

While the tzimmes was cooking I worked on peeling all of the cabbage leaves for the stuffed cabbage.

I know that some cooks swear by freezing the whole head of cabbage to loosen the leaves. I never have that kind of room in the freezer.

I was surprised at how good it felt to do something as normal as prepping for a big cooking session that will feed lots of people.