Two and a half years ago, I wrote about the charming kibbutz custom of cooking for families that either have a new baby or have lost someone. Unfortunately, since the beginning of October, we have had six deaths of old members: one I wrote about here, two more died in the following week and another died about two weeks later. November and December passed without incident, but in the past week, two more members have died. All of these members were aged 80+ and all suffered from major health problems (although one death was actually due to heart failure in the middle of an operation to fix a blocked colon), so it is very dispassionate to say that their passing has brought an end to both their suffering but also to the suffering of their families.
As I am close to the families of the last two members that died, I immediately volunteered to cook one day for them. Such is the spirit of volunteering these days that three people were designated for every day; this makes my life easier, especially as in both cases one has to cook for 10 people. I am cooking the meat; last week I also made potato slices and rice, whereas for the upcoming day, my wife will make salad. I made and will make my signature dish, slow cooked deboned chicken thighs. I see that I have never really documented this dish: it's a variation on what I described here, and is actually very simple. First I trim the deboned chicken thighs of excess fat then I place the pieces on the bottom of the slow cooker. Then I dice a quarter or half an onion (depending on the size of the onion) then scatter the onion pieces over the meat. Finally the marinade - two spoonfuls of mayonnaise, one heaped spoonful of apricot jam and a teaspoon of mustard - is mixed, poured onto the meat and spread out with a brush. Cooking time is 3 hours and the result is sublime.
So much so that I received a Whatsapp message (hence the terseness) from the family for whom I cooked last week: No'am, thanks very much. The food that you prepared was excellent. Literally everyone licked their fingers. You received many compliments. I would be pleased if you could send me the recipe for the chicken and the rice (the rice was excellent even if you said that it didn't turn out too well). As it happens, I have an old version of the recipe in a file that I prepared for a kibbutz cookbook that was announced but never appeared, so it was easy to send my friend the recipe. When making rice, I begin by frying diced onions, but this time neglected to tend to them, so some of them were burnt. Maybe these give a spicier flavour, but it wasn't what I intended.
| Title | Tags | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| 325 | Mirror mirror on the wall | Personal | |
| 442 | Caught in a musical timeweb | 10cc, City Boy | |
| 533 | Embedding pictures in HTML emails | Programming, Delphi, Email | |
| 798 | Split questionnaire design | DBA | |
| 914 | Reviving the research | DBA | |
| 1461 | Desiccated apple slices | Cooking, Ninja grill | |
| 1573 | Israeli democracy nightmares | Israel |
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