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.

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

Search This Blog