Shavuot Planning

While the rest of the US is celebrating Memorial Day, observant Jews will be, well, observing the holiday of Shavuot (Pentecost), when the Torah was given to Israel.  We’ve been counting the days.  Seriously. Every night, we count.  I am writing this on the 46th day since Passover.

The holiday starts Saturday night and ends Monday night, which is why Memorial Day isn’t happening for us.  It’s also a three day holiday – but in the most inconvenient direction.  It’s a lot easier when it’s two days of holiday followed by Shabbat.

So,  I’m faced with several challenges.  It starts with the fact that my oven’s Shabbat mode doesn’t function correctly. I can get it to stay on, but I can’t change the temperature. I don’t want a 35oF oven on for three hot days. So I want to avoid using the oven at all. In fact, I want to avoid using the stove if I can. This means I need food that can stay cold, or can be reheated easily on an electric warming tray or is best suited to be cooked on top of the stove.

I also need to be concerned with freshness, since everything needs to be cooked, if possible, on Thursday – Friday at the latest, and was purchased TODAY, Wednesday, to be possibly served Monday. And there’s a Shabbat to cook for as well. The other things to be aware of – can’t have dinner until full dark, the custom of eating dairy food, a guest who refuses to eat any animal flesh (including fish) on the first day) (for no reason we can see, actually) and my family coming on Monday. And that I want to have at least one meat meal during the holiday. Dairy meals tend to be calorically dense.

Shabbat will be chicken, store-bought kugel and veg.  My standard Shabbat.

Saturday night – quiche and fruit salad. Easy to make, easily reheated, delicious. Simple.

Sunday lunch (guests) – lasagna and salad. They’re bringing ice cream cake for dessert.

Sunday dinner – chicken filet, potato salad (store bought), vegetable. Top of the stove, fast, easy.

Monday lunch – baked salmon, yogurt-dill sauce, green salad, angel hair pasta salad.

I just cooked the salmon, and I’m going to freeze it, to thaw out on Sunday night. The chicken filet will be frozen and thawed over Shabbat and Sunday to be cooked fresh. Everything else will be cooked Thursday night or Friday. Or purchased.

Working Cook May 14, 17 and 18, 2010

I’ve been busy this week. Shavuot started Tuesday night and ended tonight, so with holiday prep (including the very important purchase of a new dress), I’ve been very busy, and of course I can’t use the computer during the holiday itself.

Friday was pretty much normal for Friday – finished the soup, cooked two roast chickens and a pan of chicken filets, plus sliced potatoes and onions, and Israeli salad.

Monday was pure Shavuot prep, since I had enough food for Mendy and for dinner. One of the customs for Shavuot is eating dairy food (which contrasts with the custom for ALL yomtovs that calls for eating meat, so there are ways people do it – a bite of dairy and then a meat meal a half hour later, dairy appetizers for a meat meal, which I’ve had once and it is so very, very weird, having some meals meat and others dairy, and having all dairy. My personal custom is to have one meat meal unless the holiday falls on Shabbat, and then having all meat for Shabbat, and all dairy for the other.)

So, I compromised for my guys. Monday was dairy day. I made a pareve soup, macaroni in cheesy tomato sauce and baked tilapia. The okay dairy knife I bought before Pesach has gone missing, and I had to use a sharpened utility knife instead, and it was bad. I even stopped everything to go out and try to buy another okay cheap knife in the same store but no dice.

After I left work, I went shopping. Not only did I buy a really lovely new dress (it’s customary to get a new outfit for a holiday PLUS I have three or four weddings in the next few weeks), which was a job all by itself, I bought a decent dairy knife. And it’s going to be MY knife and live in my knife kit. That way I’ll know where it is and it won’t disappear on me.

The job for the dress is that 1. I’m a large size. 2. All the suits available are black or white, mostly black. Sometimes navy. I have enough dark suits. The ones in my size? Have very boxy jackets. I look better in tailored jackets. In the first store, a place I’ve had good luck in the past, I found ONE cute look and it ran small. So small that the largest size didn’t fit me. That is, the very adorable skirt did, but the not as adorable but still cute jacket did not.

The next store had nothing over size fourteen. I went to a third store, and the very helpful salesgirls showed me somewhat glittery (I don’t glitter) suits for far more than I was willing to spend, but then showed me several lovely dresses in pretty colors that fit more or less – the skirt needed to be shortened and they put elastic in the neckline of the shell so I could tighten it, but those are minor. And the shortening took so little time – they just removed a tier – that I could wear it today.

Tuesday felt like Friday. And I made meat, so I didn’t even use the new knife. I made chicken filets, meatloaf and two kinds of kugel – apple and salt-and-pepper noodle. I’ve gotten very good at making the apple kugel – peeled and sliced in a half hour!

Adventures in Home Cooking 3 – Passover Edition

I’m not going to discuss my seder menus here – there was nothing unusual. But there were things I did for the other holiday meals that worked very nicely.

One was my lunch for the second day (Friday.) We use horseradish for the maror, the bitter herb of the seder, grated from a fresh root. Even with two largish seders and not truly enormous root, we still had a fair bit left over. I took salmon filet (the long thing slices. Next time, I’ll get the squarer one.) and dipped them in matzo meal, then beaten egg and then coarsely grated horseradish. I baked this at about 350°F for about 20 minutes. Oh, my goodness. The horseradish mellowed, but it also flavored the fish and it was delicious.

And then there was my prep for the second yom tovs, the last two days of the holiday. I knew I’d have guests for three of the four big meals, and I had to prepare for that.

I started with the vegetables. I had five pounds of redskin potatoes. I was making one dish that required mashed potatoes, and I wanted to serve them as a side for another meal. Normally, I don’t peel them but this WAS for company. So I peeled the entire bag of potatoes, and chopped them up, putting them into a soup pot half-filled with salted water. When that was done, I put them up to cook – mashed potatoes are best when started in cold water.

Then I peeled and sliced a pound of carrots, followed by a head of celery, followed by every decent onion I could find to peel and chop. Each vegetable went into its own bowl. By this time, the potatoes were cooked. I drained and mashed them with reserved cooking water, and put aside one quart of them for the recipe. Then I added salt and pepper to the rest, and put the pot in the sink to soak because I’d be using it again soon. I took a break.

When I returned, I took a log of frozen gefilte fish, which I’d let out to thaw a tiny bit – enough to get the paper off. Put that in a small loaf pan and put a handful of each of the vegetables, and covered it with more foil, and put it in the oven, which was then on 350&degF.

So. Then I lit three burners. One was for vegetable soup – most of carrots, half the celery and one third the onions sautéed in oil. I put in too much pepper, some bay leaves and a little thyme and when the veggies were soft, I put in two large cans of diced tomatoes and two cans of water. I let that simmer. In another pan, I browned ground beef in shifts. In the third, I browned chicken legs that I’d dusted with pepper and potato starch. Also in shifts because, well, pan wasn’t big enough for all four. These were placed in a foil baking pan with 1/3 of the onions and the rest of the vegetables, plus 8 oz of mushrooms that I washed, pepper, thyme, rosemary, a fair amount of red wine and some water. I covered this with foil and put in the oven next to the fish. Braised chicken, to be served with the seasoned mashed potatoes for lunch the next day.

As the ground beef browned, I moved it to a strainer over a pot to drain extra fat. When three pounds were cooked, I put the remaining onions in that pot. When these were cooked, I mixed them, the ground beef, the unseasoned potatoes and a bag of frozen spinach, plus some allspice, garlic and pepper, and a couple of beaten eggs. This was covered with sheets of matzo soaked in egg and baked. Main course for Wednesday night, when we’d have four guests. (Two young couples, one married, one dating. They’re in their early twenties. We call them “the kids.” We like them *a lot*.) Three items in the oven, one simmering on the stove. Break time.

Then – I microwaved two heads of broccoli, and marinated it in vinegar, oil, garlic and rosemary, plus a handful of pine nuts (supposed to go with the meat pie, but I forgot.) And then I peeled and sliced some very sour apples we had. I tossed these with brown sugar, cinnamon, walnuts and rosemary and baked them. When I reheated them later for a dessert, I added some margarine and sweet red wine.

As things were cooked, I took them off heat to cool.

The broccoli, the chicken and the potatoes, plus the fish and a storebought cake, was lunch the first day. The fish, the soup, the pie plus a salad, and the apple compote with lace cookies was dinner the second night. Dinner the first night was steak, spinach and kugel. Lunch the second day was the soup (it was pareve made on meat equipment, so we served it first in plastic bowls with fleishig spoons), cheese omelets and melon.

And my state that afternoon? Cooking farr.

Second Sock Syndrom (Sort of)

In all the talk about second sock syndrome, why has no one ever mentioned the very real difference?

The second sock (or mitten) is much faster. It took me a week, with false starts and miscounts and sometimes making negative progress in a day, to complete the first of the pair currently drying in my bathroom. The second? Took me four and half days. I knew the pattern perfectly (it’s engraved on my brain), I knew what mistakes I was likely to make and how to avoid, correct or mitigate them. It didn’t go perfectly – I certainly tinked and laddered down and there were so many dropped stitches I had to catch and reknit/purl – but it was much, much faster.

Now, I have to say that I’ve never experienced SSS myself. I think there are a number of factors. I don’t think of a single sock as a completed project, for example. But also – I’m going to be casting-on for my next pair of socks tonight, as soon as I get the skein wound. And while I’m going to be using a different stitch pattern and I’m knitting these toe-up instead of top down – they’re still socks. Whatever order, there are still toes, legs, feet and heels. And it’s a chance to do things right.

Plus – I’m an Orthodox Jew living in Diaspora. This means that most of my holidays are doubled. Every year, I have two complete seders on successive nights. Trust me, once you go through that, starting a second identical sock is nothing.

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Upshersin

Ezri just turned three, and like many other little boys, he just had his hair cut for the very first time at a big party.

It’s a milestone, after all – it’s the age of “chinuch”, where it’s possible to start actually educating a child, to introduce them to the sweetness of Torah and mitzvot. But this was different for Ezri and for his parents and all the many friends and loving relatives celebrating this day.

He was a little overwhelmed, or maybe a lot overwhelmed. He was used to a house filled with people – his parents, his sisters, nannies and therapists, his grandparents and aunt and uncles and all of his parents’ many, many friends and their kids, because his parents are generous and hospitable and their family is very close. But this was more than usual – the house overflowing with people, many of whom he’d never met, and filled with noise and shouting. But there were familiar people and there were people singing to him, and Ezri loves music. Ezri was named for a psalm his parents loved to sing, and parents do have the spirit of prophecy when they name their children.

But there was something else filling that house. Normally, a upshersin is a happy event, with a cute child getting his hair snipped so long as he has patience for it (one little cousin of mine actually snipped his own, with his father’s help) and with the promise of a future of torah, chuppah and massim tovim (learning, marriage and good deeds) ahead of him. But mostly, it’s just an oversized birthday party with a hair cut involved, and possibly a bit of a ceremony, as he’s given an aleph-beis, a beginning Hebrew alphabet book, with honey smeared on the letters so he should know learning is sweet. (Usually, that happens after the little boy is carried to his school while wrapped in his father’s tallis (prayer shawl).)

Of course, Ezri didn’t know that. He probably sensed the feeling through the house – not just celebration, but a fierce joy. Because, you see, two weeks after he was born, he became extremely ill. In fact, it was a miracle he survived at all. And he did not survive unscathed – he is developementally delayed. He doesn’t speak, his vision is very impaired and his motor skills are poor. Even his head is out of proportion small, although that’s not visible under his golden curls.

All Ezri knows is that his father spoke for a long time while holding him in his arms, and then his mother spoke and cried a little, and then there was singing and dancing – and all those strange people sang his favorite song (Ring a round a rosy) and then they sang the song with his name in it. He didn’t know that all the children came in to sing a song about the aleph beis, or that the book he was given with the honey, the book with large print and braille, was the aleph beis (but he wasn’t all *that* fond of the honey), but he knew that he was dancing in Daddy’s arms and then when people snipped at his hair (not too short at his mother’s request), he was being held by a grandpa.

But this little boy who could have died at two weeks was here with us. And so everything he does, every milestone he hits, is a blessing and a miracle and that’s how his parents see it. They love him for who he is, and rejoice at whatever progress he makes – and that he is already doing good deeds just by existing. And so they were celebrating him – as he is.

(In a different note, I took my current sock (and I *love* Koigu now) with me, and I had fascinated children and adults watch me create a sock.)