The cooking is done

I had actually hoped to write a post about something entirely different and sewing related, but my day was taken up with food prep today. ( I hope to write the post that is brewing in my head soon)

Six mammoth acorn squash got turned into...

sliced squash baked with a spicy maple dressing.

Because three pies and honey cake may not be quite enough dessert I also made meringues. They are studded with dried cranberries and big shards of bittersweet chocolate.

I made cranberry relish. it is hard to believe that such a complex flavor is made out of just cranberries, sugar, and an orange that were chopped in a food processor.

Because there is never enough cranberry I also made a whole berry sauce. The photo below is the recipe.

I got a little bit fancy and added some orange peel and two cloves.

I covered the bowl with plastic wrap and microwaved it until the berries popped. I think it may have taken seven or eight minutes. I prefer the microwaved sauce to a stovetop sauce because there is no added water to dilute the cranberry fabulousness. Between the cranberry chocolate pie and these two sauces, I have gone through four pounds of berries in less than a week.

We needed dinner for tonight, so I cooked.

What you see is cod cooked over a bed of grape tomatoes and mushrooms with some bulghur wheat added most of the way through the cooking to absorb all of the cooking liquid.

I am now waiting for the gravy to cool down enough so I can put it into a plastic container without melting said container. Aside from baking rolls, the cooking portion of our Thanksgiving adventure is over. The big job tomorrow is setting up food packages for our cohort.

Have a meaningful day tomorrow. If you are reading this, you haven't been killed by Covid-19, and that is something to be grateful for.

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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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