Mostly food---and a bunch of other stuff

 This post is mostly about food. It is about the food I have been making for Rosh Hashanah and the food I have been making for us to eat until then.

Earlier in the week I baked bagels.

That was a simple mid-week bake. I only used half the dough for bagels.

The rest was pulled pulled out of the oven in the form of a cute heart shaped loaf.

Yesterday was challah baking day.

My husband discovered apple butter this summer and suggested that it would make a yummy and appropriate Rosh Hashanah  stuffing for our challot. 

I remembered that I had actually filled challot with apple butter a couple of years ago and it was a bit too wet. so I microwaved some apple butter with tapioca starch (and probably some spices-- I was working too quickly to account for every ingredient in the challah ) to thicken it up.

Above is the thickened apple butter and below you see it in use before being rolled up.

How many challot did I make? I have no idea. I made several of them small. Three will end up in Halifax, two will be taken to out hosts friday night and the rest will be eaten by us and our guests over the holiday.

I made almost  but not quite enough thickened apple butter so one challah is stuffed with apricot jam.

I still don't know how many people are showing up at which meal so I am just cooking until the freezer is jammed. 

During the first Thanksgiving of the pandemic I made Thanksgiving dinner for all of our Zoom cohort. I bought ten turkey breasts ( because it is easier to cut up turkey breast than to carve a turkey). I am not a fan of turkey. I did however in the madness of cooking for our remote thanksgiving guests stumble into an ingredient combo that is pure alchemy. I combined Korean gochujang  which is hot and slightly sweet with molasses which is slightly sweet and almost bitter.  The combination is insanely good. No, honey or maple syrup don't create the same flavor magic as does the molasses. 

I mixed the two and coated both one turkey breast and two whole chickens.

Both cooked away at the same time.

I added a bit more of the molasses and gochujang a couple of times during the cooking time.

The chicken looked ready for a food magazine cover. 

I am now officially done with the protein portions of our meals. I can make desserts and sides on Sunday. 

I so miss my virtual cooking partner Miriam. Were she still alive, we would have discussed our meals and helped one another tweak them to be better We might have discussed an old timey favorite that Miriam's mom used to make. The conversation might have veered towards finding good recordings of women singing High Holiday music and a certain amount of clever snark  on Miriam's part about  the news. During the holidays I feel like I am virtually cooking with my parents. Unfortunately, Miriam is now one of my ghost cooking partners.

When I had last posted I thought that I was completely done with this tranche of work. I was wrong. I still had to finish the  tallit bag for Terry.

The bag got completed on Blursday of this week.

The center is a bit of the tablecloth that has been quilted and then pieced into more of the black silk. I edged the quilted bit with more of the Petersham embroidered in taupe embroidery thread.

The bag is lined in a heavy duty printed polyester twill.

I chose the fabric because it is so sturdy and I like how it compliments Terry's mother's hand embroidery.

The bag has a rectangular gusset on either side and I bound all of the edges with a soft black mystery content twill.

I have been listening to music to get into the High Holiday mood. Today, I discovered this recording of Shlomo Carlebach from 1952. It was before he was famous and I love the quality of his voice here. It is very different than his later recordings. You can hear that he had been listening to my hero Ben-Zion Shenker.