Shana Tova - Happy New Jewish Year 5767

Cheryl Isaak ,in rec.crafts.textiles.needleworkwrote: and entertained us with

I thought it was September 23 ???

Starts at sundown on Friday, 9/22.

Cheryl

To you too, Miryam!

Sara

In the US, it is. But all Jewish holidays start the night before, at sunset. That's why we always (jokingly, of course) called Xmas Eve, Erev Chriistmas.

Sara

To all of you who celebrate our New year , and To every other Person who also can always use some good wishes

Shana Tova =Happy new Jewish Year 5767

mirjam

Haifa the Beautiful City of Israel.

Shana tovah to all, may this New Year bring sweetness to all of our lives, and some peace throughout the world.

I was thinking about the meaning of the new year - a time to reflect on things, look forward, think back. We're having something between 16 & 20 people over for holiday dinner tomorrow night. The builder just had a temporary floor installed in the DR - so tonight DH and I will be moving the DR furniture back into the DR, the new unfinished (that I'm getting ready to stain) desk for DH, and cabinets for great room, into the LR, rounding up every chair we can, doing lots of cleaning. So, I guess my first New Year efforts will be getting the house cleaned. It's a nice thing - having so many people together.

We share our holidays with 2 other couples, their children. Have done so for 21 years - wow. It's an interesting crew - as we tend to invite various and sundry other friends, colleagues - to join us. This year we've got another recent college grad (friend of goddaughter), a former colleague of professor (mother of godchildren, wife of my grad school office mate) friend (who now just split from wife), a hockey ref colleague of ours who's for the first time alone for the holidays (and turning 30 on Tuesday - hmmmm - not toooo old for the goddaughter), the ex-wife (& mother of children) of the husband in couple 2 (who is coming with wife 2 whom we all adore), the ex-wife's boyfriend, 2 of their 3 kids (including the typical almost 16 yr old girl, and the emotionally troubled but not in the arrestable way 20 year old), the 17 yr old god-daughter 2, the 11 yr old with her own ADHD issues (looks 13, acts 8), our younger friends with their 9 month old (teething), and, well, at this point I Have no idea anymore. It'll certainly be interesting.

Of course - I just got e-mail from the dad in couple 2 - that his kids would find the proposed stuffed cabbage main course "out there" - so I should make chicken as well. Guess I'm switching the main course to honey-ginger chicken or brisket. Did I mention that all our dishes are in storage (except some corelle)? And now I can't find either chest of silver - but at least we have the nice set of stainless we splurged on for the new house. So, we're having the huge dinner - on lovely paper plates - but with real silverware. And I got the party pack of 18 wine glasses at Costco.

Hopefully no one minds the kind of mess that will surround us in the rest of the house. And it'll be a memorable New Year celebration. I just wonder who else might just show - or have I missed inviting someone????

L'shana tova, ellice

Mirjam Bruck-Cohen said

Thank you for the kind wishes. May you and your loved ones experience a happy and healthy New Year.

As a teenager, I hated peeling what seemed like many bags of carrots and sweet potatoes for tsimmes. My attempts don't come close to my mother's

And the very same wishes for you and for everyone.

Lucille

Ah, I remember those days. In preparation for this weekend, I finally splurged on a new, large, Cuisinart. My old 7 cup one is packed somewhere, and y'know - it's so much easier with the food processor (not the peeling, but the grating, shredding, chopping).

I started doing the cooking with my grandmother when I was pretty young - so poor mom had the reverse problem as we got older - the request for me to cook. But, she was a pretty good cook, didn't really like doing it so was happy for me to go at it.

I'm excited that I was able to order Taglaich from Wegmans. I was toying with the idea of making one - growing up in NY & Miami, every bakery had their own special one. For the rest of you - it's a mounded thing of little kind of crunchy balls coated with honey, and some have nuts, candied cherries in the mound. A wondrous, gooey treat for the New Year.

Have a happy, ellice

Do you actually have a recipe for taglaich? I personally never liked it, too sweet, but I would love to surprise my friends by making it.

My grandmother was useless when it came to getting recipes from her and her standard answer was you put in a little of this, some of that, etc. When I asked how much was a little, the answer generally was "Till it looks right." Not much help for the recipe impaired like me. My mother didn't like it, so I never found out the how.

Lucille

>

Yes - I do. But, I've never made it. I'll look for it, and send it in a bit. I'm just about to run out to Costco - to buy folding chairs. And then stop at either Linens & Things or Bed Bath Beyond, and use a coupon to get a tablecloth - found the pads, but don't think I have the huge size (seats

12-16) in an accessible place.

I'll send the recipe later today.

Ellice

Because that's how they learned to cook in the Old Country where many people couldn't read a printed recipe.

We put together a cookbook as a club fundraiser, and almost every one of the recipes came back with such useful quantities as "add flour till it feels right". The next weekend, we kids were dispatched to grannies' houses with measuring cups/spoons, and when granny said "add a handful of", she had to dump it into the measuring cup instead of the mixing bowl, so that we could get an approximate quantity.

Quite frankly, the only recipes where precision is necessary are those for certain baked goodies. Some of the stuff won't turn out right if you get the proportions wrong, or substitute margarine for butter, or substitute saccharine for sugar....

Thanks. No need to hurry. I'm going to dinner tonight at a friend's house and won't have time to fuss with it till next week, if at all.

Have a happy.

Lucille

>

That's nice that you did that.

Actually, most baked goods require precision. Except I guess chocolate chip cookies - and I know people that would argue that point. Especially pastries. Differences in amounts often have to do with size of eggs, liquid proportions, humidity, how creamy is the butter, etc. Pastry chefs are like chemists with food. Depends on what you cook - I have some "food" recipes that still require some precision - albeit not to the extent that baking does.

Not everyone is an intuitive cook. If you're lucky, then you get to feel, smell, see what the not-writing it down, or "just know how it should be" cooks are doing. So, then you can appreciate what the feel will be. Once you know with different things - then it's not such a big step to modifying a recipe, and having some prediction of what will happen. Even for something as simple for me as making matzoh balls - I KNOW what the batter should feel like with eggs, meal, seasoning, and again what it should be like when the liquid is added. I have a basic recipe - it works fine. But for them to be really great - the proportions vary - as some eggs are bigger, sometimes the matzoh meal absorbs a little more, etc.

If no one has really told you that their dough requires chilling before rolling, or some similar detail - a simple thing can come out kind of disappointing.

I'm the only one in my family who can make some interesting kind of potato dumpling like thing my grandmother made. My father used to make them as well - at some point he had my nana write the recipe. But, the reason mine come out like hers - all those days spent helping her, and she wanted to be sure that I knew what the dough felt like at different times . Consequently, I have my grandmother's cookbook - which has a lot of actual measurements for baking (she was a fabulous baker), and not so much for cooking things.

ellice

My grandmother was a semi-professional baker and used to bake challahs and strudel for neighborhood bakeries when they needed something really special. She also worked in a small hotel in the Catskills several summers. But she didn't read or write, and since I had to go to school and she had a pushcart to take care of during the day, I couldn't stay with her for the length of time necessary to watch her and write the recipes down, and most of them were lost. By the time I was old enough and interested enough to care about those things, she was gone.

Just as an interesting note, she rolled her strudel dough on a clean white table cloth right on the kitchen table. Even though she couldn't read a word, she would take a page from her neighbor's newspaper and hold it under the dough when it was rolled thin enough to please her eye. If she could see the individual letters through the dough, she deemed it ready to be filled and rolled. The end result was mouth watering.

As far as precise measurements, my father-in-law was a bread baker. He made possibly the best rye bread in Brooklyn. When I asked for that recipe, he did give it to me, but he correctly stated it would never be as good in a home oven as it was in the bakery oven. He also remarked many times that baking bread like that wasn't ever doable with a written recipe. The end result was affected by the humidity, the temperature and the general weather conditions and the proportions had to be changed daily. That was why he despised packaged rye bread and said they knew only the exact proportion in their written recipe and it simply didn't work. I guess you could call him a kosher breadbaker snob.

Lucille

>

Well, there's precision to get an edible result and precision to get exactly the same result as Grandma.

One of my former co-workers had a boyfriend who loved to cook (which was good, because she barely knew how). He was a teacher, and on some school holiday when we had to work and he didn't, he went out first thing in the morning for supplies and a dozen Mrs. Fields cookies. Many batches later, he had a pretty close clone of Mrs. Fields. The only thing she could remember was that he said it used twice as much butter as the normal recipe off the chip bag.

I have regularly had people beg for my brownie recipe and refuse to believe that it's the 99c Safeway house brand mix. They're right, it

*is* moister than when they make it, because I add more water than the box says -- I have the experience to know that I can do that, and to know how much is too much. An extra quarter-cup is one thing, an extra gallon is quite another.

Lucille wrote: > The end

I heard the same thing from the professional bakers in my family, which is why I was trained that recipes are only a guide, and you have to know whether the weather required adding more or less of something.

There was one thing that my grandfather flat-out refused to make on a rainy day because it just wouldn't come out right. I can't remember what it was, but since I live in ever-sunny California, I don't NEED to remember.

He was right. My grandmother spent her life in Iowa and Missouri and baked raised breads and rolls regularly for family, church, friend, etc. She said never attempt bread on a day when the weather is rapidly changing (common in those states) because it won't turn out right no matter what you do. If the air pressure, temperature and humidity stay reasonably constant all day, you can go by the feel and appearance of the dough to get it right. She also didn't trust the oven dial and kept two thermometers inside the oven to make certain it heated evenly. While she could read and write, her bread recipes were all in her head. She's been gone for over 20 years now; the closest any of us have found to her dinner rolls is a recipe for "Fly-Off-The-Plate" rolls in the Kitchen Klatter cookbook. Since she did gather (and frequently modify) recipes from their radio show, that was possibly her source.

And Happy New Year to you and everyone else, as well. I love the stuff I learn on this newsgroup! If I have any Jewish friends (besides the virtual type), I don't know it, so had no idea when the New Year started. Tegan