Balabusta's Shabbat meals 1/28 and 1/29/05

I was feeling pretty wiped out by cooking time on Thursday evening, and didn't have a lot of creativity for planning a menu. On Thursday night and Friday I made:

Whole Wheat Challah (story below)
Rassam (from the recipe in Laurel's Kitchen)
Spinach Kugel (recipe to follow in another post)
Glazed Turnips
Roasted Cauliflower with shallots and garlic (similar to this one, if you've never made it)
Baked Tofu (of course!)
improvised rice pilaf

The soup was great! It was not very spicy, but it was warming and pleasant. It's supposed to be very spicy. This is the problem with Laurel's Kitchen. Or maybe it's with my leftover-from-Passover ground black pepper? Spicy or not, it was delicious.

The kugel was good, it had a crust of wheat germ on the top and bottom which made it extra tasty. I will have to post my recipe now that I have made this common recipe my own.

I bought turnips again because the turnip soup was good two weeks ago. I had never eaten a turnip growing up. Had you? This dish was not a success. It was supposed to balance the sharpness of the turnips with an unctuous sweet glaze. Well it was bitter and mushy. Blech.

My husband has a thing about how challah should be made with white flour. Generally I abide by this unreasoning prejudice. This week, I ran out of the white bread flour I have been buying every week at Whole Foods, but I still had several bags of whole wheat flour. My poor life partner didn't realize that all those bags of flour were whole wheat! He gave me the go-ahead to make 100% whole grain challah in order to save us some money and a trip to the store.  I decided that since the whole wheat bread in The Bread Baker's Apprentice had come out so light, I would use that as a base recipe. This recipe calls for two pre-ferments: a soak and a poolish. The poolish is a sponge made with flour, water and yeast, and the soak is just flour and water. In order to make the challah taste like challah, I added 5 teaspoons of sugar and two eggs to the recipe, plus some oil. I made a pleasantly sweet whole wheat bread, nice and light, but it didn't ring my challah chimes.

The baked tofu, this time:

two cakes tofu
three tablespoons each: Braggs, leftover white sweet kiddush wine, balsamic vinegar, olive oil
fennel powder, dried basil, thyme
three cloves pressed garlic

It was good, but a little too sweet.

I thought the rice pilaf (ginger, sesame and shallots) was good, but my husband was unenthusiastic. The cauliflower was good.

We went to a potluck Melavah Malkah on Saturday night. I made a coleslaw of purple cabbage, carrots, scallions and mung bean sprouts, dressed in a sweet sesame dressing from the Moosewood Restaurant New Classics Asian Slaw recipe. I added some canned chickpeas. It didn't get finished, though there wasn't much left. I thought it was pretty good, but maybe people aren't in the mood for coleslaw in the middle of the winter.

All together, kind of an off week for me in the kitchen! Next week I will be visiting my parents. Probably I will be doing some cooking. At least I expect to be baking my son's birthday cake. This is the subject of some contention. My skinny husband, who eats dessert with every meal and is a sweets fiend, doesn't want to offer my son sweets until he asks for them. (By name? Who knows.)  My mom, who is perpetually dieting and obsessed with her weight, is equally extremely interested in giving my son cake. (She wanted to give him some disgustingly sugary birthday cake at his first birthday, but he was quite satisfied with some delicious--and I'm sure sugar-sweetened-- challah instead.) I feel like I'm caught in the middle. I don't totally know what I think about it. But I'll let you know what kind of cake I wind up baking!

We did have some pleasant rest on shabbat, some menuchah. I am back to work right now, Sunday afternoon, on an editing job. I hope to have time to post on some other things later in the week, and I wish you a happy week! As we sing in my favorite Havdalah song, Laner V'livsamim :

Behold the days of work renew themselves perpetually,
May peace and good be renewed in them. 

Comments

[Rebecca]

Thanks for listing me on your blogroll! It's also nice to read about one of the chief community-building activities of the Jewish community - cooking & eating Shabbat meals together! I love having people over to my house for Shabbat meals, or, alternatively, visiting friends for Shabbat meals. I hope you continue to enjoy them as well, and Shavua Tov.

[shanna]

I have a semi-whole wheat challah recipe that I'm happy with. About half of the dry ingredient is whole wheat flour, and the other half is soome wheat germ, some milled flaxseed, and mostly (white) bread flour. It's a good compromise for people (husbands and guests) who would run screaming from something made entirely of whole wheat, and because there is some bread flour in it, it doesn't require quite as much attention as a 100% whole wheat bread does. Email me for the recipe; I'm not thrilled about posting it anywhere. :)

[ar o'brien]

what do you usually have on the day of shabbat???

[balabusta]

On the day...if you are careful about Jewish law, you aren't supposed to eat before you pray the morning prayers. We are not careful about that and we do have breakfast--usually cereal. (My husband likes to eat leftover challah, which you really aren't supposed to do...but when he does I join him...) Then after services, one is supposed to have a hot meal. I don't have a great way to keep food warm, but I try to provide something in the crockpot--a soup, or cholent--and then some other yummy dishes. Since Saturday lunch is a seudat mitzvah (a meal in which one fulfills a commandment) you are meant to have two loaves of bread (like on Friday night) and wine or grape juice, and to make blessings on them to start the meal.

It is customary to have a third ritual meal called seudah shlishit (which means 3rd meal!). We do this at our usual dinner time to accomodate our baby. You don't have to have wine or grape juice at this meal. It's usually leftovers. In the summer, the best thing is to have cold soup for Saturday lunch and then eat that as a leftover on Saturday evening. where I live, summer is hot and muggy and a nice gazpacho is great!

That's probably more than you wanted to know, Ar. Anyway the whole site is devoted to minute explorations of this topic! Please feel free to come around and comment some more.

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