It's off the the Passover races...

The house got switched over yesterday.

Please ignore the passive voice. It was not a passive activity. Three of us worked really hard.

As soon as the house was switched over to Passover mode and the stove top was kashered and duly foil covered, I got the soup going.

This is a 24 quart pot. It now contains 20 lbs. of chicken bones, a large celery root, lots of parsnips, a turnip a large bunch of dill and one of parsley and some spices, leek tops and lots of giant carrots. Tomorrow morning I will start straining the soup.

Two dozen eggs are being brined in the fridge in anticipation of their moment of glory on our Seder plates. Using older eggs means that peeling the eggs is a much easier task.

This is two of the eight chickens that are now individually bagged and in our freezer.

Since you asked they are spiced with smoked paprika, allspice, ginger and black pepper. I squeezed fresh lemon over the chickens when they were mostly cooked. I ate a wing that fell off for part of my dinner and it was delicious.

Not photographed is a bag of no-nut charoset (because we will have some guests at out seder that I don't want to kill) and about half a gallon of charoset with nuts.

I bought a great deal of our Passover food haul (but not all of it) at Bingo in Boro Park. Bingo has products that you don't see in most markets.

This is a pre packed set of ten pieces of bread to hide the night before Passover so you can find them and burn them the morning of Passover.

You could purchase Haggadot in Yiddish-- and no, the original Hebrew was not printed in either volume.

You could buy Yiddish books for little kids. This one is about Shlomi and Esti's adventure in the park.

You could purchase matza covers

and plastic Seder plates.

I was able to buy both Shmurah matza and brisket at prices that would have been considered an excellent deal in 1980. Yes, we are eating brisket this year. I need it to that before I can cook it.

Managing freezer space for Passover cooking is always an adventure in planning. and shifting things around.

My house looks a little bit nuts at the moment with cartons covering my dining room table.

For dinner we ate potatoes boiled in some of the soup and some chicken pan juices along with some boiled chicken from the soup. It was a hearty and comforting meal.

The tulip bulbs that we planted in the fall in front of our building are in full par-tay mode.

We had planted a large package of a mix of tulips on a dreary cold evening in November.

The tulips close up each evening only to open up with the sun each day.

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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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