Food Friday---Went to a funeral mass edition

First a review of last week's Shabbat dinner-- also known as FleishFest. It was delicious and festive.

I admit that I made an insane amount of meat. Despite sending all of my kids home with meat there were several days this week when my husband and I ate meat for both lunch and dinner to make a dent in the leftovers. We still have a bag of frozen pigs-in-blankets in the freezer if you have a craving for some--they are yours.

This has been a week of life cycle events. I attended (virtually) the wedding of a cousin in Israel. There is something so profound about seeing faces of people I love on people a generation or two or three younger.

We virtually attended the shiva of the father of a synagogue friend and last night and this morning I attended funeral services for the father of one of our doormen. Mass this morning was in this

beautiful church that manages to make you feel both enveloped as well as giving you the sense of the infinite at the same time. The core of a mass is essentially kiddush and motzi, the sanctification of the bread and the wine. The mass is kiddush and motzi elevated to high theatre. Today also made me think about processing as a religious act. We followed the casket into the church, people processed to get the sacrament and then at the end of the service we processed out of the church following the casket again.

After I got home from the funeral I got to work forming the last challot I will be making until after Passover.

This batch is stuffed with a mix of dried cranberries, dates, prunes, poppyseeds vanilla, orange juice, and sour salt all briefly cooked in the microwave and then whizzed in the food processor. It is jammy but not terribly sweet. The poppyseeds make me feel close to my Eastern European roots. It is funny, this mixture and the one I made for filling hamentaschen isn't exactly traditional but I think it would taste familiar to any of my grandparents or great grandparents.

Here are the challot, stuffed and waiting to go into the oven.

And here they are baked and stacked.

I just pulled our spicy cod out of the oven. It is made with gochujang, honey, and chopped fresh ginger. I tasted the sauce and I think I need to make a bland grain to absorb some of the heat.

We are having a big green salad and that's Shabbat dinner.

I have been working away on both the wings tallit and the Torah mantle but haven't the energy to post about them right now. Just know that progress has been made even if I haven't written about it.

Shabbat Shalom!

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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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