Shabbat Zachor

This week is a challah baking week. Pesach is just over the horizon. My goal was to make enough challot to last until the week I change my house over to Passover mode.  I also figured that since I was making a yeast dough I could also make my childhood favorite, yeasted hamentashen. They were a bakery staple.

Your mother might make the small hamentashen with  the smooth crust and the filling visible.

This photo from thenosher.com

After megilla reading at our synagogue the tables in the social hall would have stacks of big yeast hamantaschen from the bakery stacked on trays in the middle of the table.  These hamantaschen were big--the size of a sandwich or bulkie roll, sort of  triangular glazed with honey and egg yolk and a sprinkling of poppy seeds would let you know if you were getting poppy  or the dreaded prune hamantaschen. Those were the only two possibilities prune or poppy. The dough was a soft challah dough.

I have missed those soft hamantaschen with a longing that grows stronger year by year. I figured that since I was making challah dough anyway I would also make some of the hamantaschen that I have been hankering for.

While the challah dough was rising I made the filling.

I had purchased this container at Bingo hoping to use it for Purim. Poppy seed filling out of the container isn't all that pleasant. I dumped the contents of the container into my food processor along with a whole clementine, some dried cranberries, dried apricots, a few prunes some ginger, some honey from the hills of Jerusalem and a bit of citric acid.

I cut my dough into 1/4s and set aside 1/4 to be turned into hamantaschen after I formed the challot. The other 3/4 of the dough was to be challah.

I decided to stuff most of the challot with the poppy seed mixture.

While I was working on forming the challot my husband wandered into the kitchen and mentioned that he doesn't LOVE poppy seed hamantaschen. He LOVES prune.

I then got to work on making the hamantaschen. I rolled out the dough and used a tin can to cut the circles. The first several were made in the open triangle form but they didn't seem to want to stay closed.

I then decided to make a smaller version of the bakery hamantaschen . I didn't take photos of the process but I pulled the dough around the filling, sealed it and then turned the little dough package over and  pushed it into a triangle.

So I now have a small batch of open topped hamantaschen.

I also have a small batch of  the more enclosed hamantaschen.

My husband ate one. He was surprised at how much he liked the poppy seed filling.  It reminded me of my late inlaws who every Thanksgiving before dessert would announce, " We don't like pumpkin pie."

Each year they would take a small slice of pumpkin pie to be polite, take a bite and say. " We don't like pumpkin pie, but we like this one."

So you might want to know what we are eating for dinner.  

It's a beef stew. It looks ugly but ought to taste good. Below are the challot I made today.

I just wanted to show you something that I saw in a Danish bakery in Solvang, California last year.

They look suspiciously like hamantaschen. We didn't try them. We each had a roll and a cup of coffee instead.

And here is a preview of my costume, well it's only a piece of my costume.

It's a complicated year to be celebrating Purim. It is more than a little hard to drag out the joy.

Shabbat Shalom! Chag Sameach!