sarah in nyc

With all of the food prep going on for Passover it’s sometimes hard to also plan for meals to eat now. This is what we ate for dinner tonight.  I warmed up the smallest quart bag of soup. I added a chopped tomato and the meat from the lamb shank I cooked for the Seder plate. The matza balls were good. My son is getting up early tomorrow so I made him some matza rolls to take along for breakfast. Today I cooked four chickens and three briskets. I made a no nut charoset for my nut allergic  nephew and some fruit and nut balls for dessert.   Tomorrow I’m baking cakes.

One of the big principles of telling the Passover story  is that you begin  with the bad stuff and end with the glory. That is you begin with the story of slavery and idol worship and end with redemption and the promise of Sinai. Today, my cooking did not follow the story line of the Haggadah. My first cooking task was the easiest one. I made apricot balls. They will be a nice addition to the dessert plate.   You want to make some too? I don’t blame you.  Throw a bunch of dried apricots into a food processor. I used a mix of sour California apricots and the sweeter Turkish ones.  I added a bunch of almonds and squeezed in the juice of a lemon. I then pulsed the apricots and nuts until they were a nice chunky puree. I then spread some coconut, sugar and potato starch on a plate. I put some cold water in a bowl  to keep my hands damp and made the balls and then rolled them in the coconut mixture. If I had a pre- schooler hanging around the house I w...

Yesterday my kids and I switched the house to Passover mode. All of the shelves and counters are cleaned and covered. The oven is cleaned and kashered . All of the regular dishes are put away and all of the Passover dishes and glasses and pots and silverware is in it’s place. What we didn’t have was food. It was our anniversary so we decided to go out to dinner. This is what we looked like 28 years ago yesterday. Yes, it was a fun wedding. Today I did the giant Costco pre-Passover shop.  It was time to get cooking. I went to start the charoset and realized that my  chopping knife was gone.  Actually it seems like the bag with  the kitchen shears and can opener and the like has disappeared.   I went to the hardware store across the street. it’s owned by a Yemini family. I asked for the sort of knife the owner’s grandmother uses to make babaganouj. he had just the thing. A chopping knife known in my family as a Hock-messer. If my grandmother were ...

Once again, our phone and internet connection is on the fritz. Our phone is not working at all. Our internet access is spotty at best. If you have been trying to reach me and I haven't responded, either I haven't gotten your message or I am unable to reply. Amazon.com Widgets I hope this all gets fixed for real and soon.

I had thought that the last batch of challah I had baked would be the last until after Pesach.  but my older son’s birthday is next Friday night. The boy asks for so little. I caved. We are changing over out house on Sunday…but our friends have invited us next Shabbat. I will deliver the challot to our hosts’ freezer so we can enjoy them as part of the birthday dinner.   Here is the challah early on in the process.  It always amazes me how gross it looks in the early stages. But after not all that long you get this: Two of the challot are for tonight ( we are guests again!) two are for next week and the fifth is going to our now home bound buddy , Mike.   In order to use up more of the flour I offered to bake a cake. I made a chiffon cake with chocolate chips. In the years before my parents got the religion of healthy eating my mother used to bake a chiffon cake every Friday. Mine is cooling. I did an up-skirt shot of the cake I may top ...

Now that I’m no longer hacking my guts out, I can do what Jewish women around the world are doing. getting ready for Passover.   For me the first stage is doing some of the cleaning tasks that I can ignore during the year.  My youngest was really helpful tonight. We got a whole lot done. One of my pre- Passover tasks is washing the kitchen curtain, which is actually my aunt’s mid –century modern  table cloth.  After I put it in the wash I decided to do something radical and put up a different vintage cloth as my kitchen curtain.   This cloth was my mother-in –law’s. I think that it is from the 1940’s.  I love it because it exactly expresses how my mother-in law used to serve a meal. If you ate a meal at her house there was never just one protein served at the meal. There would be chicken plus meatballs plus another sort of chicken. The same went for the starches and the vegetables. My mother-in-law always worried that maybe her guests would prefer...

Last week was not a good week. I was hit with some sort of an awful virus. Each afternoon I got so cold and feverish that I put on an old mink coat and huddled on the sofa in a stupor. I slept sitting up on the living room sofa under the same mink because I was afraid that if I lay down I would drown. The virus made my brain very very small. I couldn’t do any work that took too much figuring out. Our phone and internet  were out all week as well.   My cousin married his partner in the fall at a wedding that is now my children’s gold standard for fun weddings. They had a woman in California make them vests to wear at the wedding. I was given the task to make a matza cover  for the newlyweds.  They met with me just before I got sick. They chose the paragraph you see below from the haggadah. In each generation is person is obligated to see themselves as if they they personally left Egypt, as it is written “ You should tell the story to your children on that very...