recently we have been cooking for intimate crowds, devising glorious feasts and a sense of cooking faster than we can write. Sharing one dish in isolation would always fall short; you cannot truly know the character of a dish except in relation to a community of other dishes. At present, however, there is not enough Glittersweets’ time to relay all of the recipes in any given feast. So, we propose to share feast menus with one complete recipe in brief. This is the first menu in this new series that will run interspersed with our on-going journey of 100 cakes.
this Shabbat at the Peacock Lounge served as respite from art making collective worky-worky dinners that have been about every other week for the past two months or so. Same folks, no agenda, and a proper Jewish prayer and candle lighting.
photos by Sheena!
* Shabbat with Meatballs *
Golden Vegetable Ragout with saffron and tumeric, parsnips and yellow bell pepper
Couscous with parsley
French Lentils – simple, with just a bit of sauted onion, salt and pepper
Flat Breads in Variation including dough with shallots and tarragon slapped in topped with grated green apple or plain topped with grated fresh horseradish or garlic
Roasted Eggplant Spread and Yellow Tomato Salad with tarragon and queso fresca
Croque-en-Bouche: a sticky tower of toffee sauced, caramel pastry creme filled choux puffs
N’gella’s “Tunisian Friday Night Supper for Eight to Ten” in Feast inspired this menu, and she writes: The fact that Tunisian Jews customarily eat meatballs, couscous and honeyed and orange-scented nutcake to celebrate the Sabbath, doesn’t mean you have to be Tunisian or Jewish to enjoy it; nor indeed, do you need to save it up for a Friday night.
cooking such a feast on a sabbath, however, usually means you have the time to do it, and if your sabbath includes the camaraderie of other kitchen witches, then the potching about for this whole menu is just thing. At least one of the witches will hopefully have the knack of seeding pomegranate. In any case, this entire menu is a to-do but not a fussy one. That ragout simmers without help for hours; couscous demands only that you pour boiling water over it then ignore until you want it; meatballs take hand rolling and frying, though that is not painstaking and the other work of them barely exists. The cookbook calls for rose harissa, which we did not have on hand or in any grocery store within walking distance, so we hope to pick some up next time we are at Sahadi‘s for future use. For this supper, we relied on our Sicilian sensibilities – which fall not far from North Africa, though Italianified – making the vegetable stew caponata-like with cider vinegar and honey in addition to the dried apricots snipped into quarters and melting into the ragout. We also eschewed lamb for beef and pork halvsies for the meatballs, which we put together with just a bit of chopped sauted onion, bread crumbs and egg.
somehow in line with the meatballs and whole ensemble, croque-en-bouche for dessert. Choux, the dough for profiteroles and all their cousins, is only daunting for its Frenchness. We grated a little lemon into the choux, and flavored the pastry creme with caramelized sugar syrup. Toffee sauce is a speedy, homely thing to cook up. The whole is a grande thing from French weddings, a tower of cream puffs mortared together with toffee, ensuring a sweet struggle to free your bite from the communal plate. Somehow it is better for that, and we do not know why.
RECIPE IN BRIEF: MEATBALLS
1 lb ground beef
1 lb ground pork
1 small yellow onion and 2 cloves of garlic minced and sauted in olive oil until just brown
1/2 cup breadcrumbs
1 egg
2 tablespoons of butter
Salt & Pepper
Squidge together all of the ingredients in a bowl with your hands until thoroughly combined. Form into balls about the size of a large walnut. Heat a well-seasoned cast iron skillet, or two for efficiency, on a medium high flame. Fry meatballs in batches without crowding; cook through – cut one open to test. Serve as is or in sauce or freeze for future use.
Served here piled up with pomegranate seeds in a beautiful bowl from Turkey.
Glitter Sweets 