weekend

This shabbat my rabbi was away with the confirmation class on a retreat. I don't know which rabbi had the bigger handfull -- him with 20 or so teenagers, or the other rabbi with back-to-back services and a double b'not mitzvah (twin girls) Saturday morning. :-) I wonder what we did before we had a second rabbi.

Last week I shared my comments on the new siddur with another member of our morning minyan (I emailed her the URL). This is someone who understands liturgy, is smart, and enjoys talking about stuff like this. (I wanted to wait until she had completed her own evaluation before hitting her with the full force of my opinions.) She was there Saturday morning and told me that she really enjoyed reading my comments, and she said some very flattering things. That made me feel good. (She also asked if she could share them with an ex-congregant who is now in rabbinical school. The person in question is someone I wish I had a closer relationship with than I do, so I said sure.)

Saturday was a local SCA event, the Vetr Thing, on a Viking theme. It was a lot of fun! ( Read more... )

Today someone from the cable company came by to pick up the converter box (we dropped the digital cable), and I discovered that the "basic" service he returned us to is not the same service we had before we did this experiment. Before I was getting some extra channels that I no longer get (the History Channel is one), and some of the channels were assigned to different numbers. (On the other hand, I think we're getting one or two channels now that we didn't used to get, though they're ones I don't care about.) The person from the cable company swears that this is the basic service that I should have had before, but it's not and I want to know what happened. For the most part I don't think I care, but I am puzzled that we didn't revert to prior state.

The cable company also didn't disable the extra channels that come with digital until today, though the converter box stopped responding to the remote (and stopped offering features like the on-screen program guide) the day I cancelled the service. Since it took a week and a half for someone to collect the box and finish the downgrade, and that's not our doing, I hope they stopped billing us for the digital service on the day they said they would. I'll know when the next bill comes, I guess.

culinary quest

Last year I visited my friends Yaakov and Rivka for Purim, and one of their guests brought "vam", a very convincing fake ham made from veal. I would like to make this to spring on some friends, but the person who brought the dish won't share the recipe.

In asking around among people who know much more about cooking than I do, I gather that the solution involves soaking a hunk of meat in brine for a while. I bought a veal roast and cut it into smaller pieces to experiment with. (At $7 or so per pound, I want to keep the trial pieces small enough to be dinner for two.)

We had the first experimental version early last week, and I was disappointed. I'm trying to figure out how to tweak it for experiment number two, which I'd like to try this week.

For the first run, I made a brine out of the following (these amounts are from the recipe; I scaled down): 1C kosher salt, 1/2C brown sugar, 1 gallon stock (I actually used chicken bouillon here), 1T peppercorns, 1/2T allspice berries, 1/2T candied ginger, 1 gallon water. (Recipe attributed to Alton Brown.) I soaked the meat in this for 24 hours in a glass pot (turning a few times), then put it in a casserole, dumped some canned pineapple over it for effect, and baked it (first covered, then uncovered). It had a hint of the saltiness you expect from ham, and it turned slightly pinkish, but I know that much better is possible.

The recipe called for vegetable stock; I didn't have any, hence the bouillon. I can't use bouillon for the real run, though, because all bouillon contains MSG and one of my intended guests is allergic. So I guess I'll have to make a vegetable stock.

The meat came from a kosher butcher (I don't buy non-kosher meat), so it had already been soaked and salted before I began this process.

For the next run, I'm thinking that I should greatly increase the density of the non-water items and/or let it soak for longer. I don't have good instincts here.

Someone suggested using a mix of cloves, ginger, cinnamon, and pepper in the brine. Maybe the cinnamon and cloves would impart the sweetness that was missing from my first trial. (I assume she meant cassia, what's sold as cinnamon in stores.) The person who suggested this mix said that she accidentally brined chicken for too long and it turned pink and tasted like ham, but she didn't record quantities.

Other ideas would be very welcome.