On the road to Pesach

Our Pesach adventures have begun.

Saturday night I got the stove kashered. Normally I get the kitchen switched into Passover move in one fell swoop. This year, it was a two part adventure.

Sunday we had planned to celebrate two important family events, our daughter and son-in-law's anniversary and our youngest's birthday. Izzy's the fabulous Kosher Brooklyn barbeque joint opened an outpost few blocks from our house. They had catered our daughter's wedding so eating their food seemed a fitting way to mark their day.

Our daughter showed up at our apartment early to help me with the great Pesach switch. The rest of the celebrants joined us outside the restaurant.

We placed our order and waited for our food.

It was a spectacularly beautiful day. I realized that I usually miss these perfect spring days because they tend to occur while I am prepping for Passover.

Our food was finally ready, we walked to central park and decided to eat on a rock outcropping so we could eat together and still be socially distant enough to be safe.

We were hungry. The food was excellent.

The company was excellent as well.

Why yes, my youngest does look startlingly like my late father-in-law.

After we stuffed ourselves with smokey meat goodness, the kids were kind enough to help me get the dishes down from the top shelf in the kitchen and bring all of the boxes of dishes from their hidden places all over our apartment. I then finished the process of setting the kitchen up for Passover.

There were tasks that had to be tackled first, like the making of the pickled beet eggs for our seder plates.

No, this isn't a standard Jewish Passover custom but one that is specific to our family. If you let the eggs sit in the magenta brine for a week then the white will turn completely pink all the way through to the yolk. It's gorgeous. We learned about pickled beet eggs while on a visit to Lancaster, PA.

Pickled Beet Eggs

Hard boil eggs and peel-(older eggs are far easier to peel)

the brining liquid is made out of equal parts beet juice, sugar, and vinegar

I use the juice from cans of sliced beets- for about two dozen eggs I used two cans of beets( although it may have been three)

Put hard boiled eggs, beet juice sugar and vinegar in a pan. Cut the beets from the can smaller and add to pan as well

simmer for 30 -40 minutes

put the contents of the pan into a glass jar and store in the fridge for at least a week before eating

You may add spices to the brine. I love adding cloves but didn't this year because I didn't have any

I had other tasks to do as well. Often when I get an invitation to a charity event there will be a listing of the members of the gala committee. The invitations always state that the committee is "in formation".

Well, this is my Pesach chicken soup in formation.

I let the soup cook overnight. Yesterday I spent the day straining the soup. It is a big and messy job. Every bit of vegetable and every bone gets mashed and squeezed through a towel so all of the flavors go into the soup. I then strain and restrain all of the soup through a tea towel so most of the fat and all of the gunk gets left behind.

This is the front line of my freezer. I made twelve quarts of beautiful soup.

I also made two kinds of charoset yesterday. I made nut-free charoset for my youngest.

I made Charoset with nuts for the rest of us

What went into our charoset???

red apples

green apples

pears

dried apricots

figs

dates

raisins

fresh ginger

almonds

walnuts

pecans

silan (date molasses)

cinnamon

a whole orange

a whole lemon

red wine

( I stupidly opened our fanciest bottle of red wine and used it)

This year I used the food processor. I actually prefer hand-chopping my charoset but there is much work to do and I am the only one cooking this year

The flavors need to marinate for a while to develop and meld so it is better to make this early.

I also made chicken. Inspired bout our visit to Izzy's I made hot sweet smokey chicken flavored with silan, black pepper, liquid smoke.

and cayenne. These four chickens were made yesterday. Another three are in the oven as I type this.

Today I am pretty exhausted and am going much more slowly.

There are many dishes to cook before I sleep...

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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