Food Friday and some odds and ends

My friends who live just to the north of us tell me that they woke up to a dusting of snow. We ate truly in the thick of autumn. The scaffolding and netting outside our windows have changed our views.

We can pretend for the duration that instead of living in a more than century old dowager of a building, instead, we are living in a piece of Avante Garde architecture.

The cold weather makes orange starchy vegetables especially appealing. I boiled a few giant sweet potatoes in heavily spiced water. I then mashed the sweet potatoes with a big spoon and picked put the skins. I added more spices(cinnamon, coriander ginger, and black pepper) and added a couple of teaspoons of chopped etrog jam, a glug of spiced rum, and a couple of eggs, and baked the whole thing in the oven.

The protein portion of Shabbat dinner is

meatballs that were made with lots of pulverized dried mushrooms. Mushrooms make the meat taste meatier. There were also spices involved. Until I taste the meatballs later this evening I won't be able to tell you exactly what I added to the chopped meat.

Way back at the end of May, the plastic support for our fridge shelf broke. An insane amount of my summer was taken up with trying to get the part delivered to us. I am not going to bore you with the hours I spent on hold, the many many phone calls and emails that it took to acquire the plastic glass shelf holder. I will tell you that many, many hours were spent on this endeavor. At some point in August, we were promised a November 8th delivery of the part.

Today the top shelf support arrived.

Like everything else related to this shelf. Figuring how to install the tempered glass into the shelf support was not easy. But it was a joint effort between my husband and myself and we now after a long time have a normal-looking fridge.

But I guess our hard-working washing machine was feeling neglected and had begun screaming during the spin cycle. The repairman is only two hours late.

Shabbat Shalom!

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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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