Yom Kippur - Breaking the Fast Soup

When I grew up and well into my twenties, my paternal grandparents lived across the street from the synagogue most of my family attended. We'd have most of our holiday meals at their house, everything prepared by my baba (grandmother) and served up by my mother and aunts. 

For most holiday and Shabbat meals at Baba's, meat was on the menu.  But to break the fast of Yom Kippur, we always went with a lighter, dairy meal. When services ended at the synagogue, my family would file out the back door and stroll the half-block to the house.  Every single year, we'd be welcomed by the aromas of coffee brewing and freshly baked cinnamon rolls and blueberry or Saskatoon berry buns wafting from the kitchen in the back of the house to the entrance and living room. 

Dinner would be any combination of kugels, knishes, blintzes, fish, salads and other dairy dishes.  But the one thing I remember the most was Baba's Yom Kippur Soup. Once we were all gathered around the table, challah and the milky vegetable soup was always the first course.  Now, though we ate this soup every year, it wasn't always the same.  It was always close, but the vegetables in the soup were determined by whatever was plentiful in the garden that took up her back yard.

This recipe, Baba's Break-the-Fast Soup, was first printed in my cookbook Soup - A Kosher Collection (2004 - Whitecap).

Feel free to add or remove vegetables depending on your likes and dislikes or on whatever is fresh from your garden.

1 small yellow onion, peeled and diced

3 Tbsp. | 45 mL olive oil

1 small carrot, peeled and diced small

1 stalk celery, diced small

1/2 small parsnip, peeled and diced

6 cups | 1.5 L vegetable stock

1 medium red potato, peeled and diced

1 1/2 cups | 375 mL green beans, trimmed and cut into 1-inch | 2.5 cm pieces

1/4 lb. | 125 g button mushrooms, sliced 1/4 inch | 5 mm thick

3 Tbsp. | 45 mL all-purpose flour

3 cups | 750 mL 2% milk

2 oz. | 50 g thin soup noodles

1 Tbsp. | 15 mL  fresh dill, finely chopped

1 tsp. | 5 mL salt

1/4 tsp. | 1 mL black pepper

Over medium-low heat, sauté the onion in olive oil for 2-3 minutes, stirring as it cooks.  Add the carrot, celery and parsnip and continue cooking another 2-3 minutes. 

Add the stock and potato, cover and bring to a boil over high heat.  Add the beans and mushrooms, reduce heat to medium-low and allow to simmer gently for 15 minutes. 

In a separate bowl, whisk together the flour and milk.  Make sure the mixture is well blended and there are no lumps.  Whisk the mixture into the soup and add the noodles. Bring the soup back to a simmer.

Cook until the noodles are tender and add the dill, salt and pepper.  Taste and adjust seasoning if necessary. 

Running out of time . . .

I've been working frantically to finish recipe testing. I'm at the point where I think I'm done with new recipes -- though if something strikes me, I'll have to give it a try. Now I'm going through my files and re-testing recipes I've developed over the last 3-4 years.

It's interesting to see what I was doing back then. A couple of recipes were eliminated immediately after reading, a few were eliminated after trying. A few of them were gems. But even some of the gems needed a little tweaking and they all need good editing. I just spent an hour going through all of the recipes I tagged "Passover" and I have 30-35 recipes to cook through over then next couple of weeks.

The rush is because Rosh Hashanah will be here soon. I know most people won't give it much thought for a couple of weeks, but I've got to be ahead of the game. My real job involves a lot of sourcing and ordering for our store. I spend hours going through product lists, on the internet looking for suppliers and on the phone trying to find out what is or isn't available.

This year, for instance, I've been having a hard time finding Israeli honey. None of the kosher food suppliers that I use have any on their lists. It's not imperative that the honey be from Israel, but I like to have a selection of honeys available and the Israel part is a nice bonus. (An assortment of honeys is a nice gift to take if you're going to dinner for R.H.) So it took 2 days, but I think I found a source - not a food supplier but a Judaica company.

It's not just about the honey. I spend a lot of time working on meat orders with my dad (he's our meat department), guessing how many briskets and turkeys (and chickens and lamb, etc) we'll sell out of the store and how many we'll need for the prepared food part of the business. Then we need to put together an order form for prepared foods and somebody had to do an ad for the newspaper. And finally, I make sure the store is stocked with all of the essentials our customers might need for the holiday (kasha, noodles for kugel, yortzeit and Shabbat candles, etc).

So that's all taken care of. Our first big order arrived late Friday and now we spend a couple of weeks getting more orders in and taking orders from customers. Before you know it, we'll all have to be in the store helping customers and in the kitchen prepping food.

And that's where the urgency is coming from. For the book to be ready to print in January, the recipes should be finished before Rosh Hashana. By finished, I mean tested and typed (hopefully). There will still be a lot to do after the recipes are done, so I'm giving myself a RH deadline. Besides, it's kind of nice to think that the testing work will be done by the new year. The question is, will it?

It's all about the recipes.

For me, the best part about working on a cookbook is the recipe development and testing. Well, that's usually true. Sometimes the testing can be less than fun -- when I'm trying something for the 6th time and it's still not right. At that point I'm no longer enjoying myself.

The part I'm not as fond of is typing up the recipes. I procrastinate and can't do a long stretch without checking the eG forums and then Twitter and Facebook multiple times. When I wrote the last book I didn't have these distractions -- in fact, I spent a good chunk of time up at the lake doing nothing but typing.

Again, I think this probably has something to do with the self-publishing vs. using a publisher. No one's setting deadlines for me but me. So I'm trying to figure out how to lay down the law -- with myself.

I've been pretty good with the testing. Every day that I haven't been at work, I've been working on recipes. I've put all of my recipes into a spreadsheet so I can see what I have and what I still need. It's looking good and the end is in sight. I've made arrangements to take the rest of the week off from the family business. I'll spend the next few days working on recipes and there won't be much left on my recipe to-do list.

I'd like to take a couple of weeks cooking/baking the recipes that I wrote a few years ago. I haven't made some of them in 2+ years and I'd like to include weights -- something I didn't do then. Then it's on to typing.

I've tried to keep up with the typing. Typing as many recipes as possible between customers at the store. But I still have a stack of 20+ recipes that need to be typed, plus whatever I get done in the next couple of weeks. Then on to editing and writing the bits that go before and between the recipes.

There are so many things that I have to think about this time that I didn't give a thought to with the last book. I've started researching printers and shipping, layouts and photos -- but I can't devote a lot of time to these other areas until the recipes are done.

The good news is that I'm still on track and should be able to have the book done for Passover 2010, but there's a lot to do.

Self-Publishing

For a variety of reasons I'm trying the self-publishing route with this book. There are a lot of pros and cons either way, but after giving it a lot of thought (read: sleepless nights), I decided that the potential pros outweighed the cons.

Doing this myself means that things are a lot different. First of all, I don't have a publisher (two actually) giving me deadlines or telling me how they think the book should look. I get to decide if the book will have metric or Imperial measurments, if I spell things like a Canadian or American (lots of u's being used), how many pictures will be included, etc.

It also means that I have to set my own deadlines and enforce them. This is much harder. If all goes well, the book will be completed in time to have it printed and available before Passover. If all doesn't go well, I'll have to rethink the plan.

Add the editing, photographing, printing, marketing, distributing, listings and anything else that I've forgotten to my list of responsibilities and doing it myself is a lot more work. Thankfully I have friends and family who are ready to pitch in.

The next few months should be interesting; learning as I go. It's also exciting and nerve-racking. All sorts of questions keep coming up and I'm trying to find the answers.