F Train to Paris

In which a Jewish family from Brooklyn moves to Paris, France for two years of work, school, and adventures.

 

Shabbat starts at about 4:45 this week, and even though I have all day to prepare, it always feels frantic at this time of year. By the time I leave here to go pick up E. at school, everything has to be ready, because when I get back, I will have to light candles immediately.

As we are vegetarians, our Shabbat dinners are generally quite unique. We don't eat the traditional Ashkenazi roast chicken or brisket, nor the traditional Shabbat couscous of Paris's north African Jews. Here's tonight's menu, which is a bit more gourmet than usual: fish and mushrooms poached in wine, with a mushroom cream sauce (from a Julia Child recipe that I've made many times in the past year), Gratin Dauphinois (ditto, but I don't make it all that often because it's so rich), and--surprise--cranberry sauce. Yes, I finally bought those cranberries, and when J. saw the bag he got excited, so I decided to make them for tonight.

For tomorrow, I'm cooking rice so I can make a rice salad with a coconut-peanut sauce (to use up some leftover coconut milk that's in the fridge), roasting eggplants to make some sort of babaganoush-like salad, and I'll make a fancy vinaigrette tuna salad (no mayo of course, my family and friends know) with capers, onions, maybe chopped olives. Besides just leaving the oven on, we don't have a good way to warm up food on Shabbat here, so we usually eat salads for lunch. I've been making quiches a lot lately, because they are easy to warm up in the oven, but my children are tired of them and have asked me to cease and desist (for a little while). Perfecting my quiche-making skills has been one of my recent achievements, and my family has been supportive and appreciative, but they have reached their limit.

posted by: pariskleinmans at 12:58 | link | comments |