Sabbath Meals

I did make Hamantashen!

...and I also made a nice Shabbat dinner and lunch this weekend. I just haven't had it together to post the menu yet. No, not because I was hungover from Purim! I'm afraid that I didn't keep that mitzvah this year. I've been a little under the weather, and a little swamped with my fabulous freelance gig, editing this book. I did get to the megillah reading with my husband and my two year old, and my first bag of mishloach manot. (Those are the packages of goodies one traditionally sends to one's friends on Purim--but so far I had only been a recipient, never a giver.)

I made my mother-in-law's recipe for hamantashen. I would post the recipe but it's too vague. Wherever she got it from, the original recipe doesn't call for enough flour. So my MIL adds more. But she doesn't know exactly how much more. So this year, I added more....and more....and more! My hamantashen were delicious, but they were still just a little too rich. Too much fat and sugar in ratio to the flour, because I just didn't add enough flour. Phooey. They were still good, I'm just saying, I don't think I'm ready to post the recipe just yet!

Anyway I'm starting to feel better from this killer cold. I got a big boost from yoga class--I did a handstand! Our digital camera is working again and I took some pictures of the bread before Shabbat, so I hope to post this past weekend's menu with photos of some of the food. True, it's not Paris in the springtime but it's a pretty nice looking kugel. Okay, kugel isn't the most photogenic food ever, I know that now. I think a lot of pictures of Ashkenazi Jewish food might be a tough sell. Except for all the people who read Chez Miscarriage and want to see photos of gefilte fish. (Am I going to get google searches for "pictures of gefilte fish" and "photogenic kugel" now? Please yes!)

Purim seudah/Shabbat meals 3/25/05 and 3/26/05

Friday evening:
carrot coconut soup
spinach kugel
roasted curried cauliflower
semolina bread (pictured)

Saturday lunch
Chickpea soup in crockpot
tempeh pate (adapted from Lorna Sass New Soy Cooking)
fabulous salad brought by guest

Isn't this exciting! I have photographs! This is a picture of the Pane Siciliano from The Bread Baker's Apprentice that I decided to make this past week. I need to use up all the different kinds of flour in the house before Pesach. That was my excuse! Doesn't it look great? It's a great recipe. If you have the book, you will recognize it from the back cover. If you don't, I know you are going online to your public library right now and asking them to reserve it!

The recipe calls for a pre-ferment dough, you actually make a full-fledged French bread dough called a paté fermentée the night before you make the full dough. I made my hamantashen dough and the pre-ferment dough with my son on Wednesday evening. He loves to make dough. He stands on a step stool next to the kitchen table where I cook and says "Dough! Dough! Dough!" and wants to help put ingredients in the bowl. On this evening, I set out all the ingredients and the doorbell rang. I went to answer the door because our apartment is small and I figured I could see him down the hallway. During the time I was getting the door, he dumped almost the entire box of baking soda into the (fortunately) empty mixing bowl of the Kitchen-Aid. It was pretty funny!  I put the baking soda into a plastic container, cleaned the bowl and we kept going.                   
   Here is a photo of my spinach kugel. It's not very easy to photograph kugel. I empathize with the kugel. I am also more appetizing in real life than I am in photographs. Somehow I'm always curling my upper lip or giving myself a double chin. There is really not much you can do to make the nice crust on a kugel appear to good advantage. I didn't even try to take a photo of the carrot soup, because I knew my picture was going to be less beautiful than the one on the page where I got the recipe. Yes, I actually made a recipe that I found by googling. I admit it was in part to facilitate posting about it. I didn't follow every direction in the linked recipe. I realized that they were assuming that I didn't have a blender and that was why they were saying to remove the solids from the soup, squeeze them, process them and then return them to the soup. I just used my immersion blender that I got for making baby food. Those things are dead useful. (That was a Britishism. The author whose book I am editing lived in London for awhile and we have been exchanging British English expressions, like "knackered" and "bollocks." I know those are somewhat rude things to say, but they sound really cute to the American ear.)

Now I have to complain. Everything in these two meals came out very well except the chickpea soup, that same soup that was so incredible the last time I made it. Like many people, I have trouble getting beans to cook in a slow cooker. This time, I soaked the beans, but not for as many hours as the last time, so they didn't cook fully. I do start the soup cooking on "high" for a few hours before Shabbat, but this was not sufficient. I try to make sure that there is at least one hot thing at my Saturday lunch table, in honor of the principle of having a hot meal on Shabbat. But I can't put out a hot plate because there is no surface my two year old can't reach, and anyway we have very few electrical outlets. Our stove is gas and the burners sometimes spontaneously go out, so I don't put a blech (a metal sheet you stick on top of the stove) on top, and our oven automatically shuts off after a few hours. That leaves the crockpot.  Soon it will be too hot for a hot dish to be appetizing, so it won't be an issue.  After Shabbat I simmered the beans in a pot on the stove for a long time, and my son and I ate them for lunch on Monday and Tuesday. He is way into chickpeas.

Our Saturday lunch guest brought a salad with lettuce, fennel, parsley and blood oranges, dressed with some special olive oil. She is a wonderful cook and a raconteuse. She's another one of my peeps that I feel like I never see. She brought me some novels to read, which I unfortunately finished by the end of the weekend. One of them was The White by Deborah Larsen. It's a historical novel that was based largely on a single memoir, which I mean to read. I think I have a huge gap in my education because public schools in the United States teach almost nothing about American Indians. I read Lies My Teacher Told Me finally this year and have been confronting the implications of it for some months.

This week I'm going to a wedding in Philadelphia so I won't be cooking. Catch you later!

Shabbat meals 3/18/05-3/19/05

I can't believe that I spent almost all of Friday cooking  in my pajamas! I must get my act together. I remember I used to work full time and also cook, now I have this little part time gig and I can barely plan a weekday meal. Parenthood can take it out of you.  I know that if I had planned ahead more, I would have had to work a lot less.

These were the menus I planned this week:

Friday evening
challah
red lentil soup (Claudia Roden's infinitely adaptable recipe)
cauliflower and tempeh coconut milk curry (loosely based on a Lorna Sass recipe)
fenugreek sprouts and potatoes curry (based on  a Julie Sahni recipe from
Classic Indian Vegetarian and Grain Cooking)
pineapple fried rice (from Real Vegetarian Thai--really good and easy)

Saturday lunch
Black bean chili (?) in the crock pot
corn bread muffins
leftovers from Friday night
cucumber salad with sushi dressing from Moosewood New Classics

The lentil soup was really good as always, and even better, I just found the recipe posted on the web by this neat peacenik blogger. So now I am even happier that I made it. Sharing a recipe is almost as good as having someone at your table. I hope  that somehow the happy sighing of my sweet guests over the good honest soup at my table will mingle with similar sighs of contentment over at Leila's house.

The problem with cooking "ethnic" food is that it's basically any food that is not from one's own culture. Which means that you have work really hard to get familiar enough to improvise. I am not familiar enough with many Thai and Indonesian ingredients to improvise. For example, lemongrass--I have no idea how to use it correctly. I think from now on, instead of buying fresh lemongrass, I'm going to get bags of lemongrass tea. This time, I was going to use a recipe from Lorna Sass' New Soy Cookbook for tempeh with lemongrass and coconut milk. I didn't have quite enough coconut milk, I thought abstractedly as I chopped the fresh lemongrass into tiny pieces. Then I reread the recipe--uh oh. Didn't I do this once before? You are supposed to put the lemongrass in with other vegetables, and then remove it from the stew before serving. No way I could remove these tiny pieces! So I soaked the lemongrass in boiling water, and then poured off the resulting tea, and then soaked coconut in that, and then removed it, squeezing out the coconut.

So much for the easy recipe I was going to follow to the letter. Anyway, I didn't have the vegetables she called for either, except for the leeks. So then I boiled some cauliflower in water seasoned with turmeric, salt and ginger, and added it to the tempeh with some carrots and frozen organic greenbeans. I also thickened the sauce with cornstarch. It was really an entirely different recipe--bright yellow and really pretty.

The fenugreek sprouts dish calls for fenugreek greens and tiny new potatoes, and butter. I figured sprouts that had greened would have the same bitter flavor as the greens, cut up old winter potatoes would be similar if not the same, and ghee would work instead of butter. All true, but it was definitely not the same dish. I really like the way the sweetness of the potatoes emerges in the bitter greens, butter and black pepper sauce.

(If you want to sprout fenugreek seeds, you can follow the directions here. I let mine green up instead of leaving them small and sweet, since I wanted them for this recipe. This company sells sprouting devices, including the really simple one I have--a perforated plastic lid for a wide-mouth canning jar. I didn't buy mine from them, I got them some 15 years ago at the local food co-op.)

The pineapple rice was also good.

For Saturday lunch I made black bean soup again. It was really improvised, but to give you a feel for it, I soaked and pre-cooked 2 cups of black turtle beans, fried an onion and some garlic in the olive oil from the bottom of the dried tomato jar, and  threw it all together with chopped up bits of canned and  dried tomato, chipotles in adobo, and salt. I realized that with my crockpot, presoaking and even pre-cooking the beans can really help. We finished the soup before Shabbat ended.

My husband and the baby went out and bought frozen dessert and cookies before Shabbos. He thinks it's not a Shabbat meal without dessert. I am afraid the baby is getting his sweet tooth, but he doesn't really get the concept of cookies. He just demands cold cereal. I really think I need to reconsider my ideas about menu planning!

Jews on Juries and Jewish values

I am not sure why I think this is a good thing, but apparently, according to this New York Times story, at least in California, prosecuting attorneys regularly get Jews excluded from juries in death penalty cases. These lawyers perceive both Jews and African American women as inimical to sending defendants to be executed. The weird part of this story is that a defendant is appealing his conviction on the grounds that a Jewish judge told a prosecuting attorney to exclude Jews from the jury. The lawyer who is accusing the judge quoted their conversation this way:

"He said I could not have a Jew on the jury and asked me if I was aware that when Adolf Eichmann was apprehended after World War II there was a major controversy in Israel over whether he should be executed," Mr. Quatman said in his declaration. "Judge Golde said no Jew would vote to send a defendant to the gas chamber. I thanked Judge Golde for his advice and thereafter excused any prospective juror who was Jewish."

One of Judge Golde's two sons, Matthew, is a deputy district attorney in Alameda. The other, Ivan, is a lawyer in Oakland. Both said they were suspicious of Mr. Quatman's timing, because their father was not able to defend himself. The Goldes said their father was opposed to the death penalty, in part because of Jewish religious teachings. He was a member of Temple Sinai in Oakland.

"It is something he had to philosophically struggle with and come to grips with," Matthew Golde said. "I remember having conversations with him about it. He felt it was his duty as a judge."

The sad thing is that this judge might really have given this advice. He mentored attorneys, and apparently this is an accepted practice:

The review found, 17 people who had surnames perceived as Jewish were called, with the prosecution excluding 15 . Over all, the review found non-Jews excluded at a rate of 49.97 percent, and Jews and people with Jewish surnames were excluded at a rate of 93.10 percent.

I feel a perverse pride to be part of a group that is discriminated against for being too merciful. I don't know if that is the only Jewish value that is expressed in Jews' perceived opposition to the death penalty. Maybe we are more doubtful of the certainty of guilt, or maybe we value human life more than other people. Religious Jews believe that human beings are made in the Divine Image. Secular Jews and even Jews who barely know anything about our religious tradition share a memory of being judged unfairly both inside and outside of courtrooms, executed legally or illegally with the support of the local law enforcement. This is something that we share with African American women. Or maybe it is our shared sense that human beings can repent, or that life is the absolute value.

Anyway I'm proud that these racist fools think I oppose the death penalty just based on my name or my appearance. If I am going to be prejudged in any way, I prefer to be prejudged kinder, more humane and less murderous.

Tapioca ignoramus...Shabbat meals 3/11/05 and 3/12/05

On Friday evening there was a potluck. For it I made a lentil sprout curry based on a recipe in Julie Sahni. This was a real Julie Sahni Shabbat. Unfortunately I had to make a lot of substitutions, the original recipe was for mung bean sprouts with mangosteen, but I had lentil sprouts and lemon juice instead. I also threw in some cauliflower. It was very tasty, but not as good as the sprouted lentil curry I learned from Nupur, who emailed it to My Little Kitchen for a monthly food-bloggers' contest, Is My Blog Burning. (Is that a contest, or just a challenge? Maybe I will try to do one.)

For Saturday lunch I made

Rassam (Julie Sahni Classic Indian Vegetarian and Grain Cooking)
Vegetable Curry
Rice
Spinach Kugel (the recipe at the bottom of my long kugel post)
Tapioca pudding again (this time with pineapple)

Since I had already made spinach kugel, I substituted dinosaur (aka lacinata) kale for the spinach in the curry recipe. I don't always like kale, but this variety is usually not bitter, with a lot  of spinachy taste to it. I know it goes against the ethos of Saveur, where I found the recipe, because they don't have kale in India. But was delicious, a real kitchen-sink curry with potatoes and apples and chickpeas and lots of ginger.

I don't understand tapioca. My mom never made it for us, I suppose because it's mushy and she only likes things that are crispy. The first time I tried this recipe, I found that the cooking times were way too short and that I had to reboil the pearls because they didn't get transparent. This time I read the package of tapioca, and saw that both of their recipes called for soaking the pearls in advance. So I did, and when I tried to rinse and drain the pearls I had a gloopy mess! In the end, after some struggles with a sieve and two bowls, I came out with the same nicely cooked tapioca as before. It was really special and delicious, with a half-ring of pineapple on top of each portion and the syrup slowly dripping through to the bottom of the pearls. So I do recommend the recipe but I also hope that someone wise in the ways of this peculiar starch can give me advice!

Julie Sahni's rassam was delicious. I made it in the crockpot! I pre-cooked yellow split peas and then threw the rest of the ingredients in there with extra water. (I also didn't bother to chop up the tomatoes, because I figured they would break down in the pot, which they did.) It was surprisingly salty--I often find that crock pot soups and cholents lose all their salty flavor. But we ate it all before havdalah.

We had great guests for Saturday lunch, a friend from out of town and a newly wed couple. Lots of joking, very relaxed. Our living room is full of my grandmother's bedroom furniture, it looks like a furniture store, but we all hung out in there anyway. My son was in a great mood too. Real menuchah this week!

Theological insights and blogging

My friend D. sent me a link to a Live Journal of one of his friends, someone else who likes to post her Shabbat meals. I noticed that she likes to make lists, I can definitely relate to that.

(There is a poem that begins, "What I like best is making lists of what I like best" but I cannot find it in my bookshelf or through Google. It might not be as good a poem as I remember, but I wish I could post more than that first line here! If you are reading this and know the poem, please let me know what it is.)

I was thinking in schul this past Shabbat morning about the piyyutim (liturgical poems) between the Barchu and the Shma. I realized that the impulse to catalog the things we like is liturgical. Well, okay, I'm being disingenuous because my husband wrote a graduate paper on how this works in Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, and the ways that Whitman was consciously using biblical parallelism. So I know that making long lists of things you love is a feature of liturgical writing. But what came to me, again, on Saturday morning, was the ways that abstract concepts join more representational images in praising God in this section of the liturgy. So, the moon and stars praise God, and the seraphim and ophanim (various holy/angelic beings)  but also the abstract concepts of Tiferet and Gedulah, the Hebrew alphabet, and the Sabbath day itself.

Well, okay and why do I think this is related to blogging? What I like when I read someone else's blog, especially a food blog, is the way that they can evoke their everyday experiences and sensations. It's the same thing that I like about all reading, really, is the "the letters invented by the clever Romans long ago to fool time and distance" (a line from a Grace Paley short story)--the way you can know someone else, even someone very different, and know their life and story. This happens, I think, the way that people attempt to know God, through litanies--I mean through lists, menus, catalogs.

This is why I was so distressed about the issue of lost languages. What you lose are untranslatable jokes, little songs that your great-grandmother made up to sing to your grandmother, and the recipes that she used to make her dinner. All the dumb things that you can't believe people are posting on the Internet, which it turns out are the most important thing in the world.

 

Balabusta is a bit of a dork

I just went to check my referring pages, hoping it would be good for a laugh. I saw that a lot of people were coming to my blog to learn about bread baking, which is great because I have a lot to say about baking bread. But then I began to feel guilty. "People come here seeking vegan challah recipes and I haven't made any vegan challah! I'd better make some! Maybe Mollie Katzen's Lemon Sesame Bread recipe from Enchanted Broccoli Forest is already online. That makes a great vegan challah. It would be unethical to type it in here myself, but perhaps someone already has permission. I'd better search for it." Etc.

Getupgrrl I'm not. People in England have bereaved Jewish friends and want to know what to send to their houses to make them feel better. No one is mistakenly looking for sex toys on my blog. Bummer.

In the meantime I'm meant to be editing a book on the history of anti-Semitism. Really, that's my current remunerative project. I feel enlightened and yet somehow it's just not cheerful. Racism is always upsetting and I keep going "Oh yeah, and this is bumming me out because it's directed at me!" Right.

Cookbooks rock--Shabbat 3/4/05-3/5/05

Friday evening:

Potato and Shallot Soup (From Thai Vegetarian Cooking)
Steamed wontons with crunchy filling (ditto)
Rice noodles with vegetables and curry sauce (ditto)
challah

(passed out in the bed with the baby before I could eat any dessert!)

Saturday lunch:

Chickpea soup with garlic  (based on a recipe from Claudia Roden)
Marinated roasted beets (based on a Mollie Katzen recipe from Still Life with Menu but without the cheese and mint)
Cauliflower Fritters
(plus, our one guest brought spinach salad and marinated green beans!)
challah
organic mango
Paul Newman orange chocolate chip cookies
mango fruit leather

I decided that if I was going to break out of my rut, I had better consult a cookbook. I have a copy of Thai Vegetarian Cooking by Vatcharin Bhumichitr. It's out of print, but you can buy it online. There is a lot to like about this book. The food is really great--the author, a chef, explains that there is no vegetarian tradition in Thailand, but that Thai vegetarians just eat regular Thai food with the meat omitted, and a lot of dishes that just happen not to have any meat in them. The food is photographed beautifully in Thailand against backdrops that are somehow thematically related to the dishes. Since I have never been to Thailand, I love looking at the photos. You can't get all the ingredients for every dish but it's still worth reading for the ideas.

(I also have a copy of Real Vegetarian Thai, by Nancie McDermott. The author is not Thai and she doesn't run a restaurant, but she is more aware of  which ingredients people in the US can obtain. She has a very nice authorial persona, very likeable, and she writes some lovely passages about being a Peace Corps volunteer in a small town in Thailand. Many of the dishes are good and pretty easy to make, but a lot of the main courses don't look pretty when you present them. I really like my Shabbat food to be beautiful to see as well as eat. I do use the book though. I made her very delicious roasted chili paste and almost burnt us out of the house with the fumes! My favorite dish from this book was probably the Pad Se Ew, stir-fried rice noodles with sweet soy sauce, fried eggs and broccoli, but it's more of a weeknight dish. Perhaps I will blog some about weeknight cooking.)

I made the wontons on Thursday morning in about 45 minutes with my toddler helping me. It was really easy, even though we had a small episode of rubbing onion juice in our eyes. (Oy!) I realize that next time I can just chop all the filling ingredients--onions, water chestnuts, bamboo shoots-- in the food processor. Like a lot of the recipes in this book, this one calls for coriander root, which you can't get very easily, so I use the stems, mashed with black peppercorns. The only thing that's challenging about steamed dumplings is figuring out how to steam them without having them stick to the steamer. I also made the soup on Thursday--it's a very good soup. It's kind of neat to come up with a new soup made of potatoes, onions and carrots!

The noodle dish was great for our family, because I served the curry sauce, vegetables and noodles separately. My son loves rice noodles, broccoli and green beans, so he was very happy. I also put out my home-grown bean sprouts and some store-bought potato chips. (It seems homemade potato chips are a part of native Thai cuisine!) I didn't really like the way my curry sauce came out, but I might try again and tinker with it.

The best thing I made was the Saturday soup. If I hadn't read the Claudia Roden book, I'm sure I would have added many more ingredients, but since I saw her recipe for Tunisian chickpea soup I stayed with just chickpeas, garlic, cumin and water. At the table I put in little croutons of whole wheat toast in the bottoms of the bowls and drizzled them with olive oil, and then put the soup in and gave everyone lemon wedges to squeeze on top. It was so good! I think one thing that made it work was remembering to pre-soak the chickpeas on Thursday night so that they were very soft before they even went into the pot. Our guest D. talked about how happy it made him to eat the simple soup. The beets were also really good, as always.

The only dish I actually invented on this list was the cauliflower, and I based it on a recipe from the Millenium cookbook. I broke up a head of cauliflower into large florettes and steamed it lightly for seven minutes. Then I filled one bowl with one cup of soy milk and two tablespoons of mustard, and another bowl with a combination of cornmeal and flour. To the flour I added some curry powder that my husband mixed awhile ago, the Hyderabad curry powder from Julie Sahni, and some other spices: cumin seeds, thyme, paprika, coriander. I dredged the cauliflower in the flour and spices, then dipped it in the milk/mustard zutz, then dredged again. I fried the coated cauliflower in hot fat until it was crispy. By the time we served it, it was all soft and not that great. We slathered it with mango chutney and that made it tastier.