New Recipes, Old Favorites

For Rosh Hashanah, many Jewish groups eat a variety of traditional foods -- crown-shaped challah, pomegranates, apples with honey, dates, roast meats, dishes made with seven vegetables, and many others. My only observance of Jewish ritual is cooking and eating these foods. This year, I tried two recipes from the New York Times food section.

Chicken stuffed with kasha and roasted with vegetables was last night's selection, from this recipe, mainly. It filled the house with a smell that I remember from childhood: chicken fat, garlic, and roasting meat.

Roast potatoes, carrots, onions, sweet potatoes and apples with a head of garlic separated into cloves (the recipe didn't mention garlic, but I added it)

Roast chickens stuffed with kasha

The table with my friend Abby's spinach salad (spinach is a North African tradition), a crown-shaped challah, and behind the salad, two pomegranates

Sweet-Sour Fish

Earlier this weekend, I made another New York Times recipe -- sweet-sour whitefish. The original called for salmon. In Eastern Europe, fresh-water fish was much more common, as the Jewish villages were very far from the ocean, as are we in Michigan. Using the head and tail of the whole fresh fish I bought, I made my own fish stock before proceeding with the recipe. Of course it took much longer to cook a whole fish -- but I think that made the broth all the better.

The fish in the oven

The cooked fish, with thyme leaves, lemon slices, golden raisins, and red onion