A Moveable Feast: My Blog

In honor of my congregation’s 100th anniversary, I was asked to do a cooking workshop. (As if I would say “no”!) But why limit ourselves to one dish and one workshop? So, I thought, let’s do one recipe from each of the main streams of Diaspora life: Ashkenazi (Eastern European), Sephardi (originating in Spain and spreading eastward due to the Inquisition), and Mizrahi (Middle Eastern).

First up was Ashkenazi, but I didn’t want to do the same-old, same-old with which we are all familiar. You know, rugelach, matzah brei, stuffed cabbage. Could there be something I’d never had? Yes there was! Hungarian shlishkes, a gnocchi-like potato dumpling. Now, Eastern European Jews depended heavily on potatoes in the shtetl because they were easy to grow and within their budgets. And nutritious. Remember Mark Watney of Martian fame? But they were ubiquitous to the point that there’s even a Yiddish folksong satirizing the daily menu of potatoes:

Sunday potatoes. Monday potatoes. Tuesday and Wednesday potatoes. Thursday and Friday potatoes. But shabbos, for a change… potato kugel!”

Anyway, here’s the link to the recipe: https://carolgoodmankaufman.com/wp-content/uploads/Hungarian-Jewish-Shlishkes.pdf

This recipe makes a lot. Share prep duties with a friend!

In the Book of Exodus, God promises to rescue the Hebrews “…from the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land into a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey …”

Now, for many if not most Jews, the honey into which we dip apples at Rosh Hashanah, the new year, is the variety we can purchase at the local grocery store. Whether clover, orange blossom, or any of the other varieties of the stuff that we see on the shelf, all are made by honeybees.

However, some archaeologists believe that the honey referred to in the Bible is not actually the amber liquid to which we’ve become accustomed to see on our holiday tables and incorporated into all manner of honey cakes, taiglach, and other goodies. Rather, they believe it is silan, or date honey, made by boiling and mashing the fruit and concentrating it into a sweet syrup.

But because bees and/or honeycombs are mentioned at least ten times between the Five Books of Moses, the Prophets, and the Writings, I’m not so sure about that rationale.

Regardless, at Rosh Hashanah I’ve started serving both regular old clover/orange blossom/whatever honey and silan with my apples and challah. It is delicious!

By now, we all know the 3Rs: reduce, reuse, recycle. In addition to complying with those goals, many of us also compost. But as virtuous as composting makes me feel (and maybe even a little self-righteous), there is downside to the last of the list: drosophila, the mighty fruit fly. These little critters swarm in and around the compost bin, making me want to don a hazmat suit every time I need to go near it.

We’ve tried the vinegar in a jar trick courtesy of a Google search. It didn’t work, so I went online and ordered a plug-in fly zapper. It still hasn’t arrived.

Desperate, I went back to Google, where I learned that fruit flies like banana peels. That news could explain the infestation both in our outdoor compost bin and in my kitchen counter bin. (We forgot to empty the latter before heading out on vacation and returned two weeks later to find a truly disgusting mess).

Back to business: J put a banana peel into an empty applesauce jar, covered it with plastic wrap (yes, I still have some of that stuff around), put a rubber band around the neck of the jar to seal it, and then poked a few holes in the top with a pin.*

By the next morning, dozens of fruit flies were inside the jar. The day after that, hundreds.

It’s not attractive, but if you have fruit flies in your home, the banana peel is the way to go.

* Use only a pin. Anything larger, like a toothpick, and those little flies can come right back out of the jar. In retrospect, that could have been the problem with the vinegar set-up.

One of my favorite products, frozen, cooked, pureed squash, is no longer on grocery shelves. An integral ingredient in several favorite recipes for decades, as it was for my mother, somebody in the Birds Eye. frozen food land has chosen to remove it from its inventory. It turns out that I am not the only one bereft. The company’s website features scores of protests from disappointed customers. “Please bring it back!” they say. Is the company reading the posts? Will they return this beloved squash to its rightful place?

As if that decision hadn’t squashed my hopes for a holiday souffle, we recently discovered that one of our favorite cookies is no longer available (granted, we hadn’t purchased them in a while). On the new season of The Great British Baking Show, contestants were challenged to prepare Garibaldi biscuits. Under the name Golden Raisin Biscuits, the Sunshine Biscuit Company produced these delicious, raisin-filled delights all through my childhood and beyond. Alas, after take-over by Keebler and then Kellogg, the cookies are no longer.

Perhaps GBBS enthusiasts could join forces with other cookie lovers and start an online petition. After all, petitions saved the Clark Bar.

Just before COVID became a worldwide pandemic, I had offered to prepare a Moroccan dinner for a charity fundraiser. And last week, almost three years later, it finally happened — outdoors, on our patio —and it was amazing. That was because all the recipes I used came from native Moroccan cooks. The warm spices, the colors, and the textures all made the menu a sensual delight. All we needed was a palm tree to complete the picture since we certainly had the heat this summer.

But life is short, so let’s start with dessert. Of course, there had to be mint tea and Medjool dates, but among the prepared offerings were two classics of the Moroccan menu. Orange slices with orange blossom water and cinnamon s

ugar were super easy to make, and so refreshing. I was worried that the orange blossom water would be too perfume-y, but it just added a hint of North Africa nights.

And then there were the almond crescent cookies. Made with both all-purpose flour and almond flour, vanilla and almond extract, and all rolled in confectioner’s sugar, these little moon-shaped, melt-in-the-mouth goodies were undeniably among the most delicious things I had ever tasted.

Here is the cookie recipe. Please let me know how you like them!

Ingredients:

1 cup (2 sticks) butter, room temperature

2/3 cup granulated sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 teaspoon almond extract

2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour

1 cup almond flour (not almond meal!)

1/2 cup confectioner’s sugar

Water

Directions:

Preheat the oven to 350°F.

Beat the butter and the sugar together until light and fluffy.

Add the vanilla and almond extracts and mix.

Add the flour and almond flour. Mix thoroughly.

Add enough water, a tablespoon at a time, so that you can form a ball with the dough.

Form the dough into crescent shapes:

Take generous tablespoons of the dough \ and roll it into a small ball, about an inch in diameter, and then shape into a crescent shape.

Place onto a parchment paper lined baking sheet.

Bake at 350°F for 20 minutes or until bottoms are a light golden brown.

While still hot, roll each cookie in confectioner’s sugar.

Cool completely, then roll each cookie again in the sugar.