Home Sweet Home

April 14, 2017 – Home Sweet Home

With my 91-year old mother, Katie, for the second Seder  

After my sojourn in Portugal, I was so looking forward to spending some time at home again.  Of course, the first week or so was devoted to catching up, a task so daunting that I usually swear off future travel (but not for long). One activity that kept me busy upon my return from overseas was preparing for Passover.  While I was home for the holiday, I didn’t actually host a Seder at my house this year.  Instead, I hosted a haroset tasting a few days before Passover began.  In case you’re not familiar with this Seder essential, haroset is a mixture of fruit and nuts that’s supposed to remind us of the mortar that the Hebrew slaves used between the bricks when they were building cities for the Egyptian pharaoh.  Jewish communities in different parts of the world have developed their own special recipes for haroset, based on the ingredients that were available locally.  Since my ancestors came from Eastern Europe (the Ashkenazic community), I grew up eating a simple haroset made of chopped apples and walnuts mixed with cinnamon and a little sweet red wine (the kind that tastes like grape juice). 

In recent years, I’ve been seeking out less familiar food traditions from Jewish communities in Turkey, in the Arab world, Iran, north Africa, etc.  I’ve discovered haroset recipes that use different varieties of dried fruits and nuts along with unusual spices.  For the haroset tasting event, I made a Turkish recipe that used dates, raisins, dried apricots and figs. It called for sweet red wine, and since I didn’t have any Manischewitz wine in the house, I substituted red vermouth, which added additional complexity to the flavor profile.  I had fun making Curaçao-style haroset balls (a culinary tradition also popular among the Sephardic Jewish community in Morocco).  After forming the balls of dried dates, prunes, raisins and figs and chopped nuts, you roll them in cinnamon and eat them like candy.  The last recipe I prepared is a modern American invention, via Whole Foods.  It combines shredded apples and beets (raw) with dried apricots, honey, orange zest, walnuts and spices.  I love it not only for its sweet taste, but for its beautiful ruby-red color.  An added bonus: it makes a great topping for plain yogurt during the week of Passover.  By the way, I’m happy to share these recipes.  Just contact me and I’ll send them to you electronically.

Thank you very much to my friend Cheri for inviting me to the Seder at her home for the first night of the holiday.  In keeping with Ashkenazic tradition, she served hard boiled eggs, gefilte fish with horseradish, chicken soup with matzoh balls, roast chicken, asparagus, tsimmes (a carb-laden casserole of potatoes, sweet potatoes, carrots, and prunes), kugel (more carbs, in the form of finely chopped vegetables, matzoh, and eggs, all baked together), fresh fruit and flour-free desserts).  It’s a lot of food to eat at a single meal, especially when so many of the dishes are heavy to begin with. On the second night, I attended the Seder at Greenspring along with my mother, Katie.  Once again, it was a multi-course menu that left everyone groaning.  So I have an idea.  Since we have Seders on two consecutive nights, I think we should split up the menu, with only half of the dishes on each night.  Maybe we’d appreciate them more that way.

Being home has allowed me to resume the campaign to conquer chaos and clutter.  In the process of making room for Elisa and Christian’s belongings, I tossed out and gave away countless items.  I also put aside piles of stuff that needed to be sorted out.  Slowly but surely, I’m making progress.  With more open space and more clear surfaces, my house seems calmer and more restful. 

And now I actually have time to enjoy being at home, since I’ve started to cut back on certain activities so I can concentrate on just a few.   For example, I’ve decided to skip fused glass and English tutoring for the next couple of months while I focus on completing the book about Elliott.  Rather than feeling deprived, I think of it as a gift to myself.  And thinking of Elliott, how he would have loved the exhibit of Toulouse-Lautrec lithographs that I saw recently at the Phillips collection in DC.  I can just hear his voice, sharing recollections of life in Paris in the 1950s when he first lived in the French capital.  

This is a good month for shows at local museums.  Yesterday, I bracketed my participation in the Tax March in DC with twin visits to the National Gallery of Art.  In the morning, I stopped by the East Building to see the new “Frederic Bazille and the Birth of Impressionism” show.  Bazille is not as well known as other impressionists.  He was born in the city of Montpellier, in the Languedoc region of southern France, and was active as a young painter in Paris in the 1860s, when the impressionist movement was taking off.  At times, he shared studio space with both Monet and Renoir. Unfortunately, Bazille’s career was cut short when he was killed in 1870 in the Franco-Prussian War. One of his best-known paintings is The Family Gathering, an 1867 portrait of his extended family at their summer home on the outskirts of Montpellier.  The painting seems to burst with sunlight. One of my favorite works in the exhibit is View of the Village, painted in 1868.  It makes me long to return to France, and to include a stop in Montpellier.

The Tax March didn’t draw as large a crowd as the march back in January following the inauguration, but the participants were equally enthusiastic.  One complaint I have for all of the marches I’ve attended recently is that the speeches go on much too long.  The rally, scheduled to last from 12 noon until 1 pm, was still going on at 1:45.  Like many others, I broke away from the crowd on the West Lawn of the Capitol and made my way down Pennsylvania Avenue.  Since this route brought me back near the National Gallery, I stopped into the West Building to track down some paintings by Titian, the Venetian Renaissance artist whom we’ve been studying in my art history class at George Mason.  Seeing several of his works in person, I was particularly struck by his more painterly approach, i.e. freer brushwork and use of impasto, compared to most of the 16^th century artists from central Italy. 

Titian's Venus with a Mirror, c. 1555

Thanks to my wonderful art history professor, Lisa Bauman, I can now recognize and appreciate the differences between disegno (the rational line-based approach seen in Michelangelo’s work and identified with the mind) and colorito (the more emotional color-based approach seen in Titian’s work).  During our lectures, Lisa has provided us with many interesting tidbits of information, such as the Renaissance belief that conception couldn’t occur unless the woman had an orgasm.  As a result, extremely sensuous paintings were often placed in bedrooms.  I also want to thank Lisa for teaching me how to curse in Italian.  Isn’t continuing education wonderful? 

While I’ve enjoyed my recent time at home tremendously, I’m also excited about the next trip on my calendar.  Rather than a pleasure trip, this will be more of an educational journey, an exploration of Jewish history in the Baltic area, led by a historian.  I’ve wanted to take this type of trip for a long time since I have family connections to both Lithuania and Latvia.  In preparation, I’ve been doing as much reading as I can.  Much of it deals with grim subjects, such as the Holocaust.  But I’m also looking forward to learning all I can about Yiddishkeit, the rich and vibrant culture of the Jewish community in the centuries that preceded the murder of the Jewish population.