Food Friday--Some Things I Learned From my Parents Edition

 Dear friends from out of town will be joining us tonight for Shabbat dinner. One thing that I learned from my mother is that you can express how much you have missed your friends and how happy you are that they are with you by serving them a beautiful meal.

The chicken portion of dinner is flavored with Herbes de Provence that have been zhuzhed up with additional herbs and the juice of

a couple of Meyer lemons. My hands and the house all smell of Meyer lemons.

I flavored our rice with cardamom and a tiny bit of rose water. It isn't photographed because it looks like white rice but will be all fragrant.

I roasted some chickpeas with za'atar sumac black pepper, fresh Meyer lemon and a bit of liquid smoke.

I decided to bake a cake. I had watched the latest episode of The Great British Bake-Off while I was working out and was reminded of how any food looks fancier if it involves layers. So I baked a simple 4 egg sheet cake ( called shit cake by my father). 

My mother was serious about following recipes. My father read cookbooks but never followed a recipe. I learned baking techniques and proportions from baking at my mother's elbow and being her sous chef. I learned how to be brave and cook without a recipe in front of me from my father. I made the cake without a recipe.

Like my father, I looked in the freezer and fridge to determine what needed to be used up. We have a gallon bag of citrus rinds in the freezer taking up too much room. A heel of last week's challah was in the fridge. The cake batter was made with challah crumbs with white flour and farina making up the rest of the flour component of the cake.

I thought it would be nice to top the lemon-scented cake with a jammy topping made out of the frozen lemon peels.

As the marmalade cooked I thought about a texted conversation I had with a dear friend earlier this week. She was visiting her father who has entered the phase of life where chronology no longer matters and the past and the present are all happily mixed together in his mind.  My friend's father, asked after my now long-dead parents. My friend asked me what she should do. 

I learned from my parents that my friend should not correct her father and tell him that my parents have been dead for several years, but instead to tell her father that my parents send their warmest regards.

 I recalled a visit my parents had made to a congregant who was no longer living in the present but was residing in the past. Our friend mentioned that he was looking out of a window. My mother asked him what he was seeing. Our friend described a detailed street scene in Omaha, Nebraska in the early part of the twentieth century. My mother loved visiting the Omaha of her friend's childhood.

My mother always stressed that food needed to look pretty.

After I spread the lemon marmalade on the cake I added 

pomegranate arils from the pomegranate my husband had hoped that I would use up today.

Here they are on the cake. The cake was just out of the oven when I spread the jam and sprinkled the pomegranate arils over the surface of the cake. The pomegranate should cook just slightly from the head of the cake. The cake will be cut into dainty slices for serving and will be served with a bit of last week's cranberry non-dairy ice cream.

My parents were big on pre-planning and doing things ahead of time. I am having an MRI just after Thanksgiving.  My husband's big worry before an MRI is staying still. My big worry was removing my bracelets. I have been wearing a stack of silver bangles on my left wrist for about twenty years. I used to be able to remove them without too much difficulty but these days removing them has been nearly impossible. 

Last night I did the nearly impossible to prepare for the MRI.

I figured out that I could squish each of the bracelets into a bit more of an oval and ease it off of my hand.

Shabbat Shalom!