Weekend Images

Partly-Read Book

I wasn’t finding very many new ideas here, so I skipped several chapters
I expected more from Mark Bittman..

Silly Newspaper Items

I guess if I got drunk I would forget it was still winter. 

As they say, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Wait… What?

Baking Hamentaschen

Ingredients for the dough, which has to be made, chilled, rolled, cut out, and filled.

We cooked some traditional prune filling, and also used jam.

A Purim Play: children watch through the window. A plate of hamentaschen is on the table. 

 Photos © 2026 mae sander

Happy Purim 2025

 

Evelyn’s hands making Hamantaschen for Purim, which starts this evening.

Ready to bake.

Out of the oven.

Elaine’s Hamantaschen in Indiana.

Photos © 2025 mae sander

In My Kitchen March 2024

Our Life In March 

Spring is coming, and this is the best reason to celebrate the end of March. We did have pie for Pi Day (but not home made) and we enjoyed St. Patricks Day (but no special food). It’s the end of the week and also the end of the month, so I’m sharing my thoughts and photos with Sherry’s In My Kitchen, Deb’s Sunday Salon, and Elizabeth’s Tuesday Tea Party. I wish everyone a very beautiful April with beautiful weather, no matter which climate zone you live in.

My Peeps in my kitchen: Happy Easter!

What we cooked

Here are some of the things we cooked in March. We each made some of these dishes.

This dish was a disappointment. We added several more ingredients
to the leftovers to give it more flavor.

Recipe from “The Kitchn”

Made from scratch (not from Ikea). Both wine & water to drink.

From Evelyn’s kitchen: Hamantaschen for Purim. I wish I had been there to eat some!

Fun Stuff in the Kitchen

New dish towel

One more good ready-made dish from Trader Joe’s.

And a good sweet thing, also from Trader Joe’s

Some of the enjoyable jam, preserves, jelly, etc. in my refrigerator.

Bread

Len’s latest rye bread was awesome!

New dough whisk that Len used when combining ingredients for the rye bread.

Remembering Four Years Ago

In the beginning of March 2020, the coronavirus pandemic seemed to be a distant rumor. By the end of March, there were cases in every state, and the government had shut down virtually all non-essential activity in businesses, schools, recreations, public performances, and many other areas. Emergency rooms were overwhelmed, and hospitals were overflowing with very sick patients. Essential commodities and those that people thought would become scarce were all out-of-stock as people hoarded shelf-stable foods, frozen foods, and household goods. The resulting toilet paper shortage lasted several months. 

The effects of the pandemic still echo through our society. From the New York Times this week:

“Elected officials, strategists, historians and sociologists say the lasting effects of the pandemic are visible today in the debates over inflation, education, public health, college debt, crime and trust in American democracy itself” (source)

Injustices became apparent as the pandemic left some people working at their own risk to do essential jobs, and left others without a livelihood. The situation is no better today:

• According to the Washington Post this week: “Nearly 1 in 5 people in the essential workforce — people who cleaned hospitals during the pandemic, who provided home health care and child care, who kept food coming to our tables, who built temporary clinics — do not have permanent legal authorization to live in this country.” (source) 
• The Baltimore Key Bridge disaster last week brought home how vulnerable immigrants work on our essential infrastructure. The bridge workers who were killed and injured were all immigrants from Central America. (source)
• Farmworkers are especially vulnerable: “According to data from Farmworkers Justice, there are an estimated 2.4 million farm workers employed on American farms and ranches, the large majority of whom are immigrants. Foreign-born workers make up 68% of the workforce (the USDA cites a slightly lower number at an estimated 60%) and approximately 36% lack authorized work status under current U.S. laws. (source)

The pandemic left us with a lot of thinking to do: one essential question is why we continue to deny legitimacy of residence to workers who are clearly essential to our nation.

From IMK, March 2020: What’s really important?

Reading my blog posts from the start of the pandemic is interesting: we decided to isolate ourselves, not knowing how long we would be without social contacts. Our isolation ended a year later when the remarkable vaccine became available to us. This is what I wrote four years ago:

“My food thoughts are not just with my own needs, but with the vast numbers of people who are fearing or already experiencing hunger. I'm thinking of those whose jobs have suddenly ceased, and who don’t know how they will afford food. I worry about children who were dependent on school lunch programs but whose schools have closed, and about college students without meals or shelter after dorm closures. I'm mindful that homeless people and refugees everywhere are subject to increased uncertainty. People already living in poverty in the US and throughout the world will be suffering even more now than in the past.

“Even more pressing than the challenge of getting food to those in need, our society has enormous problems with protecting health care workers and providing care for the sick. Compared to the vast numbers of people with limited resources, to those who are already suffering from coronavirus, and to those mourning the victims, I'm extremely fortunate and grateful, and I do not want to sound like I'm complaining.”

Graffiti on a park bench in March, 2020.

WE SURVIVED!

Blog post and photos © 2020, 2024 mae sander.

Pie — $3.14 a slice for 𝞹 Day

It’s Pi Day — also Pie Day. We celebrate 𝞹. And Zingerman’s Bakehouse offers slices for $3.14.

As you probably learned in elementary math classes, 𝞹 is the ratio of the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter. The symbol 𝞹 (the Greek letter, Pi) has been used to represent this ratio since 1706, though the mathematical ratio had been known for centuries. In fact: “As a ratio, pi has been around since Babylonian times, but it was the Greek geometer Archimedes, some 2,300 years ago, who first showed how to rigorously estimate the value of pi.” (source) 

Pi Day celebrates this fundamental mathematical constant, and just for fun, pies — which are circular — are the perfect food to eat for this.

I bought two slices of pie for our lunch.

And for the next holiday:

Purim is March 23-24 this year. Zingerman’s has the classic hamentaschen.

Photos © 2024 mae sander

Happy Purim

My Hamantaschen with prune filling and poppy seed filling. Other popular fillings include chocolate, jam, and more.

Purim, which is today March 12, celebrates the rescue of the Jews of Persia by the intervention of Queen Esther, who had married the King, as told in the Biblical Book of Esther. The evil adviser to the king, Steve Bannon, oops I mean Haman, had convinced King Ahasuerus to declare that all the Jews would be hanged. The King somehow didn't know that Esther was Jewish -- so she's always considered to be the first ever secret Jew. When she told him that an evil man wanted to kill her, he decreed that the man himself would hang -- and so the authorities strung up Haman.

For centuries, the celebration of Purim (which became a holiday many centuries after the possibly mythical events in the fifth century before the current era) included a variety of pastries, because the Book of Esther says to send gifts of foods to friends or others. American Jews today traditionally make Hamantaschen, which are three-cornered filled cookies based on recipes from German Jews a couple of centuries ago. More skillful bakers accomplish a more uniform result than mine, depicted above, but that's the kind of baker I am.

In addition to giving gifts of food, the celebration of Purim includes drinking until you are drunk (which the Book of Esther says you should do), dressing up in crazy costumes (which the Israelis really go overboard with), and reading the Book of Esther aloud. I'm not doing any of these  this year.

Baking: I used the recipe in The Book of Jewish Food by Claudia Roden. I made my own prune filling,
but used a can of poppy seed filling. The prune ones came out better.

Published this week: "Claudia Roden Tells Her Immigrant Story" by Mayukh Sen -- a fantastic interview with descriptions of Roden's best cookbooks. Don't miss it.