Sabbath Meals

Wild about Culture

I am finally reading this wonderful book, Wild Fermentation by Sandor Ellix Katz. Sandor Katz, also known as Sandorkraut, is another Jewish food diva. I am finding so much to love in this book that I want to class him with Claudia Roden, Mollie Katzen, and Lorna Sass. (I need to make a list of links in my sidebar about this.)

On this blog, as I have detailed what I'm cooking for Shabbos, I have been thinking about the meaning of describing the facts of our daily lives. The most crucial things that make up the small universes that are people's lives are very trivial. These really small things are what make everything feel authentic, and they are what we lose when languages die. Sandorkraut has thought these things before I started thinking them! He also lives in multiple overlapping miniature universes: a Jewish man from the Upper West Side of Manhattan who has travelled the world and read widely, a gay man living with AIDS, a health food nut and herbalist, a gourmet taster of exciting flavors, a radical faerie living with other queer people in the woods in Tennesee. By the time I finished the introduction, I was completely in love with him.

I was also excited that even though the book was introduced and endorsed by Sally Fallon, Sandor gives recipes for vegan kefir. (One thing I have found a little weird is the current resurgence in the world of health food of animal protein. Fallon has been a key voice in that. You have to appreciate her dedication to promoting organic farming, but I feel really dubious about her organization's promotion of animal fats and cholesterol. I guess people who love chopped liver who read this blog would want to know more about a group that thinks it's a health food! Sounds like something out of Woody Allen's Sleeper, doesn't it?) Anyway, I love Sandor also for capturing a snapshot of his vegan tranny friend making sunflower seed kefir. Let's link up all of our small worlds like Venn Diagrams until everyone is in the center of several solar systems.

I was moved to finally buy this book when we had a radical faerie over for Shabbat lunch who knows Sandorkraut. Shabbat meals can lead you in exciting directions. I have been fascinated with sourdoughs for ages, and have managed to kill off several starts at my own culture before I got them alive enough to bake. I also adore the sour pickles and sauerkrauts that Sandor does, and want to learn to make them from him. I will let you know if I actually make any of these recipes and how they come out.

Shabbat meals, 5/20/05 and 5/21/05

For Friday night:
challah
baby artichoke and spinach risotto
cold gingered asparagus (Mollie Katzen Still Life with Menu)
baked tofu with wine
canned pineapple and store-bought baklavah

Saturday lunch:
invited out, brought a challah

Seudah Shlishit (Saturday supper)
deconstructed guacamole (avocado with tomato, sliced on a plate)
cold cereal with raisins and rice milk
leftovers

I barely cooked at all this week because I am determined to get my horrendously messy apartment into some kind of order. My husband is doing a lot of the work with me, plus we have some friends who are joining us in moving around all of our furniture. As you know if you have been reading this blog, my beloved grandmother died in February at the age of 95. She left me a lot of things, including furniture. Our apartment was already crammed with stuff. Books overflow every shelf, and we have some kind of problem with filing our papers. Also there is the whole toddler element, a young enthusiastic household member who likes to put things away but not necessarily where his parents think they go.

With help, we seem to be beating back the chaos. But that left me unenthusiastic about my ordinary routine of leisurely Friday cooking. My son really wanted to help me prepare baby artichokes again. As his vocabulary increases and his articulation improves, I find that "baby artichokes" is a phrase he can say very well! He likes snapping off the leaves. Using the basic formula in Sundays At Moosewood, I made a risotto. Somehow the fresh artichokes did not mess with the wine. My husband, who isn't that into artichokes, ate the risotto but now doesn't want to deal with the leftovers.

The asparagus recipe is really great, but I knew that because I've made it before. If you haven't, do. It has everything: it's sweet and sour, with garlic and ginger flavors and sesame oil and soy sauce. The ginger is like home-pickled ginger. I'm very psyched that Mollie Katzen put it on her website, that was so generous!

On Saturday we were invited to friends. They set up a room where my son could nap. I nursed him to sleep and then we sat down to our meal. My friend made a lot of recipes from Crescent Dragonwagon's book The Passionate Vegetarian. I really like Crescent Dragonwagon's authorial personna, but I had tried some of her recipes that were posted on Epicurious for Thanksgiving, and was not enthusiastic about either the process or the products. My friend's Dragonwagon picks were really good! My friend made the Moroccan carrot dip, an ersatz chicken salad made with tempeh that had poppy seed dressing, pineapple and grapes, a nice salad with cucumber and tomato, and plain steamed asparagus. I brought a challah I made on Friday and everyone tore into it and ate it in the first five minutes of the meal.

As usual, even though I have cookbooks coming out of my ears, my hosts had new cookbooks that I coveted. I was especially excited to see the new Gil Marks book of Jewish vegetarian recipes from around the world. I can't tell you much about it though.

Okay, tell me if you think this is funny: my husband teases me whenever one of us drinks Constant Comment tea by making constant comments about it. No, huh? It really cracks me up. Am I a cheap date?

The Knaidel Quest

I got my current favorite recipe for matzah balls from a very old cookbook put out by the Manischewitz company in 1930. My friend who is the scion of several rabbinical lines had it in her house and gave it to me. It has lost its cover but here is how I would cite it if I were writing a paper:

F.O. Gahr, Tempting Kosher Dishes Prepared from World Famous Manischewitz's Matzo Products. Cinncinati, Ohio: The B. Manischewitz Company, 1930.

(The author's name is kind of buried in the title page--Miss F.O. Gahr, B.S., Domestic Science Expert and Graduate in Institutional Management. If anyone is related to this Miss Gahr, please contact me.)

The book opens in both directions--that is, all the recipes are available both in English and in Yiddish. In 1930, there were still a lot of Jews left in the world who were more comfortable cooking from a Yiddish cookbook. Some items in the English table of contents refer to the Yiddish section only. I have not attempted to translate those recipes yet, but I might. I have not been bold enough to try much of the book besides the matzah ball recipes.

There are some amusing oddities in this book, including Boston Chremsel, which is a sort of pasty with a dough of eggs, matzah meal, chicken shmaltz, water and salt filled with honey-sweetened beets seasoned with ginger and ground nuts. And iced tea, they have you add iced tea. You make a sort of hamantashen out of this. I have not tried to make this, for sooooo many reasons. But if you double dare me, I'll go out and buy some Nyafat and make them for you next year. I know, Nyafat is made of hydrogenated oil. Don't worry, you will be fine.)

There are something like 25 dumpling recipes in this book, though some of them sound horrible. Liver Knoedel, anyone? The one I think most resembles my late great aunt's recipe is Fluffy Knoedel. (Since she never gave her children the recipe, I will never know if this is how she did it. This is a paternal great aunt, not the childless maternal great aunt who carefully wrote all her recipes down for her beloved niece, my mom.)

Fluffy Knoedel
3 eggs
3/4 cup Manischewitz's Matzo Meal
1/2 tsp. salt

Beat whites until stiff, then beat in yolks of eggs. Fold in matzo meal and salt. Let stand 5 minutes, then form balls with a spoon and drop into boiling soup stock or salt water. Cover and cook 45 minutes. Recipe makes 12 large balls.

Obviously, the recipe works quite well with any brand of matzah meal, transliterated any way you like. If you want your eggs to work well, bring them to room temperature by placing the uncracked eggs in a bowl of warm tap water for 15 minutes right before you break and separate them. I also recommend that you add some salt to the egg whites for more successful fluffing.

Now, as you know, there are a lot of theories about how to make matzah balls come out light. Some add seltzer, water, or soup stock. I found that worked pretty well with recipes that call for additional fat (over and above the egg yolks.) Some call for baking powder. Of course, baking powder will help you make fluffier matzah balls, but I have never tried it. It seems crazy to me that Ashkenazi rabbis will allow you to use chemical leavening agents and not put their heksher on something with corn syrup in it. It's very inconsistent. Not that I'm dying to have corn syrup on Pesach, all those folks who like the original coke formula would be quite upset. The most common way to make matzah balls is to make the batter, chill it in the fridge for an hour or more, and then plunge balls of it into a pot of boiling salted water. Everyone agrees, do not lift the lid during cooking. Of course, if you forget and lift the lid because you can't remember what's in the pot, you will still get tasty knaidlach. Especially if your husband, like mine, doesn't care if they are fluffy or not.

Some people really prefer their matzah balls to be dense. I read in some book that South African Jews, who have preserved Litvak culinary traditions, put some hardboiled egg yolk in the center of their knaidlach. Aha, here is a recipe--no, it's not hardboiled egg yolk in this one. Weirder than that, it's half the batter made with yolk and spiced with cinnamon and half made with white, with a ball of the yolk batter inside the egg white batter.

Next year, maybe.

Shabbat dinner 4/29 and the end of Pesach

For Friday night dinner, I made:

Vegetable soup with matzah balls
Braised baby artichokes
Salmon patties
Stuffed zucchini
Cauliflower kugel
organic grape tomatoes (for the baby)
Russian dressing with homemade mayonnaise
Fruit salad (mango, banana, orange and date)

Because it was nearly the end of Pesach and I couldn't get any tomato sauce, because it was nearly the end of Pesach and I accidentally melted our one plastic measuring cup on the stove, because it was nearly the end of Pesach and I didn't have any more patience, I did a lot of improvising.

There is a great stuffed zucchini recipe in Debra Wasserman's No Cholesterol Passover Recipes book, but I didn't have tomato sauce, so I improvised something equally great. I chopped up the last tomato and a half in the house and cooked it with onions in olive oil and added the zucchini innards, sugar, salt and pepper, and I mixed all of that with some matzah meal and some chopped cilantro. I have been using a bottle of whole mixed peppercorns in different colors (it has a grinder on the top) and that gave a great flavor to the zucchini.

This time, I made the soup for the matzah balls by frying onion, shallot and garlic in olive oil until golden, then adding with the water a diced sweet potato, a white potato, some zucchini, and a lot of grated fresh ginger. It came out very well, I think in part because I let the soup simmer for a couple of hours on the stove.

I know I mainly write as a vegetarian here, and I am mostly vegetarian, but sometimes I eat fish. Sort of like a macrobiotic diet, except not really--more like occasional guilty and nostalgic inconsistency. (Some people, my mom for example, consider fish to be legitimately vegetarian, but I do not. I think Jewish culture like many others does not consider fish to be meat, and that is why it is pareve in the kosher laws. But I still feel weird about eating it. Kind of like I feel about the second day of yom tov. This parenthetical comment is turning into a full-blown post so I'd better stop here.) I made salmon patties by mashing up two small cans of salmon with a little lemon juice, salt and peppper, chopped onion, matzah meal and eggs. I fried the whole mashed mess in olive oil. My husband didn't try them I don't think, but our guest and I were transported with nostalgia. She said it was just like her mom used to make. I almost never cook fish at home, for the simple reason that the cat has a little fit until you pay her the fish tax.

I also spontaneously invented the cauliflower kugel. Here is my recipe (I jotted it down before Shabbat so I would have it to give you!)

A Passover Cauliflower Kugel
4 eggs
1 large shallot
1 head cauliflower, boiled for 10 minutes and mashed
approx. 3-4 tablespoons matza meal

Place the whole, unbroken eggs in a bowl of warm tap water to come to room temperature for 15 minutes. Dice the shallot and sautee it in about 2 tablespoons of olive oil until golden. Break and separate the eggs into two vessels. Beat egg whites until stiff with a pinch of salt. (If they are warmed up, you can do this pretty easily with just a wire whisk and your hands!) Mash cauliflower with fried shallot, egg yolks, matzah meal, salt and pepper. Fold beaten egg whites into cauliflower mixture.
Bake for one hour at 350 F.

Unfortunately, I had not purchased any paprika for the holiday. I am sure this kugel would be better with a dusting of paprika on top, or with a very small amount of chopped herbs.Our friend who came to dinner (the one who finds everything delicate) can't abide the taste of dill, so I didn't put dill in the fish, or in the kugel, or in the soup. I did put some in the soup before I froze it for future meals, though.

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.

Shabbat meals 4/8 and 4/9/05

Sorry that I didn't keep track of the awesome food that the caterers served at last weekend's wedding. They had roasted asparagus with aioli, that was one good thing on Friday night.

This Friday I did a lot of cooking. Too much really. I am trying to get better at planning the meals, because I don't find doing a lot of cooking overwhelming if I can think in advance about what I'm going to make. But somehow I don't do that very well these days, and then it's like a crazy juggernaut. What I should do is plan the meals fully in a blog post, or the draft of one. The only thing I made on Thursday was the banana bread.

Friday evening
Rassam with tomatoes (the Julie Sahni one)
Curried spinach from The Spice Box by Manju Shivraj Singh
Curried Chickpea Tart with Cauliflower/Fennel Sauce
Cucumbers and tomato salad with lemon juice and olive oil
Banana bread (from How It All Vegan--the best recipe I've found to date--ha ha, get it, dates? ehhh)

Saturday Lunch
Chilled Carrot and Orange Soup
Spinach Salad with champagne mango and spicy poppadums
Dragon Noodles
baked tofu
Friday night leftovers

How I happened to make this totally crazy curried chickpea tart with cauliflower sauce: my husband bought me a wonderful new cookbook, Nita Mehta's Vegetarian Punjabi. I was tempted by a recipe for cauliflower in fig sauce. When I got my figs home from the store, I realized that the recipe calls for yogurt. I thought I would just try soy yogurt, but my husband hates yogurt so much that even fake yogurt doesn't cut it with him. So I will have to make something else with the figs. I had some nice besan (chickpea flour) so I thought I would look for a recipe that called for it with cauliflower. This recipe was a little crazy. You boil the chickpea flour like polenta. Boiling chickpea flour in water makes entertainingly strange squeaking noises! I am kind of psyched to have a recipe that is both vegan and wheat free, that is always a useful thing.

The carrot soup and the dragon noodles are tried and true recipes that I originally clipped from print journals. I've been making the noodle dish for more than 10 years, actually I kind of gave it to my husband and it's become his recipe. I told this to my guests at lunch and one of them asked her partner, "Are you going to take my recipes and make them your signature dishes?" I said, "There is actually no downside to that; it's a way to get to eat something you like all the time."

I invented the spinach salad with mangos and fried poppadums. I used the kind of poppadums with a lot of black pepper in them, the pre-washed baby spinach, and those beautiful little yellow mangoes cut in cubes. I dressed the salad with olive oil and lime juice. Since I almost never create my own recipes, I want you all to try this one! My son liked it, but not as much as the tomatoes and cucumbers. He looooves tomatoes.

Sunday is my birthday so some of our guests brought me presents. I now have a bouquet of daffodils that I bought and one of the red and yellow tulips I like so much from my guests. I love all tulips but for some reason the two color ones seem to me the nicest.

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.

Balabusta's Shabbat menus 1/21/05-1/22/05

On Friday evening we went to a potluck. It was sparsely attended because of the extreme cold, but we came with our toddler and had a good time.  I made one of the south Indian rice noodle dishes from Julie Sahni's Classic Indian Vegetarian and Grain Cooking, and added some lightly steamed broccoli. (Another truly excellent cookbook, you cannot go wrong with Julie Sahni. I love the way she tells you to have the pot lid handy in case your mustard seeds spatter when you add them to the oil.) The dish is bright yellow with turmeric, which does great things to broccoli when you add it. It did not do good things to our kitchen table and floor when my husband accidentally spilled the cup of water, turmeric and salt solution I had prepared to go into the dish. So much for the whole mise en place concept!

On Saturday I thought we were going to have a few guests, but we had just one. I made the challah from the Peter Reinhart book. The person who gave me the book said that the challah recipe wasn't sweet enough, so I increased the sugar from two to five tablespoons. I was kind of dubious about the instruction to put two whole eggs and two yolks in the dough and then brush the crust with the two egg whites. In general challah comes out best when you brush the top with egg yolk. This time, I guess because of the yolk in the dough, I got the dark shiny crust with just the whites. This is why Peter Reinhart teaches bread baking and I don't. Bo knows challah.

The rest of my menu:

Great Northern bean and sundried tomato soup with spinach
Barley with sprouted chickpeas
Sweet Potatoes Morrocan Style from Claudia Roden's New Book of Middle Eastern Food
Baked Tofu
sliced cucumber
Chocolate Chestnut Torte

I made up the bean soup--it was two cans of organic beans (on sale) about six sliced up sundried tomatoes, a very well carmelized diced onion and a spoonful of Organic Gourmet soup stock zutz, all heated with water in my slow cooker overnight.  I steamed the spinach and chopped it and had it ready at room temperature to add to the soup. (You know, so I wouldn't be cooking the spinach in the soup.) The barley was bland and needed lemon and salt. The tofu was great, I baked it in Bragg's Liquid Aminos, sesame oil, lots of freshly grated ginger, and the end of a bottle of Baron de Herzog rosé. (I keep forgetting that I need to measure for blogging.) Of course the Claudia Roden dish was delicious, her recipes are so reliable.

We had a great, freewheeling discussion with our guest. She is a seasoned political organizer and we talked about how white people can be allies to people of color in political struggles. One point that she made is that people who know the history of their own oppression are a lot more likely to have empathy for others. I don't know if this is true. It's true of me, I know I can make analogies between Jewish experience and the experiences of other peoples and immediately get what things are like for them.

I had that experience while I was cooking for Shabbos, listening to this radio show. (My husband and son were at story hour at the library!) The show was about disappearing languages and featured some people who are trying to save their Native American languages. Some white guy phones in from Western Mass or wherever and gets, I don't know, 15 minutes of airtime to pontificate about Heidegger and stuff, about how language is about communication and it doesn't really matter if you use English or Lakota or Welsh or Tutchone. This after the Tutchone speaker had explained that her parents' generation were forcibly sent to boarding schools as children, schools where they were beaten when they spoke their native language. I guess he wasn't listening, or something. I was yelling at the radio.  I kept thinking about Avraham Sutzkever and his work to save the YIVO collections in Vilna. Then of course the woman on the radio, very quietly and not angrily, explained that her mother could tell jokes in Tutchone that could not be explained in English. At that point I started to cry.

But of course on Shabbat you have leisure to consider that perhaps yelling at the radio is not the best way of effecting social change. I'll have to let you know if I make any progress in figuring out a better one. If you have any ideas, let me know.