devarim

There was plenty of good food at our Rosh Hashana table this year - but of course nothing goes off without a hitch. Or several.

We begin our story with a beautiful prime rib roast, placed into a snazzy new oven with Star-K certified "Sabbath mode" allowing us to raise and lower the temperature on a festival, equipped with a spiffy new oven thermometer purchased by my wonderful husband for the purpose of letting us know just how hot the oven is at any given time, since the "Sabbath mode" does not display the temperature on the oven's digital readout. As usual, I set the oven to 425 degrees for the first 20 minutes of cooking, which took us past candle-lighting and into the new year. The plan was to lower the oven temperature to 325 for the remaining hour and a half of cooking. However, our ditzy heroine, who had been using her oven successfully for several weeks already, completely forgot that when one wishes to raise or lower the oven temperature, one must first press BAKE, followed by + or -, then followed by START. No, see, our silly heroine just pressed -. Repeatedly. And swore and gnashed her teeth and tore at her hair pretended that the oven thermometer was broken. And, some time later, served a terribly overdone roast, leathery both in texture and in color. *sob*

On the first night of Rosh Hashana, we also had a chance to show off our inventiveness. When the last of our guests finally arrived, we began to usher everyone (ten adults, one child, one infant) to the table for kiddush. I proudly pulled out one of our last two bottles of 1998 Gan Eden Black Muscat (a not-too-heavy sweet wine, appropriate for ushering in the new year) and directed Julian to open it. We spent the next ten to fifteen minutes tearing apart the kitchen in search of a corkscrew. Eventually, faced with the prospect of grape juice for kiddush and naught but water and soda for the meal, a guest (who may chose to identify hirself here) suggested using a wooden spoon and a meat mallet to hammer the cork down into the bottle. It worked for the kiddush/dessert wine, and by the end of the night we had three bottles with floating corks inside (and only one person got splashed with wine spurted out by a downward-driven cork. Unfortunately, the wine in question was red.)

As I finally made my way to bed that evening, Julian found the owner's manual for our oven, complete with instructions on raising and lowering the temperature in "Sabbath mode." We promptly set it to go down to 275 degrees, and I buried my head in my pillow, once again mouring the destruction of what could have been the perfect roast.

Lunch first day we were invited out. Aside from a little baby spit-up, this meal was uneventful. Later in the afternoon, though, we were roused by the phone ringing, and caught the tail end of a recorded message from the electric company as it played on our answering machine: two temporary power outages planned between midnight and 7:00 inthe morning. Did I mention that the snazzy new oven has electronic controls, and if the power is interrupted, the oven will not turn back on automatically when power comes back?

I revised my Monster Brisket plan (which originally consisted of cookiing it overnight that night) and decided to pop it into the oven shortly after candle-lighting and before meeting up with our dinner hosts. As part of my plan revision, I was possessed by an uncontrollable urge (really, don't ask) to poke at the marinating Monster Brisket in the fridge. As I lifted up the carefully crimped foil at one end of the pan, the corkscrew fell out of it and onto the refrigerator shelf, cork (from the bottle of wine used in the marinade) still attached! I literally rolled on the floor laughing, and bounced off to shul (where Julian and our houseguest were just finishing up mincha) to tell them of my discovery. Bounced back home, lit candles at the appropriate time, removed some stuff from the Monster Brisket marinade, added some other stuff to it, popped the Monster Brisket into the oven, (adjusted the temperature properly this time,) and bounced back out to dinner.

Dinner was lovely, even though we had a rather violent discussion about wedding registries.

Got back home, realized I had never added mushrooms to the Monster Brisket pan, decided it didn't matter, uncovered the pan for the last hour of roasting, and washed a whole bunch of stemware. Removed the Monster Brisket, fridged it, went to bed.

Next morning (that's yesterday, right?), woke up to discover that the power did not go out overnight. As we were to discover later, the message pertained to our old building, several blocks away. This was good for us, but monumentally sucked for a bunch of other families living on that street. Anyway, I sliced the Monster Brisket and prepared most of it for rewarming in the oven. I carefully filled the Corningware container for said rewarming with pan juices/gravy. Covered the dish, placed it into the oven, went off to shul.

Came home to overflowing brisket juices and a smoky oven. Ew. Removed the (now hot) brisket dish from the oven, transfered it to the blech, went about warming up other dishes for lunch.

Lunch, for the most part, went smoothly. I apologized for the slight smokiness in the air, but I like to think we made up for it by opening our wine bottles with an actual corkscrew. The Monster Brisket (if I do say so myself) was spectacular. Midway through the meal, I raised the oven temperature for the apple crisp we had planned for dessert. Shortly therafter, I opened the oven to put in the crisp, and - whoa, smoke. We opened the windows as quickly as possible, but it wasn't quick enough. Within moments, the smoke alarm started blaring. Whee! Eventually we managed to fan enough of the smoke outside to get the alarm to shut off, but the apartment remained hot and moderately smoky for the rest of the afternoon. Copious jokes about raves and lightsticks were made. I popped the apple crisp into the oven anyway.

For dessert, among other things, we had smoky-brisket-flavored apple crisp. Mmmmmm.