Made for Shabbat, nor'easter edition

[magid]

Originally, I was going to be hosting dinner. When it became clear that the weather was going to be at its worst tonight, that changed, so my impetus of cooking-for-others vanished, but there's still Shabbat, and the possibility that the power will go for a while.

So far, it's been snowing for a few hours, but it took a while for the ground to cool off enough for snow to stick, so the plows have only just started. The T closes at 3:30, and the governor has banned vehicles from roads throughout the state as of 4, so everyone but essential personnel get to have Shabbat this week :-). And people are planning snowball fights and snow-building activities tomorrow afternoon, which might get me to leave my house, if only to watch. Or perhaps not.

Anyway. The food:

• baked sweet potato
  
• roasted Brussels sprouts (oops, they became breakfast)
  
• vegan corn chowder
  
• a small-but-whole chicken* slow-baked with rice, onion, mushroom, eggplant, chickpeas, lemon juice, and a dusting of sage

Not needing cooking: grape juice, bought rolls, hummus, olives, pickles, romaine lettuce. I had thought of making dessert, but really, then I'll just eat it, so baking sweets should wait until I can feed at least a few others. Oh, and I started soaking beans so some form of baked beans is likely motza'i Shabbat.

* Which is to say, I found a kosher bird at a supermarket I don't go to often, and the price was better than the cheapest kosher chicken parts I've seen recently, plus it was already clear that there was going to be Weather**...

** Why do people stock up on eggs and milk? Why not canned beans and onions, or even hard cheese, which can last outside the fridge for a while? If the power's only out for a day or two, many people have enough food at home to eat, even if it's not exactly what they might be in the mood for. And if the power's out longer than that, then having more perishables is more of a loss. Or is it that the weekly shoppers who go on Friday and Saturday were all moving to Thursday?

Comments

[cellio]

Are snowballs muktzeh, I wonder?

The bread/eggs/milk thing isn't just about French toast. According to my friend dglenn (don't know how to make the DW user ref off hand), it's sympathetic magic: to fend off snow we buy white things. :-) (Egg shells are white even if the innards aren't. And don't forget toilet paper.)

Shabbat shalom.

[magid]

I'm not sure about snowballs. Is it the making of them or the throwing of them that would be problematic (inside an eruv, of course)?

I like the way eftychia's thoughts work. Though one might think it would also inspire the sales of rice, sugar, vanilla ice cream, etc :-). (And around here, eggs shells from the supermarket are at least as likely to be brown, actually. There was an ad campaign years ago with a jingle "Brown eggs are local eggs, and local eggs are fresh!" which is kind of ridiculous, because the color of the shell is dependent on the species of chicken...)

Luckily I already had enough toilet paper for at least a couple of weeks :-)

PS. You can use the same lj user HTML here as LJ uses for people's names.

[cellio]

Oh, handy -- I didn't realize that the <lj.../> tags worked here as-is (as-are?).

On snowballs I was wondering about boneh (building), since a snowball is never really done so maybe handling them adds snow that's already on your gloves and maybe that's a problem. But I guess that's not muktzeh per se; inside an eiruv a snowball would seem to have a purpose on Shabbat. :-)

Interesting about the eggs -- the only brown eggs I tend to see here tend to be "fancy" in some way (just marketing, or organic, or something) and twice the price of the white ones. And no, I don't know why organic hens would tend to a different color distribution.

Vanilla ice cream would seem to be particularly appropriate for the purpose of storm-related sympathetic magic!

[magid]

I think DW has made it so all LJ-specific HTML tags work.

I didn't make any snowballs, but I'll admit to repurposing some that were thrown at me :-), though mostly handing them off to friends (especially the one dressed in a Dune-based outfit).

I guess that different species are popular in different areas. No clue what the reasons are.