sarah in nyc

 THIS was the view from my window the other night. Truly the pillar of flame and cloud. But more realistically I have been getting myself ready for Passover. The main dishes are done but the side dishes and the desserts all need to be made. One of my favorite desserts of late has been  an Italian clementine tart  that I discovered on an Italian You tube channel. Below are two different iterations of the tart.(The recipe is in the link) The tart is delicious and is made with tons of nuts. Unfortunately, some of my guests each night are very nut allergic. I was trying to figure out how to recreate this without nuts. I wondered if it was possible to make a pie crust out of quinoa, and in fact, it is. I found a few recipes that weren't OK for Passover but I found one that was made with flax seeds and Quinoa. I don't have flax seeds but I do have chia seeds. I cooked up some quinoa and added some chia seeds. I added pie crust friendly flavorings to the grains and allowed them ...

  Yesterday we switched the house to Passover mode. Each of our new York City based kids showed up with a friend in tow and we got the house switched in three hours. After my excellent work team left I started the chicken soup and the pickled beet eggs. The soup is the hardest task.I loaded fifteen and a half lbs. of chicken bones into our giant soup pot and then added  cut up the vegetables and loaded each vegetable into net soup bags and tied the bags shut. The soup simmered away from last night until four this afternoon. It was then time to squeeze every bit of goodness out of  the net bags of vegetable matter. I pulled each bag out of the soup and applied brute force to it to extract all of the vegetably essence. I separated the chicken meat from the bones. The bones got squeezed out with all of the meat juices going back into the soup. The cooked chicken bits will be the basis of our meals for the next few days. The process of extracting all of the goodies from the s...

 In a couple of hours the last days of Passover begin.When I post again, the holiday will be over and our kitchen will be back to Chametz. So a few reflections... My name is Sarah and I suffer from Jewish Hostess Delusion. After I finished slicing fifteen lbs of brisket I was sure that there is no way that it would be enough food, so I cooked two chickens, just in case. I made three different kinds of potato side dishes because they each looked far too small to serve to our crowd. I baked two large cakes and also made many small sweets...because of Jewish Hostess Delusion I don't know if the quantities of food shape shift between cooking and serving but I assure you that I was truly worried about our guests going hungry. Our guests did not go hungry. Our kids took home generous amount of food and we still have enough to get through the rest of the holiday. Our dishwasher died after our second Seder mid wash. A new dishwasher got installed today.  There are some people who do n...

 There are many tasks that need to be taken care of between now and sundown Friday. I tackled some of them. There were a few silver pieces that I had forgotten to kasher.  I just used a smaller saucepan and a slotted serving spoon for the boiling and removal tools. The little footed cordial cups had belonged to my husband's Uncle Irving. The tomato server and the berry spoon had belonged to our dear bachelor uncle  Father Blute. He wasn't actually related by blood but over the decades of friendship he had become our bachelor uncle. The pierced cake server was a gift I gave to my parents. I polished our Seder plate. I began work on desserts. I began with the simplest, chocolate covered matza. I made these for my great niece and nephew who are coming for the second Seder. My youngest is nut allergic and has been unable to eat the fabulous flourless chocolate torte that my mother began making in the mid 60s. The recipe was given to my mother by Mildred Jacobs who was a reall...

 Wednesday we drove home from Bingo and then the real work began. I would like you to meet my soup-pot. It holds twenty six quarts. My shiny pot was a replacement for a pot very much like this one. My father purchased a sixteen quart pot very similar to this black graniteware pot at Raymond's in Quincy. I have vague memories of being with my father when he purchased the pot. My father began using the pot to make chicken soup for Pesach in the early 1960s until his death. I inherited the pot after he died. Two years ago after straining the last of the Passover chicken soup I noticed that the enamel had worn away at the bottom of the pot. it was time to get a new passover soup pot. I recall that I ordered the new pot before Passover ended and it arrived while we were still in passover mode. I just looked for big pot...and I ended up getting a pot that was 26 quarts instead of the more manageable 16 quarts.  Please forgive that digression, ( if you are from Boston that digression...