Food Friday–cooking for a foodie edition

I have some friends who never ever cook and are easily impressed no matter what I make. ( My mother in law was one of those people, but she was also suffering from dementia so I tended to discount her enthusiasm and assume that it was just a nice side effect of the dementia). Tonight’s guests though are serious foodies.

Alan has been making a study of yeasted vs. sour dough challah. He is making tonight’s challah.

I began my Shabbat dinner adventure last night with a rectangular plum pie. I cut up an insane number of plums and covered them with brown sugar to let them weep a bit.

I also made a nut crust.

Here it is ready to be baked blind for a bit before I filled it. Don’t ask me exactly what I put into the crust. I can’t exactly remember, and I might not even remember if you interrogated me with bright lights shining in my face.

While the crust was baking, I added some flour to the weeping plums and also a whole lot of chopped ginger and some brown sugar.

I was thinking about how French tarts have a custard like layer just above the crust so I made one with egg, water and honey and chopped tangerine peel.

By this time the crust was baked enough to support the filling.

Here it is complete.

I have to put some thought into how to serve this, but dinner is a few hours away.

Today, I made jerk chicken.

The first time I tasted ( and made) jerk chicken was right after a trip to Jamaica. We bought a jar of the spice mix and made it after we got home. I carefully followed the directions on the jar and coated the chicken with the spice mix a couple of days before cooking. It was amazing. It was so spicy it made us feel high. Even the marrow of the chicken bones were spicy. My husband and I loved it. Our kids were little though. They were too little to appreciate the fiery flavor and it put them off of spicy food for years.Now though they love spicy food.

I also made pickled vegetables.

That’s vinegar, brown sugar,salt, black pepper, juniper berries, whole allspice and one hot pepper in the pot. You cook it until the sugar and the salt melt. basically you cook until the vegetables are all cut up.