Reunion Food

Liz has crafted a delicious menu this year - and no tacos! Not that I don't love tacos, but they are a lot of prep time. This year this is what Liz (and I) have come up with:
Wednesday - Pizza and potluck

Thursday -- Mediterranean in feel
Lemon garlic chicken
rice
Grilled vegetables
Salad with feta and olives on the side
Roast eggplant and onions with lemon, basil, and mint

Friday - We are celebrating the year of the Pig!
Grilled Pork Loin with oriental/style rub
Chinese Cabbage Salad
Broccoli with Garlic & Soy
Sushi Rice
Fortune Cookies
Green salad

Saturday - A family Thanksgiving
Turkey & all the fixings
Mashed Potatoes
Durkee Green Bean Delish
Salad
Cranberry Orange Salad Raw style

More later - I'll post recipes as we go.

July food

There is very little cultural blending of food in July except when we hit the July 4th weekend and then head to the shore in August. Summer foods are more regional than cultural I've found. Yesterday we had our annual July 4th food fest. It featured the traditional Tabor foods:
Fried Chicken
Yellow mustard/mayo potato salad
Bing! Cherries
Chips and Lipton Onion Soup Chip Dip

Added to the list this year were:
Salsa and Guacamole with El Milagro Chips
A green bean/new potato salad that is like a niçoise salad without the tuna (a nod to my need to lower cholesteral for those I love.)

Missing this year - I had the stuff but lacked the mo-
Homemade ice cream

New beverage of choice for the summer has become the Vodka Tonic with a generous splash of pomegranate juice. Sqeeze of lime. Fruity without being sweet.

We head to the Jersey shore in August. Clam strips and raw bar and bloody marys. Must take the V & T recipe to the shore.

Our family reunion is in three weeks. We spend four days hanging out on the shores of Lake Shetek. Food is a central part of that event. More to come about that.

The Easter food fest

We had the big Easter Egg hunt and Ham Feed on Easter. Shopping at the Marketplace was wild - with the convergence of Greek Orthodox and Western Easters, I had to elbow all the little Korean ladies at the produce aisle. The ham that I got was delicious and is now in the freezer awaiting a big pot of bean soup.

Small crowd this year. Liz made deviled eggs (better than mine from Seder) and we had ham, baked potatoes, beans - delish - but the potatoes took forever!!!! to bake. What was the deal with that?

Julie and Emma came over to fill out the ranks of the egg hunters and I (thank the good G-d) had chicken pot stickers (not pork - they don't do pork) and matzoh to eat with the SDSU cheddar that was fabulous!

Excellent Bloody Marys. Just enough horseradish (our Pesach nod) to make them irresistible.

I made a bunch of teeny crispy meringues (see previous post) with no chocolate chips. Ellen made fabulous macaroons that I must get the recipe for you.

The other desert option (besides the chocolate eggs) was Ella's famous lemon meringue pie. I'll post the recipe when I'm home and I have it in my hand. - and here it is:

Lemon Pie
1 C Sugar
2 TBS Cornstarch
2 TBS Flour
1/8 tsp salt
1 1/2 C boiling water

2 egg yolks
juice and grated rind of 1 lemon
1 TBS butter

Place dry ingredients in the top of a double boiler and add boiling water slowly, stirring. Cook until mixture begins to thicken. Add lightly beateb egg yolks, lemon juice, and rind. Cook 1 min [this has to be a mis-print unless you like lemon soup - it often takes 10 minutes until the mixture coats the back of a spoon nicely- keep stirring]. Add butter and remove from heat.

Pour hot filling into a prebaked 9 inch pie crust. Top with merengue made with the reserves egg whites [I often add a third], sugar, and cream of tartar [if you must]. Spread merengue all the way to the crust. This makes it less weepy somehow. Put in a moderate to high oven until the merengue browns (not too long - really).

From Passover to Easter

So, we sedered. Monday at our home, Tuesday at Anny's. I find that Maxwell House Hagaddah sexist, old fashioned, dry, and lifeless.

We had wonderful homemade macaroons that I will get the recipe for. They were amazing!
Menus -
Monday - 1st night
Haroset
Deviled Eggs
Chicken Soup with Matzoh balls
Token gefilte fish with lots of really amazing horseradish
Turkey
Mashed potatoes and gravy (yes, leaven)
Sauteed green beans
Merengues
Macaroons
Fresh strawberries

Tuesday Night - 2nd night
Haroset
Hard boiled eggs in salt water
Lots of gefilte fish
Chicken Soup with Matzoh balls
Leg of lamb
Asparagus
Beet and Fennel Salad (yum! A meal highlight!)
Boiled new potatoes
Macaroons
Chocolate Covered Matzoh from Piron Chocolateer

So now, on to the Easter ham feed - We'll have those deviled eggs again because they are universally loved. Liz makes them better than I do.
Ham and baked potatoes
Mixed green salad
Maybe I'll work that beet and fennel salad out. This recipe looks promising!

Cook for two hours

Check out the Joy of Cooking's recipe for Gefilte Fish!! Cook for two hours. Yes, seriously!

I've finally found someone who like gefilte fish. My friend Ellen! She and her family are joining us for Seder. They are also a blended family. She says that she is Jewish, the kids are diluted, and her husband is deluded. Anyway. She likes gefilte fish, so I guess we'll be having it for seder. I like it with enough horseradish. My daughter tells me that I'll eat almost anything with enough horseradish

She's making coconut macaroons dipped in chocolate and the chicken soup with matzoh balls. Yum. I'm going to make merengues. So - Here's the recipe:

2 egg whites - beat slowly until stiff
add 2/3 cup sugar - 1 Tbs at a time
add a pinch of salt
1 t vanilla
1 C chopped pecans (optional at my house - not everyone is a pecan fan and this recipe came from a sister of my - Catholic - grandmother from Enid, Oklahoma
1 C chocolate chips

Preheat oven t 350º. Line a cookie sheet with foil. Drop cookies onto sheet. Place ain the oven and turn off the heat! Leave them in all night.
Do Not Open Oven! (Double underlined and two exclamation points from my grandmother!)

Almost Seder - time to look for the Haggadah

It's almost Seder again. I am trying to figure out what to do with this particular meal. As always I lean to turkey, but seder with just the five of us feels like a ton of bird and not that many eaters. I'd invite the neighbors, but they are all away for spring break. So that leaves me with a big pot of chicken soup.

Which brings me to chicken soup. Again, my mother-in-law gave me the great soup hint of putting a sweet potato in the soup pot. This improves the color and flavor, especially if you are souping a chicken that doesn't bring a lot to the pot. And remember - cook for two hours!

Chicken soup -

Into the pot goes -
1 Whole chicken - skin, bones - the whole meghilla (that's Purim I know - but hey)
2 ribs of celery, cleaned and chopped as small as you would like.
2 whole carrots - ditto
1 peeled sweet potato - cut it in half if you want to fish it out
1 large or two small onions - peeled and diced.
Salt
Cover with water.
Cook for two hours.

Cool and pull out the bones and anything you don't want in the bowls on the table. It's delish. Really.

The first seder - Taj the dog batting clean up

I remember the first Passover, long before any of us were married or thinking of kids. We had seder at the boys apartment on Simpson street - so that would have been Craig and Sam and John. The attendant girlfriends would have been Melinda, why do I think Daryl was there, and me. So two blonde non-jews, two Jewish boys. Craig called his grandmother for her noodle kugel recipe which she reminded him that he couldn't make for Passover because the noodles were flour. He lied and told her that he just wanted to know how to make it. It was delicious - like a bread pudding with noodles insead of day old bread. Yum.

I always think of this as the training seder. From here it was seders at Claire and Bob's (Schiksas come to seder aka the all blonde seder; the seder where Marjorie made it clear where her sexual preferences were), seder with Craig and Melinda after they were married with Craig's mother and father ("Did you count the silver? You should always count the silver.") seders at our home, the sorta seders where Sam was the lone Jew - to last year's Seder in Orlando - the Mickey Mouse Seder.

The menu that first night was turkey, asparagus, some kind of potato I am sure. Craig povided the hagaddah, and we avoided gefilte fish though we had deviled eggs and chicken soup with matzoh balls.

I'm going to promise to put the noodle kugel recipe here. I need to test out my bread pudding theory. The recipe included orange juice and the whole deal was topped off with crushed corn flakes tossed with butter and cinnamon and suger. What's not to like?

Craig's Bubbe's Sweet Kugle Recipe - recreated:

12 ounces wide egg noodles
1/2 to 1 cup raisins (depending on how much you like them!)
1/3 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup orange juice
2 whole eggs
3 egg whites
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp vanilla
1/4 cup oil (plus a bit for the pan)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Oil a 13" X 9" baking dish.

Cook egg noodles according to package directions.

While they are cooking, pour hot water over the raisins to plump them up.

Mix the oil, brown sugar, orange juice, cinnamon, vanilla, eggs and egg whites together. Mix well.

Drain the noodles, put them in the baking dish. Drain the raisins. Add them, too. Stir in the sugar/egg/oj mixture.

Topping:
2 C crushed corn flakes
1/4 C sugar
1 tsp cinnamon
3 TBS melted butter

Mix all ingredients together in a bowl. Srpinkle on top of noodle mixture.

Bake for 40 minutes or until nicely browned and cooked in the center.

Now - this is a recreation and I have not tried it yet, but it seems like all the right ingredients in the right order, with the one cholesteral lowering nod of substituting 3 egg whites for 2 whole eggs although in a big pan like this, a serving of kugel will have about 1/4 of an egg in it anyway if you made it with 4 whole eggs. I'll try it out and update the post if it doesn't seem right.