sarah in nyc

 Last week's post about making Uzbeki bread was read with great interest by my friend Alan, the serious cook. Alan sat me down after services to ask me many questions about technique. Inspired by Alan's granular interest I made another batch of the baked- in -the- pot bread. This time I was successful.  I don't think that the exact ingredients matter a whole lot in this case. This type of bread baking is all about technique. Uzbeki cooked in a pot bread 2 C water 1 tsp yeast 1 tsp brown sugar Combine in a bowl and let sit until the yeast begins to bloom then mix 2C of flour with a tsp of salt Add flour and salt to the yeasty water and mix with a spatula. Keep adding flour as needed. Add a glug of oil. When the mixture gets too thick to mix comfortably with the spatula begin mixing and kneading with your hand. Yes, you can do all of your mixing in the bowl When the dough has become smooth cover with a towel and set aside for an hour or so. After the hour knead again and divi...

  I start this post with two food items. This isn't technically Food Friday because  neither are being served for Shabbat dinner.  I pulled yet another chicken that I had cooked for Passover out of the freezer but I have gussied it up with gochujang and molasses.I only did the fancying up because our son is joining us. I could serve the same meal to my husband for months at a time and he would be fine with it. My son though, loves food and likes a bit of variety so a bit of extra flavor. I roasted some pepper strips and will be serving them with blanched asparagus. The colors are pretty together --and blueberries for dessert. I made this red pepper, artichoke and cheese flatbread to bring to a potluck dinner this weekend. I am showing this bread just because it is pretty.  I  kneaded some cocoa into part of the bread flour and used my nifty silicone mate to roll our the coco-ed dough into a rectangle. i then rolled out the rest of the dough and rolled  the ...

 I know, it has been a while so here is the recap of what I have neglected to write about.  Most importantly, there has been progress on Madeline's tallit. I embroidered ribbon to frame each of the pinot/  corner pieces. The point of this activity was to create the mix of colors that Susan, the master weaver had used in the tallit. The incredible thing about Susan's work is that while you can see all of the various colors when you look at the tallit up close, the purple, lavender, sage green and dark green and the various shades of blue--from a distance it reads as sky blue. Yup, Susan is brilliant. Anyway, you can see how  my work is having a really pleasant conversation with Susan's but in a different medium. My next issue was how to create the atara/ neckband . Susan had included a test sample of the the stripes on the tallit. It's narrower than the finished tallit and used the same colors and a variant of the stripe pattern. It a perfect world I would just edge t...