Sabbath Meals

RH, Shabbat Shuvah, YK and Shabbat 10/14/05

I've done a lot less cooking than you might expect from someone who blogs about Shabbat cooking. For Rosh HaShanah, we were invited out for the first night and first day lunch, went to a potluck for second night dinner, and did a cooperative meal at our house for second day lunch. So not much cooking for me there.

I made a huge pot of clear vegetable soup with egg and flour dumplings for the potluck. I got the dumpling recipe from the Claudia Roden Book of Jewish Food--they are sort of amoeba shaped and kind of cross between matzah balls and the eggs in egg drop soup. In other words, really good. I had to make that soup again and again for successive meals. Everyone had colds and I put a lot of ginger and black pepper in the soup. I made another pot for second day lunch, and a totally wonderful non-dairy polenta lasagne. I put it together from the component parts of two recipes in The Moosewood Restaurant New Classics. I need to type out the recipe so maybe I'll do that later and post it separately.

For Shabbat Shuvah I made a pretty boring menu:

red lentil soup with lemon, garlic and mint
cauliflower and chickpea curry with coconut milk
brown rice
roasted beet salad with fresh basil
carrot kugel

My son ate up all the carrot kugel. We had leftovers of the rich curry, no one was in the mood for that this week.

For Yom Kippur, I totally forgot that I had to prepare food for the pre-fast meal and the breakfast. For the prefast meal I whipped up another batch of vegetable soup with egg and flour dumplings. We had to eat it before 5PM to get to Kol Nidre services, and we were late anyway. We brought nothing to the communal breakfast. I felt guilty about that, but to assuage my guilt, everyone else brought heavily dairy food that we were afraid to eat because we thought we'd be sick to our stomachs.

I led children's services on both Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur. My children's services aren't really services. When I was a kid, my parents brought us to these great family services at my totally formal, elegant Reform Temple. There was a choir and an organ, and majestic English prayers in the old Union prayerbook. Not very Jewish, but I recall puzzling over "he that hath clean hands and a pure heart, who hath not taken my name in vain and hath not sworn deceitfully." I always got a lot out of those services, though maybe not what I would want my child to get out of Jewish prayer. I was a sanctimonious little girl, and I loved elevated language. Well, that part is still true.

My "service" is more like a little class, to make sure everyone knows what the holiday is about, what are the greetings, what's happening in the services, what's a shofar, what does "sealed in the book of life" mean, that kind of thing.  Then we read a story and discuss it, and make a brachah and have snack. The group is generally mixed, little toddlers with children of eight or nine, and some parents, so it has to kind of reach them all. Little kids are very thoughtful, from about age four or so, they can talk about sin and repentence with a lot of intelligence. Given the chance, I mean. This was the first year I also did the Rosh HaShanah service, and I decided that instead of talking about sin, we would talk about what a new year marks. I asked them when their birthdays were and also...when baseball season starts, and when is the World Series. (The boy in day school perked up at that.)  The older children were very interested in the whole idea of the lunisolar calendar. It's too bad I understand the science of calendar making so poorly.

I also led the Neilah service on Yom Kippur. For those not in the know, this is the last service of the 25 hour fast. The usual custom is to open the ark in which the Torah scrolls are kept, so that everyone is obligated to stand. Neilah means locking, it's the service of the shutting of the gates of repentence. I always find this a moving service, and our congregation prays it with tremendous feeling, everyone kind of egging each other on. They sing loudly and people weep. Well, I always do, maybe not everyone does, but I think I'm not the only one.  I must not be, we have kleenex boxes out everywhere. Leading this group, when I get to the line: "Anu ma'amerecha, v'ata ma'amerenu" (forgive bad transliteration--roughly--we are your choice, and you are our choice) I feel a rush and I tremble.

Okay one more menu--this weekend I made:

red lentil soup--just with lemon and curry powder, made at the last minute
broccoli and carrot kugel--improvised
roasted sweet and white potatoes with garlic and shallots
baked tofu (the usual, garlic, sesame oil and tamari with black pepper, random proportions)

Yes, it was boring but everything was easy to put together and very good. We were invited out for lunch, where we had some pleasurably spiritual discussion of the meaning of blessing God. Then after lunch, we sang the grace after meals out loud and then some zmirot, which we don't always do. My son sat up in a chair, wearing a kippah and a serious expression, and clapped along with the bensching (the grace) and then with the singing. It was beautiful to see, also to hear him say "Amen!" at all the right places and to repeat "shabbat menuchah!" in his sweet little voice. Life has so many pleasures.

We saw the penguin movie!

We finally took my two year old to see March of the Penguins. We went to the movie theater after his nap, with an insulated bag full of snacks (grapes, cucumber slices and cheddar cheese). We bought popcorn and bottled water, and sat in the middle of the theater.

Amazingly, my son was able to sit through the whole picture. He did switch laps a few times. He was very excited about the movie. As soon as the penguins appeared on the screen, he began saying "Penguins! Penguins!" and didn't stop for about 20 minutes, maybe longer. Then there was a lull, in which he just watched and ate treats. Then the egg appeared, and he started exclaiming "Egg! Egg!" and then was quiet again until the chicks. The chicks excited him the most, he commented on them and on their parents feeding them, as he does at home. But then, for him, the most exciting part was looking behind him and seeing the movie on the surface of the window of the projectionist's booth! After the picture was over, we asked the projectionist to let us see how the movie works, and he graciously showed us. How much my son understood I don't know, but it was neat.

Let me also tell you something about the movie, especially to my reader Beth who has to wait until it comes out on DVD to see it.  As you probably have gathered, it's a scripted documentary about  emperor  penguins mating and raising young in Antarctica. The film, a full-length feature at 80 minutes, has great pacing. It felt short! The penguins are beautiful, getting to watch them walk and slide over the landscape was incredible. The film editor managed to capture both the sense of the birds' nobility and grace and how comic and cute they are.

Probably the most beautiful thing to watch was the mating dance. The emperors bow to each other, and caress each other with their beaks and heads, before they mate. It looked stylized but also affectionate, if that makes sense. I couldn't tell if I was anthropomorphizing the birds or whether they have the emotions we ascribe to them. It's really hard to raise penguin chicks, there are so many opportunities to screw it up. After the mothers lay their eggs, they have to transfer them to the father's feet. If they fail, the egg will freeze quickly. The cries of the penguins who made this mistake sounded disappointed, they looked sad. Penguin chicks, once they hatch, are similarly vulnerable. The filmmaker captured a mother whose chick had frozen during a blizzard, who then tried to steal another mother's chick. The bereft mother's cries of grief, and then the way that the other mothers prevented her from stealing the chick--it felt biblical to me.

We are definitely going to buy this on DVD because I hope there will be more information about how they made the film. There were some shots of the camera crew in the credits, but not nearly enough.

I don't know if my son will stay infatuated with penguins but I am definitely hooked. I am not the most perfectly religious person, but seeing beautiful things in the natural world brings out my inner believer. The penguins are brave and noble and they cooperate in community, they love each other, they stick together in a crisis. They also fight with each other, slapping each other with their flippers and yelling in their honking voices. They walk funny and they have sweetly funny faces. Yes, yes, just like my people.

last week's cooking and a preview of this week

I am quite behind on blogging! I have been looking for a full time job. I have two interviews set up for next week. In addition, I have taken on a second freelance job. Also, and this is crucial, every time that I'm near my computer that my son is awake, I have to look at penguins. I have a lot of new links for my new penguin fan readers. But in this post I am going to try to catch up on blogging my cooking.

Last weekend our family had dinner together, just the three of us, and then we had a bunch of friends to the house for lunch. I baked challah and it was incredibly good and I was not too exhausted to do it and also cook. I am getting into making the pull-apart yud beis loaves. This week I think I'm going to skip baking because it's so hot and I have to get a haircut tomorrow morning so I'll be presentable at my job interviews.

The exciting thing in last week's cooking was making a stuffed zucchini recipe from Fresh from the Vegetarian Slow Cooker. I borrowed the cookbook because I know that my readers are all having the same problems I am making vegetarian (and even omnivorous) cholent. I want to test a lot of the recipes and ideas so I can report back. I tested out this recipe for zukes stuffed with chipotle rice. The recipe was excellent--I mean the rice stuffing was nicely spiced and tasty-- and the cooker worked pretty well. You don't add liquid and the zucchinis sweat water into the pot. My cooker is a bit slow and I also stacked two layers of zukes. I think I need some practice.

This week I am going to do it again! I will be using another stuffed squash recipe. My husband bought Lebanese squash (called koosa) at the farmer's market. I want to make a Middle Eastern stuffed zucchini. The most traditional Lebanese recipe is with lamb and rice. You can find it on the Dove's food website, and also a nice zucchini with cheese dish. But we don't eat meat or cheese, so I'm going to have to improvise and let you know. (I never write about Middle East politics here--I can leave that to the Dove and other voices in my blogroll. They all disagree with each other on major things and are all smart, let them be like the chorus of commentators in the margins of the Talmud. Except more upsetting.)

I also made a very nice cold spinach soup.

Very Nice Cold Spinach Soup
1 onion, chopped
3 tablespoons olive oil
3 small Yukon Gold potatoes, chopped
1 bunch fresh spinach, rinsed obsessively and chopped
2 cups soy milk (or to taste)
salt and pepper

Sauté onion in oil in your soup pot until onion is golden and very sweet, about 20 minutes. Add potatoes and turn in the oil to flavor them. Add about 5 cups water and simmer another 30 minutes or until potatoes are tender. Turn off the heat and put the spinach on top. Stir it in so that it melts into the soup. Take your trusty immersion blender and purée the soup. Add soy milk to make it the right consistency and chill. Season with salt and pepper after it is cold. (It doesn't have to be soy milk, use whatever milky thing you like: rice milk, oat milk, almond milk, cow milk, goat milk, sheep milk, yak milk...whatever floats your boat.)

I also made Kasha Varnishkas, which everyone, but especially my toddler, loves.

Okay, more cooking tomorrow!

Gosh! Penguin Synchronicity!

I had no idea that National Geographic was about to release a new documentary about penguins! I found out about it from my weekly New Yorker. My son and I immediately found the official website for March of the Penguins, where we watched the trailer. We probably watched it twenty times. Morgan Freeman is the narrator, what could be more awesome!

Sad and hard things might happen in the world, oh and they certainly do,  but my downy Emperor chick
and I are going to the movies!  (The photo below is from Guillaume Dargaud's site, not the movie. I puffy heart Guillaume Dargaud.)

Penguins for Toddlers

I have a problem with television. If there is one available, I will watch it. I used to have a great relief in Shabbat when I couldn't turn on the TV. In fact, this might have been one of the factors that led me to greater halachic observance. I fear that the computer and the seductive Internet has taken the place of television for me. It certainly has a special place in my son's life, ever since I made the mistake of showing him that we could find pictures and even video of anything we liked using the Google search engine.

First we looked for peachtrees and appletrees. Then I thought, "Wouldn't it be interesting for him to see photographs of all the animals that appear in Where's Spot?" The first animal we looked for was the penguin. What I didn't realize is that penguins are incredibly fun to watch, beautiful and elegant but cute and funny at the same time. Whenever he sees my computer, my son says "More penguins!"

This is a perfect example about what's right with the Internet. When I was a child, I probably could have told you that penguins were black and white and waddled. Now I know that there are 17 species of penguin living all over the planet, all different sizes. What really surprised me is that they have song! We always saw silent photos or film of them. Plus, you think, it's snowy, it's cold, it's quiet.  Now, with a few clicks of the mouse, you can see and hear a family of  rare yellow-eyed penguins of New Zealand  in photos and video taken by a teacher from New York. (I really want to write to her and thank her, it's such a moving thing to see.) A French photographer and adventure hiker has made available his incredible photographs and sound recordings taken at the South Pole of Adelie and Emperor penguins. There are also several sites with information for children about penguins: this one has a 12 image penguin slideshow with text, which is just the right length for my two year old, and this page has another similar one, with even briefer text.

My son has learned that a penguin baby is called a chick and  that when they want to eat they peck at their mommy or daddy and the parent gives them food in their mouth. ("Chick" is not the easiest word for him to say, it comes out "shick!") He can say the words "waddle!" and "rookery!"  I am getting him some penguin children's books with actual photographs and not drawings, so that we can look at them together on Shabbat. I will let you know which ones I actually get and how they work out. With the long Shabbat afternoons in the summer, it may be a cooling and calming activity for us when we aren't on the swingset in our schul's backyard. I am kind of psyched that it's penguins for now and not trucks or dinosaurs...

Shabbat meals, 6/3 and 6/4/05

I didn't post any meals for last week. We went out of town to my mother-in-law's house. I did bake a challah to bring to her, but I didn't do any cooking. I didn't even make a salad! My mother-in-law is a great cook, she makes plain but tasty vegetarian food. She always makes the salad in the mode of Adele Davis, dressing the greens with oil and lemon and putting some spice blend on them.

This week, my parents came to visit. For Friday evening, I made:

Challah
spinach with chickpeas (Claudia Roden, New Book of Middle Eastern Food)
tomato rice (ditto)
roasted brussel sprouts with olive oil and garlic
roasted beets in mustard vinaigrette
baked tofu with lemon and sesame

for Saturday lunch:
challah
Potato-leek-carrot cold puréed soup
green salad with romaine, arugula, walnuts, oranges and dried cherries
(and lemon-sesame dressing)
Israeli cous-cous with French lentils (Moosewood New Basics)
leftover beets and brussel sprouts

One thing that was super about this meal was the challah. I made two batches by hand simultaneously--meaning I had two bowls going. I let my son put raisins in one of the doughs. He measured out a full cup of yellow raisins and then added some more! When I made the loaves, I decided that one should be a "yud-beis" challah--a pull-apart challah with 12 sections. I made each section out of a knotted roll. It looked like a crown.

Another thing that was good was providing beets for my mom and brussel sprouts for my dad. They were both really happy to have a vegetable they each like but don't each much at home. The beets recipe is one my mother-in-law makes that my son liked a lot. My dad is a big fan of puréed potato soups, this one was just very slightly golden from the carrots. It was very creamy and I didn't need to add any soy or rice milk to make it flow.

It's very hard to cook for my mom, because 1) she's always on a diet and 2) she likes to express her disapproval frequently, and this extends to not liking food I've made. But I am most grateful to say, it does not extend to my son, who is the apple of her eye. Both of my parents are completely wonderful grandparents. They are generous with gifts and with time and with love. My son figured out that they would each read to him if he asked, and kept walking books over to them.

I tried to make sorbet in my ice cream maker, and wound up sticking the whole bowl of the ice cream maker back in the freezer full of slush. I didn't have to mix anything together, I just took a relatively sweet bottled mango juice and poured three cups of it into the device. So it wasn't like I lost much effort there. The slush finally froze and we are eating it slowly now that Shabbat is over.

Shabbat meals 5/13/05-5/14/05

Friday night:
Challah
Carrot Rice Pilaf (from Claudia Roden's New Book of Middle Eastern Food)
Spinach with Chickpeas (Claudia Roden)
Baby artichoke pie with crumb crust
Roasted Zucchini with Lemon
Beets in orange sauce
sorbet and Tofutti Cuties

Saturday lunch:
leftovers of all of the above plus
guacamole
green salad
fruit salad (mango, orange, apple, yellow raisins)

Seudah Shlishit:
salad and cold cereal with raisins

My two year old son loves to prepare baby artichokes, we did them together for the first time during Passover. When we were in the store on Wednesday I mentioned that we would buy them and he became quite enthusiastic! I know he is bolder about actually taking off enough leaves than I am. You have to break off so many leaves that the remaining leaves are yellow at the bottom and all the same length, then you slice off the tops of the leaves so that the artichoke looks squared off and yellow. So there I had my nicely trimmed flowers--I like to leave on some of the stem, because it's tasty, and that makes them look even more floral. I thought, how about a quiche? I improvised a crust based on one of the ones in Mollie Katzen's Enchanted Broccoli Forest. (I see that I have linked to the New Enchanted Broccoli Forest, and my tattered copy is the old edition.  I learned a lot of cooking skills from the old book and haven't seen the new one.)

Anyway, my pie. It was just okay, not very special. Plain, unmarinated artichokes discolor the custard in a quiche, at least if you make the custard with rice milk they do. I also included a hard boiled egg at the last minute, and the chemicals in the egg yolk and the artichoke did not like each other and made some weird bright green streaks. Everyone who ate the pie liked it, but it was in my estimation not a successful experiment.

Also, you shouldn't make Persian rice with brown basmati if you have never successfully made it with white basmati rice. Everyone thought the carrot rice was great because it was sweet, but I am not sure that I did that right!  If only I had an Iranian grandmother stashed away somewhere that I could call. I bet one of my readers does. I have an Iraqi-Jewish grandma (a friend's mom) but she can't really cook at all. I went to interview her for a class I was teaching on Jewish food and we wound up talking about the history of Zionism and how she learned to shoot pool in the Zionist youth movement in India in the 1940s. But I digress, big time.

The beets were mind-bogglingly delicious. Try that recipe, it's good. I used raspberry vinegar, too.

Apparently authentic guacamole is made with fruit, at least according to Diana Kennedy. I did not make authentic guacamole. I made midwestern Ashkenazi Jewish guacamole. I finely chopped a shallot because I knew that the last time we had guac, the red onion was way too strong, and I added that to three mashed avocados and the juice of two lemons. Then I finely chopped a very wintery tomato and mixed it in. It was good. I guess tomatoes are fruit. Why am I self-conscious about cultural appropriation with Mexican food and not at all worried about chickpeas and spinach?

We had Friday night guests, two exhausted friends. One is doing finals--in school and also working-- and one is pregnant (and working). I found pregnancy hormones like a 40 week soporific. My son has been increasingly interested in social interaction with adults in his life, and was very happy to have our friends there. For Saturday lunch, we had our very close friend and a new person from schul, but my son napped through the whole meal.

My husband encouraged me to blow off schul on Saturday morning because we got a late start and he was worried that I wouldn't get the baby home on time for his nap. Usually he does the nap but this week wanted to read Torah for the anniversary of his bar-mitzvah. My son and I took a walk around the neighborhood and went to the playground. Does it count if you hear the leyning practiced around the house? My son has decided that he wants to know more about the tikkun (the book from which one practices cantillation of the Torah portion.) There is something very sweet about this. My friends' child has begun to say "Torah! Torah!" when the scroll is removed from the ark. I know at two my son is below the official age of education in Judaism, but I want him to have many strong and positive impressions under his belt.

Balabusta and Babar

I was in Paris once, for five days, with my mother. I took Spanish in school, after a long discussion of the relative merits of French and Spanish in a Chinese restaurant with my parents when I was eight. (We got foreign languages in public elementary school in those years.) Finally I flipped a coin. I did pass my French reading exam in graduate school, but mainly because I am the queen of cognates and also because I pleaded with the professor who graded the exam. Also in graduate school, I learned to pretentiously over-pronounce French words. We used to laugh about professors doing that when I was in college ("fon fon fon!") but I didn't get the hang of it myself until my second semester in a PhD program.

I realized that many of my fond images of Paris come from the book Babar Loses His Crown by Laurent de Brunhoff. My parents dug out a bunch of my old children's books from the basement for my son, and Babar was hands down his absolute favorite. I didn't blame him. Reading the page with the picture of the elephants on a train, "'I will show you everything', Babar said. 'You will love Paris.'" My son is in a phase of both repeating any interesting two or three word phrase or polysyllabic word that catches his ear, and of completing sentences in books he has heard read more than once. In the Babar book, he was captivated by the Eiffel Tower, by Arthur standing in the sun to dry his clothes, and by Zephir knocking over a box of live fish in the market.

Babar Loses His Crown is set in a most beautiful Paris. My husband and I are fantasizing about going with our son and our yoga teacher (who used to live in Paris) for a visit. Couldn't we help her arrange to teach yoga there, and eat macrobiotic food with her? We could go along as, uh, journalists. Yeah, that's it! Also there is a Babar and yoga connection. Our teacher has a Babar yoga poster on the fridge in her studio where we take classes with her.

But I'm not sure whether we should actually read any more Babar books together. I know I'm not the only one worrying about this. Herbert Kohl has written an essay deploring the values in Babar. I read Alison Lurie's long review of Babar in the New York Review of Books. She summarizes Kohl's argument and doesn't exactly dismiss it, but kind of mutes Kohl's and Ariel Dorfman's critique of Babar by showing Laurent de Brunhoff's remorse for the racism in his first contribution to the series. Laurent was the son of Jean de Brunhoff, who wrote the first Babar stories, including the initial book in which a hunter kills Babar's mother. (Lurie also mentions that Jean de Brunhoff's brother was the editor of French Vogue, which makes a lot of sense to me!) Lurie seems to be pardoning Laurent for the problems of the early books. But she doesn't really address Kohl's criticisms that Babar is rich without working, that he imposes colonial values on his elephant kingdom, etc. Lurie does have a strong analysis of the role of clothing in that imposition of human values, where human means French cultural values. It is funny to see Babar and his family eating pommes frites and drinking wine at a sidewalk cafe.

You could use the same logic to critique Richard Scarry, and I suppose a score of other children's books in which animals appear in clothing and eat human food (Pigs eating bacon, how disgusting, how White Album, how treif.)

On the other hand, there is another side to reading Babar. After all, this was my special book from childhood. There is some value in just reading the same books, either across geography or across a generational divide. Books defeating time and space. Movingly to me, the Deaf children in Nicaragua who invented their own sign language used Babar as one of their foundational stories.

Aleman learned Nicaraguan Sign Language at 15, a relatively late age. Intelligence and hard work, however, have enabled him to master the idiom with almost total fluency. "I couldn't learn the language earlier," he signs, "because I grew up in the forest. It was during the war, too, and since my father was a contra, we were always hiding, being hunted down by Sandinistas. So I remember guns, fear, hiding. When I came to Bluefields I was amazed. I was like" -- he pauses for a moment -- Babar in the big city going in the elevator for the first time."

I remembered reading this article when it first appeared in the New York Times Magazine and thinking, "Oh, there is a shared canon of children's literature." It's ironic that Kohl has an essay against Babar when he was one of the first hearing educators to advocate for US Deaf children to learn at school in ASL.   Here's how Ariel Dorfman dealt with this issue:

Soon after we began to talk, he launched into a critique of Babar, the French elephant whose adventures were chronicled for children by Jean de Brunhoff. I was particularly interested because de Brunhoff's books had been icons of my childhood.

Ariel described vividly the way de Brunhoff in his elegant, oversized picture books had tortured history into the shape of a colonial tale that fit well with the French imperial mission civilatrice. He was dazzling and convincing. And yet, as I listened, I felt a certain sadness. Who, after all, could look at de Brunhoff's monkey village with its shops and restaurants hanging like little submarines from the trees, or the mermaids who inhabited his offshore islands, or those vast painted elephant butts, which unforgettably sent a whole army of terrified Rhinos into retreat, without mourning the fact that these might now be exiled from the child's world?

Finally, I asked hesitantly, "So what do you do with your sons and Babar?" He looked at me with astonishment -- because Ariel is a bit larger than life, he did a genuine double take -- and then responded as if this were the only conceivable answer in our world or any other, "I read Babar to them." Believe me, you recognize sanity when it stares you in the face; you recognize the kind of impurity that makes a decent world possible, that makes life worth the bother.

Anyway, Kohl thinks you can teach children to read critically by age three or four. I don't know if that's critical reading or just indoctrination. Or communicating your values, which is a more positive way to say it. Hope you can pull some interesting thoughts out of these musings, and the ones that will surely follow on other children's books. I have definitely indoctrinated communicated my values about reading to my son!

 

Passover cooking!

We went to my parents' house for Pesach and as usual, I did a lot of the cooking. This year my mom was pretty good about letting me take part in the meal planning. Probably if I had planned the meals myself I wouldn't have chosen a list of vegetables I knew my father didn't like. I even said, "You know, Daddy doesn't like any of those vegetables" and my mom replied, "Your father never eats any vegetables at the seder anyway." I thought that was hilarious.

Anyway, we arrived Thursday and this is what we made:

artichokes (1st night--this recipe is from Joan Kekst, a Passover maven who writes for the Cleveland Jewish News)
boiled potatoes
boiled eggs
Passover rolls
homemade horseradish
gefilte fish (not homemade, just plated!) 
chicken soup for matzah balls
vegetarian vegetable soup for matzah balls
asparagus (steamed plain)
Chicken—two kinds (made by my mom)
Stuffed eggplant Provençal (adapted from Sundays at Moosewood--2nd night)
Sweet potato kugel (from No Cholesterol Passover Recipes by Debra Wasserman)
sweet and sour leeks (from Claudia Roden New Middle Eastern Cookbook)
two savory matzah kugels (2)
apple matzah kugel
Tzimmes (from Nira Rousso The Passover Gourmet, one of my mom's favorite books)
Cut vegetable platter
Glazed beets (which my mom makes, yucky feh)

Desserts/Baking
Fruit compote (my mom's)
Meringues (my mom made these from a new recipe that I don't know)
Brownies (two varieties, my great-aunt's recipe)
Sponge cake (my great-aunt's chocolate-wine cake recipe)

For Shabbat, I made some roasted cauliflower and potatoes with garlic and some steamed spinach, and we ate one of the savory matzah kugels. My mom also served soup chicken to the meat eaters.

We served the artichokes at karpas, when we handed around the saltwater, boiled potatoes and parsley. I thought this was my original idea, until my mom said that Joan Kekst had suggested artichokes in her column. My sister helped me pare them, which was fun--we cut each one in half and removed the choke, peeled the stem so we could leave it intact, and then snipped off the thorns at the tops of the leaves. I love artichokes and this was a good recipe. What was even more fun was that my son learned to say "artichoke." I think that karpas is a vestige of some Hellenistic salad course, so it makes sense to me to serve a healthy portion of appetizers then. That way, people can sit through more of the seder service without whining.

Though I am apparently not the first person to think of using this recipe in my seder (which I didn't know until I googled) I am going to give you my adaptation of the eggplant recipe from Sundays at Moosewood, with the caveat that you really should get this book for yourself because it is so wonderful.

Stuffed Eggplant Provençal
from Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant (Simon and Schuster, 1990)p. 551-553.
Adapted for Pesach

3 medium or large eggplants (I used 4 small)
1/4 cup olive oil
salt

Slice the eggplants, in half brush with olive oil and sprinkle with salt. Bake in a 500 degree oven for 20 minutes. Turn oven down to 350.

Filling:
2 cups chopped onion
2 garlic cloves
2 carrots
1 red bell pepper, finely chopped
1 cup diced zucchini
(original recipe also calls for 1/4 cup mushrooms)
1/2 cup pine nuts
2 tablespoons currants or other raisins
1 tablespoon fresh marjoram
1 tablespoon fresh thyme

Sauté onions first for 10 minutes until translucent, then garlic and carrots for another 10 minutes, and then add the rest of stuffing ingredients and cook another 15 minutes.

Topping:

Sauté 2 garlic gloves in 1/2 cup olive oil and then add 2 cups matzah meal. I add salt because since the original recipe calls for bread crumbs and parmesan cheese, it needs salt when you make it with matzah meal.

Push the flesh of the cooked eggplant with a spoon, creating hollows to stuff. Stuff the eggplant generously until all the stuffing is evenly distributed among the eggplants. Pat the topping firmly on top of the stuffing so it doesn’t fall out and bake eggplants for 30 minutes in a 350 degree oven.

I made the horseradish by soaking the whole root in water for a couple of hours. Then I peeled it with a vegetable peeler and grated it on the smallest holes of a box grater while wearing super-duper rubber gloves. The fumes were so strong that my father could feel them blast him as he entered the kitchen. The key to very strong horseradish is to keep it moist, and it's best to grate it as finely as you can. I added cider vinegar, sugar and salt according to the instructions of one of my mom's many community cookbooks. I can't tell you proportions, but I added enough vinegar to make it moist, a teaspoon of sugar and a half teaspoon salt. It was very good.

Another reason to miss my grandmother: I think I'm the only one left at the table who really loves horseradish. The second night, my second cousin came with her husband, who is from Venezuela, and he was completely smitten with the horseradish, so that was nice.

Perhaps I will put some more recipes in another post. I think my posts get a bit unwieldy to read, and this was a very long cooking session! To close, let me say that if you like sweet things at all, you had better make that Epicurious apple-matzah kugel because it is so delicious that you could faint, and it's especially good if you use green and red apples together.

Okay, I love you! I hope you are having a wonderful Pesach and being liberated!

Shabbat meals 4/15/05 and 4/16/05

Friday
Leek Spinach Pie
Potato curry with poppy seed masala (from Vegetarian Punjabi by Nita Mehta)
Steamed asparagus
Cauliflower Curry (cooked by my dear husband)

Saturday
more of the same plus green salad with watercress, peas, cucumber and oranges

My husband was surprised that I said he had purchased the Nita Mehta cookbook for me! No, he fully intended to re-enter the Shabbat cooking club at our house. In fact, he has already made a pea and potato curry from the book, which he enjoyed very much, while I was out of town for the wedding two Shabbatot ago.

This week I made a potato and poppy seed curry from the Nita Mehta book. It was quite easy and good, and featured kalonji (nigella, not to be confused with Nigella Lawson, another Jewish cooking celebrity and all-around cutie) as well as the white poppy seeds. No, it did not taste like mun hamantashen, as I feared.  Now, if you go to her website, you will see that Nita Mehta is New Delhi's answer to Martha Stewart. She has cookbooks in every style of Indian cooking (apparently the right word is "khanna") in both vegetarian and omniverous versions, in English or in Hindi. Also, she can teach you how to make vegetarian or non-vegetarian specialties from other countries, including China.

Variation on a Theme by Theodore Geisel

We took a look
we saw a Nook
on his head he had a hook
on his hook he had a book
on his book was How to Cook by Nita Mehta.

But a Nook can't read
so a Nook can't cook
and anyway a Nook doesn't know the Hindi word for poppy seeds
so what good to a Nook is a hook cook book by Nita Mehta?

You can guess what I have been reading to my two year old: cookbooks and One Fish Two Fish. I am a little nervous that he is going to think that a Gack is a real animal. He is in a cool phase of repeating all two word phrases or any polysyllabic word he thinks is interesting. He likes the word Passover (pronounced Pah-Oh!) and the word peachtree, which he says correctly but with a little pause between the first and second syllables.

Anyway we have learned a lot about Indian cooking but there is so much more to learn. We do know enough to realize that the recipe for cauliflower curry we found should not be on a website for north Indian recipes where we found it, since it's precisely like several recipes we have for south Indian dishes. It's a good recipe though. My husband made it perfectly. It was, as our favorite Shabbat guest always says, "delicate." (It's also true that we know you aren't really supposed to serve vegetable curries with no rice and no rotis, at room temperature, etc. etc. But we do it anyway. If it's not authentic, it's still very tasty.)

Here is my recipe for the leek and spinach pies I made. I know, I know, it's more frozen spinach. Okay, but I had to use up frozen spinach! Also I had to use up flour, so I used whole wheat bread flour instead of whole wheat pastry flour for this. The crust was pretty flaky anyway.

Crust:
1/2 cup Earth Balance margarine (two sticks)
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 cups whole wheat flour
1 tablespoon brown rice vinegar and 2 tablespoons water

Blend all of the above in a food processor until it makes a ball. Divide the pie crust dough into two halves. Roll out between sheets of waxed paper. (I don't have pie crust expertise, so I always use the waxed paper trick.) Put a bottom crust into each of two  9" pie plates. Put the pie crusts in the fridge while you make the filling.

Filling:

four leeks
two 10 oz. bags frozen chopped organic spinach, thawed
2 T. fat
1 T. prepared mustard (approx.)
4 eggs
about 1 cup rice milk
tamari and black pepper

Chop the leeks coarsely  and wash them in a colander to remove all dirt. Chop cleaned leeks finely in the food processor. Sauté the leeks in margarine or oil or whatever until wilted and sweet. Mix the leeks and spinach in the pan. Whisk the eggs with the rice milk and mustard to make a custard and add the vegetables, season with tamari and pepper. Pour half the filling into each crust and bake in a 350 degree oven for 30-40 minutes or until the stop is firm and lightly browned. (My husband graciously removed the pies from the oven while I was out doing an errand with the baby.)

Oddly enough, my son, the former spinach fiend, was only interested in eating the crust of the pie. It was whole wheat crust, and he's a relatively skinny toddler, so no tears, but it's weird. I thought the filling was delicious, but he didn't try it so he didn't like it. He did eat a lot of salad, mainly the cucumbers, peas and oranges.

This Shabbat marked the first time my son enjoyed a cup of tea. His dad, who usually drinks coffee, was having herbal tea to nurse this cold that he can't seem to entirely kick. So when my little sweetie began to talk about "Tea! Tea!" his dad poured him a demitasse of this nice spice tea and diluted it with a little water to cool it off. After each sip of tea, my son smiled widely, that especially charming two-year-old smile.

We had only one guest, for Shabbat lunch, our good friend who finds the cooking "delicate." My husband was a bit under the weather and we couldn't handle more. Our conversations were deep and personal, mostly. We did talk about Indian food and cooking, as our friend has developed a sudden interest in Indian culture. If you want to recommend a book that is  not superficial on Indian culture--okay, I guess any book that covers all of Indian is going to be necessarily superficial. If you want to recommend a book that is not that superficial on Indian culture, please do.