A number of unrelated thoughts…
A Nice Story
My mother was invited to a good friend of hers who completed the Hajj to Mecca. A number of friends all got together, and my mother was touched by a gift of dates from Mecca. My mother is a member of the Women’s Interfaith Encounter and she has met many of her closest friends there. I thought it was a nice story to hear after reading the news…
More Pooh Bear
We celebrated a birthday for my eldest (again!) this time in his day-care. We made a great birthday cake! My MIL gave me a pooh-bear shaped cake pan, so I used it with my basic chocolate cake. I used chocolate frosting from Ugot Lekol Et, and wrote on it with eggless white frosting from here: basically 1/2 cup sugar and 2-3 tbsp milk. I also could have used melted white chocolate, but I thought of it only afterwards. It was a great hit and all the kids wolfed it.
Chocolate Frosting
Before Frosting
After Frosting
Unexpected (but welcome!) Guests
A few weeks ago I had an urge to really cook something substantial for Shabbat. Lately we’ve been eating hard eggs, yoghurt and cheese (and vegetables and fruits, of course) for Friday dinner and blintzes or a one-dish meal for Lunch. However, that Friday I made blintzes for Friday dinner and for lunch made meatloaf, two kinds of potato, chicken soup, vegetable casserole, and a cake. We also had strawberries as an additional treat.
About 20 minutes after my husband and the kids left for the synagogue, my MIL showed up, with a bag of my eldest’s drawings that we’d left there. I was grateful but… to come specially for this on Friday evening? I asked if anything was the matter, perhaps?
She looked at me blankly: “You invited us for dinner tonight…didn’t you?”
“No…?”
“But we talked about it, you said Friday night and not Shabbat lunch!”
“I thought we were talking about next week…”
Um.
And then I rallied. “No problem, I’ll just switch between lunch and dinner”. I removed the blintzes warming on the hot plate, and put all the abovementioned foods instead. As I had prepared them on Friday, most were not in the fridge but at room temperature or warmer. My MIL tried to think of another solution, but at this point it’s too late to take anything out of the freezer, and the prospect of eating a can of tuna is not appealing. I reassured her that it’s no problem. “I felt like cooking a lot for this Shabbat – it’s turned out well!” The one thing that wasn’t totally hot for dinner was the soup, and there was plenty of food for everyone. It’s a good thing my MIL has a habit of coming early to chat a bit, otherwise we would have been in real trouble…
On Saturday, I was with the kids as usual in the morning after Synagogue, and I saw that they were tired, and besides I was getting hungry, so I put the blintzes on the hot plate so we would eat around 11:45. I woke up my husband and began to arrange the kids towards lunch and…knocking on the door. My parents came, as we had mentioned that with the winter days and daylight saving it’s hard to come in the afternoon, as my youngest sleeps between 14:00 and 16:00 and by then it’s too late to visit. So they came early, to find us preparing for lunch. Of course we invited to them to join us, and they thoroughly enjoyed blintzes with sweet cheese and strawberries (as a pre-lunch “snack”) 🙂 .
It was a lovely weekend!
Next weekend we invited my MIL… and wrote it down…
Have a great year!
Leftover Recipes 