dinner last night

[cellio]

We ended up with a small group for the NetBill dinner last night. (NetBill was a past job, and most of us were/are friends.) One person ended up not being able to come at the last minute, and all the SOs turned out to be unavailable, so it was just four of us. It was a fun gathering, though, and people stayed until sometime after 1am.

Because the dinner started before Shabbat ended, I did a combination of pre-cooking and using the crock pot on a timer. Since Dani was away at a convention, I didn't need to use the crock pot for lunch. (I just ate cold foods instead.) I adapted a recipe I've previously made in the oven for the crock pot and it came out well.

What I did:

Brown chicken breasts in a skillet in hot oil. Put them in the crock pot, and in the same oil cook chopped onions for a couple minutes (cooked but not thoroughly limp). Throw those into the crock pot, along with diced apples, raisins that have been soaked in water, curry powder, a little honey, and white wine. Cook.

(I did all of this Thursday night, including cooking the pot for a couple hours on high to make sure the meat wasn't raw. Friday I set the crock pot on a timer on low and put the pot back in on Saturday around noon for a 7:30 dinner.)

Proportions: 8 chicken breasts, 4 small white onions, 4 small apples, about 0.5C raisins, about 2T honey, about 1T curry, about 2C wine. This was more liquid than was actually necessary, but that's hard to judge with crock pots sometimes, especially when they're full as this one was. I think I would have preferred a little more of both apples and onions, but the pot was full. If I made this with 4-6 pieces of chicken I'd probably keep the amounts of everything else (except wine) the same. I deliberately kept the curry level mild; this was not hot and zippy but was quite tasty. (I also didn't use one of the hotter curries.)

Comments

Re:

[sanpaku.livejournal.com]

I don't have the responsum about electricity in front of me, so I can't respond to all of your thoughts. I will say that it seemed pretty thorough to me -- for example, as I mention, eish has certain characteristics, like creating ash, but a light bulb doesn't do that. It did deal with the "completing" issue, but in a less comprehensive way (I think because it was not the main objection in the orthodox community at the time.) As for "striking the last hammer blow," as I mentioned, I don't see that a "state change" is the same as completing something, but I am relying on lay reasoning here -- I don't really know what "striking the last hammer blow" means in practice -- that is, how completing something is different than constructive work in general. (A "state change" is not by itself melacha, either -- you can freeze or thaw water, for example -- so again, I don't know how to puzzle out the concept.)

An oven or a furnace would be forbidden for the other things they did -- cooking, or igniting fuel. It's certainly true that there are Conservative authorities who do not buy the teshuva. But as I mentioned, for me this would be a "quantum leap" in my observance.

As far as what is or isn't shabbosdig, I didn't learn that at home either -- other than services, and meals, we didn't do shabbat. There are those who would consider reading a secular newspaper to be not in keeping with shabbat, because it deals with business and wars and so on (Harry Potter isn't great but is less bad because it's fiction). Once you get into the realm of people who care about this sort of thing, you're obviously dealing with people who take a largely dim view of godless secular entertainment in general. So it's hard to know where a less extreme version of this would draw a line! I suppose it's easier because if you have had a good shabbat with friends and services and whatnot, you don't miss TV, at least in my experience. So it's more an ideal than something that can easily be stated as a principle.