Shabbos meals

At the end of this week’s portion, the Torah mentions once again that the Hebrews are about to enter a land of milk and honey (Lev. 20:24). By an odd coincidence, my wife made the oven dairy again; it had been meat for Passover. So I decided to make something with milk and honey; I made a cake with semolina flour, milk, honey and sugar. I added apples because this portion also includes the mitzvah of not mingling two types of seed (19:19) and apples of course have seeds.

This week’s country is the tiny Caribbean island of Antigua, and I found two relatively simple Antiguan dishes I can make: chop-up (basically boiled eggplant and spinach) and ‘macaroni pie (macaroni and cheese but with additions like mustard that are not typically used in the U.S.). Antigua seems to be part of the general Caribbean food culture so I suspect I will see some of these again. In addition I made Nile perch because we had it lying around and I thought my wife would appreciate fish.

My wife liked the Nile perch because she tends to like unadorned fish, and liked the cake because it was bready and not supersweet. But the Antigua recipes did not go over well: she thought the macaroni pie had too much garlic and the chop-up was boring.