Skip to main content

In Full Passover Mode

 This week has been a whirlwind of hard work.


My excellent shopping adventure ( which included the purchase of this fabulous play set)


was followed by a day of really hard work.



Yesterday I strained and squeezed out the soup.


I took this photo after the net bags of chicken bones had been removed from the pot but before I had done the hard work of squeezing every bit of flavor out of the vegetables and bones.

The bones and vegetables were reduced to this sad and ugly mess.  I have no photos of the 16 quarts of beautiful clear soup. This was probably the beast soup I have ever made. Having  18lbs. of bones to 24 quarts of water makes for a really rich soup.

Today I  got the stuff I needed to make charoset.




I made both a no-nut version and a many nuts version.





Yes, I used the food processor.  Both versions are delicious and should improve after marinating in the fridge for a week. If you want to know what I put into the charoset, just ask.


Chickens got cooked after dinner. Two are finished and two are still in the oven.


The hardest part of the cooking is over. There is one more large slab of beef that needs to be cooked. Side dishes need to be made, some vegetarian alternative need to be figured out and made. As the days go closer to Passover I will switch gears and start making desserts

Comments

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...

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 ...