home cooking but it's jewish so it's not trad technically
an expanded yom kippur break fast menu
well, i can cross off my second big homemade meal for a group involving a stupid little prep list that i invariably end up soaking in cooking oil and sweat and sometimes literal tears (all i’ll say is julie from julie and julia has never felt so relatable…..I JUST FEEL LIKE YOU’RE NOT SUPPORTING MY ARBITRARY SELF-IMPOSED COOKING-RELATED EMOTIONAL STAKES ARC, PATIENT HUSBAND) past the point of legibility. sorry, rax! and our new 1yo maltipoo franklin! who came home on wednesday! four days before the party! haha! solid planning! luckily he had a playdate during the party, because his presence would have made me go full new dog mom mode in a room containing some actual moms. everyone loves when you wear your dog in a sling and worry about his bedtime routine, right?
i grew up around dinner parties—in the obnoxious upper west side kid sense, but also just in the sense that both of my parents regularly cook for a lot of people—and i guess it was inevitable that i would eventually try to replicate my mom’s pasta or my dad’s brisket for a crowd, but i’m still a little surprised to find myself as the host of a yom kippur break fast spread for 20 people. it happened, though, and while the official jewish headline would read BRISKET DRY; DIPS A HIT, people ultimately got fed and seemed to like most of the food and we all hung out and talked about how unimaginably fortunate we are to gather over food in a time when our faith is actively being invoked as cover for forced, genocidal starvation of palestinians: cnn.com/2024/10/11/middleeast/food-nort…
as with any yom kippur, it felt a bit wrong to be celebratory in any way, but i decided to think of it less as a spiritual commitment this year (im not fasting for medical reasons this yom kippur, as opposed to my usual “i don’t want to” reasons) and more as the communal commitment that laurie colwin talks about in more home cooking. “we know that without food we would die. without fellowship, life is not worth living”, she wrote, so i took her advice, bought twice the amount of lemons i thought i’d need (she was right; even if you’re just using them in your tea or on your pan, who ever regrets having too many lemons?) and endeavored to host a good chunk of my la friends and family for a homemade break-fast (aka fuckton of food that feels vaguely jewish in nature to me, the chef) with an optional donation to middle east children’s alliance: mecaforpeace.org
today (sunday) has been wobbly—i’m hungover, the dog chewed on plastic for the first time, i’m newly aware of life’s fragile beauty now that a seven-pound animal regularly sleeps on my chest and i cry all the time anyway—but last night was really fun, i have to admit. did i break the generational curse of being a jewish drama queen in the kitchen? no, but in my defense, i made:
-smoked trout and avocado dip (standout of the night, disappeared by the time i could get to it) bonappetit.com/recipe/smoked-trout-avoc…
-baba ghanouj with mint and mama teav’s hot garlic (not my best batch of this normally great recipe tbh) foodandwine.com/recipes/baba-ghanouj
-caramelized onion and sour cream dip (basicaly as trayf as it gets, with a fun midwestern flair) that got devoured with ruffles, as it more or less always does when i make it pinchofyum.com/onion-dip
-red wine braised brisket, tbh i should have listened to the comments and my instinct and my bf’s insistence that this cooking time was too long to keep the meat tender, but even at 300 degrees over 3.5 hours, the inside meat was fairly dry. the red wine braise is lovely but yeah this was not exactly my dad’s big green egg-smoked brisket. then again, every year when he sets said brisket down he always says “it’s not my best” and it always is, so maybe this is family tradition slash inheritance and thus, very jewish bonappetit.com/recipe/braised-beef-bris…
-an attempt at potatoes anna using a bag of small potatoes we had kicking around for way too long; they didn’t really anna-fy bc i had a minor oven disaster while i was cooking them, prompting the earlier alluded-to tears and predictable meltdown aimed at rax while he calmly reset the smoke detectors, but i like gabrielle hamilton’s recipe in general terrygruggen.blogspot.com/2017/02/pomme…
-a cubed-broiled-then-fried eggplant thing i combined with carrot fronds and preserved lemon in its juice at the last moment. bright and weird and fun in a somber way, perfect for the evening; i just learned that the jewish org i got the recipe from has never used the word “palestinian” on its site, which makes me…..not rly want to provide the recipe, but trust me, it was kind of mid (it was the frying and lemon and fronds that rescued it, all of which i added, not to be a BITCH)
-charred asparagus and dates with goat cheese and mint: this recipe really works better with fatter asparagus and a higher flame, i think, but i was scared of creating further fire alarm drama. the dates were lovely, the black peppercorn jack goat cheese i got at the echo park farmer’s market on friday with my aforementioned dog in a sling (barf) was lovely all crumbled up, and the mint i didn’t throw into the baba ghanouj really worked. in the future maybe toasted pine nuts on top too? bonappetit.com/recipe/charred-asparagus…
-laurie colwin’s chocolate almond cake: this was the most personally meaningful recipe on my list, not only bc laurie colwin is my ina (no offense to ina, also a queen) but bc she specifically recommends it as a “wonderful thing to serve at passover.” this was yom kippur, but whatever! she was right again, it really does taste like a “transcendent form of fudge”. i topped it with whipped cream and tried to ice “shana tova” onto the whip in chocolate icing pen, which sank, but whatever, the whole thing rocked. it’s small but feeds a deceptively large amount of ppl bc its so rich: labellecuisine.com/archives/chocolate/T…
-pumpkin chiffon cake: perfectly fine and all got eaten, but then again, cakes tend to. needed a nod to christian girl autumn on this menu to make sure it was a truly pantheistic event! food52.com/recipes/31906-pumpkin-chiffo…
we drank dolly parton branded chardonnay (i am not being paid to say this, i wish: it’s pretty good cold!) and other bottles people brought and seltzer and i think some fun na spirits i didn’t try bc i got gone off that dolly relatively early in the night. bridget jones style self resolution note: must eat consistently throughout the day when cooking! must not ignore self care basics all day then get drunk off one glass of wine and chase an endless waterfall of dips! not for diet reasons, but for avoiding being the person who says “cool, i’ll stand in the tub” when their best friend says they’re going to go pee and then actually does stand in the tub for a while. she’s so crazzzzzy haha!
anyway, i need a nap in order to gain the fortitude to finish cleaning the kitchen (thank god rax did a triage pre-clean last night while i was trying to force everyone to go to jumbo’s clown room and then escaping to lie fully clothed in my bed insisting i was not tired). g’mar chatima tova! gut yontif! free palestine! free all oppressed and imprisoned people everywhere! feed yourself and the people you love something good if you can! xoxoxoxo
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5:07 PM
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Oct 13, 2024
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