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

[dvarin.livejournal.com]

So, I have an off-topic question:
If you're not allowed to ask non-Jews to do work for you on the sabbath, why are you allowed to put things on timers? I mean, the actual work (turning on the crock pot) still gets done on Saturday, you're just "asking" a machine to do it instead of asking a person, it seems.