Skip to main content

Food Friday-Birthday Edition

 

This beautiful child is now an adult and we are celebrating her birthday as a family during Shabbat dinner. She will be celebrating with her friends on her actual birthday. 


The main dish for tonight is:


Chicken cooked with


which is the fabulous hot spice mixture that one encounters in Ethiopian restaurants. I cooked the chicken at a low-ish temp to give the spices more time to seep into the chicken. The berbere was a gift from one of my sisters.


There is a bland rice warming in the oven and I am making a big salad. One birthday treat is this...


crispy and salty smoked meat. No, I will not be indulging.



We are having three different desserts each one was about making cooking compromises as I went along. Not pictured is a cranberry sorbet.

I had planned for this citrus-flavored cake, here shown in one skinny layer, intended 


to be filled with an orange custard made with a base of Israeli instant vanilla pudding. I had assumed that orange juice could stand-in for the milk in the directions on the box. I was wrong and while what I made was delicious it didn't have enough body to serve as the filling. So I pivoted and made a mocha-flavored filling. Yes, the cake recipe was faked.


Here it is stacked...

I then topped the stacked cake with the orange custard and added some chocolate shavings to decorate.



I will not regale my guests with the wrong turns in the life of this cake.

An essential addition for any birthday for my daughter is pumpkin pie. I had one large Costco can of pumpkin puree. I thought I would make one pie to serve tonight and one to give to my daughter to take home. Both of my round pie tins have gone AWOL. 

I figured I would make one large rectangular pie. I made a batch of pie crust that I thought would be enough to cover one of my large sheet pans. I made too little crust to cover the bottom of the sheet pan. Instead, I dumped the crust into a 9x13 baking pan and pressed the crust into place.

So we are having pumpkin pie bars.


My daughter can take the rest home with her.

And on a completely different topic...I learned a new category of looking good. This week on two different days two different homeless men complimented me on my clothing and then didn't ask me for money.

Now, all I need to learn is how to keep the credit card and car insurance people from calling me multiple times a day. Earlier this week I spent much too much time explaining that the fact that I don't have either a driver's license or a car probably makes me ineligible for car insurance to an annoying man from India.


Shabbat Shalom!



Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

I love hearing from my readers. I moderate comments to weed out bots.It may take a little while for your comment to appear.

Popular posts from this blog

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...
1 comment
Read more

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...
8 comments
Read more

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 ...
2 comments
Read more