“My heart is in the East, but I am in the ends of the West”, said the poet Yehuda Halevi. 

I am not a poet, but I am having somewhat of a parallel experience.  My blog is still in Passover, but I (and the rest of the world) am halfway/… Read full post »

Everyone loves to hate Passover food.  They hate the dryness, the crumbliness, the flatness, the tastelessness.  But I have come to love the cuisine of this holiday, the challenge of preparing food without bread products, without legumes, pasta or rice.  The reason I love it is that I/… Read full post »

 According to my mother, I ate my first chickpeas when I was about nine months old.  “Weren’t you worried that I’d choke on them?” I asked.  “That didn’t occur to us,” she mused.  Throughout my childhood, in a small Yankee town in C/… Read full post »

Shorbet Sabanekh bel Zabady .  (Say what?)  It means Spinach and Yogurt Soup.  I looked at my timetable for Pesach preparations and realized that I better cook something up fast or we’d have nothing to eat for dinner.  Luckily, the next soup up in the Soups chapter of The Bo/… Read full post »

Greek Yogurt as tabula rasa.  And very popular.  It’s everywhere you go these days.  And everyone is selling  it now.  Stop and Shop has a store brand.  “They don’t make it from sheep’s milk,” my husband grumbles, moodily. 

But y… Read full post »

If Moliere said “I feed on good soup, not on fine words,”  then he’s in good hands with me because I have, at long last, arrived at the soup chapter.  He also said, “I feel good on soup, not on beautiful language.”  That’s because soup is feel-good f/… Read full post »

My Goodness.  It is March first, and I have only managed a few posts this year.  I better get on the stick!!

Saturday night I went to a lecture sponsored by the New Haven Mikvah.  The speaker was Lori Palatnik from Aish HaTorah in Rockville, MD.  Her topic was Love and/… Read full post »

Last weekend was the four day Destination Birthday Celebration for my friend Elizabeth.  She had set it up at one of those super-fancy boutique hotels in Miami, Florida, a “see and be seen hotel,” as she described it to me.  The rooms go for $309 per night.  Elizabeth was o/… Read full post »

Monday night.  Dinner time.  Fish was on the Menu.  I had prepared it with my usual flair:  Charmoula sauce,  neatly sliced red  peppers and potatoes, all of which looked very appetizing.  I was, in fact, really looking forward to eating it and also proud of myself/… Read full post »

“Vibrating Jonny.”

“Natural Lamb.”

“Paradise Condoms.”

“Okamoto condoms..  They sounds Japanese.  They be  Japanese Condoms?”

I peeked through the corner of my glasses trying not to let the person talking see that I was liste… Read full post »

I’ve probably complained about this before, but there really is too much to do every damn day, and right now I’ve got this sinking feeling that it’s Wednesday, Michael is sick, Olivia is driving by herself to West Hartford in our only vehicle, but a month since getting her license,… Read full post »

Kids.  They say the darndest things.............. 

So I went last week to the third Bar Mitzvah put on by my friends Elizabeth and Micah:  this time the celebration was for  Joseph, the youngest of their three fabulous children.  It was a real, authentic Bar Mitzvah, t/… Read full post »

Sunday, I made yet another Savory Pastry, Bulemas kon Espinaka, or Spinach Coils.  Claudia Roden suggests that the most important thing in this recipe is to squeeze out all the water that you can from the spinach.  Only problem was that I had just had a manicure, and I wasn’t about/… Read full post »

 So where was I?  Oh, yes, the interminable chapter of Savory Pastries………….

So we managed to snag an invitation to our friends Wendy and Harold who are just about the best cooks in town.  It’s the custom around here to bring a dish whenever you&r/… Read full post »

“Rebecca, did Moshe bring a snack to school today in a Bio-Hazard bag?”  It was the voice of Rabbi F, the handsome, hot, charismatic, principal of the yeshiva day school , speaking to me on my cell phone.  In addition to the usual butterflies I get from talking to him, I/… Read full post »

Sometimes you have to get your nails painted black or play hookey from  work or put your feet up on the coffee table at your mother in law’s house.  And sometimes you have to cook something which is going to sit in your gut for a week.  So, the other day, I/… Read full post »

After two years of cooking from The Book of Jewish Food and several weeks of Early September Stress, today seems like a good chance for a review of systems. 

How are we doing?

Last week, for Shabbat,  I made Les Fila a la Viande, (Little Meat Triangles).  Full disclosure: … Read full post »

Sunday, August 28.  Hurricane Irene arrives on the scene in New Haven, CT.  My daughter Batya wakes me up at six to tell me that we have lost power. 

I spent the morning, roaming aimlessly around the darkened house.  First, I stood in Olivia’s messy bedroom, watching the up/… Read full post »

My son Moshe came in as I was making dinner the other night.  He asked what we were having.  “Ahhh….soup,” I told him. 

“And?”

“Salad.”

“And?”

“What’s Em-poop-… Read full post »

Minus $925.  That is how much we have in the bank, according to Michael.  Thanks to his having worked pretty much around the clock over the past three week he may be able to bring our balance back up to zero either today or tomorrow. Thank you, thank you, consumers of/… Read full post »

Yesterday I “graduated” another patient from the IOP.  I write “graduated” in quotes because even though he’d been my patient for four weeks he still couldn’t put two coherent thoughts together and was still coming up with neologisms like “turkily”/… Read full post »

Three days without my husband. 

The weekend before is a muddle in my head:  I know there were lots people, cocktails and food and even more than the customary amount of cooking and cleaning up. 

The past few days, by contrast, have been slow.  I was able to scramble/… Read full post »

It may happen at any time.  You’re going to have to invite some Jewish friends  over and they will expect you to serve them food.  A lot of food. 

Serve them Borekas. 

Dish up a bunch of Burriche di Tonno (only a couple of hours’ worth of work) and/… Read full post »