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!

מְחַיֵּה הַמֵּתִים

וְנֶאֱמָן אַתָּה לְהַחֲיוֹת מֵתִים: בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה יְהֹוָה מְחַיֵּה הַמֵּתִים You are faithful to restore the dead to life. Blessed are You, Adonoy, Resurrector of the dead. That particular line is recited at every single prayer service every day three times a day, unless you use a Reform or Reconstructionist prayer book . In those liturgies instead of praising God for resurrecting the dead God is praised for giving life to all. I am enough of a modern woman, a modern thinker, to not actually believe in the actual resurrection of the dead. I don't actually expect all of the residents of the Workmen's Circle section of Mount Hebron cemetery in Queens to get up and get back to work at their sewing machines. I don't expect the young children buried here or the babies buried here to one day get up and frolic. Yet, every single time I get up to lead services I say those words about the reanimating of the dead with every fiber of my being. Yesterday, I e...

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...

Food friday - your grandmother's food processor

My grandmother bought my mother this wooden bowl and a chopping knife, known in Yiddish as a hock-messer, soon after my parents got married. Yes, she also got them a dairy set as well. these wooden bowls and chopping knives were a big part of food prep when I was growing up. meatloaf and meat balls were mixed in this bowl. Chopped liver was made in this bowl as well. Sundays we often made chicken salad for lunch made out of chicken left over from Shabbat chopped with vegetables and mayo. That too, was made in this bowl. When I was in college my parents got their first food processor and the chopping bowls were not used as much. Several years ago, my father asked if i would like the bowls and the hock-messers. I was happy to have them. I like the sheer physicality of chopping up a big bowl of stuff into teeny pieces. While the wooden bowls have stood up well to the years of use, the hock-messers had not. The bladed which were bolted into their handles, wobbled. The blades wouldn't ...

sarah in nyc

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