Shavuot food

[magid]

I'm hosting dinner tonight, with the rest of the meals relying on the likely leftovers, possibly supplemented with cheese or lox or something. One of the guest tonight needs gluten-free food, while another is vegan. I wanted to make a meal that both of them could eat most of.

• wine, challah (part white flour, part rye)
  
• chipotle hummus with baby carrots
  
• mushroom-cabbage soup (onion, garlic, leek, red cabbage, white mushrooms, dried mushrooms, oyster mushrooms, fresh winter mushrooms, sweet potato, cannelini beans)
  
• polenta rounds topped with olive spread and roasted zucchini and cauliflower
  
• dilly cucumber salad
  
• corn and bean salad (fresh corn, black beans, roasted green beans, and roasted red peppers dressed with olive oil, lime juice, black pepper, and cumin)
  
• green salad (Boston lettuce, red lettuce*, arugula*, chives*, marigolds*, scallions, orange, and hearts of palm dressed with balsamic vinaigrette and olive paste (er, probably; the green salad's being assembled after yom tov...))
  
• sauteed gai lan and broccoli (with onion, garlic, ginger, and tamari)
  
• rice salad (read: I couldn't find rice wrappers with a hechsher for spring rolls, so improvised by putting the sticky rice, tofu, and cucumber together with a dressing of cashew butter, tamari, lime juice, toasted sesame oil, and fresh mint*)
  
• frozen desserts (blood orange sorbet, blueberry sorbet, caramel frozen yogurt) and toppings (roasted mango and peaches with brown sugar and black pepper; homemade mixed candied citrus peel)
  
• fruit salad (kiwi, strawberry, citrus, if I find the time before people arrive)

* harvested from the porch

Happy Shavuot! I'll be offline until Thursday night, so play nice :-)


The eruv's already declared down for Shabbat; not enough time to make the fix and check the whole between yomtov and Shabbat. *sigh*

Comments

[alandd.livejournal.com]

Play nice? aaw, do I gotta? :-P

Happy holidays. ;-)

[rethought.livejournal.com]

Hmmm...I wonder what celiacs do on a regular basis with the bread portion. None of the gluten free flour are grain except buckwheat.

[surrealestate.livejournal.com]

mmmmm!

Chag sameach!

[magid.livejournal.com]

Playing nice can be fun :-)

And thanks. Have a good weekend!

[magid.livejournal.com]

The celiac person I know just doesn't have bread of any sort. Yeah, it's better to have a seudah with bread, but the rules are for living by, not dying by.

As for the kid I know who's allergic to wheat, oats, rye, barley, spelt, and corn, his mom makes 'bread' of rice flour and potato starch and something else, and they use it as bread (washing, saying the blessing over it) because their rabbi decided this was an appropriate way to teach the kid. I don't know whether that will change when he's older.

[magid.livejournal.com]

Thanks! Hope you had a nice week too :-)

[alandd.livejournal.com]

You too! Ping me if you want to play some wii this weekend, I'm sure I'll have plans at some point but as of now, not so much. ;-)

[alandd.livejournal.com]

One of the things that I like about Judaism is that all the rules are subject to health issues... Fasting, etc.

[magid.livejournal.com]

Thanks! Sunday's booked, but Monday's a possibility, especially if the weather's right for a bike ride. I've held off on making definite Monday plans so far, though, just to make sure I can get house stuff and such done. Will know better Sunday night, if that's ok.

[alandd.livejournal.com]

Not a problem, just let me know. I might have other plans by then, but if we're both free, it would be great to see you...

notes

[magid.livejournal.com]

As always, really fresh bread is a good thing.

Don't leave things in the oven; I almost forgot the polenta.

The green salad didn't have olives in any form, nor hearts of palm, but did have some nuts.

There wasn't nearly enough mint in the rice salad, nor enough of the non-nut-butter things to make a balanced dressing.

The both sorbets tasted good, but the texture of the blueberry was superior (and the flavor more intense).

Re: notes

[(Anonymous)]

What a lovely meal!

I've sometimes thought the rice mixture used for stuffed grape leaves would make a nice rice salad on its own.

What brand was the blueberry sorbet?

There is expensive oat matzah made from a special kind of oat that is somehow grown gluten-free so that celiacs can have matzah on Pesach, but I suppose such flour would be difficult to obtain year-round.

I like that you noted what came from your porch garden. So cool that you are growing and harvesting all that right there.

Marigolds in the salad!

Re: notes

[magid.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

I tend not to like rice salads much, because I don't care much for rice that's been refrigerated. The sticky rice with all the dressing soaked in seemed to do find, though.

I'll try to remember to check the sorbet brand when I get home.

I can get oat flour (as well as other, non-five-grains flour), but it's difficult to make breadstuff with just that; regular bread depends on gluten for the rise. I can find gluten-free bread approximations, but it's not at all the same process I'm used to using for bread.

I love having food on my porch, even if it's just a little. It's so satisfying that I mostly grow edible things. Plus, fewer worries if little kids come to visit :-)

sorbet brand

[magid.livejournal.com]

Natural Choice. Bought at Harvest Co-op.

Re: notes

[(Anonymous)]

I agree, refrigerated rice isn't pleasant unless it's been soaked or otherwise kept moist, baked into a kugel or cooked in a pudding or something.

regular bread depends on gluten for the rise

Makes sense that it works for matza, then!

Even if a gluten-free five-grains flour doesn't make good bread on its own, it could be mixed with gluten-free non-five-grains flours that may be more appropriate. If your young friend's mother could add the special gluten-free oat flour to her rice flour/potato starch/something else bread, it could be considered bread. I assume there are halakhic guidelines about the necessary proportions for this to be so, though.

Your porch environment sounds fulfilling. Is your porch off your kitchen?

Re: sorbet brand

[(Anonymous)]

Thank you for checking!

Re: notes

[magid.livejournal.com]

For the celiac person, I could mix the oat flour with the non-five-grains flour (making sure the oat flour was the majority; I think that would be sufficient) and play around to see what would work; I didn't have time for the requisite experimentation before Shavuot.

For the kid-person, he's allergic (not celiac) to all five grains, so any 'bread' they make is by definition not even mezonot.

My porch is off the kitchen. It was one of the reasons I moved here, having a sukkah porch right there (no cold soup!), and I've tried to grow at least a couple of herbs every year. I still have to organize this year's batch, though; there's a lot of bits of wood and such around that need to be moved so there's room for people.

Re: notes

[(Anonymous)]

Oh, I did confuse the celiac situation with the allergy situation, didn't I? Oops.

I remember learning that if someone who for health reasons can't eat even a tiny amount of matzah goes ahead and eats it anyway in order to fulfill the mitzvah, he is not considered to have fulfilled the mitzvah. That is to say, it's shame the young person has so many restrictions, but his health is the important thing.

Your kitchen/sukkah/edible-garden/room-for-people porch indeed sounds wonderful. I always did picture it as being off your kitchen. Now I picture it with marigolds, too.

there's a lot of bits of wood

This caused me to imagine woods, that is, a densely wooded area, on your porch, trees packed in tightly to the boundaries of your porch, in stark contrast with the open airspaces immediately outside the perimeter and the neighboring houses beyond.

Re: notes

[(Anonymous)]

in stark contrast with

Or, contrast to.

Re: notes

[magid.livejournal.com]

I agree, it's all about the health thing. Hopefully the young one will outgrow at least some of his allergies; his parents are being strict about exposures now partly for the immediate health, and partly with the hope that with the immune system not constantly triggered, it'll mellow enough that he'll lose at least a couple of the issue foods. Apparently anything that causes anaphylaxis is unlikely to change, though. And in some ways I feel worse for his brother, who now almost never gets bread due to his sibling's issues along with his own (separate) allergies.

I need to get more marigolds for the porch :-).

*grin*
I like your image; I'd love to have a whole woods on my porch (Tardis porch!)!

Reality is a bit less interesting, being a porch too narrow for a real table, currently cluttered with plants not yet in any order, a plastic tarp I keep forgetting to bring in before the next rain, excess pots and gardening stuff, plus bits of two-by-fours and such that I tend to put on top of schach to help it stay in place during the chag. I really don't need to have them there just now. I'm lucky that my porch overlooks not only my building's back yard, but the neighbors' as well, so it's a very green view.

Re: notes

[(Anonymous)]

That's a smart approach the parents have. May their son outgrow at least some of the allergies and never gain any new ones. Perhaps you can invite the brother over for a bread-baking session?

Glad you like the image!

Maybe you can get a small cabinet in which to store the gardening items and schach weights, so that you can have them "put away" yet still handy right there on the porch, and the top of the cabinet can serve as a surface on which to place small plants.

Re: notes

[magid.livejournal.com]

The parents have had to deal with a lot, including the elder one having worsening allergies when they weren't as strict with avoidance at the beginning. I haven't had the brother over for a bread-baking session, but I have made challah for his class for when he's the 'abba' :-).

A cabinet's a possibility, though more for gardening things than the schach wood, which would take up too much space. Really, I just have to take half an hour (or whatever) and make a number of trips to the basement carrying stuff. Usually what I do about porch-stuff is wait until I'm absolutely sure that X thing is what I want, because there's little enough room and I'd rather not waste the space (nor my money :-). This year's porch funds (over and above plants) have gone for stackable planters, so I have plantspace with a smaller absolute footprint, plus a few more railing planters.

Re: notes

[(Anonymous)]

That's so nice, that you've baked the challah for the brother for his class!

Sounds like you are being smart about space, money, and all your porch plans.