Food Friday and three unrelated topiocs

For the food portion of this post, I offer you

chicken legs cooked in a marinade of pomegranate molasses and mustard and then topped with pomegranate arils. I may have added other flavors to the marinade but I no longer remember exactly what they were.

The fruit and vegetable pushcart a couple of blocks away has become my favorite place to buy produce since the pandemic hit. The selection isn't very broad but I can shop outside. Lately, the pushcart has been selling pomegranates and some have been wonderful. Big fat leeks have been for sale as well. So we have been eating lots of potato leek soup.

Today I decided to make a batch in our slow cooker.

At the moment, it just looks like wet salad but hopefully, by the time we sit down to eat dinner, it will be a proper soup.

Our challot just went into the oven. I finally figured out that we can make do with smaller challot since there are just three of us at the table. This also means that I only have to bake challah once every three weeks instead of every other week.

And now a round-up of three tiny topics that are unrelated to the rest of the post, and to one another.

Tiny Topic 1

Work is being done on my building. Scaffolding has gone up. Which gave me the odd pleasure of seeing someone right outside our window, not six flights down but close up.

Netting was put up outside the scaffolding. I think it is put up to keep debris from falling to the street on a windy day.

The netting plays visual tricks with our view.

It makes the buildings across the street appear to be much closer.

The combination of the netting and the scaffolding also makes it look like we have a porch or balcony outside of our living room window which makes me feel as if our apartment has gained a room.

It may very well be that no one aside from me finds this as amusing as I do. But during these pandemic times, you take your joy where you can get it.

Tiny Topic 2

Earlier this week, my friend Tanta Marcia took me out for dinner. I haven't eaten dinner out in a restaurant since before COVID-19 hit.

We ate here.

Eating at Ayurveda feels like eating at your Indian grandmother's house. There is no menu. They just feed you until you are full. Do you want seconds on your lentils? No problem. Are you sure you don't want more raita??? White rice or brown? How about both? The food isn't fabulous but they fuss over you and keep offering to bring you more of this or that.

They set us up at two tables on the sidewalk so we could be socially distant while we ate dinner together. The combination of being with Tanta Marcia and our waiter fussing over us made me feel very, very loved.

Tiny Topic 3

My husband unearthed a box of color slides taken by his uncle Irving in the very early 1950s. Many of them were of dashing Irving in a bathing suit with his arm around one or another glam young woman in a bathing suit. Irving was a handsome man about town.

Some of the images were of my husband with his family near their home in Brooklyn. My husband had a few photos printed.

I just love this photo of the man I married.

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

Search This Blog